No Resting Place

by William Humphrey

  Only one of the tribes, the Seminoles of Florida, had fought. Vastly outnumbered, disadvantageously armed, poorly provisioned, they had fought the United States Army for twelve years. Seminole women had fought alongside their men, and just as fiercely, murdering their infant children so as not to be hampered by them nor given away by their cries. They might be fighting yet but for an act of deceit and treachery in violation of the fundamental rule of civilized warfare. Invited, under a flag of truce, to a conference on peace proposals, their chief, the resourceful and inspiring young field commander, Osceola, was seized and put in prison, where he soon died, as hostage for the surrender of his followers.

  Of the forty thousand of the four tribes deported so far, some ten thousand had perished on the way.

  That first day they traveled through territory familiar to them. Here they had lived and worked and courted, had visited relatives and friends, had explored as children, had hunted and fished and trapped, gone nut-gathering, berry-picking. The very houses, or their ashes, that some of them had been driven from, had been born in, they passed. Of these some were now occupied by white squatters. From them the occupants came out to watch the Cherokees’ exodus, some to pelt them with stones and hoot them on their way. Even so, it was land with associations that urged them to linger, not leave. Their steps lagged that day. At the end of it they had accomplished less than ten of the hundreds and hundreds of miles that stretched before them.

  That first day’s march gave a bitter foretaste of all that were to come. With its end came the heart-sickening realization that it was only the first—the first of how many? It was not long; after months of inactive confinement, they must be toughened gradually. Even so, it was wearying, particularly to those who were leaving the most behind, not the most in material possessions but the most in time spent and memories accumulated, like Agiduda and Grandmother. In camp that evening the boy went to fetch water for them. There at the wagon he met the Mackenzies.

  “But, man,” said Agiduda, “you don’t have to do this. You are not one of us.”

  “I am if you will have me,” said the Reverend Mackenzie. “I’m certainly not one of them. I got the call to go. I hope to be useful.”

  Thereupon Agiduda adopted them both into his clan. The boy said to them, “Please, sir, please, ma’am, from now on call me Noquisi. But only when there’s nobody but ourselves to hear.”

  Later that evening Agiduda said, “Saints, my child, are all fools, bless them. Now don’t go telling him I called him that. ‘Saint’ I mean. The ‘fool’ part he wouldn’t object to.”

  They were not linked by collars and chains but it was as though they were. In the morning when the starter’s bugle blew and those in the lead took the first forward step, the lurch was felt all along the line.

  This was after they had been issued their daily ration of salt pork and cornmeal from the commissary wagons and allowed time to cook them.

  Fire was obtained from wagons in which they were kept burning day and night in pots and pans. Some of these were true tusti bowls, replicas of the one in which Diyunisi, the Water Beetle, first fetched fire, preserved from olden times and handed down in the family, the holiest of household vessels, snatched up to be taken with them when they were seized in the roundup. Along the route the children were the tenders of the fires. They minded their duty with the seriousness of little priests and priestesses, knowing well that the fires were sacred, that The People’s continuation depended upon them, that their very name, Tsalagi, or Cherokee, as the whites called them, meant “the fire-bringers.” They gathered sticks from the roadside, then scampered to catch up with the train. In the night, while the children slept, the adults took turns feeding the fires. Being the blessing of all, they were the care of all. Even to those for whom the old tribal customs had lost their religious significance, these symbolic fires were now a common bond. One at least must still be burning when they reached their distant destination. In the village council houses to be built there the fires would be kindled with fire from the old country, and would burn until ceremoniously extinguished at their first Ah tawh hung nah in exile. That would mark the end of the old life and the commencement of the new. In the meantime they ate their meals cooked over fires kindled in common, one big family.

  Ultimately the search-and-seizure operation, the roundup of the Cherokees, although thorough, allowing few to escape, had been so haphazard that now on the march were people in all stages of dispossession, of preparedness. Depending upon whether the U.S. Army, by far the more lenient, or the more disinterested, of the two, or the Georgia State Militia had been their captors, depending upon the humaneness of the officer in charge of the squad, some prisoners indeed came with nothing but the clothes on their backs while others came in buckboards, in oxcarts, in wagons drawn by teams of their former plow horses containing everything they owned. Some had a train of slaves to bear on their backs their owners’ worldly goods. Some rode saddle horses, with colts accompanying dams, some were followed by faithful dogs. The work animals had grazed outside the stockade during the detention time, the dogs fed on scraps from the soldiers’ mess. They could be heard whimpering as their owners spoke to them through the tall pointed pailings.

  For the very old, the very young, the weak, of body and of mind, for nursing mothers and for women big with child, for the lame, the blind, places were provided in army wagons. They would have been better off walking, if only they could have, so rough was the ride on the uneven road—where there was a road. Children took turns riding in the wagons, resting their legs for an hour, then yielding their places to others like them and trotting alongside.

  Light would be just breaking when the day began with the bugler’s sounding of reveille. In those early days on the road progress must be made in the relative cool of the morning. The heat of midday slowed, often stopped them altogether, prostrating even the fittest. They rose, stiff and sore, from their bedding grounds, hastily cooked and ate their breakfast rations, and readied themselves for the starter’s bugle. The sound of getting under way, overtopping the first creak of the wagon wheels and the rumble of their beds, was a groan of reluctance uttered in a single concerted voice.

  They enjoyed one regular day’s rest a week. In their rigid observance of the Sabbath, the Reverend Mackenzie took satisfaction, but it was a mixed satisfaction. Pagans and Christians both, the former as adamant as the latter, refused to move a step on Sunday. The others spent the day in communion with the Great Spirit; for the converted the Reverend Mackenzie conducted Holy Communion. The rite only. He preached them no homily. He felt that to these brave and hard-pressed people he had nothing to say. They needed no exhortation. God’s holy words, not his. He had become acutely conscious of the color of his skin—though among his flock were many as fair as he. All the more reason for holding his tongue. They saw that he was voluntarily enduring their hardships. Did that not do a bit to expiate for his race? Or did they merely think that he was a paleface fool to endure on his own what they were condemned to endure? Did they perhaps censure him for making his little wife accompany him on this comfortless mission? These self-questions he enunciates in his diary.

  The bandanas masking their lower faces as they marched made them look like an army of bandits. The dirt road, following months of unbroken drought and searing summer heat, was powdery. The water wagons with their tin dippers to drink from were spaced at intervals along the line; still they choked and were blinded by the dust raised by hundreds of marching feet, the hooves of the horses and the oxen, the wheels of the wagons. It was like groping their way through the smoke of a fire, and the coughing and hawking were incessant. Hard as it was to break the old taboo, they were forced repeatedly to do it and spit out their souls upon the ground, to be trodden upon by those at their heels.

  They were out of reach now of the state militiamen. Those convoying them were soldiers carrying out orders, not zealots. There were no whips nor prods, no shouts nor curses. On the contrary, their guards were as
considerate of their welfare as circumstances allowed.

  Still, there was a long, long way to go, and they must take advantage of the weather. This heat was bad, but the coming cold, already overdue, would be worse. For their own good a pace must be kept up.

  As the fittest and the less fit and the least fit and the unfit were sorted out and separated, the column straggled like an old animal whose hindquarters are failing it. And now that sense of their being yoked together ran not from the lead to the rear but from the rear to the lead. All were restrained by the pace of the slowest, the very young and the very old, and those with one or another of these on their backs, like Aeneas or else like St. Christopher, and when one of their number faltered, all felt the check, as though they were chained together.

  They tried to keep up their spirits by talking as they trudged along. They soon found that they had nothing to say. Memories of home were a subject to avoid, their recent detention in the camp an experience to suppress, their present existence no occasion for conversation, the country they were passing through nothing for them to remark upon but merely something to put behind them, and of their destination they felt only dread. They were not travelers seeing the sights. They were more like workhorses with blinders plowing an endless row. Yet to do nothing but plod daily like dumb animals was to fear becoming one, forgetting how to speak, losing your mind. They marched to the slow measures of “Amazing Grace” and “Just As I Am.” Over and over again in their two tongues they told themselves that they were wretches who had been saved, were lost but now were found, were blind but now could see—that they were coming at the bidding of the Lamb of God.

  Meanwhile, as they strained toward their remote goal, how many of them, Noquisi wondered, knew of the prophecy made by the wise men of the tribe—so far remarkably fulfilled—that even there they would find no resting place, but would be driven all the way to the western waters?

  He felt the isolation and the oppression of being young and being the bearer of a burdensome truth, one affecting them all, that his trusting elders did not know.

  Noquisi—or as he was soon known to them, Tad—short for Tadpole—another of the many names his eventful early life would confer upon him before he settled down to Amos Smith—was not the only one to serve as the soldiers’ interpreter whenever one was required, whenever something untoward occurred, an accident, a breakdown, a person’s sudden collapse, but he was the one most often sought out. He was nimble in both tongues, he was bright, and he was small. To his added weight no horse objected. He could be lifted with one hand and swung up to ride behind the saddle and quickly transported to the scene.

  It was while riding behind him, holding on around his waist, and hearing him mutter to himself, that Noquisi got to know something of Captain Donovan, the caravan’s commandant. It was from the Captain’s grumbling and cursing that he got an inkling of the muddleheadedness of those who had projected this operation, the bureaucrats far from the scene in Washington, and even further from a sense of reality, of their blithe confidence that all factors would comply with their paper plans, that hundreds of people of all ages and conditions could be led as one, and that he, Captain William Donovan, to whom the experience was as novel as that of Moses in the wilderness, would know exactly how to solve any unexpected hitch that might arise as though he had a field manual.

  To many Captain Donovan was an unfeeling man who viewed his job as that of a cattle driver determined to deliver to market the greatest number of head he could. He was determined to do just that, but he was not unfeeling. Noquisi, with a hand on the man’s heart, had a knowledge of its beats, and its skipping of beats.

  Riding thus post-saddle, Noquisi heard the Captain always answer the question, one asked more and more frequently as time went by, “Where are we, please, Captain, sir?” with a gruff, “We’re here. On the right road. Follow me and we’ll get to where we’re going.” Sometimes the boy did not bother relaying the question when it was spoken in Cherokee but responded to it on his own with the Captain’s stock reply.

  “They wouldn’t know if you told them,” the Captain muttered, which was true. But, employing his growing Cherokee gift of being able to read a person’s thoughts, Noquisi knew that the man feared the opposite of what he said: he wanted no knowledge of where they were—which was to say where they were not—to spread among them. They were making such slow and difficult progress, Captain Donovan feared that should they learn how far behind schedule they were—or have their suspicions and fears of it officially confirmed—should they realize how far they had yet to go, they would be swept by despair, would give up en masse, would sit down daunted and dispirited beyond coaxing or goading, and refuse to move on. His field map, which he was often seen to spread and study, he consulted as guardedly as he might the weak hand with which he was bluffing at poker, and always poker-faced. Even his troops, all of them strangers here, were kept in uncertainty as to their whereabouts lest they be demoralized by the knowledge.

  One day a man fell out and sat himself down beside the road. This was something that happened all the time. A person rested for a while, then caught up again. But this man sat on as the marchers passed him by, until the column had left him behind. They slowed and slowed and at last came to a halt from that sense that they were linked together and that when one of them faltered, all faltered. A soldier spotted the laggard and reported him to Captain Donovan, who picked up Noquisi on his way, set him behind him on his horse and galloped back to the scene.

  “He says he cannot go any farther, sir,” the boy translated. “He says this is a good day to die.”

  “Tell him a place will be found in one of the wagons for him to rest up over the next few days.”

  “Sir, he says it is not his body that is worn out. It is his spirit.”

  “One case of that,” said the Captain, looking ahead at the arrested line of his charges, “and it will spread quicker than measles.” Surrender was unthinkable to the soldier that he was through and through, desertion under fire punishable by disgrace from the ranks and summary execution.

  “Ask him who he is to give up while old women and little children push on? Is he a Cherokee or isn’t he? Ask him that.”

  “His answer, sir, is, yes, he is a Cherokee. That is his trouble.”

  “We’re in this all together. One for all and all for one. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Tell him that.”

  “He says tell you that you are a good and brave man and he wishes you a long and happy life, but as for him, he will die here.”

  “That he will, and damned quick, too, if he doesn’t get to his feet and start moving,” said the Captain, drawing his pistol. “I will make him an example to all by shooting him dead on the spot and leaving his carcass for the wolves.”

  Another day Noquisi was picked up by Captain Donovan and ridden to the dispensary wagon to help the doctor deal with a refractory patient. This was a man with a carbuncle at the base of his neck, grown huge from neglect owing to his fear of the doctor, now grown fearful enough to overcome that fear, but not enough to induce him to submit to what he gathered from the sight of the surgical instruments to be the treatment for it. As much as anything, he was resisting the first step in the procedure, the cutting off of his braids. Having it explained to him in his own language sobered him into submission. The whiskey he was given had the same effect through the opposite means.

  To the doctor’s amazement, the boy began by asking to be shown what the medical problem was, as though he—all four and three-quarters feet of him—were a colleague called in for consultation on the case. Now he said, “I have told him, sir, exactly what you are going to do, and why, and have warned him that with that thing so near his brain, he runs the risk of death if it is not done.”

  “But I haven’t told you any of that, boy,” said the doctor.

  “My father is a doctor,” he said. “Your patient is ready. You may proceed.”

  It was an operation that he had watched his fathe
r perform. Thus when Dr. Warren finished with his scalpel and turned to reach for his curette, it was ready and waiting. As he probed, extirpating the roots of the growth, the boy, taking turns at it with him, sponged the area. When the final cleaning swabs were needed, there they were. When the time came for it, there was the bottle of permanganate. And when the cavity was ready to be packed and dressed, there were the bandages, one folded into a pad and the other unrolled to bind it.

  Equally as impressive as the boy’s competence was his composure. In his lack of any squeamishness when the incision was made, his indifference to the sight of the blood and the pus, his acceptance of the patient’s unavoidable pain, he was a seasoned professional. He was engrossed in the work at hand, and he was offended at being patronized by the doctor’s compliments afterwards upon his part in it. Having seen it done by a graduate of King’s College, he had been about to offer him, whose training consisted of the standard two years apprenticeship with a country-town practitioner, his compliments. As for himself, he had assisted in surgery far more complicated than this.