No Resting Place (5 page)

Said the Reverend Mackenzie with an encouraging smile, “Don't let it bother you, my boy, if that is not quite clear to you.”

Said the boy, “But it is, sir. Quite clear. Three in one, one in three.”

They got through the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer, the Sacraments and the Last Supper, then for the eighth time in as many days the boy stripped himself for immersion in the river.
Usgasedi
for a name had lasted him no longer than that. Busy days they were at his turning time of life!

“Great heavens, boy!” cried the Reverend Mackenzie. “What on earth has happened to you?”

He looked as though he had been mauled in barehanded combat with a bobcat. From top to toe, down his arms, down his legs, across his chest, across his back the scratches ran. Music paper was not more lined than was the boy's body by the claws of some wild beast. Recently inflicted, the wounds were still scabbed over.

The Reverend Mackenzie had found his first Indian.

He thought of those stories so common of white children taken captive and raised as Indians. But no.

“
Jijalagiyai
,” said the boy—outlandish sounds, all the more outlandish issuing from the mouth of a freckle-faced, blue-eyed bairn. “I thought you knew.
Jijalagiyai
. That means, ‘I am truly one of the Real People.'” That was said proudly, this bitterly, “If you don't believe me, that I am an Indian, just ask any of these true-blue white folks hereabouts, Your Reverence. They will set you straight right quick.” Then this, though with a laugh, ruefully, “The other day I heard a man say—he was a man whose house was being taken from him because he was an Indian, ‘Our Cherokee blood must be very strong blood. It takes so little of it to make one of us.'”

In the long-laid-aside rite that he and his grandfather were reviving, the boy had been scratched with a comb made from a wolf's bone. Just so had it been done in former times. The comb was cracked and yellowed with age. The wolf would have been killed by a wolf-killer, a professional, the office hereditary, the formula for deceiving the wolves into believing that the killing had been done by somebody from another settlement, and thereby deflecting their revenge for their brother's murder, handed down from father to son. The comb was sharp-toothed; his blood had flowed and the pain he endured without flinching filled him with pride of manhood. He washed away the blood by a plunge in the river. Afterwards, to toughen him, his grandfather bathed him in a solution made from the catgut plant. As always in former times whenever any new phase of a Cherokee's life was about to be entered upon, he purged himself with the black draught, an emetic and a laxative.

That week after being scratched and going to water, and before being baptized, he spent out at the farm, in sequestration, in a sort of male purdah. During that time he was not to be touched by nor eat with a woman, not even his grandmother. His days he spent sleeping, his nights he spent with his grandfather in the
asi
, the hothouse, his eyes washed with owl-feather-water to keep them open, listening to the stories of the Creation, of the early history of his people and of their recent period of glory, their present peril, the portents of their impending disaster. And although, to his grandfather's sorrow, theirs was only a makeshift
asi
(was, in fact, a deserted henhouse), nonetheless, with the ceremonial fire blazing on the stone in the center of the floor, hearing his grandfather begin, as such séances must, always had, with “When I was a boy like you, this is what the old men told me they had heard from the old men when they were boys,” he felt that he had come into his own, that he was now truly one of The People, the Principal People, the Real People, with all the privileges and all the pressing present responsibilities of that membership.

Beginning at the beginning of the end, his grandfather went back to the beginning of things, then throughout those seven nights in the
asi
traced their course back to the end. Many were the gaps in the chronicle, for, alas, the Cherokees were a people like none other for shortness of memory, irreverent toward their past, disposed to chase after newness (the boy was even then lighting their ceremonial fire not with a coal brought from another fire in a
tusti
bowl, as had been the custom ever since fire was first fetched to the Chosen People by
Dayunisi
, the Water Beetle, but with one of the white man's newly introduced locofocos), but as best he could he would relate all that had been passed on to him. Once there were priests to remember everything, and when they gathered in the
asi
to recite the legends of how the world began, and life and death, and where The People originated and by what wanderings they were brought here, promising boys were admitted to attend the fire and listen and they grew up to be the priests of their time. But that was before Sequoyah invented the alphabet and nothing of it was written down and meanwhile the Cherokees had ceased to be Indians and now from their book many pages were missing.

The beginning of the end was when that old chief of the tribe heard, at a distance of thirteen moons, unfamiliar sounds coming through the forest from the direction of the coast, journeyed there and returned to report that strange men with fair hair and pale skin had come from out of the ocean. So rapid was their spread that within a generation the wise men of the tribe made a prophecy. This prophecy his grandfather did not need to recollect. With the light of the flickering fire glinting on his spectacles, he read from the Cherokee newspaper
The Phoenix
, since suppressed, its type seized. It was an article that had appeared there three years earlier. It was entitled “Remarkable Fulfillment of Indian Prophecy.”

“Our elder brother” (meaning the white man), said the prophets, “has become our neighbor. He is now near to us, and already occupies our ancient habitations. But this is as our forefathers told us. They said, ‘Our feet are turned toward the West—they are never to turn around.' Now mark what our forefathers told us. ‘Your elder brother will settle around you—he will encroach upon your lands, and then will ask you to sell them to him. When you give him a part of your country, he will not be satisfied, but ask for more. In process of time he will ask you to become like him. He will tell you that your mode of life is not as good as his—whereupon you will be induced to make great roads through the nation, by which he can have free access to you. He will learn your women to spin and weave and make clothes, and learn you to cultivate the earth. He will even teach you to learn his language and learn you to read and write. But these are but means to destroy you and eject you from your habitations. HE WILL POINT YOU TO THE WEST, but you will find no resting place there, for your elder brother will drive you from one place to another until you reach the western waters. These things will certainly happen, but it will be when we are dead and gone. We shall not live to see and feel the misery which will come upon you.”

So long ago did the world begin that nobody now knew when or how. This much was known: first came the animals, then the plants; man was last. Life on earth began when
Galunlati
, the world above this one, where the birds and the animals first lived, became overcrowded and they all migrated here. Those were not the creatures known to us but were all bigger and far more intelligent than ours. They all spoke the same language as did man, had their common councils, and, like men, were fond of playing ball. The time came when, for reasons nobody knows, these superior creatures deserted the earth and removed themselves back to
Galunlati
, where they still reside, leaving here behind the stunted, dumb, puny imitations that we know.

The first man and woman were brother and sister. Who made them and put them here has been forgotten, is a mystery. The woman conceived the first child when her brother smote her with a fish. In seven days, and again every seven days thereafter, like a hen laying eggs, she gave birth, until this world was in danger of overcrowding, and then the matter was regulated as we know it.

Even so, people multiplied so rapidly that in course of time the animals found themselves crowded for space. Meanwhile, man invented the bow and arrow, traps and snares, knives, spears, hooks and fishnets. The animals convened to take measures for their safety. It was then and there that all the illnesses and ailments that afflict mankind were invented: fevers and chills, rheumatism, toothache, blindness. So venomous was the atmosphere of that convention that
Tuyadiskalawtsiski
, the Grubworm, the very one whose job it had been to marry people, and whose hatred of them now came from his being stepped on by their innumerable get, rolled on his back in glee over a proposal that menstruation be made fatal to women, and has never since been able to get on his feet again. Had not the plants, which were friendly to man, offered themselves as healing herbs (for diseases invented by the Rabbit the weed called rabbit's ear, for yellow bile the yellowroot, for forgetfulness the cockleburr, for nothing clings like a burr), humankind would have perished from the earth.

It was in those early times that the animals acquired their features and their dispositions. Insufferably vain of his bushy tail,
Sikwautsetsti
, the Possum, got it shaved by the Cricket, who pretended to be grooming it (the Cricket was a barber by trade), and ever since he has been so embarrassed to be seen that he lies down and grins a silly grin. In one footrace with
Tsitstu
, the Rabbit, that mischief-maker and arch-deceiver, himself so often deceived, the Deer won his antlers, and in another, the most memorable footrace ever run, the one against the Tortoise,
Tsitstu
got his lasting comeuppance. The Tom Turkey got his beard, a scalp that he cozened the Terrapin out of, and the Turkey Buzzard, who had formerly boasted a fine topknot, was rendered bald for his proud refusal to eat carrion, thereupon lost his self-respect, and now lives on carrion.

There were spirits then in all things, large and small, moving and stationary. Everybody and everything spoke in a universal tongue. The woods were full of voices. In every creature, every tree, every rock, every mountain, every brook there resided a spirit. Some were evil spirits, some good. There were the
Yunwi Tsudi
, the Little People: cave dwellers, music lovers, wonder-workers, good-hearted creatures who found lost children and restored them to their parents—and there were the underwater cannibals whose diet was children's flesh. All alike were departed now, powerless any longer to cheer or scare, dispelled by the missionaries. Exorcised. Explained away. Scorned away. Now a tree was just a tree, a rock just a rock, and now when you went for a solitary walk in the woods you had only yourself to converse with.

To think there was a time, and not so long ago, barely beyond living memory, when, instead of being tales told for the entertainment of children, these were the living faith of a people—your people! To think this as the night in the
asi
ended with the rising of the sun and your rising to go forth and salute it and go to water to wash away your sweat was to—was to what? To smile? To blush? To thank your lucky stars that you were born when you were, emancipated from primitive superstition? Or to yearn with your whole heart for such sweet simplicity, such happy harmony among all things that be, to come again, knowing that it never could?

From savagery to civilization in half a generation, from universal illiteracy to universal literacy in their own tongue through the alphabet given to them by their own living flesh-and-blood Cadmus (would that he also had the power to grow armed men from dragons' teeth!): that was what the Cherokees had achieved. It was a feat without parallel in the long record of human endeavor, and the period coincided with that of the childhood which Amos Ferguson—Noquisi—
Ajudagwasgi:
Stays-Up-All-Night—was now putting behind him. It was as if his childhood and that of his people had lain until now ripening in the womb of time.

It had been, for the most part of it, a happy childhood—doubly happy, for it had been two childhoods in one, and whenever one of them turned temporarily unhappy there was always that other one to take refuge in. Until it became the worst of times, the worst of places, it had been the best of times, the best of places, to be a boy, to be two boys in one, red and white. No matter what the day of the week or the season of the year, deep inside himself he was always that secretmost self with its own unutterable name, whatever that happened to be at the time, but depending upon the day and the season he was one or the other of his two known selves. When school was in session, on weekdays, he awoke as Amos Ferguson, and put on shoes; on Saturday he awoke as Noquisi, and put on moccasins. The proportion of six days to one just about corresponded to his mixture of bloods. His white blood was the milk of his being, his red blood the cream, and on Saturday it rose. But without milk there can be no cream, and while it was that rich side of him that took him out of doors, on pleasure, and that brought him, at his grandfather's knee, tales of olden times, appealing to that love of the past, that conservatism and longing for stability common to all children, school was no drudgery to a child whose schooldays were those when his entire people had enrolled along with him, and were garnering the new knowledge as though it were manna from heaven. For that was what had happened, and even now, despite everything, was still happening. For the Cherokees it was a time of overnight emergence from the stone age to the age of iron, from benightedness and inconvenience to enlightenment and comfort. The first products of the Industrial Revolution had reached them. Later on would come the iron horse, the factory smokestacks, the pollution of the water and the spoliation of the land, but for now it was the small material blessings that make life a bit less brutish and, perhaps, a bit less short. Knives and hatchets of steel instead of stone. Instant fire: you could not know, you who took it for granted, what a convenience that was! Needles—a small miracle! Eyeglasses! They showed the world to people condemned to grope their way to the grave from the age of fifty, forty—from birth. They put an end to the barbaric practice of abandoning such people to die. Instead of having to stump through life lame after breaking a leg and having a witch doctor mumble over it, now it could be set and splinted and mend straight again. Imperfect as was his administration of it, the white man brought representative government, trial by jury, condign punishment, and replaced the code of blood revenge, the endless family feuds. Freed from superstitions that answered none of one's questions about life but only threatened one with curses and blights, they were healthier in mind. One went to school each day filled with expectation, and brought home to the hungry family what one had learned like food for the table. Revelation upon revelation it had been. With the rapture of children at a fair, a nation of twenty thousand gaped in wide-eyed wonder at a world in which the things that had always mystified them were suddenly simplified and the deep mysteries for the first time revealed. “Amazing Grace,” they sang—it had become almost the national anthem—“how sweet the sound/ That saved a wretch like me,/ That once was lost but now am found,/ Was blind but now can see.” And there was that coincidental acquisition of their own alphabet. What no white man had ever done one of theirs had done. As well as the whites, The People could now communicate with others of their kind who were out of sight. (Blood was forever being talked about in those days: white blood, red blood, full-blood, half-blood, mixed-blood, and all his life long, even into extreme old age, he would retain some measure of his childish wonder that his, when let, ran red. He expected it to be pink, barely pink, nearly white.) On Saturday afternoons the horse was harnessed to the surrey and his father and mother rode in it while he, in his moccasins, his turban and sash, rode alongside on his pony and they went out to the farm to visit his father's people. Being Noquisi on Saturdays was no holiday. He had as much to learn as did Amos Ferguson. At school Amos absorbed his indoors education; around the farm, in the woods, along the rivers and, like this, listening to his grandfather, Noquisi absorbed his.