An Undisturbed Peace (24 page)

The town grew faster than anyone had anticipated, and yet Sassaporta and Son continued to flounder, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy despite Abe's brilliant promotion plan of having Hannah and their baby girl bring around welcome baskets to the freshly arrived. Why this didn't increase business was a mystery to him—his daughter, Raquel, was an attraction all on her own, everyone cooed and smiled at the very sight of her—until one of their new neighbors mentioned casually to him that it was too bad what he'd heard on the street about the wonderful emporium that had been ruined by rubber. Then he asked for a discount on a set of shovels. Abe bemoaned to Isadore that the old customers were poisoning their reputation with the new. Isadore sat at his desk, shuffling through papers, scribbling in his ledger. He kept his nose in the big book while he spoke. “Customers suffer from selective memories, Abrahan,” he told him. “They forget the credit my peddlers once bestowed in the years of a bad crop or an overlong winter. They remember only the rubber.” He sighed grievously and slammed his ledger shut in a gesture that was half tenacity, half defiance. “In a matter of months, we will have to close up shop and return to the peddlers' camp. Business there is also not so good. As the roads improve, more and more people are willing to travel to towns for their shopping. We can always expand the field by catering more to the needs of slaves, but their pennies and nickels won't save us.”

The prospect of returning to the camp town was abhorrent to Abe. He could not imagine his dear wife and sweet child living among the rough crew that remained there. What if that was the final destination of their lives? Dear Raquel maturing among lowlifes and whores? Hannah old before her time, bent by care and woe? Himself a disgruntled, bitter failure?
Baruch Ha-Shem.
There must be a better answer.

“What about the trading posts in the upper towns? We can redouble our efforts to supply them. They could well expand their stock and keep the farther-out Indians and settlers from traveling for their needs. Perhaps we could even persuade the family headquarters in Savannah to allow us to reach into Mississippi or Louisiana, in the least settled parts, where others are loath to go. New markets are ever worthy for a business.”

Isadore stroked his beard. “It might hurt us as much as help,” he said, then threw his hands up in the air. “But any port in a storm!”

“Alright, then. I shall devise a battle plan and lead the charge.”

The two men shook hands, unaware that Abe's use of a military metaphor would prove meaningful over time. He made a list of items that could easily be transported, ones he'd never seen in a trading post before, things that might spur a sensation. Isadore wrote to the Sassaporta Brothers in Savannah and secured permission to solicit any territory of Mississippi and Louisiana that was more than seventy-five miles from a town. Abe mapped out all the known posts and ranked them according to whatever information he had on the population type and density of habitation each one served. Then he revisited his lists to further refine what could be safely carried along some of the more treacherous routes. He resisted the decision, but in the end realized that only he could be trusted to make the sales trips, for none of Isadore's dwindling staff of peddlers would be half as motivated to succeed as he was. At the first difficult mountain pass, all but he would immediately give up. “Ah, Raquel,” he'd whisper to the child, “I will have to leave you for months at a time and it will break my heart. But more will it break my heart to see you destitute.” The child would purse her plump, rosy lips for him and flash him a saucy look she'd learned from her mother, her brown eyes glittering with charming flecks of gold. “Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa,” she'd say, and throw her arms around him.

When it could no longer be avoided, Abe packed Hart with samples for a sales trip beyond the foothills. It was the summer of Raquel's first year. She was at an age when pretty children of jovial nature are equally demanding and adorable. With terrible reluctance, he took his leave from her on the street outside the store. He was on his horse, outfitted with layers of saddlebags piled on top of one another in gradually decreasing size. From a distance, Hart looked as if he had a giant squeezebox draped over his flanks, but good-hearted equine that he was, he didn't seem to mind. Hannah held Raquel up to Abe for a final embrace. In the strong light of a fine morning, Abe noted the cares writ upon his wife's brow, although she smiled bravely at him and patted their daughter's back soothingly. Intense pride in her courage swelled his chest. He leaned forward and kissed them both, then straightened up with his jaw set in firm resolve and rode off.

He was on the road through the summer and into the fall. Sales went well. His store of samples dwindled. He took orders at every stop. But traveling by himself away from his family, surrounded by the wilderness in which he'd spent his most formative years before his wife and child had entered his life, had a curious effect. He became afflicted with a terrible nostalgia for his early days in America. He thought of his first love often and wistfully recalled himself as young, callow, ignorant, and passionate. Everywhere he went in the upper towns, a part of him hoped to run into Edward Redhand or the brothers Stone, to hear news of Marian and Jacob, but chance did not turn to his desires. He could have traveled to Redhand's village, but he felt it wrong to seek him out. If fate denied them a meeting, fate knew best. With effort, he pushed from his mind all things Marian as an act of fidelity to his marriage, for he found no good in thinking of her or her brothers, only a romantic distraction possessing the power to consume his solitary attention bit by bit. With chastened heart, he pressed on beyond Cherokee territory.

Looking to rid himself of the last of his goods before going home, he found himself on strange ground in Mississippi. There he saw his first parties of Choctaw, a tribe he knew to have recently signed expulsion treaties, marching under the guns of soldiers escorting them from the land of their fathers to unknown territories in the West. These were not the wagon trains he'd seen on his way home after he left Jacob and Marian in Chota, those solemn, voluntary processions of tribes in exodus, their transport slowed by a lifetime of possessions, their women and children, their old and infirm riding or walking in as much ease as modern travel allowed, their men astride the backs of fine Indian ponies, providing protection. This lot was the resigned, betrayed by a false treaty full of holes. Their old and sick rode in rude army wagons built to convey boxed supplies. Thirty or more were stuffed into wagons with no covering to protect them from the elements, neither beveled bonnet nor simple blanket set up on poles. Abe saw faces, very old and very young, stretched in extremis and yet no one ordered that the wagons stop to give them succor. In despair, mothers and sons jogged alongside them, working to keep up, able to offer nothing but the hot comfort of eyes that bore witness to their suffering. Behind them, proud women, warriors, and children walked, their heads high, their faces set in determined silence. There was a ruckus, but it came not from the exiled but from soldiers who whooped and galloped about to fluster those who walked, trying to frighten them into utterance, making a game of it until their lieutenant ordered them to cease. From the hillock on which he and Hart paused to watch the rueful march below, Abe attempted to count the exiled. By his reckoning there were nearly two hundred people along with twenty soldiers and a single wagon loaded with sacks of supplies; food, he supposed, and maybe medicine.

This was but the first group of the expelled he witnessed. There were others he encountered on his way home, each in the same state of abject, silent mourning. It caused him to recall Edward Redhand's prophecies of the Cherokee future with a sense of inescapable dread. What would happen to Marian and Jacob, he wondered despite himself, when the same policies that afflicted the Choctaws came to rest at the Cherokee's door? How could she possibly accept a mandatory expulsion? He imagined her anger, her fighting spirit ramming heads against her afflictions and those of Jacob. He imagined her annihilation and groaned lament in the night by his lonely fire. He looked up at the swarm of stars blanketing the mountains and swore upon them as Ha-Shem's jeweled agents of light that, if it came to all that, he would do what he could, however he could, to preserve the life and freedom of Marian and Jacob even if it meant his own well-being. He amended himself almost immediately. Anything, that is, that did not compromise the safety of his dear Hannah and Raquel.

A Return to Grace by Suspect Means

N
ear mid-fall, when the mountains are the most beautiful, when streams rush, trees go the color of gold and fire, and animals grow fat and dark in their winter coats, Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar returned home triumphant. He'd sold every item in his pack. His pockets were stuffed with orders. His ready cash earnings were not glorious but substantial enough to keep the store afloat in a manner that would ensure solid nights of sleep for the entire family. It happened that he arrived in Greensborough shortly before the Jewish New Year, which was declared by his mother to be a great and wonderful omen of continued good fortune. To cement it, she convinced her husband to hire a traveling rabbi, who would conduct services for them despite the fact that the price of such was a dear percentage of Abe's profits. “It will be a
mitzvah
,” Susanah said, “and bring us more blessings.” It was exceedingly difficult to arrange at the last minute, but thanks to the use of swift horses and homing birds along with a dollop of luck, the deed was done. Word was sent out. The remaining handful of Jews at Isadore's camp traveled to Greensborough to attend the rabbi's service, along with other Jews spread out over the countryside who'd heard there would be an old-fashioned holiday there. The new hotel was full. Every home with a spare cot was rented out. For the first time the sound of the shofar was heard in the town, attracting considerable attention and curiosity. Quakers remarked that dogs ceased barking, cows stopped lowing, birds stopped singing from the shofar's first blast to its last. More than one admiring farmer contemplated sawing off one of the horns of his ram to fashion a like instrument.

No one loved the shofar more than little Raquel. Now that her father was home and she'd learned to stand up, she clung to his leg at every opportunity. As she was under three years of age, the rabbi permitted her to stand with Abe during the services rather than in the section marked off for women by quilts strung over a clothesline. When the shofar was blown, she dropped the arms that encircled Abe's knee and stood straight and wide-eyed at the long notes, hopped one foot to the other with the short. When it was over, she reached up her little hands to beg her father to pick her up and transport her to a spot near the rabbi. Once there, she pulled on his caftan and begged for more. Everyone, including the rabbi, laughed. After services, the Sassaportas feasted on roasted turkey stuffed with barley, chestnuts, shallots, apples, raisins, and spice all properly blessed by the rabbi. Susanah served honeyed delicacies from the old country and everyone toasted to a sweet year of health and prosperity. Pleasing his elders no end, Abe sat at table teaching his wife the words of all the blessings required before, during, and after their meal. Until then, they'd not been sure he remembered them.

Hannah had only learned the blessing for the candles on Friday nights, and this by virtue of her mother-in-law's efforts, not her husband's. When Yom Kippur came, Susanah noted how Hannah did her best to fast with them for the first time, taking only a little fruit and water during the day as she was not accustomed to such deprivation. Her parents wrote asking her if at least she and the child might visit them at Christmas, providing there was not too much snow on the byways. Her sisters and their families would be there, it would be a grand family reunion. She replied that she would do her best. Abe promised to take her there, weather permitting. When Susanah overheard Hannah describing to Raquel the Christmas tree and the presents, there was at least no mention of a baby Jesus and from this omission, she took hope that her granddaughter would not be Christianized over her mother's holiday.

Between the Jewish holidays and Christmas, business was slow as it always was in the cold months. Abe pondered mightily trying to devise new sales strategies for the spring, but his bag of tricks was empty. He looked constantly for inspiration, had a few lame ideas, ran them by the family for critique, and accordingly abandoned them. Apparently, he always said later on, one must sift through a lot of dross before finding gold. The key is never giving up. Indeed, the striking of gold is often happenstance.

What happened to Abe was that while taking his wife and daughter to the Milner farm for the Christmas reunion, he crossed paths with a convoy of army supply wagons. He asked the man in charge, a lieutenant of craggy, war-worn appearance, where they were headed.

“Anywhere that ain't Choctaw country,” was his reply. “We almost got all the buggers out of our assigned section down there but they's some laggards ran north. We went after to round 'em up and escort 'em west.” He took a flask from inside his shirt, drank long and deep against the morning chill. “We got 'em,” he said. “And we'd be long home except for the weather and supplies. Now, there's nothin' a man can do 'bout weather. Supplies, though. Somebody's hide should burn. Supplies din't last. Quartermaster couldn't get everything we wanted before startin' out. We was hopin' to get 'em there quick and easy, let 'em hunt their way to food and such. But the weather. The rains was terrible, flood was all over, and then came the snow. Slowed us down. We'd run out of just about everythin' by the time we put 'em on the ferries to cross the river. We bid 'em fare-thee-well and told 'em to get 'emselves to the new territory next to Arkansas, what they's callin' the Oklas—on their own. Good luck to 'em. Bound to be a frigid walk.”

There came a fork in the road. Convoy and family parted company but the information imparted to him resounded in Abe's mind like the echo of cannon fire. For whatever reason or reasons, something he would devote his winter to finding out, the quartermaster in charge of outfitting troops charged with Indian removal had difficulty in the requisition of necessities. Perhaps it was a question of funding. Perhaps it was a question of will. Whatever it was, if Abe could get to the right people in Washington, he knew he could convince them that the North Carolina branch of the Sassaporta Brothers trading group was precisely the vehicle that would find what was needed for the next round of removal and at a good price too.

The Christmas visit lasted four days. Tobias and Esther spoiled little Raquel with treats and presents. She played with her cousins, two girls close to her in age and an infant boy. Hannah sequestered herself with her sisters much of the time while their husbands attempted to befriend one another. Gunther and Paul did just fine together. But there was a distance between Abe and the others that could not be breached. He was alien to them and knew it. One night, Bekka's husband and he sat cozy by the fire. Gunther asked Abe if he could feel his horns, which he'd been assured all Jewish males possessed. Abe had heard the question before, but not since he left London. He sighed grievously. “I don't have any,” he said. The other man leaned back, squinted as if sizing Abe up, and remarked, “Then why you always wearin' that cap, if not to cover 'em up?” Abe weighed telling him the truth, that he kept his head covered because Ha-Shem told him to, that he had given up so many of his observances in this wild, free country, he had to hold on to something, even something so flimsy as a cap, or he would no longer know who he was. But this would only lead to questions more difficult to answer. “I suffer in the cold,” he replied instead. Bekka's husband stroked his chin. “Well, you are a desert people.” His observation was uttered with the finality of a man who is accustomed to considering his own judgment and finding it invariably right. Abe let him be.

It was not difficult for him to find ways to spend his time at the Milner farm apart from the others. No doubt they were as uncomfortable with him as he was with them. While they were singing carols at the local church five miles away, he spent his time with paper and pen secured from his father-in-law, and with them sketched out plans for his assault on the US War Department, General Quartermasters Division. While they strung the draft horse's reins with sleigh bells and trundled off to give the neighbors baskets of baked goods, he combed Tobias's stack of newspapers for articles on the removal procedure, taking down the names of the men in charge. While they napped after Christmas dinner, he jotted down the food, clothing, blanket, and medicine requirements for a family of four traveling from Vicksburg to Fort Towson, on the border between the new Indian and the Arkansas Territory. Then he determined the number of oxen, hogs, horses, sacks of corn, dried beans, pumpkins, and onions that might be purchased along the route and how much would be vital before starting out. He figured how many people a midsize steamboat could ferry across the Mississippi to Arkansas and budgeted what would be required to sustain them after they reached Little Rock.

“Just imagine!” he enthused to Isadore on his return to Greensborough. “We won't have to take credit. The government pays on the spot. We can get all the goods we need from the farmers hereabouts, I'm sure of it. Now that most of the Cherokee have removed themselves to the upper towns, the farms in the foothills are reporting sizeable gains in acreage and projected harvest. They're not sold by contract anywhere yet. We can be the first. All we have to do is supply the army with enough to get them to Vicksburg. We could make a deal with the Mississippi branch of Sassaporta Brothers to resupply the trip from there on. So even on the second leg of the trip, we'll make a handsome commission. Not only that, once we've proved ourselves in '32, there's a final round planned for '33. We can supply that removal too. After the Choctaw are resettled, surely there'll be other tribes we can help relocate.”

