No Resting Place (24 page)

He believed that he was witnessing a mass miracle, one being reenacted daily, a demonstration of the unflagging faith and trust that God in His greatness was able to inspire. It compared to the martyrs unflinchingly facing the lions in the Roman arena, to an entire nation of Jobs, never doubting, though tested without precedent or parallel. These were truly the Chosen People, wandering in the wilderness. The Reverend Mackenzie's question was, Did He who had chosen them know what they were enduring? No place on earth was godforsaken he knew, but there were times, especially at night, with the cold winds and the hungry wolves intermittently howling and the horde of vultures roosting in the nearby trees, their dreadful droppings audible, when it was hard to sense His presence here.

Yet the unconverted were as courageous, as persevering, as helpful to their companions in misery as the members of his congregation. Endurance and patience were not confined to those of the faith. The Reverend Mackenzie's creed underwent another change for the worse. He offered not God nor his bishop nor his diary any apology for his deviation from doctrine. At mass gravesites, unmarked for lack of time, he gave Christian burial to all, converted and pagan, shriven and sinner alike. The gospel had not been rejected by these souls, it had never reached them, in part because of the language barrier, in greater part because of the interdiction by the government of Georgia. Were they to be made to suffer, after all their earthly woes, the fires of hell in eternity because of their deprivation, their ignorance, their innocence? They were like those Cherokee children whose parents had signed their names to that petition to Washington against removal: they would have signed it if they could. That petition had been rejected by the one to whom it was addressed, but he was a man—and a hardhearted one. The Reverend Mackenzie's petition was to God. A jealous god, to be sure, so self-described, but a merciful one, a forgiving one. Works, not faith, were the path to salvation, and these souls had worked! The path they had traveled was straight and narrow! They would never reach its end in The Territory. They must find a resting place, one more hospitable than this bleak one which, in its frozen state, often refused to receive even their mortal remains.

To heaven's gate they would wend their way instinctively as to their cote, as sure of shelter as lambs. There they would meet their master and would thank Him for deliverance from their fellowman. He was jealous but He was not petty. He would not insist on inspecting them each and all to see that they bore His brand. A flock without a shepherd, then and there they would be purified like a sheep sent through the sheep-dip and passed through the gates into the fold.

“At least, Lord,” he ended his prayer, “make a place for them in that purlieu of yours, limbo. After what they have been through, to them it will seem like heaven.”

To his young friend and acolyte the Reverend Mackenzie spoke so many times of his people's patience that at last the boy grew annoyed with him for his simplicity. He was still one of
them
. He was still white, after all. Not only for the tongue but for the Indian mentality he needed an interpreter. Even an adopted Cherokee ought to have been better at thought-reading. In any and every mind of all those around him he would have found burning the same bowl of sacred fire, all kindled at the same source. What now impelled them, and to which each new woe was an added goad, was not meek acceptance, not blind faith, not hope of reward in some life to come; it was wrath. Enlightened by a boy, the Reverend Mackenzie learned that the lure now drawing them toward their promised land was the exaction there of revenge Old Testamental in its stark severity. The Cherokees were on the warpath.

“This is a good day to die.”

Some Cherokees lived to say that more times than one but for most it was said just once in a lifetime. It was held in reserve until that day declared itself indisputably. Knowing this, those hearing it did not gainsay it. It was said in submission, to placate death so that one's spirit might rest peacefully, not forever contend against its fate. Best that it be said where one was born and had lived and would have kindred spirits close by, but wherever it was said would be one's resting place; peace must be made with it, acceptance. When living relations came to commune they would find tranquility.

Long since gone now is the grave at the roadside, indicated by the second of Captain Donovan's three maps, on the spot where Sarah Ferguson, wife of David, said those words, and where she was buried together with a boy of ten who had died within the hour along with her. This was done at the bereaved mother's suggestion and with the bereaved husband's concurrence. In this alien and lonely place, remote from kith and kin, woman and child would forevermore have each other for company.

