No Resting Place (20 page)

To many Captain Donovan was an unfeeling man who viewed his job as that of a cattle driver determined to deliver to market the greatest number of head he could. He was determined to do just that, but he was not unfeeling. Noquisi, with a hand on the man's heart, had a knowledge of its beats, and its skipping of beats.

Riding thus post-saddle, Noquisi heard the Captain always answer the question, one asked more and more frequently as time went by, “Where are we, please, Captain, sir?” with a gruff, “We're here. On the right road. Follow me and we'll get to where we're going.” Sometimes the boy did not bother relaying the question when it was spoken in Cherokee but responded to it on his own with the Captain's stock reply.

“They wouldn't know if you told them,” the Captain muttered, which was true. But, employing his growing Cherokee gift of being able to read a person's thoughts, Noquisi knew that the man feared the opposite of what he said: he wanted no knowledge of where they were—which was to say where they were not—to spread among them. They were making such slow and difficult progress, Captain Donovan feared that should they learn how far behind schedule they were—or have their suspicions and fears of it officially confirmed—should they realize how far they had yet to go, they would be swept by despair, would give up en masse, would sit down daunted and dispirited beyond coaxing or goading, and refuse to move on. His field map, which he was often seen to spread and study, he consulted as guardedly as he might the weak hand with which he was bluffing at poker, and always poker-faced. Even his troops, all of them strangers here, were kept in uncertainty as to their whereabouts lest they be demoralized by the knowledge.

One day a man fell out and sat himself down beside the road. This was something that happened all the time. A person rested for a while, then caught up again. But this man sat on as the marchers passed him by, until the column had left him behind. They slowed and slowed and at last came to a halt from that sense that they were linked together and that when one of them faltered, all faltered. A soldier spotted the laggard and reported him to Captain Donovan, who picked up Noquisi on his way, set him behind him on his horse and galloped back to the scene.

“He says he cannot go any farther, sir,” the boy translated. “He says this is a good day to die.”

“Tell him a place will be found in one of the wagons for him to rest up over the next few days.”

“Sir, he says it is not his body that is worn out. It is his spirit.”

“One case of that,” said the Captain, looking ahead at the arrested line of his charges, “and it will spread quicker than measles.” Surrender was unthinkable to the soldier that he was through and through, desertion under fire punishable by disgrace from the ranks and summary execution.

“Ask him who he is to give up while old women and little children push on? Is he a Cherokee or isn't he? Ask him that.”

“His answer, sir, is, yes, he is a Cherokee. That is his trouble.”

“We're in this all together. One for all and all for one. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Tell him that.”

“He says tell you that you are a good and brave man and he wishes you a long and happy life, but as for him, he will die here.”

“That he will, and damned quick, too, if he doesn't get to his feet and start moving,” said the Captain, drawing his pistol. “I will make him an example to all by shooting him dead on the spot and leaving his carcass for the wolves.”

Another day Noquisi was picked up by Captain Donovan and ridden to the dispensary wagon to help the doctor deal with a refractory patient. This was a man with a carbuncle at the base of his neck, grown huge from neglect owing to his fear of the doctor, now grown fearful enough to overcome that fear, but not enough to induce him to submit to what he gathered from the sight of the surgical instruments to be the treatment for it. As much as anything, he was resisting the first step in the procedure, the cutting off of his braids. Having it explained to him in his own language sobered him into submission. The whiskey he was given had the same effect through the opposite means.

To the doctor's amazement, the boy began by asking to be shown what the medical problem was, as though he—all four and three-quarters feet of him—were a colleague called in for consultation on the case. Now he said, “I have told him, sir, exactly what you are going to do, and why, and have warned him that with that thing so near his brain, he runs the risk of death if it is not done.”

“But I haven't told you any of that, boy,” said the doctor.

“My father is a doctor,” he said. “Your patient is ready. You may proceed.”

It was an operation that he had watched his father perform. Thus when Dr. Warren finished with his scalpel and turned to reach for his curette, it was ready and waiting. As he probed, extirpating the roots of the growth, the boy, taking turns at it with him, sponged the area. When the final cleaning swabs were needed, there they were. When the time came for it, there was the bottle of permanganate. And when the cavity was ready to be packed and dressed, there were the bandages, one folded into a pad and the other unrolled to bind it.

