An Undisturbed Peace (32 page)

The second day they traveled, someone followed them in stealth. He'd heard a slight rustle, turned his head expecting to see a squirrel or rabbit, and caught the briefest glimpse of fringed buckskin disappearing behind a rock. The hair on his neck prickled, his skin drew beads of sweat that rolled slowly down his spine, but no one molested them. The third day the disruption repeated itself. He knew that a small number of Cherokee continued to haunt the mountains and foothills and evade the soldiers but it would do no good, he decided, to pretend whoever followed them was benign. He halted Hart, checked on Marian in the back of the wagon, then took up his rifle, cocked it, and fired a shot in the air. Two figures suddenly ran from behind the nearest tree into the thick of the forest beyond. Abe's jaw dropped. He thought he knew them. “Mr. Broken Branch!” he called out. “Beatrice!” but they were either not those two or were far, far gone.

Two days later, he reached Laurelton and gave the care of Marian over to his wife. Hannah took her in with wholesome heart. Who could not pity this battered woman, no matter what her husband's feelings for her had once been? Three weeks later, Marian came back to herself. Her first words were “Where are they, my friend? When can we go to them?”

Again, he lied. “When you are stronger,” he said. “They are already in the new territory. I've had word. They made it, against all odds. You want to live to see them, don't you?”

Hannah said, “My husband is right. Eat your lunch. The stew will help you heal all the faster. You'll like it. It's from a recipe taught me by a Cherokee woman who was once with us.”

Marian smiled at them both. A world of joy enlivened her blood. “My friends,” she said. “My dear, dear friends.” She ate. Between mouthfuls, she told them, “I am glad I named my son what I did,” and then she laughed. They asked her, and what was that? She said, “He is Sleeping Bear in Cherokee, but for English”—her eyes sparkled and she laughed again—“for English we wanted him to have the name of a person beloved by us. His English name is Abrahan.” Abe marveled. It was the first time he was absolutely certain she knew his name.

Little by little, while she recuperated, he embellished his lies about the fates of her husband and son to the point he'd begun to believe them himself. If he'd not told her his stories, he was sure she might die. They gave her a reason to live. Accordingly, he told her Jacob and his namesake had been removed that summer and lived now in the new territory. Their journey had taken sixty-four days. Many had died, but the dream of finding her again kept them alive. The air of the high plains was good for the boy. He breathed easier there. Her husband was unable to write her, he lied further, the postal system had not yet been set up, but he'd sent word through Lewis Ross's men that he loved her and waited for her, that he would build her a new home with her own garden and a little pen for goats.

The day his lies unraveled arrived after she was whole again, strong and healthy. He came upon her while she was in Hannah's garden with the children. She wore a dress his wife had given her. It was a blue color that set off her copper skin, bringing out the gold beneath the red. She'd not yet gained back all her proper weight. The dress hung off her at the breast and the waist but she looked strong. Her back was straight, her arms muscled. Even the old stiffness Hannah had noticed on Marian's visit to the store while Abe was on the road, the vestige of her foot's injuries, was gone. His son Judah clung to her skirt. They had grown fond of each other. While Raquel and Gabe pulled weeds from Hannah's vegetable beds, Marian taught Judah Cherokee names for the bugs he collected in a little tin pail. Hearing his father approach, Marian looked up, kissed Judah's head, and sent him to his siblings.

“I'm glad you're here,” she said. “I owe you much, my friend. My life, in fact. But I'm in good health now and it's time for me to go. My family waits. I've read the newspapers your O'Hanlon leaves you. Five of the thirteen detachments John Ross set up for transport have not yet left for the new land. I will join one of them and be with my family before the worst of winter.”

Abe grabbed her hands. He stared at her with eyes wide with fear, wondering how to tell her that most likely her family was dead. His mouth opened, his throat worked. No words came.

She studied him, perplexed. She tilted her head. Her brow wrinkled up.

“Marian,” he tried at last. “Jacob … I don't … he is …”

Understanding dawned over her features. Then clouds came and darkness fell. She slipped her hands out of his.

“Oh, titmouse, titmouse,” she said quietly. “You don't know where they are, do you?”

His voice was a whisper. “No,” he said.

She shook her head and clucked her tongue. His very soul shrunk inside his skin at her remonstration. Then she turned and walked away from him, away from the house, toward the old couple's property next door, the property gone wild while heirs bickered.

