Panther in the Sky (80 page)

Star Watcher did not want to criticize what Tecumseh had done about the salt. She understood why pride was more important than salt. But she did tell him how little salt there was and asked him what might be done.

“There are small salt springs in the lands of that treaty,” he said. “No whites will keep us from going there to make what little salt the springs will yield, my sister, because as I have said, that treaty means nothing to me or our People.”

“Then,” she said, “I will get some women and go to those springs, and we will work hard to make salt. You must give me some warriors to protect them. And now, come home with me and eat. My husband and your son have not seen you for a long time.”

He looked at her for a moment, at this sturdy, good-faced, graying woman who had seen half a hundred years of strife and hunger and had given the People everything she had but was stronger than ever and had more than ever to give, and his tension and anger about the treaty and the annuity salt just melted away. And he thought:

How much of our strength comes from such as she!

W
HEN THE BOATMEN RETURNED TO
V
INCENNES WITH THE
rejected salt and told of their rough treatment at Tecumseh’s hands, the governor expressed his regrets absentmindedly. Then he went back into his office and sat down. He picked up a quill pen and gazed out a window, his face pale, grim.

The treatment of the Frenchmen ordinarily would have provoked him to take up his pen and issue still another ultimatum to those insolent Shawnees at the Prophet’s town.

But just that day Harrison had talked with a group of twenty Iowa Indians, who told him that they had recently encountered on the Illinois River a large band of Sauks, Foxes, and Winnebagoes who were on their way to the Prophet’s town on the Wabash. That in itself would have been no unusual matter; warriors were always, it seemed, traveling to and from that damned place. Winnemac’s recent report of two thousand warriors there was, Harrison had thought, probably exaggerated, but still there were too many there. When Harrison had asked the Iowas what numbers
they meant when they said a large band, their answer had made him step back with a gasp.

There were, they said, eleven hundred.

A
CRY CAME DOWN FROM THE PRAIRIE INTO THE TOWN:
Many people were coming! They were in the dress of western tribes.

Tecumseh rode out to greet them, and as he rode toward the drifting dust of their coming, he was astonished at their numbers. Then their head rider separated from them and came galloping with a spear held high, and a smile of joy spread on Tecumseh’s face. There was no mistaking those massive shoulders, that wide, happy face. It was Shabbona—the Charcoal Burner—Black Hawk’s second chief and a man Tecumseh had grown to love like a brother already. And here he came, as he had promised, face aglow with happy triumph.

They halted their horses together and clasped each other’s hands, grinning as if their cheeks would split. “So many!” Tecumseh exclaimed, waving toward them.

“Yes! When we heard of the treaty of that white governor, many said, ‘Unless we unite and go with Tecumseh, they will overrun us!’ We see their Fort Madison there in our own land, and we grow harder inside. And so I bring more than you expected. Two hundred and forty strong young men. And their families, with some older men who can fight if they are needed. And these are only the ones who come to stay. Black Hawk’s warriors will be ready when your great sign comes and you call them.”

Two weeks later, when their lodges were standing on the prairie near the upper end of Prophet’s Town and the families of all of Charcoal Burner’s warriors were deep in the ceremonies and teachings of Open Door, Tecumseh sent the two hundred and forty warriors up to visit Matthew Elliott at Fort Malden in Canada. “He is our friend. He has many new British guns and much powder that he is eager to give you,” Tecumseh said. “Get them and come back, and may the Great Good Spirit smile along your way.”

O
PEN
D
OOR WAS ALONE FOR A CHANGE, SITTING IN HIS MEDICINE
lodge, just himself and his effigy, which stood against a pole opposite him beyond the fire-ring, as if it were the Prophet’s guest—or as if the Prophet were its guest. Perhaps the Prophet was the guest, he was thinking, idly pulling a string of his sacred beans through his fist; the hollow reed man lived here in the medicine
lodge almost all the time, while Open Door was forever busy among his multitudes, seldom alone, seldom with a moment for meditation.

