No Resting Place (11 page)

It was to attend a session of the district court that the boy was taken by his grandfather to town that day. Had things been otherwise than they were, had there been any counterattractions, the court sessions would have been the place's feature entertainment; as things were, they were its only one. However, no loss was felt; they filled the gap. A bearbaiting, a public hanging would have had to compete for custom when court was in session. To see the jurors retiring to deliberate, and then returning in under a minute with a verdict of guilty as charged, was worth the price of a ticket, and it was free. And when, through their interlocutor, the foreman, they put long legal questions couched in mumbo jumbo to His Honor, the judge, they were as good as a minstrel show. It was said that somebody had once opened and looked into the copy of the Bible upon which witnesses, whether right- or left-handed, or even ambidextrous, placed their right hands while swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and had been shocked to find that it really was a Bible. Most likely because no book more appropriate to the tenor and atmosphere of the court was procurable locally.

Among the pool of prospective jurors a spirit of civicmindedness prevailed. No venireman ever asked to be excused from duty, not even those working in the gold fields, for whom the per diem allowance of a few dollars and all you could drink was a financial sacrifice. Jury duty was a chance to shine, a challenge to put on a performance for an appreciative but demanding audience. Deliberations were never protracted, there was never any wrangling, a verdict had already been arrived at before the choice was made of twelve good men and true.

Nonjury cases were every bit as entertaining, for the judge was a one-man show. His way with the gavel, his bullying of witnesses, his comically straight face, his steady sipping from his glass of water, the proof of which could be sniffed as far back as the fifth row of spectators' pews, had gained him a following. He was judging the case the Fergusons went that day to hear tried. It was one in which the plaintiff sought a court order for the eviction of a family illegally occupying a house belonging to him. The head of the family was the man from whom the owner had bought the house. He had been served notice to vacate but the notice had been ignored. As proof of his ownership of the house, the plaintiff produced the deed of transfer, signed by the defendant, and two witnesses who swore under oath that they had been present at the transaction.

That they knew the outcome of the trial beforehand did not lessen the spectators' pleasure. It was like seeing a favorite skit performed again. This one was far from the first such case they had attended, and all ended alike. They were not there to be surprised by the plot, they were there to enjoy the action and to see a demonstration of blatant impudence.

Questioned by his attorney, the defendant on the stand claimed that the signature on the deed purporting to be his was not his signature, examples of which he executed and entered in evidence; that he was barely acquainted with the other party in the case; and that he had never until now laid eyes on either of the witnesses. He was then questioned by the plaintiff's attorney.

“You had, I believe, a mixed-blood grandmother, part Cherokee?”

The man on the stand was silent. His conflict of mind was plain to see. He was torn. He wanted justice, wanted to keep the home that was his, yet he was remembering some of his grandmother's many acts of love and kindness to him. She was his mother's mother. Now, poor soul, she was dead. One day her spirit and his would meet again. In the end—swayed also by fear of being prosecuted for perjury—he was unable to disown his grandmother.

With that the plaintiff's attorney rested his client's case. He moved that this man's testimony was inadmissible in this court. The judge's ruling was mandatory: the order of eviction was issued forthwith.

“
Next
case!” said His Honor. It was his punchline, and it never failed to draw from the crowd a great guffaw. The merriment was enlivened by his mock-serious attempt to gavel them to order.

It was not long afterward that Sonny Slocum, whom Amos had known all his life, whom he had sometimes played with despite the gulf in their social standings, the Slocums being little better than pore whites, got wise to this trick and stole Amos's pony. The pony was stolen while grazing in the pasture, wearing only a halter. Later Sonny came over and offered a dollar for the saddle and blanket and the bridle. It puzzled him that his offer was refused.

“Why, Amos, you ain't got no more use for them things,” he complained.

Early one morning in February a man appeared on the place. Who he was, how he had gotten there, when he had arrived, there was no accounting for. It was as though he had sprung from the ground overnight like a toadstool.

