Panther in the Sky (45 page)

That had been their council, the best of all they had shared. And now they were here in front of the fort. The guns of the men
in the fort and of the Cherokees around the fort were still banging and filling the humid air with smoke. Chiksika’s last fire-arrow had set ablaze something inside the palisade. Much smoke was rising, and the men inside were yelling to each other. Chiksika was laughing. He fitted another burning arrow to the bowstring and stood up, drawing the bow, the long, beautiful muscles tense in his arms and shoulders, his copper skin agleam with sweat, a fierce, happy grimace baring his white teeth.

Tecumseh was looking up at him feeling rich with pride when a bullet from the fort struck Chiksika in the forehead. The fire-arrow flew wild and stuck in the grass. Chiksika stood swaying. When Tecumseh caught the toppling body in his arms, its life was already passing out from it. And now from Tecumseh’s heart burst an unbearable dismay, and his cry of lamentation was heard everywhere on the battlefield, a sound that was never to be forgotten by anyone who heard it.

F
OR A LONG WHILE THE LOSS OF
C
HIKSIKA WAS LIKE A DISEASE
in Tecumseh, like a famine in his spirit. The Cherokee girl would try to embrace him in their bed and would find him trembling, and he would get up and go away in the night. By the campfire Big Fish would try to talk to him, about Moses, about warfare, about heroes and knights in the books that he vaguely remembered, but Tecumseh would remain silent.

“You do not seem to be listening,” Big Fish would say. Tecumseh would wave his hand as if turning over pages and tell him to go on, but as Big Fish talked on he would see by the firelight that Tecumseh was listening only to the echoes in his own empty heart.

The Cherokee warriors to whom Tecumseh had become so strongly attached during the months of raiding and fighting before Chiksika’s death now stayed back from him. They were polite, but they were abashed because they knew they had failed him. After Chiksika was killed, they had thought that the death of such a great and invulnerable warrior was a bad sign, so they had withdrawn their attack of Buchanan’s Fort, even though Tecumseh, with Chiksika’s blood fresh on his shoulder, had exhorted them to stay and charge the fort one more time for a certain victory, to keep Chiksika’s death from being wasted. The fire inside the fort had been burning hard and most of the men inside busy fighting it, and surely the Cherokees could have gotten to the walls. But instead they had drawn back and stood on a hill among the trees looking down on the little fort and the
stumps and the dead cattle in the clearing around it. If they had attacked the fort again, he would have let them help him with Chiksika’s body. They had wanted to take the body back to their village for the ceremonies of burial. But Tecumseh had not let them touch the body; he had carried it alone through gunfire to a place on the hill, then had furiously hacked out a grave in the thin, rocky soil with his own tomahawk and bare hands and buried him there near the battlefield, as was the Shawnee custom for a great warrior. He had put rocks over the grave to keep wolves from it and had carefully concealed all traces of digging so that the white men would not dig up the body to mutilate it or steal its head bone, and then he had left his beloved brother there on the ridge to look down upon the fort that had killed him. Perhaps he would haunt it forever as it tried to grow into a white man’s city.

After a week of struggling silently with his own despair, Tecumseh looked suddenly to Big Fish and the other Shawnee warriors of his little band and said:

“I must go away. I have a promise to keep.”

I
T WAS IN THE
S
EEMINEE
K
EELSWAH
,
THE
P
APAW
M
OON,
when Tecumseh rode into the Creek town of Tuckabatchee far to the south. It was a town of square cabins built of pine logs, with chimneys made of sticks and mud. The town was on a rich bottomland full of crops and cotton fields. The heat of the day was intense, and the sun was so high that Tecumseh’s horse stood upon its own shadow. The people who came out of the shade to watch him ride in were a good-looking, well-built people, but some of them very fat. They were almost naked in the great heat, and those who wore clothing were wearing brightly dyed shirts of cloth.

When the Muskogee chief came out to meet him, Tecumseh was jolted by the sight of his broad face. It was one of the faces he had seen in dreams. It looked, he remembered, like the face he had seen that was mottled with pale spots, though this face before him had no pale spots. It was as dark as a deer’s liver. Tecumseh dismounted and took the hand of the chief, who said, “You are Shawnee! Long ago we were neighbors of Shawnee. I, Big Warrior, welcome you here!”

