No Resting Place Page 8

  Now what had been the satisfaction of curing people of the expected illnesses and the unexpected accidents of life turned more and more into the sorrow, the terror, the impotent outrage of treating people set upon and savaged. The doctor was called in to perform surgery upon a man shot in the back by a settler, to treat another one clubbed nearly to death. He was called in to assist at a difficult delivery, and he learned that the husband’s cattle had been stolen, his barn burned. One patient’s neighbor had been forced from his house at gunpoint, was subsisting now, he and his family, like wild animals in the woods. The doctor was torn between leaving his boy at home nowadays as he made his calls and sparing him these impressions, or taking him along so that he would never forget them, would pass them on to his last living descendant.

  The boy thus got to see the land and learn to love it; he saw his people and learned to love them—to love them for their endurance and their obstinacy, their resistance to deportation. He saw the desperation that turned them for hope and consolation to the Reverend Mackenzie’s teachings. His father loved the land and the people, too, but the more he saw of the ravages to the one and the trials of the other, the more convinced he was that to emigrate was now their only hope of survival. It was this exposure of his to the ever-worsening conditions, an exposure greater than any other man’s possibly excepting John Ross, that inclined him toward the Treaty Party. Meanwhile, however, he did not discourage his son’s attachment to his grandfather; on the contrary, he fostered it, although it made the boy a partisan on the other side in the running dispute between his father and himself.

  Dr. Ferguson and his family had suffered no molestation, neither by the authorities nor by the settlers. The district’s only doctor was far too precious to his people—and also to the settlers and the authorities, who, when they took sick, found themselves able to overlook his drop of Cherokee blood. It was understood that any mistreatment of him would have met with the terrible Indian retribution of two eyes for an eye. John Ross, when he was abused—arrested without charge, clapped into a one-room jailhouse where the body of a man (if a Cherokee could be so called) still hung from the rafters two weeks after his execution, run out of the state, his home confiscated—had restrained his people from retaliating; Dr. Ferguson would have been unable to do so. But they themselves could turn against him, and when his inclination to emigrate became known, they did. No harm did they do him, and it was illegal for them to attempt to dissuade him, but they turned against him.

  Dr. Ferguson did not feel that he would be abandoning his people. Like it or not, they would all soon be joining him in their new home in the west. There they would have the same need for him as they had here. He would be waiting for them with a pharmacy, a surgery, a hospital all set up. Indeed, rather than abandoning them, by going ahead he would be rededicating himself to them.

  However, the diehards who felt that anyone who went was deserting them were resentful of their doctor for even talking about going. That he was the son of one of their most respected leaders was no mitigation; on the contrary, it was a betrayal of that leader, and thus doubly a betrayal of them all. It had become heresy to think differently from Tsan Usdi. The more prominent the person who did so, the greater the outcry. Anyone who was not with them was against them. Any break in their ranks reinforced the enemy.

  “It is not that I think the cause is wrong and deserves to lose,” the doctor declared. “I think as you do, that it is right and deserves to win. But anybody with eyes in his head can see that it is lost. We are outnumbered and we have been outfought. Now is the time to make the best we can of things before they get still worse. However, if it turns out that you were right to stay and I was wrong to go, if conditions here improve and the outlook brightens, I can always come back. All roads lead two ways.”

  He likened himself to Noah. The flood was coming and he had been forewarned. He had been chosen not because he alone among men found favor in the eyes of God but rather because he was better educated than most, knew more of the world, could see where things were tending, was clear-eyed enough to recognize the inescapable. He had been told to build his ark, provision it, take with him the wherewithal for starting life over after the waters had receded. If his kind was to survive, he must prepare the way, find his Ararat and send out the dove. He would have a home ready and waiting for his old father and mother.

  “Is this the only spot of earth that we can live on?” he asked. “Is this the only air our lungs can breathe? Are we so dependent, so delicate, so unadaptable?”

  “You speak like a white man,” said his father. “To them one place is the same as another so long as it yields a profit. For us the earth is more than a provider. It is our mother and father. All its creatures are our brothers.”

  “What you are describing, Father, is a backward and primitive people. Yes, I have seen what it means to them to be evicted from their homes and driven off their land. I have seen grown men and women kneel and kiss the ground. I have seen them stroke a tree and bid it good-bye. A touching sight. It brought tears to my eyes. Both of them. With one I wept for their sorrow and with the other for their childishness.

  “What is home? Our first one is our mother’s womb, but there comes a time when we outgrow it and the cord is cut. Then it is our parents’ house. Precious. Never to be forgotten. But there comes a time when we leave it, like the birds their nests, to make a home of our own. Those who do not do so, who spend their lives with their parents, we feel have never quite grown up but have remained children. Maybe leaving here and going to a new country will be the thing to make our people grow up, become independent.

  “This place is no longer our home. It is our prison. We have been deprived of every freedom. We may not plan anything for our protection. We are forbidden to speak to one another in numbers of more than two. Our newspaper has been suppressed. Our children are growing up in ignorance and superstition. We are losing the advancements we have made and reverting to savagery. Out there we will be free to take up where we were interrupted.”

  The appearance on the family farm of the lottery land surveyors that day in celebration of his son’s coming to manhood only crystallized into a decision sentiments long felt by Dr. Abel Ferguson. Here there was to be no manhood for that son of his.

  On a morning not long afterward, Noquisi was sent out to the farm. There he left his pony, driving back to town with a wagon and team. He felt himself being watched with hostile eyes from every house he passed along the street. For although the doctor had announced his intention to nobody outside his family, all the world knew about the wagon train then assembling and being provisioned, its departure date set.

  The job of packing the household goods was Noquisi’s and his mother’s. It took them a week, not because so many of their belongings went into the wagon but rather because so many of them, each requiring consideration, reluctant rejection, did not. The items of bare necessity for life, those permitting one no choice, declared themselves unarguably; from each of those little personal possessions that lighten living came its mute appeal. One had to be firm. Room for pots and pans, no room for playthings. Several times his mother came upon the boy handling something of his that she knew he treasured, and more than once she said, “I’m sure we can make space for that, Noquisi.” He refused, irritably after a while. She desisted when she realized that he was putting his childhood behind him and that his pride in his manhood more than compensated for any sorrow he might have felt. If she herself sometimes weakened and wept over parting from the home she had made, Noquisi was never allowed to see it. “What many of us never had I reckon we can learn to get along without,” he heard her say to his father. Mainly the wagon contained medical supplies.

  Of all the many people whose ailments he had treated, whose broken bones he had set, whose wounds he had stitched together, whose aching teeth he had extracted, whom his wife had nursed, none came to see the doctor off. At the edge of town, in the open door of one house, just one, a little girl, stoo
d to wave good-bye. As she did so she was yanked inside by her mother.

  They rode on for a little way, then the doctor reined the team. For a while he sat silent. Then he said, “I delivered that child. Without me, the mother might have died and the child too.

  “I know that what I am doing is right and that it is only a matter of time before they must all follow me. I know that I am right. That is what worries me. A person in the wrong can never forgive the person in the right.”

  At the crossroads a mile outside of town they were met by the old folks. Their good-byes were kept brief because their separation would be brief. They would be reunited all too soon.

  While his parents proceeded on their way, Noquisi rode home with his grandparents. Entrusting him to their keeping would make this temporary separation of the family seem less of a separation. He was being left with them because he was a man now and would be a help to them both here and on the road when the time came. And because, pale of face though he was, Abel Ferguson had the Indian sense of the strong bond between children and their grandparents. Indeed, it was the parents’ duty to relinquish the child to them, that they might enjoy him in the time left them.

  For a while the drawings of the Georgia State lottery for the redistribution of Cherokee homes, farms, shops and stores were suspended. They had been suspended after it came to light that the supervisor of the lottery, one Shadrack Bogan, had, for a consideration, rigged them. Five winning tickets, all for highly valuable properties, were found to be fraudulent, forged by Bogan’s hand. There was no knowing how many more such had gone undetected, how many of the certified winners occupied their holdings through downright thievery.

  Now that a new supervisor of the lottery had been appointed to succeed the discredited Bogan, the gaming wheels were spinning as before over in Milledgeville and Cherokee holdings were again being awarded to the deserving, including the five known frauds, which were resubmitted and redrawn. However, following the Bogan scandal there was considerable erosion of the public’s trust in Georgia’s lottery. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and there’s more than one way to skin a cat. There existed ready-to-hand an alternative procedure by which settlers might acquire Cherokee homesteads, one that left nothing to chance. Noquisi was taken to observe this procedure at work. It was a sign of the times they were living in that his grandfather wanted him to see and remember, to tell his grandchildren about, if, God willing, he lived to have any.

  To go into town on a Saturday was a risky thing for them to do, for although, among the many white strangers now there, they might easily have “passed,” Agiduda, unmoved by Grandmother’s arguments, her pleas or her tears, would wear the turban, the sash and the moccasins he had defiantly adopted late in life, and if he would, then so would Noquisi. It was on Saturday that firewater flowed in the town. To sell liquor to an Indian was illegal. They were not permitted to enter the taverns. In some cases it was hard to tell who was an Indian and who was not. So—in great quantities—liquor was bootlegged: the bottle produced from out of the leg of the seller’s boot. Many Cherokees, dispossessed, homeless and despondent, were now drowning their sorrow in drink. Sometimes the drink turned them sullen and resentful, and a sullen Indian was one just asking for trouble. For an Indian to find trouble he never had far to look, and when he did, then every Indian in town at the time was in trouble. All this notwithstanding, the Fergusons went into the county seat.

  It was to attend a session of the district court that the boy was taken by his grandfather to town that day. Had things been otherwise than they were, had there been any counterattractions, the court sessions would have been the place’s feature entertainment; as things were, they were its only one. However, no loss was felt; they filled the gap. A bearbaiting, a public hanging would have had to compete for custom when court was in session. To see the jurors retiring to deliberate, and then returning in under a minute with a verdict of guilty as charged, was worth the price of a ticket, and it was free. And when, through their interlocutor, the foreman, they put long legal questions couched in mumbo jumbo to His Honor, the judge, they were as good as a minstrel show. It was said that somebody had once opened and looked into the copy of the Bible upon which witnesses, whether right- or left-handed, or even ambidextrous, placed their right hands while swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and had been shocked to find that it really was a Bible. Most likely because no book more appropriate to the tenor and atmosphere of the court was procurable locally.

  Among the pool of prospective jurors a spirit of civicmindedness prevailed. No venireman ever asked to be excused from duty, not even those working in the gold fields, for whom the per diem allowance of a few dollars and all you could drink was a financial sacrifice. Jury duty was a chance to shine, a challenge to put on a performance for an appreciative but demanding audience. Deliberations were never protracted, there was never any wrangling, a verdict had already been arrived at before the choice was made of twelve good men and true.

  Nonjury cases were every bit as entertaining, for the judge was a one-man show. His way with the gavel, his bullying of witnesses, his comically straight face, his steady sipping from his glass of water, the proof of which could be sniffed as far back as the fifth row of spectators’ pews, had gained him a following. He was judging the case the Fergusons went that day to hear tried. It was one in which the plaintiff sought a court order for the eviction of a family illegally occupying a house belonging to him. The head of the family was the man from whom the owner had bought the house. He had been served notice to vacate but the notice had been ignored. As proof of his ownership of the house, the plaintiff produced the deed of transfer, signed by the defendant, and two witnesses who swore under oath that they had been present at the transaction.

  That they knew the outcome of the trial beforehand did not lessen the spectators’ pleasure. It was like seeing a favorite skit performed again. This one was far from the first such case they had attended, and all ended alike. They were not there to be surprised by the plot, they were there to enjoy the action and to see a demonstration of blatant impudence.

  Questioned by his attorney, the defendant on the stand claimed that the signature on the deed purporting to be his was not his signature, examples of which he executed and entered in evidence; that he was barely acquainted with the other party in the case; and that he had never until now laid eyes on either of the witnesses. He was then questioned by the plaintiff’s attorney.

  “You had, I believe, a mixed-blood grandmother, part Cherokee?”

  The man on the stand was silent. His conflict of mind was plain to see. He was torn. He wanted justice, wanted to keep the home that was his, yet he was remembering some of his grandmother’s many acts of love and kindness to him. She was his mother’s mother. Now, poor soul, she was dead. One day her spirit and his would meet again. In the end—swayed also by fear of being prosecuted for perjury—he was unable to disown his grandmother.

  With that the plaintiff’s attorney rested his client’s case. He moved that this man’s testimony was inadmissible in this court. The judge’s ruling was mandatory: the order of eviction was issued forthwith.

  “Next case!” said His Honor. It was his punchline, and it never failed to draw from the crowd a great guffaw. The merriment was enlivened by his mock-serious attempt to gavel them to order.

  It was not long afterward that Sonny Slocum, whom Amos had known all his life, whom he had sometimes played with despite the gulf in their social standings, the Slocums being little better than pore whites, got wise to this trick and stole Amos’s pony. The pony was stolen while grazing in the pasture, wearing only a halter. Later Sonny came over and offered a dollar for the saddle and blanket and the bridle. It puzzled him that his offer was refused.

  “Why, Amos, you ain’t got no more use for them things,” he complained.

  Early one morning in February a man appeared on the place. Who he was, how he had gotten there, when he had arriv
ed, there was no accounting for. It was as though he had sprung from the ground overnight like a toadstool.

  When first seen, he was standing down by the barn lot gazing up at the house, his putty-colored hat pushed back on his head. He watched Agiduda’s approach with his arms folded across his chest. He was a tall, gaunt man with several days growth of rusty-red whiskers on his face and throat, rising almost to his eyes. Between this and the shock of hair that grew low on his forehead he peered out at the world as a poodledog does. By spitting on the ground he gave away his race.

  “Drawed you a nice place there, neighbor,” he drawled. His breath visible on the frosty air seemed to be the fumes of envy and resentment. “Warn’t quite so lucky in the draw as that myself. But you can keep your fine big house, mister. I got me a gold mine.” He spat again, this time venomously, turned his back and stalked away. He covered ground with a stride that was long and stiff-kneed. He disappeared into one of the former slave cabins, where, apparently, he had already made himself at home.

  On that same morning of his sudden appearance from out of nowhere, the new owner of the 160-acre lottery parcel adjacent to the Fergusons’ remaining land fell to improving his property. Not only had he himself materialized unobserved, mysteriously conveyed, he had brought with him tools—at least, an axe. The steady sound of it at work in his woodlot reached the house daylong. You would have thought the man had undertaken single-handedly to clear the land for crops, and to get the job done before nightfall.

  For several days, from sunup to sundown, the sound of chopping continued, as persistent as the hammering of a woodpecker. Then, although the Fergusons were early risers, they awoke one morning to find, on the line dividing their shrunken property from that of their new neighbor, a row some six feet long of palings driven into the ground to form a fence, or rather, a wall. As contiguous as teeth they stood. The man was erecting a stockade, and such was his urgency to get it done, he was driving stakes into ground still only partially thawed. To put up this first section of it he must have worked by the light of last night’s moon.