When first seen, he was standing down by the barn lot gazing up at the house, his putty-colored hat pushed back on his head. He watched Agiduda's approach with his arms folded across his chest. He was a tall, gaunt man with several days growth of rusty-red whiskers on his face and throat, rising almost to his eyes. Between this and the shock of hair that grew low on his forehead he peered out at the world as a poodledog does. By spitting on the ground he gave away his race.

“Drawed you a nice place there, neighbor,” he drawled. His breath visible on the frosty air seemed to be the fumes of envy and resentment. “Warn't quite so lucky in the draw as that myself. But you can keep your fine big house, mister. I got me a gold mine.” He spat again, this time venomously, turned his back and stalked away. He covered ground with a stride that was long and stiff-kneed. He disappeared into one of the former slave cabins, where, apparently, he had already made himself at home.

On that same morning of his sudden appearance from out of nowhere, the new owner of the 160-acre lottery parcel adjacent to the Fergusons' remaining land fell to improving his property. Not only had he himself materialized unobserved, mysteriously conveyed, he had brought with him tools—at least, an axe. The steady sound of it at work in his woodlot reached the house daylong. You would have thought the man had undertaken single-handedly to clear the land for crops, and to get the job done before nightfall.

For several days, from sunup to sundown, the sound of chopping continued, as persistent as the hammering of a woodpecker. Then, although the Fergusons were early risers, they awoke one morning to find, on the line dividing their shrunken property from that of their new neighbor, a row some six feet long of palings driven into the ground to form a fence, or rather, a wall. As contiguous as teeth they stood. The man was erecting a stockade, and such was his urgency to get it done, he was driving stakes into ground still only partially thawed. To put up this first section of it he must have worked by the light of last night's moon.

The Fergusons watched him from a window. He pounded the stakes into the ground with the flat of his axe. Infinitesimal was the penetration into the grudging ground that each stroke gained him; a quarter of an hour's work advanced his project by mere inches.

“What kind of livestock is he meaning to fence in that he needs a solid wall like that for?” Agiduda wondered aloud. “Cattle don't require it. Sheep don't.”

“Even hogs don't,” said Noquisi.

“What can he have in mind?”

The man worked with the persistency, the concentrated single-mindedness, or mindlessness, of an insect at its one instinctual function. To him the Sabbath meant no more than to a pissant. It was doubtful that he knew when it fell, all days of the week being alike to him. He would run out of saplings, and then for the next several days his axe would be heard again in the woodlot. The tick of a clock could hardly have kept up with it. Then he would be seen plying between the woods and his work site carrying saplings in bundles on his back. After a stake was driven in place its tip was sharpened to a point with a drawknife.

What was fueling all this activity was another mystery. Sheer willpower, he seemed to be going on. Perpetual motion. The man took off from work for a spell occasionally, but hardly long enough to have gone into town, on foot, to trade. A shot sounded from time to time in his woods, and there were still some nuts from last year's crop on the ground, but no roots at this season and certainly no berries. Flour, sweetening, fat: what he was doing for these white man's staples God only knew. He could have set a trotline on his stretch of the river and, breaking the ice, have run it mornings and evenings. No team, not even a saddle horse, was anywhere to be seen on his property, yet he must have arrived by some conveyance well-provisioned.

Chop, tote, pound, sharpen: daylight to dark, rain or shine, seven days a week: after a month of it the fence stretched fifty yards. Then work stopped. The man disappeared from sight. Silence fell. No more saplings came out of the woods.

“Wore himself out,” said Agiduda. “He needs to rest up before turning the corner with that thing. A week in bed, I should think.”

But the fence was carried no farther. It was left a straight line enclosing nothing, starting where it did, running its length, then terminating. Anybody could have walked around either end of it.

Just one finishing touch was applied to it. One day soon after work on it was abandoned, or, as it turned out, completed, a sign appeared midway on its outside. There was no need to get closer than the house to read it. What it said was, “KEEP OUT. Mr. O. J. Blodgett, Sole Prop.”

