No Resting Place (28 page)

All present knew that not one of them, except for the old man, and he for the last time before they were born, had ever been in battle, had ever uttered a war whoop. But they were men now prepared to die defending their homes, and they were working themselves and one another up.

Throughout all this rant the old Chief sat and dozed—shut eyes as one listened signified rapt attentiveness—grunting from time to time as though in approval of the speakers' declamations. The more steam let off into the air the better. The pot on the fire would not boil over with the lid lifted. If a boy like Noquisi could think it, must not the old man also be thinking, “If you are so invincible against the palefaces then what are you doing here?”

The Caddo and the Choctaw chieftains sat discreetly silent. It was a long time since the Caddoes had been known as warriors; their pottery was the envy of all other tribes. As for the Choctaws, their proudest claim was that they had never warred upon the white man. Thus of them too one might have asked what they were doing here.

The old Chief dozed and nodded and grunted, knowing all the while that he had his messenger on the way to Houston, perhaps by now closeted with him. When the others were finished and his turn came to orate, he said simply, “The Cherokees' record speaks for itself.”

The decision on whether or not to stand and fight was put to the vote, Diwali presiding.

“We are many and time is short,” he said. “I ask you to be brief. Now, what do our brothers, the Shawnees, say?”

The man in the long blue tunic, tight-fitting blue trousers gartered below the knees, wearing a red turban crowned with five fluffy black plumes, a red sash and a bandolier, his cheeks painted vermilion and with silver pendants the size of dollars hanging from his ears, said, “We Shawnees say to fight.”

“What do our brothers, the Coushattas, say?”

“The Coushattas say fight,” said the man with the silver ornament in his nose.

“What do our brothers, the Delawares, say?” The man in the knee-length cape said, “Fight.”

“What do our brothers, the Caddoes, say?”

“To fight,” said the man in the smock and the broad-brimmed sombrero.

“What do our brothers, the Choctaws, say?”

“The Choctaws say to fight.” This drew grunts of surprise and approval. Even the Choctaws!

“What do our brothers, the Tamocuttakes, say?”

“Fight!”

“What do our brothers, the Kickapoos, say?”

The man encased in the skin-tight suit of white deerskin as though he had been born in it said, “The Kickapoos say fight, and win!”

“What do our brothers, the Alabamas, say?”

“Fight.”

“What do our brothers, the Quapaws, say?”

“We Quapaws vote to fight.”

“What do our brothers, the Utangous, say?”

“Fight!”

“What do our brothers, the Yowanis, say?”

“Fight!”

“What do our brothers, the Biloxis, say?”

“Fight!”

“What do our brothers, the Chickasaws, say?”

“Fight!”

“What do we Cherokees say? We say, don't fight.”

This settled, a battle commander was elected.

“The Shawnees?”

“Diwali.”

“The Coushattas?”

“Diwali.”

“The Delawares?”

“Diwali.”

“The Caddoes?”

“Diwali.”

“The Choctaws?”

“Diwali.”

“The Tamocuttakes?”

“Diwali.”

“The Kickapoos?”

“Diwali.”

“The Alabamas?”

“Diwali.”

“The Quapaws?”

“Diwali.”

“The Utangous?”

“Diwali.”

“The Yowanis?”

“Diwali.”

“The Biloxis?”

“Diwali.”

“The Chickasaws?”

“Diwali.”

“The Cherokees?”

The old man kept them waiting upon his answer for some moments, though there was little doubt what it would be.

“We Cherokees cast our vote with our brothers for Diwali,” he said.

This piece of diplomacy was something other than what it appeared to be: a politic bid for unanimity and the graceful acceptance of an unsought honor, although it was allowed by all to pass for that. It was tacitly understood as his acknowledgment of the code binding both him and them. Had he refused the election, even on the seemingly unarguable ground of his age, he would have been summarily executed, and while he had so little time left to forfeit that this was a matter almost of indifference to him, such a death would have dishonored his tribe. Actually, a plea to be excused on account of his age would have been the least admissible; his age was his qualification for the post. Years were experience, wisdom, survival through cunning and guile, and the attainment of them a mark of the special favor of the gods, a favor extended to those who exalted and followed you. Respect for you was respect for them, and was rewarded accordingly. Battles were won by the combination of age and youth. Age was the bow, youth the arrows.

As honored houseguests of the Chief, the Fergusons, father and son, were present at his next meeting with President Lamar's commissioner, General Rusk. (The boy would live to see the time, long after the disappearance of the last Indian, when this area would be a part of Cherokee County, one of its streams Bowl Creek, with nobody to tell how it got its name, and a nearby town, Rusk.) The day was hot enough to suggest that hell had just received a fresh consignment of souls. Except for a breechclout, The Bowl on this occasion was naked. His wrinkled skin and gnarled veins made him look like an ancient tree, its bark entwined with clinging vines.

“Colonel Bowles,” said General Rusk, “your presence here can no longer be tolerated. You have stolen our livestock. You have burned our houses. You have attacked and killed our people.”

The Chief had heard all this before. He had heard it ad nauseam. The last charge referred to the massacre the year before of a family of settlers named Killough. Sixteen of them there were, three generations, blood kin and in-laws: not one was spared. The details were gruesome. Unfortunately for the Cherokees, it had happened inside their territory. The whole country was enraged and clamoring for the expulsion of the Indians. Which tribe had done it was not known, thus all stood accused—were judged guilty.

“It was the Comanches,” said the Chief. He had no proof of that, but the Comanches were always blamed for everything, and most often deservedly. They would have been blamed by the Texans for this atrocity had they not been nomads with no land to seize.

But this was a distinction which to most whites meant little or nothing. Indians were Indians, and any difference between one tribe and another was like that between the copperhead and the diamondback rattlesnakes. This time the Comanches, next time the Cherokees.

“This land,” said the Chief, spreading his arms wide, “is ours. It was deeded to us by the Mexicans twenty years ago. I myself travelled to the capital city and negotiated the treaty.”

“This is not Mexico now.”

Ignoring the interruption, the Chief continued, “And the one with the Republic of Texas confirming our rights.”

Meanwhile Noquisi was doing what his Cherokee blood empowered him to do: thought-reading. Having entered the Chief's mind, he found him thinking that the hatred of somebody for you because of your difference from him was intensified by all the many inadmissible but undeniable resemblances that you bore to him. You, too, stood upright, had two eyes, were tailless, could utter speech, or some sort of sounds that to you passed for speech. That did not make you like him, but it made you too much like him.

Inside the Commissioner's mind Noquisi found a refinement upon his distaste for the likes of himself. He was a mongrel, but just barely one. He might have concealed his Indian blood and passed for white; to be inferior by choice was to be a creature beneath contempt.

“That treaty was never ratified by our government,” said Rusk. “It is worthless. So is all this palaver.”

With that last remark the Chief agreed, and, indeed, he was hardly attending. Going through this routine was like wild animals in their ritualized disputing over a mating territory. He was thinking of Grandgent's protracted absence and of the mounting pressure upon him by his young men to stand and fight.

For his own life he cared next to nothing; he had lived it—had outlived it; but for the rest the loss would be catastrophic. If they fought, and shed one drop of their enemies' blood, and were defeated, those of them who survived would be treated like vermin to be exterminated.

At the next conference the weather was even hotter than before. Again the chief wore nothing but a breechclout. Yet Noquisi sensed (or else he interpreted it thus in hindsight long years later, in relating the incident to his grandson) that the old man's reason for this was not the heat. He had bared himself to the skin to remind his uninvited guests that, stripped of their coverings, all men, red and white, were alike, and with his aged body to demonstrate that all faced the same end. It was both a gesture of pride and a plea for elementary humanity. In his nakedness he was both regal and as common as clay.

This time the Commissioner came with an ultimatum. He produced an intercepted letter from the Mexicans reminding the Chief that he was a colonel in their army and inviting him to join in a plot to overthrow the government of Texas. The Indians were promised their disputed land forevermore if they rose up in a counterrevolution. The Chief protested that he had never so much as received the letter, and that the Mexicans, or anybody else, could write him without it implicating him. But that such a proposal could even be made was all the evidence Rusk needed to prove that he was amenable to it. With the Texans demanding that he go, he would have been a fool not to be amenable.

They must begin preparations for their removal at once. They would be compensated for their properties and provisioned for the journey. They would be escorted by troops. The locks, with their hammers, would be removed from their rifles, rendering them harmless, and deposited with the Texans, to be restored to them at the international border.

Drawing himself up still straighter, the Chief declared that they would never go under escort. It would made them look like prisoners. They were a free people. As for surrendering their gunlocks, his men would suspect that, once disarmed, they and their families would be slaughtered. They would never consent to it.

“Those are our conditions,” said Rusk. “You have three days time to assemble your people for removal.”

“They will assemble, but not for removal,” said the Chief. He sighed sorrowfully. “There will be much bloodshed. Many widows. Many fatherless children.”

For his part, the threat was hollow, meant not to precipitate a confrontation but to delay and perhaps avoid one. He still hoped that Grandgent's message had been or soon would be delivered and that Houston would yet intercede. This was a gamble, intended to give Rusk pause and make him ponder his willingness to go that far. It might instead provoke him to attack. To do that he might have to send for authorization to Lamar, or he might have his contingency orders in his pocket even now. How much if any time he had gained the Chief did not know. Little at best. Meanwhile, a man of eighty-four must pretend to be frightened by the Texans' threats to kill him if he fought and the unspoken threats of his own people to kill him if he did not.

Had all gone well, Grandgent ought to have been back by this time. The distance was not more than forty miles each way. The weather was dry. And the man was one who could cover ground like a chaparral. But he was not back, and the Chief thought he knew why. He had made some allowance for this from the outset. Whenever he himself went to call on Kalunah he always took the precaution of bringing along his tepee and a dog for the cook pot. Once he had camped in Kalunah's yard for three days waiting for him to drink his fill, then sleep it off and sober up. Not that the cares of office had kept tightly corked the former President's jug; he seemed confident of being able to run the country part-time; and there was nothing in his performance to complain of—dead drunk, Sam Houston was a better man than Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar cold sober—but now that he was free of those cares he was rumored to be drinking harder than ever. To think that this was the case now did not trouble the Chief. On the contrary, Kalunah would come to in a bilious temper, and he would take it out on the detestable Lamar.

During these days of negotiations with the Texans a change was noticeable in the old Chief. He appeared more and more detached, remote. Those pale, depthless eyes of his seemed to see beyond the visible horizons. His spirit had gone ahead of him to scout out the well-traveled path that went in one direction only, and he was attending upon its call.

Meanwhile, he was busily preparing for the battle he hoped never to have to fight. Gatunwali, his second in command, as opposed to war as he was and just as doubtful about its outcome, was out in the countryside alerting the headsmen of the tribes. They knew where and at what signal to join forces. They knew the battlefield. They knew from which quarter to expect attack. They knew where to take cover if forced to, and where then to regroup. Those who lacked them were supplied with guns and ammunition.

Not even Kalunah could go on the binge for this long. Grandgent had found him away from home and had either set off to find him or was waiting for his return. That had to be the explanation for the passage of such an amount of time.

The day before the one set for the battle, the warriors of the many tribes were summoned by drums from their scattered villages to the command post. That evening, hot as it was, they gathered around a blazing bonfire for a performance of the long-disused going-to-war ceremony.

The near-naked old Chief seated himself idol-wise inside the circle of light, shut his wrinkled eyelids and invoked the attendance of the ancient gods. “
Hayi! Yu! Sge
!” Then in a low singsong, his voice crackling like the blaze, he chanted the traditional spell: