An Undisturbed Peace (22 page)

He and Hart traveled on. They came across another caravan of Indians, this one less populated but just as burdened with housewares and livestock. When they drew closer to areas where farms and settlements were established, a riot of war whoops startled them back undercover. Ever wily, horse and rider crept through the forest, evading the tumult's source. From a safe distance, they witnessed crazed caravans of roaring white men charging through the wilderness along roads that led to abandoned native farms in the lush, cultivated valleys and on hillsides scored by terraced fields. Abe's vantage point gave him a wide scope of vision. His eyes followed the marauders to the places the Indians had left, each one of them racing to be the first and to claim the most. They were terrifying, exuberant, exhilarated. Where the Indians had been full of dignified, tragic grief, these were grave dancers, frantic, aggressive, hopping mad with avarice, barbarous in both their greed and contest.

Abe was repelled, ashamed of his race, and then calmed himself. He was not white like them, not really. He was a Jew. He was apart from them. All his life he'd been reminded by the English that he was different, fit only for commerce or a short list of trades, best left to live with his kind, out of the sight of Christian men. Yet in America, they accepted him more or less, he'd felt liberated here, he'd married a non-Jew after all, without much comment from anyone. But was he safe only for now? In the hundreds of years the whites had known the Cherokee, Marian's people had felt as secure in the beginning as he did at present, surely even more so. It was all confusing and disturbing. The more he contemplated the land grabs he'd witnessed, the more he questioned. Similar thefts had been suffered by Jews throughout the diaspora, wherever Jews had resided for however long. Could he be certain his own property would always be protected? The simple answer was he could not. And yet, as long as America wrestled with issues of Indian removal and black subjugation, he felt uncomfortably confident that it would take them a while to get around to the Jews. Or would it?

At last they entered familiar territory. They rode past Marian's ruined cabin, her shed torn down, her front grazing land marked by rows of corn and cotton planted by an unknown usurper. He rode along the outlands of the Rupert place, imagining the days when they belonged to Chief Redhand, and from there, he rode past his own in-laws' farm, where he did not stop. Another two days of travel, days made longer by heavy late-spring rains, and he rode into the streets of Greensborough in the early evening under a pelting, blinding downpour. He took Hart to the stable behind the store, untacked him, checked his feet for stones, then bedded down a stall with dry straw before leaving him there, properly cooled and towel dried, with hay, a bit of sweet feed, and water. “Good job, my dear,” he said to the horse, thanking him for making their trek and getting them through. Hart nickered and gobbled the feed. “What a good-hearted soul you are.” Abe bid him good night. He pulled down the visor of his cap against the elements, then took to the wooden sidewalks built half a foot above the coursing streams of rainwater on the streets. When he got to his house, there were no signs of life within. Concern drove out all other thoughts. If the last weeks had taught him anything, it was that the path of love was fraught with fateful episode. What if something had happened to his bride? Worried, he went on to Isadore's house, knocking on the front door. Hannah answered.

“Husband!” she cried out, slapping her rosy cheeks with two hands before dragging him inside and gripping him in the fondest embrace. “I've been so worried!” She held on to him, unmindful of his sodden, trail-worn clothes. He freed himself from her grasp only long enough to raise a hand to her chin, which he lifted that he might kiss her deeply.

There were coughs behind them. Abe looked up. His mother and stepfather stood in the arch that led to the drawing room. Both beamed, both clasped hands over their hearts in thanksgiving. Beyond them, bright hooked rugs, soft couches, and easy chairs glowed in the lamplight. The warm hearth beckoned.

“My son! You must get out of those wet clothes! Isadore, bring him something!” his mother said. Hannah and Abe separated, looked down, and laughed to acknowledge how wet they had both become. After short, loving greetings to the elder couple, the newlyweds retired to the parental bedroom to change what needed changing. Once behind a door that shut, they made quick, hot, and happy love before returning to the others. Spirits were poured, glasses were raised, toasts made. In the dining room, a buffet of tasty victuals was laid out. They sat to eat. Talk turned, almost immediately, to business.

Abe reported his promises to the Cherokee. Isadore shrugged, then tilted his head left and right as Jacob had when they discussed convincing Marian to move to Echota. “I hope I can do what you have promised, son,” he said. “So many considerations have come up. The neighbors, for one. The settlers hereabouts and beyond for another. Let's face it, everyone who purchased rubber will want a refund.
Baruch Ha-Shem
, the weather has been off and on. Not all our customers have lodged complaints yet. But they will. I'm still waiting on further response from Goodyear's lawyer not only about refund on the goods we sold but also about the down payment of the reorder we canceled. I've had only a perfunctory communiqué from the man, which said something about blood from stones. If we carry on with a lawsuit, we'll use up resources we won't see back for years or maybe ever. Whatever judgment may come is uncertain. We must face facts. We convinced all of Sassaporta Brothers outlets to take on rubber. The members of the family headquarters are in equal straights. Compensation to our customers as well as damages will be up to us alone.” Abe, until that moment drifting into a fog of cozy respite after a long and difficult trip, bolted upright in his seat and spoke harshly to his stepfather. “It's not possible that I disappoint my Cherokee!” he said, pounding the table with a fist. “They are ill-treated everywhere of late and I will not add to it!”

