Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II Page 8

  Then Lolla-Wossiky will see if he should live or die. If the black noise goes on, and waking up teaches him nothing more than he knows now, Lolla-Wossiky will go sleep in the river and let it roll him to the sea, far away from the land and the black noise. But if waking up teaches him some reason to live on, black noise or not, then Lolla-Wossiky will live, many long years of drink and pain, pain and drink.

  Lolla-Wossiky drank four swallows every morning, four swallows every night, and then went to sleep hoping that when the dream beast woke him up, he then could die.

  One day he stood on the banks of a clearwater stream, with the black noise thick in his vision and loud in his ears. A great brown bear stood in the water. It slapped the face of the water and a fish flew into the air. The bear caught it in his teeth, chomped twice, and swallowed. It was not the eating that Lolla-Wossiky cared about. It was the bear’s eyes.

  The bear had one eye missing, just like Lolla-Wossiky. This made Lolla-Wossiky wonder if the bear could be his dream beast. But that could not be. The white light that called him was still north and somewhat west of this place. So this bear was not the dream beast, it was part of the dream.

  Still, it might have a message for Lolla-Wossiky. This bear might be here because the land wanted to tell Lolla-Wossiky a story.

  This is the first thing Lolla-Wossiky noticed: When the bear caught the fish in his jaws, he was looking with his single eye, seeing the glimmer of sunlight shining on the fish. Lolla-Wossiky knew about this, cause Lolla-Wossiky tilted his head to one side just like the bear.

  This is the second thing Lolla-Wossiky noticed: When the bear looked into the water to see the fish swimming, so he could slap at it, he looked with the other eye, with the eye that wasn’t there. Lolla-Wossiky didn’t understand this. It was very strange.

  This is the last thing Lolla-Wossiky noticed: As he watched the bear, his own good eye was closed. And when he opened his eye, the river was still there, the sunlight was still there, the fishes still danced into the air and then disappeared, but the bear was gone. Lolla-Wossiky could see the bear only if he closed his good eye.

  Lolla-Wossiky drank two swallows from the keg, and the bear went away.

  One day Lolla-Wossiky crossed a White man’s road, and felt it like a river moving under his feet. The current of the road swept him along. He staggered with it, then caught the stride and jogged along, the keg on his shoulder. A Red man never walked on the White man’s road—the dirt was packed too hard in dry weather, mud too deep in rain, and the wagon wheel ruts reached out like White man’s hands to turn the Red man’s ankle, trip him up, break him down. This time, though, the ground was soft like spring grass on a riverbank, as long as Lolla-Wossiky ran along the road the right direction. Not toward the light anymore, cause the light was soft around him, and he knew the dream beast was very very close.

  The road three times went over water—two little streams and a big one—and each time there was a bridge, made of great heavy logs and sturdy planks, with a roof like a White man’s house. Lolla-Wossiky stood on the first bridge a long time. He never heard of such a thing. Here he was standing in the place where water was supposed to be, and yet the bridge was so heavy and strong, the walls so thick, that he couldn’t see or hear the water at all.

  And the river hated it. Lolla-Wossiky could hear how angry it was, how it wanted to reach up and tear the bridge away. White man’s ways, thought Lolla-Wossiky, White man has to conquer, tear things away from the land.

  Yet standing on the bridge, he noticed something else. Even though the likker was mostly gone from his body, the black noise was quieter on the bridge. He could hear more of the green silence than he had in a long time As if the black noise came partly from the river. How can that be? River got no anger against Red man. And no White-built thing can bring the Red man closer to the land. Yet that was what happened in this place. Lolla-Wossiky hurried on down the road; maybe when his dream beast woke him up, he’d understand this thing.

  Road poured out into a place of meadows and a few White man’s buildings. Lots of wagons. Horses posted and tied, grazing on the meadow grass. Sound of metal hammers ringing, chopping of axes in the wood, screech of saws going back and forth, all kinds of White-man forest-killing sounds. A White man’s town.

  But not a White man’s town. Lolla-Wossiky stopped at the edge of the open land. Why is this White man’s town different, what’s missing that I expect to see?

  The stockade. There was no stockade.

