Panther in the Sky (59 page)

“And so we see once more,” Tecumseh said, “what the boundaries of a white man’s treaty mean to a white man.”

The Delaware put his hand on Tecumseh’s arm, and in his scarred face there was an earnest light. “My son, what you do here, we think often of it, we who were pressed down to mark the treaty of Wayne.…” He paused, as if remembering something, then went on: “My villages on the Wah-pi-ha-ni, near the Great Mound—you know the place—this is a good land, my son, fertile, easy to defend, and not so close to the white man’s roads. My People would be pleased if your People came to live nearby.…”

Tecumseh felt a great warmth. To receive an invitation like this, from another tribe, was an uncommon honor. He lowered his head. “Thank you. My People revere our grandfathers, the Delawares. And you know my belief: we must all be united together as red men, or the whites will scatter us until like dust we will no longer be seen nor be able to see each other. In council next time I will tell my People what you have said.” He paused, then said something he had not thought he could say. “I understand, Father, the great weight that pressed you down when you went to treat with Wayne. I know that many who put their marks on the treaty withheld their hearts.”

The old chief nodded. “We grow sick now as we watch the
white men come like a flood into the old lands. The boundaries are being forgotten already by the O-hi-o governor. St. Clair has made a new division he calls Wayne County, named for that general, and as I hear this land described, it is far outside their boundaries and into the land of our brothers, even the Auglaize, even to Mis-e-ken, I hear.”

Tecumseh clenched his jaw. This was no surprise to him, but it churned him inside. For nearly half his life he had been fighting to hold back the white intruders, but it was apparent that the fight had only begun. And now the Delaware was saying:

“Here is another thing about Wayne. I hear that his aching sickness brought him down and down until, in the last Hard Moon, he died, in a fort in Pennsylvania, on his way home. He was a great war chief, even we whom he harmed must say he was great, but it would have been better if his aching sickness had taken him two years sooner, before he struck us at the Fallen Timbers.”

“Ahh!” Tecumseh nodded. He sat quiet, remembering what a force Wayne had been in the fate of his People. Wayne had crushed the confederation “under his little finger,” as his boast had said, then had forced the British to withdraw from Fort Miami, then out of Detroit into Canada. The British had been cowardly, and Tecumseh did not feel sorry for them. But their departure boded ill for the red men.

Wayne had done all that, and now Wayne was no more. His body lay dead in the earth somewhere, but what he had done was still here, and would continue, and in this way his spirit would never leave the red men in peace. “He, like Clark, was a mighty enemy, and he still hurts us,” Tecumseh said. “May there never be another so great.” But as he said this, the other officer’s face came into his mind, the young one who had always been at Wayne’s side. When Tecumseh thought of him, he felt a chill.

Then Breaker-in-Pieces, as if he had seen into Tecumseh’s mind and glimpsed the young officer’s face there, said, “Wayne’s young chieftain, the one named Harrison. He grows very fast in importance for a man so young. He is now the chief of Fort Washington, by their big town of Cincinnati. He has married a daughter of one of the biggest of the land buyers. This one man, called Symmes, has bought all the land between the Little Miami-se-pe and the Great Miami-se-pe, all the way up to Fort Hamilton.”

Tecumseh remembered that area well from many hunting trips, and he gasped. “One man buys for himself a whole hunting ground!”

“Yes,” said Breaker-in-Pieces.

“And then he says all of it is his!”

“Yes. And all the white people have to believe him.”

“And then what does he do?” exclaimed Tecumseh, hardly knowing whether to laugh or cry at such a grandiose illusion. “Does he then tell the Great Good Spirit, ‘You must get off of my land’? Is that what he does?”

The old chief’s brutal face softened and creased with amusement. “Yes, that is what he says. And from what I have seen of white men’s land, Weshemoneto does leave it. And he takes with him all his creatures, and all that made it good.”

The two chiefs laughed at this. But their laughter was not light and pleasant. A deep foreboding loomed, and in its deepest shadow lurked the man named Harrison. There was something ominous in this: an ambitious white chieftain, rising fast, and associated by marriage with one of the great land-taking devils. The workings of the white man’s society were an unimaginable mystery, but even from the outside this seemed to portend the worst sort of trouble.

And then Tecumseh said something that made the Delaware’s eyes widen with surprise. “But the Great Spirit will come back with his creatures and make it a good land again,” he said in a soft but certain voice, “when we return and make the white men leave it.”

O
NE DAY
S
TAR
W
ATCHER MET
S
HE-
I
S-
F
AVORED AT THE
spring, where both had gone for water.

One was not supposed to meddle in another’s marriage, but Star Watcher put herself in the way of She-Is-Favored and made her meet her eyes and said, “Young sister, there is a cloud over your house. I see my brother drawn tight like a bow. This must not be. Are you the wrong woman for our chief?”

To Star Watcher’s surprise, She-Is-Favored did not shut her out but looked as if she were hungry for a chance to speak of her troubles. “He stays away from the house, with the People, too much,” she said.

“Yes. Is he not the chief?”

“Am I not the chief’s wife?” she snapped.

“Listen. Some think you do not act like it. To both the chief and his wife, there is only the health and happiness of the People. Tecumseh gives all to that. You must, too.”

“What of
my
health and happiness?”

“Sister, you have good health. You have all the food you need,
for your husband is the best hunter. You wanted to be the wife of the chief, and you are. You wanted to have babies, and you are going to. If you are unhappy, it must be from holding everything to yourself.” She reached for her hand and told her the old teaching: “When you give from your heart, your heart grows lighter. I hope you will learn the joy of giving from your heart to the People. As the wife of the chief, that is what you are for.”

But the face of She-Is-Favored did not show that she understood.

W
HEN IT WAS AGREED IN THE NEXT COUNCIL THAT IT WOULD
be good to go farther from the white men and become neighbors of the Delaware, Loud Noise was sent to locate a favorable townsite on the Wah-pi-ha-ni, which was the Delaware name for White River. The shaman was always the one who determined whether the medicine of a place was good. The tribe would move after the harvest.

Through all this planning, She-Is-Favored grew closer to her term and ever darker in spirit. She complained that she did not want to go farther away west from her home country.

“Just so do we all feel,” Tecumseh exclaimed, “but the whites move us despite our wishes. Do you not remember that half the nation long ago had to move beyond the Great River? Compared with what they had to do, this is not far, to the White River.”

But she argued and was still arguing when the baby started to come down. Then she stopped complaining long enough to groan with the labor. Tecumseh sent for Star Watcher to help her. His sister acted very happy for him, then told him to go someplace else. “For once she will not want you right here,” she said. “So go, and enjoy your freedom to walk around.” He went, but his mind was in a turmoil.

She-Is-Favored had ruined for him the proud, tender anticipation of fatherhood. Their marriage had become a relentless, unwanted burden because of her selfishness, her unwillingness to give any time or attention to the People. Many spoke of her as a nosy-mouth, which was their word for a gossip. She had not had a smile for him in months. After a hunt she would insist that he not give so much of the meat or so many of the skins to the old people. But she would not even tan the skins he did keep for her. She was a spoiled woman who would not listen to teaching and seemed not to want to understand anything important, and Tecumseh feared that their child would grow up in a house of silent thunder and become unhappy. Maybe she would choose
to leave him and return to her Peckuwes. Probably that would be the best thing. But then what about this baby?

While he was pondering this problem, he was also beginning to watch for any sign of the baby’s
unsoma.
He watched the sky and birds; he listened for sounds. As the wait went on there was nothing remarkable. The day was oppressive and still; nothing moved or announced its singularity. The sky was overcast but with no feel of rain, and thus there were not even any shadows to make suggestions.

At last an old midwife came to tell him the child was born and well, and was a boy, and She-Is-Favored was also well.

When Tecumseh went into the
wigewa,
the room still full of the moist musk of childbirth, she actually smiled at him, and he wondered if mothering might soften her, make her more giving, as motherhood tended to do. Perhaps his worries about the marriage had been unnecessary. She lay bared to the ribs, the dark, almost purple, animallike little creature squirming on her arm. Her breasts were swollen large. Tecumseh knelt and put his hand on her forehead. Her hair was damp. He looked closely at the baby, smiling with tender wonderment at all its tiny perfections: jointed fingers no bigger than flower buds, ears no wider than a man’s thumb, the little sprig of a
passah-tih
between his legs. Here it was as from the very beginnings, and for this moment Tecumseh did not worry that it was not a good time to be born. The baby outfaced all portents. The pungent room was a sacred place.

“Thank you for what you have done,” Tecumseh said.

She let him press his cheek against hers and felt the wetness of a tear.

W
HEN THE TIME CAME FOR THE BABY TO BEGIN SUCKLING
, Tecumseh was there watching. Having seen no
unsoma
sign yet, he had been idly thinking that somehow the infant might acquire a name associated, like his own, with the Panther.

It was night. Now the child, as if suddenly finding the milk-turgid breast beside him for the first time, squirmed violently, grabbed for it with both hands, and tried to stuff the whole mammary into his gaping mouth.

Tecumseh laughed. “He should be called The-Panther-Seizes-His-Prey!”

And so that—Neh-tha-weh-nah or Cat Pouncing—became the baby’s name.

S
OON THE MATERNAL LANGUOR WORE OFF, AND
S
HE-
I
S-
F
AVORED
began using the baby to put more pressure on Tecumseh. Now that she had gone to such effort to bear him this perfect baby, she did not feel obliged to do much of anything else, even though she was up and about. And she mentioned many pretty little things she had long wanted from the white men’s store near the Auglaize: a new mirror, a certain kind of earbobs which, she thought, would delight the baby as they dangled from her ears above him … The list of wants grew every time she spoke.

“The white men’s store is an evil place,” Tecumseh said. “It is the place of whiskey and debt. Look, the gifts our own women make are more beautiful.”

She clamped her mouth shut and glowered at him. “Do you mean to say we will never trade at the white men’s store?”

“Only for true needs,” he said. “And then it will be a British store, not the American. Their goods are better, and their cost is more fair. And though they amount to little as friends, at least they are not enemies.”

She-Is-Favored expected all the women of the town to come and pay homage to her now that she had borne the chief this wonderful son. But those who did come she found tiresome, because they wanted to talk about their own mothering as much as hers. And two women had had the effrontery to suggest that she should change the down in the baby’s bundle sooner and more often. Soon her laziness became so great and her tongue so abrasive that one evening Tecumseh lost his temper and grabbed her by the shoulders. He did this to make her look in his eyes, because it was time to blow the mist from her vision and make her see clearly. She reacted not as a mate in a quarrel, but as if she were once again, as of old, out on the ball ground. She clenched her teeth, shook her hair, and kicked Tecumseh hard on the ankle. Astonished, he tightened his grip on her shoulders and shook her. “Listen to me!” he hissed.

But she was not going to listen. Suddenly, teeth bared, she snatched with a quick, strong right hand at his genitals, grabbing the knot of them and his breechcloth and starting to twist and pull.

The pain was blinding, but Tecumseh shoved her to arm’s length so powerfully that her grip was torn loose, and he held her there while his vision came back and he gasped for breath. She struggled against his iron grip until she was too tired to move, then slumped there, hair disheveled, glowering at him, panting, sneering. And he said: