Panther in the Sky (65 page)

“I am tired now,” Loud Noise intoned with sighs. “I have traveled as far as anyone travels, and returned as well. I must rest. Tomorrow let us gather under the sky in front of the council lodge, men and women and children. And then I will reveal to you the way to purity, as Our Creator decreed it to me. My children! Cry your thanks to the Great Good Spirit, for telling us how to save ourselves from doom, and how to find the joy we knew in the earlier times!”

W
HEN
O
PEN
D
OOR WENT OUT IN THE MORNING, THERE WERE
more people, many more, waiting in front of the council lodge than there had been crowding outside his
wigewa
the night before. There were, in fact, more people than the population of the village. Many Delawares, and some Shawnees and people of other tribes who lived with the Delawares, had heard of this miracle and had come to hear what he would tell.

People had never looked at the man who had been Loud Noise the way they looked at him now that he was Open Door. Their gazes followed him with awe, or reverence, or at least with intense curiosity, as he made his stately way along the edge of the crowd under the trees to the front of the council house. Never had Loud Noise moved in a stately way before. Never had he enjoyed being looked at before. He was a changed one. Though he was still the stout, one-eyed man with the hairy upper lip that he had been—for the Creator had not remade his physical body or visage—he now walked erect with his head high and his face straight forward, no longer edging obliquely along with a stoop and one eye leading him.

And he was no longer unkempt and filthy in half-rotted, grease-darkened skins. For this occasion he had borrowed from Tecumseh a clean, soft, beautifully tanned hide robe which he wore like a toga; his bare left arm was encircled at wrist and bicep by wide silver bands. Under his nose hung a silver ornament in the fashion of three leaves. Tooled silver earbobs the size of white men’s dollar coins hung by thongs from his earlobes to the base of his neck, and with the motions of his measured steps they clinked against the silver gorget that curved around his throat. His hair for once was clean and untangled, and around his head he wore a patterned silk bandanna of scarlet, orange, yellow, and green shimmering like a songbird’s plumage. A silver scalplock
tube with a lock of his hair pulled through it hung over the bandanna from the crown of his head.

He walked with a long staff decorated with a quarter circle fan of feathers, and he was as resplendent and serene as a king. The staff was in his left hand; in his right hand, held up before him, was a short, slender stick decorated at its upper end by a small plume of delicate, flame-colored oriole feathers that trembled in the breeze to give an appearance that the stick was burning. On a string from the other end of the stick dangled the fragile copperhead skull Tecumseh had brought him from the ruins of their home in Chillicothe. He carried this stick as one would carry a torch at night; indeed, even in the bright, sun-dappled glade he seemed to be lighting his way with it.

Those who had come to ridicule the biggest fool of Tecumseh’s town held their tongues, for the moment, anyway, for they were impressed by the profound change in his demeanor. He had not said anything yet this morning, either foolish or wise, but for the first time he did not bear himself at all like a fool.

Most of the people had not come to mock. Through the night they had been thinking of him and of what he had said, or what they had heard he had said, and had felt a strange tension in themselves, like being pulled between eagerness and dread. Somehow for many of them his miracle had come as an answer to a question they had not known they asked. Through the dark hours as they thought of him, they had become aware of a kind of buzzing empty place in their souls where some lost hope or faith belonged, and his words had started to fill that empty place. All sensed, whether they ever said it or not, that the spirit of the People had been weak and unhappy. Except for a few like Tecumseh and Stands Firm and Seekabo, there seemed to be no exciting warriors anymore. Many now and then would do an act of boldness when necessary, but there were few of great repute. Deep in their hearts the People suspected that their spirit had been weakened by the white men and their liquor; some thought the Great Spirit was displeased with them, some thought there was witchcraft being used by many against many. And somehow they sensed that what the one-eyed medicine man had encountered might raise them from their lethargy, might restore new power to their spirit. Here seemed to be a true messenger at last. Though few could have explained it in words, they had drifted to the council lodge yearning for hope. They filled the shady space, seating themselves on their blankets and robes, murmuring to each other, watching him, their hearts beating a little faster, a People
nervous but wanting. Their chief Tecumseh, the dominant and most beloved figure in their lives, stayed in the background, standing quietly under a great, mottled sycamore off to the side instead of at the door of the council lodge. Tecumseh felt that he did not need to preside in this. He himself was so impressed by his brother’s confident new demeanor that he was willing to let him hold his own show. Tecumseh had thought often during the night about his own dream of five years ago, in which the white dove had flown from Change-of-Feathers’ breast into Tenskwatawa’s. And as his brother, who
was
now He-Opens-the-Door, took his place before the council house and faced the multitude, straight and glittering and grave, he who before had been afraid to look one person in the eyes and now dared to do so with hundreds, Tecumseh felt an unusual compassion for this odd, star-marked person, and he sent a thought to him on a warm impulse of his heart.

Speak well, my brother. We will listen well.

F
OR MINUTES AFTER THE CROWD FELL STILL
, O
PEN
D
OOR
stood silent before them, still holding his staff in his left hand and his short stick in his right, turning slowly from one side to the other to look at them all with his good eye. The crowd waited, looking at him. Then they began to look around, at Tecumseh, at each other. Tecumseh grew alarmed that the poor man was suddenly tongue-tied in the face of so many.

It was awkward. Unlike a council, which began with a pipe ceremony and then opened with general discussion of old familiar matters and proceeded to new, this was simply one man standing before a crowd, which expected him to start without preamble and tell them something from beyond experience. Small wonder it was that the people were beginning to squirm and the would-be mockers to smirk, and Tecumseh thought now that perhaps he should not have let his brother plan it this way. What confidence he had summoned might be blown away forever if he made a fool of himself now.

Loud Noise had witnessed some of the white men’s religious gatherings and had been impressed by the drama that was created when one man stood apart and above, gazed at the people for a while until they were uncomfortable, and suddenly opened up in a loud, emotional voice with a message from God. To him, this tense pause before the beginning was a rare and pregnant moment. And just now, by happy chance, a lark’s song trilled
through the village from someplace, like a signal from the Great Good Spirit.

Now he took a deep breath and thrust his arms up. The colorful feathers on his stick and staff were held high above the heads of the sitting crowd and trembled in the breeze. Then, when they had feasted their eyes long enough upon this commanding gesture, he opened up with a tone of voice he had sometimes practiced in his solitary monologues when he was a drunkard living in a bog. It was an eerie, flutelike tone created by a tightened throat, and he measured out his phrases so they were like a chant.

“My brothers! My sisters!”

Their scalps prickled as the strange, quavering sound wove through the space under the trees, so unusual a voice that it might well be coming from Weshemoneto through him, as a musician will express his music through a flute.

“I have been given a great power. I have been told by Our Creator to use this power to save you.

“My name is He-Opens-the-Door. I have been shown how to open the door that has shut us out from happiness.

“I died and went to the World Above, and saw it. I had done every sin, against my people and myself. You knew me! I was a sinner, I was a drunkard! I had another name then. That name is so smeared with the filth of my old sins that my mouth will not utter it, for my mouth is now pure! Tenskwatawa, Open Door, has never spoken a lie or an obscenity, and never will. I have come back cleansed. I am as we were in the Beginning! In me is a shining power!

“In the Beginning, we were full of this shining power, strong because we were pure. We moved silently through the woods. With a silent arrow we killed the animals and ate their pure meat. In silence the fish swam in pure rivers, and we caught them in silence and ate them. In silence our corn and beans and squashes grew from the earth, and those we ate. We drank only clear water, after the milk of our mothers’ breasts.

“I have heard that lost silence. You have not heard it because you have not been dead.” He pointed up with his small stick. “Up under the roof of the sky, there is that pure silence!”

