An Undisturbed Peace (23 page)

Once they were in the store, the two customers on the floor took one look at the Cherokee bandoliers, at the spears trailing feathers, and left the premises. The gentleman tipped his hat, the woman kept her eyes downcast. Soon enough, Abe and Redhand stood facing each other in the empty store. The two Stones quietly entered to stand behind their elder brother. It feels like the prelude to a duel, thought Abe, with Isadore, unaware and muttering in the next room, as his second.

“You know why I am here,” Redhand reached into his side pocket and withdrew a tattered rubber settlement flyer, now many months old.

Abe swallowed. He could not do this alone.

“Uncle Isadore! Could you come here, please?”

The squeak of wood against wood as Isadore pushed his chair away from his desk in the back room resounded through the empty store. There followed his great sigh, the loud shutting of a book, and the shuffle of the elder shopkeeper's tired feet. He pushed back the curtain that provided privacy to his office chamber and saw the party waiting for him. Surprise swept over his features, yet he gathered his wits and smiled broadly.

“Why, Mr. Redhand! We had despaired of seeing you again when you did not come forward last fall to make your claim! Good to see you, good to see you.”

“I am here now.”

“Yes, yes, I see.”

Redhand waited for Isadore to make his offer. He was prepared to wait a long time. He stared ahead at the wall of the store. He did not move a muscle. Neither did the twins. Isadore studied him, trying to determine his wants. Abe held his breath, waiting. Just as he was about to purple, his stepfather said, “Mr. Redhand, how I wish you'd come earlier. Our resources just now are very slim. We can pay you twenty cents on the dollar and offer the remainder we owe in kind.” Redhand looked at him directly for a time as if measuring Isadore's word. He looked away again.

“The paper reads thirty-five cents. I remind you, you promised more in the mountains.”

Isadore put a hand on the man's back to guide him to the free room. “My dear friend, that was six month ago or more. We have been wiped out by this debacle of miracle substance. But here is the place we keep for the purposes of settlement. Take what you wish. Even beyond the eighty percent.”

The camp peddlers held that Indians will take any worthless thing if they find it pretty or if it's manufactured. They often bragged of the wild trades they'd made with one or another unsophisticated tribe. Colored glass for beaver pelts, a child's music box for gold nuggets. Most of these stories Abe discounted as rubbish, but as he and his stepfather stood back watching Marian's brothers examine the poor excuse for merchandise the Quakers and settlers had left behind after their zealous grabs at compensation, he found himself wishing the stories were true. No such luck. After striding the length and depth of the room, fondling various wares, lifting them to the light, bracing others against his knee, Edward Redhand turned to look at Abe and Isadore with bemused disbelief. He pointed his spear and made a wide sweeping arc with it.

“We would have to clear this room four times to make up what you owe us. What need have we for a loom with missing pedals? An iron sieve with holes conjoined? A hollowed gourd with a breach in its bottom would work as well. The rest you have here is no more than toys for children. A hatchet without a handle. A fork with only one tine. A teacup with half a saucer. Cherokee children do not play so much as white ones. They must grow up faster than that.”

Isadore's mouth twitched. “You are very late coming to collect.”

Redhand's mouth twitched also. He held up the flyer and crumpled it pointedly in his free fist.

“There is no deadline on this paper. Nor in the promises made to me.”

Abe could stand no more. It was his own word at stake in these deliberations, his reputation among Marian's people. That word looked to be sliding into the mire along with the word of so many, from the duplicitous Andrew Jackson to the gold-hungry Governor Gilmer of Georgia. He could not let that happen. He could never go back to being Marian's titmouse no matter what the cost. It was time he assert himself as a man. Wasn't he the “son” in Sassaporta and Son? Didn't that mean he had as much say as Isadore in negotiations? He coughed for attention and spoke up.

“You're right, Edward. Let's sit down and review what it is we owe you exactly and then you may take what you like from the main floor. No one is buying anyway. We have plenty of stock.” He glanced over at Isadore, who regarded him with knit brow. Whether his look was one of confusion, surprise, or anger, Abe couldn't tell. He didn't care. Meanwhile, the Redhands filed into the back room. The deal was struck for good or ill.

It took several hours to hammer out the details. In the end, the Cherokee took what they could comfortably carry, packing the chestnut and paint with clothing, tableware, kitchen and gardening tools, needles, thimbles, buttons, and shoes. There were heavier items, plows and yokes, the younger men lobbied for, but Edward refused, reminding the twins they'd descended the mountain expecting more coin and few goods. Though the settlement was just, they were unprepared. Whatever they took had to be carried back up steep, rocky paths. “There is no wagon or wheelbarrow waiting for us to help in the ascent,” he cautioned. “No longer can we leave goods on the trail until we can return for them. There are more white men swarming the hills this spring than ever before. They would steal what we leave behind before we can get back.” They prepared to leave. Abe took Edward aside.

“So,” he said, “your sister and Jacob are well, you say? Where are they living? Still in old Chota?”

“For now, yes.”

The phrase struck Abe as odd. “What d'you mean? ‘For now'?”

Edward studied him as a physician studies the sick, with acute attention, with curiosity, and with pity. When he spoke, there was a quiet, paternal quality to his tone, as if he were instructing a child who, through no fault of his own, was ignorant of many things that mattered.

“Our world, the Cherokee world, has been under siege since the first white man arrived. We fight them. They fight us. In the past, we give them land to make them go apart from us, to leave us in peace. They are to pay us for the land but they make the payments difficult to collect or they do not pay us at all. We fight their wars, hoping for peaceful alliance. Andrew Jackson promises war's rewards, then repays us by stealing land, our property, and our slaves. Always, the whites want more land. They raid our villages. We raid theirs. We adopt their ways to win respect as a nation. First we are a nation in their eyes, and then there is gold, so we are not. Surely you know all this?”

It irritated Abe that Redhand would speak to him this way. He struggled to keep annoyance out of his voice, but he failed. “Yes, yes,” he said. “The worst laws against you are in Georgia, where the gold is. Our sales force there is not permitted to deal with Cherokee anymore, not without a writ from the state. It's ridiculous. That law will not stand in the courts. You'll see. It will be reversed.” Even as he reassured the man with regard to the fate of his entire people, a judgment he based on his immigrant's faith in the benevolence of a country that had been good to him, Abe doubted himself. What he said next was more an effort to convince himself of his words than to convince his listener. “I understand, I can see that the white man rules over blacks and attempts to rule over the Indians. I'm not a fool. But this is a new country. It's not all settlers and missionaries. Every day it changes, it grows.” His optimism was met with a skeptical expression from Marian's brother, who knew too well the dire consequence of American growth. Abe's brow wrinkled as he sought within himself a clarification of his stated beliefs, beliefs that had come to his mind as suddenly as rain on a dry day, before he'd had time to consider them. “Good change will come. Isn't that what John Ross and the others work for, day and night? And as for the slaves …”

His voice trailed off. Neither Abe nor Edward Redhand had ever lived in a society without slaves. There was an Abolition movement gaining strength in the North, but not in the South, where Cherokee and white man alike owned men as easily as a pair of gloves and needed them too, to achieve their goals. Abe wasn't sure what he was about to say. That slaves might one day be free? All of them? Ridiculous. As ridiculous as the land grabs the Georgia legislature barreled through daily, writing laws governing the disposition of ancient Cherokee territories, laws that all the good Quakers of Greensborough swore would never hold up in federal court. Both men sighed. Both men shrugged. They fell silent.

“I am not so hopeful of the future as either John Ross or you, Peddler. I fear worse times are coming, not better ones. Our medicine man fasted and bathed in the river. He had a vision. The soldiers will come, the land will turn to smoke, and many will weep. Only our ghosts will remain in the forests of our fathers. The only security for my people is in the upper towns, where they can hide.” Edward said. “One day, Dark Water will know this and come back to the caves and village of our mother.”

For reasons he did not fully comprehend, Abe's eyes watered, his throat went thick with bitter fluids. He coughed. “Yes, security,” he said. “Security is the thing, isn't it?” He cocked his doubtful head, wondering where Marian marked security on her list of priorities. Defense, yes. But failing to stand her ground? Someone pulled at the hem of his jacket. In a kind of daze, he turned about, looked down, and saw a young boy with an earnest face, a fringe of ginger hair poking out from beneath his round black hat, a young boy who said, “Sir. I am sent to tell you your child is coming. Now.”