“I tried, Marian!” he called out to her back. “I tried everywhere. They were not at the other forts! If I'd told you the truth—oh, forgive me for saying it aloud—that they are likely dead, you too would have died!”

She stopped and turned again to answer him.

“And what would have been wrong with that? Our ghosts would be together. We would wander the Upper World, hand in hand. But listen well and I shall tell you. Jacob and Sleeping Bear are not dead. I know this. If they were, their ghosts would come to me and ask me to join them. I know this as well as I know the titmouse cannot help but lie.”

She gave him her back for good and walked into the high grass. He wanted to follow her, but his feet would not move. He was as rooted as a tree to his wife's garden, where his children played.

Paradise Regained

I
t was the hardest winter in memory, a winter of ice storms, blizzards, weeks of sunless skies, unrelenting cold. When Abe thought of the final 13,000 Cherokee marching off that winter into the arms of frigid, hungry death, he was robbed of all peace. John Ross had spared the remnant of his people the disaster of the warm-weather removals, in which hundreds out of several thousand died of summer diseases, by begging the United States to cease operations until the weather had cooled and vectors slept. But how could he or anyone know that instead of the mild chill of a southeastern winter, that year a glacial evil would sweep down from the north and seize 4,000 people, including Chief Ross's own wife, around the neck until they were dead? It was as if the land itself refused to let them go. Abe grieved for Marian every day, convinced she was one of the removal's dead. He remembered her last words to him and asked her ghost for a visit, just a short one, so he could beg her forgiveness. Otherwise, he feared his life would be blighted forever.

Hannah and the children suffered for his sins. That winter, the husband and father they loved for his good humor and kindly ways withdrew into a solitary sadness, neglecting his work, neglecting them. He sat in Isadore's old office, windows shuttered against daylight, without burning a lantern or feeding the fire O'Hanlon made for him each morning. Hannah brought him meals he would not eat. O'Hanlon brought him whiskey he drank too quickly until the Irishman decided it did him no good and brought him no more. His wife sent a desperate message to his mother, who braved sleet and ice to visit him, but even Susanah's arguments neither consoled nor moved him. Isadore made an impression, reminding Abe that he was getting old. He needed him. The business was too large for an old man, a tired man, to keep track of alone. If Abe did not get back to work, their business would fail and his wife and children would be destitute in the end. So he started working again, keeping the books, making orders, analyzing payroll, but when his chores were done of a day, he sat in his office in the dark, letting the fire die as before.

Spring came and the enlivening of the earth failed to cheer him. The flowers his daughter picked for him brought tears to his eyes but little joy. His family began to learn how to live with him and yet without him when out of the blue at the start of summer the letter came. Hannah knew who it was from the moment the postman handed it to her. It was a thick envelope from the Indian Territory and his full name was written over it in a fine, well-trained hand.
Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar
, it read,
Laurelton, North Carolina
. Hannah could almost hear Marian's laugh when she wrote that. Almost.

She put on her coat, her hat, and bundled up the children. She hitched Hart to the small buggy and hurried to Abe's office that had been Isadore's. All the way she considered how her love for her husband had grown over the years. Once, she had been bitter and jealous at the very mention of Marian Dark Water Redhand's name. Now the Cherokee's letter was a precious lifeline giving her hope her husband might come back to them. She burst into his office with Hannah, Judah, and Gabe in tow, everyone chattering, throwing open the shutters, letting in light. Her husband, slumped over in his desk chair, blinked and slowly stirred himself. Hannah gave the letter to Gabe, who scrambled up into his father's lap and handed it to him. He stared at the thing, opened it, then his face came alive and the world blossomed. This is what the letter said:

My Dear Friend. May this letter find you and your family healthy and whole, especially your wife, who was so kind to me, and your son, Judah, who gave me solace when I had not my own boy to hold. I hope they have forgiven me for taking leave of them without proper good-byes. I know that you think of me. When I was on the trail and the North Wind howled greeting to me in the night, your voice was hidden in his beard, but I found it out of all the others. “Marian Dark Water Redhand!” it called out. “Forgive me!” I looked everywhere for the West Wind to ask that he carry a message back to you but I could not find him. So here I am to tell you of my fortune and in it I pray you find what you seek.

After I left you, I went back to the fort at Ross's Landing, where the people who were yet there made preparations to go to the new territory. Things had changed at the stockade, but not much. We were resigned. There was rare need for the soldiers so there were fewer of them. No one wished to escape, or if they did, none tried. I discovered I was not the only one separated from her family. There were others. We banded together, a clan of outcasts who had lost the most important possession of all, our flesh and blood. We were ashamed, defiant, but none of us abandoned hope of finding what was ours again. Each day we spent in the stockade was another day we could not seek our beloveds. All we desired was to get on with it, the march and the search twinned in our hearts. Among us were old ones and children. We took care of one another as best we could, hoping somewhere another took care of our own.

The day came when my detachment was on the move. The omens were not the best. The sky was gray. There were bolts of lightning in the hills that set trees afire. Hail fell too, pelting us with balls of ice. The Spirits were angry with us for leaving them, we told each other, so we said to them, “Come with us. The whites will not love you as we do. Come with us.” Only the North Wind heard our invitation. He swept the trail ahead of us with his snowy robes and made paths with his boots of ice. He gathered up the souls too weak to follow him, leaving their bodies behind like the broken limbs of trees that litter the frozen ground after a storm.

We were hungry, we were so cold the only warmth came when we lay together and the heart of one beat against the heart of another. Storms came without cease. The wagons got stuck in snow or slid into boulders and trees. Often, we stopped for days until the skies gave us small respite and we could move again. Many people died, and so did the beasts who pulled the wagons. We wept for them. Our tears froze on our cheeks. We stopped to butcher and eat the beasts, oxen and horses both, because it was all the fresh meat that we had. It made us sick. In that cold there was nothing to hunt. The streams were frozen, the fish slept at the bottom of riverbeds unmolested. The birds were silent. Without their song, we could not find them.

One day, our leaders thought to change our route. They looked for a place to cross the Great Rivers. There were ice floes all through them. Some places, they were frozen over completely. They tried to convince us we could cross on foot. Every Cherokee knows the western rivers take souls to the resting place of the dead. It has always been so. Only those tired to madness of our journey wanted to cross the river this way. The first of them broke through the ice and disappeared. No further attempts were made.

How many of us fell to our knees and did not rise? How many while holding their children in their arms? Only the moon, who witnessed our sorrows, can count them. You cannot know what it is like to pry a crying babe from his mother who has gone stiff by that sole embrace colder than that of the North Wind, the embrace of death. But I did it. More than once I pried babies from their mothers' arms as I prayed somewhere someone had taken my own child and nourished him under her wing. Sometimes, you know, I thought I saw him, my boy, as a little dark form on the horizon coming at me, his arms outstretched. At first I was happy and lifted my own arms in welcome. Then I would tremble inside, hoping he was not a ghost who would melt into vapor once we met. Always, he disappeared before I knew what was what. Still, I had reason to hope he was alive, the strongest hope. I do not know if you will believe what I tell you next but trust me. Every word is true and it fed my hope, that burning hope, for your namesake.

There were bodies sometimes we came across. Bodies abandoned by those who marched before us. Abandoned by the orders of soldiers who would not allow the dead's loved ones to take the time to bury them. They were covered in leaves gone brown in the cold, then often snowed upon. There were mounds of them here and there along the way. Some of us rushed to them, brushed the snow away to see if we knew who lay there, unblessed, but the bodies were rotted beyond recognition.

One night, our march ended until daylight came again. I laid down with my band of outcasts near a mound of the dead. We asked their forgiveness, then stole some of the driest branches that covered them to make our fire. Our bellies rumbled but we had little to eat. We melted snow over the fire. When it was hot, we threw into the pot a single potato cut into small pieces and a few bones from the squirrel we'd shared days before. It was the last of our stores. On the morrow, we would be beggars. But what can you beg from those who have nothing? From families who must care for themselves first or die? I confess that night I despaired. I separated myself from my band and laid down next to that mound of the dead. I prayed to join them. I closed my eyes. My ear, my cheek were pressed against the icy ground. Then the wind howled against the side of my face that was exposed to the air. Inside it, I heard a voice murmur to me. “Open your eyes, my love,” it said and I knew who it was. “Open your eyes,” it said, and I did.

Yes! Yes! It was my husband, my Jacob! He lay next to me, his arms around me although he gave me no warmth. “Beloved, at last you are here!” I said. He smiled at me and then I realized that he was young again, and whole, as handsome as the day I first kissed him in the dark outside my father's room. “Oh, you are dead! Am I dead also?” I asked this with eagerness, hoping that my suffering was over. He smiled again and laughed, that big laugh of his that echoed against the walls of our cave in days gone by. “No, dear one, you cannot die. What would our son do without you?” My heart leapt. I struggled to my feet. He stood also, if ghosts can be said to stand. “Where is he?” I asked. From out of the woods, a woman walked toward us. She called out. Jacob turned his head to her. “He is in the West, waiting for you,” he said with his head turned toward that other. The woman, whose face I could not see, said, “I've found them, tell her to come here.” Jacob beckoned to me to follow him, which I did although the closer we got to the tree line, the fainter his image became. He was like smoke drifting up through the air while the woman became more defined, larger, and suddenly I saw she was my mother, also young, dressed in buckskins, and that she was pointing. I looked in the direction she gave me and saw in a nest of pine needles covering a hole in the ground a family of rabbits, five of them, their little chests rising and falling in slumber. My hunger returned to me. It gnawed at my belly, reminding me I was yet alive. I made a prayer, a quick one, thanking the rabbits for their lives, and then I took a nearby rock and killed them all, in five swift strokes. Their warm blood ran over my hands as I picked them up.

I walked back to my band of outcasts with my bounty, then turned in guilt that the sight of fresh meat had made me forget the ghosts of my mother and husband. I caught one last sight of them, fading into the night as they climbed on the backs of stars into the heavens, and they were hand in hand, all peace made between them. I would have perished from loss then and there despite the meat except that Jacob's words, “He is in the West, waiting for you,” rang in my ears loud as the echo our laughter made in our happy mountain cave.

What do you think happened next? The rest of the trail was hard and many more were lost, but the vision of Jacob and my mother, their promise of my living son, kept me at it until at last, in the third month of the English New Year, our destination was reached at the fort near Arkansas. Crowds of Cherokee were there to greet us. Everyone looked for family and clansmen. I'm afraid I was enfeebled by then. I was placed on a pallet in an area designated for those in dire condition. Imagine my joy when I spied walking toward me my brothers, Black Stone and White, with Waking Rabbit, whom you know as Edward. I could no longer walk myself. It had taken everything I had just to get to the fort. They wrapped me in blankets and carried me home with them. It was some distance away, a mean place of rough tents and wide-open space, our new paradise. They told me not to worry, better land lay beyond, things would get better, we could make a home here, US money promised for our old homes was on the way but slow to arrive. I didn't care. All I wanted was Sleeping Bear. Abrahan, my son.

I grabbed at my brothers, whichever carried me at the time for they took turns, asking, “Have you seen my son? Do you know where he is?” They exchanged looks and put me off, saying, “Soon you will be at rest. Then we will talk about your son.” I feared the worst. But I clung to the idea that my mother and my husband, his father, would not lie to me about Abrahan, about Sleeping Bear, my son. At last they brought me inside a tent and lay me down on a narrow bed made of pine logs and a mattress stuffed with hay. A young woman I did not know brought me bread and a joint of chicken with sweet spring water to drink. I pushed it away. “No, no, I want only my son!” I told her, and then the entrance to the tent moved and crisp air flooded in. There, bathed in a shaft of light, was my boy, my Sleeping Bear, my Abrahan, my son. He ran to me, his mother. We have been together ever since.

My foolish brothers thought the shock of seeing him would kill me, so they kept him from me until I was safe, at rest. I know I was near extremis when they found me, but I could have told them he is my only strength. During his trail, I learned, this dear boy watched his father die. Jacob had carried him part of the way, despite his old injuries. But it cost him dear. He grew weak quickly. He caught a fever and, within a day of catching it, lay down and died. My son sat with him, weeping, all the day long. Then, at night, a ghost-woman brought him by the hand to a living woman, who took care of him until he reached the promised land. She was a woman of the deer clan who had her own son die in her arms of typhus and so my son was precious to her. I am certain the ghost-woman was his grandmother, who never met him in the flesh, protecting him despite his black skin. By yet another miracle, when my son and his foster mother arrived here, my brothers found them easily, almost by accident. I like to think his father's spirit had a role in that.