Panther in the Sky (51 page)

And there beyond the fire, his one eye bulging, his lips and mustache smeared with red paint and the grease of the meat, a bowl of liquor on the floor beside him, sat Loud Noise, who had promised to subdue his appetites and do honor to his family and his destiny.

Tecumseh stared at him, face drawn with loathing, and it seemed a long time before the cloud of Loud Noise’s stupor cleared enough for him to realize that this was his own brother standing in the firelight glaring at him. He grinned drunkenly, and there was half-chewed human flesh in his teeth. When at last Tecumseh could speak, he said in a sad, low voice:

“So now you have even come down like one of the vultures.”

And then he was gone, leaving only the contemptuous echo of his words and a draft of the winter air.

L
IKE A SILENT, INVISIBLE REVENGE FOR THEIR DEFEAT, A DISEASE
of the white men swept through the Indian towns that winter. Warriors who had dodged a thousand bullets and bayonets were brought low by burning fevers. Their bone joints ached until they could not move, and their lungs filled up. Women and children and old people fell into whimpering, sweat-soaked sleeps from which they never awoke.

Loud Noise boiled roots and barks to make bitter teas. He burned pinecones and nut shells to make healing smokes. He wore a wooden mask, shook a tortoiseshell rattle, and sang prayers. His decoctions made people sweat or shiver or vomit, made their bowels spew dark fluids, made them urinate almost ceaselessly in their bedding. Many of those he treated died without relief, some more miserable than the disease itself would have made them. When they were in their graves they did not say he
was a poor medicine man. Some got well, because or in spite of his remedies, and these were glad to praise his medicine. So when the epidemic had run its course, there were a few people who would say he was a healer, and therefore he was. There were many people who still did not like him or trust him enough to turn to him for medicine. He was still a drunkard and a loud mouth with crazy ways. It was known now that he had eaten manflesh with members of that unpopular society, a society that old Black Hoof and most other leaders termed evil, and many members of the tribe shunned him for that reason. But some of the Shawnee secretly believed that manflesh eaters and other contrary people were in touch with special kinds of magic. Maybe it was the magic of Matchemoneto, and if a person grew desperate enough, he might eventually turn to the Evil Spirit for help. If an illness or pain was believed to be caused by a witch, extreme cures were needed. Thus it was that Loud Noise began to have a small following, and he studied hard with Change-of-Feathers to learn all he could before the ancient shaman should die and take his knowledge to the grave with him. And so Loud Noise, once useless, now had a way of making a modest living and no longer had to depend entirely upon the generosity of his family. Now he spent much time in the woods digging for roots of dogbane and sassafras and mayapple, drying and grinding them, stripping out the inner bark of elms, making feather fans and bone rattles, grinding mouse bones to powder, rubbing tobacco down to dust, and, as he had always done, talking and chanting to himself.

Beginning to fancy himself a substantial member of the tribe, Loud Noise set his mind on getting a wife. Once this would have been his most hopeless task. But his medicine had cured some men and women who had daughters, so now as a suitor he had some choices. His first choice was, of course, She-Is-Favored. But when he approached her she looked at him with a wary and defensive gaze that brought back to him the memory of the worst pain he had ever felt—his testicles seemed to have a memory of their own—and Loud Noise simply nodded to her and passed on by. And when he took a wife it was instead a round, placid, pretty-faced girl who seemed unlikely ever to twist her husband’s balls, even if he deserved it. Loud Noise had long since decided that he was not by nature a fighter, so why should he bring a fighting woman under his own roof?

L
OUD
N
OISE WAS NO SOONER MARRIED THAN HE BEGAN SUGGESTING
to Tecumseh that he, too, should enter that state so natural to man.

They sat in Loud Noise’s clean, orderly new lodge, which his bride had recently built. It was the first time the brothers had visited with each other since the night Tecumseh had found him among the manflesh eaters, and it seemed as if Loud Noise were advocating this natural condition of marriage in order to make himself seem less unnatural by it.

Loud Noise exaggerated the bliss of his marriage. Though his new wife was a calm and gentle woman who kept a good house and never raised her voice, she did have annoying ways of expressing her dislike of her husband’s personal shortcomings. She would wrinkle her nose at the smell of his breath when he had had a little whiskey. A garment he had worn too long she would hold at arm’s length between her thumb and forefinger as if holding a rotten fish by the tail. These silent expressions would irk him more than if she had complained aloud, and he would glower at her and get heartburn. And when she saw his angry expression, she would cringe about in the lodge, her eyelids trembling as if she anticipated being hit—which he understood to be an allusion to his notorious bullying of women in the past. Yes, this woman looked like an ideal wife. But she would not let him sleep the day away as he sometimes would have liked to do. She would not let him nest in his own squalor as he had used to do. And when he vented his gases with his usual loudness and virtuosity, she would not laugh but instead would get up from whatever she had been doing and go outside and make a great show of breathing fresh air, inhaling until her big breasts were as high as her chin. Furthermore, she had a passion for such costly white men’s things as iron kettles and steel awls and needles and mirrors and tin cups and silk cloth and glass beads. People would say she was a perfect wife. But without a word of complaint or nagging, she had made it clear from the beginning that she did not have a perfect husband, nor a good provider.

Loud Noise was not as happy a husband as he pretended to be. And perhaps his reason for urging Tecumseh to get married was that he thought someone else in the family should be as miserable and exasperated as he. So he discussed with Tecumseh the idea of marriage, saying, “You’re going to be an important war chief. You should have a woman and children, so people won’t shake their heads and moan about you.”

