The second reading of the storehouse — the same valley, the same years, the same papers, another narrative of the time. A novel on a documented armature: every date, name, deed, boat, and petition in it is held in the research store. The women are real; where the record is silent, the book says so rather than inventing certainty. An alternative to the history — one record, two ways through.
THE GENERAL HARRISON
a novel in two crossings
by Scott Flack
For the women the maps kept on nothing.
m. (1st) Mary Wells, dau. of Capt. William Wells, of Fort Wayne, Ind. — The Wolcott Genealogy, 1912
The nineteenth century had passed its meridian before any public agitation had taken place in the Maumee Valley relative to the equal rights of woman. — Rosa L. Segur, 1905
PROLOGUE — WHAT THE RECORD SAYS
Eleven words. That is the whole of her in the family book: a wife, a father, a fort. The record gives her a captain for a father and a county for a birthplace and a husband for a destiny, and it spells all three correctly, and it is not lying. It is only doing what records do, which is to keep what the keeper valued and let the rest go down under the ink.
It does not say that her father had another name, which was Apekonit, the wild carrot, for the red of his hair, given to him by the people who took him as a boy and loved him as a son. It does not say that her mother was Wanagapeth, Sweet Breeze, daughter of Mihšihkinaahkwa — the war chief the frightened young republic rated the ablest soldier on the continent — or that her own first name, older than Mary, was Amehkoonsahkwa. It does not say what she watched from her white veranda above the rapids, or what she heard in the name her husband painted on his boat, or why, fifty-one years after her death, her son would go to the government with a petition asking to be written back into a nation the family book had already written out.
There is no portrait of her, either. The house survives — fourteen rooms of it, white above the rapids — but not the face; the record kept the property and let the woman go. Of her mother there was never anything at all.
The general is on the counties. Her grandmother is on nothing.
This book is the nothing, written down.
PART ONE — THE HOUSE
Chapter One — The Boat
Maumee, Ohio. April 1839.
The fish came up before the boat did.
They came the way her mother had said they always came, since before there were people to watch them come — up out of the lake and into the broken water, against the current, thousands upon thousands under the brown spring flood, so many that the river above the town seemed to be swimming in its own bed. From the veranda Mary could see the men standing to their thighs in the rapids with dip nets and spears, whooping when they lifted a walleye the size of a stove-length into the light. White men now, mostly, in wool trousers rolled to the knee. Her mother had told her the old people took them with their bare hands, laughing, in the years when the river had belonged to the laughing. Her mother had been dead thirty-four years. The fish still came. Mary had arrived at the age when a woman keeps a private ledger of what still comes and what does not, and the fish were on the first page of it.
The house at her back was three years old and smelled still, in the newest rooms, of lime and paint, fourteen rooms of white timber set on the bluff with its columns facing the water, and it was called — she had heard a boatman say it to another, not knowing she could hear — the finest house between Buffalo and Detroit. Her husband had built it the way he did everything, patiently and in writing, and she had chosen the wallpapers from a book of samples that came up from Cincinnati, and there were days she walked its long upstairs hall and counted doors the way a woman counts children, and there were other days the house sat on her chest like a stone she had agreed to carry and could not now remember agreeing to.
Below the bluff, at the wharf, her sons were waiting for the boat.
She could see the two of them from where she stood — William Wells Wolcott, fourteen this year, named for her father, standing very straight with his hands behind him because he had decided this spring that he was a man of business; and Henry Clay Wolcott, six, named for a senator in Kentucky her husband admired, hopping from plank to plank on the theory that the spaces between them were rivers full of snakes. A daughter slept in the house behind her. Two more sons were at their letters in the parlor with the door open, and she could hear the young one chanting his alphabet with the fury of a war song, the way children make everything into the thing they need it to be.
Her children had a grandmother no map would ever carry and a great-grandfather the maps could not stop carrying, and none of them knew it yet, not really, not as more than a story told at bedtime with the candle low. She had not decided when she would make them know it. That was a page in the private ledger too.
The boat showed first as smoke above the cottonwoods on the lower bend, then as a white bow wading up the channel with the current combing hard against it. She watched it make the crossing below the island, small against the width of the water, dogged, ugly, hers. Her husband owned two steamboats and a wharf and a warehouse and the good opinion of every man of accounts from here to Detroit, and he was not aboard — he was downriver at Toledo, at the land office, where all of him that was not kind went to be exercised — and so the boat came up the river alone with its name run out along the paddle-box in letters a yard high, gold on black, the hull new that winter out of the yard at the foot of the town and back now from the lake with her first freight, and her son Henry Clay stopped hopping and stood on the wharf and read the letters aloud slowly, the way he was learning to, sounding each one, proud of himself, his voice carrying up the bluff on the spring air as clear as a struck glass:
“G — E — N. General!” A pause, working at it. “General HARRISON!”
A mile above her veranda, in the timber behind the town, there was ground where the sumac grew up through old fallen trunks gone soft as cake, and nobody plowed it though it was good bottom land, and boys found gun flints there and traded them at school. Her grandfather’s thousand men had stood in that timber forty-five years ago come August, fasting, waiting for an army. The plan of the battle that broke them — she had been told this by a man who thought it a fine thing to tell her, at her own table, over her own china — the plan of the battle had been sketched for the general by his aide-de-camp, a young Virginia lieutenant of good family who would go on to burn Prophetstown and kill the last hope of her mother’s world at a river in Canada and be, it was now confidently said in the newspapers her husband took, President one day. Harrison. The boat brought up flour and dry goods and window glass, and took down wheat and staves and potash, and paid for the wallpapers and the columns and the senator’s name on her second son, and it was called the General Harrison, and her husband had named it, and he had not been cruel to name it, which was somehow the part she could not put down. Cruelty she would have known how to hold. It was only that it had never once occurred to him that there was anything in the name at all. It was a good name for business. It was a name that meant, to the men on the wharves, reliability.
“Mother!” Henry called up the bluff. “The General’s come!”
“I see him,” she called back, and her voice was steady and pleasant and belonged to Mrs. James Wolcott of Maumee, Ohio, and she waved to her son, and her son waved back, ferociously happy, and the boat blew off steam like a whale.
She went in through the river door to see about dinner. On the desk in her husband’s office, squared to the blotter’s corner because he squared everything, lay the papers he had had drawn before he left — she had watched the copying clerk at it two days together — instruments, he called them, that was the word, instruments, by which certain of her mother’s people up at the reserves, her own cousins by blood and older kinships the English language had no words for and so declined to believe in, made James Wolcott, Esquire, late judge, attorney-in-fact over the sections of land the treaties had let them keep. So that it could be managed, he said. So that it could be protected, he said, and he believed it, and — this was the second thing she could not put down — he was not altogether wrong: she had seen what became of allotments that no white man of accounts stood in front of. The wolves took less when a dog stood in the yard. You fed the dog. In time the dog owned the yard. She had turned that over many nights while the house ticked and her husband slept the sleep of the justified beside her, and she had never yet found the flaw in it, and she had never yet stopped looking.
At the bottom of the first paper, above her husband’s seal, one of the cousins had signed. The clerk had written the name out fair — his mark — and beside the words stood the mark itself, a small firm X, and she had stood in the doorway when it was made and had said nothing, and the cousin had looked at her once on his way out, not unkindly, and had said, in the language her mother had sung to her before the fevers took her, four words she did not translate for the clerk, and had gone.
She was five when her mother died. She had the songs but not the grammar; enough to be wounded in it, not enough to answer.
Dinner was to be whitefish, and the first greens, and a pudding. She stood a moment more in the cool of the office where she did not customarily go, one hand on the squared papers, not moving them — in eighteen years of marriage she had never once moved a paper in that room, and something in her had lately begun to keep count of that too — and out the window, down the silver reach of her grandfather’s river, the boat with the general’s name on it warped in against her family’s wharf, and her sons ran along the gunwale shouting, and the lines went taut, and held.
Chapter Two — The Paper That Said I Was Lost
Deaf Man’s Village, the Mississinewa, Indiana. September 1837.
They came in the ninth month with a paper that said I was lost.
Two old men and an old woman, in a hired wagon, with an interpreter from the trading house whose Miami is poor but polite. The old woman wept before the horses had fully stopped. The old men were graver; they had brought the paper. It was a newspaper from the East with a letter printed in it, and the letter was about me — a trader had sat in my house two winters past and heard my story and written it to the towns where I was born, the way white men cannot carry a thing in the heart but must set it somewhere outside themselves to be sure it is real. The paper said that a white child carried off by the Delaware in the war of their revolution, from a valley called Wyoming, in the fifth year of her age, was believed to be living yet as an Indian woman on the Mississinewa, and that her name had been Frances, and that her people had never ceased to look for her.
Fifty-nine years they had looked. I will say that of them, and it is not a small thing to say. Their mother — my mother — went twice into the towns in her life looking, and died with my name in her mouth. The old woman in the wagon was my sister. The old men were my brothers. The youngest of them had been in the yard when the warriors took me, and remembered my red hair going over his father’s fence, and he was seventy now, and when he said this — the interpreter going slowly, choosing — he put his hand flat on his own breast like a man swearing something, or holding something in.
Then the eldest did the thing they had carried sixty years for. He asked, might he see my left hand. I gave it to him — I knew by then what he wanted of it; my own eldest daughter is named Kekesequa, Cut Finger, for what her mother’s hand carries — and he led me by it to the door where the light was, an old man leading an old woman like a figure in a dance neither had been taught, and he looked a long time at the forefinger where there is no nail and has been no nail since a boy hammered it in our father’s shop when the finger was four years old. How came that finger injured? — the interpreter barely above breath. I said: my brother struck it with a hammer, in the shop, a long time ago, before I was carried away. And the old man stood holding my one hand in his two as though it were the paper itself, the deed, the proof recorded, the only entry in all their books that could not be forged or amended or lost, because it was written in me. For once their kind of proof and my kind were the same thing. He did not weep the way my sister wept. It went harder with him than that.
I gave them the seats of honor. I fed them.
What they had come for they said gently, and more than once, and each time as if it had newly occurred to them: that I should go home.
I am four years a widow. My husband was Shepoconah, who the whites called Deaf Man, a chief of the Myaamia, and this village bears his name and I keep it. I have two daughters living, and horses — more horses than any of my white brothers’ neighbors, I came to understand, which changed something small in the younger one’s eyes when he took it in — and cattle, and fields, and women who work them with me, and the respect that is owed to the widow of a chief and owed also, separately, to me. I sat with my hands in my lap while the interpreter walked their words across to me, and I looked at my sister’s face, which had our mother somewhere in it, in the set of the chin, like a face seen deep in a river; and in their language, which I had not spoken in fifty-nine years and which lay in me not dead but sleeping, like the fish under winter ice, I heard, before he had englished it, the word lost.
They kept saying I had been lost.
I thought of everything I might say to it. That the child they buried in their minds had died and been mourned rightly, and a Miami woman raised in her place by hands as kind as our mother’s. That I had been wife twice, and the second time well; that I had stood in this doorway and traded sharply with men of three nations; that my daughters were here, and my husband’s grave was here, and my dead child’s grave was here, and that a woman is not lost who knows where her dead are. That among the people I was called Maconaquah, and had been called it far longer than I had been called Frances, and that a name is not a garment; after enough winters it is the skin.
I said, through the interpreter, that I was glad they had lived, and glad our mother had not died in the war, and that I would not go.
They stayed three days. They were good people; I saw why the child I had been was loved. My brothers walked my fields and priced my horses without knowing they did it, the way their kind price everything, gently, in the back room of the eye. My sister sat with my daughters and wept and laughed in the same hour and taught the little ones a game with a string. When they left, the old woman held on to me a long time, and said — the interpreter murmuring it — that she would come again in the spring, and she did, and brought calico and a Bible I cannot read, and I gave her moccasins my daughter worked, and this is what we are to each other now, two old women trading gifts across sixty years of dark water, and it is not nothing. I do not say it is nothing.