Equally as impressive as the boy's competence was his composure. In his lack of any squeamishness when the incision was made, his indifference to the sight of the blood and the pus, his acceptance of the patient's unavoidable pain, he was a seasoned professional. He was engrossed in the work at hand, and he was offended at being patronized by the doctor's compliments afterwards upon his part in it. Having seen it done by a graduate of King's College, he had been about to offer
him
, whose training consisted of the standard two years apprenticeship with a country-town practitioner,
his
compliments. As for himself, he had assisted in surgery far more complicated than this.

Thereafter the boy had another job in addition to that of interpreter, and another name to go with it: “Doc.”

Serving as Dr. Warren's assistant when needed not only relieved the monotony of the march for the boy, it was a recovery of the self that had been taken from him. He was doing again what he had done with his father. He regained a sense of purpose and usefulness. He enjoyed making himself helpful to people in pain, and the satisfaction of their praise and thanks. He welcomed the responsibility. He familiarized himself so thoroughly with the inventory of the dispensary that he was able to fetch whatever the doctor required.

They had been on the road for just under a month and were somewhere in Tennessee when something happened one day up at the head of the line to stall the march. The question—what was it?—was relayed. The answer was a long time in getting back to those as far in the rear as the Fergusons. At the side of the road had been found the graves of a family of Cherokees, father, mother and daughter, casualties of an earlier emigration. It was what all had been dreading and none dared speak of.

When his turn came to pass the spot, Noquisi saw that the family's name, burned, along with their familiar names and that of their clan in Sequoyah's alphabet, into the wooden crosses marking their graves, was Grant. He dared not speculate on what it might have been that had wiped out a family at a stroke. Grant: he could recall knowing no one of that name, yet it was one that seemed to have a significance for him.

Three days later, and just twenty miles farther along the way from the site of the first ones, two more Cherokee graves were found at the side of the road. The victims here had been unrelated.

Then a week later came Beesville, where the message relayed rearward from the head of the march coursed through the column like a shudder down a person's spine.

Beesville? Yes, said the owner of the Cherokee Trail Motor Lodge and Trading Post, whose overnight guest I, Amos Smith IV, had been, he knew the place. It was about a hundred miles up the road. Why?

I was his only guest, and, being otherwise unoccupied, after frying my bacon and eggs and dishing them up, he had seated himself, uninvited, at my table. Looking at the showcases around the walls while waiting for my breakfast, I had been reflecting upon the revolution in Indian trade goods. Nowadays it was they who sold trinkets to the whites: Navaho earrings, Cherokee beaded belts, Cheyenne feathered warbonnets, tom-toms of no known tribal design.

There was something in Beesville I wanted to see. Was there a decent place to put up there?

“Tex,” said my host (he had seen my auto license plate), “there ain't
nothing
to see in Beesville. Blink as you pass through and you'll miss it. No, sir, there ain't no decent place to put up at, nor even an indecent one—reason being there's no reason why anybody in his right mind would want to stay overnight there. This here is a one-horse town, but at least it's got both ends of the horse.”

But there was something to see in Beesville, or its environs, and I had a map to it. It was a hand-drawn map on U.S. Army stationery, stained, faded and creased, giving the location I sought to the minute of latitude and longitude, for it designated the site of something that had happened long before Beesville was there as a reference point. It was one of three such maps I had, handed down through four generations of us Smiths.

Although the road was a good one, those were one hundred and more miles of sheer mountain climbing. It was a hot day and three times my laboring car overheated and had to be rested. But notwithstanding these stops, plus one for a leisurely lunch and another for a service-station rest room (thinking the while of doing what I was doing in public view, when the urge was not to be denied and there was not so much as a bush to hide behind, telling yourself that it was only human, when that was what it was not, it was animal: a memory of humiliation and shame that had lasted my namesake into his deep old age), I still made it to Beesville by midafternoon. I tried to imagine what it had been like to do it on foot and in the cold of one of the worst winters ever before or in all the many years since.

Their party of just under a thousand was now following several days behind another one the size of theirs. In the personal possessions they found abandoned and scattered all along it there was evidence that the road had been wearisome enough for the earlier travelers; for those who came after, it was the worse for their passage. In dry weather all those feet, hooves, wheels churned it into a choking dust, in wet weather into a quagmire—at times they struggled on the sticky road like flies on a strip of flypaper—and when sunny or frosty weather followed wet, into hardened furrows like plowed land. Bare feet and feet shod only in thin-soled moccasins were bruised and torn. It was hardest on those in the rear, the ones least able to keep up. They had to breathe the dust and slosh in the mud and stumble in the ruts of all those ahead of them.

It was as though the rain had been accumulating all through the months-long drought, for when it came it seemed that a dam had burst. In the beginning the emigrants permitted themselves the luxury of finding some stretches temporarily impassable, some weather unsuitable for travel, and camped to wait things out. The change that now came was one that made travel not easier, but harder, and yet imperative, for just as the drought was broken by torrents, so the long heat wave was broken by cold that corresponded in its severity. Now that road conditions were truly impossible and the weather worse than unfit, they must push on or perish. Ironically, they must hope for the cold to worsen. The freezing of the roadbed would ease travel.

As the sodden and shivering emigrant train toiled through the mire up one steep slope after another, the roadside crosses appeared with the frequency of mileage markers—with the difference that, unlike mileage markers, these spoke not of your getting nearer to your goal but of the lengthening odds against your ever reaching it. Meanwhile, Noquisi had his own reason for approaching each new one with dread. Though he had never known them, he had remembered who the Grants were.

They were an old mixed-blood family of considerable substance in their part of Georgia. They had been steadfast holdouts, supporters of Ross, opponents of Ridge. That the Grants had changed course, had decided that the cause was lost and the time had come to leave, had carried weight with Abel Ferguson. Such a big, such an unpopular, even heretical step it was that he contemplated taking, he argued with himself as to its rightness up to the end. The Grants' going had been a factor in swaying him. They would be in the same wagon train.

Of his identification of the Grants as members of his parents' party of emigrants, Noquisi said nothing to his grandparents. They had enough to worry them as it was.

But for him, Beesville, though no less of a shock—rather more—came not with the shock of complete surprise.

A century and a half later, just as the motel owner had said, there was nothing in Beesville to see. The site that I, Noquisi's descendant, located was a bare plot of ground indistinguishable from its surroundings. There was no monument, no marker, no memory. The earth in its gyrations, the frosts, the rains, the snows, the winds of all those years had long ago tumbled down the wooden cross and plaque and leveled the shallow mound, hastily heaped up over a shallow pit hastily dug, by people hard-pressed and anxious to get away from this place of pestilence. But the meticulousness of Captain Donovan's map left no doubt that I stood on or near the spot where my great-grandfather, as a boy, had stood and read, among the names of the fourteen buried in the mass grave, that of Anne Ferguson, his mother.

There was no time for him to mourn. That was an indulgence that would have to wait. The train was already in motion under a steady cold rain, and keeping up with it demanded all one's strength of will. There was no time and there was no allowance. He had his duty the same as everyone to the spirit of the group. They were in this all together, one for all and all for one. He must not be the weak link in the chain. Most of the journey must be made knowing what he now knew, and he must act as though he did not know it. With apologies to his mother's spirit and solemn promises to remember her later, when this was over, Noquisi resolutely put her out of mind. Familiarity with death had toughened him, and that was as well, for he now had adult responsibilities. Nor must he live constantly in dread of having to ask Captain Donovan, somewhere farther along the trail, to draw him a second map. His father had never broken the news of his wife's death to the family back home. Had that been to spare them? He had never written anything. Had that been to spare himself? Or had he never been given the chance? Of this also the boy must forbid himself to think. Because from now on his grandparents would often be entering his mind and reading his thoughts, and they must find him courageous, resolute. They would have need to draw upon all his courage, and more, for, despite his resolutions, that was not much. Grandmother, as he soon found, was already in need of borrowing some.