His family sat back, surprised by his passion on the subject. “What is this?” his wife said, folding her soft hands over his hard, clenched fist, which she stroked to soothe him. “My love, my love. How are these Cherokee ‘yours,' first of all? How are they separate or superior to, say, my parents, who have also been hurt by this plague of rubber you so espoused?” Abe looked at her with jaws flapping wordlessly. He floundered about, looking for an answer that would please her, when his mother rescued him.

“My son, like my husband, is an honorable man,” she said. “All of his customers are dear to him and his fortunes rely upon his honesty and reputation with them, that's all, daughter. Don't worry too much, Abrahan. We will do the best we can and then we will work harder to restore ourselves. You'll work hard too, won't you, Hannah?” She turned brightly toward her son's wife, deflecting her question as expertly as a diplomat in the court of a Spanish king. Isadore looked to his Susanah with admiration. “Alright,” he said, “it's settled. The best we can with what we've got and no more. And now, to bed.”

None had objection to that idea. To bed they went, each in their own homes, for one couple to discuss the economic implications of Abe's negotiations, and for the other to find the kind and genial gestures that cement a passion yet untried.

The Fall of Sassaporta and Son

Q
uakers,” Isadore always said, “are good people.” Abe could not disagree. It was well known they were honest, prayerful, and kind. They'd accepted the Sassaportas among them without comment on their beliefs or heritage. They also accepted the Catholics, Presbers, Moravians, Lutherans, and Methodists of Isadore's camp town, the missions, and farms about. Quakers always treated the Cherokee with common decency. He'd heard gossip there were Abolitionists in their ranks who held secret meetings and, it was rumored, helped fugitive slaves escape to free territories. But these were rumors only. No one held enough animus against the Quakers to investigate closely whether these honest, prayerful, and kind people truly broke the law. Also, they'd founded the town and were in the majority.

After the rubber melted, Sassaporta and Son discovered something new about Quakers. When they demanded justice, they didn't hold back. They were fierce. Daily, furious Quaker farmers and townspeople barreled into the store with scythes, whips, canes, and even burnt-out torches in hand, slamming such onto the front desk as if they might not receive proper attention without proof of potential aggression. They decried the faulty goods they'd been sold, declared the promises of its excellence indisputably betrayed, and refused to budge until Isadore gave them legally binding notes that they would be made whole. When all the claims against rubber were in, a process that lasted until mid-fall that year, Abe and Isadore took stock of their holdings and determined the best they could do and remain in business was provide a thirty-five-cents-on-the-dollar refund and open a room of free merchandise for complainants to peruse to make up the rest of what was owed. Many of the items in the free room were quality, high-demand goods, ones either made in Isadore's work camp or lots paid for on delivery from the manufacturer. Other items were pretty much useless junk that never sold, novelty items, and goods damaged in transit. Customers grumbled but accepted the deal. After loading up on the choicest of wares in the Sassaporta and Son free room, they displayed their dissatisfaction by withdrawing their business and patronizing the competition in town with their hard coin, even buying in the used goods store. It was humiliating, Isadore and Abe agreed, but in the great scheme of things it was just. They had blundered. They had squandered their good name. They would have to re-win their customers' loyalty. It would take time, but they would do it.

In order to absorb the cost of refunds and merchandise giveaways, Isadore cleaned out his savings and mortgaged his home along with the land on which he'd built the store. Abe sold his house to the owner of the new lumber mill over on Haw River. He sold it at a great discount in order to sell it quickly. The younger Sassaportas moved into Isadore and Susanah's home, which was just as well, since Hannah carried their first child and they could use the help. It was cramped, there weren't luxuries for any of them, but they managed to eat and keep the store doors from closing for good. As for the Cherokee, Abe sent peddlers armed with flyers for display in all the trading posts, which described the settlements offered to Quakers and any others who'd bought rubber products. The flyers recommended those affected send representatives to Greensborough to collect compensation. Oddly, no Cherokee came to the store that fall and then it was winter, the time of year no one traveled anywhere.

All winter long, Abe wondered why Edward Redhand had not appeared before the mountain pathways turned to sheets of ice. He'd been hoping to see him, to settle matters justly between them as he'd promised, and to hear how Marian and Jacob fared. When he packed up to vacate his former residence, he found a moment when he was alone to lift the floorboard under which he'd hidden Lord Geoffrey's portrait of Marian, her family, Jacob and Lulu. Now that he knew who was who and what was what, he studied faces he recognized from life. There was Black Stone and White Stone, the twin brothers he'd met on the porch of Marian's mother's mountain house, looking much the same. Her mother looked entirely different. She had more flesh about her, and in her native clothing her posture was softer, less grand lady than contented matron. Her hair was not yet white and there was a warmth in her eyes rather than the icy-cold glitter he'd encountered. Like his brothers, Edward looked much the same, just younger. Abe realized his original opinion of the expression captured on both Edward's and Marian's mother's face, that they were possibly angry or suspicious of the painter, was a false one. Now that he was accustomed to Cherokee people, he realized Lord Geoffrey had simply captured that gravity, that self-possession­ they all displayed. If he'd misinterpreted their painted aura, it was out of ignorance and because of an enormous contrast in the representation of her family and the representation of Marian. One was realistic, unemotional, the other an aching hymn to lush, impossible beauty. The chief looked proud and stern to Abe's eyes, but then they'd never met. Lulu was indeed a winsome creature with the long, elegant neck Daniella described. Jacob's appearance, however, gave him pause. Despite his many viewings of the painting, he'd not paid much attention before to the man's likeness, partially because of the smudge over his face, which obscured it somewhat. But having come to know the man more intimately, he wanted to determine just how he looked before he had been ruined. Taking the canvas in two hands, Abe squinted at it, held it far away, then up close. He took it to a lamp and held it under the light, where he made a startling discovery.

The smudge was not a smudge but an indent of sorts, a pattern of tiny lines pressed into the canvas either by a sudden extreme pressure while the paint was still fresh or one applied repeatedly for a very long time. It occurred to him that if one filled in the impression of tiny lines with small grains of something dry, the pattern might be identifiable. Taking a handful of the sand Hannah had put in a box of breakables to protect them during their move, he shook a thin stream over Jacob's face and gave out a little gasp. There was only one interpretation to the indentation of the tiny lines possible. They had been made by a pair of lips pressed against the painted face of Jacob the slave, first while the painting was new and then over and over and over again during a period of twenty years. Abe wasn't sure why the idea stunned him, but it did. All the time he'd known the portrait, all the time he'd kept it, he'd assumed the smudge to be just a smudge and that the letters nested with the portrait in Marian's treasure box were most likely from Lord Geoffrey. Now he wondered if indeed they'd been from the much-kissed Jacob, written during that period in the stockade before he'd gone to Chota. He'd claimed it was Marian who taught him to speak proper English and also to write. Abe wished he'd taken the letters from the derelict cabin too. Sighing his regrets, he rolled up the painting and stuck it under his shirt until he could find a new hiding place in Isadore's home. As the weather was cold and he'd a jacket on over the shirt, the secreting of Lord Geoffrey's masterpiece into his marital bedroom—an area at the back of the kitchen closed off by makeshift draperies—presented no difficulties. No one was home. He wrapped the painting in a square of protective linen lining a drawer, then stuck it behind a large, heavy wardrobe. With effort, he pushed the furniture hard against the wall.

During that winter, the family heard from a new group of malcontents. A much smaller one, it's true, but one no less vocal and demanding of recompense. For whatever reason, perhaps the benevolence of the protected hollows they called home, this group had not found their rubber melted in summer. Instead, it went dry, brittle, and cracked broken in winter. Once more, Sassaporta and Son was forced to open the free room and let the disgruntled have at it. “We'll have to close up shop if another onslaught of the rubber cursed knock on our doors,” Isadore confided in Abe. “We have to start making a profit somewhere, or else you and I will both be hitting the trails in the spring.” Abe hoped he exaggerated but he feared he did not.

Hannah's pregnancy was worrisome in a season when life was already full of burdens. In the first months, she couldn't keep a morsel down. Susanah suggested she eat cold ashes from the fire, but it didn't help. Her complexion went sickly pale, there were dark rings beneath her eyes. She grew haggard and weak, though she bravely soldiered on. At night, Abe rocked and soothed her with songs and kisses until she fell asleep, then he spent hours awake, adding up debts and subtracting resources, wondering how he was ever going to keep the wolf from the family door.

By midwinter, Hannah could eat again, but just as she appeared to be regaining her strength, her back bothered her and she began to have fainting spells. Twice in the next months, spots of her blood stained the bedsheets. Susanah, who'd had some experience as a midwife's assistant back in Bethnal Green, advised Hannah to spend her time in bed until the child came. The young mother obliged. She lay in bed all day in a room shut off from light and air as protection against winter's icy touch, filled with unwholesome daydreams of losing the child. Abe tried to comfort her, but there were days he could not. He'd come to love her for her beauty, her energy, and her pluck. The pregnancy had drained her store of each. Her anxieties seemed to him endless and intractable. There were days he told her he must be gone to work overlong in order to complete an inventory or restock the shelves. But it was winter and business was exceedingly slow. What he aimed for was a little time without her. “She drives me mad!” he'd complain to his mother. “I cannot help but feel the child is a test of our love and we are both failing completely!”

Susanah consoled him. “She'll be back to herself in form and temperament once the child is born and so will you,” she assured him. “But until then, maybe it's good to work a little late now and again. Don't worry, I'll look after her.”

He'd go, insisting to Hannah on his way out the door that yes, yes, he loved her, he'd worry about her all day, and yes, yes, he'd return for lunch, but he wouldn't have time for a lingering one, what with the pre-spring orders and invoices to complete. Once he hit the street, he walked rapidly to the store, nearly running, only dimly aware that he was not running to work but fleeing from a helpless, frightened wife and his growing fear that he would prove unable to take care of either her or the child, should it survive. Often, he thought of Marian and Jacob, of the infinitely greater trials than his own they'd faced with stoicism. His thoughts left him both envious and ashamed.

There came a day in early March when Abe sat tense and idle, wondering if business would ever pick up. Hannah had come to term. She could deliver the child any day, so his mother said, which put him on pins and needles. He worried about money constantly. Isadore studied his accounts in the back room. Every so often, he'd hear the elder man mutter, “Ay, yi, yi, yi, yi,” which did not encourage. It was a time of year business should be picking up, when farmers planted their fields, when cows began to calve and horses foal. Everyone needed new clothes after winter had worn their old wardrobes out, but the haberdashery section of the store gathered dust. Even the bin of cloth and leather scraps favored by those looking to patch rather than purchase new, and the shelf of buttons, needles, and threads, were left untouched. Bored, uneasy, and depressed, Abe left his stool with duster in hand to brush off the windowsills. He glanced across the street to where people filed in and out of the storefronts of the competition. Something was wrong. Everyone seemed in a hurry. All heads turned north. He followed their direction to see what was of such universal interest.

It was Edward Redhand, riding into town astride a massive black stallion. Behind him were the Stone brothers, Black and White, one astride a chestnut mare, the other a black-and-white paint. The Redhands were dressed in European style, more or less, but their mounts were outfitted as Indian horses were in the old days before the tribes were civilized, with blankets and hemp halters. The men bore arms. Pistols and hatchets were stuck in their braided belts, bandoliers of bullets crossed their chests under frockcoats. They held aloft spears streaming with feathers and fringe the way corsairs on parade bear ceremonial swords. Neither man nor equine was decorated in war paint but yet they were terrifying.

They terrified especially Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar. Here he was, a breath away from fatherhood, partner in a business that teetered on the edge of collapse, a maker of promises he'd pushed so far to the back of his mind he'd forgotten he'd made them except in nightmares, and trotting down the road, heading directly to him, were the avenging angels of Cherokee justice, arrived, no doubt, to collect on a debt he could not pay. He swallowed, he gathered courage. He prayed Ha-Shem was not so cruel He would leave Hannah a widow with an infant child by the end of the day. His prayers gave him courage. He worked up a smile of welcome and exited the store to stand at the entrance next to the freshly planted flowerpots.

“Edward,” he said. The lead horseman dismounted, tied his mount to the hitching post, and approached. “I've been expecting you.”

“I am here.”

“So you are.”

Edward extended his hand. Abe shook it. He nodded to the younger men, saying, “White Stone, Black Stone,” although he had no idea which was which and wondered suddenly why he had never been told their Christian names. There followed a short silence, a fractional one, perhaps two, two and a half seconds longer than it should have been, but yet that hesitation was enough to lend an awkwardness to conversation. “How is your mother?” he thought to ask. Redhand shrugged a little and looked straight ahead, over Abe's shoulder and into the store. “Old.” Abe prattled on. “It happens to us all, don't it? If we're lucky. Growing old, I mean. Well, I hope aging is gentle to her. And your sister? She is well, I hope?” Redhand glanced at him with narrowed eyes. “Hmm. Well. Yes,” he said. He lifted a hand waist high, palm upward, and raised his eyebrows.
Are we going to stay out here all day?
his pose, his expression asked. Abe blushed and ushered him inside. The twins dismounted as well.