They went to the chief’s house to smoke and talk, and it was strange. There were many things of white men’s manufacture in this house. There were mirrors and other things made of glass.

There was a bellows, which made Tecumseh think of Loud Noise and his Thunder-Sucker.

The only times Tecumseh had been in square houses was when he had raided and burned the cabins of white people. He had never sat in their stick-seats, which Big Fish had told him were called chairs, and he did not like this. It creaked when he moved. The chief’s chair creaked so loudly under his great weight that Tecumseh was afraid it was going to break under him, but it did not. There were roaches on the floor, and a quick little lizard came in the door and went partway up a wall. Flies buzzed in and out of the rectangular door, which was blinding with sun glare. After the smoke and giving of small gifts, Tecumseh explained to Big Warrior who he was and why he had come, and Big Warrior’s face brightened. “So you are Tecumseh! You are of our blood! We have heard of your birth under the Panther Star. I myself saw the Panther Star at that time, and I remember that all the old men said it marked something important. Come, and I will walk with you to the house.”

As they strolled through the big village, through the shade of great oaks with dusty-looking moss hanging from them, Big Warrior recounted that he had known Hard Striker as a young man. Tecumseh was listening to the chief and observing the strange houses and dress and the evidences of the white men’s influence upon the Creek culture—the pigs in the streets, some mules within a fence, something with wheels that at first he thought was a cannon but then saw was only some sort of a carrying conveyance—but with most of his spirit he was yearning ahead and preparing himself. A crowd began following, looking at him. Finally, near the river, Big Warrior said, “Now here is the house, and I believe she is here.” Tecumseh was happy to see that it was not one of the square houses but a round one, made of bowed saplings, like a Shawnee summer house, with woven straw mats that had been rolled up on the sides to let fresh air flow through. Silhouetted in the shade within were four people, sitting on the floor. One of them, a woman, was talking in a soft, low voice, a voice thrilling to hear. The chief stopped outside this house and said:

“Turtle Mother! Here is your son who has come far to find you.”

She turned and rose, her left arm across her bosom, a feather fan held in her hand, and came out into the sunlight, squinting against its brightness, and the squinting revealed the many fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes now. Her hair hung no more in the Shawnee style with a braid but loose and cut straight across
the brow. There was much gray in it. Her face was as handsome as ever, but the lines around her mouth showed bitterness, sadness. She was a Creek by birth and had come home to the Creeks and now was dressed like a Creek woman, in cotton. Her eyes glittered. She came toward him slowly, her wrist still on her breast, holding the fan at her shoulder, looking at him so intently that he shivered.

“Tecumseh!” she murmured. “It is Tecumseh!”

“Neegah,
my mother!”

Her eyes were brimming, her chin was crumpled and quivering, but she was smiling, smiling with her lips bitten tightly shut, as if to keep from crying aloud. She let go of the fan, which then dangled from its loop around her wrist as she reached toward him with both hands, her palms down, and put them on his forearms. They held each other’s arms and stood for a long time, looking deep into each other’s eyes as ten years fell away.

“Weh-sah,
” she said at last.

“Weh-sah.”

“A handsome man is my son. I am proud. I hear of you sometimes, even so far. Chiksika told me of your leg. I see it did not heal very straight—” Suddenly she stopped, seeing the strain of grief in his eyes. “What?” she asked.

“I must tell you of a terrible thing.”

She shut her eyes, and her eyelids trembled. “It is of Chiksika.”

“Nep-wa,
he is dead.” he said softly.

Her hands gripped him desperately as she struggled with her grief. At last she released a long sigh. She opened her eyes and tears flowed down her cheeks, but her face was set firm. “Of course. He was only for war. You must come into the shade and sit with me. There is much to say.”

“There is much to say.”

“He told me you had promised to come.”

“I am here.”

