An Undisturbed Peace (7 page)

Abe nodded. He knew of such cities. Jews had them in ancient times. It was a revelation to hear that Cherokee had them too. He'd heard of Echota. It was a far place from the Rupert plantation, some two or three hundred miles south over the mountains of North Carolina, through South Carolina, and into Georgia. His rounds took him no place near it.

“But,” the boy continued, “there's stories he died in battle trying to win his freedom, which is the Cherokee way. They say his ghost must be trapped down there or else surely he'd come back and haunt Dark Water to punish her for his troubles. They say he was much betrayed, havin' been loyal to her once upon a time. She was the flower of her day and men trailed along after her like puppy dogs. Him included. Who knows? If the rumors heard at master's table are true, President Jackson fixes to boot all the red men from down there, and their slaves too, even the ghosts. Maybe that vengeful spirit'll show up here soon. Then again, maybe he's still alive. Maybe.”

All the while the boy spoke, Dark Water took most strongly the shape of Marian in Abe's mind. Why? he wondered. Why does my heart allow the persons of the beautiful murderess and my beautiful Marian to intertwine so perfectly? Was it intuition? Or was it as foolish as expecting a native woman to love him? He thanked his informant, gave him his second cup as payment, and, as he'd teased the boy some, threw in the teapot that went with. The boy fumbled a bit trying to hold everything in his small hands. Abe gave him wrappings and a sack to carry the lot home. Afterward, he asked, “Do you know, does this Dark Water have a Christian name?”

“All them all do nowadays.” The boy sat on the ground to wind scraps of cloth around his booty and place its pieces gently in his sack. “Let's see, it's Mary, I'm thinkin', or maybe it's Margaret.” He polished a saucer with a wrapper and a bit of spit. Abe fixed him with an urgent look. “Try to remember for sure,” he said. The boy screwed up his mouth for a minute and studied the sky above. At last he said, “No, it's Marian, yes, that's surely what it is. Marian.”

A piece of Abe's soul rose and fell with the sound of her name. He took a deep breath to steady himself, then remembered to ask, “And what was his name, this slave of Dark Water's father, who is likely dead?”

“Jacob, sir, like him who wrestled angels.”

“Jacob,” Abe muttered, “Jacob.” The name echoed in his thoughts constantly over the next two months while he completed his rounds and sold out his wares. At the same time, he filled his mind with Marian's kindnesses to him and his horse. Why, she'd been the very soul of humane concern. How could she possibly have committed such vile torture as murder by flaming arrow? Could he trust the testaments of a German farmer or a young slave boy bribed by a teacup? Seized by a jealousy he could not name, he longed to discover the hows and whys of Marian's link to the true perpetrator, the cruel slave, Jacob, who'd followed her like a puppy. A man would have to be very close to her indeed to have murdered on her account, if that was what happened. With a fat wallet and bags of coin in his saddlebags, he thought over and over, Jacob, Jacob, until the name became a torment. After studying his map well, he made a decision. The hell with the distance, he told Hart, and turned the horse toward Echota, the city of refuge, before heading back to his uncle's camp.

In Echota

W
hat Abe knew of Echota, he knew from Clive Burrows, Uncle Isadore's man who sold there. Burrows had not told him that it was a refuge for criminals, but what he had told him was just as fantastical. According to Burrows, Echota, as capital of the Cherokee Nation, was a vibrant model city inhabited by civilized natives. It was a place where law was written, advocacy nourished by mind and treasure, where a newspaper was printed, where society congratulated itself on its wise path of adaptation and conciliation to the European invader, its abandonment of the old ways, its hopeful embrace of the new. At the time, Abe had doubted the elder peddler's descriptions, thinking them the typical exaggerations in which all their kind indulged when telling a colleague of their adventures on the road. They certainly flew in the face of what the other peddlers claimed, that Indians were brutes and primitives no matter the tribe or what clothing they chose to wear. Thinking on it, he realized in the time since their conversation he'd observed at least two kinds of Cherokee. One, mostly in the upper towns in the mountains, clung to the old ways. A second, in places near settler communities, were more or less civilized. Then there were individuals like Marian, sent abroad for education and display. Some returned to their old lives in disquiet, being neither traditional nor European but half and half. Others embraced European ways and married whites. Still others lived apart like she did.

But what Clive Burrows told him was something else altogether, representing a higher degree of assimilation than anything Abe had witnessed. Abe considered that the Cherokee of Echota were like
conversos
, those Portuguese Jews who swore allegiance to the cross to avoid torture, death, and expulsion from the land of their birth but who nonetheless prayed in secret in the sacred tongue of their fathers. Slowly, generation by generation, the Hebrew they murmured in shuttered rooms shed its meaning until only a handful of empty rituals remained. Eventually they prayed on their knees to Jesus all the week long and lit candles on Friday nights before taking a bit of bread and wine, but without comprehension. He pondered whether a similar fate would befall the Cherokee.

He also wondered if murderers seeking asylum in Echota lived together away from law-abiding citizenry or if they lived in common without stigma. Burrows told him there were few white people there, a missionary or two, a schoolteacher. He imagined the people of Echota kept slaves in small numbers, like most folk who didn't have plantations to run, maybe keeping a woman for kitchen help or a strong man for the heavy work in running a business. But why grant a slave refuge?

