No Resting Place (26 page)

Dismaying to the Reverend Mackenzie was the number of deathbed reversions. Not conversions—though there were those too. Reversions. Outright repudiations of faith. From the lips of people soon to face His everlasting judgment he heard God cursed. He heard His existence doubted—denied—derided. He was asked scornfully by one man, “Did he who made Old Hickory make me?” His answer, prompted by the man's complexion, was, “Out of clay of two different colors.”

Meanwhile he prayed, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do. Simple souls, Lord. Childish minds. Consider how sorely they have been tried.”

But this extenuation on the grounds of their simplicity received a shock when a civilized man, an educated man—none other than his friend and fellow-clansman David Ferguson—said with a fatalism that left him wordless, “Last night I got a glimpse of heaven. Just a glimpse. I saw it through the gates. It didn't look like I picture The Territory. It looked to me like Georgia—or like Georgia used to look to me. I was told by the old gentleman standing guard that this was not the place for the likes of me. I turned and went my way. I knew it to be my way because in the dirt were the prints of many moccasins.”

Came the night when the Reverend Mackenzie kept bedside vigil with his own patient. A black night it was. The light of the fire was not enough to read by. But for the present occasion he did not need his book. Two of its orders, that for the sick and that for the dead, he had come to know by heart, so many times had he had to repeat them. They had become compositions playable without the scores. In this performance of the one called for now, however, he foresaw some difficult passages.

The opening was already troublesome.

Peace be to this house, and to all that dwell in it

There was no house, there was only the thinnest of cloth tents to shelter from the cold the sick young woman who had dutifully followed him here to do God's work. She lay on the ground. He must be grateful that instead of just one blanket to wrap her in she had three, including his. The third had belonged to somebody now dead.

Remember not, Lord, our iniquities

Iniquities? His Nell? He verily believed that in her incorruptible purity she would have resisted the inveiglements of the original Serpent.

And the iniquities of our forefathers

He knew hers back to her great-grandparents. Iniquities! More virtuous souls could nowhere be found. To confess their sins, they would have had to commit the first one by inventing some. How many generations must bear the dusty guilt of their progenitors? That the sins of the fathers be not visited upon the children was belied by every prayer in the book. In Adam's fall we sinned all. The forgiveness of a grudging god must be sought forever after. Repent. Repent. Repent.

In the darkness of the night that surrounded him in this lost and lonely place he felt the lurking presence of Satan, tempting him to question and rebel.

In terror of himself, he skipped the next words of the service to get to:

Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses. As we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. Amen
.

Whether after that he recited the text as prescribed, he could not, in his fright, be sure. Perhaps by rote.

He next found himself at this passage:

Dearly beloved, know this, that Almighty God is the Lord of life and death, and of all things to them pertaining, as youth, strength, health, age, weakness and sickness. Wherefore, whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly, that it is God's visitation. And for what cause soever this sickness is sent unto you; whether it be to try your patience for the example of others, and that your faith may be found in the day of the Lord laudable, glorious and honorable, to the increase of glory and endless felicity; or else it be sent unto you to correct and amend in you whatever doth offend the eyes of your heavenly father
.

Take therefore in good part the chastisement of the Lord, for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth and scourgeth
—

Satan had stepped into the circle of firelight. He could not be seen but his face was prefigured in his voice. Both were sorrow-laden. His words were, “Poor pitiful fools! Poor, long-suffering, misguided fools, to worship and give thanks to a cruel and capricious god.”

Fortifying himself with, “The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life,” the Reverend Mackenzie discontinued the text. The deity addressed by it, the one who for his glorification tested beyond endurance the weak, imperfect vessels of his own creation, who exacted tribute by scourging, not a healer but the very god of affliction, every sickness a visitation from him: that was not the god he served. That was some implacable stone idol left over from early man, cringing and quaking in superstitious dread. That was Satan's god.

