Panther in the Sky (57 page)

He looked at the metal cup in which his tea was steaming. It was an army cup, from the battleground where Little Turtle had destroyed St. Clair’s army six years ago. It was a good and durable item, one of those white men’s artifacts that made a woman’s chores easier, and she treasured it for its usefulness, but he still somehow did not like to drink or eat from metal. He thought for a while, then said, “I have thought of many matters since the chiefs marked the treaty and turned themselves into dogs in the white man’s yard. Now, I see, only we are the true Shawnees, we who came here to keep the old ways.

“And so, if we in this band are the only true Shawnees anymore, should we not multiply and grow? Oh, as I have told you many times, this is not a happy world for children to come into, and I still say so. But should I not have sons and daughters who will grow up as proud and free as our People used to be? Should there not be more of us who are
not
under the foot of the white men?”

She smiled. “That is so, my brother. I am glad that you are at last looking at it from this side.”

He nodded. Then he said, “I have also decided that the wedding will be in the old manner. Not like yours, a mating after a frolic dance.”

She compressed her lips. Rarely, but sometimes, her brother could make her angry. Like this. Once he had decided something, he talked as if anything else could not be right. In her mind, her marriage to Stands Firm had been as sacred as the old manner, for the tribe had come to accept that as a way of marrying. And it had been a good marriage in all ways since. She thought of mentioning the girls he had lived with unmarried here and there. But she did not retort, because she too believed that it
would
be good
to resume some of the customs from the old days, those times before the coming of the whites had unsettled the People and loosened their morals. She understood why Tecumseh wanted to change back to those very spiritual customs. It was just that he had not said it in a very good way. So she told him, “It will be good to see you wed as our father and mother were. And I will pray to Weshemoneto that your marriage will be as long and good as has mine, which came from a mating dance.”

She saw in his face that he was abashed, as he deserved to be, and with a rush of tenderness she understood why she had felt the sadness and anger at first. There were words for the two kinds of love.
Tap-a-lot
was the love between adults and children, between brothers and sisters, between members of the tribe and relatives, between great friends, even between leaders and followers, like that which Tecumseh had had for Chiksika, like that which Thick Water had for Tecumseh. Like that which she herself had for Tecumseh. It was the biggest kind of love in the world.
Soos
was the kind of love men and women have for each other, in which they yearn for each other and get their bodies together.
Soos
was just a little part of
tap-a-lot,
but at times it could seem greater and stronger, as when you danced with the person you wanted and gave him the signal of your bare hand and did not care who saw or what they thought. And sometimes your
tap-a-lot
for someone was so great and so complete that you did not want anyone else to give him
soos.

That was how she had felt, she understood that now.

C
HANGE-OF-
F
EATHERS, BELIEVED TO BE THE OLDEST MAN IN
the nation, he who had seen the coming and going of more than a hundred summers, sprinkled tobacco dust on the bed of embers in front of the beautiful young man and woman. As the smoke curled upward around his silvered head toward the vent in the roof, he prayed in a voice dry as husks:

“Weshemoneto, Master of Life, father of Our Creator, of all the sky and waters and world! The smoke of the
nilu famu
carries our prayer to you. Weshemoneto, who create by your thought, bless what we do here and make this one of the best days in the whole time of the South Wind People!”

The folds of skin over his eyelids were so creased and loose that his eyes were almost hidden. His face, once so round and grandmotherly, was gaunt, sunken by toothlessness. From the jutting cheekbones his skin hung in wattles. A heavy necklace of bear teeth and a breastplate of quills looked as if their weight
would drag him to earth. Loud Noise, formerly his student, looked at him from behind Tecumseh and wondered if he would ever die and make a place for another shaman.

Star Watcher knelt on the floor near the place where the bride stood, and as she looked up at the old medicine man her heart quaked with reverence. It was said by the Singers that the Master of Life was so old that, if he were not invisible, he would be beautiful. Change-of-Feathers was almost beautiful in his great age like that, she thought.