“Now!” Abe slapped his hands against his cheeks. “I must go,” he said, “I must go!” Yet he stood rooted to the spot.

Edward Redhand nodded. “Yes, I think you must.” He mounted his horse, picked up a trot, and gestured to his brothers to follow him. The Stones had waited astride their mounts while the other men talked, keeping so still that Abe had forgotten them. They trotted out of town after Edward with the same aloof dignity they'd displayed on trotting in.

Their sudden departure startled Abe out of his shock. Without further delay, he ran toward his uncle's house, his heart full of more emotion and contradiction than his mind could bear. He ran about to the back of the house and threw open the door that gave to the kitchen and his marital bed. The privacy curtain was drawn. Bloody cloths were heaped in a bucket next to the bed. Another bucket held a thin sheet of something slimy and brown-colored, sitting in a pool of more diluted blood. He saw the buckets first, which panicked him. He dared not raise his eyes and chance to see her, his Hannah, spread out on the bed, legs raised and parted, the child straining through between them. He paled thinking he must, he must look up, except if he chanced to see such a thing, he might never touch her again.

There were shoes around the bed. Two pairs of women's shoes, one pair of men's. All had feet in them, but he was too frightened to look up and see to whom they belonged. Then he heard her. His daughter. Crying. Crying in the way newborns cry, in the plaintive bleats of little lambs. His heart rushed to his throat, his face ran with tears, and suddenly he was kneeling by the bed, looking from the tired, enraptured gaze of his wife to the tiny, squealing pink creature in her arms. His jaw dropped. His breath stopped. Never had he seen anything more beautiful than his daughter, not even Marian naked in the firelight or Hannah on her wedding day. She had what seemed to him to be long, slender limbs, tender feet, exquisite hands with elegant fingers made to bear rings of gold and fine jewels. Her chin was gently curved, her nose small and snubbed like her mother's, her mouth was plump and purple. Of the eyes, he knew nothing as they were shut, but their orbits looked perfectly shaped, fringed in impossibly long, silky lashes the same color as the wisps of auburn hair that graced her little head. Behind him, Isadore clapped a congratulatory hand on his shoulder while his mother and the young messenger boy's aunt, a Mrs. Collins who lived down the street, murmured to him the details of the birth. “It went smooth as glass,” they said. “Your little girl was hardly any trouble to her mama at all. The water came and then out she slid.” Hannah rolled her eyes from side to side as if to tell him it wasn't quite as easy as all that, then laughed. He was so proud of his wife, so entirely delighted, he kissed her in front of everyone, giving her a hearty, happy smack on the lips, then a delirious series of smaller kisses all over her face and neck, stopping only to bestow yet more caresses upon the fingers, toes, and belly of his clever daughter, who had stopped crying having somehow found the teat. He swore to heaven, Hannah, and the child that he would make certain they never wanted for necessity or comfort, that he would crawl through hell on a path of broken glass before he would let them suffer deprivation or harm.

He had no idea how hard keeping that promise the first few years would be. By summer that year, Sassaporta and Son had not recovered from the rubber debacle. There were no signs they ever would. It was not for lack of industry on the new father's part. He created a multitude of advertisements and sale promotions, creating a kind of shoppers' club with numerous free rewards. He went on a buyer's trip to Raleigh, the state capital, finagling with every wholesaler and big retail outfit he could find for the best goods at the best rate. He packed Hart with wares and rode him to the foothill trading posts. None of it yielded much in the way of profit, although it helped them keep the doors open.

Over that year, two new stores opened in town. One specialized in spare parts for agricultural tools and had a blacksmith onsite. The other sold ready-made suits and offered professional tailoring carried out “in the European style.” With great reluctance, Isadore rented out the old rubber room to a cobbler, who fashioned boots and slippers there. His hands were tied by desperation and the deal they struck was less than favorable. The cobbler sold his shoes at a profit in the front of the store without having to pay the shop owners a penny above rent. At least from time to time one of his well-shod patrons stopped to buy a trinket or two from the landlord, so there was that to console them.