Of course it was good to be so important to so many people, to give them spiritual food where they had been empty and hopeless for so long, and when Open Door was preaching to their upturned, rapturous faces, all was well, and he was joyful that Weshemoneto had made him the messenger for this great upsurge of love and power in this critical time.

But the people had so many nonspiritual needs and problems, too, and were always entreating him for some little thing or other. They had their little disputes and jealousies, being from so many different tribes; they had their particular rituals and manners, and he and his wife and Tecumseh were constantly called upon to make judgments and decisions. The followers always had to be supplied with food, which sometimes had been an unfulfillable task, but for the present anyway was being met. Kokomthena at last had helped the women bring in bountiful crops, and the British had been generous, and the hunters, by traveling far south toward the White River country, had been able to bring in adequate meat. Open Door’s wife had turned out to be the best sort of a village queen, able to administer and oversee the women’s part in ceremonies and food preparation even on this enormous scale. She was, he had admitted to himself at last, a great blessing to him after all. Before he had gone to Heaven and acquired this importance, she had been a scornful, nagging woman, a curse and a burden upon his life. But she had grown with the rise of responsibility, as had he, and now she was a helpmeet of immeasurable value, as well as a good mother who kept their children from becoming tyrants as the children of important chiefs sometimes become. In her own spirit she had become great and powerful, and her hatred and distrust of the whites was as keen as his. She felt a holy duty to keep the women and children safe. Yes, all was most favorable, in general. Open Door felt that he himself was a miracle of the Great Good Spirit’s wisdom and power. From a drunkard and an object of ridicule esteemed by no one, he had been transformed into the most revered red man of his time, perhaps of all times. He was a miracle, and he carried the race of red men upon his shoulders.

But lately, in these rare moments of solitude, when there was time to reflect, Open Door had found himself troubled and frightened now and then. Subtle changes were taking place, and even in the midst of the great, humming, throbbing spiritual power of
this sprawling village—no, it would be better to call it a city now—Open Door would look at the effigy standing over there beyond the rising smoke and would feel that the big reed doll was substantial while he, Tenskwatawa, its creator, was hollow.

It had been three years since he had had a vision or even a dream of any significance. Nothing came to him that could be read as a prophecy. Though he might pull his string of beans through his hand like this, or chant prayers, or pass the sacred sticks through the smoke of the sacred tobacco, no ecstasy visited him, no more messages came in the roaring silence of the voice of the Master of Life; even when he looked out the smokehole at the moon where he had once gone, it looked like nothing but the moon, a ball in the sky as the white men believed it to be; Our Grandmother never talked to him or showed her beautiful wrinkled face. She still had never revealed anything special to him about medicine or cures, beyond what he had learned from Change-of-Feathers; the truth was, he was just as mediocre a medicine man as he had always been.

When Open Door would think of the moon, that was when he would feel most hollow and afraid. His one great triumph of prophecy, the day he had made the moon cover the sun, had been a fake. Though he reminded his followers of that miracle over and over, and his fame rested largely upon the world’s memory of that day, the awful and shameful truth of it was that he had got the information of it from Tecumseh, who had got it from some white man. Sometimes Open Door convinced even himself that the Great Good Spirit had told him of the eclipse; sometimes, carried away by the flights of his own preaching, he even recalled that he had simply commanded the sun to go dark and it had done so. If a whole People believed something, did that not make it so? But then he would remember how it really had happened, and he would grow afraid, because he would wonder if he really was the hollow one.

And there had been other things that had made him feel hollow.

Some things he had had to do simply because of the way life was on this lower world: despite his preaching against hog meat and cattle meat, there had been many times when nothing but British salt beef or the arrival of a stray pig had kept the People alive. There had been times when he had let his own fire go out, and his life had not ended as he had predicted would happen to anyone who neglected the sacred hearth fire.…

Or had it? He pulled the beans through his fist—though they
were sacred beans, they grew moldy in these humid summer months—he wondered if the visions had stopped because he had failed to keep the fire kindled now and then. Oh, it was frightening to think!

Sometimes when he was thus troubled he would feel that there were still witches working against him. Only this spring he had learned that Leatherlips, the ancient Wyandot chief in O-hi-o, had been poisoning people’s minds, denouncing the Prophet, and using witchcraft against him. To defend himself against it, Open Door had sent Roundhead and five warriors to find Leatherlips, try him and kill him. They had found the old man in his camp on the Scioto-se-pe, had tried him in council as a witch and a traitor to his people, and had found him guilty. They had made the old white-hair kneel at the edge of his grave, then struck the blade of a tomahawk into his brain. Leatherlips had jerked about and fallen partway into the grave but had not died right away. For a long time his blood had oozed onto his white hair and his body had perspired, which had proved that he was indeed a witch.

Open Door also believed that Winnemac the Potawatomi was using witchcraft against him, as well as spying for Harrison. Winnemac was without doubt an American dog, who had helped Harrison make the terrible treaty last year, and the only reason Open Door had not openly accused him of witchcraft was that he was related to so many important Potawatomis that to kill him would likely drive some of them from the alliance.

The alliance! Yes, the alliance itself was one matter that whispered always over Open Door’s shoulder. Of course the alliance was a good and necessary thing. He understood perfectly well how important the alliance was, and he supported it in every way. Tecumseh had explained over and over to him that the alliance of all tribes into a red nation was Weshemoneto’s larger plan, and that the Prophet’s religious movement was just one part of it.

But Tecumseh was the maker of the alliance, and that part of the miracle was growing more and more important.

Open Door was aware that his city was becoming as much an armed war camp as a holy place. He knew that hundreds of the warriors and dozens of the chiefs were here because of their dedication to Tecumseh rather than to his own spiritual power. Withered Hand was an example. He was here not because he wanted to stop drinking and become a good man, but because he wanted to be a great victor when the war against the Long Knives came. Withered Hand believed his own medicine was as great as the Prophet’s; in fact, it probably was as great, if not greater, Open
Door would have to admit, though with awful chagrin and only to himself. Withered Hand looked across to Open Door as an equal shaman, but he looked up to Tecumseh as a superior war chief. In fact, almost all the chiefs, when it came to such matters as dealing with the British, talking back to Harrison, or planning hunting trips and diplomatic journeys and the ultimate tactics of the whole red nation, looked to Tecumseh for guidance and judgment, not to Open Door. Why, even the Prophet himself had fallen into the habit of letting Tecumseh decide things. And not just big things. Like that matter of the Kickapoos’ annuity salt. Open Door could well have made a decision about that at once; it was, after all,
his
town. But he had been preoccupied with spiritual things, with rituals, with dances, with morals, so he had let Tecumseh handle that of the salt. And then he had envied Tecumseh the pleasure of shaking that American dog of a Frenchman by the hair. How the people had liked that—how they had laughed and cheered Tecumseh for it—when it could have been Open Door himself receiving that applause.

He sighed. Then he scowled across at the silent effigy.

I am the holy man! I am the Open Door for the red people, Tenskwatawa suddenly and silently cried within himself. Weshemoneto, why do you not reveal yourself to me anymore? Why is it Tecumseh who has the dreams and the signs of the shaking earth and the moon-eyed wolves and the bundles of sticks? Why did you show me a glimpse of Heaven so long ago and come to give me all these things to do, and then retreat into silence and invisibility again? Why do you not visit me with guidance anymore? Why have you put all this upon my shoulders and then gone away?

A great, bitter, swollen ache gripped his heart; he was afraid, as he had always been as a child, afraid that somehow, sometime, he would be ridiculed again, that no one would respect him, that no one would believe him, that no one would need him, and that he would be scorned. His heart hurt, an exquisite pain.

Oh, how glorious it was to be needed! What a power it created in one’s being! How terrible it would be to lose that! He shut his eye tight and moved his head slowly from side to side.

And then, just as he thought Weshemoneto was about to respond to the cry of his yearning heart, someone outside the lodge called for him. Somebody needed something again. With a groan he rose to his feet, hung the necklace of beans around the neck of the reed doll, and went to open the door flap.