No Resting Place (29 page)

“
Nagwa usinuliyu Atasu Gigagei hinisalatagina. Usinuli dudata unanugatsidasti nigesuna. Dudanat elawiniyu atassu digunagei degulskwitahisesti
…”

There he stopped. He uttered a few exploratory words, shook his head and gave up. It was plain to see that there was more to it, and that he had long ago forgotten the rest.

Then for the edification of the young men, to incite in them the martial spirit of their fierce forefathers, half a dozen of the old ones staged a war dance. In former times all the warriors would have participated, but those now of fighting age were seeing the ceremony for the first time. The dancers were naked except for breechclouts; they had breasts as slack as old women's; the muscles of their arms sagged; their scrawny shanks were knotted with sinews. They had shaved their heads, leaving only a topknot in which to tie feathers, as had been the custom when their enemies were other Indians, for to be scalped defiled the body and made it unfit for burial. Their faces were painted vermilion all over while one eye was circled with white and the other with black. Brandishing red and black clubs, they stooped and rose and shuffled and stamped around the war pole, for which an ancient, moth-eaten human scalp had actually been produced—somebody's heirloom and curio. After about five minutes the dancers came to a halt, uttered four whoops and the performance was over.

Then to his untrained and inexperienced army the old Chief gave a lesson in the Indian art of battle.

As was always the case, alas, he said, they were less well armed than the enemy. Thus they must draw his fire. They must make targets of themselves.

This was translated into twenty tongues.

“Single out one of them as you single out a goose in a flock. Shoot at them all and you hit none. Concentrate upon your man. Make him think that you are to be the death of him, that his is the scalp you crave to add to your collection. Make yourself his target. Stand still while he takes aim. Tease him, taunt him, so that when he fires he fires too soon, from too great a distance, shakes with fear of missing, and misses. Then while he is reloading or running in retreat, rush him.”

He awaited a grunt of understanding, approval. He was answered by the silence of dismay. Let the enemy try to kill you? Stand still while he takes aim? Make
targets
of themselves?

Any man caught slipping through the Texans' lines trying to reach the Cherokees now must be one of them; if he was white, then he was a renegade from his race, to be dealt with as his degenerate kind deserved. So it was after dark, on the eve of the battle, when Grandgent, The Bowl's messenger to Houston, finally got back, ten days after setting off on his mission.

It was as the Chief had surmised. Lamar had timed his move with care. In Nacogdoches, Grandgent was told that Houston had recently left for Tennessee. However, he would be stopping over for several days in the vicinity of Jackson, Mississippi. So Grandgent set out across Louisiana. In Mississippi he missed his man by two days. He would have gone after him to Tennessee except that he could never have gotten back in time to influence events here.

“So, Chief, are we going to fight?”

The old man nodded sorrowfully. “You have been heroic,” he said. “If you had found him, you might have been the savior of your people.”

It was the least he could say to a man who had run some five hundred and fifty miles. He would later that night tell the boy that he was by no means sure of what he said. It was to be wondered whether even Houston could have prevailed against his fellow Texans' hatred of Indians. Had he said, “If my red brothers go then I go,” they might have said, even to him, “Go.” The Chief had tried the only thing he could, had hoped it might work, but had felt all along that the odds were against it. His own rejected counsel to his people against their fighting had made him wonder how much influence any leader, even a Houston, had over his people in an unpopular cause. Looking back on it from his long perspective, it seemed to him, for whom, when he was young, war was a calling, a joy, a necessity, that opposing war was the most unpopular thing a leader could do—unless perhaps it was to defend a minority race. Houston was revered by the Texans, but his feeling for Indians was a blemish upon him and had to be overlooked. “Houston's pets,” they were scornfully called, and this reason was given for it: his taste for their women. And for that this reason was given: with them he could do things he would never dare propose to any white woman—an incompatibility which for some explained the failure of his first marriage.

The Chief would not sleep that night. For years he had slept little anyway, but tonight he wanted to talk. He was pleased to have as his listener one who might outlast him by many years and give long life to his words. Between the man and the boy there was this mutual attraction: both longed to reach across the void of time, the one by grasping the distant future, the other the distant past. That night, while readying himself for battle, the old man talked as only a man could talk who knew that this night was his last.

By candlelight he laid out the tricornered hat, the red sash and the bright, shiny red silk vest given to him by that flamboyant dresser, his friend Kalunah-Houston. In these he was going to make a most conspicuous target. He tested the soundness of his saddle girth, his stirrup straps, his bridle reins. He drew the old charges from his brace of long-laid-aside but well-kept pistols, snapped the hammers, oiled them, loaded them afresh and returned them to their holsters. He filled his powder horn and his bullet pouch, cut patches. With his horny thumb he traced the edge of his bowie knife, found it dull, honed it on a stone, then he whetted the edge of the long sword given to him by Houston to commemorate their signing of the treaty between them. The one thing reminded him of the other, and, although he was unable to read the words, he took the paper from its box and looked at it for a long time, grunting in affirmation of its validity, and sighing as he put it away.

He had been called the Moses of his people. He knew the story of this Chief Moses. How, long ago and in another world, Moses had led his oppressed people out of a land called Egypt ruled by a tyrant named Pharaoh across a red sea and into a wilderness before reaching the land promised to them. Twelve tribes they had been, all living together in peace and brotherhood. The fitness of the comparison to himself drew from the old man a satisfied grunt. It was as though he were conferring upon his predecessor a pat of approval.

He had been the Moses of more tribes than those of the Israelites, red refugees from America come to join him in the Mexican province of Texas. With Houston's help, and under the altered circumstances, he had succeeded in doing what the great Tecumseh had tried earlier and failed to do. From Tennessee by way of Louisiana came the Coushattas. From Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with a stop for a generation in Indiana before being driven farther west, came the Delawares. Driven from Wisconsin, the Kickapoos had settled in Illinois, only to be driven from there. The Quapaws came from Missouri. The Caddoes were native Texans, and the Tamocuttakes and the Utangous had been here for so long they had forgotten where they were from. The Alabamas had left behind them in their homeland nothing but their name. The Choctaws, the Yowanis and the Biloxis came from Mississippi. The Shawnees, Tecumseh's tribe, had sided with the British in the last war, and had been driven by the victors from their home in Tennessee. The Cherokees had helped the Americans win that war, yet they were here now too.

But though he had brought his people across Red River and through the wilderness to this land of milk and honey, even here his Pharaoh, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, had pursued him. Now, instead of fleeing further, he was going to stand and fight, and on the eve of the battle a vision had come to him. In the course of nature, it was time for him to die—long past time; it was not dying that he regretted so much—although he did regret it; what he regretted more was that he would have liked as his last act on earth to lead his people, all the tribes, back across Red River to their promised land. That was no land of milk and honey, as he knew from having lived there, but it was promised to them, and this was now taken from them. Their presence there might have tipped the balance toward peace among the feuding Cherokees.

That vision vouchsafed to him of his own end had freed his spirit from his body and enabled it to venture into the future which he would not live to share. He had thought that here he had escaped from that Egypt of his called America. Instead he had seen it advance steadily throughout his long life until even here it had caught up with him. The first waves of that white flood, felling the forests, breaking the land, exterminating the game in its path, had reached even here. He saw in his vision that the way he had lived his free and unfenced life could never again be done. There were too many people and not enough room. The whites littered like possums. There was fast approaching a time when even in a place as vast as Texas the Indian would occupy an impermissible amount of space. Through scribes, he had communicated with Chief John Ross, and he understood, not in all its details but in essence, something of the new age and of The People's efforts to adapt themselves to it. The lands of milk and honey were the ones the whole world wanted, but a man could learn to love any spot on earth as long as it was his, and his to leave to his. Give the Indians a land of briers and nettles, and then maybe they might be left alone at last.

His old—or rather, his young—friend Kalunah had revolutionized their world, yet the country he had created was not the refuge for his dispossessed red brothers that he had envisaged, rather it was the latest in a long series of lands for grab beckoning to the outcasts of Europe and to adventurers from the states. Those now coming here in wave upon wave did not share Houston's affection for Indians; they were the same ones, even the very generation, who had driven them from their homes in the east. Texas was now another America. Houston may have dreamed of an empire, a blend of white and red, like the roses of the Trace, but the Americans who had followed him down that very road were those whose grandfathers had thrown off one king and those Europeans escaping from theirs. They established a republic. They made Houston their President. They limited his term in office to two years. Upon the expiration of that term they replaced him with the man of his own creation—there that day on the battlefield of San Jacinto. He brought with him from his native Georgia his hatred of all Indians, Cherokees in particular.

The young braves chose to fight. Perhaps some even believed they would win. Others were doubtful about the outcome; it was just that after being driven so far there came a time to make a stand. Among them were not more than a handful who had ever fought, but they were determined to fight now, and he, a man of eighty-four, whose last engagement with an enemy had been before their grandfathers were born, was to lead them in battle.

Truth was, he had thought at the time when he was asked to remain neutral in the war against the Mexicans that Houston overvalued his neutrality. Kalunah was living in another of his youthful memories, that of the Cherokees as ferocious warriors. They had been, but they were no more. They had last fought with Jackson, alongside young Houston—much good had it done them!—but that was long ago; men were now fathers who were infants then. He had accepted Houston's gratitude and his gifts, and his copy of their treaty, and had felt that he was cheating the man—certainly that the man was cheating himself. His followers, the Indians, were brave enough, no doubt, but they had become farmers, cattlemen, sheepherders, family men—in all but color, white men; inexperienced as they were in war, their very valor would cost them their lives. They had lived in peace. Now they were to do battle with the soldiers who just three years ago, outnumbered three to one, had slaughtered Santa Anna's Mexicans. And to lead them they had chosen their oldest man—the Indian veneration of age, their belief that every additional year conferred that much more wisdom. How untrue that was nobody knew better than he. He had seen more than most men but most of what he had seen had been more of the same. They had chosen him because he was the wisest of them all. In his wisdom he had counseled them against fighting, and they had chosen him to lead them in the fight.

While the Chief prepared that night for tomorrow's battle, Dr. Ferguson, with Noquisi's help, prepared for it too. He also had blades to sharpen: those of his scalpels. He filed the points of his surgical needles, dampened catgut for sutures to make it supple. With the saw he used for amputations he cut lath into strips for splints. While he packed his saddlebags with whiskey, laudanum, forceps, tourniquets, cauterizing iron—supplies the packhorse had ported down from The Territory—Noquisi rolled bandages. Father and son together would be the campaign's medical corps.

Now it was time for the boy to go to bed.

“Agiduda?” said Noquisi.

“Sgilisi?” said the Chief.

“We are going to lose, aren't we?”

“It is in God's hands.”

“
Ai
!” said Noquisi to himself. “We are going to lose.”

Next morning the old Chief found that many of those who had been so hot for blood had made their private peace and stolen away in the night. He was not much surprised. Nothing could surprise him much anymore. He was wryly amused. They had elected him, unanimously, against his will, to lead them, and then had deserted him. Now instead of the fifteen to eighteen hundred he had reckoned on, he estimated that he could field maybe half that number. That would still make his force about equal to the enemy's, according to his scouts' reports, but being less well-armed, they needed superior numbers.

Dressed and painted for battle, with dyed feathers in their hair, slit-eyed, hawk-nosed, the warriors of the different tribes looked like an aviary of rare and colorful birds of prey in full plumage. The shaven heads of the Kickapoos, painted red, were like the bald domes of vultures; the contours of their jaws were striped white. The Caddoes, from whose ears hung pendants that stretched the lobes, and from some of whose noses hung silver plates that had to be lifted aside for every bite they ate, blackened their faces all over. The Delawares looked as though their chins were smeared with their enemies' blood. Down to their mouths the faces of the Yowanis were solid red, their jaws were vertically striped with white. The Shawnees painted round red spots on their cheeks and chins. Many had stripped down to breechclouts and had greased their bodies to make them slippery to hold in hand-to-hand combat. In the heat of this hottest day in even the old Chief's memory, all glistened with sweat.