It was a time for tears, but the time was short, just as the grave was shallow. Here where people, benumbed by hardship, had ceased to be persons and been dehumanized, death had lost its sting, and the loss was felt as the ultimate deprivation.

The old man and the boy marched no faster now that they were no longer held back by the old woman. The pull of still another place, a part of themselves, tugged at their steps.

After the allowance of a few days privacy, Noquisi revisited his grandfather's mind. As though on tiptoe, having timidly knocked and gotten no answer, he peered inside. He drew back from what he found and quietly beat his retreat.

To make sure he had not just happened in on a passing thought, he returned several times over the succeeding days. Always it was the same, still and silent, dominated by one image: that of his wife's grave. For the boy's sake, his body marched on, but his spirit had stayed behind with hers, and there it would always remain.

The time came when they could go no farther. Too many were too sick. They made camp and settled in. A hospital camp it was.

Captain Donovan armed able-bodied men and sent them to hunt game for fresh meat. He combed the countryside and at large farms commandeered livestock and stores. He paid for them, but he commandeered them, and he named his price—a fair price. He sent wagons to towns within a radius of fifty miles with orders to come back loaded. “Buy whatever you can find. We need everything.” If the town was one big enough to support a chemist, he sent a shopping list of Dr. Warren's needs. It was seldom fully filled, although—or perhaps because—the remedies he prescribed were of the commonest. Captain Donovan bought out whole dry-goods stores and issued the cloth for as far as it went. An ironically gaudy assortment of tents and tepees it made, in stripes, dots and flowers, like a gypsy encampment. He shocked all, yet won their practical endorsement, by forbidding the dead to be buried wrapped in their blankets. He would have stripped them of their clothes, he told the Reverend Mackenzie, but, fearing that such a barbarity might provoke an uprising, he stopped short of that. The blankets were redistributed among the living, who, in their dire necessity, overrode their superstitious objections and slept in them.

The doctor and his assistant went their rounds from tent to tent, both those of the emigrants and those of the sick soldiers. More than one disease was loose among them but the most prevalent and the deadliest were cholera and typhus. They bundled their patients in blankets with heated stones inside to sweat the poison from their systems—the same remedy as the exorcist's but with a different explanation for it—a white man's explanation—a similarity not lost upon the boy. They dispensed calomel.

Then the doctor came down sick. The boy nursed him. He felt himself responsible for the health of the one responsible for the health of all. On him the calomel had no effect. Or rather, it had its effect: it hastened, if it did not cause, the man's death, as on a distant day—a man well past middle age by then and long since known by another name—Noquisi would learn from his reading. (He maintained a lifelong interest in medicine, owing to his brief juvenile career at it, and in secret loving memory of his real father, the doctor.)

“
Ai
!” he cried, holding his finger on the doctor's pulseless wrist. Back from out of the darkness, echoes of his own, from all over the camp, came the wail, “
Ai
!” Roused to join in the chorus was the pack of wolves encamped nearby.

Said the Captain after the funeral, “Looks like you're our doctor now, son.”

“I'm not off to a very good start,” he said, looking at the grave of his first patient. “But I reckon I'm about as near to one as we've got—Lord help me and help us all! I'll do my best, sir.”

“Spoken like a trooper,” said the Captain.

He had the feeling that to Captain Donovan his youth and inexperience were not disqualifications. It hardly mattered who their doctor was, so little was any able to help them. The post was mainly ceremonial. He himself thought that too. He would do what little he could, but his main worth, he suspected, would be to give dying people the comfort of thinking that somebody was busying himself trying to do something for them. Many would expect of him just what they would expect of a witch doctor whom they called upon in extremity despite knowing that profession's record of failure and because at least they did no harm. He was saved from feeling like an imposter by his own modest estimate of his worth, and sustained by the sense that he was of some worth at least.

Actually, he would tell his grandson all those years later, disclaiming the boy's admiration for his taking on, at age fifteen, the job of doctor to some seven hundred people (that was what they were down to) there was not all that much to know about the profession back then. To be sure, it was a lot more than he knew; still it was pitifully little in sum. In fact, he was already more of a doctor than many of his more backward patients had ever consulted. They believed that medicine was white man's magic, and he did nothing to discourage them from believing that he, the son of a doctor, had inherited it.

And so indeed he had. His father had always explained to him what the symptoms were that had led to his diagnosis and what the treatment prescribed for the illness was. If the demands upon his attention were too pressing at the time, then he described the anatomy of an injury and the procedure for dealing with it afterwards on their way home. The uses of the herbs they gathered and grew were known to the boy by heart. He was a walking pharmacopoeia.

True, his apprenticeship with his father had been short, his experience limited, but to make up for what he did not know he now had the book.

The late Dr. Warren's formal education had been supplemented by study of the one volume comprising his medical library. It was entitled
The Doctor's Vade-Mecum
. It was some three hundred pages long. It contained the whole art and science of medicine, human and veterinarian. That it had been closely read was evidenced by its thoroughly thumbed condition, and that it had been consulted often in haste and anxiety at times of emergency—especially its index—by the drug stains and the bloody fingerprints on its pages. It became the boy doctor's bible.

He had not yet reached the chapter on fractures when a child who had fallen out of a wagon was brought to him with a broken arm. However, he had once watched his father set a similar break and listened to his explanation. He knew he would need splints, bandages, the flannel ones used also to bind the fetlocks of horses, and a sling.

As he had seen done for children with teething pains, he made a cloth sugar-tit, soaked it with whiskey, and gave it to the child to suck. On second thought he gave the unhappy father a shot of the whiskey too. Then, both to nerve himself to inflict the pain he must, and to seem more of a man, he took a shot of it himself. When he gave the arm the first wrench the little girl passed out. The father, unable to watch, withdrew. He was then able to work on an unconscious patient and without an anxious observer.

“That was as good as your father could have done,” said Agiduda, just before the boy threw up.

But though the old man was proud of his grandson, he feared for his safety in exposing himself to contagion. For soon there were a dozen tents segregated from the rest, with people in them suffering from a variety of communicable diseases, if the boy was right in his diagnoses.

“I must do what I can, Agiduda,” he said. “I am my father's son. He would do it if he was here.” As he said that he wondered where his father was, whether he was alive. “He would expect me to do what I can. I'm better suited than anybody else we've got, though not by much, I admit. But I'm learning fast.”

He made his rounds carrying Dr. Warren's black bag morning and evening, in between times reading the book, often in search of clues to cases he had just examined, and having his grandfather, text in hand, quiz him. Often he would identify a set of symptoms accurately, and name the specific prescribed for treatment, only to have to say of the latter, “But there isn't any more of that. It's been all used up.” Or that he never had had any.

One of the tents contained half a dozen children with whooping cough. Their convulsions racked them, bent them double, turned them blue in the face. They had every appearance of suffocating, of drowning on their phlegm. They sweated profusely. They ruptured vessels and bled at the nose. He dosed them with ipecac and sulphur, belladonna, a sweetened elixir of dilute nitric acid, as recommended by the book. Their mothers nursed them—their older sisters in the mothers' absence.

Having had the disease as a child, as he learned from her family, and being now immune to it, a young woman was placed in this tent to recuperate from her latest fit of the falling sickness. She had frothed at the mouth, had convulsed violently. Her tongue had had to be held by hand to keep her from swallowing it and choking. She lay in a comatose sleep for two days. Awake, she lay in a daze, corpselike, staring, too weak when spoken to to answer, deaf to the whooping and wailing going on around her, regaining her shattered strength. Possible causes of the falling sickness, according to the book, were “fright, distress of mind, passion, worms, and many more.” He had seen dogs with worms slathering at the mouth, contorting, running in circles and biting their tails. He gave his patient the vermifuge wormwood. Before she could be discharged from the tent she had another fit, as severe as the first.