No Resting Place

by William Humphrey

  “What about the ones over the years who have married among them, become their kin, been taken into the tribe?”

  “Them ain’t white men. Them are paleface Indians—the worst kind of all.”

  He posted himself outside the house of call. Thus he was never actually where he was supposed to be, present at ceremonies, only on sentry duty, and had no way of knowing how many undesirables were assembled inside or what went on. “Stinks in there worse’n that fox den I took that pup out from,” he said. Besides, he was always expecting ambush, and that meant in the least expected places. That the savages had for so long remained peaceful did not reassure him. Indian vengeance matured like whiskey in the cask.

  The Corporal was skeptical among all else of Cherokee vows of fidelity exchanged in the rites of holy matrimony. Sitting on the buggy seat and loosing a stream of tobacco juice, his parting words as the Reverend Mackenzie went up the path to perform the marriage ceremony were, “Now, remember, just one bride to the groom, eh, Preacher. More’n that constitutes unlawful assembly.”

  The boy and his grandfather were seldom apart during this time. They worked alongside each other. They took walks together. They spoke little then. Each was straining with all his senses to impress the scene upon his memory, to take it with him on leaving. Words were unnecessary between them. Each could read the other’s thoughts.

  On these walks their sense of their loss was expanded. For this was land which their people had forever tended with a care for it and for all the fellow creatures with whom they shared it, leaving in the field at harvesttime a portion of the corn for the deer and the migrant geese, not farming to the edges of their lots expecting from every inch a marketable yield, but leaving the hedgerows untrimmed, a tangle of protective cover for the small animals and the birds to feed and nest in. And beyond the bounds of their own parcel lay land that they were losing too: tribal land. For as his grandfather said to the boy, a white man thought that only his small plot of earth was his, and not that all of it was. And to him that plot of his was his enemy, begrudging him the living he must wrest from it in the sweat of his brow.

  They tried even in their thoughts not to pity each other, for they knew that to be pitied made one pity oneself and weaken. But they did pity each other. The boy pitied his grandmother, for her attachment to her home was like that of the generations-old wisteria vine that clung to it with its many tentacles from the foundation to the eave. But he pitied his grandfather more, for because of his long life as a farmer and an outdoorsman he had as many roots in this soil as did the trees of the forest.

  Although he was not getting much taller, as measured by the mark on his wall, it was during this period of inner ripening, of forced mental growth, that the boy’s power of thought-reading rapidly matured. He had known to expect this. It was a faculty possessed by Cherokees—one they did not advertise to outsiders. Thus he had known from the time he knew anything that if he was to have any secrets from his grown-ups he must think about them only when he was off by himself, for such thoughts proclaimed themselves like smoke signals. He had had many startling but convincing proofs of that. As this power of penetration grew with age, he was not sure but that Agiduda knew what he was thinking even when they were apart. Not that he had anything to hide from him, for with age also came tolerance of youthful mischief. Now the current began to flow in both directions. Old, wise and wily as it was, his grandfather’s mind, perhaps deprived of its distinctiveness from others of his kind because of their common predicament, became accessible to the boy. This new ability of his did not gladden him, it saddened him to find that he could enter and find there a mind caught and writhing in the same trap as all the rest. That was one of the most painful aspects of being included with all your kind in a common threat: it was to have no life of your own, no more individuality than a raindrop.

  Their evenings were spent by the family with the grandfather reading aloud to them. That was how their evenings had always been spent. Thus it was an assertion that life went on as before. It was more important now than ever. The boy’s education must not be neglected, nor must the old folks’ minds be allowed to stagnate and they turn into the uncivilized savages that the whites proclaimed them to be. And it was a distraction from their troubles. Or would have been had the old man not veered in one direction like the needle of a compass to readings that reminded them of their troubles. He read them, “Breathes there a man, with soul so dead,/ Who never to himself has said,/ ‘This is my own, my native land!’” He read them Robinson Crusoe. They were not entertained by the hero’s ingenuity at surviving in adversity. They were appalled by the hardships of a civilized, social man, castaway, reduced to brute existence, aching with loneliness and homesickness and with the fear that he had been abandoned by God.

  Their most recently finished book was Paradise Lost.

  “If it had happened here it would never have happened,” was Grandmother’s comment on The Fall.

  “How so?” asked Agiduda.

  “Because there were no apples in this country until the white man brought them with him. And because no Cherokee woman would have been enticed by a snake. We all know they speak with a forked tongue.”

  They laughed together over this but soon fell silent, each listening to the echo in their minds of the poem’s closing lines and thinking of the similarities and the differences between themselves and their original parents. On being expelled from their paradise, not all the world was before them, where to choose their place of rest. They would have no choice, they would find no resting place. Theirs was to be the land west of Eden. Nor would their steps be wandering and slow. They would be pointed directly toward the setting sun, and they would be in quick march.

  Go they must, there was no escaping it, the date was set, and there was this powerful inducement to come in voluntarily to the stockade: if you did so you were allowed to bring with you whatever you could carry. You could ride in, on horseback or even by wagon and team, and with these you could make the long trek west. Wait to be hunted down and brought in and you would come as you were. You would come as you were and you would go west as you were: on foot and with nothing but the clothes on your back. It was like the favor of giving a condemned man his preference in the mode of his execution.

  It was a time to choose from among your belongings the most essential, the things needful for making a new home, beginning a new life in a new place, and, among the inessential ones, those the most precious, without which life would be nothing more than bare existence, ones that would be links with the old life. It was a time to find white buyers and get the best prices you could for the things you must leave behind.

  Agiduda would go to the library to choose among the books. White buyers for these locally there were few or none, but so many could not all be taken. The bound volumes of The Tatler, for example, would seem to have little application to life in The Territory beyond the Mississippi among the coyotes and the wild Osage. And yet it might be just the thing to make life tolerable in that literary desert. He would dip into its pages. And for that day the choosing of books was over. The Tatler’s remoteness from his troubles made it appealing to Agiduda. Its urbanity and polish made him feel that his crude world was not the only world that men had made for themselves.

  The departure date was like one fixed for your execution, and the inducement to come in beforehand on your own like an invitation to mount the gallows sooner than the date set by the judge. Who would hasten his own execution? Yet perhaps the condemned man who has lost his every appeal sometimes felt the temptation to get it all over with. To live for nothing but to watch the approach of your appointed end—was that to live?

  But they had not lost their appeal. They had won it, had won it in the highest court of the land. They had shown that the Ridge party did not speak for them and that the treaty it had signed was invalid. Even now, powerful members of Congress were working in their cause. There were editorials, lectures, fund-raising events, protests, rallies for the
m in New York, Boston, Philadelphia. Good people everywhere were on their side. Something so monstrously unjust could not come to pass. It was not possible in the modern civilized world that a people whose only offense was their existence could be so mistreated. Tsan Usdi had not given up. It was for you that he fought on.

  Then it was another day nearer to the appointed one and somebody stopped to say that Tsan Usdi was just back from his latest mission to Washington and that President Van Buren, Jackson’s handpicked successor, who was as bent upon Indian removal as Jackson ever was, had refused even to see him. You said to yourself, “The end has come. I must start packing.” And you were so overwhelmed with sadness that you were unable to stir from your seat. The next morning you summoned up a bit of strength (there was a renewal of strength when all hope was lost, all illusions dispelled) and made a start on the job, and somebody dropped in with a letter from people who had made the trip and such were its terrors you said to yourself, “If they want me to go, they will have to come and get me. And they will have to drag me kicking and screaming every inch of the way.”

  Noquisi, or rather, Amos, served as the Reverend Mackenzie’s interpreter for some of the wave of conversions to Christianity during this period. The Reverend Mackenzie ought to have rejoiced in this salvation of souls but his own soul was troubled by the tactics he was obliged to employ. The primitive mind required special handling in matters theological. The Indians looked about them and saw themselves losing and the white man winning in their unequal contest. This must be because the white man’s was the more powerful god. So they would switch their allegiance, then with His help they would keep their homes and not be removed to the place they conceived of as hell on earth. The Reverend Mackenzie tried to warn them that prayers were not always answered, yet he found it hard to explain to them why not, when God was all-powerful, all-merciful, and you had kept his commandments. He tried to instill in them higher, selfless, spiritual motives for converting, but he feared he was not always successful, and he dreaded their disappointment and disillusionment, and their consequent anger directed at himself.

  The case of one Corn-dancer taught him circumspection.

  Corn-dancer’s god was no good. He had sacrificed to him all his days, and what had it gotten him? Corn-dancer’s enemies prospered while Corn-dancer suffered. He wanted to hear more about the Reverend’s god. He was prepared to listen sympathetically.

  The Reverend Mackenzie began by saying that he, Corn-dancer, had a soul.

  Corn-dancer snorted. He was offended by what he considered an insult to his intelligence and to that of his race. He knew he had a soul. All Indians knew that—even the ignorant Osage.

  This soul of his was everlasting.

  Another snort. To the everlasting souls of his ancestors Corn-dancer had turned since childhood. Even the Osage—

  For the salvation of this soul of his from the eternal flames of hell he must believe in and worship this one and only, this jealous god.

  That a god should be jealous and insist on being the one and only came as no surprise to Corn-dancer, but he knew a good trade when he saw one. He grunted in agreement. Nor did the Holy Trinity give his primitive mind any more trouble than it had given Amos’s childish one. In fact, the ease with which it was accepted troubled the Reverend Mackenzie by confirming his own reservations.

  The old man listened, nodding and grunting with approval, as the Reverend Mackenzie expounded the Articles of the Faith and the Ten Commandments. Of these, keeping the seventh would cost Corn-dancer no effort at his age. As for the fifth, he had always honored his father and mother—all Indians did, even the Osage. As Corn-dancer, in an untranslated aside to the boy, observed, he found it rather revealing that white people should have to be told by their god that they must. He particularly approved of the fourth commandment, which came out in translation as to loaf on Sunday. Best of all he liked the last two; they suited his situation precisely. These alone would have sold him on this god, but for one thing. Every day the white man, whose god this was, bore false witness against his neighbor in the courts of the land, while the Indians were forbidden by law to testify against him. Coveting his red neighbor’s house was what the white man was here expressly to do. Had this almighty god not the power to enforce his commandments upon his believers?

  The Reverend Mackenzie assured Corn-dancer that such sinners as those would roast eternally in hell—unless, he felt obliged to add, they repented on their deathbeds.

  Ah. In other words, just believe in this god and you were free to do all the mischief you pleased and leave your ill-gotten gains for your children to enjoy—as the sins of the fathers could not be visited upon them—so long as you said before dying, “I’m sorry. Forgive me.” Corn-dancer understood now why this god was so popular. He was a good god for white men, not so good for the poor outnumbered Indians.

  Finally, Corn-dancer could feel nothing but shame and contempt for a father—one supposedly all-powerful—not coming to the rescue of his only child when that child was tortured by his enemies and put to die at the stake.

  And so Corn-dancer was lost and damned, much to the Reverend Mackenzie’s sorrow, and his embarrassment before the boy, his interpreter. To these simple-minded arguments the answers were too complicated, he explained.

  It was at this time that two men, one, after a period of eclipse, even of disgrace, now world-famous, powerful, the other always obscure, long assumed dead, reentered the life of the tribe. It turned out that they had been silent partners in a recent event that had changed the course of history, had redrawn the map, and brought the one to prominence and fame. Of this connection between them Agiduda learned at a meeting of Ross’s cabinet just over the line in Tennessee. Although it then seemed irrelevant, it was information which was to prove in time to be of importance to the Fergusons, those left of them.

  For some Cherokees there had always been alternatives to be feared even more than deportation to the land of darkness, and, over the years, bands of them had fled there. For them it was a refuge. Of these, some belonged to that small minority faction who resisted being civilized and clung to the old traditional tribal ways, others were fugitives from justice, some from red justice, some from white justice. Fugitives from justice of both colors was the first band ever to go, and they had kept going until they got clear out of America.

  There were two versions of their story, a red one and a white one. Both were agreed that it took place at a spot in Alabama called Muscle Shoals, on the Tennessee River, on a day in June of 1794.

  Down the river that day came a boat known to be laden with trade goods and with twenty slaves, a prize of war (not to mention the thirteen white scalps on board—as yet still attached to their owners’ heads) to be coveted. And so (this was the white version) the Cherokee chieftain Diwali and his band boarded it, killed the six men of the crew, the three women and four children, and took captive the slaves.

  News traveled slowly and by word of mouth in those days, for Sequoyah had not yet invented the alphabet, and, busy raiding white settlements here and there, Diwali had been on the warpath for some months and was out of touch with things. Now, nearing home, he was met by runners with the news that the war he had thought he was fighting had been concluded by a peace treaty some time past. The news of Muscle Shoals had preceded him and the event, committed in peacetime, had been condemned as an atrocity by the whites and repudiated by the Cherokees. Awaiting him was arrest and extradition and most likely the gallows and a hangman’s noose. Diwali turned about and went west, settling his band in Arkansas, where, over the years, the outpost was joined by others of The People, forced for one reason or another to leave their homeland.

  Blood had flowed at Muscle Shoals that day, both versions of events agreed as to that; but according to the red version it was not an act of war but a private dispute over money and deception. Captain William Scott had trinkets to trade to Indians and he invited Diwali and his band aboard to inspect his wares. Plied with whiskey, th
ey paid exorbitant prices for glass beads, mirrors, body paint.

  When they sobered up, and saw how they had been swindled, the Indians returned and demanded their money back. They were refused. In the fracas that ensued, an Indian was speared by a boat hook and killed. It was then, and only then, according to this account, that Diwali attacked, and while in the fray the white men were all killed, the women and children were released unharmed and sent on their way downriver.

  But his version might not be believed, not even by his own people. Flight to the dreaded west where none dared follow him was the prudent course for Diwali. Now he was seen by many Cherokees as their Moses.

  Diwali: The Bowl, or Chief Bowles, as white people called him: at least half and maybe pure Scots, possibly the only Bowles spared, because of his tender age, in the massacre of his family by Cherokees and raised in the tribe as one of their own (like the convert more Catholic than the Pope, these grafted-on ones were often the most thoroughgoing Indians of them all, and the most ferocious haters of whites) was thirty-eight years old at the time of the events at Muscle Shoals. Today, in 1837, he was still alive, now eighty-three, and still out west, though no longer in Arkansas. Long a figure of legend, remote in time and place, he now reentered the lives of The People remaining, holding out, in the old country. His fortunes had changed radically; they had been completely reversed. Now instead of being an outcast, a fugitive, he was suddenly able, in this their hour of need, to offer them, all eighteen thousand of them, as well as all the other four of the so-called Civilized Tribes, the Creeks, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws and the Seminoles—any who wanted to come—the more the better—a homeland.