American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  Gradually she drifted back into an uneasy and fitful sleep, dreaming of mice desperately trying to scratch at the walls but without hands with no claws, and somewhere Seth calling her name but she could not hear him because he had lost his tongue in battle.

  When Cherity awoke, the gray morning seemed almost as lonely as the night. It was too early to get up and Cherity lay for another hour until at last she heard stirring below. If it was possible, she felt more exhausted than when she had gone to bed.

  She tossed back the blankets and dragged herself to her feet, splashed her face with cold water from the basin on the chest of drawers, then dressed and went downstairs.

  After breakfast, as she had done in Bend, and getting a few more directions from Mrs. Butterfield, she set out to explore Jefferson’s Crossing and see what she could learn. She walked out from the boardinghouse and turned onto the boardwalk of the main street. Carts and wagons rumbled down the road in both directions, raising clouds of dust behind them. Spotting the dry-goods store, she darted across the street between two slow-moving wagons. A terrible stench suddenly filled her nostrils. She glanced toward one of the wagons whose open bed was clearly visible from where she stood.

  He stomach lurched and her knees weakened. It was filled with eight or ten corpses… men without arms… without legs… amputated limbs thrown in on top of the bodies.

  Faint-headed and dizzy, Cherity stumbled across the street and slumped against a hitching rail. She gagged once, twice, then lurched and lost her entire breakfast on the dirt street at her feet.

  While she still stood hunched over and breathing heavily trying to recover, a shadow darkened the street beside her.

  “Takes a little getting used to, doesn’t it?” said a man’s voice.

  Cherity stood and turned toward it, covering her mouth with her handkerchief. A man with a compassionate expression was gazing down at her.

  “Mrs. Butterfield told me you were here,” he said. “I’m Dick Garr… the man who wrote for you.”

  “I’m sorry… I don’t… What do you mean?” said Cherity, still struggling to get control of her stomach and her head.

  “You are one of Miss Barton’s nurses?”

  “I’m sorry… no,” said Cherity, shaking her head and trying to smile.

  The man called Dick Garr sighed and glanced toward the wagon disappearing along the street.

  “Those poor fellows didn’t make it through the night,” he sighed. “I expect we’ll have more tomorrow. We hardly have time to give them a proper burial anymore, the ones we can’t identify. The men take them out to the cemetery, say a brief prayer, and bury them without even a name on their marker. Are you alone in town, miss?” he asked.

  “Yes,” replied Cherity, at last standing up and forcing a smile. “I arrived on yesterday afternoon’s train. I’m trying to find a young man named Seth Davidson.”

  “Can’t say I’ve heard of him. Sure hope he’s not like one of those that just went by. He a Confederate or a Yank?”

  “He’s not a soldier,” replied Cherity. “He takes pictures of the war for a newspaper. The last we knew he was on his way to Atlanta. I thought he might have been injured on the railway accident near here?”

  “I wish I could help you, but we’ve had hundreds through here. Why don’t you come with me. You can take a look yourself. You never know, maybe you’ll find him.”

  Cherity followed the man’s long stride as he led along a street at right angles to the main street, then stopped in front of a simple wooden church building and entered. Men’s groans filled Cherity’s ears. The sights that met her eyes brought her stomach again into her throat… men lying row upon row on dirty pallets… some without arms and legs, nearly all with bloody bandages over their faces, chests, and stomachs.

  She gagged again at the sight and hesitated. She drew in a breath and slowly followed Garr into the large room.

  “Nurse… nurse,” said one of the men, his face beaded in sweat, clutching at her as she passed. “Can you get me some water?”

  Cherity turned toward him and glanced down. The dressing on his chest was drenched with yellow pus and the red of oozing blood. The nausea of a few minutes before returned like a swelling tide. She stumbled away and leaned for a moment against the wall. Already the man she had come with had moved on down the row. She tried to catch her breath, but the stench of infection and the reek of chloroform filled the air. She clamped her hand over nose and mouth and gradually began to breathe more easily.

  She looked around the large room. A pail and dipper stood in one corner near the pulpit. She walked over to it, scooped out a dipper of water and brought it to the young man who had spoken to her. She knelt beside him and held it to his mouth. He sipped, choked a little, then sipped again and finally lay back and closed his eyes.

  “Thank you, nurse,” he mumbled.

  “I… I hope you get better soon,” said Cherity.

  “I will,” he said, opening his eyes again. “Nothing much wrong with me except my foot. Well, and this chest wound, but they say it ain’t too bad. But my foot hurts something terrible—got three toes blowed off.”

  Cherity winced and stood and took the dipper back to the pail. She walked slowly along from bed to bed, both relieved and disappointed to see Seth nowhere among the wounded. She began to realize that she didn’t know whether she wanted to find him or not. To find him lying unconscious or wounded or mutilated would break her heart. Dick Garr had already disappeared into a little room off to one side of the pulpit. He now reappeared with a woman wearing a bloodstained apron whom he introduced as Nurse Beech. She was mostly interested in whether the newcomer, queasy stomach and all, had come to help. Before Cherity knew it, once again the morning passed like that of the previous day.

  About noon, when it seemed they could get along without her, Cherity left the church for the Walton farmhouse on the outskirts of town, only to discover that they were even more shorthanded than at the church. At least there she found several people who had been on the train and were able to tell her in horrifying detail about the accident. None of them remembered anyone like Seth.

  When Cherity realized that the sun was beginning to set, she told the farmer’s wife, who was considerably friendlier and more appreciative than the woman at her first stop on the previous day, that she had to get back and tell Mrs. Butterfield to expect her for a second night.

  “You handle yourself with the men like a trained nurse,” said Mrs. Walton. “I know you’re just looking for your young man, but if you’ll help me out for another day, it would be an enormous boost for me. I’ve got plenty of room upstairs where you can sleep, and a hot supper to go along with a bed. A softer bed than you’ll find at Mrs. Butterfield’s!”

  “What about mice?” asked Cherity with a smile.

  “I’ll put a cat in your room, no extra charge,” rejoined Mrs. Walton with a kindly smile of humor. “What do you say?”

  Cherity smiled and nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “But I really must move on tomorrow.”

  “Have you been to the accident site?” asked Mrs. Walton.

  “No, where is it?”

  “Couple miles up the line toward Jonesborough. Not that you’d find anything there either… just thought you might be interested. Lot of folks been going out there to see what they could find, even some of the injured when they were up and could travel again, picking up whatever was left. With the war being so close like it is, and most of the men gone, nobody’s had time to clean it up. The railroad just patched the rails to get the trains back on schedule. But the overturned coaches are still laying there, broken and turned on their sides where they fell down the bank, with stuff strewn about everywhere. Least that’s what they tell me. I haven’t been out myself. First I knew of the accident was a rider galloping into town yelling everywhere he went asking folks to come out to the site to help and others to make places for the wounded. Then wagons full of them started creaking and rumbling in an hour later. Lo
ts of folks were out helping load them up and doing what they could there. It was hard to find space to put them all. It was bad. You’ll never get me on a train after what I’ve seen. And then as we were getting some of them back on their feet and the dead either buried or the families contacted—Rev. Wilcott mostly saw to that—then came the battle at Jonesborough and we were flooded with wounded soldiers and it hasn’t stopped yet.”

  “Well,” said Cherity, “maybe I will go out to the accident site like you say. You wouldn’t have a horse I could borrow to ride up there tomorrow?”

  “I just might. Can you ride—some of the terrain’s a little rough between here and there?”

  Cherity smiled. “I’ll be able to manage it,” she said.

  The sound of a cannon exploding in the distance interrupted them. The woman shook her head. “Sounds like the fighting’s getting closer again,” she said. “Will it ever end? I hate this war.”

  “Do you have anyone close in the army?” Cherity asked.

  “Not anymore,” answered Mrs. Walton, her characteristic smile fading. “I did,” she added, “but I lost my son at Shiloh.”

  Sixty-One

  While the newspaper article about Veronica’s involvement with the Union and Confederate spy ring occupied most of the attention of those at Greenwood, Chigua LeFleure found an altogether unexpected reaction springing up within her. It was, however, as a result of a different article on page three of the same issue of the Boston Herald that went largely unnoticed by most of the others.

  Where she stood listening behind him, she had seen its headline as Richmond had opened the paper to finish his reading of the lead story. The words FORMER CHEROKEE CHIEF PROMOTED TO GENERAL IN CONFEDERATE ARMY jumped off the page at her. When Richmond and the others were through with it, Chigua picked up the newspaper from the table and opened it again and read the article from beginning to end.

  Principal chief of the Confederate Cherokees, Stand Watie, was promoted on May 6, 1864 by General Samuel Bell Maxey, to the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate army. At the same time Watie was given command of the two regiments of mounted rifles and three battalions of Cherokee, Osage, and Seminole infantry.

  He is the first officer of Indian descent in either North or South to attain such a high rank.

  At the outbreak of hostilities, siding with the Confederacy, Watie raised his own private regiment of Cherokees to fight against the Union. He was later offered a commission as a colonel in the Confederate army.

  Watie, great-grandson of legendary chief Attacullaculla, is of ancient Cherokee lineage. With his brother Buck Watie and cousin John Ridge, son of controversial Cherokee leader Major Ridge, Watie represented a movement of young Cherokee intellectuals in the 1820s who helped lead the Cherokee nation toward a new emphasis on education and literacy. The discovery of gold on Cherokee lands in Georgia and the Carolinas, however, turned the attention of a greedy nation toward the Cherokee holdings of millions of acres and resulted in their removal from the area, culminating twenty-five years ago in what became known as the Trail of Tears. Rumors persist to this day of hidden caches of gold through the East.

  A schism developed within the Cherokee Nation which persists to this day between those calling themselves the Ridge group and the Ross group. The dispute became violent among the Cherokee immediately after the completion of the Trail of Tears. Three months after the arrival of the weary wagons from the East, a council of Cherokee leaders attempted a formal union of the two groups. Though reviled by many of the recent arrivals, Major and John Ridge, and both Watie brothers attended, hoping to heal the wounds of recent years. But their presence so angered some that a secret council was convened to seek retribution against them. The Cherokee blood law from ancient times indicated death as the penalty for selling tribal lands. The secret gathering unanimously condemned Major Ridge, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and Stand Watie to death.

  The executions began the next morning when John Ridge, Major Ridge, and Elias Boudiinot were all brutally murdered. The only one of the four to escape was Boudinot’s brother Stand Watie, who had been traveling and escaped the vendetta.

  More assassinations followed, though Watie himself managed to escape the fate of his brother and cousin. With his comrades gone, Stand Watie gradually became the leader and primary spokesman for the treaty party—a divisive split which created a rivalry for leadership between himself and Cherokee chief John Ross that lasted for the next twenty years.

  With the outbreak of war in 1861, Watie sided with the South and raised a following called the Cherokee Regiment of Mounted Rifles. Cherokee chief John Ross temporarily also agreed and sided with the South. But he was at heart a Union supporter. When Ross later left Indian Territory for Philadelphia in 1862, Watie became Principal Chief of the Confederate Cherokee Nation.

  Throughout the war Watie continued to distinguish himself. After his promotion to general last spring, the two regiments and three battalions under his command have been based south of the Canadian River.

  Sydney found Chigua sitting on the back porch of the house several days later, staring thoughtfully into the distance.

  “You’ve been quiet all day,” he said sitting down on the wide porch seat beside her. “What are you thinking about?”

  Chigua smiled… a far-off, melancholy smile.

  “My people,” she replied softly.

  Sydney looked deep into her eyes. It was not that he was ever capable of forgetting his wife’s Indian ancestry, or his own French and Jamaican roots. Yet in the melting pot of ethnic mixes that Greenwood had become, it was easy to overlook skin color and racial backgrounds to such an extent that they almost ceased to exist. But now he beheld in Chigua’s features and expression and skin and in the distant gaze of her eyes, a heritage that was uniquely native to this American mainland to which he had been brought as a youth.

  “Perhaps I am feeling my Cherokee blood more than usual,” Chigua went on after a moment. “There are times when I feel, I don’t know how to explain it… isolated, cut off from my heritage—like a stranger in the white man’s world… perhaps that a part of me belongs elsewhere.”

  She smiled. “Does that sound silly?”

  “Of course not,” said Sydney. “But this is not really the white man’s world at all. It is the land of your people.”

  “Perhaps,” rejoined Chigua. “Yet we are now surrounded by the white culture. My people no longer possess their ancient lands. In the same way that the Cherokee were taken from their lands, I was taken from my people at such a young age that my memories grow dim. I cannot remember what it was like to be a Cherokee, living with Cherokee, on lands that had belonged to the Cherokee for generation upon generation.”

  As he listened, Sydney heard a longing in Chigua’s voice that he had never heard before.

  “I find,” she went on thoughtfully, “that it makes me sad. I do not want to lose touch with my roots and my heritage. As an Indian, I am alone. My Cherokee past becomes more and more faint. But I do not want to forget. And yet,” she added, again smiling as she looked deep into Sydney’s face, “it is no different with you and your ancestry.”

  Sydney nodded. “That may be true,” he said. “Yet you were taken away from your family at a younger age than I. You lost an entire culture that was ripped from you in a single moment.”

  “It is not that I am ungrateful for Richmond and Carolyn and this wonderful place. Yet I am aware that it is not my world. And,” Chigua added, “I almost tremble to think what might have become of me without you. I hope you do not think that I wish my life were other than it is. I love you and our family. Yet… part of me longs to know what it means to be a Cherokee.”

  Sydney nodded. “I understand,” he said. “I sometimes feel similar yearnings. I think all people who have been torn from their families or homelands do. Being uprooted from the only life I knew, having to adjust to the life of a slave, and now being treated by Richmond as an equal though my skin is tan—sometimes I lie
awake at night beside you wondering who I really am. Deep down I am the same person I always was. Even when I was a slave all those years, pretending to be something I wasn’t, I was still me—Sydney LeFleure. Yet I wonder if the man other people see is the same me that I am inside. Perhaps we of darker skin will always wonder such things.”

  “But why only those of darker skin? White people have come from other places too.”

  “I had not thought of that,” said Sydney. “Your people are the only true natives. But most whites have come here freely by choice—to find the freedom of a new life. No one can fault them for that, but it is much different than the historical legacy of the Negro who was brought here against his will, and not for freedom but as a race of slaves.”

  “And my people have always been here. We have not been enslaved, just displaced and our lands taken from us.”

  “Your people are the only true rightful possessors of this land. Yet it is an enormous land, rich in possibilities for many rather than the sole possession of a single race. Times change. People and races move and mix and adapt and flow together and have throughout time. All lands over all the years of our history have been shared. So will this one be. But they must be shared in mutual respect. It is not for we blacks and your Indian people to be angry for past evils but to find good and sincere people like Richmond and Carolyn and share life with them.”