Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II (35 page)

He heard the thump, thump of cannon firing. “Can you hear that, Alvin?” he asked.

Alvin couldn’t.

“The shooting’s started. The cannon.”

“Then run, Measure. Go as fast as you can.”

“Alvin, I’m in a root cellar. They barred the door.”

Alvin cussed with a couple of words that Measure didn’t know the boy had ever heard.

“Alvin, I got me a hole half-dug here in the back. You got such a knack with stone, I wondered if you could loosen things up for me here, so I could dig out real fast.”

And that’s how it worked out. Measure rolled himself into the hole and just closed his eyes and pawed at the dirt above his head. It was nothing like digging the day before, rubbing his fingers raw on the dirt. It just fell away, slid off him; when he reached up to dig more, the dirt slipped under his shoulders, and
there
it firmed right up, so that he didn’t even have to think about moving the dirt out of the hole, it was just filling up underneath him. He kicked, and his legs jostled the dirt loose, so his whole body was rising up the same way.

Swimming through dirt, that’s what I’m doing, he thought, and he started to laugh, it was so easy and so strange.

His laugh was finished in the open air. He was on top, just behind the root cellar. The sky was pretty light—the sun would be up in just a minute or so. The booming of the cannon had stopped. Did that mean it was over, too late? Maybe, though, they were just letting the guns cool. Or moving them to another place. Or maybe the Reds even managed to capture the guns—

But would that be good news? Right or wrong, his brothers and his father were with them guns, and if the Reds won this battle, some of his kin might die. It was one thing to know that the Reds were in the right and the Whites in the wrong; it was something else to wish defeat on your own family, defeat and maybe death. He had to stop the battle, and so he ran, like he never done before. Alvin’s voice was gone, now, but Measure didn’t need to be encouraged. He fair to flew down that road.

He met two people on the way. One was Mrs. Hatch, who was driving her wagon along the road, loaded down with supplies. When she saw Measure, she screamed—he was wearing a loincloth and filthy as could be, and she couldn’t be blamed for thinking he was a Red all set to scalp her. She was off that wagon and running before
Measure could so much as call her name. Well, that was fine with him. He nearly tore the horse from the wagon, he worked so fast, and then he was riding bareback, galloping along the road hoping that the horse wouldn’t trip and spill him.

The other person he met along the way was Armor-of-God. Armor was kneeling in the middle of the common green, out front of his store, praying his heart out while the cannon roared and the muskets crackled across the river. Measure hailed him, and Armor looked up with a face like as if he’d seen Jesus resurrected. “Measure!” he shouted. “Stop, stop!”

Measure was all set to go on, to say he had no time, but then Armor was out in the middle of the way, and the horse was shy to go around him, so he
did
stop. “Measure, are you an angel or alive?”

“Alive, no thanks to Harrison. Tried to murder me, he did. I’m alive and so is Alvin. This whole thing was Harrison’s doing, and I’ve got to put a stop to it.”

“Well you can’t go like that,” said Armor. “Wait, I said! You can’t just show up wearing a loincloth and covered up with dirt like that, somebody’s going to think you’re a Red and shoot you on the spot!”

“Then hop on this horse behind me, and give me your clothing on the way!”

So Measure hoisted Armor-of-God onto the horse behind him, and they rode out to the river crossing.

Peter Ferryman’s wife was there to run the winch. One look at Measure was enough to tell her all she needed to know. “Hurry,” she said. “It’s so bad, the river’s running scarlet.”

On the ferry, Armor stripped off his clothes while Measure ducked himself in the water, blood and all, to wash some of the dirt away. He didn’t come out clean, but at least he looked somewhat like a White man. Still wet, he put on Armor’s shirt and trousers, and then his waistcoat. They didn’t fit too good, Armor being a smaller man, but Measure shrugged on the coat all the same. While he did, he said, “Sorry to leave you with just your summerjohns.”

“I’d stand naked half the day in front of all the ladies
in church if it would stop this massacre,” said Armor. If he said more, Measure didn’t hear it, cause he was already on his way.

