Panther in the Sky (64 page)

A stink of rot rose, as if he had been long dead.

Then someone cried, “His mouth! Look!”

Loud Noise’s lips were moving. His mouth was open. The smell of rot was his breath.

Tecumseh arched over him, staring. The eyeball was moving behind the closed eyelid. Tecumseh called to him. “Brother! Brother! Wake and be well! Please come to us!”

Loud Noise began whimpering, and his chest began to rise and fall with his breathing. Even before his eye opened, it was trickling tears. His sobs and whimpers were pitiful. His wife lifted his head onto her lap and stroked it and murmured passionately to him as if he had been not a source of misery and embarrassment to her for years, but instead an esteemed lover and provider.

He wept and groaned for a long time. When he opened his eye it was flooded with tears. His face was contorted. Little by little his strength seemed to return, and he could raise his arm, which he laid across his forehead. When he tried at last to speak, he broke again and again into abject weeping. When his wife asked him where the pain was, he touched his chest over his heart.

Late in the night Loud Noise was sitting up and sipping broth. It was the longest he had ever gone without food; he had been gone for two days. He sat with a robe over his shoulders. With hesitation and stammering at first, then with an eloquence growing beyond any he had ever revealed before, he told his amazed listeners where he had been while he was dead.

“Two perfect warriors came down from the sky for me,” he said. “They took my arms and pulled me out of my body. I looked down and saw my wife lay the baby down and hurry over to my body where it had fallen. Then we rose out through the roof, into the evening sky. The warriors who flew me up, they wore dark blue breechcloths and moccasins decorated with glittering stars.

“Never had I seen the land from so high! Not even as a boy when I climbed a great oak so far that its little branches bent! In the dusk below I saw the White River twisting through the woods and meadows. I looked one way and saw the
wigewas
and smoke of the village, and in the other direction the ancient
mounds, and farther down the town of the Jesus missionaries. The western sky was the color of squash, and in the blue above it was the evening star.

“We went higher and higher until things on the earth were too small to see, except the rivers and the Great Lakes. Up there, there was no smoke in the air, no bird song, no voice of tree frog or cricket. It was a perfect silence, the only perfect silence I ever heard. We came onto the Road of Stars and kept going upward. A long time later we passed through the Roof of the Sky and onto the Parallel World above. When we passed through, the sky felt like spring water, and then at once it was bright daytime.

“There the road forked. To the right it went on as a road of stars, but to the left it was a road of dirt, like a bison trace. The star road led toward a green and misty land of meadows and corn fields, and elm trees and blue streams, where herds of bison and elk stood in grass as high as their shoulders. Birds flew everywhere, more than could be counted. Happy men and beautiful women were hunting, fishing, planting, playing games, and dancing. Oh,” he groaned, tears flowing, “the sound of their laughter made me weep!

“But the other road went through a wasteland. Trees stood dead and leafless in bogs. Their bark was gray and always falling off. Everything there was rotten, and there were green bubbles in the thick water of the swamp. There were hovels by the roadside, and at their doors were sick, snarling people, with hogs running among their legs and knocking them down!”

The listeners’ faces were grimacing as they envisioned this place he described. Star Watcher and Tecumseh looked at each other across his shoulders.

“I tried to ask the sky warriors which way they were going to take me, but they answered me not. And then as I had feared they took me down the road to the left, away from the heaven I had seen. They took me to a smoky, scorched lodge, hundreds of paces long, which was Matchemoneto’s house. They made me go inside. Oh! The heat in there seared my skin! I watched blisters come up! I was choked by the thick, brown smoke!

“The crowds of sinners in there were sooty, and their eyes were red. They went in three lines. One line of them walked wailing into the heart of the fire! There they twitched and blistered, they grew black, they turned to ashes. Those were the Worst Sinners.

“Another line of people went only to the edge of the great fire. They had to stick their hands and feet into the flames, and they
were screaming almost as loud as the roar of the fire. These were the Lesser Sinners.