“I know,” Tecumseh replied. “You are not the first to give me
such counsel. I have heard it from Black Hoof. And from Stands Firm, and certainly from our sister. And from Blue Jacket. Even from Little Turtle, who is not even of our tribe.” He smiled with patient amusement and said, “The next American general who comes into our country will probably send a messenger, saying, ‘Tecumseh, you should have a wife and children.’ Ha! And I will answer, ‘Why? If I had children, you would burn down the house they live in, and destroy the food that was raised for their mouths, and chase them off the ground they play on, and then drive them into a corner and chop them with your long knives.’ That is how I would answer. No, brother. I do not want to put children onto this earth until I am sure that they will not be like leaves before the wind.” He drew from his pipe and looked at Loud Noise, then at his woman, who was moving a piece of bark to enlarge the smokehole in the roof—her silent way of saying that she did not like all this tobacco smoke in her lodge, even if it was being produced by one of the tribe’s most renowned warriors, her esteemed brother-in-law.

“But if you
were
to marry,” Loud Noise persisted, “you would want a woman of this kind.…” He nodded at her with a smile, speaking clearly so she would hear every word. “A perfect and obedient wife, not one of those ball pullers.”

Tecumseh smiled at this. “Of course,” he said.

“May I ask who would interest you, if you were interested?”

Tecumseh sighed. How could he make it clear to a misty-brain like Loud Noise this important conviction he had reached? He tried to say it in a way that would not offend the woman on the other side of the fire:

“The Messengers tell me that my life will be used up in fighting the white men. They tell me that I alone of the Shawnees will stand against them when all the other chiefs have put their marks upon their treaties. Until there are no more white men coming against us, I cannot divide my spirit between this task and the needs of a family. The Shawnee are my family, and I must be free to take care of them. And so, I am not interested in a wife yet. Even though …” He smiled and inclined his head toward his sister-in-law, who pretended not to be listening as hard as she was. “Even though a good wife does give her husband strength as well as comfort, as I am sure.”

Loud Noise seemed to have been listening well to all of this, and he sat puffing smoke and gazing into the fire. But then he said, “If you do try to get a wife, you would not want to get one like the Peckuwe woman, She-Is-Favored. You would not want
a troublesome woman, one of those ball pullers.” He feared the maiden might tell Tecumseh of his assault.

Tecumseh sighed. Then he tilted his head and looked with mock reproach at his brother. “Why do you call that one troublesome? You know it is one of the worst offenses to say untrue gossip about a person.”

Loud Noise, suddenly afraid of being censured again, raised his eyebrows and shrugged like an innocent. “Oh … I know nothing! She just
looks
bold, like one of those who would not be afraid to grab you.”

Tecumseh smiled. He did not know the painful memory Loud Noise had of being grabbed by the Peckuwe girl. He himself was remembering when she had grabbed his loincloth off in the ball game. He smiled at the memory of that hilarious moment that seemed so long ago. “It is true,” he said, “that one would not be afraid to grab you.”

But, he thought, who would want a woman without strong spirit?

W
HENEVER
T
ECUMSEH MADE A HUNTING CAMP, WHETHER
he was near enemy country or not, he chose the most advantageous spot he could find and walked all around it, memorizing the terrain, noting where gullies and thickets and approach and escape routes lay. Chiksika had taught him this, and several close escapes in the south had affirmed the lesson.

Now, as the campfire burned orange and low between the two shelters of his hunting camp north of the Beautiful River, and droplets from the day’s drizzle pattered in the woods, Tecumseh sat wakeful and tense, a hide robe over his shoulders. He had started this hunting trip in the Green Moon with ten men. But this morning, while they were rounding up horses, one of the hunters had vanished without a trace. Most of the day had been spent hunting him instead of game.

Now his remaining hunters, including Big Fish and Thick Water, were asleep in the two army tents they were using as shelters. The horses were hobbled in a small meadow below the camp. The fires under the jerky racks were out, but the ashes were still warm, and in Tecumseh’s nostrils lingered the smell of meat grease and ashes. He had been awake wondering about the missing hunter. Then his wakeful mind had wandered over the signs and dreams that guided his life and from there to wondering what the American great chief Washington would do next—whether he would again this year try to avenge the defeat of his army.

Tecumseh knew by now that those two things in his life were bound together: the signs and the doings of the white men. This was plain to him, and it was seldom out of his waking thoughts—or even his dreams, when he could sleep. This night he apparently was not to be allowed to sleep; his thoughts had been clamoring. Because of the disappearance of that one hunter, he had a persistent intuition of danger. Probably the hunter had gotten in a long pursuit of something and would find his way back tomorrow. Tecumseh had not seen or smelled or heard any sign of enemies near the hunting camp, even while lying awake in the stillness. But something, like a tiny sharp point, stayed at the base of his skull and would not let him relax his vigil and sink into sleep. Because of the snoring of Big Fish he could not listen well enough to the woods.

At last he rose from his bed of boughs and, still wrapped in his robe, carrying only his war club and sheath knife, crept out behind his shelter to sit leaning back against the big tree trunk, in the warmth of the ashes of the jerking fire but out of the campfire glow. Here he could keep a keener watch and determine whether there was any real cause for his uneasiness.

For a long while he sat and heard nothing, and at last the middle-of-the-night weariness overwhelmed him. In his dream he saw Eagle Speaker, who was telling him about the day when the bed of the Great River would heave and its water would flow backward.

He awoke, heard nothing, and tried to go back to sleep, hoping that perhaps if the same dream continued, Eagle Speaker would reveal more about the meanings.