But before the wagon was off my land, the eldest brother had taken out a little book and a pencil. I watched him from the dooryard. He was writing me down — the day, the words, the horses, the X of my house against the trees, I could not tell — writing with the terrible tenderness they save for it, because it is how they keep from losing things, because it is the only way they know.
They wrote me down. I let them.
Paper is how their kind grieves.
THE LEDGER — I
THE LOST SISTER. — The public will remember the touching account, first printed in the papers of Lancaster, of a female child carried off by the savages from the Wyoming settlement in the year 1778, in the fifth year of her age. It is now ascertained beyond doubting that this person is living, in circumstances of comfort and even of property, among the Miamies of the Mississinewa country, Indiana; that she has utterly forgot our tongue; that she was twice married among them, and is the widow of a chief; and that upon being visited this autumn by her surviving brothers and sister, and entreated with tears to return to her kindred and the habits of civilized life, she refused, saying (as rendered by the interpreter) that she was an old tree, and could not be moved. Her friends have reluctantly relinquished the hope of her recovery. She was born FRANCES SLOCUM, of a respectable Quaker family, and is called by the Indians Mo-con-no-qua. — reprinted in the western papers, winter 1837
Chapter Three — The County
Maumee. Winter 1837–38.
Her husband read the newspapers aloud in the evenings, by the good lamp, in the voice he used for facts.
It was a habit she had loved in him once and had then stopped noticing for fifteen years and had lately begun to notice again, the way you notice a clock when you cannot sleep. James read the markets first, always — wheat at Buffalo, the wretched state of the banks, which men in New York had failed and which had only appeared to — and then the Congress, and then the territory news, and he read it all in the same level irrigating tone, water going along a ditch, because to James Wolcott the world was a single connected ledger and every column of it touched his own, which was, she had come at last to understand, not greed in him but a kind of faith. The failure of a house in New Orleans would reach Maumee by spring like weather. He was rarely wrong. It was an honest church.
In the winter after the panic he read her the story of the lost sister.
He read it because it was remarkable, and because it was from Indiana where they had both been young, and because — she watched this cross his face as he arrived at it — a woman of property was in it. He read it straight through, the capture, the fifty-nine years, the brothers with their tears, the refusal, and at the words she was an old tree, and could not be moved his voice did the small respectful dip it did at deaths and great sums, and he laid the paper down and said, “Extraordinary,” and looked over his spectacles to share it with her, because he was not a cold man, her husband, that was never it; and she said, “Yes,” in the voice of Mrs. Wolcott, and asked whether there was more coffee, and inside her something stood at a window it had not known was there, looking through.
A white woman who had been made Miami, and stayed. Sixty miles from the rooms where a Miami child had been made — what? Made Mrs. Wolcott. Made mother of Henry Clay. Made the woman who asked about coffee. Nobody had carried her off; that was the trick of it; her captivity had come to her the way James’s weather came, by connected columns — a mother dead of fever when she was five, a father shot down when she was twelve, a war that took every alternative away one house at a time until marriage to a kind man of accounts stood in the doorway like the last dry ground in a flood. She had walked to it on her own feet. They would say — the papers, if they ever troubled to write her down — she was not lost.
The same winter, further down the same column, James read that the legislature of Indiana had organized a new county in the upper Wabash country, and had named it Wells, for the celebrated Captain William Wells who fell at Chicago in the late war.
“Why,” James said, pleased, laying down the paper again, “there is your father on the map, my dear,” and the children looked up, and William Wells Wolcott, sixteen and grave, sat visibly straighter under the name, and it was a fine moment in the history of the family, and she smiled at it and was proud, and that was true; and it was also true that a cold clear voice inside her, in the mother-tongue she had lost the grammar of, said something for which she had only the feeling and not the words, and the feeling was: they have written down the man they killed, and not the woman who bore me.
Her father was on a county now. Her great-grandmother, her grandmother’s mothers, all the women running back along that line like a river running dark under another river — on nothing. Her mother was on nothing. Wanagapeth. Sweet Breeze. She said the name to herself in the parlor, silently, twice, while her husband read the price of staves, because if she did not say it there was no place left in Indiana or Ohio or the hurrying Republic where it was written, and a name not said anywhere is not lost, it is worse than lost; it is spent.
She had been five in the year the name went out of the world. She kept of her mother: two songs, most of a third; a way of splitting a porcupine quill; the exact weight of a hand on the crown of her head; and the rows of small silver brooches down a blouse-front, cool under a child’s one finger, counted in the firelight like coins that bought nothing and outshone everything that could be bought. Of the year itself she kept almost nothing — 1805; they told her later it had been fevers along the rivers that season — and of the great summer of ruin, 1812, when she was twelve, she kept everything, in the too-bright too-still way of things seen through the palisade of a fort under siege: Major Stickney the agent moving among the families with his terrible energy — the same Stickney, it made her nearly laugh now, who was grown old and famous downriver for baiting Michigan, who had named his own sons One and Two as if children were ledger lines — the smoke of the burned town beyond the walls; the news coming in July that her grandfather had died in his bed in the government’s house, of the gout, like any beaten old white general, with the President’s doctor’s medicines on the table; and the news coming in August, in pieces, each piece worse, that her father had ridden for Chicago to bring off the garrison, and had painted his face black before the fight in the way of a Miami who does not expect to return, and had not returned.
What was done to her father’s body afterward she had been told twice in her life: once, by a schoolfellow in Kentucky, as an obscenity; and once, years on, by an old Miami man at the Fort Wayne payments, as a reverence — they honored his courage; they wished to carry some of it away inside themselves — and she had understood, sitting very still between her two languages, that both tellings were faithful, that the one fact could be an atrocity in English and a communion in Miami, and that she was the only person at that table — perhaps in Ohio, perhaps alive — who was obliged to hold it both ways at once, forever. That was what she was. Not lost. Not found. The place where the two tellings met.
Somewhere there had been a pair of pistols. That was the other thing she kept, uselessly: her grandfather in the porch shade at Fort Wayne, very old, very amused, showing them small and heavy across his palms — a gift, he said, from a Polish general who had fought for the Americans and been disappointed in them, sent with the charge that he fire them on the first man who ever came to rob his people of their rights. Her grandfather had never fired them. She did not know where the pistols had gone. That was the summer everything went somewhere.
There had been a painting, too. Her grandfather had sat for it in Philadelphia, in the American clothes he wore in the East, at the order of the first President himself, and by the same hand that painted the President — the Republic hanging the face of the man who had beaten it twice beside the faces of the men he had beaten. Then the British came in the next war and burned the Capitol, and the painting burned in it. She used to think about that in church, in the long sermons: that the record could keep a county forever and could not keep a face for seventeen years; that of the ablest soldier the frontier ever raised there remained, by his enemies’ own doing, no likeness on this earth — only the pistols, gone; the counties, standing; and whatever looked out, now and again, from the eyes of his granddaughter’s children, whom the record would call white.
There had been four of them once — Wells children, sent down to Kentucky to their father’s white kin to be finished, which was the word used, as though children were furniture. Her sisters had gone back up to Fort Wayne when the finishing was done and married there, and were Mrs. Turner and Mrs. Hackley now; and two of them had stood up in the Baptist meeting at the fort in the year twenty, when the missionary McCoy took their hands, and been entered on one more roll — this one kept, she supposed, by God — and the church would remember them kindly forever after in five words, ladies of refinement and intelligent piety, which was the record doing its patient work again: every word true, and the whole life between the words let go down under the ink. And there had been the boy, their brother, named Wayne — her father had named his one son for the general he scouted for against his wife’s own nation, which was the sort of knot that family tied for a cradle-gift — and Wayne Wells grew up and went out onto Lake Erie in the year twenty-three, and the lake kept him. Of the four who went down to Kentucky, three came back up. Of the names, one lay at the bottom of the lake, wearing the conqueror’s name like a stone.
When the house was asleep she came down in her wrapper, turned up the lamp a quarter, and cut the lost-sister column out of the paper with her sewing scissors, neatly, squaring the corners, the way her husband would have. She put it under the false silk floor of her workbox where the letters from no one were kept. Then she sat a while with her hands in her lap, hearing the ice go on the river like far-off wagons.
Paper is how they grieve, she thought — not knowing she shared the sentence, word for word, with an old woman on the Mississinewa she would never meet.
She was, after all — the record said so — one of them.
Chapter Four — Buttonwood
Maumee. June 1838.
The word ran up the valley ahead of the wagons, the way word does.
The government’s agent that season was a man the country liked — Howard, a trader’s son, valley-raised, who had the languages and was welcome at the fires, which was of course precisely why he had been engaged, kindness being, in the ledger’s long experience, the cheapest of all instruments — and through the early summer he gathered them in: the last bands, the leavings of seven nations, off the reserves at the Auglaize forks and the oak openings and the marsh edges where they had held on twenty years past the treaties by the simple violence of staying. They came in by families. They camped on the island above the ruined fort — Buttonwood, the boatmen called it, for the sycamores — with the river on both sides of them like a parenthesis, and the smoke of their fires stood up over the water and leaned, every evening, whichever way the weather meant to go, and from her veranda Mary Wolcott could see it. Eight hundred people. Two miles of August-colored water between her columns and theirs.
The General Harrison took the contract for part of the flour.
She learned it from the wharf-book, which she was not in the habit of reading, and stood with her finger on the entry a long time. It was good business, and it was even mercy of a kind — someone’s flour would feed that camp, and her husband’s was unswept and honestly weighed — and she thought of the dog in the yard again, her old unanswerable catechism, and got nowhere with it again, and closed the book. The boat went up light and came back empty and the name on the paddle-box passed the island going both ways.
She went over on a Thursday, with the reverend’s wife and two baskets, in the ferry skiff.
It was a thing the town’s women had begun doing that fortnight — the camp had become, God forgive the word she could not stop her own mind from supplying, an attraction — and most brought bread and stayed twenty minutes upwind and were not wrong to come, charity being no less charity for being clumsy. She brought thread, needles, a ham, dried cherries, and a paper of fishhooks for the boys, and she did not stay upwind. She walked in among the fires with her bonnet in her hand. Dogs, kettles, the good smell of parched corn; a girl running a hoop of barrel iron between the shelters exactly as her own sons did between the lilacs; two old men playing at moccasin-and-bullet on a blanket, betting twists of tobacco, laughing low; and everywhere the terrible ordinary tidiness of people who have packed.
An old woman by the third fire looked up at her and did not look away.
She was small and upright, with eyes like creek stones, and she studied Mary’s face the way you read weather, at leisure, and then said something quiet to the woman beside her, and the word went along the fires ahead of Mary’s own steps so that she walked the length of that camp inside a hush of her grandfather’s name. Mihšihkinaahkwa. Not spoken to her. Spoken about her, over her, around her — the name settling on her shoulders from all sides like the first snow of a hard winter, and she could not answer it, and she did not pretend to, and when she had given out the last of the fishhooks the old woman was standing at her elbow, no higher than her collarbone, holding up one dried cherry taken from the paper as if it were a coin she meant to test, and the old woman said, in English, kindly, with a griever’s terrible economy:
“His girl’s girl.”
“Yes,” Mary said.
The old woman nodded, looked at the cherry, ate it, and patted Mary once on the forearm — the pat you give a child who cannot be blamed for the storm but was born in it — and turned back to her packing.
That was all. That was everything. She was rowed home over her grandfather’s river by a boy who whistled a minstrel tune, and paid him, and went up her lawn between her columns, and dressed for dinner.