He let them imagine that high silence. Then he went on:

“In the Beginning, our People broke that beautiful silence only to pray to the Great Good Spirit, or to speak wisely in council, or to say kind words to our children and our elders, or to give the war cry when we avenged wrongs.

“Our Creator put us on this wide, rich land, and told us we
were free to go where the game was, where the soil was good for planting. That was our state of true happiness. We did not have to beg for anything. Our Creator had taught us how to find and make everything we needed, from trees and plants and animals and stone. We lived in bark, and we wore only the skins of animals. Our Creator taught us how to use fire, in living, and in sacred ceremonies. She taught us how to heal with barks and roots, and how to make sweet foods with berries and fruits, with papaws and the water of the maple tree. Our Creator gave us tobacco, and said, Send your prayers up to me on its fragrant smoke. Our Creator taught us how to enjoy loving our mates, and gave us laws to live by, so that we would not bother each other, but help each other. Our Creator sang to us in the wind and the running water, in the bird songs, in children’s laughter, and taught us music. And we listened, and our ears were open, and we saw, and our eyes were clear. Our hearts and stomachs were never dirty and never troubled us.”

Tecumseh listened, and his heart ached for the time when the People and the world had been so good. In the eyes of the listeners he could see the same yearning. Surely his brother had been purified, if a mouth that had only lied and profaned and gossiped could now evoke such pictures of goodness.

“Thus were we created,” Open Door went on in that strange voice that was now beginning to sound beautiful because of what it said. “Thus we lived for a long time, proud and happy. We had never eaten pig meat, nor tasted the poison called whiskey, nor worn wool from sheep, nor struck fire or dug earth with steel, nor cooked in iron, nor hunted and fought with loud guns, nor ever had diseases which soured our blood or rotted our organs. We were pure, so we were strong and happy.

“But!
Beyond the Great Sunrise Water, there lived a people who had iron, and those dirty and unnatural things, who seethed with diseases, who fought to death over the names of their gods! They had so crowded and befouled their own island that they fled from it, because excrement and carrion were up to their knees. They came to our island. Our Singers had warned us that a pale people would come across the Great Water and try to destroy us, but we forgot. We did not know they were evil, so we welcomed them and fed them. We taught them much of what Our Grandmother had taught us, how to hunt, grow corn and tobacco, find good things in the forest. They saw how much room we had, and wanted it. They brought iron and pigs and wool and rum and disease. They came farther and drove us over the mountains.
Then when they had filled up and dirtied our old lands by the sea, they looked over the mountains and saw this Middle Ground, and we are old enough to remember when they started rushing into it. We remember our villages on fire every year and the crops slashed every fall and the children hungry every winter. All this you know.”

Tecumseh was surprised that his brother’s sermon had picked up his own theme of the white men’s evils. He had not suspected that Open Door’s mission had to do with the problem of the Americans. But now he realized that somehow their two voices were conveying the same complaint. Of course, he thought. Our messages are from the same heaven!

“For many years,” Open Door was saying, “we traded furs to the English or the French, for wool blankets and guns and iron things, for steel awls and needles and axes, for mirrors, for pretty things made of beads and silver. And for liquor. This was foolish, but we did not know it. We shut our ears to the Great Good Spirit. We did not want to hear that we were being foolish.

“But now those things of the white men have corrupted us, and made us weak and needful. Our men forgot how to hunt without noisy guns. Our women don’t want to make fire without steel, or cook without iron, or sew without metal awls and needles, or fish without steel hooks. Some look in those mirrors all the time, and no longer teach their daughters to make leather or render bear oil. We learned to need the white men’s goods, and so now a People who never had to beg for anything must beg for everything!”

Much of what Open Door was saying now, Tecumseh recognized from his own harangues. It was good that he was saying these things. Open Door went on:

“Some of our women married white men, and made half-breeds.

“Many of us now crave liquor. He whose filthy name I will not speak, he who was I before, was one of the worst of those drunkards. There are drunkards in almost every family. You know how bad this is.