No Resting Place (10 page)

Sometimes the distance from town was too great, or the patient too sick to be left so soon, for them to return home the same day. In some of those one-room, windowless, smokefilled cabins they slept on the floor alongside the family members. The people asked to be told the latest news; when they heard they groaned. Time was when the doctor had taken home with him meat, meal, molasses, game, wild honey, nuts. Now fewer and fewer were able to pay him even in barter. Gravely ill patients, if they were able to travel, were brought back to the hospital to be attended there.

The garden tools were for the trip home, for along the way father and son were both on the lookout for plants for the pharmacy, or for transplanting in the herb garden. Some places they knew always to stop at in season. On one road was a field where pennyroyal grew, a simple cure for many ailments, its oil an excellent insect repellent. There was a certain field of mustard, for making plasters; another of flax, its blossoms the bluest of blues, its oil used in poultices and for bringing boils to a head. They knew the whereabouts of a toothache tree, rare in those parts, the nodules of its bark better even than cloves for deadening the pain. Wormwood, a garden escapee, they collected to be rendered into a vermifuge, mint for colds and coughs, licorice root for sore throats, larkspur for the ridding of head lice, hellebore for a sedative, Indian hemp for an anaesthetic, thorn apple for the spasms of asthma, willow bark for a tea to alleviate the miseries of rheumatism and headaches. Syrups, salves, creams, lotions, ointments, tinctures in flasks and crucibles cooking on the stove made of the laboratory by turns a perfumery and a pestilence—and always a fascination, an enchantment, a place where a profession was play. Had he not made himself so useful there, the boy would have made himself a nuisance. The path he had marked out for his own in following in his father's footsteps ran as direct as the flight of an arrow. Now that the mission school had been closed, he was studying the textbooks his father had been taught from by his tutors when he was a boy. He would follow him next to William and Mary, and from there to King's College in New York. Such at least had been the plan before the late worsening of the troubles. Now …

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, stood 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.