No Resting Place (15 page)

1800! As many as Santa Anna's own troops—but with this difference between them: they were far more warlike because they were far more motivated. Driven there from lands much loved, and having lived there long enough now to love this place, with nowhere else to flee to, they would make this their last stand; what was Texas to those peons impressed into the dictator's ranks? Had the confederated Indians fought alongside the Mexicans that day at San Jacinto, as self-interest suggested they should, the outcome would surely have been reversed. It was their neutrality that made the difference. Houston, too, had promised them title to their land should the rebellion be decided in his side's favor, but in gambling on that the Indians were taking a mighty big risk. The Texans were odds-on losers.

All this Agiduda learned at that meeting of Ross's cabinet. From Texas had come an emissary empowered by Houston and Diwali to offer the Cherokees a home, to urge them to come out en masse to the new country,
their
country, the only one headed by one of theirs. An all-Indian country, outside the reach of the United States. There they could preserve their old ways. They were welcome. They were wanted. They were needed. For no sooner had Santa Anna been released from captivity and repatriated than he broke the pledge which had gained him his freedom and began raising an army to invade and reclaim Texas, and vowing to punish every Texan with summary execution. With their help he could be repulsed. The whole world knew what warriors the Cherokees were!

God knew, by then the Cherokees needed a home to go to! For this was after the government in Washington, in order to get around Ross's stubborn immovability, had taken the simple expedient of deposing him from office and appointing Ridge as The People's negotiator. Yet to this emissary from the white red man for whom time had stood still for the Cherokees since his boyhood, the cabinet members could only listen politely and with straight faces. What an irony! Here was this imitation Indian, Houston, urging them to preserve their way of life when that way of life was long a thing of the past, hardly a memory. Warriors? The Cherokees? Maybe those of them out west, cut off from the encroachment of the whites, the teachings of the missionaries, the blandishments of creature comforts, the things that softened a man, no part of the Cherokees' self-transformation, maybe they still lived in the old tribal way, dancing the Green Corn dance, playing the bloody, the murderous stick-ball game, maybe they were still warriors, but to the ones in the east, now so worldly, so mock-white, these things were quaint and curious, childlike if not childish. Texas, even more remote, was more daunting than The Territory; what was expected of them that they do to win their place there, fight for it, was the very tactic they had always rejected here.

Said John Ross to Agiduda before the meeting broke up, “David, you look like a man smiling to keep from crying.”

Agiduda surveyed Ross from his sandy crown down to his small feet—a survey that took but little time considering the distance to be covered. “I was just trying, John,” he said, “to picture you in nothing but a breechclout, a feather in your hair, and war paint on your face.”

“And yourself? What about it, David, lad? The unspoiled wilds of Texas, where the buffalo still roam and the alligators enliven your morning dip. Fresh trophies on the old scalp pole. Stewed puppy in the cook pot. You'd take to that life, wouldn't you?”

“Ugh,” said Agiduda.

It was not the Indian grunt of assent, it was the white grunt of distaste.

The Ridges, long in favor of going but lingering on in hopes of persuading the others all to go with them, had gone at last. They did not go on foot. They went, for most of the way, by steamboat. Twenty dollars a head was the cost to the government of transporting the volunteer Indians on the open deck, but for the Major and his family stateroom passage was provided at a cost of some three hundred. This too was chalked down, to be remembered.

The Ridges were only being sensible, facing up to reality, and you told yourself that you ought to stop being foolish and follow their example. The day was almost upon you. Yet, like those people who put off making a last will and die intestate because they cannot face death, you made no preparations. How prepare yourself for a life that you had no wish to live, or care how you were transported to the place that you knew as the land of death? The slower the pace you went at the better. In your hopelessness, suffering and the prospect of suffering came to have a perverse appeal for you. You dared your enemies to do their worst for all the world to see and shame. In this there was some small measure of revenge.