In London, there were slaves in the great houses, usually owned by men who'd made their fortunes throughout the Empire but most often in India or the Americas. It was fashionable for great ladies to flaunt their possession of enslaved footmen or ladies' maids, often black children gussied up in livery, wearing turbans that trailed exotic plumes and paste gems. They were more than toys but less beloved than milady's carriage horses, who were sold away with far less frequency and better comforted in their old age. Of the free blacks in London, many were runaways who lived in the worst circumstances, huddled together in fear of recapture, their movements about the city accomplished in the dark and in stealth. The Jewish ghetto was far from theirs. Abe himself had but glancing knowledge of black people before he came to Uncle Isadore's camp, and the ones he'd met in America through trade were universally slaves of the laboring kind, as far apart from London's tokens of wealth as stardust from the soot of a debtor prison's hearth. Even when he sold to them, he learned little of their hearts and minds. He saw they were shy of him, not knowing who he was, or what to expect. Because of his connection to the woman he loved, the idea of Jacob intrigued Abe mightily, yet he was alien to him, an unknown entity. The very idea of his life and death mystified. He hoped people in Echota remembered him well enough to answer all his questions.

After five days, Abe rode through a forgiving mountain pass, then along the Coosawattee River toward Echota. The Coosawattee was a broad river, its banks thick with trees and rocks and not much else. Every once in a while he came to an old campsite with a mound of refuse piled up next to logs half-buried­ in river sand, which he judged had been used by a Cherokee fishing party. As he got close to the city, he saw plantations in the distance, black slaves like so many crows dotting the landscape as they bent in the sun. They worked fields, or stirred steaming vats and sawed wood, all the various labors required to keep up fine estates. He noted smaller homes too, new ones jutting out from the sides of hills cleared of pine. He checked and rechecked his maps, thinking he'd wandered from Indian territory into white. It seemed not, but he was confused. Where were the huts, the tents and longhouses? Where the naked children playing at barbarous games?

When finally he entered the city of Echota, he nearly fell off his horse from twisting and turning about to take it all in. It was yet another bright sunny day. Glittering mountain light fell upon crisp manicured lawns, cultivated flower beds, clean streets, and immaculate two-story buildings painted in brilliant whites and yellows, arranged not in the haphazard assembly of the ragtag structures of Uncle Isadore's camp town, but in the kind of precise and dignified order that bespoke thoughtful planning and execution. In the middle of the town was a large public square, landscaped, bordered by a white picket fence, sporting a round, covered platform for public meetings and concerts, also benches and tables for the enjoyment of residents. Riding by him in the streets were Cherokee men with clipped hair, wearing tailored clothes and fine leather boots. They rode mounts under English saddle. Women walking along the well-swept wooden sidewalks wore fashionable dresses, bonnets, and gloves. Were it not for their chiseled faces, the high cheekbones and black eyes, the copper tint to their skin, Abe would have been certain he'd landed in a white man's town, and a wealthy one at that. Clive Burrows had not exaggerated. The European-styled men who had come to Marian's cabin, surprising him while he plucked fowl, were not half so finely attired or mannered as the least of these geniuses of imitation. He felt the dirt of his trek to Echota on his skin, heavy as a weight. He decided the first thing he must do was find a bathhouse or a hotel to clean himself up before he approached men better dressed and groomed than he to inquire about a refugee slave.

While Abe regarded with wonder the best hope of the Cherokee, more than a few Cherokee regarded him. Young boys jogged after him, racing to be the first to come alongside, and when two succeeded he queried them. “Boys,” he said, “is there a hotel in this town?” They shook their heads in the negative. He halted Hart and the boys halted also. “Then where can a man clean up before he conducts his business?” he asked. The boys shrugged. “In the river,” one said. Abe sighed, turned his horse, rode long enough to find a stretch of the river that was more or less private and washed himself in the cold waters of the Coosawattee while Hart grazed. He changed into the freshest of his shirts and brushed his britches with the same brush he used to groom his horse. All the while, he knew he was being watched and knew too it was the same racing boys, who perhaps intended to rob him. For all he knew, they had already.

Once he was dressed and as polished as he could get on the road, he made a show of going to a line of bushes to pee. He loosed his britches, leaned right, then left as if undetermined of the direction of his stream. The leaves of the bushes swayed in tandem with his movements—or rather against them—despite the fact that there was no wind. Abe smiled, then in an abrupt movement, pushed his hand into the leaves and grabbed a young Cherokee by the collar, hoisting the child in the air. Though the boy's face screwed up, his mouth twisting at its center, a vortex of discomfort, he uttered not a single sound. A brave one, Abe thought, just before the boy's compatriots dashed from the bushes to rush at his calves, kicking and biting them until he howled and fell, dropping his captive in his descent. The boy scooted up before Abe hit the ground.

