Let Them Play!

From Scottdale, PA in my childhood. My grandmother, Olive Trader Rutherford, tells me stories from her mother, Mary Ellen White Trader, who was a Mingo Indian. I just wrote this, in a torrent. The voice of the long-gone great-grandmother is in boldface type.

LET THEM PLAY!

by Brett Rutherford

“Mother, would you call the girls in? It will be dinner soon,”
Aunt Margie shouts from back in the kitchen.
I sit with my grandmother on the cool porch glider.
Across the street and on up the park's hill, her daughters climb
the steep sliding board and breeze down its shiny, polished curves.
Up again, downsliding, exulting the brief up-skirt blush,
legs not tiring, up again, down again, dolls put aside
in favor of the giddy height, the pull of gravity.
On a higher-up hillside, boys scale a tree, ride swing-sets
out and up almost to escape velocity. Ray guns
have replaced cap pistols, star-dreams of rockets in their heads.

My grandmother just smiles. “Oh, let them play!” she says to me.
“Another story I know, that I can tell you, aside
from the back-and-forth of the secret names of animals
(she never finished that one!) is why I say Let them play.
My mother told me true, one day in the clearing, The day
will come when you have two, three, or half a dozen children,
and you will treat each one as a new-found jewel, a pearl,
a lump of gold. Then you will want to keep each one at home,
in sight, never to leave your guarding. I say, Let them play!

Let them run in the woods. Let them chase and be chased.
Let them bite and be bitten. Let them climb up tree and rock,
wash their own little wounds in a clear, calm stream. Do not call
them until the last possible moment, till bread-crust cools
and the meat is singed black on the open fire. Let them play!

“Why, mother,” I asked, ‘should I let them run so late,
until it is so dark I can hardly see them coming? ”

It happened, she said, not here, but three villages
down creek and around the sharp-peaked mountain.
It was the time of harvest dance, a thank-you stomp to sun
and sky, just when all the trees had gone crisp and color-up,
a night when all the men would drum and dance on till midnight,
and songs would go on until it was too cold to sing
another, and the fires grew ashy and dim. With sweet fruit
and sassafras tea and honey the children and their dolls
were sent to bed, tucked in and hugged, warned that the Wendigo
must not be permitted to see them. No child was to peek.
No child was allowed to stand in pretend-dancing that night.

In their long-house beds, the children fidgeted, their blankets off,
their blankets on as they heard the drum beats, the water-drums,
the shrill flutes, the deep-voice song of the men. One, whose name was
Not-For-You-To-Know, blew into a gourd and made sounds.
The women's chant answered, high and low. They all watched,
as those shimmering stars — the Seven – what do you call them?”

“The Pleiades, grandmother?”

“Yes, the Pleiades!”

“My mother called them something else, but she showed me
their glittering up-rise from the edge of the world. She told me:

As the lonely, the desolate, the shimmering sisters crept
from the edge of the earth into the peak of the sky.
They could not harm the dancers – too far and too weak
in their sad darkness — but the children! "Ah!” she puts her hand
to her bosom and gasps, and pauses — “Mother!”
comes the call from Aunt Margie again. “Please call them in!”
Grandmother leans close to me and continues,
channeling again her own mother’s speaking:

But the children were not tired. Far from it. The song-dance twitched
in all their fingers and toes; their knees and elbows jabbed out
at one another in their beds. The straw ejected them.
They sat up They crawled unseen into the dark-on-darkness. 
In the shadow of the longhouse, no one could see them go.
And they began to dance! They danced! Up, knees! Down, feet!
The lonely spinster Pleiades, childless, saw them dancing.
They were light as feather-down, the children. They joined their hands
All their feet went up at once. A little breeze lifted them.
The Pleiades with bird-claw fingers, lonely among stars,
ah! how they wanted to have their own sons and daughters! —

“Mother! Do I have to go get them myself?
I know you’re out there. I heard the glider squeak.
I hear the two of you talking!” Aunt Margie calls, close by
from the living room, the smell of apple pie-cinnamon 
wafting out to us.

“Not quite yet, daughter,” my grandmother calls back assuringly.
“They’re right where I can see them!” I look at her expectantly. 
“And then? And then?” (Not another unfinished and interrupted tale!)

And then! she answers me. While all the elders are thanking
the sun and the moon and all the good winds, thanking the Crow
for not taking more than his share, and the Bear for forbearing 
to tear up the bark and logs of the longhouse —
a whole long, ancient list of Thanksgivings you can be sure,

The children are all trying to echo them, and just at
Crow-Thanks and Bear-Thanks, just when they hear
the elders address the Snow, that he should
not come too soon this winter nor stay on too long —
by then the Pleiades have got the children, the big ones
first, full of ten years, the not-so-big ones so full of corn
and six or seven years, even the sachem’s dear son!,
even the tiny ones whose dance was no more than a stumble 
foot-stamp. All of them up! All of them higher than cornstalks, 
higher than trees at the edge of the clearing. Fog-fingered 
and jewel-eyed childless sisters of the cold space of night —
they took them screaming into the ink-black sky. Children, gone!

That is why their village was abandoned, empty. We passed
it with sadness and shuddering along the way. We wept:
their name was soon gone at the Council Fire.

I look at her in disbelief. “I have said.” she finishes.

“Mother!” Aunt Margie shouts, her face appearing close-up
behind the porch screen-door. 

“Let them play, I say!” grandmother repeats. “Let them play
until they are so tired they drop to sleep! It is that time
of year. It is November and the night sky is lonely.”

“Those stories again!” Aunt Margie complains. Her hands go up
as though to block her ears. “Why tell your grandson those stories?”

Grandmother stands. Her tiny profile and her jet black hair
defy her tall daughter. “I have said, or memory dies.”
Soon the exhausted daughters are called inside to dinner.

[Revised at Lake Atsion NJ, April 2019)

SUBJECTS: Mingo Indians, Native American stories, Olive Rutherford, Pennsylvania, Pleiades, Seven Sisters, Scottdale.