And so, some out of fear, some out of faith in their powerful new god, some out of trust in their Tsan Usdi and a lastminute miracle of his, some out of pride, some out of apathy, some dejection, some defiance, some simply out of old age and its listlessness, its indifference to the future, the Cherokees hung on; even as the last day dawned the stockades awaiting them still stood all but empty. And as long as a single one of them held out, Agiduda would hold out with him. As long as a single one was forced to go on foot with nothing but the clothes on his back, nothing to eat but army rations, nothing to sleep under but the blanket he was issued, so he would go. The captain must be the last to leave the sinking ship, and in the lifeboat must share the fare of all.

You waited for them to come to your cell and lead you away. Instead of getting in a late sleep and thus shortening your hours of consciousness, you woke early. You could not sit still. All that you were seeing you were seeing for perhaps the last time, and you found yourself picking up and fondling the familiar objects that surrounded you, and weeping over them. The clock seemed to have broken. It was only a moment ago that you had looked at it, and yet it said now that an hour had passed. One of your precious last few hours, and you had lost it. Better not to look. But of course you looked, and now it was long since, yet the clock said it was only minutes—that much more time to have to get through. As the day passed and nothing happened, you oscillated between a hope that at the eleventh hour you had been given a stay of execution, a reprieve, and the dread that you were being toyed with, that this forlorn hope was your captors' ultimate cruelty: to make you long for release through their coming for you, and even thanking them for putting an end to your harrowing suspense. That night you went to bed certain that tomorrow would be the day that today was to have been, and they would come down upon you all the more ferociously for having been balked in their original plan.

On the following morning the resolution with which you had faced yesterday had to be marshaled afresh. Under cover of darkness hope had stolen back to tease and torment you. Meanwhile there was no knowing what was happening. If anybody knew, he was lying low. The whole world was. It seemed to be holding its breath. No news spread. You could only wait and wonder. And speculate. Tsan Usdi had won from Congress a temporary injunction, a permanent revocation. President Van Buren had dropped dead, been assassinated, impeached. Protest riots in the northern cities had spread into insurrection. The army of troops sent to round up the Indians had mutinied. The British had landed. God's pent-up wrath had been loosed in earthquakes, floods, cyclones. The Cherokees, some at least, maybe many of the young braves, had rebelled against Ross's passive resistance and gone on the warpath.

Surrounded and besieged as you had been for so long, called upon time and again to surrender and go into captivity, your cause written off, a part of you still stubbornly held out, kept its confidence that reinforcements would arrive in the nick of time, the worst would not come to pass. It was inadmissible, unthinkable. It would be like one of those hellfire-and-brimstone millenarian preachers prophesying the end of the world, and the day for it came and went like other days and the world was the same as ever.

But where now were the Creeks and the Choctaws, the Chickasaws and the Seminoles? Where indeed? Where were the Abnakis, the Apalachees, the Biloxis, the Catawbas, the Chickahominees, the Delawares, the Mohicans, the Munsees, the Nanticokes, the Narragansetts, the Natchez, the Pequots, the Penacooks, the Powhatans, the Susquehannas, the Winnebagoes?

Listening for a loud convulsion, you heard the hush that had fallen. The leaves and the blades of grass, the earth underfoot, no longer spoke. The familiar spirits had departed from the Cherokee homeland. You had lived to see and feel the misery foretold of old. Your feet were turned toward the west, never again to turn around.

One thing you must do, painful as the prospect was, by way of preparing for the end, was to pay a last visit to the graves of your kin. It was a long time now since the Fergusons had visited theirs, one reason being that to do so they would have to trespass on their unneighborly neighbor Mr. Blodgett's land, another that they dreaded a reproach from those spirits for abandoning them, leaving them to strangers, a separation which to the ancestor-worshipping Cherokees was the worst wrench of all in this forced removal from their homeland. Now such a pilgrimage could be put off no longer. And so, on one of the last of those last days, Agiduda, Grandmother and Noquisi, pausing on the way to pick wildflowers for offerings, went down to that back section of their former property where, in a grove of ancient oaks, lay the family cemetery containing all the Fergusons who had died in the New World, stretching back in time over a century.

