The notches cut nightly by Agiduda in his walking staff amounted to two months’ worth, and still they had farther to go than they had come. All this while a tithe was mounting of tears for the common weal. One dismal day they overflowed the font. Reduced to a single purpose and a single fate, the people cried with a single heart. In this, as in so many things, they acted tribally, with a blood bond that amounted to mass mental telepathy. Once one of them cried for all, then all of them cried together. They looked up from their endlessly plodding feet at the indifferent heavens and heard the ceaseless grate and creak of the wagon wheels, they felt the sting of the sleet that hissed in their faces, and through them one and all swept the sense that they had been abandoned by God and their fellowman, that nature herself had set her hand against them. They were in truth the Chosen People—chosen to be the scapegoat of the human race, sent into the wilderness to atone for all its sins. They were marching to perdition, and the groan they gave seemed to rise out of the earth, up from the horizonless plains of Hell.
The longing now to reach the place you dreaded to reach, and there rest, the rearward pull of the place you had left behind, the ache in your every cell of the long weary miles you had marched, that of the many still before you, made one of your feet push you forward and the other one hold you back. You were pulled on as though by a halter, held back by the tug of homesickness as though you strained against a tether. And knowing that their feelings were reproductions of your own, you felt not just for yourself but for all those trudging alongside you.
A thousand people cried as one, yet it was not just for the hardships they were enduring that they cried. For physical stoicism they had no equal. It was not for their tired, cold, aching, ill and hungry bodies, it was for their lost homeland that they cried, and the farther they got from it the greater was the pain. To them it was like an elastic cord to which they were attached: the farther it was stretched, the stronger its pull.
The beef cattle purchased wherever available along the route, their doleful bellows accompanying the groans of the people, though they were a welcome rare relief from the sameness of salt pork, proved to be almost more trouble than they were worth. In the night they strayed off, wandered into woods and swamps, and precious marching time, more and more precious in the ever-worsening weather, was lost in finding and herding them back. They stopped to graze wherever, in this recently drought-parched and now frost-blackened land, they found something to graze on, and had to be driven by force. They ate poison ivy, sickened, and delayed the march. To water them, all must halt while they were taken aside to the source—when, after a search, a source was found. Yet they were too valuable to be abandoned, and not just because they had been bought at a profiteer’s price, but because they were mobile food, nonperishable, rations for who knew what emergency might arise. For days at a time the caravan was stalled while quartermaster corpsmen scouted, in a countryside of subsistence farming where fodder barely enough for the family cow was as much as most men raised, for grain and hay for them. Fed as they were fed, watered as they were watered, driven as they were driven, these starvelings made at best lean, tough and tasteless eating.
But it would have been welcome now. It would have been devoured raw. Under these conditions the hides, the horns and the hooves would have been eaten. The last of their number had been slaughtered far back down the trail.
For three days now they had marched on empty stomachs, and on almost empty ones for another two days before. This after Captain Donovan had called a halt, drawn the train together, ordered shot and butchered six head of the draft oxen, roasted them and rationed the meat. The portions were small, soon consumed, did little more than whet the appetite, but more than six he dared not sacrifice even to this exigency; they would be needed to haul supplies—when they ever got more—and the more and more people unable to walk, for the rest of the journey. Without their animals at the tongue to draw them, the oxcarts left behind had the look of carcasses. What little they had left to eat went to the children and the nursing mothers, the pregnant women. Delays, one on top of another, had caused them to consume before time the provisions allotted for this stretch of the route. Axletrees had broken; replacing one took at least a day. One group took a wrong turn in rain and fog, went miles before the mistake was realized and had to retrace their steps.
Those were some of the minor delays.
They had spent the better part of a week with every able-bodied man felling trees and driving piles in the construction of a forty-foot bridge. To ferry them across another river, too broad to span, too deep to ford, they had built a raft. They had widened a stretch of road five miles long where, in this little-traveled country, there was nothing but a narrow overgrown trail. They had hacked their way through a canebrake. To moccasined feet, even to the pads of hooves, the stubble was a veritable bed of nails. And these obstacles were minor compared to the swamp.
That the road continued beyond the spot where it disappeared from sight was evidenced in the fact that the clearing between the trees ran on. But the roadbed was lost, drowned by the recent rains. There was no knowing how extensive the swamp was. It did not appear on Captain Donovan’s field map because it had not previously existed. There was no detouring around it. This was the only road in that part of the world.
The swamp could only be traversed in two stages because the wagon teams would have to be doubled to get through the mud. Even so, those who were able were soon obliged to wade in icy water waist-deep to save weight. Loads were lightened of wagons mired up to their hubs by jettisoning hundred-pound barrels of meal, meat, molasses. Men slithered and floundered in the mud pushing on spokes and tailgates. The crossing took three days and two nights. The first group camped on the far side while the animals were returned for the rest. The second detachment too emerged with as much of their provisions sacrificed to save weight.
Here they were now still a good two days away from the depot where the next food was stored in wait for them. Driven by hunger to move faster, weakened by it they slowed. Just as they yearned now to reach the place they dreaded, so they hoped for no interruption in the mind-numbing monotony of the march. Monotony meant progress.
Paradoxically, this worst of the woes they had encountered silenced their crying, dried their tears. They were drawing upon a tribal second wind, a reserve of fortitude. Or—so it seemed to the boy—they were afraid now to cry. Afraid that all spirit would desert them and they would drop by the wayside and give up the ghost as one.
To Captain Donovan this stoical silence was more worrisome than wails. To him it portended trouble. Emotion given vent was easier to manipulate than emotion bottled up. Wounds opened and permitted to drain were healthier than wounds closed over to fester. These people had been tested to the outermost limit of their patience, and he wondered what form their outbreak of impatience would take. As he drove them daily onward he wondered what rebellion was fermenting in their minds. The Indian mind was a mystery to this native of New Hampshire. The very endurance and docility they had so far shown was potentially explosive.
He felt they had reason to hate every white man without exception, especially those nearest to hand, the representatives of the government which had dispossessed them and set them on this deadly exodus. They showed it in their faces. Initially their expressions had been ones of unrelieved sorrow and dejection; now they flashed frequently with resentment and rage. What they were enduring, coming on top of their detention-camp experiences, and the never-ending heartache for the loss of their homeland, was generating uncontainable hatred. When and on whom would they take it out? This had worried the Captain all along, but now that they were starving he feared something more. He worried at night, after camp was made and darkness fell upon these supperless and sullen people in his charge.
“You’ve spent time among them,” he said to the Reverend Mackenzie. “Tell me—I’m thinking now of some of those real dark-skinned ones—you don’t reckon that if they get hungry enough they might turn cann
ibal, do you? Not against one another, you understand.” It was for his men’s safety that he feared.
The Reverend Mackenzie assured him that he had nothing of that sort to worry about.
At sundown that wintry late-autumn evening, approaching a large farm, they saw something that stopped them in their tracks. It was the very familiarity of the sight, formerly, that made it now such a wonder. It was a field glowing with pumpkins on the vine as thick as hailstones. Nuggets of gold of that size and in those numbers could not have amazed them more, nor stirred greater longing.
The well-to-do farmer, along with his wife, having heard from a distance the approach of the procession, had come out on the road to watch. He gazed appalled at this stream of wretches in their rags.
Captain Donovan dismounted and saluted the couple.
“Sir,” he said, “these here are Cherokees on their way west. We’ve been held up on the road by one thing and another. They’ve had little or nothing to eat for several days and still have miles to go before they get their next meal. Will you sell your crop of pumpkins?”
The farmer looked inquiringly at his wife, and, satisfied with the answer he read in her face, emphatically shook his head. “No, sir, Captain,” he said. “I couldn’t do that. Not and live with myself afterwards. There but for the grace of God go I. They’re welcome to them every one, poor souls.”
They flocked onto the field. The pumpkins were sliced and, frosty as they were, eaten raw, down to the shell. And promptly produced cramps and pandemic diarrhea.
The prosperous pumpkin grower, though more lavish in his generosity than most because he could afford to be, was representative of the treatment they received along the road once they were out of their homeland. In this there was sorrow, not solace. Another farmer turned them in upon a field of turnips he had not gotten around to harvesting. They gnawed them salted with their tears. Seldom did a landowner deny them permission to camp on his property. Hearing their approach, people came to watch, and often pressed bits of money on them. As they slowly wound through the thoroughfares of towns, a herd of human cattle on the march, storekeepers and housewives stood looking on from their doorways. Many, including men, wept at the sight. Noquisi would never forget seeing a man sit down and remove his shoes and hand them to a barefoot Indian, and another put his coat on the back of a woman wearing nothing but a summer dress of cotton cloth, originally thin, now little more than gauze. This sorrow caused by the sight of their suffering saddened them further for themselves, and often they wailed their way through the town. Captain Donovan had more to fear from these sympathetic bystanders than he did from his charges. He was subjected many times to their hoots and catcalls. He was pelted with stones. Once quite a large crowd blocked the road. “Good people,” said the Captain, “I am trying to shepherd these poor souls to their new home, and they are tired and anxious to get there and rest. I ask you, please, to stand aside and let us proceed. Thank you.” Yet, as Agiduda said, “They feel for us, and I am grateful. But where were they when we needed them?”
Three—not two—days after the pumpkins, famished, almost faint, they arrived at the food depot. Cornmeal, it weevily and with abundant evidence of rats, and beans, they worm-riddled, were distributed. The barrels of salt pork and bully beef were broken open. From each and every one the odor was the same. It was not their many delays on the road that had caused the meat to spoil. It had been improperly cured, if cured at all. Its condition was such as to indicate that it had been bad already when sold and put in place.
To prevent people from eating it anyway, and poisoning themselves, Captain Donovan ordered the ramshackle storehouse put to the torch. Around it he posted armed guards, otherwise the smell of roasting meat might have maddened some of them into risking the flames. The sickening smell of it charring subsequently drove them out of range.
“That low-down son of a bitch,” said the Captain of the sutler who had purveyed the provisions. It was an epithet that Noquisi had heard before and in the course of a long life would hear many times more, but never before or after with the force of an original expression coined for the occasion.
Grandmother would have walked herself to death had the boy not complained occasionally of being tired and needing a rest. Agiduda understood this to be the pretense it was; Noquisi had entered his mind and read his thoughts. So the family slipped steadily a little farther behind in the march. It was as though each day added to their years as they found themselves among the aged, those still ambulant and deathly afraid of the infirmary wagons, down toward the tail of the column. Darkness would be closing in and the line of campfires aglow as they reached the rearmost one.
They were huddled around the fire at the end of another day that had actually been short because of its difficulty and for that reason seemed long. Grandmother, dazed with fatigue, sat gazing dully into the flames, forgetful of the bite of tasteless food unswallowed in her mouth. Without her knowing it, and without himself knowing that the boy was reading his thoughts, Agiduda was studying her.
Now he was remembering his courtship, the story of which Noquisi knew, for it was a piece of family lore he was now old enough to know, and a lesson in how times had changed. Agiduda was trying to forget where he was and cheer himself. He was thinking, “Your people, my dear, the Camerons, were no more Indian than mine but were one of those that we say are more Indian than the Indians, the purebloods. Never in all his life did your father—nor his before him—set foot inside a church, nor permit his womenfolks to do so, though in appearance he might have passed for a deacon. Church was one of the things the first Cameron had come here from overseas to get away from. He lived in a big stone house, but its observances were those of the wigwam.
“Your father was a stickler for the Cherokee laws of hospitality. He had been the beneficiary of them and he would have been disgraced for life ever to have failed to observe them. No stranger could stop at his door without being invited to a meal. In hopes of much more than just a meal, many did stop. Fortunately, your home was not so far from neighbors as to oblige him to offer every man a bed. Many were sent on their way toward evening with never so much as a glimpse of you, if they failed to pass your father’s test. He was, naturally, proud of you, and eager to spread your fame and that of his house, but you were too fine a prize to be awarded to every Tom, Dick and Harry.
“Us young bucks were always swapping word of old-fashioned fathers like yours. Not only did we know of those like him, with desirable daughters, we knew also of those strict observers of the old customs who, unfortunately, had ugly daughters, and we were careful not to get caught in their vicinity at the approach of night, for to refuse the offer of hospitality, and all that it entailed, was as much of an insult as to be refused it—rather more. Besides, for a single man, a polite proposal on the morning after was the expected thing. The more of these a daughter turned down, the prouder the father—as he would formerly have been of his son’s prowess as exhibited in his growing collection of scalps. Those girls with few trophies, or none until now, were prone to overlook the polite formality and accept.
“Needless to say, no shame attached to the practice—before the spread of the missionaries. For a lone stranger, far from the comforts of home, to be given a daughter of the house to share the blanket for the night was a part of the hospitality of the frontier home, however humble or grand, along with the food and the shelter. She was pleased to be gracious, flattered to be desired, basked in the praise lavished on her the next morning, was proud of her father’s pride in her and in himself. Every young woman, if she was at all attractive, did it, and every young man—including suitors—knew they did it; none would have wanted one whom nobody else wanted. Long sanctioned, enjoyed by all, it was a custom not easily stamped out.
“When I stopped at your house that day forty and more years ago now, I asked directions of your father, pretending not to know whose place it was, nor ever to have heard of the daughter of the house. I had, of course. There was not a young
buck in Georgia who had not, for you were the talk of the land. I had heard about you from a friend of mine.
“‘Go!’ said this friend. ‘Go! It is three days ride from here, but worth doing it on your hands and knees. If you’re lucky enough to be invited, you will have the night of your life. You might even be luckier, though many have tried and none has succeeded. When I proposed marriage the morning after, I meant it! Like all the others before me, I was refused. Why should she be tied down to one man when she can have them all?’
“Having timed my arrival for sundown, I doubt that I fooled your father with my asking for directions. Playing in the yard were the handsome little boy and the lovely little girl from the overnight unions with the fine young men chosen as partners for you by your father, your gifts to him and your mother to brighten their old age. I had come hoping for nothing more than a night of pleasure; seeing them, I thought, I would like a woman to make me some just like those.
“I was invited in and given refreshment. As we talked I heard the whisper of a light-footed moccasin on the floor of the next room and I felt myself being observed. I wondered, is she hoping, I hope, that I will be asked to stay?
“As your father and I talked the twilight deepened into dusk. Still there was no invitation for the night. I drained my drink and said that I must go.
“‘Go if you must,’ said your father. ‘I would be honored to have you stay. My home is your home, and all that is in it.’ Then he called you in.
“You appeared in all your youth and beauty, and your many lovers were like jewels in your crown.
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