Isadore was behind him one hundred percent. “We'll send you to Washington come the spring,” he advised. “It's not just the War Department men you need to see but the other ones, agents from the Commission of Indian Affairs. They'll be the ones. They'll be your men with their boots in it. You'll have to woo them, we'll have to budget for that. Don't fear. We'll get the money somewhere.”

Isadore begged and borrowed to remain true to his word. Outfitted in a new suit, a sleek beaver hat, and a fat purse, Abe visited Washington in the late winter when the roads were more of mush than snow and ice. It was a dirty, difficult ride for him and Hart, but better, the family agreed, than waiting for spring. A keystone of Abe's sales plan was to solicit officials before they had time to think of how to improve the next round of Choctaw removal. When he arrived, he learned quickly that the game of government lobbying is one in which the most useful tools are those of patience and flattery. His backside polished a bench outside the door of the War Department for three days before he was seen by a midlevel administrator more concerned with the cut and crease of his uniform than the tasks at hand. Abe smiled and bowed and saluted, addressing the man as sir. His pitch was a hot stew of the most obsequious flimflam a seasoned salesman can muster. Without spending a penny on the man, he succeeded in obtaining a set of preliminary papers stamped in all the colors and varieties the War Department had to offer, which he then took to the office of the Commission of Indian Affairs. There he sat and waited again, this time under a row of Indian busts that were apparently modeled on a single man who looked astonishingly like Edward Redhand. He'd scrambled to get a seat. The corridors were crowded with Indian agents eager to pester the new commissioner, Elbert Herring, for one favor or another.

Abe was in a state of contained excitement, like that of a duck hunter, still, quiet in his blind while an unsuspecting flock of fat birds glide into the pond under his watch. He asked the fellow to his right what exactly was the name of the new commissioner as if he did not already know it. He plucked the sleeve of another man and asked him how to spell “Elbert Herring,” then made a show of scribbling it in his notebook. “Why, thank you, sirs,” he said. He made his eyes round, the eyes, he hoped, of a child. “I fear I'm unprepared for my business here. I could use guidance from gents like you.” He glanced at his fob watch. “It's rather late, don't you know, but if you're hungry, might I buy you a good lunch? A drink? An early supper?” The agents exchanged a sharp look, one Abe recognized from his old days in the ghetto. If there were such a phenomenon as the Mile End Lie, what passed between the two men was the Mile End Unspoken Collusion. Their gaze traveled in tandem to the door of the commissioner's office, where enough men were clustered to make the chance of seeing Herring before the end of the day slim indeed. Abe made his features open, innocent as he regarded them. “Yes? You'll come?” The men smiled and shrugged. “Marvelous! Obviously, I'm new here. Where do you suggest? Anywhere you like!” The agents pulled at their beards thoughtfully, then tapped the tops of their tall beaver hats. “The Old Patriot would do this time of day, no, Mr. Parker?” said one. Abe did not miss that agents standing near them turned or cocked their ears at the mention of the place. “Oh, yes, Mr. Judson,” said the other, “it would do well indeed.” Incredibly, as they quit the lobby, other agents parted to make away for them, dispensing Abe's new friends little nods of admiration as they passed.

At lunch—which extended long into the night—Abe learned first that an Indian agent spends so much time in the rough hinterlands, when he is in town he likes nothing better than a swank meal of oysters, prawns, squab, and tender cuts of beef washed down with plenty of Champagne, followed by exotic fruits and port. The Old Patriot, Washington's premiere hotel and dining establishment, had the well-earned reputation of offering all the luxuries a man stuck in the hinterland could dream of, if only someone else were paying. Abe could smell the money the moment he walked through the eatery's door. Stout men dressed in natty suits, their satin vests adorned in brightly stitched brocade, their thick gold watch chains stretched across satisfied bellies, sat around heavy oak tables draped in costly linens. Potted palms in brass pots created corridors and veils between tables as if stationed to provide a privacy everyone ignored.