No Resting Place (17 page)

The routine of life inside the compound was quickly established; there was little option in it. You staked out a position for yourself on the ground. There you sat. You got up to go for a drink or go to the latrine and you came back to your spot and sat. As there was continual shifting about, you might find that somebody had appropriated your place. Not that it mattered. Except for near the wall, which you could lean against, and where there was shade for a while each day, one spot was the same as another. Even those with places against the wall abandoned them out of restlessness.

In the night you got up to relieve yourself, stepping over sleeping bodies on the way, sometimes stepping on them, and afterwards you could not find your way back to your place in the dark. In the depth of night—between the snores—the cries arising out of nightmares—the wailing of wakeful infants—you heard the sound of the sentries' footsteps patrolling the perimeters of the walls. Despite them, a few young men leapt over. Most were caught and brought back at once, some gave themselves up after days of starving in the woods, a few made good their escapes—at least, they were never seen again.

Growing from this inanimation, and from their dejection, a pall of listlessness settled upon them. The sameness of the hours made the days interminable. The sameness of the days made them meaningless; without events to differentiate them one from another they ran together in the mind, confused the memory. There were outbursts of momentary madness caused by the inactivity and the tedium, and the person had to be restrained. The women bore up better; it was the idle men who broke. Stunned, almost stupefied, the women squatted, silent, or else emitting in chorus a low wordless hum of lamentation. The children drew in the dirt. The men gambled with their fingers. They soon lost interest, then sat dozing, hunched like birds roosting along a limb. Some stoked their pipes and smoked without stop. Whiskey was smuggled into the camp and sold to the prisoners by the soldiers; drunks, sprawled on the ground, grunted in their sodden sleep like dogs whimpering in their dreams. Just as did an animal confined in a cage, you stirred, opened your eyes and looked blinkingly around you, saw others in your same condition, and relapsed into torpor. To the old Amos Smith, recollecting his youth, the ordeal that had since come to be known as “The Trail of Tears,” terrible as that had been, began as a relief from the mindless stagnation of those months in the concentration camp.

For, months it was. Not for all of them, but for all but a few.

The first contingent of emigrants departed on a day in June that was like a day in August—hottest in living memory. They were of a manageable number—some three hundred-odd. Beef cattle, hogs, chickens to be slaughtered and consumed on the way, and other provisions; wagons, oxen and draught horses, and fodder for them; drinking water to be found for no more than they were would present no insuperable problems. All was orderly. There were sorrowful leave-takings between those going and those forced by illness to stay behind, but even the anguish of separation was tempered by gladness that their loved ones were escaping from the camp.

Before reports could get back on the progress of that first group others set out from the various concentration camps. All wound up stalled together on the east bank of the Tennessee River. This they were to have navigated by steamer and flatboat to the place where they would disembark and proceed overland; now, as army officers experienced in the transportation of people in numbers ought to have been able to foresee, the yearlong drought had lowered the water level so that the river was too shallow to be navigated. The land was parched, a desert. Oxen and horses keeled over in their traces. Before the sun rose to evaporate it, people licked dew from the leaves of trees. Their numbers now were not manageable. They soon exhausted their provisions, their fodder. Afraid of contagion, farmers and storekeepers fled from their procurement agents. For epidemic diseases had broken out among them, including the most dreaded one of all, cholera, and word of this spread like the plague itself. The stifling heat rose daily to new highs.

When word of this state of things got back, the government in Washington charitably acceeded to Ross's request that further emigration be postponed until the advent of the cool season. Through the rest of June, therefore, through all of July and August and into September, the Cherokees would stay where they were. Actually it was October before they left.

Meanwhile more prisoners were crammed inside the compound daily as the squads of soldiers combed the countryside in their search-and-seize operation. The condition of these worsened with each batch. Last-ditch holdouts, hiding in the woods, in caves, moving only under cover of darkness, living on roots, on the bark and the sap of trees, forced to search for drinking water, they were brought in too weakened to flee further, or had been forced to give themselves up. Among the crowded masses body lice, nits, ringworm became universal. Inside the stockade, with people bunched together like a bed of maggots, it was as though the rays of the sun had been gathered by a lens and focused upon that spot. Life there became a foretaste of hell.

Dysentery flared like spontaneous combustion, fanned into flames. That there might be latrines for use while others were being cleaned, more were built. The stench of them never lifted. Victims elbowed one another as they squatted over the trench—only to have to return momentarily. They might have been able to laugh in their tormentors' faces as their fingers were lopped off one by one, but dysentery destroyed all defenses by destroying all dignity. They writhed on the ground and groaned like animals in their pain and their punctured pride. Desiccated by loss of body fluid, unable to eat, they grew emaciated and jaundiced.

So numerous did the deaths become that the two coffinmakers worked full-time in the shed they were allowed to erect against a section of the wall, taking advantage of periods when demand was slow to stack up an inventory for busier times to come. They made them in two sizes, adult and child. The sound of their sawing and planing and hammering was daylong. Everybody else being idle, they never wanted for watchers. They were envied for having something to busy themselves with.

Survivors of the dead, if there were any male ones, and their friends, served as pallbearers—members of their clans when there were none. Others, including strangers to the deceased, volunteered to be gravediggers; it was an opportunity to get outside the walls for a little while. Only a little while, because the graves were kept shallow, the diggers' guards being unwilling to stand for long in the heat and glare of the sun. There was much inattentiveness at these graveside services, as the prisoners, waiting for, or waiting out, Noquisi's translation, gazed off longingly at the distant woods. The Reverend Mackenzie officiated.

Between Christianizing the living and interring the dead, administering the communion of the sick and the dying and conducting classes in the catechism, the Reverend Mackenzie and his young acolyte were kept busy. The Reverend Mackenzie had hopes that the boy might get the call to holy orders. He knew much of the prayer book by heart, could have performed the called-for offices without assistance from his elder.

The Reverend Mackenzie had reappeared in the camp on the second day, and he would continue to appear there daily throughout their stay, doing God's work, dispensing what solace he could. There was much in the official line for him to do even before the deaths began. The misery of life inside the stockade and fear of the future converted many of the as-yet unconverted. In all this it was Amos Ferguson who interpreted for him. Thus in his duties at both baptisms and funerals the boy was allowed outside the gates more often even than the gravediggers.

The baptisms were done in the nearby river, the convert marched there and back under armed guard. Their procession made the Reverend Mackenzie think of the Christianized Roman slaves, and he likened the stockade to the Colosseum in which they were martyred. It no longer bothered his conscience to practice baptism by total immersion now that he knew it was not the rite of the Baptist Church but rather the Cherokee tradition of “going to water.” What did bother his conscience was the feeling that in his missionary zeal and out of his longing to give comfort he might have overstepped his commission by allowing simple minds to infer that God had made them promises. He knew that the expectation of deliverance from earthly oppression was not the proper aim in embracing the faith, but he knew it was the aim of many who came to him, and that to preach otherwise to them would be to perplex, discourage and possibly dissuade them. These people were so desperate for a glimmer of hope! Their oppression was so great, their cause so right—perhaps if he could convert them
all
, to the last one, if they were to speak to God with a single, concerted voice, then He would hear and heed. It was as though he himself had said to John Ross, “That petition you took to President Van Buren—let me try it on my Great White Father.” Yet he would have dreaded that, as the President had treated Ross, God might refuse to see him. He writes of his sorrowful sense of God's disinterestedness when, while pronouncing his benediction upon a man whose nose he was pinching shut and whom he had just raised from under the water, he saw one of the guards cross himself.

Among the Reverend Mackenzie's camp-inmate converts were a young half-breed couple. The husband's name was
Inali:
Black Fox, the wife's name was
Kanama:
Butterfly. They were from South Carolina, had been caught in the roundup here while on a visit with friends. Kanama was expecting her first child any day now. She was little more than a child herself, but if she was frightened at what lay in store for her she never let it be seen. Those among whom she found herself had much to be frightened of, and they did not have what she had to be glad of.

The older woman, herself a mother, who slept on the ground beside Kanama coached her in what she was to do when her time came, and this woman took it upon herself to make the necessary arrangements. Thus on the morning when Kanama's water broke, the coffinmakers vacated their shed, which was then curtained with blankets lent by their owners. Taking with her a length of rope, a knife and a piece of string, a pail of water and a scrap of cloth, Kanama went into her labor room. The rope, in this instance suspended from a roof beam instead of the usual tree limb, would be looped under her arms for her to strain against while squatting.

Customarily it would have been some older woman relative of Kanama's, but as she had none of them here, it was her neighbor-sleeper who sat now outside the curtain and chanted the traditional charm. Amos translated it for the Reverend Mackenzie.

Little man, come out! Hurry! A bow and arrows are waiting for you. Hurry! Come out
!

Little woman, come out! Hurry! A corn sifter is waiting for you. Hurry! Come out
!

It was early morning when Kanama entered the curtained shed. No sound was heard from her until the sun had passed over the compound from one side of it to the other. Long before that time activity had ceased. A hush had fallen that deepened as silence lasted behind the curtain. Sufferers from dysentery too sick to suppress their groans were removed as far as possible from the shed, placed near the latrines for speedy access thereto. Children left off their games, talk stopped, all attended with mounting expectancy. The future father sat with his head on his arms. More and more infrequently, as though growing discouraged, the woman chanted the charm, which appeared to have lost its old-time power. Meanwhile, although the women disapproved, fearing it might invite a curse and bring the child on impaired in some way, or even stillborn, such was the men's love of gambling, greater than ever now because of the boredom of confinement, they made bets on the baby's sex and on just when it would be born. Those gamblers who had picked losing times settled their debts with the winners as the hours passed.

Except for infants and little children, everyone fasted through the day. In this there was nothing traditional—a birth under these circumstances was a novelty to all; the fasting was spontaneous. An hour before time for the serving of the midday meal, and again an hour before time for the serving of the evening meal, word was relayed to the commissary that no food was to be prepared. Which of them it was who had taken it upon themselves to issue the order, nobody knew; but all concurred in its appropriateness.

Shortly before sundown there came from behind the curtain a loud, astonished gasp, a deep groan, a long-drawn, quavering cry. It was the moment of birth. Knowing as she did how public her lying-in was, Kanama had endured her pains in silence until then. A moan of support in which all joined answered her. A moment later the baby's first wails were heard. Sighs and grunts of satisfaction sounded.

Minutes passed, then in a weak, tired, but happy voice Kanama announced through the curtain, “
Tseliku
.”

“That means ‘a bow,'” Amos explained. “It's a boy.”

The delivery over, the carpenter's shed reverted at once to its original use, for while all were absorbed in the birth, one of the sufferers from dysentery had died alone and unattended.

As the Reverend Mackenzie tells his diary, he was of two minds during this period. He felt a proud sense of purpose in having this church of his, and he felt a deep sorrow that his church was what it was. He took advantage of every opportunity for ceremonial occasions. To the prisoners they were such a welcome diversion! Yet this very thing bothered him. For the first time he felt a touch of sympathy for those nonconformists who deplored High Church ritual as a distraction from stark spiritual substance. Kanama's baby, however, was such a joyful occasion for all, despite concern over its puniness and what whites might have called its Indian silence and stolidity. It was passed around the compound like a doll, and must have been dandled by every occupant out of infancy, so involved had they been in its birth. This called for “The Churching of Women,” with its imagery so appropriate to the setting:
Like as an arrow in the hands of a giant: even so are the young children. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them
. And following this, the thanksgiving of the mother after birth: Holy Communion.