On the twenty-fourth of June the camp went. They were taken off the island at first light onto flatboats and keelboats and driven west by way of the road the government had built through the swamp — she heard the order of march for weeks afterward, in pieces, at her own table, from men who had sold to it: so many wagons, so many hundred on foot, dust and psalms, an agent’s outriders — bound for a river in the far country called the Neosho, which her atlas, when she looked, rendered in the smallest type it carried. By noon the smoke over Buttonwood was out. By July the island was only an island, green as ever, keeping like every other acre of that valley no visible memorandum of anything.
A few old chiefs remained — suffered to stay, the phrase went, on this ground or that, by grace of paper — a scattering of old men in the emptied country, like the standing trees the loggers leave to show where the forest stood.
“Where did they all go?” Henry Clay asked her at supper — eight now, sunburnt, kind, hers.
“West,” she said.
The word did its work upon him the way it did upon everyone in that Republic: he nodded, satisfied, seeing (she could watch him see it) a direction, an adventure, a sunset the color of the maps. He went back to his pudding. She looked down the white cloth at her husband, who was happy, at her children, who were safe, in the finest house between Buffalo and Detroit, on the highest ground above the massacre, and she ate what was before her, and it had no taste at all, and she thought: west is not a place. West is what they call it when the ledger closes an account.
THE LEDGER — II
RETURN of Indians emigrated from the encampment on the Maumee, June 24th, 1838, under the direction of the subscriber: souls, eight hundred, of the Ottawa and sundry remnant bands, seven nations in all; with baggage, kettles, and 74 horses; commenced the march for the country assigned them on the waters of the Osage and Neosho, and proceeded without disorder. A few of the old chiefs, by permission, remain. — return of the conducting agent, D. W. H., filed with the Superintendency
Chapter Five — The Section
Deaf Man’s Village, the Mississinewa. Winter 1838–39.
In the eleventh month the chiefs signed another treaty, and inside that treaty, folded small, like a knife carried to a parley, was a piece of paper with my daughters’ names in it.
A section of land — that is their word, section, they have cut the world into a checkerboard and a section is one square of it — six hundred and forty of their acres, on this river, at this village, confirmed to my daughters and their heirs. Ours not by the old title, the only true one, which is the title of the dead who lie in it; ours now also by the new title, the paper one, the kind their courts can see. My white brothers had a hand in it, and the trader Godfroy’s people, and men in Washington I will never see who know me only as a story in a newspaper — the Lost Sister — and who were moved, they wrote, by the peculiar hardness of my case.
I have thought a long time about the peculiar hardness of my case.
When the Ohio bands went last summer — we heard it here within the month; the moccasin telegraph outruns their post — an old woman of the Ottawa was on the boats who had traded dried fish to my husband thirty years, and she is gone now to a river whose name I do not know how to say, and no paper stood at her door, because no white child had ever been carried over her fence, because no trader had ever found her story quaint enough to print. That is the whole of the difference between us. Not virtue. Not wisdom. A newspaper. My whiteness, which I have not used in sixty years, which I set down in the dooryard of a Delaware town before this country had a name — it seems I never lost the title to it. It has lain all this time in their records like money in a strongbox, drawing their kind of interest, and now my daughters draw it out.
The señora at the trading house says I should be glad, and I am glad. Do not mistake me. I am as glad as a woman is glad of the dog that keeps the wolf from her lambs, knowing what the dog is, knowing whose kennel it comes home to. Mary’s husband downriver — the merchant the Miamis of the reserves speak of, who holds their papers in his strong hand, they say, some bitterly, some not — he would understand me perfectly, and that is exactly the trouble with the world as it has been arranged.
When the wagons come for the Myaamia of this river — and they will come; I have watched this Republic sixty years from inside its blind spot, and it does not tire, and it does not forget an acre — the paper with my daughters’ names inside it will stand at their door like a dog. The graves of my husband and my child will stay whole under their own grass because of ink. The same pencil that grieves can fence.
So I have decided, and let it be recorded here in the only book I will ever keep, which is the dark under my own breastbone: I was five years old the last time being white was ever done to me. I am sixty-five now. I will let it be done once more — this once, in ink, at a distance, to buy the ground my dead sleep in.
Maconaquah signs nothing.
But Frances — Frances they will believe.
PART TWO — THE NAME
THE LEDGER — III
GRAND RALLY OF THE PEOPLE! — FORT MEIGS, JUNE 10th & 11th. The freemen of the Maumee country and of all the West will assemble on the ground OLD TIPPECANOE defended, to greet the HERO OF FORT MEIGS in person. A LOG CABIN will be raised upon the old works. Steam boats will run from Toledo, Perrysburgh and the lower landings at half fare. Bring your canteens. HARD CIDER for the multitude. — One flag upon the old fort will bear the General’s answer to the British summons: TELL GENERAL PROCTOR, WHEN THE FORT IS TAKEN THERE WILL BE NONE LEFT TO SURRENDER. — campaign broadside, spring 1840
Chapter Six — The Candidate
Maumee. June 1840.
The year they ran her boat for President, the river could be walked on shoes-dry from wharf to wharf, so thick the steamers lay.
That is how she would tell it, if she were ever to tell it, which she would not: that they ran the boat. Because the men who managed these things in the East had reached down into the country for a story, and the story they had chosen — out of all the stories this valley could have furnished them — was the old general, the Hero of the Maumee, Old Tippecanoe, reborn for the occasion as a plain man of the log cabin and the cider barrel; and so for one delirious summer the name her husband had painted on a paddle-box for reliability’s sake became the loudest word in the Republic, and the General Harrison steamed up and down the lake trade dressed in bunting like a bride, and made money, James said, hand over fist, carrying Whigs.
That same season the yard put a second hull into the water for him, a small quick one, eighty tons against the Harrison’s near three hundred, and this one he named the James Wolcott; so that in the year the whole country was roaring the general’s name, the merchant quietly set his own beside it on the river, and the two boats passed each other loaded in the channel all that summer — the name that took the valley and the name that kept its books — and if her husband ever heard the sentence they made, passing, he never said so.
In June they came to the fort itself. It had stood empty her whole marriage, a grassed ruin across the water from her windows, the pickets long since carried off by settlers for barn-sills — she knew a smokehouse in town built of Fort Meigs oak, and so did the smokehouse’s owner, who mentioned it the way men mention a famous ancestor. Now for two days in June the ruin held more people than had ever stood on that ground in its life — more than the sieges, more than both armies together, the papers said twenty thousand and the Whigs said forty and her husband, counting fares, said the truth was glory enough. They raised a log cabin on the old parade. They set three flagstaffs on the works, and on one they ran up the old answer to the old surrender demand — tell General Proctor there will be none left to surrender — and the crowd roared it across the water all day like surf, and the cider went around in tin cups dipped from barrels with the heads knocked in, and at night the fireworks stood up over the ruin and lit the river reach by reach, and from her veranda Mary Wolcott watched the burning flowers open and fall over the ground where the gauntlet had run, and held her shawl at the throat, and could not have said one true whole thing about what she felt, because there was no language on the continent that held all of it at once. Her mother’s had come closest. It was in Kansas now.
On the second day she was presented to the candidate.
It was her husband’s doing, and proudly meant: the committee’s dinner, the leading families, Mrs. Wolcott of the white columns in her gray silk. The general was old — sixty-seven that year, though the songs had him younger — a small-boned, courteous, tired Virginia gentleman got up as a frontiersman, with a face like a folded letter, and he took her hand as one more hand in a day of a thousand hands; and then the committee-man leaned to his ear and said the sentence that was always said, the sentence that was her passport and her cage in every room in that valley — daughter of Captain Wells, General — and she watched forty years fall off the man in one clean drop, like ice off a roof in thaw.
“Wells’s daughter,” he said. Not to the room. To her.
“Yes, General.”
He held her hand now as if it were the hand of the year 1812. “I knew your father, madam,” he said. “I knew him well. A braver man never lived — and I have known all the brave men of my time.” His eyes had filled, easily, the way old men’s do, and she understood that it was perfectly sincere and cost him nothing, a coin from a purse that refilled itself. “He died trying to bring off women and children. I said so at the time. I have said so for thirty years. Wells should have a monument.”
He is on a county, she did not say.
“You honor him, General,” she said, in the gray-silk voice, and the general pressed her hand and said that this — meeting her, here, upon this ground, on this happy occasion — that history was a remarkable thing; and then the committee turned him, gently, the way you turn a ship, toward a senator’s cousin; and that was all. He had known her father well. He had fought her great-grandfather’s war and drawn the plan at the timbers a mile from her nursery and burned the towns her mother was born among and priced the whole world of her grandmothers by the acre at his treaty tables — she knew the list; the list was not the point; the point was smaller and colder and she carried it home across the water that night in the skiff like a stone in the mouth:
He had asked nothing about her mother. It had not occurred to him that there was anything to ask. The half of her that came down from the beaten had passed before his filling eyes entire, in gray silk, unseen — and this was the man the Republic had chosen, out of all its men, to remember the frontier for it.
They roared his name — the fort’s name, the boat’s name, the buffalo-fish word underneath it that nobody roaring it could hear — until two in the morning. In November he carried every county she had ever lived in. In March he stood bareheaded in a cold rain in Washington and gave the longest speech ever given by a President of the United States, and caught his death in it, and in April he was gone — one month in the office it had taken the whole valley to buy him.
They did not repaint the boat. It ran all that summer of mourning with the dead man’s name in gold on both boxes, and made money, her husband said — the phrase had stopped meaning anything in the house by then, it was only the sound the house made — hand over fist.
Chapter Seven — The Five Years
Deaf Man’s Village. 1841.
Their great chief talked himself to death in the rain.
The trader’s son brought the news up the river in April as a wonder, and it is a wonder, but not the kind he meant. Among us a man who had taken that office would have known the speech is for the people and the rain is for everyone, and would have put on the blanket his wife handed him, because among us a chief that age has a wife of that age, whose word outranks eloquence. But the Big Knives do not keep old women near the fire of power, which is the strangest thing about them, stranger than the writing, stranger than the fences — a people who will take advice from paper and not from their grandmothers — and so their whitest-haired chief stood a March morning in his shirt to prove to them he was strong, and the rain, which cannot read, wrote him down.
I did not rejoice. I am asked — my daughters ask, gently, for they know the list too, Tippecanoe, the burned towns, the treaty tables — and I answer them what I answer here: the man was the arm, not the will. The will is the whole people of them together, the hunger that no one of them owns or can call off, and against a will of that kind the death of one old man in the rain signifies exactly what the death of one bee signifies to the swarm’s direction, and the swarm’s direction is west, and has been west since before my white mother bore me.
The proof came the autumn before, in ink, as their proofs come.
In the eleventh month of 1840 the chiefs signed away the last of it — the Big Reserve, the last great whole piece of my nation’s country under my nation’s own name — and the paper gives them five years. Five years, and then the wagons and the boats for every Myaamia soul the paper does not except by name. The men who signed did what the beaten do at the end, they carried out of the fire what could be carried: the annuities, the private sections, the exceptions — Godfroy’s people excepted, the Richardville line excepted, the Meshingomesia band excepted — a nation reduced to a list of families the ink agrees to see, and every family not on the list already, in the law’s eyes, halfway to Kansas.
The same year the rain took their white-haired chief, death took ours, in the late summer: Peshewa, the Wildcat, Richardville, the portage chief — Roman-nosed, blue-eyed, a Frenchman’s face on a Miami mother’s son, the one man of the nation who had learned their arithmetic so deep in the bone that he died, the traders say, the richest man in their whole state of Indiana. I did not love him. But mark what he did with the numbers: it is his line, and Godfroy’s, and Meshingomesia’s, standing excepted on that treaty paper — he played their own ledger against them to the last line, and bought his people’s ground back out of it with its own ink. A chief owes his people a shield. He made one of the only metal the Big Knives cannot melt.
My daughters are on the list. My white brothers are seeing to the rest of it — there is talk of a paper from the Congress itself, with my born name in it, to fix us to this ground past any agent’s argument — and it will pass, I think, in a year or three, because the story of the Lost Sister is beloved in the East, and the Republic dearly loves to make one exception. It proves their largeness to themselves. One old white woman spared upon her ancestral river: they will frame it. Eight thousand of my neighbors driven off theirs: that is policy, and goes on the other page.
Five years. I sit in my doorway in the evenings now and count what the paper cannot see. The graves, first. The bend of this river, which my husband could read like the whites read their letters. The bee trees. The place on the bank where my first daughter took her first fish, laughing, under a sky I could draw for you still. All of it on nothing, as their maps would say. All of it, in the only ledger I keep, on everything.
Chapter Eight — The Song
Maumee. February 1843.
The record does not say what took her. It says the date — the nineteenth of February, 1843 — and it says consort of, and it spells the county right, and lets the rest go down under the ink. She was forty-three years old. It had been, that winter, thirty-one years since Chicago, thirty-eight since the fevers on the St. Marys; the last summer’s news had been the Wyandots at Upper Sandusky voting, in a purpose-built hut, with an English novelist passing through to breakfast nearby, to sell the last Indian acre in Ohio and go; they would start west in the coming July, and she would not see it, and she knew both of these things, the way the dying know the calendar better than the well.
What the record does not say, this book may: that in the last fortnight, in the river bedroom with the curtains ordered open — she wanted the ice; James thought it morbid and obeyed her, which was their whole marriage in six words — she called her children to her one at a time, in order of age, and did the accounts.
To William Wells Wolcott, twenty-one, grave, good, her merchant son, she gave the pistols’ story, having no pistols — told him of the Polish general’s gift and the charge that came with it, fire these on the first man who comes to rob your people of their rights, and watched her father’s name doing its work in the boy’s straight back, and did not tell him — there was not time, there was never going to be time, there had not been time in her whole life — which people the charge had meant.
To Mary Ann she gave the workbox, silk floor and all, and what was under it.
To Henry Clay Wolcott, twelve, sunburnt, kind, hers — the one the river had chosen somehow, the one who fished the spring run with the town boys and came home smelling of it — she gave the song.
She was three days deciding which one; she had two whole and most of a third; she chose the one her own mother had sung last, not because she remembered choosing but because the body chooses. She had him sit on the bed’s edge with the ice-light on him and she sang it through once, small, the fever making the low notes swim, and the boy watched her mouth the way children watch a thing they know is being given to them before they know what it is. It was not English and he did not ask what it was, which is why the river had chosen him.
“Now you,” she said.
He got it wrong twice, the vowels skidding — the sounds were not in his mouth’s country; his mouth was Ohio’s — and the third time he got it nearly, and the fourth time he got it, all of it, the whole verse riding on that clear unbroken boy’s voice out over the counterpane, over the squared furniture of the finest house between Buffalo and Detroit, and for the length of it there was one more place in the world where the thing existed.
“Whose is it?” he asked — not what is it: whose. Hers, the river’s boy.
“Wanagapeth,” she said. “Say it.”
“Wanagapeth.”
“Again.”
“Wanagapeth.”
She did not explain, and he did not ask, and she was not able, that far down the cold river of it, to tell whether this was wisdom or only the last of her cowardice — whether a name planted without its story is a seed or just a stone. He would carry it, she knew, the way children carry such deposits, underground, for decades, unspent — and past that her lamp did not reach, and she let it go, at last, with everything else that had ever been hers to carry: the songs, the quill-work, the grammarless wound, the cousin’s X, the hush at Buttonwood laying her grandfather’s name across her shoulders like first snow, the whole unwritten testament of Amehkoonsahkwa — Mrs. James Wolcott — Mary — down all her names to the first one, her mother’s hand on the crown of her head, the exact and now at last returning weight of it.
The fish came up seven weeks later, on time, past the empty veranda.
THE LEDGER — IV
DIED — At Maumee City, on the 19th ultimo, after a lingering illness, borne with Christian patience, MARY, consort of the Hon. James Wolcott, in the 43d year of her age; a lady of refinement and benevolence, daughter of the late Capt. WILLIAM WELLS, of Fort Wayne, whose services and melancholy fate are known to all readers of the history of the late war. The funeral was attended from the family mansion by a large concourse of citizens. — the valley press, March 1843
PART THREE — THE ROLLS
Chapter Nine — The Sparing
Deaf Man’s Village. October 1846 – spring 1847.
The paper from the Congress came, as I said it would: a resolution of their two councils with my born name inside it, Frances Slocum, and the names of my daughters and their families, twenty-one souls fixed to this river past any agent’s argument. My white brothers carried it like men carrying fire indoors, so proud, so careful, and I thanked them, and meant it, and I record here what I have told no one: it is the heaviest paper I have ever held. It weighs twenty-one souls exactly. It weighs also everything it does not say.
In the tenth month, at the falling of the leaves, they took the nation.
Not mine to see — Peru is a half-day’s ride, and I did not ride it; I am old, and there are things it is not required of a woman to look at with her own eyes to know forever — but the telegraph of the fires told it as it happened, and the trader’s son filled in the whites’ half afterward, and between the two tellings I have it whole, and give it here to the only book I keep. On the sixth day of October the soldiers and the agents brought them down to the canal basin at Iihkipihsinonki — the whites say Peru — and put them onto three canal boats, my nation, the ones the lists did not except: the young men sitting on the cabin roofs with their faces shut, the grandmothers below among the bundles, the children — the children at the windows, because children will look at anything, it is their work — and the mules took up the slack, and the boats went east along the ditch the whites had cut through the middle of our country to carry their wheat, and the water in that ditch does not run, it only lies there and is pulled; and my nation went out of its own land at the pace of a walking mule, down a dead river their enemies had made, toward the boats for Kansas.
They went by Godfroy’s, where the excepted stood along the bank. I am told the boats and the bank called back and forth as long as voice could carry — names, mostly. Just names.
To be spared, I have learned this winter, is its own kind of removal. They did not remove us; they removed the world from around us, and left us standing on our little islands of ink — the Slocum section, the Godfroy sections, the Meshingomesia grant — a scattering of families in an emptied country, like the standing trees the loggers leave, that show where the forest stood and cannot themselves make shade enough for a child. The village is quiet in a way it has never been in the sixty years I have kept it. The paper held. I would sign it again; hear me, whoever reads this in whatever world: I would sign it again, twenty-one souls is twenty-one souls. But no one warned me that the price of the wall would be the view from it.
Spring is coming up the river valley now. I am seventy-four years old. I was Frances five years and I have been Maconaquah sixty-nine, and when I go under this grass, between my husband and my child, the stone-cutters may write whichever name the living need; the ground will know which one it holds.
Chapter Ten — The Petition
Maumee. 1894.
An old man sits at a desk of the modern kind, oak with a rolling top, in a river town the railroads have passed by, writing in a good clear merchant’s hand that shakes now on the downstrokes, and every few lines he stops and reads what he has and once, aloud, alone in the room, he says: restored.
William Wells Wolcott is seventy-two years old — older than his father the judge ever got, thirty years older than his mother got, though he has to work the sum now to believe it, she has been forty years the age of his own daughters — and he is the last of the accounts. The house on the bluff passed out of mourning long ago into the family’s second era, the one with a stepmother in it; the boat’s engines are two generations gone to scrap, though he can summon the exact tone of her whistle off Presque Isle the way other men summon hymns; the town’s water-power dreams died with the canal; and the fraction the clerk’s form requires of him — state the degree of Indian blood — sits on the page in his own handwriting, one quarter, the first time in his long American life that the arithmetic of what his mother was has ever been worth one cent on any paper in the Republic, and he is ashamed of the occasion, and proud of the fact, and old enough at last to hold both without dropping either, being his mother’s son.
The family was struck from the rolls years since — removed therefrom, the record says, by reason of separation from the nation — which is the ledger’s way of saying: you moved into the big white house, you named your sons for senators, you passed. The ledger is not wrong. That is the worst of the ledger, he has found, and he a ledger-man his whole life; it is so rarely wrong about the things it consents to see.
He writes the petition anyway. Not for the annuity, whatever his nephews think — he has money; money, to him, is of no value, and he smiles the old family smile at the sentence without knowing down what long water it has come to him — but because a man at the end wants the record right, and the record, for fifty years, has had him down as the son of Captain Wells and a blank. His brother Henry, who died with the name their mother planted in him still underground and unspent — he had sung the song once only in William’s hearing, drunk and weeping, aged sixty, at their sister’s funeral, and could not say whose it was, only WHOSE, in the old exact voice, “hers, hers” — Henry is four years gone. There is no one left who was at the wharf the day the boy spelled the boat’s name out. There is only the paper, and what a man chooses to make it carry.
So he dips the pen, and where the form says derivation of claim, the old merchant writes the account through, in full, for the first time in the family’s history — debits, credits, and the name.
THE LEDGER — V
To the Honorable the Commissioner of Indian Affairs: The undersigned respectfully represents: that he is the eldest son of MARY WELLS WOLCOTT, deceased, late of Maumee, Ohio; that his said mother was the daughter of Captain WILLIAM WELLS, killed at Chicago in 1812, and of WAH-NAH-GA-PETH, called SWEET BREEZE, daughter of ME-SHE-KIN-NO-QUAH, the LITTLE TURTLE, principal war chief of the Miami nation; and that the names of your petitioner and his family, formerly borne upon the rolls of said nation, were stricken therefrom; wherefore he prays that they may be RESTORED. — filed 1894
It is the first paper in this book that says her name.
CODA — WHAT THE RECORD SAYS NOW
The genealogy came out in 1912 and gave her eleven words, and the ledger seemed, as it always seems, to have closed. Five years later a county history, pausing to admire the Wolcott Building at Maumee, remembered her generously and got her wrong — Mrs. Wolcott was a daughter of Little Turtle — a generation folded shut like a fan, the mother skipped over by the very act of remembering. Even reaching for Sweet Breeze, the record could not hold her.
But records have descendants too. The white house on the bluff stayed in the family until 1957, when the last of the line gave it to the public, and it stands today as a museum above the rapids, dusted, docented, its fourteen rooms smelling of other people’s history; the fish still come up past it every April, on time. The nation that went down the ditch at a mule’s pace kept its government alive through Kansas and the lost years and the second removal, and governs today from a town in Oklahoma that carries its name — and when, in a new century, that nation wrote itself a constitution, it built its citizenship upon the very census rolls the old ledger had made to divide it: the instrument of the taking, turned at last, in the nation’s own hands, to the instrument of the remaining. The language the fevers and the boats and the boarding schools put to sleep has been wakened from the old word-lists — the paper grief of soldiers and missionaries become, of all things on this earth, seed — and there are children now, in Oklahoma and in Ohio both, who can say correctly, without being taught by a dying woman in an ice-lit room, the name this book was written to say.
Maconaquah’s grave got its stone in the new century: a monument on the Mississinewa, unveiled in the spring of 1900, the Miami of the river standing around the granite for the photograph — among them an old woman of whom the caption notes only that she cannot speak English, which was the caption’s way of recording, without meaning to, that the language was still alive on that ground. And the family that had wept for its lost sister produced, in the end, the river’s own historian: a Slocum wrote the standard history of the Maumee basin, two heavy volumes, the valley she was carried into entered at last in the family’s book — the grief and the refusal reconciled the only way records reconcile anything, by outliving everyone concerned.
The maps have not much changed. The general is still on the sixteen counties. The candidate is still on the town by the fort. The scout is still on his county in Indiana, and the men who priced the valley are on its schools and its streets and its money.
But go to the rolls — the living rolls, the nation’s own, kept now in the nation’s own hand — and there, current, carried forward, drawing the only interest that ever mattered, you will find what the counties never carried:
Wanagapeth.
Amehkoonsahkwa.
Maconaquah.
Written down, at last, by their own.
— end —