CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE MOON HAD been a sliver the night John was born; Margaret had seen it tossed in the tops of the bare trees when she went out of the hut to relieve herself. As the moon thickened, she hoped that Little Mouse would return when the moon was full, but its fullness had passed along with three more nights of darkness before Little Mouse pushed through the door hole.

John was asleep on the pallet. Little Mouse knelt beside him, studying his face, then lifted and uncurled each of his hands. She undid the belly band Margaret had torn from her petticoat, studied the crooked knot Margaret had made at the base of his birth cord, and then replaced the strip with a clean length of cloth from her pack. Before she swaddled him, she scrutinized his body as though she was looking for a sign. Wrapping him up again, she lifted him in her arms and Margaret followed her out of the tent.

At the village, Little Mouse paraded John from lodge to lodge and the kweewe, coming out, exclaimed at what they seemed to perceive as the baby’s uniqueness. Margaret had seen no other newborn welcomed in this way. The attention made her proud but also anxious. What could it portend?

She followed the kweewe who were heading to the center of the village, laughing and singing. Even Win-I-Too, the medicine woman, joined with her rattles. Margaret hoped that her baby was looked upon as a good omen. Perhaps he would prove to be a link to the Long Knives who some of the peace-making women still hoped to persuade to stop their raiding. Indeed, one of the first words Margaret had learned, eavesdropping at the edge of the council tent, had been the Shawnee for “truce.”

After a few days, she realized with dismay that the village believed her baby was White Bark’s grandson, fruit of one of his sons and so greeted as a future leader of the tribe. She had no words to explain that he was her husband, John’s, son, and after a while she accepted that this misunderstanding might prove to be helpful to them both.

During the following weeks, Margaret acknowledged with a degree of comfort that her baby belonged to the tribe rather than to her alone. It was convenient. There was always an extra pair of hands to swaddle him or wash his cloths, a woman to carry him on his cradleboard (a habit Margaret had at the first resisted, not wishing for her son the flattened head the Shawnee prized), even milk from Nonee-Lee-Wa’s breasts on a day when Margaret’s nipples were too sore to nurse. Nonee-Lee-Wa was Little Mouse’s daughter. Her own infant had died a week earlier and Little John relieved her swollen breasts of the unneeded milk.

Margaret finally recognized the usefulness of the cradleboard, which freed her hands for her tasks and could be hung up on a roof-supporting pole at night. When she examined the back of John’s head, it did not seem to be flattening, and she guessed that the rounded skull he had inherited from his father governed the outcome.

Her resistance to these Shawnee ways faded entirely when she remembered how her mother had warned her when she found Margaret rocking her first infant, the little daughter murdered on the trail. “Never forget,” she’d said, “that many die before their second year. Do not become too attached.” Like Nancy’s injunction to “Teach, Margaret. Teach,” this grim reminder was in tune with Margaret’s new life, where so many infants died without undue mourning, their mothers becoming pregnant soon after.

By early summer, she knew she had no reason to fear that John would die—he was filling out, bright-eyed and alert with a hearty appetite. She had little time to worry over him: she needed to work.

While she was away in the birthing hut, a trader had come from Fort Pitt with saddlebags full of calico. He had cut off lengths for the seven braves who wanted shirts. Margaret found herself occupied from morning to night, measuring each brave in the manner she had perfected, then cutting out the shirt according to her established pattern and stitching it up. She was paid three shillings for each completed shirt, which greatly benefited Little Mouse and her family when the trader came again. Only once, when in her haste she had sewn a sleeve too close to the selvage, the sleeve had ripped when the brave was hunting and he came to demand his payment returned. He was very angry and Margaret feared the worst, but White Bark came to intervene and the brave relented when she promised to resew the seam with greater care. To her great relief, he did not spread the news of her mistake around the village, which would have harmed her reputation for performing good work.

This was the beginning of Margaret’s closer association with White Bark. At first, resisting the notion that he was her father, Margaret had avoided him, but now she recognized his usefulness. He spoke a fair amount of English and had a kingly way about him Margaret could not help admiring. It was different with his son, Margaret’s brother. He preserved his granite way.

A week after White Bark’s intervention on her behalf, Margaret went boldly to ask him a question. She found him seated beside his fire. He waved her to a place across from him.

Margaret began at once. “I have been afraid for a long time that I might be forced into a marriage. Girty warned me of that at the start of my stay here.” She was careful not to call it her captivity.

White Bark stared at her. “No, my daughter. That is not the Shawnee way.”

She carefully concealed her relief.

“Perhaps the women have been tormenting you with this idea,” White Bark went on. “Sometimes they are cruel to women captives.”

“They have been very kind to me,” Margaret told him. “Especially my mother, Little Mouse.” It was the first time she had called her that.

“Very well,” White Bark said, dismissing her.

After that Margaret went from time to time to his lodge, nearly convinced that White Bark had no ill intentions toward her. She learned that there were certain questions he would not answer, such as whether war was about to break out, as was rumored around the village. He turned his head away when she asked for information he did not wish to give her and smoked as though she had disappeared. At that sign she always made her departure, careful not to strain the fragile alliance by persistence.

As she grew to know him better, she surmised that White Bark was probably younger than her real father had been when he died, but much worn by warfare. He had been gruesomely wounded at the Battle of Point Pleasant with a shot to the hip that had nearly crippled him. Little Mouse called it Lord Dunmore’s War, but as Margaret increased her command of the Shawnee language, she learned that most of the tribe, many of whom had fought there, called it the Battle of Point Pleasant, on the Ohio. No one knew the number of losses since the Shawnee carried their wounded and dead away and were not in the habit of counting them. But the cost had been high on both sides, with the pressing possibility of more battles to come.

White Bark no longer hunted with the other braves, and the hours he spent alone in his lodge seemed to have led him to cogitating. On a bright morning in October, Margaret was summoned and found the old chief sitting by his fire.

Gesturing urgently, he asked her why when the sun came up in the east and set in the west he had never been able to see it traveling back and forth. Since the Earth was flat, did she believe that the sun dove under it at night, coming up on the other side in the morning?

To answer him, Margaret balled up the partially finished shirt she had been sewing and placed the ball close to the fire. She pointed out that the flame brightened the near side of the ball, as the sun brightened the east side of Earth in the morning, leaving the other side, which stood for night, in darkness. White Bark seemed satisfied, although her demonstration did not explain where the sun went when it disappeared. She was content to allow him to continue to believe that it passed under the Earth.

Fall turned into winter, the second of Margaret’s captivity, with little more of consequence. John was thriving. There was always a woman to pass him to when she went to Blue Jacket’s house to teach his sons. Both boys now knew their alphabet and were advancing to spelling apple, bear, and deer, although cat was out since they knew no cats and coyote was too long. Their white mother tolerated Margaret because she was teaching the two boys to read and write, but she did not become a friend. Margaret wondered at this; the Shawnee women were warmer.

She noticed a drawing in of the tribe as her second winter waned. After the warriors came back from a raid on the Kentucky settlements, a council was held in White Bark’s lodge. To Margaret’s astonishment, Little Mouse and six of the other older kweewe attended. When Margaret passed, she heard the women speaking; her knowledge of the language was now fully developed and she understood that they were advancing the cause of peace.

Over the three days of the council, the warriors resisted the women’s pleading. Long Knife Clark had burned two more Shawnee villages, killing many, and Major William Crawford had just attacked the village of Seekunk, destroying it as well.

“Will there be war?” she asked Robert Dean when he came by to collect a shirt she had sewn.

He shrugged. “The squaws are the peace arguers,” he told her. “They fear losses greater than what the tribe suffered at Point Pleasant. Clark is a fierce warrior.”

“Who is this Clark?”

“A white captain who crossed the Ohio at Corn Island with a small force some weeks ago. Our runners spread the news, and the braves have been determining how to force him back to the other side of the river. Already he has burned three more of our towns.”

The restlessness of the village increased in the early spring, with many braves coming in from raiding, creating a stirring Margaret had not felt before. She began to fear danger not only for herself and for John, but for the whole tribe. The war might break out close by. Months passed with more rumors but nothing happened.

One afternoon when she was grinding corn for winter storage, a white man appeared, led by Little Mouse. Margaret got up, understanding that he might have a message for her, even news of a rescue party on its way.

“What is your name?” she asked, gathering herself.

“Thomas McGuire,” he answered. He was about twenty-five and of the fair, blue-eyed tribe, like most of the inhabitants of the Greenbrier Settlement.

“Do you come from the Greenbrier?” she asked.

“No, from Fort Harrod. Six days hard travel. I bring a message.”

“What is it?” she asked, trying to see something, a glint of hope or comfort, but his face was as bland as unbaked bread.

“Your husband John Paulee is dead,” he told her pompously, “dead many months.” He was watching her as though expecting tears or screaming.

Margaret said, “I feared as much. He was grievously wounded when we were taken captive.” She remembered how John had run away, holding his side, from which blood was streaming, and how the Shawnee had watched in astonishment, expecting him to fall.

“He died the next day after your capture, at a settler’s cabin.” McGuire said in an ordinary voice, as though her composure had calmed him, and Margaret understood that he had dreaded her reaction to his news.

“Then why,” she asked sternly, “in all this time has no one come to ransom me?”

Tom looked discomfited. “I do not know,” he said.

“You must tell me,” Margaret said with the voice she used when she was correcting Blue Jacket’s little boys. “I must know.”

After some hesitation, Tom said that it was believed at the Greenbrier that she had been adopted into the tribe as a wife and had birthed a son.

“My boy is my husband’s child!” Margaret cried. “I have suffered no indignity here! I am White Bark’s daughter. I am not his concubine!” She spoke with a pride in the distinction she knew at once she should have muffled.

Tom took a step back. “I have only told you what I have heard,” he said, and hastened on to give her news of her sister. Agatha had married the son of the governor of Detroit and was with child. “A worthy match,” Tom added.

With both hands, Margaret dismissed him. He hurried away, relieved to be gone.

Margaret sat down and returned to her sewing. She felt a hollowness, as though something whose presence she had barely noticed had been stripped away. Now she knew there might be no ransom, she had to admit to herself that she felt great sadness, but in addition, a sort of relief.

The tears she had thought she would shed at the thought of never seeing her mother again, or her brothers and sisters, refused to come, although she sat for a while waiting for them. Were her ties of affection to her family so frail, so easily frayed? She did not know, she did not understand. Something weightier had come between her and those feelings, a weight made up of the orderliness of the life that now included her, a sense of connection she had never experienced before.

It was not that the tribe honored her. They honored only their warriors and the medicine man and woman and, at times, their ancestors. But the tribe had given her a place in their midst, as White Bark’s daughter, a place that felt more secure than any she had known before. At the Greenbrier, she had been one among many, a daughter, then a wife, and had she returned there as a widow, she would have needed to struggle to survive. Here, that would not be likely to happen. And John, toddling around the village and chattering his first words of Shawnee, was accepted and indulged as a Shawnee boy. She had never seen a white child so loved or so happy.

With a start, she recalled the news of her sister’s marriage in Detroit. By now her first child might already have been born. The news had made little impression; Agatha belonged to a time that now seemed long gone by. Margaret was shocked to discover that her affection for her sister had faded and surmised that her love for her other relatives was also sinking into the past.

Around her, she heard the usual sounds of the village: wood being chopped, a knife sharpened on a flintstone, low talk among the kweewe. She breathed the rich savor of a deer haunch grilled over a fire and felt for the first time the terror of familiarity. No one from her earlier life would believe that familiarity possible for her here. Her ease was a betrayal of her family and her friends, and although they were far away, they must have sensed it. They had abandoned her.

Early the next morning, so early the halfmoon still hung in the sky, the village was stirring. A runner had come in during the night with the news that Clark and his Long Knives had approached within a mile of the village under cover of darkness.

At once preparations for battle began. Margaret gathered with the other women in the center of the village as the horses were driven in and saddled. Then, a long wail on a horn announced the start of drumming. A conch shell blew a piercing note. A whistle pierced the drumming, harsh and high, as White Bark rode into the center of the space, his face fully painted under his eagle feather head dress. He wore a white breast plate made of lengths of bone, and his ceremonial robe fell over his moccasins nearly to the ground.

His warriors began a strange stomping, stooping dance to the pounding of the drums, circling first to the left and then to the right as the strange high whistle pierced the air. As the sun rose, Margaret saw that each warrior was painted in red, black, and white, wearing only a breechcloth and carrying a bow, a fletch of arrows, and a flintlock. When the drumming stopped, they mounted their horses and rode past White Bark at a slow gait. He made no sign of recognition or blessing, but Margaret felt that something potent was passing between him and the younger men. She trembled, realizing that some of these men would not return.

The warriors galloped out of the village.

“Where are they going?” Margaret asked the woman standing beside her, in Shawnee.

Without answering, she hurried Margaret to where the other women were snatching up bits of deer jerky and roasted potatoes still hot from the fire, stuffing their pouches before gathering blankets and children and fleeing into the woods. They were led by an old man who appeared to be too ancient to join the warriors.

Margaret screamed for John, who came running with the other boys. They were carried along with the women like sticks on a flooding river. The old man led the way across ravines and through bramble thickets to a space inside a grove of chestnuts, where they settled on the ground.

Within minutes Margaret heard the war hoop and the pounding of hooves passing close by on the other side of the trees. She laid her hand over John’s mouth and crouched down with him inside her shawl. If they were discovered, she thought their white skin might save them, but if there were men from the Greenbrier Settlement with Clark, as well there might be, men who believed the worst of her and had already abandoned her, why would they care if she and her son lived or died?

John soon became restless and strove to push away her hand, and she remembered the captivity doll she’d seen in a cabin at home with its skirt of rags and white featureless face, topped by a bonnet. It was taken down from a hiding place and used to keep a child quiet during a raid. There was no such doll here. She pressed her hand firmly over John’s mouth.

Presently the uproar of battle turned and the warriors passed so close Margaret caught a flash of red between the tall guardian trees. She stretched herself flat on the ground, holding John pinned beneath her shoulder. The clamor circled them and then moved off. A little later, one of the kweewe raised her head and, crying softly, gestured toward plumes of black smoke rising above the trees.

All morning, the pillars of smoke rose higher, then spread into the depths of the blue sky. The little group sat and watched in silence with an equanimity that proved they had seen their village burned before.

Around noon, the old man who had led them from the village went out to assess the situation. When he came back, he motioned to the women and children to follow him. No matter what he had seen, his face told Margaret nothing and no questions were asked. Holding John’s hand, she followed with the rest.

At the lip of a rise, they stopped. Below them, their village was entirely laid waste. The long houses had crumbled into heaps of smoldering logs, and rugs, baskets, weapons, and food were all buried beneath the ashes. Close by, wounded warriors lay side by side. Among them Margaret recognized Blue Jacket’s nephew.

Some of the women, recognizing husbands, brothers, or sons, rushed forward with their strange quavering cry to tip water from their canteens into dry mouths or attempt to lave wounds. Margaret went up to Blue Jacket’s nephew, but as she lowered her canteen he croaked his death song and returned to the other side.

Then it was time to attend to the dead. The kweewe washed blood off the bodies while two warriors dug holes as deep as possible in the dry rocky dirt. Each of the dead was blessed by Te-Cu-Sah, the medicine man, and laid in his grave, which the women then filled, stacking stones on top to keep off the wolves. Although they knew they were in constant danger of a new attack, the work was done without hurrying, and again Margaret felt the nameless pull of the connection that now bound her to these strange people.

Te-Cu-Sah then sent the women to gather whatever bits of food had escaped the fire. The sum was hardly enough to fill a saddlebag. Then they set off, led by White Bark and the other surviving braves. It looked, Margaret thought, as though half of their men had perished.

Sleeping on the ground that damp night, Margaret fell into a teeth-chattering chill. She wrapped John in her blanket and nestled next to him, hoping the small heat of her body might warm him. He came through the night with no apparent harm, but Margaret woke with a fever and the aching limbs of ague.

At dawn, Little Mouse scooped John up and carried him away to feed him a little gruel and care for him. Margaret was left to tend to her own misery as best she could. For five days in their temporary camp, she burned with fever, sipping the acrid dark brown teas Little Mouse brought her. Gradually her fever and chills abated and by the sixth day she and all the rest who had fallen ill that cold night were well enough to travel.

But Margaret was still weak when White Bark gave the order to move on. Little Mouse helped her to mount and then took charge of John, carrying him in front of her on her horse. As they rode out, Margaret had to hold to her saddle horn with one hand for fear that jolting over the rough trail might topple her. Little Mouse rode beside her when the trail was wide enough. John slept throughout their journey.

As they rode, Margaret understood much of what the kweewe near her were saying. The loss of Shawnee warriors was considerable. The women put that down to the fact that due to the surprise nature of the attack, there had been no time to conduct the requisite ceremonials. Some men had even lain with their wives the night before the battle, a deadly mixing of woman power with the warrior spirit, which had weakened them and caused the great losses.

Three days’ journey from their burned village, White Bark chose a spot for their next camp on a bare plateau above the river. Here they settled, and the next morning, the men began to chop wood for the new long houses. Margaret noticed that the work was done without complaint and guessed that these people had seen many of their villages burned and had always fallen to with a will to build them again.

White Bark had chosen the site because of the abundant water and game nearby and so the hunting was good, the best Margaret had seen. The first afternoon, hunters brought in three well-grown female deer as well as six wild turkeys. This was the first time since the Greenbrier that Margaret had plucked, skinned, and gutted one of these wild birds; they were disappointingly scrawny beneath their plumage. But with the addition of the roasted deer, the tribe ate more bountifully than before, and it seemed that the new village might bring them better luck, or at least more food.

It was the first time since her capture more than two years earlier that Margaret had eaten until her belly was full. John had his first meat, gnawing with his five teeth on a wild turkey wing, and Margaret knew that the time of weaning was at hand. His first tooth had already caused her pain. When she asked Little Mouse for help, she gave her a mixture to rub on her nipples. It must have been as bitter as gall, for John, trying to suck, made a horrid face and pushed her breast away. Then he scurried off to play with the other boys.

Margaret played her part in the building of White Bark’s lodge, which was to be her new home. She skinned the bark off the limbs the men were bringing into camp, smoothing the rough surfaces with her knife. Meanwhile, the men were digging holes at regular intervals around a level patch to hold eight enormous posts that would support the roof. Margaret noticed that there was no arguing, as the supporting timbers were laced with smaller limbs and twigs; a slight dispute between two elders about who should carve the faces of the gods to be hung on two doorway timbers was quickly resolved when Mary Rabbit suggested that each man carve a face. The fearsome images were duly carved and hung, with a twist of tobacco above each.

Margaret had retained a blanket for a pallet, but all her other belongings—her housewife, her sewing kit, and the two little books—had been left behind at the village and burned. She felt great unease at the thought that she would no longer be able to sew shirts. As for the two books that had been of such importance to her and her sister at the beginning of their travail, she had not looked at them for many months, being both fully occupied and at a greater and greater distance from the life those books represented. And it had been many moons since she had written in the open spaces between the lines in Dr. Franklin’s volume.

When John pulled at her blouse for his next feed, she pushed him off and offered him, instead, a spoonful of gruel. Angrily, he shoved the spoon away, and the kweewe nearby laughed. Margaret persisted, and, finally, sorrowfully, he gave in and accepted the wretched substitute, while her breast grew hard and painful. Sensing her trouble, Little Mouse brought her a warm poultice that smelled of dried mint leaves. Margaret was grateful, but her breasts remained painful for four days.