Ghost of the Indian Under the Tree

In November of 1777, the great Shawnee Chieftain Cornstalk was murdered in cold blood, along with his son Elinipsico and a couple of other warriors, by militiamen at Fort Randolph. Chief Cornstalk, a man of honor, had repaired to Fort Randolph in an attempt to maintain peace with the colonialists. Legend has it that Chief Cornstalk, before he died, placed a curse upon the militiamen and all their generations, and upon the point where the fort stood, a wide, lovely, and peaceful expanse of land lined by tall trees where the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers converged that was known by the Ayamdotte Indian phrase “tu-endie-wei,” translated as “the point between two waters,” or “the mingling of waters.” Many years later this area would be named Point Pleasant, but that did not lift the curse. Now, legend has it that Cornstalk’s curse was not to avenge his own death, which he accepted with calmness and nobility, but for the murder of his son and other young companions. True or not, over the two hundred years since the murder of Chief Cornstalk, many calamities have befallen that otherwise pleasant part of the world, such as great recurring floods and fires and the frequent visitations of strange, unearthly beings, call them aliens or angels, that as often as not have proven to be portents of disaster.

The curse of Chief Cornstalk was once visited upon my mother in the form of a great wild bird when she was a little girl in Point Pleasant. It happened during the course of one of the monotonous floods when she was nine or ten. Her father, who had not yet lost his garage and car lot in town, where he repaired and bought and sold automobiles, had moved all the vehicles, either by driving or towing, to the high ground of the field above their house, where looking out over them one foggy morning, Mom let herself imagine they were a herd of some wondrous, giant, dreaming turtles.

The floodwaters had driven the wild chickens and roosters from their roosts in the willow trees in the mudflats by the river up into the hillside woods and meadows, and many had nested among the cars and trucks parked above the house. One sultry, buggy afternoon, Mom’s mother sent her to the little country store over the hill to buy a bottle of vanilla extract for a big batch of macaroons she had to bake for her church circle. This was a trek Mom dreaded, for it meant that unless she wanted to follow the blacktop road around over the hill, a good mile walk roundtrip, she would have to go down that shortcut path through the woods, where at the path’s sharp right turn, Mom had seen the naked body of a dead man back under the bramble bushes. Because none of her little brothers were around to go with her, Mom took the long way, and upon her return she had cut down through the field of great dreaming

turtles.

Mom was weary and hot but mostly just bored from the walk and she drug her bare feet through the high grass as she drifted along. Her head was in the clouds as usual. Her own mother always accused Mom of being a dreamy girl with no sense of direction, like a little cloud. Mom trudged along that day only half-hearing the sweet drone of bees back in the apple trees at the edge of the field and dreaming of faraway places and love. As a child, Mom had always imagined that she was somehow a very special person. She never mentioned this to anybody else, but she knew she took special pleasure and comfort from things other children did not, like walking luxuriously barefoot through the rain, or hiding in the top of the old apple tree by the house, where its gnarled branches held a secret lap only for her. She would sit curled up in the bay window of her bedroom over a beloved book for hours. She took so much private pleasure it hurt sometimes, in the beauty of storm clouds moving across the sky or a crow’s call or tiny blue wildflowers struggling up through slowly melting snow. Mom’s dreams of love and solitude were her best friends. Not romantic boy-girl love, kissy stuff, necessarily, just love, love, tender, gentle love that would make you not always want to be alone.

Mom’s head was in the clouds as she hummed and strolled down over the hillside meadow among the dreaming turtles. The sky was clouding over again for even more rain, which meant more flooding, but Mom didn’t care. Mom prayed for rain. What Mom thought at first was that something had exploded, a can of gas or something, in a blazing ball of red flame out of the back of the pickup truck she was passing. But then she realized that she was being engulfed by feathers, not flames. Blazing red feathers surrounded her like fire she could burn up in!

The wild rooster was red as an Indian and big as a turkey. It was a great warpath headdress of a killer rooster. Its claws were as blue as a wound and its popped-out, lidless, yellow eyes insane. It was a pure malevolent commotion of flapping, snapping comb and racket of red rattling feathers. Mom began to scream as it raged about her pecking and clawing and flying at her face with its fierce spurs. The field was a hysteria of cackling and clatter and Mom screamed and ran for her life as that devil bird flew through the air after her for revenge. It was as she ran terrified down through the field with that bird at her back that Mom caught a glimpse out of the corner of her eye of the Indian standing under the apple tree. Then even as that devil bird landed on her head, Mom slowed to look. The Indian under the tree was wearing a bright war-bonnet with red feathers and buckskins and the right side of his face was painted blue.

Mawmaw, my grandmother, Mom’s mother, saw the ghost of the Indian under the apple tree too. Mawmaw was accustomed to seeing ghosts, but she had never seen the ghost of an Indian before, so when she spotted him through the kitchen window standing out under the apple tree, she had gone onto the back porch to get a better look. It was then that she saw her daughter tearing down the path from the upper field screaming and flailing her arms frantically at a giant red bird that rode her head like her own Indian war-bonnet.

That wild rooster was real enough, Mawmaw could see, it was no ghost chicken. She picked up a hoe at the edge of the porch and hurried out into the back yard to greet that bird blazing atop her only daughter’s head. Mawmaw was a short, stout woman with veiny forearms as thick as a man’s. She swung that hoe like a baseball bat when she bashed that wild rooster, which sailed like a fly-ball of a bird backward across the yard to land at the feet of the Indian ghost. Clubbed silly, the huge bird flopped about in crazy, dizzy circles as Mawmaw descended upon it with the gleaming blade of the hoe raised high. In the flushed, shifting light under the apple-trees at the edge of the yard, the ghost of the Indian dissolved like fluttering specks of tinsel. Mawmaw clobbered the bird again, and then she thrust a hand amid the spastic flurry of feathers and grabbed the rooster up by its blue claws, and she carried it head-down across the yard to the chopping stump. The bird flapped its giant, red wings awkwardly, upside-down, as though trying to escape into a strange, dizzy, dirt sky.

Mawmaw swung the rooster solidly across the bloodstained block, stunning it still. For maybe a heartbeat her axe hovered above the thick, feathered neck, then it thudded down. The rooster ran headless back in the general direction of the field where the giant turtles were dreaming, as though now that its hunger for vengeance was sated at long last, it wanted to return to the chicken nations and have things be just like they had been before the evil, wily white man came. After several yards the headless rooster folded into the long grass, a pile of trembling feathers and spastic little kicks and twitches. Finally, only its bloody red feathers quivered, as though stirred gently by unseen breath.

From up in the field, the ancient racket of fear and alarm was soon gone, and the wild chickens went back to pecking about in the tall grass among the dreaming turtles, the great rooster ancient history. Mawmaw hung the rooster by its legs from a fencepost, to let its blood drain. There did not seem to be all that much blood, though. At least not as much as Mom might have expected from such a great bird. What there was, though, was bright red. It dripped soaking into the dirt, absorbed in dark swirling patterns that drew Mom’s eye, as she stood there on the back porch shivering, crying soundlessly, as she had taught herself to do, wishing her mother would hold her, would caress her and rock her and kiss those scratches instead of burning them with iodine and slapping band-aids over them abruptly, as though Mom had done something personally wrong to incur the wrath of Chief Cornstalk’s curse.