The voice of the ancient grew stronger and more resonant in the Great House of Tecumseh’s town, where the old man had been brought on a travois to perform this marriage. “Here is Shooting Star, whose destiny you have foretold to us. You see him. You know the good he has done. You direct the good he has yet to do. He is worthy. Here beside him is She-Is-Favored, a maiden who is good to her old father. You see her. She is worthy. These two are worthy of each other. We ask that you find them worthy of your blessing.

“Now witness, Great Good Spirit. He will cover her against the cold and draw her to him, to show that she will be only for him, and that he will protect her against all harm.”

Loud Noise unfolded a fine-tanned deerhide, soft and pale as a morning cloud, and gave it to Tecumseh, who then draped it across his own shoulders and hers. She was trembling, this bold and quick woman who once had challenged him on the field of play combat; she was trembling, and her eyes were wet with joy. His heart was suddenly so swollen with his feelings that he groaned to keep from weeping.

“You are my wife,” he murmured in her ear.

“Niwy sheena,
you are my husband!” she gasped.

Loud Noise, who could remember how she looked naked by a stream in the morning sunlight, sighed with miserable envy. His bandanna was tied low over the right side of his face to hide his empty eyesocket. Now for a moment in the midst of this sacred beauty he felt so ugly that his heart hurt. He had a lewd thought, that this woman might someday yank her husband’s balls. This made him smile, a lopsided smile rendered more lewd by his stringy fringe of mustache. Loud Noise was the only man in the village with hair on his lip. He could not bear to pluck the hairs out or let his wife do it; it made his face twitch and his nose run and his eyes water and caused fits of sneezing, so he had a mustache—just another one of his strangenesses.

He became aware then that Change-of-Feathers was looking
at him—or seemed to be; his eyes were hidden in pouches of wrinkles—and the old one did not look pleased. Surely he sees inside my head, Loud Noise thought, and knows what, I was thinking about. He squirmed and tried to assume an expression of piety and happiness. He wondered if he would ever have the power to see into people’s souls. His doubt made him sigh again.

Star Watcher was looking up at her brother and his bride. Light from the roof seemed to shimmer on their glossy black hair. Inside the soft deerhide together, they were in their
soos.
She was excluded from that, as she knew she should be. But she could feel the greater love, the
tap-a-lot,
surrounding all the People in the Great House and the village around it. It was as if the Great Good Spirit held a vast, warm, soft robe around everybody, and Star Watcher, a woman of nearly forty summers of work and grief and giving, felt young and happy.
She is always happy,
her father had used to say of her. And that had been true, it seemed, despite the troubles of her People. She was doing well at watching over her brother the Shooting Star, so she was happy in his happiness.

T
HERE WERE SAID TO BE—SO WOMEN WOULD GIGGLE AS
they talked in the menstrual hut—there were said to be a few fortunate women who carried such passion in their loins that they could start coming down inside just by thinking and flexing. And She-Is-Favored was one like that. Since she had fallen in love with Tecumseh, she had had those moments of inner brightness several times while sitting alone, dreaming of him and rocking on her hips.

Now there had come a time when there was no line between what was dreamed and what was touchable, and on the bed in his lodge by firelight they coupled again and again, anointing each other with musky juices and sweat, slowly at first and then quickening, with the cries of excitement clamped in their throats, galloping finally into the joyous spasms. She felt as if she must turn herself inside out upon him. Again and again they became a single being. Behind his eyes he saw glowing, warm, shapeless dreams.

At last, her hair wet with sweat, sweat drying on her copper skin in the night-cooling air long after midnight, she went to sleep.