Big Warrior, seeing the intensity in Turtle Mother and her son, summoned the other people from the hut, and they walked away with him. Tecumseh and his mother went in under the roof. She gave him water to drink, and then she washed his feet, her head down, tears falling from the end of her nose. After a while, when she could talk, she did not talk of Chiksika at first. She explained that the other people in the house had been distant relatives, a man and his wife and a little girl. Turtle Mother had come to live with them, she explained, because the place where the Shawnees had gone west of the Missi-se-pe was a strange sort of land,
on the wrong side of the Great River, and such a small piece of land within such a vast countryside that it had been like being forever shut in a room. To go west, it had seemed to her, was to go toward death. Here in Tuckabatchee at least was the place where she had grown up, and she was more content here, even though, as one who had gone away for a long time, she was a little set aside from the Creek women. The Creeks had not lately had trouble with the whites and did not like to hear her speak of her hatred for white men.

After a while she knelt across from him with her hands in her lap and said: “What does my daughter Star Watcher say of me? Does she curse me for leaving my family? Often I dream this, in shame, and think I should have stayed.”

He was astonished to hear this. “No,” he exclaimed. “Wipe away that word ‘shame.’ When we speak of our mother it is only with longing! Often we make ourselves smile in hard times by talking of the days when we were together under your care!”

Turtle Mother’s eyes were now glimmering. “This is indeed true? Even Star Watcher does not blame me?”

Fervently, to be sure she knew it was the truth, as she so needed to know, he told her:

“She is so true in her admiration that she tries to be another Turtle Mother. She is beloved by all the People for her goodness.”

Tears streamed down Turtle Mother’s cheeks. She asked to know everything about her grandchildren, and when that had all been told, she at last braced herself and said:

“Now I am ready to hear about my son Chiksika. It was white men who killed him?”

“Yes. White men.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “So many women would still have our husbands and sons if not for the white men.”

“True,” Tecumseh said. “And so many white women would still have their husbands and sons if not for Chiksika.” He said this with a grim satisfaction.

“Did he hurt long?”

“He was laughing, and then he was gone. He was fighting, and then he was at peace.”

“Then Weshemoneto is to be thanked.”

“He had foreseen it and was ready.”

“Like his father.”

They sat silent for a long while, absorbed in thought. The cicadas were shrilling in the bright sunlight outside, and there were
the calls and cheeps of many birds, many of them unlike any he had ever heard in the homeland so far away north.

She held both his wrists in her hands now, and with her thumbs she was caressing the bones of his wrists. Though she was grieving, her touch was calming his own grief and strengthening him. He remembered what a different place the world had been when the family had all lived together. He could feel something of that rich, deep inclusion again. But now of course it lacked Chiksika, and there was a gap there in the circle that would never be closed again. Cat Follower too was dead. Chiksika had told her of the beestings.

Outside the shelter the sunlight hammered down on the yellow grass and red earth, people made their working sounds, the voices of children rang in the distance. He felt as he had felt in the old Kispoko Town when he was a small boy, before he had become aware of the trouble with the whites. He remembered the sunny, droning days, the nearness of a mother, the feeling that there was no trouble in the world.

“My son,” she said after a while, “will you stay with me long?”

He shook his head. “Not long. Chiksika led a small band of us. A few Shawnees, a few more Cherokees. We had been active and struck the whites often. We have to do more. Before I came here they chose me to lead them in his place. I have thought of ways to distress the whites by shutting their roads.” She sighed and nodded. “You have a great name among the Cherokees already. The Creeks tell of your deeds. They do not speak of Chiksika without speaking of you also.”

“If I am to have a name spoken with his, I shall have to do much to be worthy of that honor.”

“You must do the great deeds, it is true. But never be reckless. My heart could not bear to hear again the sadness it heard today.” Then, after another deep silence, she said, “Do you understand yet what the shaking earth means?”

“I am more mystified than ever. I have seen more and I understand less. Listen …” He told her of the dove, of the wolves with the moons in their eyes, of seeing the face like Big Warrior’s, of the houses falling down. Then he was quiet for a minute, gazing out around the village of Tuckabatchee. He said, “The houses I saw falling were not like houses I had seen before. But now I recognize as I look at this town that they were houses like these.” She replied: