No Resting Place (27 page)

After a short while he said, “You don't need to tell me about my mother. I found the grave.”

Then there was nothing the orphaned widower could say to solace the orphan. Together in their losses, each must cope with his special own, respect the other's. There was an exchange of roles between father and son. Bereavement had for the time made a man of the boy and a boy of the man.

The doctor regained his presence to find himself under study by a number of people ranged at some little distance from him. They were in tatters, wasted and gaunt. The unnatural jaws denoted to his trained eye gums swollen by scurvy, pigmentless patches on the backs of their hands a condition he recognized but for which medicine had no name (his Dust Bowl era descendant, Amos IV, would know it as pellagra), and the bloated bellies of the thin-limbed, owl-eyed children malnutrition brought on by their months-long diet restricted to salt pork and cornmeal and molasses. On approaching nearer to offer his professional services, he saw that one man was missing the tip joints of all his fingers. Frostbite. In lieu of a surgeon, nature herself had amputated the affected parts, sloughed them off, and the decay had been prevented from spreading farther up the limbs by the very cold that had caused it.

At the doctor's approach they shrank from him as one, shrank not in fear but in hostility. Just as he feared, they identified him with those who had brought upon them the ordeal they had endured. Rather than blaming John Ross for encouraging them to hold out until things came to such a pass, they blamed those who had sold them out, and for those who had tried to warn them, and had been proved right in their predictions, there was no forgiveness.

The doctor sensed a reproach, silent as a volley of arrows and just as piercing, in their stony stares. Not a word was spoken. Their condition was expressive of itself; let it accuse him. For his personal loss, for his having only just learned of it, no special pity. Though his was their common lot, it did not make him one of them. His father had been one of their headsmen, much respected; his death, and that of his wife, known to all, the loss felt by all, yet that gained the son none of their sympathy. His father had been a holdout, he a sellout. The Indian talent for bearing a grudge Abel Ferguson knew in his veins.

In one long exchange of looks all these understandings transpired.

Yet, paradoxically, as he would later tell his son, never had he felt himself to be more one of them than in that moment when he stood rejected by them. Outcast by his own, he felt an odd pride in their obduracy. What a people! Who but they would refuse the desperately needed services of the only doctor they had?

The reckoning was quick in coming. Its thoroughness, its brutality was meant as a lesson to last Cherokees forever. On a morning just eight days ago John Ridge was dragged from bed and hustled outdoors. While his wife looked on, he was stabbed twenty-five times, once for each member of the posse. Then his throat was slit. His body was tossed high into the air, then stamped on, in file, by all twenty-five. Meanwhile his cousin Elias Boudinot was being hacked to death on the site of the house he was building for himself and his new wife (the first one had died in childbirth on the eve of their departure from Georgia), and his father, old Major—the framer of the law against the sale of tribal land, and its one previous enforcer—gunned down from ambush.

Others, less prominent, identified with the Ridge party, were also killed on that day. Abel Ferguson knew now that he could not rely upon his value to them as their doctor to protect him from this prairie fire of vengeance. The boy had been told by his grandfather of The Bowl. To him they had fled. With his skills he hoped he might make himself useful. Here he hoped he had found a home, peace, brotherhood, a new life.

The old chief's comment upon what he had heard was one that permanently impressed itself upon the boy, both by the unexpectedness of his having picked up the expression on which it was a twist, and, in the light of subsequent events, its appositeness to his own situation. He said, “They who take the pen shall perish by the sword.” He said it almost as though pleased. At his age there was satisfaction in having the world confirm you in your disenchantment with it.

He said, spreading his arms to include everything in view, “You are welcome. What is mine is yours.” Although he said it, they felt, with something less than wholeheartedness.

The confederation was separated by their different languages into several tribal villages. In the principal one, this of the Cherokees, The Bowl's was the biggest house, not just because he was Chief but also because his family was, or had been before the many children whom he, and others, had begotten upon his three wives grew up and left home, a big one. The three wives were all with him yet but that still left plenty of room, and his home was their home for as long as it was his. Time was when he would have been honored to lend them each one of his wives, but they must excuse him, for he feared that even the youngest of them was too old now to be found attractive by younger men.

Dr. Abel protested that he was not to give it a thought, and the red- but straight-faced Noquisi held up a palm to signify that for his part no apology was needed.

The Chief remembered the Ferguson family from the old country, and they would have been welcomed out of respect, even just out of frontier hospitality, but, having heard the boy speak both Cherokee and English, he invited them also out of curiosity and admiration.

The curiosity and the admiration were mutual, as was the pleasure of their hearing each other speak. The nucleus of The Bowl's band had left the old country before Cherokees in any numbers had begun to learn English, and they had later come to a country where the official language was Spanish. The dialect he spoke was Noquisi's own, liquid and musical as a brook, but more so in its nearness to the source, for this was the pure-blooded, hundred-proof speech he and his band had taken west with them two generations ago and preserved in isolation, uncorrupted. It tasted on the palate and tongue like a fine old liqueur, mellow but with a kick to it. The old man had been called the Moses of his people; to the boy it seemed rather as though he were listening to Adam bestowing upon the things of the world their names. The aged patriarch looked elemental, a living anachronism. He had at least as much white blood in him as red, probably more, yet to the boy he seemed their people's prototype, their progenitor, straight from his Creator's hand, immune against mortality and apt to last to Adam's age—almost to have reached it. He had lived as a savage. He had been a warrior, a killer of men. He had drawn the bow and seen the arrow pierce human flesh. He had swung the tomahawk. He had wielded the scalping knife. Now, though he still stood as straight as a gun barrel and his stride was upright and brisk, his sandy hair was streaked with white and his weatherworn and suntanned face was as wrinkled as the rind of an Osage orange, the fruit of the tree of the ark. His eyes were gray with age, it seemed, as though they had once been a darker shade but had been bleached by time, had faded from all his close and wary observation of life. In the Indian fashion, he kept them shut for lengthy periods when he was speaking and when he was listening—they opened, suddenly or slowly, for emphasis, of his words or of yours, and this suddenness or slowness, combined with their paleness, made them unfailingly startling.

“Theirs for as long as it was his”—in reference to the Chief's home—turned out to be something other than the formality that the Fergusons, nodding politely, had taken it for.

“It is bad news that you have brought me,” he said. “I am sorry to say that I have got bad news for you too.”

It was only yesterday that he had been visited by the commissioners of Houston's successor, President Lamar. They brought him a letter from their chief saying that the Indians would never be permitted to establish a permanent and independent jurisdiction within the country, that their claim to their territory would never be recognized.

The Fergusons felt as though they were back in Georgia. Well they might. Lamar was a Georgian, had been personal secretary to Governor Troup when the lands of the Creeks within that state were taken from them.

In his inaugural address as President of Texas, Lamar had declared his intention of ridding the country of Indians. Should they be driven out, they would travel up that same Cherokee Trace which the Fergusons had just come down, and would join those whom they reported to be now in open and bloody conflict, perhaps on the verge of civil war, the destruction of the tribe.

The Texans offered the Indians twenty-five thousand dollars for their homes and their standing crops and all the improvements made over twenty years time to the land, some thirty by fifty miles in extent. That worked out to about three dollars per household. The Chief had succeeded in putting them off for the time being, saying that he must confer with his subchiefs. Meanwhile, he had a plan of his own.

The Chief excused himself and went inside the house. He returned carrying a tin box. From this box he drew a sheaf of papers. Noquisi read over his father's shoulder. It was the treaty, dated some three months before the battle of San Jacinto, between the Indian Confederacy and the provisional government of the Republic of Texas, reaffirming the Indian claim to the land granted them by Mexico. This was the receipt for their neutrality in the revolution. It bore the signatures of a dozen Texans, headed by Sam Houston's, and the marks of half a dozen Indians, headed by The Bowl's.

Lamar claimed that the treaty, ratified by a government that was only provisional and had not been elected by the people, was not worth the paper it was written on. Houston maintained its validity. Without it, he said, there would be no Republic of Texas, and he and his co-signers would all be dead at the hands of Santa Anna.

Houston was out of office now, forbidden by the constitution to succeed himself, and the Chief had to admit that among Texans he was almost alone in his friendliness toward Indians, but he was still the most powerful man in the country, revered as its George Washington: its victorious revolutionary commander, its first President. He was the Chief's longtime personal friend; he had once given him one of his daughters overnight. Lamar had been Houston's Vice President, and in that time Houston had learned to despise him—to despise him all the more, perhaps, for having himself been the making of the man, for not having seen through him from the start. The wretch had grown in his own shadow, like poison ivy underneath an oak. The two were at odds on every issue, and most of all on the Indian question.

Now, even as they talked, a runner, a white man married to a Cherokee, one who could pass unchallenged, unnoticed by the Texans, was on his way to Nacogdoches, Houston's home—a distance of a day. This runner, Grandgent by name, was a man whom nothing could stop, or even long delay. He would deliver his message before the sun went down. When Kalunah heard what that snake Lamar was up to behind his back, he would come at once to his old friend Diwali's aid. He would address the Texas Senate. He would remind them of their debt to the Indians and insist upon their duty to honor the treaty. It was to be hoped that he might prevail. The expulsion order would be revoked. They could go on living peacefully in their home of twenty years. There would be no bloodshed. No widows. No fatherless children.

Meanwhile the drums had relayed the news throughout the territory, and that same afternoon of the Fergusons' arrival the subchiefs assembled in council. Some rode on saddles, some on blankets. Behind many rode a boy or a girl, the man's interpreter, for it was the children who were quick to learn a second language. Proud, not to say vain, men, in their prime, they bore themselves like finalists in a contest.

The Bowl's homesite had been chosen for the gathering because of the deep, cool, ever-flowing spring just behind it, and on this hot and dusty day all went there on arrival for a drink from the gourd dipper and to water their horses at the trough. Several chieftains arrived together. They passed the dipper among them. Before drinking, they deliberately, ceremoniously spat on the ground. It was an attestation of their trust in one another, their putting their lives in their brothers' keeping. Nothing like it had Noquisi ever seen before. It made him feel that he had found the good place, the safe place, the friendly place—only to be threatened with the imminent loss of it.

Having unsaddled and hobbled or tethered his horse, each man spread his saddle blanket on the ground and seated himself on it, in token of a friendly powwow. Like the numerals of a dial, they disposed themselves around the Old Chief, with him at twelve o'clock. Awaiting them were large steaming crocks of stewed meat and cornmeal mush, served by the three wives. From his pouch each man produced his spoon, some of metal, some of wood, some of bone, some of horn. With it he fed himself and his child interpreter. After eating, many packed and puffed on pipes. In their colorful costumes, such a contrast to the Cherokees with their white man's clothes made from bolt goods bought from itinerant peddlers, they made the boy feel that at last he was seeing
Indians
, and he thrilled with pride and savagery. Here was his racial heritage surviving and asserting itself.

The Bowl was the Chief of the Confederacy but he was the elected Chief, and while his word carried the most weight, it was the will of the majority that he must abide by and carry out. Although the Cherokees were by far the most numerous of the various tribes, they had but one voice in the council, the same as the rest. Quick work was made of the Texans' offer. The vote to reject it was unanimous. The chieftains were then given time to speak. In each case it went more or less like this:

“I am the voice of the Kickapoos. There are no greater warriors than we. When we frown the sky darkens. When we stamp our feet in anger the earth trembles. When we shake our fists the sun hides its face in fear. We strike like the lightning. We shed blood like the rain. At the sound of our war whoop the palefaces turn and run for their lives.” And so on.