No Resting Place (6 page)

To accompany almost everything Indians did there was one of the old tales for a man to tell and retell, a child to listen to and listen again. Giving Noquisi lessons in the art of chipping arrowheads (Never mind that they had guns now. Guns were fine but the bow too still had its uses. While a white man was measuring and dispensing powder from his powder horn and fumbling for a patch and ramrodding it down the barrel of his rifle and finding a ball and ramrodding that and fitting a cap to the nipple and shouldering his arm and taking aim, an Indian could loose a dozen arrows. Besides, a gun made a hunter out of anybody; with a gun any fool could kill game, even a white fool.), his grandfather told him about Flint. Of how all the animals hated Flint for his having caused the death of so many of their kind, but only one, that wily little rascal
Tsitstu
, the Rabbit, had the courage to approach him, the cunning to undo him. Of how
Tsitstu
had inveigled Flint into paying him a visit, had dined him to such satiety that he dozed off, whereupon
Tsitstu
drove a stake into him, causing him to burst into pieces (one of which, striking
Tsitstu
, cleft his nose), and that is why we now find pieces of flint scattered everywhere, yours for the picking up. Actually it was as though Flint had burst into finished arrowheads, so many were there to be found scattered everywhere, yours for the picking up: the legacy of generations of Cherokee hunters, warriors. Like every boy, Noquisi had a basketful of them.

That was last year when on Saturdays out at the farm Grandfather was always to be found in his toolshed at work on the bow and arrows which he had been taken with the notion to make.

“Getting ready to go on the warpath, Agiduda?”

Under the present circumstances it was not very funny even to the boy's father, who had asked it. To the old man it was not funny in the least. He responded with his most Indian grunt.

It was plain to see from the care going into its making that this was to be the bow to end bows—or else to bring them back. Grandfather turned out to be an expert bowyer. The wood was seasoned Osage orange, but the Osage were traditional enemies of the Cherokees and even now were harassing those of them who had given up the struggle and already gone west, so better call it by its other name,
bois d'arc:
wood of Noah's ark. Close-grained, almost unworkably dense it was, so that the shaping of the stave with drawknife and spokeshave took weeks. Perfect symmetry of the two limbs was the goal, thus their tapering proceeded simultaneously, cautiously, with almost imperceptible progress from week to week—wood once removed could not be replaced. When shaped, the limbs were tillered: balanced so exactly that, when drawn, the bow bent in as perfect an arc as the crescent moon. The final finishing was done with the cutting edge of a piece of broken glass, the shavings as fine as eiderdown. Endless hand-rubbing with oil made the yellow wood gleam like gold. The bowstring was plaited of gut, the handle woven of leather, the tips carved of antlers. A dozen arrows, each requiring days to true up straight and fletch with feathers all from the same side of the bird, in a quiver of hide decorated with dyed porcupine quills, completed the outfit. Only now, after months of labor, was it finished, so that much as he longed to, he being already a better than fair shot with his own miserable boy's bow, and more than an apprentice in the patience and stealth and immobility on the trail and on the game stand which hunting with the bow and arrow took, Noquisi did not dare ask Agiduda to make one like it for him.

Now when his week in the
asi
had ended, Amos Ferguson could go and get himself baptized by the new minister, meanwhile he was Noquisi full-time.

He was hearing little that was new to him. The recent and ongoing occurrences affecting the elders affected the children too and were common knowledge, a common threat. What he was hearing in this old, all-but-forgotten tribal rite was more in the nature of a review of all that he knew, lest he forget it in the press of events soon to overtake them. He sensed that his grandfather wanted in these nights together to tell him once again, as though for the last time, who and what he was, for a way of life was threatened, might be coming to an end—if, indeed, the end had not already come.

They talked of the old-time festivals, six to the calendar year, when The People assembled like so many grains to make one ear of corn, some of them traveling for days to get there. They celebrated the appearance of the first green of spring; the heading-out of the maize; its harvesttime; the first full moon of autumn and the advent of the hunting season. Greatest of all the celebrations was
Ah tawh hung nah
, the new year. Life itself began afresh then. Old clothes, old furniture, old utensils, everything old was brought to be thrown on a communal bonfire in the village square. The fire in the council house was ceremoniously extinguished and a fresh one kindled. In every home the fire was extinguished and a fresh one lighted from the embers of the council-house fire. All was swept clean, all freshly coated with paint. The people purified themselves with the black draught and by bathing in the river. All was pardoned. Murderers came in from hiding and sat beside the survivors of their victims, who had been sworn to avenge them with blood. There were ball games and footraces and shooting matches and trials of strength and all week long there was dancing day and night. Something nobody but an Indian could know was the brotherhood, the simultaneous sense of community and self, the ecstasy of belonging to one's tribe—and the sorrow of seeing it riven into hostile halves.

They talked of real, historical people, their chiefs and their champions, of actual events, of the time when their young men lived only for war, of their battles against their blood enemies the Senecas, the Shawnees, the Creeks, and while in their present-day powerlessness they thrilled to the tales of their former ferocity, yet they counted their blessings in being free from the fear of the war whoop in the night, the scalping knife, torture and death at the stake. Their pride in their one-time bloodthirstiness was tempered with shame, for they had been taught, both man and boy, to believe that this was not bravery but barbarity.

If there were gaps in the telling of the story, there were also gaps in the listening. For it was a nightlong lament, a dirge, and even the eyewash of owl-feather-water was not proof against the old man's unbroken, low monotone, the darkness, the heat, the flickering flames, the cross-legged immobility relieved only by getting up stiff-kneed from time to time to add sticks to the fire, and the boy often dozed off despite himself. These lapses from attentiveness he laid to the white blood in his veins.

At break of day the fire was banked and, carrying their clothes, the man and the boy strode through the woodlot down to the river, both of them glistening with sweat as though they had already bathed. At the water's edge they offered up to the Great Spirit a prayer of thanksgiving for the new day. After bathing, they stood in the risen sun to dry themselves. Then they dressed, wrapping their turbans around their heads, slipping on their beaded moccasins, and returned through the woods, along the edge of the fields and past the barns and the slave quarters to the house.

Always before, until this year, there would have been cordwood for the coming winter stacked between standing trees and mounds of yellow sawdust on the sites where it had been sawed to fireplace length. The cotton fields that stretched out of sight would ordinarily have looked two feet deep in snow at this time of year; now they bore the stubble of last year's crop, brown stalks and empty bolls.

The slave quarters had stood vacant since spring.

“I am not freeing you,” their master told them that day when he had them assemble. “Rather, I am letting you go. To the head of each family, and to each of you single men and women, I am giving this paper, stating that you belong to me, David Ferguson, of this place and of the Cherokee Nation West. That way no man may seize and claim you as his. You too are God's children. May He watch over you one and all.”

The floor-to-ceiling windows were shuttered now and the house was beginning to need painting. Only beginning, for it was always painted every fifth year and was now overdue just one. The coat of white that it would have been given last summer would have been the tenth.

But for the kitchen, the downstairs had been stripped, the furnishings, accumulated over those fifty years, sold for a hundredth part of their worth, hauled away by the wagonload. Gone from the hallway were the marble-topped pier table with the ormolu mounts and the tall, ornately framed pier glass that hung above it. The caned Recamier settee, the many-branched sconce, the life-size Venetian blackamoor in his ruff collar and doublet: gone. The floorboards were bare where the long Turkey-red runner had stretched.

In the library the books remained in their places on the shelves. Of these Grandfather was determined to take with them as many as possible, for there would be none where they were going. But the deep armchairs, the leather-topped tables, the carved mahogany sofas, the paintings, the patterned carpet, so soft underfoot: all gone.

A coat of dust upon the floor where once had lain an Aubusson, where once had sat sideboards with rosewood veneers figured like flames, marble-topped gueridons upheld by kneed legs with paws, capped with rams' heads, a many-paned cabinet—Noquisi's particular joy—containing the collection of colorful porcelain figurines: harlequins, dwarfs, mythological and biblical characters, old-world shepherds and shepherdesses, an orchestra of musical monkeys, the mantelpiece garniture of delftware vases, the bronze clock with its statue of General Washington—a coat of dust with nothing but bare floorboards to lie upon was the only thing furnishing the drawing room now. Before long all would be gone: house and land, barns, sheds, cabins—the domain of its new owner, the white man holding the winning ticket in the Georgia State lottery for this piece of property of the dispossessed and deported Cherokees.

August 9, 1807. It was with this date in the collective diary of The People that Agiduda located the origin of the current and ongoing state of affairs that began the story still unfolding, its final chapter still remaining to be written.

It was not for having stomped his pregnant wife to death that on this day Doublehead, petty chieftain of the Chicamauga towns, was brought to justice. Nor was it for having massacred the thirteen women and children of a family of white settlers named Cavett. That first act was a private, family affair, to be settled between the chief and his late wife's menfolks; the second was, or had become so through the influence of white men's notions, an excess to be frowned upon—what Doublehead had done to wind up that day with a tomahawk buried in his skull so solidly that, to get it out, his killer had to set foot on his brow and tug with both hands, was to commit what to the Cherokees was the capital crime. Their only crime at the time, for this was the year before they had formed a government and decreed a uniform code of law.

The day before, August 8, all day long Doublehead's appointed executioners had waited for him in McIntosh's, the tavern in Hiwassee Town on Hiwassee River. His canoe was beached there. He himself was off at a ball game and there he had been detained. After the game was decided, liquor had flowed, and, full of it, a brave named Bone-polisher had picked a quarrel with Doublehead. Fueled by firewater, words grew heated and Bone-polisher was provoked into calling Double-head to his face what everybody was calling him behind his back, a traitor. Doublehead drew his pistol and shot the man on the spot. He died, but not from the gunshot wound, and not before chopping off with his tomahawk one of Doublehead's thumbs. With his good hand, using his pistol as a club, Doublehead beat the man's brains out.

At McIntosh's tavern in Hiwassee Town still waiting for him when Doublehead came in that evening were The Ridge—since become Major Ridge, one of the nation's two principal men and the leader of one of the two factions into which it was now riven—and his deputies, an Indian named Saunders and another named Rogers, the latter of whom, years later and in another country, would figure again in this tale of destinies entwined. At point-blank range The Ridge shot Doublehead full in the face and left him for dead on the tavern floor. However, with a severed thumb, a shattered jaw and a bullet lodged in his neck, Doublehead managed to take refuge in a barn loft. There at dawn on the following day, August 9, The Ridge and his posse, now including vengeful relatives of the late Bone-polisher, tracked him down. Battered as he was, he was still full of fight and he went at his assailants with pistol and dirk and then with bare knuckles. After being shot again, this time through the hips, he was tomahawked. For good measure, his head was then pounded to a pulp with a spade. So died Doublehead, and so would die any and all Cherokees guilty of his crime, selling tribal land without tribal consent.

Murder being the wanton killing of a human being, the death of Doublehead would have gone no more noticed by the white authorities than that of any other head of game had it not been that he was their kind of Indian, one who could be bribed into selling tribal land, and so The Ridge might have gotten into trouble over the affair. This was prevented by the tribe's declaring itself a sovereign nation with powers to treat on a footing of equality with other governments, and making Doublehead's punishment the law of the land, that particular statute framed by The Ridge himself. Georgia was enraged. Not for the hapless Doublehead, but at the uppityness of a band of savages in declaring themselves a nation within the boundaries of the state.

The boy and his grandfather would find breakfast waiting for them. His grandmother kept out of sight. After eating the boy went to bed. He was tired and his eyes smarted, yet for a long time he lay awake, going over in his mind the stories of the night. He felt himself to have been present at each scene, to have been a participant in each event. As much as the features of his face, these stories were a part of him, his birthright. As with the clothes handed down in families, he was now of a size to fill them out. When he was wakened for their next session, the sun had set and twilight was coming on.