What they found, scattered on the ground, were their skulls and bones, coffin lids and rotted cerements, mounds of more or less freshly dug earth beside each grave, the cavities filled with rainwater. In search of ornaments buried with the dead, Mr. O. J. Blodgett had mined his gold mine.

Their knees buckled and all three sank to the ground amid the flowers that had fallen from their fingers. Agiduda quickly covered the boy's eyes with his hand and turned his head aside from the scene—though even as an old man himself, telling the story to his grandson, he could still make vivid the glimpse he had had of it.

“Now I want to go from here,” Agiduda said. “Forever. At once. We will pack the wagon. Then we will go to the stockade and give ourselves up.”

However, that was not to be. Agiduda was spared the consequences of his lapse from self-abnegation. No Cherokee would go west in greater deprivation than he. The bill of sale for the homeplace produced by its new owner, Mr. O. J. Blodgett, who appeared early the next morning in the company of the soldiers detailed to capture the Fergusons, stipulated that he had bought the land, the house and all that it contained. There was Agiduda's signature on the agreement, forged by someone with access to the genuine article, dated and witnessed. The cost of that document, with its official ribbons and seals, must have been considerable. The Fergusons knew where the money had come from. Grandmother knew now where her missing ham had gone, who the fox was that had stolen her chickens and the rat her stores, who had gathered the eggs and milked the cow before her in the dark of the morning.

Mr. Blodgett had learned just in time of his neighbor's race. To Agiduda in parting he said, “Well, Chief, you sure fooled me. I took you to be a man like me.” He said it admiringly and expected it to be taken as a compliment, for fooling him he felt to be a rare feat, and to be taken for somebody like himself to be everything any man could want.

“A curse on you,” said the old man. “May you be haunted by the spirits of all my ancestors. May you go unburied for birds to pick your bones.”

In token of his contempt Agiduda spat on the ground at the man's feet. The gesture petrified the boy. For a Cherokee to do that was unheard of. To Noquisi it signified that his grandfather had spat out his soul because it had come to taste foul in his mouth in a world where the air must be shared with people such as this one.

They were marched down the lane and around the bend. There the six soldiers mounted their horses that had been left behind in order that the house might be taken by stealth and surprise. Then they were marched down to the main road. There they halted and waited, for what they were not told.

Presently there came down the road a troupe of some forty people with a dozen soldiers riding guard over them. Side by side, four and six abreast they marched, some with walking staffs, some who had readied themselves for this eventuality with packs on their backs, others with small household objects in their hands, a silver spoon, a china cup, a doll—whatever could be snatched up for a keepsake as they were driven from their homes. Mothers carried babies, fathers rode little children on their shoulders, pulled others along by the hand. On army remounts and caisson mules rode old men and women too feeble to keep up on foot, a man with one leg, an idiot girl enjoying her ride and the company of the crowd. Several more mounts, for other handicapped people yet to be rounded up, were in reserve, led on halters by a soldier muleteer. A sick woman was being carried in a litter by two of her three sons in turn while the off-duty one shielded her eyes from the glare with a roofing shingle. Thoroughness was the aim of the army's operation. No Cherokee was to be overlooked, whatever his or her age or condition; from those in the cradle to those with one foot in the grave, all were to be cleared out. The sight of Agiduda drew from them a universal groan. The Fergusons were ordered to fall in and the troupe proceeded down the road.

They had lost—if they had ever possessed it—the stolidity attributed to them. There was scarcely a dry eye in the crowd. Among them as they marched there was no talk. All were experiencing the same shock and numbness. While they had been driven from their separate homes and might each have had a different story to tell about what he or she had been doing at the moment of the soldiers' surprise appearance, all divergences among them had been canceled by the common fate that had swept them up and hurled them together. They had been reduced to cells of a single body, with a single purpose and destination, like a column of ants on the march. Meanwhile, Indian fortitude and Indian pride imposed silence upon them. It ought also to have forbidden them letting their captors see and enjoy their dispiritedness, but this was too great for them to dissemble. It was to give them an outlet for their desolation that Agiduda sang: