No Resting Place

by William Humphrey

  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 yo
u 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.

  To accompany almost everything Indians did there was one of the old tales for a man to tell and retell, a child to listen to and listen again. Giving Noquisi lessons in the art of chipping arrowheads (Never mind that they had guns now. Guns were fine but the bow too still had its uses. While a white man was measuring and dispensing powder from his powder horn and fumbling for a patch and ramrodding it down the barrel of his rifle and finding a ball and ramrodding that and fitting a cap to the nipple and shouldering his arm and taking aim, an Indian could loose a dozen arrows. Besides, a gun made a hunter out of anybody; with a gun any fool could kill game, even a white fool.), his grandfather told him about Flint. Of how all the animals hated Flint for his having caused the death of so many of their kind, but only one, that wily little rascal Tsitstu, the Rabbit, had the courage to approach him, the cunning to undo him. Of how Tsitstu had inveigled Flint into paying him a visit, had dined him to such satiety that he dozed off, whereupon Tsitstu drove a stake into him, causing him to burst into pieces (one of which, striking Tsitstu, cleft his nose), and that is why we now find pieces of flint scattered everywhere, yours for the picking up. Actually it was as though Flint had burst into finished arrowheads, so many were there to be found scattered everywhere, yours for the picking up: the legacy of generations of Cherokee hunters, warriors. Like every boy, Noquisi had a basketful of them.

  That was last year when on Saturdays out at the farm Grandfather was always to be found in his toolshed at work on the bow and arrows which he had been taken with the notion to make.

  “Getting ready to go on the warpath, Agiduda?”

  Under the present circumstances it was not very funny even to the boy’s father, who had asked it. To the old man it was not funny in the least. He responded with his most Indian grunt.

  It was plain to see from the care going into its making that this was to be the bow to end bows—or else to bring them back. Grandfather turned out to be an expert bowyer. The wood was seasoned Osage orange, but the Osage were traditional enemies of the Cherokees and even now were harassing those of them who had given up the struggle and already gone west, so better call it by its other name, bois d’arc: wood of Noah’s ark. Close-grained, almost unworkably dense it was, so that the shaping of the stave with drawknife and spokeshave took weeks. Perfect symmetry of the two limbs was the goal, thus their tapering proceeded simultaneously, cautiously, with almost imperceptible progress from week to week—wood once removed could not be replaced. When shaped, the limbs were tillered: balanced so exactly that, when drawn, the bow bent in as perfect an arc as the crescent moon. The final finishing was done with the cutting edge of a piece of broken glass, the shavings as fine as eiderdown. Endless hand-rubbing with oil made the yellow wood gleam like gold. The bowstring was plaited of gut, the handle woven of leather, the tips carved of antlers. A dozen arrows, each requiring days to true up straight and fletch with feathers all from the same side of the bird, in a quiver of hide decorated with dyed porcupine quills, completed the outfit. Only now, after months of labor, was it finished, so that much as he longed to, he being already a better than fair shot with his own miserable boy’s bow, and more than an apprentice in the patience and stealth and immobility on t
he trail and on the game stand which hunting with the bow and arrow took, Noquisi did not dare ask Agiduda to make one like it for him.

  Now when his week in the asi had ended, Amos Ferguson could go and get himself baptized by the new minister, meanwhile he was Noquisi full-time.

  He was hearing little that was new to him. The recent and ongoing occurrences affecting the elders affected the children too and were common knowledge, a common threat. What he was hearing in this old, all-but-forgotten tribal rite was more in the nature of a review of all that he knew, lest he forget it in the press of events soon to overtake them. He sensed that his grandfather wanted in these nights together to tell him once again, as though for the last time, who and what he was, for a way of life was threatened, might be coming to an end—if, indeed, the end had not already come.

  They talked of the old-time festivals, six to the calendar year, when The People assembled like so many grains to make one ear of corn, some of them traveling for days to get there. They celebrated the appearance of the first green of spring; the heading-out of the maize; its harvesttime; the first full moon of autumn and the advent of the hunting season. Greatest of all the celebrations was Ah tawh hung nah, the new year. Life itself began afresh then. Old clothes, old furniture, old utensils, everything old was brought to be thrown on a communal bonfire in the village square. The fire in the council house was ceremoniously extinguished and a fresh one kindled. In every home the fire was extinguished and a fresh one lighted from the embers of the council-house fire. All was swept clean, all freshly coated with paint. The people purified themselves with the black draught and by bathing in the river. All was pardoned. Murderers came in from hiding and sat beside the survivors of their victims, who had been sworn to avenge them with blood. There were ball games and footraces and shooting matches and trials of strength and all week long there was dancing day and night. Something nobody but an Indian could know was the brotherhood, the simultaneous sense of community and self, the ecstasy of belonging to one’s tribe—and the sorrow of seeing it riven into hostile halves.