No Resting Place

by William Humphrey

  The Fergusons watched him from a window. He pounded the stakes into the ground with the flat of his axe. Infinitesimal was the penetration into the grudging ground that each stroke gained him; a quarter of an hour’s work advanced his project by mere inches.

  “What kind of livestock is he meaning to fence in that he needs a solid wall like that for?” Agiduda wondered aloud. “Cattle don’t require it. Sheep don’t.”

  “Even hogs don’t,” said Noquisi.

  “What can he have in mind?”

  The man worked with the persistency, the concentrated single-mindedness, or mindlessness, of an insect at its one instinctual function. To him the Sabbath meant no more than to a pissant. It was doubtful that he knew when it fell, all days of the week being alike to him. He would run out of saplings, and then for the next several days his axe would be heard again in the woodlot. The tick of a clock could hardly have kept up with it. Then he would be seen plying between the woods and his work site carrying saplings in bundles on his back. After a stake was driven in place its tip was sharpened to a point with a drawknife.

  What was fueling all this activity was another mystery. Sheer willpower, he seemed to be going on. Perpetual motion. The man took off from work for a spell occasionally, but hardly long enough to have gone into town, on foot, to trade. A shot sounded from time to time in his woods, and there were still some nuts from last year’s crop on the ground, but no roots at this season and certainly no berries. Flour, sweetening, fat: what he was doing for these white man’s staples God only knew. He could have set a trotline on his stretch of the river and, breaking the ice, have run it mornings and evenings. No team, not even a saddle horse, was anywhere to be seen on his property, yet he must have arrived by some conveyance well-provisioned.

  Chop, tote, pound, sharpen: daylight to dark, rain or shine, seven days a week: after a month of it the fence stretched fifty yards. Then work stopped. The man disappeared from sight. Silence fell. No more saplings came out of the woods.

  “Wore himself out,” said Agiduda. “He needs to rest up before turning the corner with that thing. A week in bed, I should think.”

  But the fence was carried no farther. It was left a straight line enclosing nothing, starting where it did, running its length, then terminating. Anybody could have walked around either end of it.

  Just one finishing touch was applied to it. One day soon after work on it was abandoned, or, as it turned out, completed, a sign appeared midway on its outside. There was no need to get closer than the house to read it. What it said was, “KEEP OUT. Mr. O. J. Blodgett, Sole Prop.”

  After his fence was finished, nothing more was seen of Mr. Blodgett. He got an early start on the day; smoke was already rising from his chimney no matter what hour the Fergusons got up, but what he was doing with his time there was no knowing. Then one spring morning at break of day he was seen issuing forth with a pick and shovel over his shoulder. Had he been serious, was he speaking literally, in saying that he had gotten himself a gold mine? If so, he was wasting his time even more senselessly than in putting up his pointless fence. The gold fields were confined to a distant part of the Cherokee territory.

  Meanwhile, provisions were running low, and as if that were not bad enough, Grandmother, in her anxiety, imagined them to be disappearing even faster than they were. She said nothing about this at the time for fear of revealing what she had long suspected, that her brain was going soft, and of pointing out what was already plain to see, her incompetence as a housekeeper.

  First it was a ham. She had thought she had four of them left in the smokehouse. She could have sworn there were four. They had butchered in November. She had served a fresh ham at Thanksgiving and a cured one at Christmas. After that they had lived off the buck which was the first deer to be killed by Noquisi with his new bow. What Indian would eat hog meat when he could eat venison instead? To this day, some would no sooner touch it than would a Jew. So she had thought that of the original six hams she had four left. Now when she went to get one she found only three. When could they have eaten the other one? And how could she not remember their eating it? Cooking anything was an experience for her, not just memorable but painful; how could she have forgotten cooking that ham? Her brain was going soft. It had never had much use, and now it was going soft. She mistrusted her capacity to count to ten. She was ashamed of growing old and embarrassed to have it seen. Her ineptitude at the household tasks now asked of her added to this sense.

  She who had never planned or prepared a meal, who had never been inside the root cellar except to take shelter there from cyclones, must now manage a house. Of quantities of foodstuffs needed in store, of methods of preserving this one and that, she had only the most rudimentary notion. How long different things took to cook, so as to have them all ready to serve together, how much seasoning to add: these things, second nature to most women, to her were a mystery. She had sat down to her meal and eaten it, and that was her only connection with it. The activity that went on in her parents’ kitchen when she was a girl, and later in her own, no more concerned her than did the picking of the cotton or the shearing of the sheep.

  In a kitchen Mr. Ferguson was as inexperienced as she was. But he had taken his turn as cook in hunting camps. He had never slaughtered a hog or a beef before, but he had killed and butchered many a buck, and there was not all that much difference. He had cooked a little for the fun of it, and now, seeing her struggle, he came to her aid, he made a game of it—two old folks playing house. And, indeed, the empty house had something of the air of a playhouse, especially with the boy living with them; they were camping out in it. Between them, Mr. Ferguson and Noquisi did the scullery work. It drew them close. Having these chores to do helped to some extent to take their minds off the separation of the family, the threat of dispossession and removal that hung constantly over them. Yet it shamed her as only an Indian woman could be shamed to see her man doing woman’s work, and to have the boy see his grandfather thus humiliated in his old age.

  No matter how she tried, she mismanaged everything, and now, under her supervision, a general collapse loomed imminent. The milch cow seemed to be drying up, long before the time for it—no doubt because she was such a poor milker. The hens’ production of eggs had fallen off by fully half. Hardly a week passed but what another one disappeared from their pen. A fox must be getting into it, though she could not find the breach. A turtle it must have been that got one of the ducks on the pond. Apples, potatoes, squash, turnips, pumpkins, peas, beans, lard—she knew she was wasteful, that she spoiled much food in preparing it, still she did not understand how an old couple and a boy could consume stores at such a rate. When spring came and the ground thawed and could be worked, a kitchen garden could be planted, but could she hold out until then?

  Go the Cherokees must, sooner or later, and the sooner the better, for conditions here worsened daily, and those the earliest on the scene out there would have the first choice of a place to settle—that was one of the arguments used by the Treaty Party to persuade them to emigrate. Another was that by going voluntarily they could pick their own departure date, at a favorable season of the year, travel their own chosen route, at their own pace, could provision themselves according to their tastes, could go in dignity rather than be driven like cattle, which was the alternative they were threatened with. Yet none, or very few, almost none, went voluntarily.

  Did they think that the threat was an empty one? How could they think it? Had recent events taught them nothing? Were they blind to the example of their brothers the Choctaws, the Chickasaws and the Creeks? Where were they now? All were gone, deported, and along the way, such were the conditions under which they were herded, they had lost thousands of their numbers to disease, exposure, starvation at the hands of swindling sutlers operating under government contract. That same threat hung over the Cherokees. What made them think that they and they alone of all the tribes could escape it?

  Even those who asked the question, or who p
ut it to themselves, knew what made them think it. Their innate and unshakeable conviction of their difference, always held, now more than ever strengthened by the invention of Sequoyah’s alphabet, the success of their efforts to civilize themselves, the consciousness that outside the American south, all around the world, were thousands of people who believed them to be, and encouraged them to think themselves, superior to their backward, naked and illiterate red brothers. From the white man the Cherokees had learned many lessons, but despising Indians, all except their own, was not among them. In that the whites could have taken lessons from them. That the Cherokees had congressmen and clergymen, editors and philosophers crusading on their behalf whom the other tribes had not had, they took to be fitting and proper.

  They had followed a different course from that of the other tribes, a course which, if it had not won, had still not lost. The Creeks, the Choctaws and the Chickasaws had crumpled under pressure at once, had sold out; the Seminoles had fought, and, through base trickery, now had lost. The Cherokees had litigated in the white man’s courts. They had won there, and although the President professed himself powerless to enforce the high court’s ruling against the state of Georgia, here they still were, unlike the Creeks, the Chickasaws and the Choctaws. Meanwhile their archenemy was nearing the end of his tenure in the White House. In the coming national elections there was a good chance that the other party might win. Its leader, Henry Clay, was a friend of the Cherokees. He would assert the power of the federal government over what Georgia called its state’s rights. Meanwhile, working for them tirelessly, selflessly and brilliantly, they had their own Tsan Usdi. How could you lose all hope? To do so was to desert him.

  The notice first appeared tacked to the door of the former Cherokee council house, now district headquarters of the United States Army, in the former Cherokee capital of New Echota, toward the end of 1837. Within days it was posted on trees throughout the territory. The message, in English and Cherokee, was that on May 23 of the following year those Cherokees who had not yet removed themselves would be forcibly removed to the lands awaiting them in the west. The locations of depots to be built to receive them were given, and their cooperation was solicited in presenting themselves voluntarily for transport and thereby sparing the Army having to hunt them down. What Cherokee had translated the English and set it in the only existing font of type in Sequoyah’s alphabet? For his family name, at least, most needed only one guess. Ridge.

  The first sweep by the soldiers of Cherokee homes was for the confiscation of their arms. Not even the poorest cabin in the remotest part was overlooked. And because there was often no communication between the raiders and the occupants, the place was turned into a shambles in the search.

  Such as they had were hunting arms. The loss of them was disheartening not because they were deprived of the opportunity of turning them upon people, they had no intention of doing that, but because of their attachment to them. Most had forgotten—had never known—the use of the bow and arrow; upon the household rifle depended the meat for the table traditional to them, their very concept of themselves. An object of beauty as well as usefulness, the product of skilled craftsmanship, purchased at sacrifice or lovingly handed down from father to son, his rifle was often the only possession that a man looked upon as personal. Together, he and it shared memories of many a head of game, and mutual respect, each for the other’s trustiness. His rifle was the emblem of a man’s manhood, its loss the loss of that attribute. That it should be thought that, even armed, they posed a threat saddened them with the sense of their present-day powerlessness. Agiduda doubted that his Joseph Manton fowling piece or his father’s Pennsylvania flintlock would find their way into the federal armory. He suspected that they would remain in the possession of the Georgia State militiaman who rode off carrying them.

  Like the condemned man on death row, the date for whose execution had been set, becoming his own cellblock attorney, the Cherokees tried to stop the clock, sending Ross repeatedly to Washington to argue their case, to delay. Yet on the homefront, meanwhile, the setting of the date seemed to have made little or no difference, hardly any perceptible impression. So the Reverend Mackenzie reports.

  He had been unsuccessful, incidentally, in his efforts to have the town tavern closed on Sabbath mornings. It was there that the husbands and fathers of his congregation waited for them until services were over. Thus he was not reaching with his message of brotherly love those for whom it was primarily intended.

  The concentration camps—log stockades requiring the felling of whole forests—were erected and their gates thrown open to receive the volunteers; they stood empty. On their walls appeared the words TLA YIDAYOJADANVSI: we will not emigrate. The Cherokees now had an added reason for wanting to remain in their homeland and resisting to the last all efforts to remove them: horror stories of the journey reaching them from those who had gone west, of the ruggedness of the land out there, and even of the hostility they had encountered from those of their brothers who had gone and settled there earlier, of being swindled by members of their own clans in the purchase of land, stock, provisions, seed. Their troubles had split them, had frayed the tribal tie, and pitted Cherokee against Cherokee. On his errands around the countryside, ministering to the sick and the dying, burying the dead, baptizing the living, marrying them, the Reverend Mackenzie found no evidence of panic, certainly none of widespread preparations to leave any time soon.

  He found just the opposite, in fact. People burned off the brush and last year’s stover and stalks and vines. They mended fences. As his friend David Ferguson said, speaking of his repairing his verandah, “Why am I doing this for the next owner? I’m not. I’m doing it for all its past owners. They kept it up for me and as long as I’m still here I’m responsible to them.” They even cleared new cropland. The threat that they would not be here to gather their crops did not discourage them from planting; on the contrary, it was as if planting a crop were the guarantee that they would still be here when harvesttime came. The seeds they sowed were their link with that land they loved. The roots of the plants were their roots; the more of them the stronger the tie. Not ordinarily the most industrious of farmers, an occupation they for long resisted, the Cherokees that spring of 1838 were industrious as never before. The winds of change were blowing but they fanned into flames the embers of resistance. As do certain plants, hope flourishes in the poorest soil.

  Surely people the likes of the Fergusons were not so simple as to think that by working the soil they sent their roots in it down deeper? Necessity in part dictated their zeal but they worked not just out of necessity; they took satisfaction in the work. Did this arise from a sense that this would be the last time they would ever till that precious soil? Or was it just the opposite of that: the novelty of their doing so for the first time? Was it a sense of belated self-discovery, a disavowal of the privilege and the pampering that had always been theirs and an identification in these troubled times with the masses of their people who had always fed themselves with their own hands? Whatever was their drive, they were always busy whenever Reverend Mac, as they had taken to calling him, and which he forbore to correct (it was not the “Mac” that he minded—he rather liked that; it was the “Reverend” without the “the” that was improper), dropped in on them that spring. Busy spading rows in the kitchen garden, sowing seeds, busy molding candles. It was plain to see that working together drew them together. They were grateful for the physical exertion; it kept them from brooding.

  They were glad to see Reverend Mac, for he was almost the only person they saw those days. A siege mentality had gripped them, as it had everyone. This house that had once been open house to one and all—red and white and shades in between—now received few callers. Its size made it all the more silent; its emptiness was large-scale. Neighbors with news to relate came by night, spoke low, were brief and soon departed.

  From time to time on his pastoral house calls out in the countryside the Reverend Mackenzie was acc
ompanied by Corporal Willis Odum of the Georgia State Militia. His duty was to enforce one law, to check that the one man to whom it applied was adhering to it. Thus he was present at last rites, conversions, baptisms, always with the same expression on his face of disbelief and distaste. To the Corporal the Indians’ Christianity was a pretense and a put-on, a fraud upon the Reverend Mackenzie above all. They were, he said, an open book to him. If so, said the Reverend Mackenzie to himself, it was the only book that was.

  “Christians my foot!” he said. “Spawn of the devil. All this religious hocus-pocus ain’t nothing but a way to get around going west. But they’re going, them johnnycakes, every last one of them, and the sooner the better. You know, Preacher, you’re lucky to have me with you out here in some of these out-of-the-way places. You could get bushwhacked and nobody’d ever know about it.”

  “I have never met with anything but friendliness and hospitality from these people.”

  “Had me a pet fox once. Raised it from a pup. Gentle as a hound. Run loose but never run off. Come when called. Eat right out of my hand. One day for no particular reason that critter turned on me and just look a-here at the scar. That’s redskins for you. No more to be trusted than wild animals. Think you’ve got them tamed but they’re fooling you and you’re fooling yourself. It don’t matter how little a part they are. One drop is enough to taint the blood.

  “Unless we kept watch every minute they’d rise up and slit our throats to a man, woman and child. Our biggest mistake is in learning them some of our own ways. Makes them more dangerous than ever. You can put them in decent clothes, proper houses, make them look on the outside like human beings, but you can’t take the Indian out of them. And don’t never make the mistake of thinking you’re the exception to the rule. They hate us white folks one and all.”