American Spirits: "The Sugar Creek Anthologies of Jesse Freedom Series"

By Judith Fowler Robbins

In the days before the great migration to the nursing homes, the memories of seasoned pioneer descendants, who lived their progeny on the land that their ancestors had chosen, were still keen. It was a good time to glean the minds of these ancient people. Old men rocked in chairs on porches and tiny, bent great-grandmothers in long dresses and head scarves stole quietly around darkened, musty interiors. Their years of childbearing and working the family farms were accomplished. Yet, their minds were fertile when prodded to remember the old times, their parents and grandparents, and what the road out front was like before it was paved. These armchair historians would start by saying they didn't remember much, but what they did remember was often the odd things people did - all gold to the writer's ear. Their recollections brought to life the vital records at the courthouse and the names on tombstones in the old-time cemeteries. Their stories were the shreds, which, in time, began to weave themselves together into a common story that will go on forever because, just in time, they were written down.

In our story, the Faire pull a thread through time to connect the generations one to another and to show how fate forges life's burdens and joys. Who's to say that in an unseen dimension fairies are not our fatemeisters?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 23, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469795539

Judith Fowler Robbins

Judith Fowler Robbins lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with her husband, Michael. She is the mother of two daughters, Juliana and Jennifer. She is a graduate of Indiana State University and worked in the School of Journalism at Franklin College for 18 years.

Book preview

All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Judith Fowler Robbins

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission

in writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press

an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse, Inc.

5220 S. 16th St., Suite 200

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

Any resemblance to actual people and events is purely coincidental.

This is a work of fiction.

ISBN: 978-1-4697-9553-9 (ebook)

Dedicated

to Hardtack

and all the gurus

Contents

EPIGRAPH

INTRODUCTION

THE CAST

PREFACE

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

PART ONE

FATHER O’SHEA

CHAPTER 1

THE LEGEND OF GRANDFATHER

WATCHER

CHAPTER 2

"O’Sheas of Ireland

CHAPTER 3

THE SEA CHEST

CHAPTER 4

THE ANCIENT TRAIL

CHAPTER 5

KEREN-HAPPUCK

CHAPTER 6

THE FIDDLE O’SHEA

Part Two

MASTER RILEY

CHAPTER 7

AMERICAN SPIRITS

CHAPTER 8

THE ENCOUNTER

CHAPTER 9

MASTER RILEY

CHAPTER 10

A KENTUCKY CHRISTMAS

CHAPTER 11

FIRESIDE DREAMS

CHAPTER 12

THE HUNTER’S MOON

CHAPTER 13

THE NIX

CHAPTER 14

RILEY’S MILL

Part 3

GRANDMOTHER SPARROW

CHAPTER 15

SPRING STORMS

CHAPTER 1 6

FAIRY TALK

CHAPTER 17

THE FLOOD

CHAPTER 18

THE HOMECOMING

CHAPTER 19

OF PEACOCKS AND FIELDMICE

CHAPTER 20

THE GIFT

CHAPTER 21

POTIONS

CHAPTER 22

A TALK WITH SPARROW

Part Four

GRANDFATHER SHUCK

CHAPTER 23

FAIRY TALES

CHAPTER 24

THE SPANISH MISSION

CHAPTER 25

WILDFLOWER WEDDING

CHAPTER 26

THE WEDDING PARTY

CHAPTER 27

GRANDFATHER SHUCK

CHAPTER 28

IN THE WINK OF AN EYE

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

EPIGRAPH

There is a point in the wilderness where the caretakers live,

where facts and fancies cocoon,

where storms give way to fair winds.

—Jesse Freedom

INTRODUCTION

Once upon a time, three friends were parting and promised to write fairy tales to each other. One returned to the country of his youth and wrote a novel instead. One went to the Orient and wrote about Chinese dragons. Only Judy Robbins, in her persona as Jesse Freedom, wrote a fairy tale—and what fairies and what a tale!

Surely no one else could have linked Native American legends, tales of the American frontier, and a trio of immigrant European house sprites in such a rich weaving. The Sugar Creek Anthologies remind us of the immemorial need for myth, and its presence even in the unlikely country of the American Midwest. (Dorothy did, after all, start out in Kansas.) As another child of Sugar Creek, I read it with a pang, for a place that never was, and should have been, and now is, in the warm imagination of a writer. Jesse Freedom has done what artists do, which is to create a world we believe in while we are in it, whatever its improbabilities by ordinary daylight. This is a book that mothers could read to children, who will welcome it in the spirit of Lewis Carroll:

Child of the pure, unclouded brow

And dreaming eyes of wonder!

Though time be fleet and I and thou

Are half a life asunder,

Thy loving smile will surely hail

The love-gift of a fairy tale.

Bill Bridges, Director

Pulliam School of Journalism

Franklin College

Image526.JPG

The illustrations in this book are composed by the author using

CorelDraw and Corel Photopaint.

THE CAST

CHARACTERS

FAIRIES

PREFACE

Set in Nineteenth-Century America, this book was inspired from a collection of journal entries I wrote and came to call my Sugar Creek anthologies. It is a genealogical treatise wrapped with fantasy. It is for the storytellers who find rhythm in the hearth and heart of everyday life.

There is a place in a remote woodland in the very heart of America where, long ago, a generation of mysterious old souls came to live. They came from different cultures but all for the same reason—to find fortune in the new Indiana frontier that had opened up following the Indian removal. Along with the Native Americans, they are gone now and, from a distance, the ground on which they worked, built the old mill, and lived looks rather unremarkable—just a timber lined creek beyond the tired fields that are still being farmed. But, mind you, once you step foot onto the soil along Sugar Creek, chances are, you will feel the mystery that permeates the air that their spirits haunt to this day. I know this firsthand because I was born there, and upon that day, which I can vividly remember, my soul was old.

I am gone from there now, too, but not forever. I still call the Smiley’s Mill community on Sugar Creek in Johnson County, Indiana, home. As a child I spent my days walking the seed rows of our family farm (where I sometimes found arrowheads) and exploring the woods through which Sugar Creek runs. I remember wishing I could have lived in the past to see the Indian who shot the arrow or the pioneer who, behind a horse and plow, walked every inch of the field he was working. When I followed those fence rows, I tried to imagine the life of the Native Americans. I wanted to see the land before all the trees were cut down to make the settlers’ farms. Even then, without knowing, I was being pulled back into life of a previous time. Always the dreamer, I grew up and moved away from the farm to a land where the grass is asphalt, the quiet is gone, and the tree is severed from the root.

There is a rather controversial theory that if people can be born with the physical traits of their forebears, then why not their memories. There are those with the memory trait who walk among us who have old souls. I believe I can testify firsthand to that theory through the real events of my own life. I was a full forty-two the first time a true, real-life old soul came into my life. That encounter, I am convinced, unleashed the specter of my own memory trait and plunged me into the wonderful yet terrible grip of reckoning. The account of that meeting has no place in this story and so will not be told other than to say that it caused me seek the sanctuary of home for healing. I sought reclusion in the depths of our piece of vanishing America—the rare woods with a creek running through it, where once upon a time, fields of wildflowers blossomed after the winter. In its heart there lay an old log dwelling.

That old cabin back in the woods on the old home place, built in the 1830s, was to be my home for two years. I lived quietly and wrote about the seasons of my life and some things that I learned from the woods. My friend Hardtack visited me there and encouraged me to keep a journal, which I did; but I doubt whether he meant for it to evolve into a fairy tale such as this. He has written a few poetic lines about the magic along Sugar Creek, himself.

* * *

Upon my return to the woods, occasionally, I ventured out to talk to a neighbor. In those days, before the great migration to the nursing homes, there were still a lot of seasoned relatives living with their progeny on the land that their ancestors had chosen—it was a good time to glean the memories of these ancient people. Old men rocked in chairs on porches and tiny, bent great-grandmothers in long dresses and head scarves stole quietly around darkened, musty interiors. Their years of childbearing and working the family farms were accomplished. Yet, their minds were fertile when prodded to remember the old times, their parents and grandparents, and what the road out front was like before it was paved.

These armchair historians would start by saying they didn’t remember much. And maybe they didn’t, but what they did remember was often the odd things people did, the peculiar habits of their relatives and neighbors—all gold to the writer’s ear. Their recollections brought to life the vital records in town at the courthouse and the names on tombstones in the old-time cemeteries. I included the conversations with my neighbors in my journal. These writings were the shreds, which, in time, began to weave themselves together into a common story that will go on forever because, just in time, I have written it down.

Rather than a diary, the writings turned out to be an anthology of dwarfish five-minute themes documenting some happening in the woods, a thought that I wanted to develop, or visits with the oldest of the neighbors whose early memories I wanted to plumb. I found that I wanted to know more and more about this land on which I lived and who had walked and worked it before me. Several octogenarian descendants of the first local settlers gave me genealogy records of their ancestors and told me stories that had been handed down in their families. Many of the people about whom they talked were buried in the nearby pioneer graveyards where I recorded the tracks on their tombstones.

A story was forming on the pages before me in the anthologies of these old pioneer souls who settled on Sugar Creek. The names in family Bibles became characters in chapters. I began to sketch out family trees rather carefully so that their simultaneous journeys coincided with pioneer progress. The names used are often recorded in county land transfer records, obituaries, census forms, maps and legends and, to that extent, represent real people. Some roles are of people whom I imagine were conceived from all those who have walked beside me so far. The story is of journeys taken to claim the Indiana frontier. Largely based on scraps taken from the journal, the story is embellished with fairy folk to create a colorful tapestry about how the community where I grew up came to be.

The Faire pull a thread through time to connect the generations one to another and to show how fate forges life’s burdens and joys. Who’s to say that in an unseen dimension fairies are not our fatemeisters?

Special thanks to all

those who breathed life

into this story.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

William A. Bridges

J. D. Fowler

Mrs. J. D. Fowler

Mrs. Rachel Henry

Mr. Harvey Jacobs

Mrs. Grace Johnson

Mrs.Martha McClain

Mrs. Thelma McClain

Mrs. Ruth Thompson

Mrs. Judith Vaught

PART ONE

FATHER O’SHEA

Image576.JPG

CHAPTER 1

THE LEGEND OF GRANDFATHER

WATCHER

ONCE UPON A TIME, deep in the woodland of North America, an ancient white sycamore tree stood atop a high bank in a bend of a beautiful stream. The Lenni-Lenape¹ (Delaware Tribe known as the Grandfather Indians) living there called the creek Then-a-me-say²which meant Sugar Creek. The towering Sycamore spread a ceiling of branches above the forest floor that gathered everything below it, like great wings, into its keep. It was conspicuous amid the hickory and sugar maple trees growing there, because it was by far the tallest tree in the wood. The tree trunk was narrow at the top and massive at its base like a tepee. Its thick roots crawled across the woods floor fingering the eroded bank into the creek. Licked clean by the water, they formed a cage where water creatures swam through its bars. A steeple shaped slit on the moss covered north side of the tree provided a glimpse into its hollow. This is the story of that magnificent tree.

FINDING THE WAY ON A WESTWARD WIND

To BEGIN WITH, EVEN BY THE EARLY 1700S, the Lenape Nation was riding a westward wind on its long journey across the trail of death. River people, the Tribe could no longer live peacefully in their Delaware River Valley. Colonial settlers had disrupted the natural order of their walk with Creator³ The Tribe was heavily troubled as they began their journey toward the setting sun. During this journey their chieftain, Watcher, walked closely with Creator to find the way through the wilderness. Watcher’s moccasins were guided into the valleys of the Ohio River, the immemorial land of the great Miami Prairie Nation—their brothers of the Algonquian Language. The Lenape people rejoiced when the Miamis granted them land on the tributaries between the Muskingum and the Waupe Kom-i⁴Rivers.

Watcher and the clan council traveled two days in advance. The Nation of hundreds, with wondering eyes, followed carrying their summer tepees and everything they had into the fresh frontier country. Game was everywhere and fish jumped freely in the streams. Watcher was heartened as he led the way. Creator is good, he told the braves. One morning they climbed a knoll and saw before them Then-a-mesay, a tributary of Waupe Kom-i. The men’s eyes brightened as they looked upon its splendor. In this place, Watcher said, we will build the Big House for the generations. What say you? It was agreed. A runner, Dewali, Watcher’s younger brother and member of the council, fled back to the people with the news while plans for a village began that very day. Once the principal village was built on the Waupe Kom-i, bands would spread out to hunt and fish in camps along the crystal clear streams. Meanwhile, the three sisters, corn, squash and beans, would be planted as crops on the land, which the women would claim, following Lenape tradition.