Nothing was the way Alvin Miller Senior thought that it would be. He’d imagined shooting his musket at the same screaming savages who cut up and killed his boys. But the city turned up empty, and they found the Reds all gathered in Speaking Meadow, just like they was ready for a sermon from the Prophet. Miller never knowed there was so many Reds in Prophetstown, cause he never seen them all in the same place like this. But they were Reds, weren’t they? So he shot his musket all the same, just like the other men, firing and reloading, hardly looking at whether his shot hit anything. How could he miss, them all standing together so close? The bloodlust was on him then, he was crazy with anger and the power to kill. He didn’t notice how some of the other men were getting quieter. Shooting less often. He just loaded and fired, loaded and fired, stepping a yard or two closer every time, out from the cover of the forest, out into the open; only when the cannon got moved into place did he stop shooting, make way for them, watched them mow great swaths through the mass of Reds.

That was the first time he really noticed what all was happening to the Reds, what they were doing, what they
weren’t
doing. They weren’t screaming. They weren’t fighting back. They were just standing there, men and women and children, just looking out at the White men who were killing them. Not a one even turned his back to the hail of shrapnel. Not a parent tried to shield a child from the blast. They just stood, waited, died.

The grapeshot carved gaps in the crowd; the only thing to stop the spray of metal was human bodies. Miller saw them fall. Them as could, got up again, or at least knelt, or raised their heads above the mass of corpses so that the next blast would take them and kill them.

What is it, do they want to die?

Miller looked around him. He and the men with him were standing in a sea of corpses—they had already walked out to where the outer edges of the crowd of Reds
had been. Right at his feet, the body of a boy no older than Alvin lay curled, his eye blown out by a musket ball. Maybe my own musket ball, thought Miller. Maybe I killed this boy.

During the lulls between cannon volleys, Miller could hear men crying. Not the Reds, the ones still living, huddled in an ever-smaller mass down toward the river. No, the men crying were his neighbors, White men standing beside him, or behind the line. Some of them were talking, pleading. Stop it, they said. Please, stop it.

Please stop. Were they talking to the cannon? Or to the Red men and women, who insisted on standing there, not trying to escape, not crying out in fear? Or to their children, who faced the guns as bravely as their parents? Or did they speak to the terrible gnawing pain in their own hearts, to see what they had done, were doing, would yet do?

Miller noticed that the blood didn’t soak into the grass of the meadow. As it poured out of the wounds of those most recently hit, it formed rivulets, streams, great sheets of blood flowing down the slope of the meadow, toward the Tippy-Canoe Creek. The morning sunlight on this bright clear day shone vivid red from the water of the creek.

While he was watching, all at once the water of the creek went smooth as glass. The sunlight didn’t dance on the water now, it reflected like a mirror, near blinding him. But he could still see a solitary Red man walking on the water, just like Jesus in the story, standing on the water in the middle of the creek.

It wasn’t just a whimper behind him anymore. It was a shout, from more and more men. Stop shooting! Stop it! Put down your guns! And then others, talking about the man standing on the water.

A bugle sounded. The men fell silent. “Time to finish them, men!” shouted Harrison. He was on a prancing stallion at the head of the meadow, leading the way down the blood-slick hill. None of the farmer folk were with him, but his uniformed soldiers formed a line and came along, bayonets fixed. Where once ten thousand Reds had stood, there was just a field of bodies, and maybe a thousand, a
ragged remnant, gathered near the water at the bottom of the hill.

That was the moment when a tall young White man ran from the wood at the bottom of the hill, dressed in a suit too small, his feet bare, his coat and waistcoat all unbuttoned, his hair wet and tousled, and face grimy and wet. But Miller knew him, knew him before he heard his voice.

“Measure!” he cried. “It’s my boy Measure!”

He threw down his musket and ran out into the field of corpses, down the hill toward his son.

“My boy Measure! He’s alive! You’re alive!”

Then he slipped in the blood, or maybe he tripped on a body, but whatever happened he fell, his hands splashing into a river of blood, spattering his chest and face.

He heard Measure’s voice, not ten yards away, shouting out so every man could hear him. “The Reds who captured me were hired by Harrison. Ta-Kumsaw and Tenskwa-Tawa saved me. When I came home two days ago, Harrison’s soldiers captured me and wouldn’t let me tell you the truth. He even tried to kill me.” Measure spoke slow and clear, so every word carried, every sound was understood. “He knew all the time. This whole thing, Harrison planned it all along. The Reds are innocent. You’re killing innocent people.”

Miller stood up from the bloody field and raised his hands high over his head, thick blood running from his scarlet hands. A cry was wrung from his throat, forced out by anguish, by despair. “What have I done! What have I done!” The cry was echoed by a dozen, a hundred, three hundred voices.

And there was General Harrison on his prancing horse, out in front of everybody. Even his own soldiers had thrown down their guns by now.

“It’s a lie!” cried Harrison. “I never saw this boy! Someone has played a terrible trick on me!”

“It ain’t no trick!” shouted Measure. “Here’s his kerchief—they stuffed it in my mouth yesterday, to gag me while they broke my bones!”

Miller could see the kerchief clearly in his son’s hand. It had the WHH embroidered in large, clear letters in the
corner. Every man in that army had seen his handkerchiefs.

And now some of Harrison’s own soldiers spoke up. “It’s true! We brought this boy to Harrison two days ago.”

“We didn’t know he was one of the boys they all said the Reds had killed!”

A high, howling cry floated over the meadow. They all looked down to where the one-eyed Prophet stood on the solid, scarlet water of the Tippy-Canoe.

“Come to me, my people!” he said.

The surviving Reds walked, slowly, steadily toward the water. They walked across it, then gathered on the other side.

“All my people, come!”

The corpses rustled, moved. The White men standing among them cried out in terror. But the dead were not rising up to walk—only the wounded who still breathed, they were the ones who rose up, staggered. Some of them tried to carry children, babies—they had no strength for it.

Miller saw and felt the blood on his own hands. He had to do something, didn’t he? So he reached out to a struggling woman, whose husband leaned against her for support, meaning to take the baby from her arms and carry it for her. But when he came near, she looked into his face, and he saw his own reflection in her eyes—his face haggard, White, spattered with blood, his hands dripping with blood. Tiny as it was, he saw that reflection as clear as if it had been on a mirror held in front of his own face. He couldn’t touch her baby, not with hands like his.

Some of the other White men on the hill also tried to help, but they must have seen something like what Miller saw, and they recoiled as if they had been burned.

Maybe a thousand wounded got up and tried to reach the creek. Many of them collapsed and died before they got there. Those that reached the water walked, staggered, crawled across; they were helped by the Reds on the other side.

Miller noticed something peculiar. All those wounded Reds, all the uninjured ones, they had walked on this
meadow, they had walked across the blood-red river, and yet there wasn’t a spot of blood on their hands or feet.

“All my people, all who died—Come home, says the land!”

All around them, the meadow was strewn with bodies—by far the majority of those who had stood there as living families only an hour before. Now, at the Prophet’s words, these bodies seemed to shudder, to crumble; they collapsed and sank into the grass of the meadow. It took perhaps a minute, and they were gone, the grass springing up lush and green. The last of the blood skittered down the slope like beads of water on a hot griddle and became part of the bright red creek.

“Come to me, my friend Measure.” The Prophet spoke quietly, and held out his hand.

Measure turned his back on his father and walked down the grassy slope to the water’s edge.

“Walk to me,” said the Prophet.

“I can’t walk on the blood of your people,” he said.

“They gave their blood to lift you up,” said the Prophet. “Come to me, or take the curse that will fall on every White man in that meadow.”

“I reckon I’ll stay here, then,” said Measure. “If I’d’ve been in their place, I don’t figure I’d’ve done a thing different than what they did. If they’re guilty, so am I.”

The Prophet nodded.

Every White man there felt something warm and wet and sticky on his hands. Some of them cried out when they saw. From elbow to hands, they dripped with blood. Some tried to wipe it off on their shirts. Some searched for wounds that might be bleeding, but there were no wounds. Just bloody hands.

“Do you want your hands to be clean of the blood of my people?” asked the Prophet. He wasn’t shouting anymore, but they all heard him, every word. And yes, yes, they wanted their hands to be clean.

“Then go home and tell this story to your wives and children, to your neighbors, to your friends. Tell the whole story. Leave nothing out. Don’t say that someone
fooled you—you all knew when you fired on people who had no weapons that what you did was murder. No matter whether you thought some of us might have committed some crime. When you shot at babies in their mothers’ arms, little children, old men and women, you were murdering us because we were Red. So tell the story as it happened, and if you tell it true, your hands will be clean.”