No Resting Place (21 page)

The door to Grandmother's mind stood open as had that of her home to company. Now, as the Fergusons, restricted to her pace, slipped daily rearward in the march, Noquisi found in it two things: a determination to push on to the last footstep she had in her, and a conviction, enforced by this discovery of her daughter-in-law's death, that she would not make it to the end of the trail. Ahead, at the side of the road down which her thoughts plodded, loomed a cross. Far off and small when first seen, it grew steadily larger. It neared even as her progress toward it on foot shortened by the day, as though she and it were both on the move, narrowing the distance that separated them. She faltered more and more frequently, but that marker in her mind now served as her incentive to rise and carry on. It stood awaiting her like a lover, arms outspread for the welcoming embrace. She joined in now with a fervor all her own to the words of the hymn, “O, Lamb of God, I come! I come!” This combination of frailty and spirit was an inspiration to those beside her, they marching reluctantly as before to their resting place, she now longingly to hers.

Now the train was being followed at a distance by a lone wagon. Its soldier-driver, a different one each day, made no attempt to catch up with the column: on the contrary, whenever there was any slowing of the main body, he slowed. When the day's march ended and camp was made for the night, this wagon was not drawn up to join the rest but stayed back in its isolation. It was so far behind as to be almost out of sight, but it was almost never out of anyone's mind. Only Dr. Warren went near it and he went several times a day. Otherwise not even the family members of its invisible occupant approached it. Though this wagon kept its place, stopping when all stopped, it followed when all moved on again as surely as a ball and chain. Its occupant was a young man with smallpox. The fear of one and all was deepened by their tribal sense. The blood that flowed in one flowed in everyone. They were the same in their susceptibilities.

On the fifth morning of his patient's quarantine Dr. Warren sought and found the Reverend Mackenzie before the day's march began. Noquisi saw the doctor give the Mackenzies that quick examination which he had seen his father give people whose appearance worried him. The one was as unsuited to this ordeal as the other. Outdoors work, manual labor from early youth, life as subsistence farmers had conditioned most of the Cherokees; not the Mackenzies. A bit of flower gardening was the extent of her work out of doors, and that was more than his. University studies and then composing and delivering sermons were what he had exerted himself on. They had their faith and dedication to draw upon, but while the spirit was willing the flesh was weak. Yet no one had even suggested that they take seats in a wagon, knowing they would refuse.

The doctor was about to make his morning visit to the patient in quarantine and he asked the Reverend Mackenzie to accompany him.

“I don't know what we will find,” he said. “When I left him last night he was sinking. I've done all I know to do. It's out of my hands now. The time has come for you to do your part. Prayer might help. It can't hurt, can it?”

The patient was one of the Reverend Mackenzie's converts.

“I'll come too,” said Noquisi. “He won't know what you're saying without me.” What he was thinking was that without him to interpret God would not know what the man was saying with perhaps his last words.

The white doctor's medicine was not working and the sick man's family had taken matters into their own hands. While they squatted around a fire heating stones, the exorcist they had engaged was inside the wagon with the patient. The trials in the camp and on the road, and now the appearance among them of this dread disease, were turning The People back to their old ways and beliefs. They were moulting the civilization they had acquired with such effort. These here were mumbling prayers in Cherokee and in English—both broken, Noquisi noted. The Cherokee prayers were not addressed to God but to various pagan gods. They were Christians but they were also half-breeds, and in this dire circumstance they called upon both their resources as they employed their two hands at a task. One needed all the help one could get. “Thou shalt have no god before me”: to this they had subscribed. But it was not “before.” It was like a chief and his subchiefs. In case the headman was occupied with weightier matters than yours, you might get a hearing among the lesser ones. This was an attitude of mind that Noquisi understood because he shared it.

The patient was wrapped in his blanket with hot stones inside to sweat the evil spirits out of him. They were tenacious ones and the exorcist was obliged to use strong language on them and to menace them with shakes of his rattle. He paused in his work just long enough to assure his colleagues—or his competitors—through Noquisi that he had immunized himself by eating buzzard meat. As was well known, buzzards were immune to disease. Their foul odor kept evil spirits away.

The exorcist finished his operation and grunted with satisfaction at the result, or at the prospect of the result that might soon be expected. It was a look of some superiority that he bestowed upon Dr. Warren, whom he had been called in to relieve of the case, when he climbed down from the wagon. The Reverend Mackenzie, followed by Noquisi and the doctor, climbed in. The doctor signified by a look that the matter was indeed out of his hands now.

Even had there been time for it, the Reverend Mackenzie could see nothing to be gained by going through the Order for the Visitation of the Sick. His missal stayed in his pocket. What would it mean to this semisavage dying on the barrens of Kentucky to hear of the Holy Ghost, virgin birth, Pontius Pilate? Nor would he cheapen the solemnity of the moment with false assurances of recovery. In the little time he had he absolved the man and prepared him with a few words about the better life that would soon be his and the promise that he would be joined in eternity by his loved ones.

The man had reserved the strength for his last duty, to make peace with his fate. He said, “This is a good day to die.”

“
Ai
!” Noquisi wailed, and the family outside responded. It was a Cherokee farewell to the man, to let him know that he was mourned by those he was leaving behind. And though they were separated from the column, the boy heard the cry run its length like the calls of a flight of geese.

The dead man's four survivors took it upon themselves voluntarily to march in the rear of the column and to camp alone at night. They segregated themselves so as to spare the rest fear of contagion from their nearness. They did it also out of shame at one of theirs having been the harbinger of trouble.

The detached wagon was rejoined with the others.

But it had been a fuse lighted at the end of the train. The spark had leapt the gap and spread through the line with the speed of fire.

Their oneness, the loss of their individuality, caught up as they were in the common plight, was nowhere more evident than in this: illness, when it struck, was instantly epidemic. Hard-driven, unrested, poorly fed, huddled together, exposed to harsh elements, inadequately clothed, all sharing the same conditions, as bound to one another as the pages of a book, they succumbed as one.

Still they pushed on, those unable to keep pace lying in wagon beds head to toe, to save space, like fish packed in crates. The outcries of the delirious sounded above the creaking of the wheels. Some survived to tell of riding in length-long contact with bodies hot and thrashing with fever, then burning out and growing cold and stiff. To escape this, people kept marching until they collapsed in their tracks.

The cold winds whipped up and they fell like the leaves from trees. For protection against its bite and its chafing, Agiduda took grease from the axletrees and coated the family's faces. Wagons were emptied of goods to make room for the invalids. At night they were emptied of their dead. Another inspection of them was made first thing in the morning. Before the day's march got under way the burials were conducted. The Reverend Mackenzie read the service from his prayer book. For Noquisi the text was unnecessary. He had served as its interpreter so many times he now knew it by heart in both English and Cherokee.

Word of the contagion they carried ran ahead of them, and at the edges of towns and settlements they were met by armed bands who forced them to detour around. These men, determined by fear, stood their ground against mounted troops of the United States Army.

The Reverend Mackenzie tells of married couples being buried together and their orphaned children being adopted at the graveside, motherless infants put to other breasts. And the trek was resumed.

Noquisi—old Amos Smith I—would remember all his long life long this reversal in the normal order of things: how the grown-ups cried more than the children did. The ones cried because they could not restrain themselves, the others did not because the sight of their elders crying like little children struck dry-eyed terror to their souls.

Your tears at first were spontaneous, intermittent, personal. These were trivial tears, sentimental tears. The mindless marching in one set direction left your thoughts free to wander. They wandered toward what you knew. You remembered a favorite nook in the house where at a certain hour of the day the light fell with a special glow; a flowery path; the mouse you had trained to eat from your hand; the pleasure of sunny summer afternoons with you stretched out in the shade on the bank of the brook; the coming on of evening and the homeward lowing of the herd; you remembered wrapping the comforting darkness around you as you tucked yourself into bed at night. Then you were ashamed for your weakness in giving way to your feelings while others with as much to regret as you trod staunchly on.

The notches cut nightly by Agiduda in his walking staff amounted to two months' worth, and still they had farther to go than they had come. All this while a tithe was mounting of tears for the common weal. One dismal day they overflowed the font. Reduced to a single purpose and a single fate, the people cried with a single heart. In this, as in so many things, they acted tribally, with a blood bond that amounted to mass mental telepathy. Once one of them cried for all, then all of them cried together. They looked up from their endlessly plodding feet at the indifferent heavens and heard the ceaseless grate and creak of the wagon wheels, they felt the sting of the sleet that hissed in their faces, and through them one and all swept the sense that they had been abandoned by God and their fellowman, that nature herself had set her hand against them. They were in truth the Chosen People—chosen to be the scapegoat of the human race, sent into the wilderness to atone for all its sins. They were marching to perdition, and the groan they gave seemed to rise out of the earth, up from the horizonless plains of Hell.

The longing now to reach the place you dreaded to reach, and there rest, the rearward pull of the place you had left behind, the ache in your every cell of the long weary miles you had marched, that of the many still before you, made one of your feet push you forward and the other one hold you back. You were pulled on as though by a halter, held back by the tug of homesickness as though you strained against a tether. And knowing that their feelings were reproductions of your own, you felt not just for yourself but for all those trudging alongside you.

A thousand people cried as one, yet it was not just for the hardships they were enduring that they cried. For physical stoicism they had no equal. It was not for their tired, cold, aching, ill and hungry bodies, it was for their lost homeland that they cried, and the farther they got from it the greater was the pain. To them it was like an elastic cord to which they were attached: the farther it was stretched, the stronger its pull.

The beef cattle purchased wherever available along the route, their doleful bellows accompanying the groans of the people, though they were a welcome rare relief from the sameness of salt pork, proved to be almost more trouble than they were worth. In the night they strayed off, wandered into woods and swamps, and precious marching time, more and more precious in the ever-worsening weather, was lost in finding and herding them back. They stopped to graze wherever, in this recently drought-parched and now frost-blackened land, they found something to graze on, and had to be driven by force. They ate poison ivy, sickened, and delayed the march. To water them, all must halt while they were taken aside to the source—when, after a search, a source was found. Yet they were too valuable to be abandoned, and not just because they had been bought at a profiteer's price, but because they were mobile food, nonperishable, rations for who knew what emergency might arise. For days at a time the caravan was stalled while quartermaster corpsmen scouted, in a countryside of subsistence farming where fodder barely enough for the family cow was as much as most men raised, for grain and hay for them. Fed as they were fed, watered as they were watered, driven as they were driven, these starvelings made at best lean, tough and tasteless eating.

But it would have been welcome now. It would have been devoured raw. Under these conditions the hides, the horns and the hooves would have been eaten. The last of their number had been slaughtered far back down the trail.

For three days now they had marched on empty stomachs, and on almost empty ones for another two days before. This after Captain Donovan had called a halt, drawn the train together, ordered shot and butchered six head of the draft oxen, roasted them and rationed the meat. The portions were small, soon consumed, did little more than whet the appetite, but more than six he dared not sacrifice even to this exigency; they would be needed to haul supplies—when they ever got more—and the more and more people unable to walk, for the rest of the journey. Without their animals at the tongue to draw them, the oxcarts left behind had the look of carcasses. What little they had left to eat went to the children and the nursing mothers, the pregnant women. Delays, one on top of another, had caused them to consume before time the provisions allotted for this stretch of the route. Axletrees had broken; replacing one took at least a day. One group took a wrong turn in rain and fog, went miles before the mistake was realized and had to retrace their steps.