An Undisturbed Peace (29 page)

He flipped through the pages of the magazine. Another article reported on the Georgia Land Lottery. Georgians boasted of the benefits of swallowing up prime land in full development, gold mines, and entire towns regardless of federal treaty authority. The author quoted snippets of the Supreme Court's Chief Justice Marshall's decision in solid favor of the Cherokee on matters where federal treaty and state law such as the Lottery conflicted. He quoted also President Jackson's famous retort: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!” Abe shook his head at the cynicism of both Jackson and the author of the article. The summation was one that grieved him personally. It read: “In the end, Georgia does what it will. Earlier this year, when Principal Chief John Ross returned to his home from Washington after negotiating for weeks with the War Department on Removal matters, he found a certain Mr. Smith living in his home. He too had been dispossessed by the Lottery.”

Abe shut the magazine, unable to read further. He was full of disquiet and complained to his wife of the state of the world. She held him tenderly, then distracted him with a story about the antics of Raquel, who'd attempted to suckle her baby brother that day in a most comic manner. Yet the fate of Chief John Ross disturbed Abe's sleep for a long while. In the end, he buried himself in his daily tasks, deciding that the raising of children with a sense of ethics and fair play was the best remedy he could offer an unjust world, with the hope their generation might grow up to reform it, person by person, bit by bit.

Enemies

T
wo years later, at the tail end of 1835, Hannah found herself about to give birth yet again. As luck would have it, the very day she went into labor, Abe heard at the store that the Ridge family had signed a comprehensive removal treaty without the full authority of Cherokee law. In it all of the Cherokee Nation's land was delivered to the United States for the pittance of $5 million to be paid in allotments over time, payments no one believed would ever be made in full or without significant and frequent delays. Thousands of people would be transported to the western wilds. Abe gasped with disbelief at the bearer of the news. How had the Ridge family managed to override Chief John Ross? “You lie!” he told the hapless fellow, a trader come to fill outstanding orders before the deep freeze of midwinter. “Sir!” the trader protested, putting a hand on the gun holstered around his waist as if to challenge the shopkeeper or perhaps to protect himself in case Abe's consternation took an expansive course. To prevent either from occurring, Abe grabbed his hat and rushed out the door, leaving Isadore to take care of business and clear the air.

Once he was on the street, he had no idea where to go but home. He burst into the house brimming over with undigested emotion, ignoring the fact that his first two children were not there, having been shipped off to their grandparents for the evening to afford Hannah and Abe a rare night of quiet. It was a good month before her time. Hannah's face, a map of contented smiles, made no impression on him. Instead of recognizing her content, he poured out his dismay at the traitors of Chief John Ross and all his people.

“Why has this happened? What were they thinking?” he asked her who had no idea what he was talking about. “All they had to do was wait for the chief to finish his work. But now they've gone and done it. Placed all the Cherokee riches into the laps of settlers, planters, tradesmen, and miners. All those … all those
mamzers
who've been waiting, aching for them for so long, ah! So very long!”

Finished, exhausted, he sunk into the settee facing the fireplace and looked at his wife, his eyes brimming with frustration and disappointment. He expected her to come sit by him, drape an arm around his neck, and console him. She did not disappoint.

“My dear, my poor dear,” she said, settling in close to him, one hand over his shoulder, the other braced against her belly, “what are you talking about? What has distressed you so? What has happened?”

He told her. She considered his news and his distress while he continued to fidget and scowl.

“There's nothing you can do,” she said. “You mustn't torment yourself. It was bound to happen sooner or later. The people are tired of the ‘Indian Problem.' They want them gone, out of sight, so they can enjoy life like Georgians who defy the courts and take matters into their own hands.”

Abe's back stiffened. Her pragmatism sounded to him like betrayal. He took to his feet to lecture her. “The people can go to hell,” he said in a dark, ugly tone. He slammed a lamp stand with an open palm for emphasis, making his wife jump in her seat. Suddenly, she gave out a sharp, loud cry, grabbed his wrist, and said in wavering voice through clenched teeth, “Oh, no, oh, no, it's time. Get your mother here straightaway!” As he ran off in a panic to fetch Susanah, he decided his anger somehow had brought his wife's labor on and cursed himself.

The delivery was difficult, her struggle long, lasting the entire day, the night, and most of the next day as well. Judging by the faces of the women who bore bloody towels and basins of water as they came and went from the bedroom where Hannah lay, screaming at regular intervals, terrifyingly silent in between, Abe thought he'd lose her or the child or both. In despair, he vowed never to mention the Treaty of Echota in anger again, if only they would live. At last the child arrived, a small but healthy boy.

True to his promise, Abe kept his mouth shut as his neighbors hailed the resolution of the Cherokee fate. When the Quakers said, “It's as the papers say. They'll be better off out west, where there are no white men to trouble them,” he did not so much as shake his head. Defenders of the Treaty Party pointed out that the documents were signed out of patriotism because the War Department was losing patience with John Ross and his constant haggling over details. If he kept it up, there would be no more talk of payments for land or allowances in the new territory. There would only be the sharp ends of bayonets driving the people across the Mississippi, they said. Though it cost him dear, Abe neither raised an eyebrow nor a smirk. Privately, he nursed the vain hope that Chief John Ross would succeed in nullifying the Ridge betrayal. Ross had two years to do so before all Cherokee were forcibly expelled. “Two years is a good amount of time,” he said to his wife, “and Ross is the man for the job.” But he didn't really believe it. Rather, he agreed with Isadore's assessment that once the wheels of progress chugged along with determined direction, they were impossible to reverse. Hannah was also right. He was helpless to do anything about it. He stopped reading his father-in-law's journals. All they did was upset him. When he dreamt of Marian, he awoke depressed, out of sorts, a condition his family could not help but notice. He fought to put her out of his mind for their sake while his hopes of ever learning her fate faded inexorably into the West.

By the time their third child, Gabril, or Gabe as Hannah liked to call him, was learning to walk, Judah was closing in on four, Raquel six. Hannah was exhausted. The children were lively, noisy, the house was too small. For respite, she'd put them outside with Raquel in charge but Greensborough had grown. Their backyard playground had shrunk. The children's shrieks of laughter or petty argument bled through the walls. Their mother had no peace. Everything got on her nerves. Abe realized there was no need for them to live near the store anymore. His function in the family business had become managerial. He no longer worked the floor but spent most of his time at a desk next to Isadore's, writing letters to factories, negotiating contracts, devising sales campaigns, analyzing product trends, tracking the performance of peddlers and trading posts, investigating maps for locations of new stores in the towns popping up everywhere, and a dozen other sedentary chores. So he built them a larger house outside the camp town, a grand, two-story home atop a rolling hill with pillars, porticoes, many fireplaces, gardens, and shade trees. Once a week, he traveled to Greensborough with all his papers and charts to confer with Isadore and, when he did, spent the night with his stepfather and Susanah. The rest of the week he worked out of Isadore's old office in the camp town, a bustling community now large enough to sport an official name, Laurelton, for its stands of sweet bay.

Raquel went to the Methodist school in Laurelton most days, which lightened Hannah's load, as she had been teaching the child her letters and numbers by the family hearth the same way her mother taught her. Once someone else took over that job, Hannah's temperament improved considerably. She cooed her little student out the door and celebrated her return with kisses and smiles. She praised the virtues of Laurelton's one-room schoolhouse whenever she had a chance. There were twenty-seven other students, most of them children of farmers. Only Raquel was from a trading family, which meant that she attended most regularly while the others were often called away to help in planting or shearing or harvest. A handful were younger than Raquel but most were from two to eight years older. Their parents or grandparents hailed from Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and Ireland. It was good for her to know them, Abe and Hannah thought, until it wasn't anymore.

As Laurelton grew, the Sassaporta name became less important. No longer its sole employer, Sassaporta and Son competed for labor and market share. Of all the endeavors the new town supported, only the public stables under O'Hanlon's management remained a Sassaporta monopoly. Still, people were jealous. None of the old hands forgot the leaner days when Isadore ruled them like a king. They spoke behind Abe's back, remarking that he knew nothing of the land or the difficulties of taming it. He only knew how to exploit those who did. There were rumors that, after the rubber debacle, he was more loyal to the Cherokee than his own kind, and what was that exactly? Oh, yes, he was a Jew. Those types always went where the profit was. What was it the Cherokee gave him? Gold? It wasn't long before little Raquel was pushed in the dirt outside the schoolhouse, tripped when she climbed its stairs, and ignored by her teacher when she hugged her scraped knee and whimpered. Abe took her out of the school and put her back in the constant care of Hannah, who now had her hands full not just with the demands of the older children, but also with the toddler Gabril, who ran about constantly getting into mischief. To keep the peace, he hired the full-blood wife of poor Mr. Broken Branch to help her.

Poor Mr. Broken Branch and his wife lived on the derelict property next to Abe's own. Beatrice, a strong, stocky woman with a broad face and big hands and feet, had most lately looked after an old settler couple who'd died the previous year of feeble hearts, one after the other. Around the same time, poor Mr. Broken Branch had been kicked in the head by a horse he labored to shoe. He had a dent in the shape of a hoof on the left side of his forehead and was only good for the most directed tasks. O'Hanlon gave him a small pension out of his own pocket, but it was not enough. With no place else to go, the Cherokee remained in the servants' cabin of the old settlers' spread, leaving the big house to fall back into nature's cruel embrace while the heirs to the place squabbled endlessly in court. Abe felt righteous about the hire. He could have bought a slave for less than he'd pay Beatrice the first year. He liked the idea that his children might learn something of Indian ways from her, and she was in need. Of late, Beatrice had become more or less a beggar, scavenging in a town where people did not waste so much as a thread. The day she came around the back door looking for day work or scraps, they had a conversation. He asked her about her people. She claimed she had none. “I am away from them so long I can't remember,” she said. A planter-soldier, whose name was lost to time, had stolen her from her village when she was nine. He'd needed someone to wash his pots and his clothes while he was on campaign. He told her he took her because she was the right size, she wouldn't eat much. Beatrice was not certain if he was British, American, or French. “All I know is he like children,” Beatrice said. “He not like women. When I become one, he cast me out.” She shrugged as if such events were commonplace, leaving Abe to speculate uneasily on what she meant. “After that I wander. Mission men take me in. They teach me English and how to read and write a little. I was baptize in the water. I learn to cook and clean the way white men do. One day, I meet Broken Branch and we like each other well enough.”

Throughout their interview, Beatrice kept her hands in her lap. Her gaze was without expression, her voice was monotone. If ever a spirit of fire or ice had dwelt in her veins, it was gone now, smothered, beaten off. He considered the indelible twists of fate that had made her so. “I wonder,” he suggested to his wife, “if she is what happens to a people ripped from their roots and plunged, solitary, into an alien life. They are left adrift, belonging nowhere within touch or smell or taste of their true blood, whatever blood that may be, and this, you must agree, is a tragedy.” Hannah nodded. As long as the woman was honest and hardworking! she thought. The old couple had liked her. That was recommendation enough. Any rumination about her circumstances, how they came to be, was pointless. As a woman with a hundred daily practical concerns, she considered her husband a tender soul who thought too much. Abe was always philosophizing and sometimes came to dubious conclusions. That was his nature. She agreed with him anyway. She wanted help and Beatrice seemed humble and obedient. What else was there to say?

As it turned out, the children liked her. She taught them Indian songs, her only memories of her people. She cooked corn pudding for them and baked yam bread the way her husband taught her before he'd lost his sense. If they were very good and very patient, they found they could make her smile, which felt like accomplishment. As a bonus, poor Mr. Broken Branch fascinated them. They thought there was a magic about him because he was docile but also given to strange pronouncements out of the blue, like a mad wizard or bewitched king from a fairy tale. They took him with them when they went to fish or pick berries or mushrooms in the forest. Often, when Gabe got tired, Mr. Broken Branch carried him home. Once he was in the forest, he always did something unusual.

One day, in the late spring, when the children and their damaged companion tromped through the trees with their baskets and sacks looking for wild herbs and new fruits, Mr. Broken Branch stopped short. The children followed suit. He looked up at the sky and tilted his head. Slack-jawed, they waited to see what he might say. They waited a long time and were about to give up when suddenly Mr. Broken Branch said, “The drums are loud. The words are wrong. They come.” He said it the first time in his own language, so they could not understand him. “English,” Raquel said, tugging his sleeve. “English, please.” “English,” Judah said, hopping up and down. “English,” Gabe pestered also, pulling on his pant leg. Mr. Broken Branch blinked, then repeated himself in English, “The drums are loud. The words are wrong. They come,” and said it again in English after that. Later in the night, the family gathered in front of the living-room fireplace before bed. Abe and Hannah chatted about their day. The children played on the floor with their collection of feathers, stones, and sticks. Suddenly, young Gabe stuck out his little hands before him, closed his eyes, and repeated the Cherokee's pronouncement in his baby's lisp. “Drums loud, words wrong, they come,” he said as best he could while his siblings rolled on the rug, collapsed in laughter around him. “Drums loud, words wrong, they come!” they echoed, repeating themselves louder and louder until their parents begged them to stop and explain what game it was they played. They all talked at once so that neither Abe nor Hannah could understand them. “Time to go to bed,” Hannah pronounced at last, “before you give your mother a sick headache.”