To his he prayed, “Dear Lord. Just and merciful God. Hear me in my hour of need. Lead me not into the slough of despond. Expose me not to the temptation of despair.”

Out of the darkness came the piercing long-drawn
Ai
! that announced another Cherokee death.

Shaken, shivering, he continued. “Thy servant Nell is sick. Spare her. Take her not unto Thee at this time, Lord, I beseech Thee. Leave her to me yet for a while. Man that is born of woman hath but a short while to live. Let her live her short while. The joys of motherhood she does not know, nor I, Lord, the joy of fathering a soul for Thee. Heaven is populated by her kind. Thy world here below hath need in it of those like her. A virtuous woman, who can find? For her price is above rubies. She will be with Thee in eternity; let her now be Thy beacon shining in the darkness for those who have strayed from the straight and narrow path and lost their way.”

With a fearful hand, warmed at the fire, he felt her forehead. It was chilled by a cold from within.

“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” he cried, fully expecting to be struck dumb for his audacity in appropriating those words from their source. Out of the night there thundered no voice of anger or reproof.

He felt choked by the clerical collar that his wife had kept clean for him, both unfit to wear it and resentful of it, and he ripped it off. Without it he felt naked, alone and afraid. He was not himself—no longer knew who he was.

At her burial he was too sullen, despondent and defiant to perform the funeral service. He could not in conscience plead for God's mercy upon her soul. It had no need of any plea. As unspotted as it had come from His hand, just so was it returned.

It was noted and remarked upon that the minister's wife had been put into the alien earth without ceremony. To his embarrassment, it was those who had left the faith who were the most sympathetic toward him, and the saddest. It further dispirited them as the final evidence of their abandonment, one and all. His still-faithful flock solaced him, saying, those whom the Lord loved he chastened and scourged. Coming back to him now, those words of his own to them were like his gorge rising. Most still affirmed in song that they were lost but now were found, were blind but now could see; but many showed in little acts of kindness and consideration their pity for him as the ill-rewarded servant of a thankless and hard-hearted master. He felt it was for God, not him, to explain His ways, if He chose, to such unassailably primitive minds.

At length the plague ran its course and lifted. The survivors rose from their sickbeds pale, thin and shaky, struck their colorful tents and resumed their trek.

At this point in his tale to his grandson in Texas old Amos Smith I was given a sign that his time to conclude it was growing short. The words “This is a good day to die,” beginning distantly, rapidly relayed nearer, sounded in his mind like tom-toms.

Remaining to be related was the final chapter that would bring the story back to the spot on the banks of Red River where his recital had commenced.

The vision vouchsafed to Agiduda of a heaven closed to the likes of him had been prophetic. On a morning not long afterwards, at the site of the third of Captain Donovan's three maps, he could not be awakened for all Noquisi's shaking.

A shallow grave was dug for him by the side of the road and a few stones heaped on it. There was not time to dig deeper, gather more. They must push on. One of the pots of sacred fire was placed on the mound in deference to his age and his standing in the tribe, to burn itself out after they were gone.

The Reverend Mackenzie prepared to orate. He had grown very weary of his oration. He could do it word-perfect without the book.

This time he was not allowed to speak. Noquisi stopped him.

“I am my own man now,” he said. Then, in English, but in the only way to say in Cherokee that a person is mistaken, he said, “Sir, you lie.”

Knowing this usage, the Reverend Mackenzie did not bridle. He did blush, however.

The boy looked around him, at the dismal day, at the endless road both behind and before them, at the huddled and shivering mourners, wan and wasted, at himself in his rags, so unready for this role of man thrust upon him.

“Your god is not his god,” he said. “Nor mine. Nor theirs. Ours was taken from us and yours won't have us.” And once again he looked around him, tabulating the misery of their lot.

Their difference did not divide the two friends. Rather it strengthened their bond, on one side at least. The man would be enthralled by the boy's staunch and unwavering disbelief, elevated by the example of his resoluteness, alone and unsupported by trust in any power outside his own small self.