After his fence was finished, nothing more was seen of Mr. Blodgett. He got an early start on the day; smoke was already rising from his chimney no matter what hour the Fergusons got up, but what he was doing with his time there was no knowing. Then one spring morning at break of day he was seen issuing forth with a pick and shovel over his shoulder. Had he been serious, was he speaking literally, in saying that he had gotten himself a gold mine? If so, he was wasting his time even more senselessly than in putting up his pointless fence. The gold fields were confined to a distant part of the Cherokee territory.

Meanwhile, provisions were running low, and as if that were not bad enough, Grandmother, in her anxiety, imagined them to be disappearing even faster than they were. She said nothing about this at the time for fear of revealing what she had long suspected, that her brain was going soft, and of pointing out what was already plain to see, her incompetence as a housekeeper.

First it was a ham. She had thought she had four of them left in the smokehouse. She could have sworn there were four. They had butchered in November. She had served a fresh ham at Thanksgiving and a cured one at Christmas. After that they had lived off the buck which was the first deer to be killed by Noquisi with his new bow. What Indian would eat hog meat when he could eat venison instead? To this day, some would no sooner touch it than would a Jew. So she had thought that of the original six hams she had four left. Now when she went to get one she found only three. When could they have eaten the other one? And how could she not remember their eating it? Cooking anything was an experience for her, not just memorable but painful; how could she have forgotten cooking that ham? Her brain was going soft. It had never had much use, and now it was going soft. She mistrusted her capacity to count to ten. She was ashamed of growing old and embarrassed to have it seen. Her ineptitude at the household tasks now asked of her added to this sense.

She who had never planned or prepared a meal, who had never been inside the root cellar except to take shelter there from cyclones, must now manage a house. Of quantities of foodstuffs needed in store, of methods of preserving this one and that, she had only the most rudimentary notion. How long different things took to cook, so as to have them all ready to serve together, how much seasoning to add: these things, second nature to most women, to her were a mystery. She had sat down to her meal and eaten it, and that was her only connection with it. The activity that went on in her parents' kitchen when she was a girl, and later in her own, no more concerned her than did the picking of the cotton or the shearing of the sheep.

In a kitchen Mr. Ferguson was as inexperienced as she was. But he had taken his turn as cook in hunting camps. He had never slaughtered a hog or a beef before, but he had killed and butchered many a buck, and there was not all that much difference. He had cooked a little for the fun of it, and now, seeing her struggle, he came to her aid, he made a game of it—two old folks playing house. And, indeed, the empty house had something of the air of a playhouse, especially with the boy living with them; they were camping out in it. Between them, Mr. Ferguson and Noquisi did the scullery work. It drew them close. Having these chores to do helped to some extent to take their minds off the separation of the family, the threat of dispossession and removal that hung constantly over them. Yet it shamed her as only an Indian woman could be shamed to see her man doing woman's work, and to have the boy see his grandfather thus humiliated in his old age.

No matter how she tried, she mismanaged everything, and now, under her supervision, a general collapse loomed imminent. The milch cow seemed to be drying up, long before the time for it—no doubt because she was such a poor milker. The hens' production of eggs had fallen off by fully half. Hardly a week passed but what another one disappeared from their pen. A fox must be getting into it, though she could not find the breach. A turtle it must have been that got one of the ducks on the pond. Apples, potatoes, squash, turnips, pumpkins, peas, beans, lard—she knew she was wasteful, that she spoiled much food in preparing it, still she did not understand how an old couple and a boy could consume stores at such a rate. When spring came and the ground thawed and could be worked, a kitchen garden could be planted, but could she hold out until then?

Go the Cherokees must, sooner or later, and the sooner the better, for conditions here worsened daily, and those the earliest on the scene out there would have the first choice of a place to settle—that was one of the arguments used by the Treaty Party to persuade them to emigrate. Another was that by going voluntarily they could pick their own departure date, at a favorable season of the year, travel their own chosen route, at their own pace, could provision themselves according to their tastes, could go in dignity rather than be driven like cattle, which was the alternative they were threatened with. Yet none, or very few, almost none, went voluntarily.