At the Edge of the Bathing Party

At the Edge of the Bathing Party

       By Douglas Plenty Toys

Pocahontas played by herself while her mother and father cleaned blueberries. She sang a small song under her breath as she lined up pebbles and twigs to make a square in which more squares represented a group of people. They were bathers in a creek and included those in her immediate family as well as others from the camp. There were mother, father, aunty Mohawk, aunty Ojib, uncle Leslie, Paul, the Undertaker, Whisper, Whispering Pines (these last two both her cousins by her aunty Who Goes There), Philipina the Brave, Gathering Dust (a beautiful woman who had recently come to the camp by way of capture), Rocking Horse Winner (a famous warrior and rider who could make it to the Great Mountains in two weeks with just one change of horses), Kinikinik the Strong One (a small man but renowned for his large loin cloth), Missy Running Reindeer (who preferred the company of forest animals to any humans, though that did not keep her from attending ritual bathings and large get-togethers for she loved a good meal and especially the personal consumption of much intoxicant), Pay Back Time, a weakling brother of Pocahontas’s who spent much of the time on sleeping mats next to his mother’s and whom the mother comforted by crawling under the blankets with him whenever he sniveled at length and demanded more attention, Grandfather Lewis who had spent many winters alone in the far northern woods defending against the Dené and the south keeping the Sioux out of their territories, Grandmother Wisconsin, a once very attractive woman who had by dint of the years grown old and less so, and five girls and five boys of Pocahontas’s age all arranged in the willows at the edge of the bathing party.

       A ruckus outside made her look up from her play. Horse hooves thundered, voices screamed, children calling for their mothers thumped on the ground, an arrow came through the tent. A roving band of Sioux had ridden through the camp and destroyed half of it. Everyone left in the village hid, waiting to see if any of the marauders would return and then began to load onto their travois all their remaining belongings. After burying their dead they headed northward under the direction of Old Ned the Horse-lover toward the inhospitable country of the Red Sucker Clan. There they would meet with hostility but not slaughter. This Pocahontas knew as surely as did her mother and father, all of whom had survived the attack.  The Red Suckers were not an armed band in the same way that the Sioux were. They did own each man and woman either an ax or a blade or a spear but these were more intended for use in the field against animal or surprise       attack. The Red Suckers would get accustomed to them in their neighborhood.

       Next fall, some six months later, Pocahontas married Moose Head, the Sioux Control, and the resulting alliance kept death and carnage at bay for the next twelve summers. All those intervening years, however, Pocahontas remembered the moments when she played at the hearth as a girl with her friends and relatives bathing in the Lacroix River. The very stations of the figures seemed burned into her memory at the instant of the sudden turmoil. Though she placidly paid homage to foreign gods, learned to sing worshipful songs about strange kingdoms, kept house for Moose Head and his brother, The Lame One, fed and watered the horses of the chief when he wished her to, and generally carried out all the chores necessitated by her new family arrangement, she despised all of them, or should I say, she limped mindlessly through these duties without much thinking about herself.

       She had a plan, though, and arranged a mysterious set of figures in a dirt corner of their abode, a corner where she alone held sway. It was a small nook, not much of a space, but with the persistent effort of giving and withholding she eventually made that little piece of ground her own to do with as she chose. A bathing scene again, it had in it members of Moose Head’s family, mother, father, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts and their closest friends. These always seemed, to her husband, to be floating in motionless permanence, in a creek or watery hole of some sort. He thought little of it, knowing how lucky he was to have a competent woman taking care of domestic arrangements.

       One day, Pocahontas’s people, now renewed in purpose and led by a great warrior of unusual strength and will, snuck up to Moose Head’s camp and in the dead of night attacked it with grave ferocity. Not a man, woman or child was left alive or uncaptured. Pocahontas received the blessing of Man of Many Arms, their leader, to do with Moose Head and his clan as she wished. She had them all led down to the creek nearby and drowned. Then she floated them together, each unliving body, with rocks for anchors and with dry reeds as floatation, in a lively circle where they lay in still imitation of the play objects she till then had necessarily had to be content with. She reckoned that, her need for play now satisfied, never again would she spend her idle hours lining up sticks and stones to represent people important to her memory of things past.