There, from the dust, he stared up the noses of a ring of five panting, triumphant lads, none of whom were older than nine or ten. Each clearly debated in his wily mind whether to beat Abe further or let him be. While they hesitated, Abe got up and calmly brushed the dust from his clothes. He lifted up his pants legs to the knees to assess himself for marks and cuts, continuing to affect an unperturbed air. “So,” he said at last, “had your fun?” None spoke. He continued. “When I check my saddlebags, will all my goods be there?” To a boy, they scowled, angrily, but still did not speak. Thinking he'd hit a nerve, Abe went to his kit and inspected everything. Nothing was missing. “Alright then,” he said. “What were you spyin' on me for?” Again, none answered. Abe found himself irritated by their silence more than he was humiliated by their beating. He cursed under his breath, turned his back on them, and mounted Hart. Just as he parted his legs to give Hart a bit of a giddy-up, the boy whose collar he'd grabbed spoke. “We meant no harm, sir,” he said. “We don't get many strangers here.” Another boy, the runt of the group, chimed in. “Especially white ones.”

This made sense to the peddler. As a boy growing up in a London ghetto, he knew the excitement a stranger in their midst caused. He'd joined a surveillance party or two of his own back then. Now that they were all friends, so to speak, he thought to ask the boys what he'd come to find out. “I've traveled here looking for information about a man, a black man. He was a refugee and his name was Jacob. Do you know of him, lads?”

The last was a superfluous question. At the name Jacob the boys exchanged a furtive glance, their chests rose and fell in unison, then in unison they dissembled, each in his own manner. One made a circle in the dust with his boot, another crouched, intensely interested in a particular pebble, which he picked up and examined closely, a third turned and studied the opposite shore of the river, and so on. Abe wrinkled his brow, mulling over their reactions. The boys seemed to fear speaking about the man Jacob. Perhaps he should not have asked so directly. Perhaps the man Jacob was even still alive. “Now, there's a thought!” he said aloud, startling the boys, who took advantage of his pursuant meditations to scatter into the brush. Abe continued to puzzle things out. If Jacob were yet alive, perhaps the boys sought to protect him from strange white men, in which case he'd best be careful how he approached further inquiries in town or ranks would close and he'd get no information at all. It felt a good strategy to pretend to be a messenger carrying an important message from a friend. Why not from Marian herself? He could tell a lot from the reactions of whomever he spoke with on that score. But he must be cagey, as cagey as his rascally mates had been back home when they set a trap for some unsuspecting booby. He would have to employ a technique they'd taught him. He thought of it as the Mile End Lie, paying tribute to the place where the Jews Walk of London ended and the sumptuous new homes of the middle class began.

The second time he entered Echota he went directly to the largest building on the street, and as it happened, the building he chose was the courthouse. He tied his horse at a hitching post and went up the steps inhaling the rich scent of fresh paint. Inside, he was met with a functionary sitting at a desk, quill pen in hand, scribbling in a ledger. His shoulders caved inward as if he'd carried a terrible burden from childhood and never quite set it down. Abe coughed. The man looked up, then froze, his pen in midair. So it was not just the boys, Abe thought. White men appearing out of nowhere in Indian territory was always cause for alarm. He made the first move, putting a smile on his face and going forth, his hand extended. “I am Abe Sassaporta,” he said, “a friend of Clive Burrows.”

The Cherokee stood, extending his own hand across his desk. “I am William Blackclaw,” he said. “Clerk of the Court of Echota, capital of the Cherokee Nation.”

They shook hands.

“I hope all is well with Mr. Burrows?”

Abe reassured William Blackclaw of the senior peddler's health and after a preamble of praise for the beauty and cleanliness of Echota, he told the clerk of the court he was looking for a man named Jacob, once a slave of the family of a woman named Dark Water, a man rumored to be in residence in Echota as a refugee. There was no question William Blackclaw was surprised by the inquiry. He blinked. He licked his lips. His jaw clenched. “And what sort of business might you have with this man?” he asked. Abe's heart quickened. He'd played the game well. Judging by Blackclaw's response, he was now certain Jacob yet lived. What a coup! he thought triumphantly. What a coup! At the same time he assured himself of the slave's resurrection, a fire flared within him, a fresh, hot desire not to just learn about this Jacob, but to see him, to speak with him, to discover all he could about Marian's role in the murder of Billy Rupert from that singular source. He dissembled. “I am honor bound to bring him a message from a dear friend,” he lied.

William Blackclaw muttered “I see, I see” while going around his desk and putting on a frock coat that hung on a brass hook near the front door. Telling Abe to please make himself comfortable for a few moments, he hurried out the door. Abe watched the man's progress through an open window whose curtain fluttered gently against him in a sweet afternoon breeze fragrant with jasmine and pine. Blackclaw moved with determined purpose to a building kitty-corner to the courthouse and disappeared within it. He emerged in company of a severe-looking gentleman with a broad, bold face whose thick black hair was styled in the manner of an English dandy, short at the sides and swept up and over at the crown of his head. The two men chatted out the sides of their mouths while they crossed the street. Their eyes drew a bead on Abe's window, forcing him to draw back and away so they could not see him. After they reached the courthouse and entered it, all three men found themselves face-to-face nursing brittle smiles, insincere tones, and the kind of florid phrase that always connotes mendacity.