Tecumseh lay with his head propped on the heel of his hand, leaning on his elbow, feeling the flames of their
soos
diminish to coals in his tingling groin, wondering and glad, watching her sleep with the little pout on her lips, watching her brown, small-nippled breasts rise and fall with breathing, watching the dim
light gleam along the length of her naked body, feeling reverence for the creator of man and woman. Lying there wakeful but languorous, he remembered how his mother would tell that story:
And this time Our Grandmother remembered to give them their genitals, which they found to be very interesting.
He smiled, remembering those words. At this moment he was happier than he had ever been since the dreamlike days of his childhood. He was complete now; he was one with a woman who was as beautiful and fertile as Earth the Mother.

Soon his eyes were not seeing and his head dropped forward, awakening him. Somewhere out in the darkness, where before only the barred owl had been screaming, people were screaming.

Wide awake at once, he rose and put on his breechcloth and slipped his feet into moccasins. Several people were screaming out in the night. In an instant he had primed his rifle, snatched up his war club, and sped out into the night, as swift and silent as a breath of wind. People were stirring in the doorways of their
wigewas,
their voices querying as he went by. Could the Long Knives be coming? The Treaty of Greenville had said there would be total peace forever.

Tecumseh had not roused the village because he did not think it was Long Knives coming. The disturbance was down near the stream, beyond the ceremonial ground. And there were no white men involved in it—only the white man’s curse. Tecumseh could smell the whiskey in the air even before he reached the screaming people.

A knot of them were screaming like demons, staggering and shoving each other around in the light of a bonfire. A whiskey keg sat open. In the mud and grass a few men, and two naked women, lay unconscious. One of the women was asleep under a sleeping man. Some men simply sat in the grass, their faces stupefied, shrieking for no apparent reason other than their drunkenness. A few warriors in the milling mob were waving knives at each other. Near the edge of the stream Loud Noise lay facedown in his own vomit.

With an angry bellow, Tecumseh charged into the clearing, knocking men down as he came. He went straight to the keg, and before the bleary-eyed men could gather their wits, he kicked it into the bonfire and a
whooshing
flame billowed up, getting the attention of even the wildest screamers.

“No!” he roared, spinning to face them. At a flick of his arm, his war club knocked a knife from the hand of a swaying, whining, slobbering young warrior.

He cried to all of them: “This is the white man’s poison to make us weak and stupid! Look at each other! Are you not poisoned? Where did this come from? Do you think we want this poison here?”

I
T WAS SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE EVERYTHING WAS BACK IN
order. Some of the men had to be carried to their homes. Two who had been cut with knives had to be patched up. One very young man was found unconscious in the woods, where he had fallen down a rocky bank and broken some ribs; he stank, and his breechcloth was full of his own waste. It was the first time this youth had ever had whiskey, and it had hit him exceptionally hard. The women were wives of two men who were away hunting, and they had drunkenly fornicated with three or four of the revelers before passing out, and then many others had lain upon them while they were unconscious, so there would be much trouble ahead about that. The whiskey, he learned, had been bought from several white men who went from village to village with kegs loaded on their packhorses.

“I told those white men,” Tecumseh warned, “that I will kill them if they try to sell their poison again near our town.” There would have to be a discussion of this problem in the next council, of course, and Tecumseh knew it would be a delicate matter to judge over, particularly since his own brother was one of the worst of the addicts. The council could decree that anyone who wanted to drink whiskey should be sent away to one of the towns of white men’s Indians. But for several reasons he did not want that solution. First, it would mean banishing his own brother, who was the shaman of this town; second, there were so few warriors left who were not under the treaty chiefs, and Tecumseh did not want his core of followers decreased by this kind of trouble. The way to strengthen and purify the true Shawnees was to make them spurn the whiskey poison, to make them yearn for something better, not to make drunken outcasts of them.

And so these were the worries he had as he returned to his lodge before dawn, exhausted. When he stretched out in the gloom with a long sigh beside She-Is-Favored, thinking she was asleep, she startled him with a light slap on his mouth, and he sat upright, slightly angered by this slap because of the problems on his mind. She complained, in a voice that sounded only half-teasing:

“Bad husband! You left your wife still hot in our bed.”

“I am sorry. I had to go. Some of the people were in trouble with whiskey.”