“Out of the mouths of babes,” the Reverend Mackenzie writes years later. He contrasts his conversion there on the road to Arkansas with Saul's on the road to Damascus. He could never afterward justify the ways of God to man. It was not that what he had seen and experienced on that trail of tears had made him lose his belief in God's existence. His heresy went deeper than that. Gone from him forever was his faith in God's goodness. He would survive the long march, in time would take a Cherokee second wife and would spend the rest of his life ministering to his adopted people in The Territory, blessing them in God's name into and out of this world, revealing only in one of the last of his letters, this to a fellow seminarian, that the words of his which his flock wanted to hear, and which he mounted the pulpit, like a scaffold, every Sabbath to tell them, were words in which he himself had long ago lost all belief. This life of imposture and deception he defends on the ground that having seen the suffering he had seen he was not only justified but in duty bound to tell whatever harmless little lies might alleviate any more.

Part Five

Like Sam Houston not long before him, Noquisi was a Texan as soon as he crossed Red River, and to himself he called himself one:
Nvdagini
. The Cherokee prophets of old were wrong: here, at the end of a trail bordered with roses, white streaked with red like himself, he had found his resting place. Perhaps he had even found a foster-grandfather, a substitute for the one he had lost.

Everything about Texas appealed to the boy. Its very name meant, in the language of one of its native tribes, “the friendly country.” To one who in a short life had already encountered as much unfriendliness as he had encountered, that phrase sounded like “Rainbow's End,” “The Happy Hunting Grounds,” “Land of Heart's Desire.”

Of the place's many attractions, the paramount one was that it was not a part nor a protectorate of the United States. He had seen what guarantees by the United States of protection for him and his kind were worth. This was another country, one too young for the old animosities, vast, still sparsely settled, still unspoiled, largely unexplored. Though it almost staggered the mind in trying to comprehend this, it was a country won—with the help of his red brothers—by one of their own. One without a drop of the blood in him, a Cherokee by choice. Awaiting Noquisi here were not just his own people but those of many tribes, all living together in harmony, unified at last, not divided, by their red blood. Among these Texas Cherokees were none of the differences inflaming the others. A week on horseback he and his father had spent following that trail of roses, and the distance and the time added to the sense of having put all that division and strife behind him and finding here peace and friendship and a new beginning.

The sight of Chief Bowl, a man of almost as many names as Noquisi—The Bowl, Diwali, Colonel Bowles, Chief Bowles—was a comfort in itself. In him, every Indian had a grandfather—or a great-grandfather. His very age was an inspiration and a joy. It denoted peace, security and that most precious of rights, privacy, the opportunity to live one's personal life and not be just another of history's hapless pawns. He had attained that age: you could hope that you might. He had attained it here, away from America, away from the hostility toward and among your kind, back there.

They had been taken to him immediately upon their arrival. Now, as Dr. Ferguson told their story, with assistance from the boy when his Cherokee failed him, the old man listened in silence and with his eyes shut. The huffs he emitted as the account took its turns seemed not to evince his surprise but rather the contrary. It was as though he had heard it all already, or as though it was all just as he had foreseen. It seemed to the boy impossible to tell a man his age anything new to him.

As the refugees straggled in, Dr. Ferguson visited the reception camps in search of his son and his parents. Finding the one was easy, because in his role as doctor-interpreter, always on the scene of whatever went wrong, tending the sick, continually galloping up and down the column behind one or another of their mounted escorts, Captain Donovan's second tongue, he had come to be the best-known person on the march.

When father and son met, the boy allowed his being alone to speak for itself. As he observed the effect of this, a new conception of his father came to him. Seldom until then had he thought of him as somebody's child, always as somebody's father. In his childish self-centeredness he had not really thought of him as somebody's husband. Older and wiser now, knowing that one could be a child without being a
child
, he recognized his father's right to his private grief, and that for even him to attempt to mollify it would be meddlesome.