  Where did the White men go to hide? Where did they lock up drunken Reds and White man thieves? Where did they hide their guns?

  “Lift! Lift! Lift!” White man’s voice ringing out loud as a bell in the thick air of a summer afternoon.

  Up a grassy hill, maybe half a mile off, a strange wooden thing was rising up. Lolla-Wossiky couldn’t see the men raising it cause the angle was wrong; they were all hid up behind the brow of the hill. But he could see a new-wood frame go up, poles at the high end to raise it into place.

  “Side wall now! Lift! Lift! Lift!”

  Now another frame rose up, slowly, slowly, sideways to the first. When both frames were standing straight, they met just so along one edge. For the first time Lolla-Wossiky saw men. White boys scrambled up the frames and raised their hammers and brought them down like tommy-hawks to beat the wood into submission. After they pounded for a while, they stood up, three of them, standing on the very top of the wall frames, their hammers raised up high like spears just pulled from the body of the wild buffalo. The poles that had pushed the walls in place were pulled away. The walls stood, holding each other in place. Lolla-Wossiky heard a cheer.

  Then suddenly the White men all appeared on the brow of the hill. Did they see me? Will they come to make me go away or lock me up? No, they were just going down the hill to where their horses and their wagons stood. Lolla-Wossiky melted into the woods.

  He drank four swallows from the keg, then climbed into a tree and settled the keg into a place where three thick branches split apart. Nice and tight, nice and safe. Leaves nice and thick; nobody see it from the ground, not even Red man.

  Lolla-Wossiky took the long way round, but pretty soon there he was on the hill where the new walls stood. Lolla-Wossiky looked a long time, but he couldn’t understand what this building was going to be. It was the new way of building, those frame walls, like White Murderer Harrison’s new mansion, but it was very big. Bigger than anything Lolla-Wossiky ever saw White men build, taller than the stockade.

  First the strange bridges, tight as houses. Now this strange building, tall as trees. Lolla-Wossiky walked out from the shelter of the forest onto the open meadow, rocking back and forth because the ground never stayed level when he had likker in him. When he reached the building, he stepped up onto the wooden floor. White man’s floor, White man’s walls, but it didn’t feel like any White man building Lolla-Wossiky ever saw. Big open space inside. Walls very high. First time ever he saw White man build something that wasn’t closed in and dark. In this place a Red man still maybe glad to be here.

  “Who’s that? Who are you?”

  Lolla-Wossiky turned around so fast he almost fell. A tall White man stood at the edge of the building. The floor was up so high it met this man at the waist. He wasn’t in buckskin like a hunter, or in uniform like a soldier. He was dressed like a farmer maybe, only he was clean. In fact Lolla-Wossiky never saw such a man in Carthage City.

  “Who are you?” demanded the man again.

  “Red man,” said Lolla-Wossiky.

  “It’s getting on dusk, but it sure ain’t night yet. I’d have to be blind not to know you’re Red. But I know the Reds close by and you ain’t from around here.”

  Lolly-Wossiky laughed. What White man ever knew one Red from another so well he could say who was from close by and who was from far away?

  “You got a name, Red man?”

  “Lolla-Wossiky.”

  “You’re likkered, ain’t you. I can smell it, and yo
u don’t walk too good.”

  “Very likkered. Whisky-Red.”

  “Who gave you that likker! You tell me! Where’d you get that likker?”

  Lolla-Wossiky was confused. White man never asked him where he got his likker before. White man always knew. “From White Murderer Harrison,” he said.

  “Harrison’s two hundred miles southeast of here. What did you call him?”

  “Governor Bill Harrison.”

  “You called him White Murderer Harrison.”

  “This Red very drunk.”

  “I can see that. But you sure didn’t get drunk at Fort Carthage and then walk all this way without sobering up. Now where’d you get that likker?”

  “You going to lock me up?”

  “Lock you—now where would I lock you up, tell me that? You really are from Fort Carthage, aren’t you. Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Lolla-Wossiky, we got no place to lock up drunk Reds around here, cause around here Reds don’t get drunk. And if they do, we find the White man who gave him likker and that White man gets a flogging. So you tell me right now where you got that likker.”

  “My whisky,” said Lolla-Wossiky.

  “Maybe you better come with me.”

  “Lock me up?”

  “I told you, we don’t—listen, you hungry?”

  “Reckon so,” said Lolla-Wossiky.

  “You got a place to eat?”

  “Eat wherever I am.”

  “Well, tonight you come on down and eat at my house.”

  Lolla-Wossiky didn’t know what to say. Was this a White man joke? White man jokes were very hard to understand.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Reckon so,” said Lolla-Wossiky again.

  “Well, come on, then!”

  Another White man came up the hill. “Armor-of-God!” he called. “Your good wife wondered where you were.”

  “Just a minute, Reverend Thrower. I think maybe we got us company for supper.”

  “Who is that? Why, Armor-of-God, I daresay that’s a Red.”

  “He says his name’s Lolla-Wossiky. He’s a Shaw-Nee. He’s also drunk as a skunk.”

  Lolla-Wossiky was very surprised. This White man knew he was a Shaw-Nee without asking. From his hair, plucked out except the tall strip down the middle? Other Reds did this. The fringe on his loincloth? White man never saw these things.

  “A Shaw-Nee,” said the new-come White man. “Aren’t they a particularly savage tribe?”

  “Well, now, I don’t know, Reverend Thrower,” said Armor-of-God. “What they are is a particularly sober tribe. By which I mean they don’t get so likkered as some of these others. Some folks think that the only safe Red is a whisky-Red, so they see all these sober Shaw-Nee and they think that makes them dangerous.”

  “This one seems not to have that problem.”

  “I know. I tried to find out who gave him his whisky, and he won’t tell me.”

  Reverend Thrower addressed Lolla-Wossiky. “Don’t you know that whisky is the devil’s tool and the downfall of the Red man?”

  “I don’t think he talks English enough to know what you’re talking about, Reverend.”

  “Likker very bad for Red man,” said Lolla-Wossiky.

  “Well, maybe he does understand,” said Armor-of-God, chuckling. “Lolla-Wossiky, if you know how bad likker is, how come you stink of cheap whisky like an Irish barroom?”

  “Likker very bad for Red man,” said Lolla-Wossiky, “but Red man thirsty all the time.”

  “There’s a simple scientific explanation for that,” said Reverend Thrower. “Europeans have had alcoholic beverages for so long that they’ve built up a tolerance. Europeans who desperately hunger for alcohol tend to die younger, have fewer children, provide less well for those children they do have. The result is that most Europeans have a resistance to alcohol built into them. But you Reds have never built up that tolerance.”

  “Very damn right,” said Lolla-Wossiky. “True-talking White man, how come White Murderer Harrison not kill you yet?”

  “Well, now, will you listen to that,” said Armor-of-God. “That’s the second time he called Harrison a murderer.”

  “He also swore, which I do not appreciate.”

  “If he’s from Carthage, he learned to talk English from a class of White man that thinks words like ‘damn’ are punctuation, if you catch my drift, Reverend. But listen, Lolla-Wossiky. This man here, he’s Reverend Philadelphia Thrower, and he’s a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ, so mind you don’t use no bad language around him.”

  Lolla-Wossiky hadn’t the faintest idea what a minister was—there was no such thing in Carthage City. The best he could think of was that a minister was like a governor, only nicer.

  “Will you live in this very big house?”

  “Live here?” asked Thrower. “Oh, no. This is the Lord’s house.”

  “Who?”

  “The Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Lolla-Wossiky had heard of Jesus Christ. White man called out that name all the time, mostly when they were angry or lying. “Very angry man,” said Lolla-Wossiky. “He live here?”

  “Jesus Christ is a loving and forgiving Lord,” said Reverend Thrower. “He won’t live here the way a White man lives in a-house. But when good Christians want to worship—to sing hymns and pray and hear the word of the Lord—we’ll come together in this place. It’s a church, or it will be.”

  “Jesus Christ talks here?” Lolla-Wossiky thought it might be interesting to meet this very important White man face to face.

  “Oh, no, not in person. I speak for him.”

  From below the hill came a woman’s voice. “Armor! Armor Weaver!”

  Armor-of-God came alert. “Supper’s ready, and there she is calling out, she hates when she has to do that. Come on, Lolla-Wossiky. Drunk or not, if you want supper you can come and get it.”

  “I hope you will,” said Reverend Thrower. “And when supper is done, I hope to be able to teach you the words of the Lord Jesus.”

  “Very most first thing,” said Lolla-Wossiky. “You promise not to lock me up. I don’t want lock-up, I got to find dream beast.”

  “We won’t lock you up. You can walk out of my house any time.” Armor-of-God turned to Reverend Thrower. “You can see what these Reds learn about White men from William Henry Harrison. Likker and lock-ups.”

  “I am more moved by his pagan beliefs. A dream beast! Is this their idea of gods?”

  “The dream beast isn’t God, it’s an animal they dream about that teaches them things,” explained Armor. “They always take a long journey till they have the dream and come home. That explains what he’s doing two hundred miles from the main Shaw-Nee settlements on the lower My-Ammy.”

  “Dream beast real,” said Lolla-Wossiky.

  “Right,” said Armor-of-God. Lolla-Wossiky knew he was saying that only to avoid offending him.

  “This poor creature is obviously in dire need of the gospel of Jesus,” said Thrower.

  “Looks to me like he’s in more need of supper at the moment. Gospel is learned best on a full belly, wouldn’t you say?”

  Thrower chuckled. “I don’t think it says that anywhere in the Bible, Armor-of-God, but I dare say you’re correct.”

  Armor-of-God put his hands on his hips and asked Lolla-Wossiky again. “You coming or not?”

  “Reckon so,” said Lolla-Wossiky.

  Lolla-Wossiky’s belly was full, but it was White man’s food, soft and smoooth and overcooked, and it grumbled inside him. Thrower went on and on with very strange words. The stories were good, but Thrower kept going on about original sin and redemption. One time when Lolla-Wossiky thought he understood, he said, “What a silly god, he makes everybody born bad to go to burning hell. Why so mad? All his fault!” But this made Thrower get very upset and talk longer and faster, so after that Lolla-Wossiky did not offer any of his thoughts.

  The black noise came back louder and louder the more Thrower talked. Whisky wearing off? It was ve
ry quick for the likker to go out of him. And when Thrower left one time to go empty himself, the black noise got quieter. Very strange—Lolla-Wossiky never before noticed anybody making the black noise louder or softer by coming or going.

  But maybe that was because he was here in the dream beast place. He knew this was the place because the white light was all around him when he looked, and he couldn’t see where to go. Don’t be surprised at bridges that make black noise soft and White minister who makes black noise loud. Don’t be surprised at Armor-of-God with his land-face picture who feeds Red man and doesn’t sell likker or even give likker.

  While Thrower was outside, Armor-of-God showed Lolla-Wossiky the map. “This is a picture of the whole land around here. Up to the northwest, there’s the big lake—the Kicky-Poo call it Fat Water. Right there, Fort Chicago—it’s a French outpost.”

  “French. One cup of whisky for a White man scalp.”

  “That’s the going rate, all right,” said Armor-of-God. “But the Reds around here don’t take scalps. They trade fair with me, and I trade fair with them, and we don’t go shooting down Reds and they don’t go killing White folks for the bounty. You understand me? You start getting thirsty, you think about this: There was a whisky-Red from the Wee-Aw tribe here some four year back, he killed him a little Danish boy out in the woods. Do you think it was White men tracked him down? Reckon not; you know a White man’s got no hope to find no Red in these woods, specially not farmers and such like us. No, it was Shaw-Nee and Otty-Wa who found him two hours after the boy turned up missing. And do you think it was White men punished that whisky-Red? Reckon not; they set that Wee-Aw down and said, ‘You want to show brave?’ and when he said yes, they took six hours killing him.”

  “Very kind,” said Lolla-Wossiky.

  “Kind? I reckon not,” said Armor-of-God.

  “Red man kills White boy for whisky, I never let him show brave, he die—uh! Like that, quick like rattlesnake, no man him.”

  “I got to say you Reds think real strange,” said Armor. “You mean it’s a favor when you torture somebody to death?”