“The sky warriors put me in the third line. This went not to the fire, but to a great smoking stone, where iron ladles steamed. In them was molten lead, as when musketballs are made, but it smelled like whiskey. We in this line were drunkards. I recognized people I knew had died of drinking. Do you remember Crooked Hand, who died in our town at Deer Creek? He stood there and greeted me. His lips were all burned. From his mouth came stinking smoke, and red flames, and flakes of burned-off skin.…”

A screech of horror came from a woman among the listeners. It was Crooked Hand’s widow. She gasped and sobbed as Loud Noise talked on.

“Crooked Hand offered me one of the iron ladles. ‘Drink some!’ he told me, and more flakes of burned skin floated out of his mouth with the words. I was afraid. ‘Come, drink,’ Crooked Hand told me. ‘You love whiskey! Look! I drink! Oh, it burns me inside! Oh, but the burning is exquisite!’ Crooked Hand poured it into his own mouth. It was terrible to see him drink it! More flesh burned off his lips, and he dropped the ladle and clutched his arms over his glowing belly, and made a bubbling scream!”

Crooked Hand’s widow screeched again and fell in a faint. Loud Noise went on, his voice quaking and curdled with horror.

“Hundreds of other drunkards were doing the same. Their screams were like the roar of a great waterfall. They drank and screamed, they fought with knives for more to drink, they fell, they rose and drank again, burning their insides worse each time! Smoke came out of their noses, and ears, and navels, and from their behinds squirted a boiling froth of melted metal, blood, and runny excrement. Many of them were screaming to me, ‘Come! Drink!’

“I began to drool! I wanted to seize a ladle and empty it in my mouth, even though I knew the pain would be too much to bear! My hands shook. I reached for a ladle, beginning to cry for it!”

His listeners were moaning, aghast. Almost every one had had a relative who had died from drinking or from the troubles of drinking.

“But the sky warriors saved me from that. They had only wanted to show me. They took hold of my arms again and took me out the door, and we flew up again, into the cold. We came
near to the moon, and stopped at Our Grandmother’s house. They threw me inside. There she sat! I have seen Kokomthena! She is huge. Her face has the wrinkles of thousands of years. Her hair is white, in a long braid. On her cheeks are red dots. She reached out toward me! Her hand was bigger than I! There were sparks in her eyes. Her mouth was down in anger. Her voice sounded like brush burning. I was afraid. She asked me a question.” When Loud Noise related the question, the voice sounded not like his own, but like the one he described, crackling and rushing. No one had ever heard such a voice. “Her question was: ‘How are you getting on with the task you were to do?’ I did not remember any task. She said to me:

“ ‘You were born under a strong sign. Two others were born from the womb with you. You have been told that you have a sign, and thus a great good task to do. But you have done nothing good!’ Then she did this to me:

“She reached out and pinched my mouth off and held it before my eyes! It was lopsided and sticking out in all directions. She shouted, ‘Is it for this that I created your mouth, to lie and deceive and mock and gossip?’ Then she slammed my mouth back on my face and yanked off my ears and showed them to me. They were all hairy and twisted and clogged with dirty wax. ‘Is it for this that I created your ears, that they will listen to anything bad, but not to truth and law?’ Then she slammed my ears back on so hard that I heard my head crack, like a hazelnut between two stones! Then the worst thing she did: she plunged her fingers into my chest, fingers as big and hard as logs! And plucked out my heart to show me! And Our Grandmother shouted at me:

“ ‘Is it for this that I created your heart, that it is full of rot and lust and corruption?’ My heart was furrowed and stained and moldy! She shoved it back into my chest, and she told me:

“ ‘You have been permitted to come and see the World Above, the past and the future. You saw the heaven where your father and your dead brothers now hunt in happiness as in the early days. And also you saw the house of Matchemoneto, where drunkards and sinners suffer for what they have done. Many more of the People go to that house now than before. They have been made weak and confused by the troubles the white men brought,
but their sins are their own!
They will not be strong and happy again unless they return to the old ways. I have brought you here to tell you how to make them pure again. You will go back as a messenger. You will have to help your brother do his great work.

“ ‘Now listen well,’ Our Grandmother told me. ‘I have cleaned the wax and dirt out of your ears so you can hear the truth from me. Here are the things you will tell all the red people, not just the Shawnees, but all …’ ”

The people crowding into and around the house of Loud Noise cast dubious glances at each other, to see if others were believing or not. There was much reason to suspect that the crazy shaman had simply come up with another elaborate sham to make himself seem more than he was. Tecumseh himself listened most skeptically. Though happy beyond measure that his brother was alive after all, he as well as the others had little reason to believe that Loud Noise was telling the truth. And this afterworld of Matchemoneto’s that he had described in such horrible detail sounded less like the Shawnee underworld than like the hell in the white people’s religion that Big Fish had used to tell of in their talks. Tecumseh wondered if Loud Noise had borrowed it from what he had overheard in those talks or perhaps from one of the various other Jesus religions he had become fascinated with lately.

Tecumseh was in fact ready to believe that this whole episode was a trick, by which his wretched brother meant to improve his sorry reputation as a medicine man, when Loud Noise said something that went through him like a lightning bolt:

“Our Creator told me, ‘You will go back as a messenger. Your name will be Tenskwatawa, He-Opens-the-Door.’ ”

“Brother!” Tecumseh gasped. “She said, ‘He-Opens-the-Door’? She said you will be called …”

Turning his head like a man in a trance, Loud Noise said in a soft voice:

“Yes. Tenskwatawa.”

“He-Opens-the-Door!” Tecumseh repeated, suddenly full of shivers. It was the name of the one-eyed prophet in his own dreams! Then he quickly tried to remember: Had he ever told Loud Noise that name, ever told him that the Shawnee prophet would be called Tenskwatawa?

He was sure he had not.

So now Tecumseh sat stunned, having to believe that the same name had been given in his own vision and his brother’s. Yes! This did go with the signs! Tecumseh’s heart was beating fast, and he inhaled as if he had been running. At last something was coming by another way to confirm the signs that had for so long been only in himself!

Now Loud Noise—or Open Door—was shaking and weeping openly as no grown Shawnee man would do in the presence of
others, and between spells of sobbing he poured out confessions and vows. “Yes! I have sinned every day of my life that I can remember! There was no law I did not disobey! There was no sacredness that I did not spit on! I have stolen from my people, I have hurt the weak. I have hidden from danger. I have done things in secret for which others suffered the consequences! I have spied on women and forced myself upon them. I have ridiculed the good that people do! I have lied for no other reason than that I scorned truth telling. I have eaten manflesh, only to seek deeper for revulsion! And, oh, my beloved people, I have said bad things, untrue things, about every one of you.… I have … only now do I understand it … I have been like a disease among my own people. I have been a slave to whiskey for half of my life. I have gone cackling and dirtying everything, thinking the whiskey made me wiser than the wise men.…”

The people in the lodge, family, warriors, womenfolk, at first grimaced and squirmed with disgust and embarrassment at hearing this outpouring, as if they were watching someone eat his own vomit. But as he went on purging himself, their eyes began to glitter with pity, their faces began to glow with compassion as if they were seeing something holy happening before them in this transformation. Some of them began to tremble with him now, realizing that he had had to go face to face with the Creator to be so shaken and wrung out in his soul. Some of them were wondering how they could face the Creator with their own little sins drawn out from the secrecy of their hearts; imagine going with Loud Noise’s load of sins and standing before Our Grandmother, who knew them all! And here was a man who had died and been returned to life! Of course he would have appalling things to say! And how blessed they were to be here and hear it from his own mouth!

The word was spreading in the village, and dozens, then hundreds, were crowding in the night outside his dimly lit lodge.

“Never! Never again,” he bawled through contorted, drooling lips, “will a drop of that white man’s poison enter my mouth! I vow this from my purified heart! My people, how I have suffered to pass through this door and learn what I know at last! Our Creator ripped out and held my own corrupt heart before my eyes to teach me the lesson. And now I have been sent back to guide our poor People out of the pain and confusion they live in. I am the Open Door! And through me you must pass to find the narrow road to paradise!” He was trembling violently now, and many of his listeners were, too. Tecumseh watched and listened with
utmost concentration for gestures or words that would reveal how this miracle was to interweave with his own.