“Bean, why did ye scream like a bean sidhe? Ye dragged me from my sickbed, thinking that ye were hurt or dying. Have ye no care? Are ye mad? Ye scared me, woman.”
He ranted at her, venting the fear that gripped him. Her grin faded and he thought for a moment she would rage at him but instead, she smiled.
“Ah, Johnny, I fell down the hill, ‘tis all and it startled me. I didn’t know ye would hear me but no harm done, just mud on my dress. Ye are the one who is mad, barely out of a fever, chasing out the door with knife in hand. If I’d not come back now, ye’d be lying in the woods yerself.”
She had a point, he thought but his desire to save her from danger outweighed his common sense. He would not be able to stand much longer and now a headache pounded, familiar and frightening. He covered his face with both hands, as if that could will the pain out of his head. Bright pinpoints of light danced behind his closed eyelids, a sign he would faint soon.
Sabetha must have put down both the rifle and the bird because she touched his hair, stroked it back with gentle fingers, and felt his forehead above his hands, checking for fever.
Johnny lowered his hands, which trembled, and said, surprising himself.
“Kiss me.”
It was not what he planned to say, but he meant it and wanted it. Her blue, blue eyes looked into his as she touched her lips to his, a mere whisper of a kiss. That was not enough, so he pressed his mouth over hers, her lips sweet against his. Her hands fastened onto him as he swayed, about to collapse but he could not stop kissing her, would not give up the fire and power that charged through his veins. He chose life over death days ago but this kiss, this physical contact reaffirmed it. When he pulled back so he would not faint, there was no need for words, no explanations necessary, and no declarations of love spoken. He knew and so did Sabetha.
“Ye’re feeling better, then, mo chroi.” It was not a question.
He smiled, felt his lips stretch wide with joy, a rich emotion he had almost forgotten. He hadn't known happiness for a very long time.
“Aye, I am, save for a headache fit to split my skull.”
Sabetha smiled, too, and took his hand. “Come back inside and I’ll brew ye willow bark tea. Ye did too much but don’t fret – you’re not sick again.”
How did she know, he wondered, that he was afraid his headache portended more illness? He did not know but walked back inside with her help, still smiling. Sabetha would have put him to bed but he insisted on the rocker so she moved it near the hearth. He waited for the willow bark tea with a blanket draped over his shoulders, watching her work. Her deft hands crumbled the bark, steeped it with boiling water always kept on the hob, and put it aside.
While it steeped, she dressed the turkey, plucked the feathers, and readied it for the pot with some sage, an onion, and a bit of salt. By then, the tea was ready and he drank it, holding the cup with both hands. His headache ebbed and although he ached to the bone, weary, he would not lie down. Johnny sat with her as the turkey cooked, watched her boiling pots while she ventured outside to tend the garden and the corn, and ate supper before he would go to bed. The turkey tasted sweet, as if the bird had been eating berries, but it was very good and he ate his fill.
“Do ye feel well now?” Sabetha asked. She offered him her hands to help him rise from the rocker and he took them.
“I do,” Johnny said, standing with slow, easy movements. “I’m that tired and still weak but I feel fine, better than I have for a very long time, even before.”
That dangerous subject loomed between them, the tragic miles of Nunna-da-ul-tsun-yi like a wide chasm and although he did not want to broach it, he did want to talk of the time before, the good times, his raising and his early life, before the Removals and before Janey.
“Do ye? I’m glad of it.” Sabetha answered.
“I’m from Tennessee, ye know, from the hills, back far enough no one cared if we were Irish or white or Cherokee,” Johnny said. “My family lived well enough; we were many but we worked together and I was happy then.”
As she walked with him to the bed, she squeezed his arm and said,
“Ye will be happy again, Johnny.”
He would. He felt the same, now, but that she spoke it pleased him. Any at other moment in the past year, even the past weeks, he would have said he would not, could not find happiness again but he had. This woman, this Sabetha, made him happy and returned to him the hope he lost back in Tennessee.
“I am,” he told her, two words but they said much more. She would understand.
They were at the bed, side by side and he turned to face her.
“So am I,” Sabetha said.
This time he kissed her with hunger as well as desire in a slow, gentle kiss that sent thrills through his body. After the kiss, he enfolded her into his arms and held her, content to feel her proximity, to know that he could embrace someone who loved him again. Her arms circled him and they stood, together.
He had been empty but now he was full, restored from a shadow man who danced around the edges of life almost unseen to himself, now vital and alive again. Johnny could stand so forever and he wanted to keep this woman that long. Passion, almost forgotten, stirred deep within but he was yet too weak in body to act on his desire, still too shy with his love to ask. For now, the tender emotion sufficed but he knew that one day, it would blossom into full expression for both spirit and body.
Johnny did not say the words but he gave her his heart with silent embrace, felt the same flow from her into his weary soul, and sighed with wonder. Then, because he felt weak and tired, he lay down, she beside him. Neither one spoke but Sabetha reached out, grasping his hand in her own, holding it and caressing it.
That gave him the courage to tell her about the last year, speak it so he could put it away, and bury it as he wished he could have done for his dead.
****
Johnny Devaney Remembers
‘Twas an early spring and never had the corn grown so fast or fine. By late May, the corn was knee-high, tall enough for the wind to ripple the leaves with a whispering sound. Although there had been much talk about Jackson’s Indian Removals, Seamus Devaney put little stock in the tales. After all, he was Irish, and his six wanes were Americans. He had heard from some that General Scott’s orders for removal excluded those married to Cherokees as “Indian countrymen,” their families too, pending further action by the government. That alone would spare them, Seamus believed. This he told his son, Johnny, as they left the double dogtrot cabin that morning, heading to the upper cornfield. James, his youngest brother, the one they called Seamus Usdi, little James, trailed behind them.
Ma – She-Who-Sees-Light, called Light by her husband and Dances-At-Morning, her mother, filled them with buckwheat cakes and bacon. His own wife, Janey, still lay abed, miserable with the morning sickness in the tiny cabin, hardly more than a lean-to Johnny built after they wed. He didn’t like Janey much and did not love her at all but the child she carried was his so he did the decent thing and wed her. That child and the marriage had both been conceived in lust; if he had any regrets, that was it.
As they passed the barn, Davey joined them, hoe over one shoulder, and Samuel met them on the trail that led from the cabin he'd built for his growing family. Weeds sprouted between the neat rows of corn and as they reached the field, Samuel slapped him across the shoulders.
“Would you look at all the weeds,” he said, laughing. “’Tis twice as many as there were. We’ll be all day at this.”
Johnny did not care. He would rather spend the hours in the cornfield with Da and his brothers than listen to Janey puke or whine. Being out of the crude cabin, the warmth of the sunlight shading through the trees, he was in high humor and he started singing, “The Stuttering Lovers.” They all joined in, hoeing at the weeds until Da looked up.
“Do ye smell smoke?” he asked, sniffing at the wind.
They did, strong smoke, different from the woodsmoke that came from their chimneys.
“Look!” Davey cried, dropping down his hoe to point at a plume of black smoke rising above the trees. “Fire!”
“A Dhia!” Johnny said. “If that’s not the cabin, ‘tis close.”
He started toward the path but Da put up his hand to stop.
“Listen. I hear horses coming, troopers, and soldiers.”
In that last moment, before the soldiers burst out of the woods and into the corn, they all heard the jingle of bridles, the hoofbeats, and the jocular sound of many men talking. Johnny heard the sounds and then jumped as a large bay stallion came over the top of him, raking his shoulders with its hooves. He hit the dirt and by the time he raised himself up, a full company of American soldiers surrounded them. Much of the corn lay flat, trampled by the soldiers. In the center of the field, his Da stood, erect and angry as the company commander read out General Scott’s orders for removal.
“What are ye doing in my field?” Seamus Devaney shouted. “Get out; ye’ve ruined my corn.”
“Cease!” The young Lieutant, who read the orders barked. “We are rounding up all Cherokee.”
“Are ye blind, man?” Seamus raged. “Do I look like an Indian to you, amadon? Scott’s orders say ye cannot take my land nor take away my family. Leave, go on with ye!”
“Are you resisting?” the officer asked.
“I am, ye fool.”
The soldier shot Seamus, pulling his pistol and firing without warning so that the deed was over almost before Johnny knew what happened. Da crumpled, and then pitched forward, his own rich red blood spreading in tiny rivers through his corn. The brothers bunched together, prodded by the troopers. Their hoes lay discarded in the dirt and although Johnny wore his knife inside his trousers, he knew if he pulled it, he would die too. Without looking back, they marched back to where the cabin burned with their women huddled together. They watched in silence as their cabins burned, all except Janey who wailed and cried.
By nightfall, they reached a crude stockade, herded like animals along the road. They had nothing but the troopers who harried them carried plunder from many homes. Keeping to the pace was hard but those who lagged were beaten. Janey, seven months great with child, struggled and soon after they reached the stockade, she collapsed. She died before dawn, hemorrhaging in premature childbirth and the child died too. Johnny dragged their bodies off and covered them with limbs; it was the best he could do for them. They had no tools to dig a grave, no food, no fire, nothing.
Penned like animals, they remained as the spring stretched into summer, hot and dry. The few springs dried up, the river fell low, and rations were few. No one knew why they could not move on or where they would be taken except it was west, in the Night Land, the country of death.
A few bites of salted beef, rancid and spoiled, a ration of cornmeal alive with weevils, and a little salt were all the troopers fed them. At first, Johnny, Samuel, Davey, and Seamus Usdi foraged for food but what little the woodland yielded vanished quickly. Dances-At-Morning walked into the forest and did not return, choosing death on her terms over dying of slow starvation.
His sister Kate waited for her betrothed, a young Scotsman named Rab Mackenzie, to rescue her but he did not come and she became silent, speaking little. She died next, after a violent round of dysentery. Sickness spread through the penned-up people like wildfire through dry brush. Samuel’s six children died next, victim to measles, and then his wife, Lizzie, went into early labor and died, the child living just an hour.
Light said little, sitting like a tragic queen among the rank stench of excrement and blood. Mollie, pretty young Mollie, began to go into the bushes with the soldiers because they gave her scraps of food. She was no longer pretty by the time that six troopers took her by force, injuring her so that she returned bleeding and died. Samuel, roused to anger by her death, attacked one of the troopers and was whipped, his back flayed open.
In the dry summer heat, it festered. They had nothing to treat it, no way to keep the flies from the open wounds and he grew fevered, then died. By late September, Johnny, Davey, James, and their mother were all that remained of a family that had numbered fourteen. As the soldiers herded them on the journey west, the surviving Devaneys held onto a slight hope that they might live to see the Night Land, but it was not to be.
After months of stifling hot weather, the burning summer yielded to a cool, wet fall. Rain fell on them as they marched in a caravan that stretched back three miles. Some of the weakest and sickest were in wagons but everyone else walked. They had fewer provisions than before but as they passed settlements or cabins, no one would help. Many threw garbage at them or called out foul names as they passed.
By the time they reached the banks of the great Mississippi River, winter brought more trouble. It was so cold that the river froze and they could not cross it. The ice was too weak to bear their weight so they camped on the banks, sleeping on the bare ground, most without even a thin blanket. Light died on the second day, frozen, her body taken with many others but they did not know where. Johnny mourned her loss but he was preoccupied for James was now sick.
The lad struggled to breathe and burned with fever, lung fever some said but no one could help. Davey and Johnny took turns trying to keep him warm with their own failing body heat. They supported his head so he could breathe and brewed willow bark tea but he slipped away, cold one morning in their arms. Even worse, when they went to beg a blanket or cloth to wrap his body in, they could not get one and his body vanished while they were gone.
Johnny and his brother trailed onward, hope dying, sick in body, and bellies empty. Fort Gibson proved to be no promise land, instead nothing but a desolate post nicknamed “Charnel House” because death visited daily and without discrimination. They were two among the thousands of displaced Cherokees swarming the fort, unwanted by General Arbuckle. The Old Settlers, Cherokees who came of their volition a decade earlier, did not want them and the soldiers had few provisions to share, the same rough food of the trail. Johnny built a brush shelter for them in the hills above Gibson but they almost starved. Indifferent now, taciturn to the point of almost perpetual silence, they trusted no one else and eked by, day by day.
Davey turned to the wisgi, powerful rotgut whiskey that dulled his senses and relieved his pain. Far removed from the fine, aged water of life Seamus Devaney praised, the wisgi was rank, bitter, and tainted. More than one man went blind from drinking the home brew; others suffered other ills. Johnny would not drink it after the first two times but he could not keep Davey from it.
He did odd jobs around the fort for crumbs, emptying chamber pots running over with reeking diarrhea, and helping to bury the dead. Sometimes he took one of the laundresses and rutted with her, relieving his body but never touching his soul.
After a few weeks, he could not bear Fort Gibson any longer. His skin and hair crawled with lice, the daily insults and taunts to the “dirty Injun” were too great, and there was nothing here. He decided to leave, to head back up into the Missouri country where the terrain reminded him of home.
“Come with me,” he begged his brother but Davey, drunk and past caring, would not listen.
He went alone, walking along the rivers after he talked with several scouts to get an idea of how to reach the Ozark land. Before leaving, he smeared his hair with bear grease and stole a wooden comb. Three days gone, he combed out the dead lice from his hair, and then washed in the river with soap root until he felt cleaner than he had since home. He did not know it then but he carried with him the illness that robbed his laundress of her life.
From that point on, Sabetha knew his story and so he stopped, his breath ragged in the dark with tears he could not shed, tears from remembering the nunna-da-ul-tsun-yi wet on his face in the darkness.
Chapter Six
Sabetha Mahoney Trahern
His voice was so soft as he spoke that she strained to hear it, even lying next to him in bed. Sabetha listened, holding his hand to offer what measure of comfort she might.
In the dim light, she could see the outline of his face but not the expression but it did not matter; she heard his anguish in his tone.
“After that, ye know,” Johnny said, after a lengthy silence. His voice cracked and she relinquished his hand so that she could put her arms around him. Johnny turned to her and she held him.
He buried his face against her shoulder and wept, cried all the tears he could not shed on his long trail. She stroked his hair and spoke to him, although she doubted that the words reached him through his sobs. Sabetha prayed that as he wept he released all the hurt, the bitterness, the grief, and pain that he had held.
“Och hone, och hone,” she crooned to him. “Let it all go, mo chroi.”
His body convulsed in her arms as he spent his emotion. After, he lay quiet, then whispered,
The Marriage Cure Page 5