The tribe lived in their tepees while the principal village was being built. With thanksgiving to Creator, the Big House and a sacred kiva were built for the community before anything else. Watcher chose a tree around which to build the Big House and carved a ritual mask of Creator upon it, whose face he painted half black and half red. The first permanent house was for the clan mother, Hope, and her mate Chief Watcher. A framework of cut saplings was buried in the earth, their tops bent over and tied in the center. They stripped sheets of bark from the trees to cover the frame to keep them dry from the rains and warm in the season of winter. Other dwellings were built in the same fashion. Soon, the clearing in the frontier became a beautiful woodland village. Thus their life began in the western frontier.

Hunting season came. Bands of hunters left the village to follow the animal paths and old hunting trails of previous generations of the original natives. Chief Watcher’s family traveled downstream on Then-ame-say. They came upon a place where wild flowers covered the floor in the woods where a great Sycamore tree grew. They struck their first hunting camp there and built a smaller kiva in which to ask upon Creator for success before each hunt. In February, when the sap began to rise, the village camped in the sugarbush to boil sugar then returned to the wild flower camp to prepare for the trip back to the principal village. It was to be the final home Watcher and Hope would ever know for they never returned to the Big House. The reason why they stayed at the Sycamore is steeped in legend but may always remain a mystery.

So began the tale of the Sycamore. Time passed, along with a century of the Lenape as they moved ever westward to the eastern banks of the Mississippi.

¹Delaware, ²Sugar Creek; ³Kishelamakank, in Lenape; ⁴White River

WHEN THE LAST OF THE WILD FLOWERS BLOOM

BY 1800, IT WAS THE CUSTOM FOR THE LENAPE descendants to journey to the Great Sycamore on Then-a-me-say for an Annual Council. They congregated there for a few days at the Fall solstice, when the last of the wild flowers bloom. It was a time of jubilation as sister met sister and brother met brother to retell stories of Watcher and his people in a time gone by. It was a festival of hunting and games and renewal as the scattered relations gathered to reclaim and relate their long history, to celebrate in feast and sport their heritage as Lenape. It was in this place upon the Trail of Death that their fathers and grandfathers found homes among the prairie Indians.

At the festival, the men worshiped, as Watcher and the fleeing Lenape had, in the large old tribal kiva. The sacred place faced the eastern hills, whence the morning sun was born. Their ceremonies commenced as the first rays of sun reached the fire in the burning hearthstone below. They were happy there in an unhappy time when they were all being pushed farther and farther into the interior of America.

Some evenings the few, first early white settlers could hear in the distance the pad of stomping feet, together with the pulse of the turtle rattle and the wistful, haunting melodies of songs the women sang in accompaniment. They stole quietly through the woods to watch the Indians and saw that they were striking with long black hair, swarthy to nearly black skin, high, prominent cheekbones and painted faces, sometimes with tattoos. They noticed the Indians were handsome, washed and very neat in appearance—taller than white men. The Lenape visits were the subject of conversations held around the candle-lit tables of the locals, but they never interfered with the rites of the Lenape. As quietly as the festival parties came, they would leave in the dead of night.

Now, the old village mound was the landmark toward which the last of the Lenape traveled. If winter was early, they came wearing fur robes and leggings. Women sometimes wore shawls of feathers. And always, there was the black hair worn long by both men and women. It was looked upon as a thing sacred and unique to each person, a kind of signature placed by Creator upon each person at birth. The only exception were the boys and young men who shaved their heads with a sharp flint, leaving a crest of long hair in the center, which was greased to make it stand erect, or a long length of hair on a shaved head called a scalp lock was worn and decorated with shells.

They did not wear beards. From the time of their ancestors, they regularly pulled the hairs out using mussel shells as tweezers. The hair grew back thinner each time it was pulled. By 1800, most of the men had only scant, wispy beards, which they pulled out when they wished to paint their faces for war or ceremony. Both men and women painted their faces using various colors. The men often painted their bodies, as well. Women used red to make spots on their cheeks and to paint their ears and around their eyes. Both men and women wore tattoos made by pricking a design into the skin, they setting it with burnt, powdered poplar tree bark.

The time was magic for their children, who spent their festival days away from the old village, down at the ancient sycamore, which they called the Tree of the Tepee. They loved to spend the day in its spacious chamber while their fathers hunted for the nightly feast. Inside the tree, which was lighted by fox fire and fireflies, the children often sat on ermine skins and listened to the tales of an ethereal, old white owl whose name, they learned, was Watcher. At day’s end as they lay near the campfire, their fathers asked, What adventures did you find in the big tree today? (for they, too, as young ones had visited the owl, Watcher, there.)

But, you see, the Little