No Resting Place Page 7

  Now it was the eighth day and outside the asi the sun was rising. To the best of his ability, the old man’s tale was told. Awaiting Noquisi was the world he had detailed. Things had come to this—remarkable fulfillment of Indian prophecy!: their homeland had been sold out from under them by none other than Major Ridge, the man who wrote the law against doing what he had done and enforced it the one time ever with his own bloody hand, and now the Cherokees must prepare themselves to be uprooted and moved west to the land of the setting sun, the land of darkness, leaving behind them the bones of their ancestors, there to settle in deep discord. Even into the Fergusons’ own family, as into the nation’s first family, the Rosses, the division extended. It all but paralyzed his old tongue to say it, but his own son, his Abel, Noquisi’s father, was of that party, Ridge’s party.

  Actually father and son were of one mind on the matter, or rather both were of the same divided mind, and when they argued it was not with each other but each with himself. This heated their exchanges, for no opinion is more exasperating to a person than one of his own which he finds himself unable to defend. Add to this the frustrated longing to be convincingly refuted in the opinion one is espousing and the self-dissatisfaction is compounded. The hearts of both men were with Ross, the minds of both with Ridge.

  Recently the final blow had fallen, the ultimate irony: the earth itself, that Cherokee earth so precious to them that despite the missionaries’ teaching it still spoke to them through every rock, every brook, every leaf of every tree a tongue, had betrayed them. Precious indeed! Buried in its bowels, unknown to them, and only now, at the worst possible time, brought to light, the element that the white man coveted most, that drove him raving, murderously mad, that brought out the very devil in him: gold. The misery foretold of old, they, man and boy, had lived to see and to feel.

  Magnified by his spectacles, the tears brimming, the old man’s eyes glistened in the light of the dying fire, overflowed to mingle with the sweat of his face.

  “Do not despair, Agiduda,” said the boy. “All is not lost. As long as we have Tsan Usdi there is still hope.”

  “He is the hope of us all,” said the old man. And then: “But as for me, Sgilisi, you are my hope.”

  “Oh, Agiduda!” the boy cried aloud, and pressed his sweaty body against his grandfather’s. To himself he said, “Ai, me! Then I fear all is lost.”

  Having greeted the sun and gone to water, the boy—now the man—was served the traditional meal of partridge and cornmeal mush. As a warrior he would have need of the stealth of the partridge, its natural camouflage, its ability to lie so closely concealed that no hunter suspected its presence—then that burst from cover with drumming wings that stopped his heart with fright.

  Noquisi—Usgasedi—loped his pony home that afternoon with the bow and the quiver of arrows bouncing painfully, pridefully against his grated back. Meant from the start for him, they were his grandfather’s gift to mark the occasion of his becoming a man. It took all his strength to brace and string the bow; to draw it to the full length of an arrow was beyond him. To achieve that now would be his aim and the measure of his manhood. He must grow big and powerful, and the way things were going he must do it in a hurry. An allotted life span later and a world to the west, he would still remember and would relate to his grandson, who in his turn would relate it to his son, how all the way home voices had called to him, saying,

  Noquisi, be nimble!

  Noquisi, be quick!

  Noquisi, jump over the candlestick!

  Part Three

  “Ai! So now the handwriting is not just on the wall—it is on the very trees,” said Abel Ferguson. “Tell me, Father, after this are you still determined to hold out here?”

  For some time following Amos’s report he had said nothing, restrained by the presence of their guests. But his exasperation would out. His tone was such as almost to make one think he relished this confirmation of his worst fears, his direst predictions.

  “We will discuss it tomorrow,” said his father.

  “Tomorrow!” said Abel scornfully. “Here there is no tomorrow for the likes of us.” Then he was ashamed of having shown to strangers disrespect for a parent. “As you say, Father.”

  Unknown men were in their woods. Georgians. Three of them. Two of the three carried a long link chain between them and of those two one carried a paint bucket. One stood still while the other one, him with the paint bucket, paced off the length of the chain. Exactly twenty-two yard-long paces it was, Amos had observed. Where the chain fetched him up, this man slashed the nearest tree with the hatchet hung in his belt and on this raw slash he painted a number. The third man stood guard with a double-barreled shotgun. A fine guard! Never for a moment did he suspect that they were being followed and watched, and by somebody near enough—phew!—to smell them.

  This ill-timed allusion to the offensive body odor of whites reddened the faces of all the family with embarrassment, and Amos could have bitten his tongue. Fortunately, the Reverend and Mrs. Mackenzie seemed to think it was meant to apply to the men in the woods personally and took no offense themselves.

  For this party in commemoration of the baptism, the Mackenzies had ridden with the Fergusons out to the farm. Dressed white for the day, Amos rode his pony. He had gotten to the farm ahead of those in the buggy. He was in the barn lot feeding and watering the pony when he heard the sound of the hatchet in the woods and went to scout it out. He left his shoes behind. It turned out that he had little need for his stealth. Yvwunegas all had poor ears, no eyes in their heads at all. To the momentary sense of superiority one always feels over anybody whom one is observing unsuspected, Noquisi (he was Noquisi now, despite his clothes) added his own abiding sense of superiority: that of the Indian for white men. This superiority turned to contempt when the objects of it proceeded to do what these did.

  The man holding the hind end of the chain called, “John?”

  Both of the other two answered. However, before he could do so, the one with the paint bucket was obliged to empty his mouth of tobacco juice. Noquisi could hardly believe his eyes.

  “John Yoder?”

  Here the man was, in enemy territory, and yet, ignorant, incautious fool that he was, the one with the paint bucket answered to his name!

  Noquisi let the party move on, then emerged from hiding. Whether or not he was actually going to do what it had now been put in his power to do would be decided later, but here was an opportunity not to be passed up, and so, to impress his enemy’s name upon his mind, he repeated it to himself as he stirred the end of a stick in the gob of spit on the ground. He wrapped the paste in a leaf.

  “Sir,” said the Reverend Mackenzie to Grandfather when Amos reported the presence of the men in the woods, “if this is some matter requiring your immediate attention—”

  “No, sir, it is not. I know what it means, but while I don’t like it, there is nothing I can do about it.”

  It was that “while I don’t like it” that sealed the fate of John Yoder.

  To make his Scottish guests feel more at home, Grandfather had greeted them dressed in his kilt and sporran. He looked like the chief of his highland clan, or rather, he would have had he not also worn a fringed and embroidered buckskin shirt, a red-and-white polka-dot turban and his best beaded moccasins. He met them on the verandah, where he served them home-brewed beer in stoneware bottles fresh from the springhouse and frosted with sweat on this hot day, along with cracklings of pork rind and salted crawfish tails. His own man now, Amos drank along with the rest.

  Now the meal had been served and grace said over it. To eat it, all were seated on the dining-room floor. Their plates had been filled out in the kitchen, but instead of seating them at the table there Grandfather dispensed cutlery to them and led the way down the hall. The family, bringing up the rear, exchanged wondering and worried looks. At the dining-room door Grandfather stood aside and ushered in his guests. They were too polite to exhibit any hesitation. Perhaps they s
upposed that they were meant to pass through this empty room en route to another. There where once on the great mahogany table silver had gleamed, crystal sparkled, china glowed, where family portraits looked down from the dark, unfaded squares on the papered walls, Grandfather spread a handkerchief on the bare floor, seated himself beside it and invited Mrs. Mackenzie to take her place upon it. The rest of the Fergusons straight-facedly followed his example, for the will, the every whim of the head of their house was law.

  It was pride, that flinty, unyielding Cherokee pride. Never admit defeat, not even in defeat. Especially not then.

  When he had finished his meal Amos asked to be excused. He could never be kept indoors for long when he was out at the farm and the weather was fair. He said he was going fishing.

  And he did dig worms in the barn lot. He set off with a cane pole. But while he had a use for the worms, the pole was just to throw anyone off his scent. What he was about to do a boy of his clan, the Wolf, two years older than he, said to have witch doctors for relatives, had offered as a great favor to teach him. To find a safe place to talk, deep in the woods, they had walked for miles; even so, they had spoken in whispers. For this was powerful medicine. Not until they were alone would the boy even pronounce its name: Ditalatliti.

  He had memorized the spell, had collected the requisite ingredients and made up a kit, had searched and found a suitable place, just in case the need to do it should ever arise. The way things were going these days, with enemies on every hand, you never knew—better be prepared for the worst. This kit of his, in its deerskin drawstring pouch, he kept hidden in the barn loft. There he had gone from the house to fetch it, taking care not to be seen and to do all his thinking in Cherokee. Whenever he was about to do something of which God would disapprove, he thought in Cherokee, the language from the time before the coming of God. In the loft he took the red sash from the pouch and wrapped it around his waist, for no important enterprise could hope to succeed unless from the outset one wore something red.

  Thinking that he would never have dared do what he was doing had Agiduda not scratched and toughened him and made him usgasedi, he left the fishing pole at the asi, then went along the riverbank and through the woods to the tree that had been struck by lightning. There he took from his pouch the tube made from a joint of kanesala, the poisonous wild parsnip. Into this tube he put first the paste made of dirt and the man’s spit, then a paste made from seven earthworms which he ground on a stone, then a splinter from this same lightning-blasted tree. At the base of the tree he dug a hole. Into the hole he put the one black pebble and the seven yellow ones along with the tube and covered everything with the square of black cloth. Then he filled the hole.

  He recited the spell. He was fearful of unleashing the powers he was invoking, more than a little fearful of himself. Knowing that what he was practicing was denounced by missionaries as black magic, he spoke in the language of the vengeful, merciless old red gods to whom he was appealing and for which the jealous and watchful white God, whose wrath he knew to fear, needed an interpreter. However, in relating the incident to his grandson, in Texas, all those many years later, having in the meantime tested the wrath, as well as the mercy, of that great God and found him impotent in the one and arbitrary, if not racially prejudiced, in the other, he had no hesitation about translating it into His tongue.

  What he said was, “Hear me! I am going to trample on your soul. I know you. You are of the clan of Yoder. Your name is John. I have buried your spit. Your soul I have buried. You are covered with the black shroud. You are on the path that leads to the land of darkness. Your soul will yellow and then will blacken. It will be poisoned. The worms will devour it. It will turn blue and fade away, nevermore to be seen. I have spoken.”

  He concluded the ceremony by building a fire on the spot, watching it burn out, and scattering the ashes.

  Pleased with his day’s work, Noquisi, before becoming Amos again, cut a gourd from the vine trailing the picket fence on his way back to the house. It was a good omen. In time the gourd would dry and the seeds inside it would rattle. Just so, but much sooner, would the soul of his enemy wither within him. The irreversible process had already begun. Even now the spell was doing its deadly work. It could not be stopped, for nobody knew about it. Had he known what he was doing by both spitting and revealing his name, John Yoder might have hired his own medicine man to protect him against the peril he was in, but then, if he had known he would never have done it in the first place—ignorant yvwunega! His ailment was one that no white doctor, not even the chief of King’s College in New York, where Noquisi’s father had trained, could diagnose and cure. A week from today that careless fool John Yoder would be dead. Then at least there would be one less surveyor to parcel Cherokee land for the Georgia State lottery.

  The old Amos Smith, in recollecting for his grandson, Amos III, his long-lost Cherokee childhood, spoke of his good fortune in having had a doctor for a father. No other boy got to know his place and his people as he did in making house calls around the countryside accompanying the only doctor within hundreds of miles. No other basked in reflection from the gratitude, the adoration, of people cured of illness, relieved of pain, saved from deformity, spared from death, from the untimely loss of loved ones—a people, even the most advanced of them, still retaining vestiges of their traditional awe and veneration of medicine men and their magic, their occult powers. And he had had not just any doctor for a father, but one uniquely qualified by the combination of his college training and his folk heritage of the curative virtues of plants.

  He was his father’s groom and liveryman, his pharmaceutical laboratory assistant, his herb-garden helper, occasionally his surgical team, oftentimes his interpreter—for the doctor’s Cherokee was nowhere near as fluent as the boy’s, and frequently their calls took them into outlying areas where that was the only language spoken—his sometime nurse’s aide in the three-bed hospital which a wing of the house in town had been made into.

  A rider or a runner from out in the country would come with the message that some person was too sick, or too badly injured, to be transported. While his father packed his medicine bag, Noquisi harnessed Arrow, the dapple-gray gelding whose groom he was, hitched him to the buggy and packed it with garden tools. The foot messenger rode in the bed. They left never knowing when they would get back.

  Like the varicolored concentric rings of a target, the complexions of the people, lightest at the center, grew ever darker the farther out from town into the countryside you drove, until, high in the hills or deep in the valleys, you reached the root stock, the source, the pure, undiluted bloodline. The Old People, Noquisi called them, although among those out in the hinterlands where intermarriage had seldom reached or from which those of mixed blood had left, drawn to their own kind in and around the settlements, were to be found young people too. On a call deep in those parts they just might find a medicine man or a witch doctor, an exorcist of evil spirits, at the patient’s bedside practicing his arts while awaiting the coming of the doctor. These colleagues of his he treated with full professional courtesy as consultants in the case. They did no harm; on the contrary, they did good by distracting the sufferer’s mind. Moreover, he declared, much of his own herbal lore—some of it spurious, to be sure, but much of it time-tested and proven—had come to him from them. It was there among those outer rings, in the performance of his pastoral duties, that the Reverend Mackenzie would find the Indians of his expectations. And he, too, often took along his young friend Amos Ferguson to serve as his interpreter.

  Sometimes the distance from town was too great, or the patient too sick to be left so soon, for them to return home the same day. In some of those one-room, windowless, smokefilled cabins they slept on the floor alongside the family members. The people asked to be told the latest news; when they heard they groaned. Time was when the doctor had taken home with him meat, meal, molasses, game, wild honey, nuts. Now fewer and fewer were able to pay him even in barter. Gra
vely ill patients, if they were able to travel, were brought back to the hospital to be attended there.

  The garden tools were for the trip home, for along the way father and son were both on the lookout for plants for the pharmacy, or for transplanting in the herb garden. Some places they knew always to stop at in season. On one road was a field where pennyroyal grew, a simple cure for many ailments, its oil an excellent insect repellent. There was a certain field of mustard, for making plasters; another of flax, its blossoms the bluest of blues, its oil used in poultices and for bringing boils to a head. They knew the whereabouts of a toothache tree, rare in those parts, the nodules of its bark better even than cloves for deadening the pain. Wormwood, a garden escapee, they collected to be rendered into a vermifuge, mint for colds and coughs, licorice root for sore throats, larkspur for the ridding of head lice, hellebore for a sedative, Indian hemp for an anaesthetic, thorn apple for the spasms of asthma, willow bark for a tea to alleviate the miseries of rheumatism and headaches. Syrups, salves, creams, lotions, ointments, tinctures in flasks and crucibles cooking on the stove made of the laboratory by turns a perfumery and a pestilence—and always a fascination, an enchantment, a place where a profession was play. Had he not made himself so useful there, the boy would have made himself a nuisance. The path he had marked out for his own in following in his father’s footsteps ran as direct as the flight of an arrow. Now that the mission school had been closed, he was studying the textbooks his father had been taught from by his tutors when he was a boy. He would follow him next to William and Mary, and from there to King’s College in New York. Such at least had been the plan before the late worsening of the troubles. Now …