Breed, by Richard McGhee
"Breed" a chapter from Ghost Country, Vol I, book by Richard McGhee reprinted here with permission from Richard McGhee, author
Half-breeds; men born of Indian women by white fathers. The race has much of the depravity of civilization without the virtues of the savage. The Prairie, by James Fenimore Cooper (1827)
Thomas Jefferson MacKay, ex-Confederate soldier, half-breed Cherokee, urged his pony across Honey Creek on a warm April morning in the year 1866. Bonds broken, brotherhood dissolved, passions spent, he was returning home for the first time since he left it to join Stand Watie's soldiers. It was the place where he had been born in 1844 and grew to the manhood which, as if by an arrant destiny, made him an actor in the renewal of civil war between Cherokees. His father, Abraham MacKay, white American long distanced from hardly confessed Scots-Irish progenitors forgotten and lost in their Shenandoah graves along the Wilderness Trail, built a cabin on Honey Creek in 1839, after Jeff's Cherokee mother, Tsuta (Judy) Cockburn, took him as her man.
He laid his hand softly along the pony's neck, lending confidence as they forded the swollen stream to reach feebly glaring uplands. He was easy with her, this one which had been with him in the last weeks of the war. She and he rode as one. His limbs could find no rest, his arm dispersing insects around his face and the neck of his horse.
He lifted a hand toward his neck, found a small leather pouch there, lifted it on its thong and dropped it back inside the collar of his shirt.
He kept keen eyes focused ahead.
The house waited on a rise a quarter mile from the banks of the creek. His father had dug a cellar nearby the original cabin and that became the start of a foundation. Jeff could smell lilac in the air and he thought of the old cellar as he rode beneath aged branches of great oaks and ancient elm, through newly leafed forest paths, leading him past signs of deer. Hunting had trained him well. Uncle Jesse always said, "Good hunters make good warriors."
He, conscious of animal alarms, lapsed past a treacherously well-worn side-path, one to which he gave a lingering glance. It led off, beneath impending boughs, into a pasture where lay, so unspeakably insensate, both his parents. He had himself dug the grave for his father six years earlier, on a harsh day in March.
He had been far away, ignorant and still innocent, when his mother's corpse was interred. He was with Watie when she died. His sisters buried her beside their father. They lay together, out there, down that path, on a bank of Honey Creek, in a meadow embraced by trees, watched by birds and deer.
He would visit his mother's grave before he returned to Jaytown.
He broke free from the shading woods, into the clearing which made a yard for the house. He remembered to avoid the sink hole. Around its edges, where once a log fence had stood, with remnants still visible, stood wildly blossoming lilac. An ancient hackberry, in mockery, fronted him where it once held targets he had practiced for hunting. Taught not by his unsolicitous father but, as was natural for Aniyvwiyai, the Real People, by their Uncle Jesse, as he himself had been trained by his Uncle Bushyhead. Jeff expected at any moment to hear the bark, the yaps, the greeting of their hunter that had made its way over the creek alone, a splendid bitch whose puppies his sister Elizabeth had helped bring into the world.
The house was deserted, but not ruined, as so many had been throughout Delaware District. The early white sunlight reflected off its emptiness. The porch, dull in its floor, sagged in its roof. An iron pot lay, rusting, on one of the steps. Fruit trees, thinned by undisciplined growth and nibbled of leaf by deer both young and old, stood for attention. Thistle grew through the gaps of hewn logs, not yet rotted, which served as a walkway to the steps. Burrs littered the yard, occupied by advancing hordes of weed. Poppies threatened the iris beds.
Jeff halted the pony, briefly surveyed the scene, saw the spring house decaying half-covered with willow flowers and grass, and then he dismounted, easily in his youth and with experienced efficiency of early maturity. In the same motion did he tether her reins to a post of the porch. The leather of his military boots was suppled and pliant to his tread as he lifted himself up the steps, noticing how a weed, responding to a morning breeze, tapped against the side of the house and briars, grown along the corners, greeted him in their vigor on a fresh spring morning. Honeysuckle, the saddest odor of all filled the air. It clung to window frames which, once holding clear glass, now gone, stood innocently open on each side the doorway, where no door hung. Inside he passed.
This outwork of humanity stood defenseless. Inside he found signs of encroaching nature, no longer at bay. Sunlight streamed, assaulting dreams of strong women. The floor was dry and dusty. He rebelled against disappearance.
Jeff knew again the pain of failed vision.
This had been a house full of articulated passions. Now, there were things up there, in the attics, rotting in drawers and along shelves, where they had been left by a disbelieving family in shock. Mid-morning sunshine beamed into the room, ironically innocent of any murderous intent, as it looked with equanimity on the leavings of rats and children alike.
In this moment of uncertain vision, Jeff foresaw sinking and falling, when the house would pitch downward, when the roof would sink, briars and nettles would blot out the path, growing lustily over the mound where the house once stood. He would bring the force necessary, leering and lurching, into this place calling for dignity, for solemnity. Because truce and some peace had come. Nature would be forced back.
He went to the pasture, to visit his mother's grave.
Against all reason, he expected a sign, from the forest, the water, the earth. He raised his fist, and then he relaxed into self-scorn. Resigned to mockery, he shuddered as blackbirds stirred into the sky from the trees and pastures, circling at a distance from the man alone in the clearing.
There, beneath that sunken mound, lay the body of his mother. Beside that of his father, who always said a man is the product of his fortune, a woman of her misfortunes. She, at the center of their lives, at the circumference which defined their being, knew no limit to her powers. She resolved everything into simplicity for them, for her children, who had been silly, spiteful, squabbling and sparring in their inevitable and determined efforts to assert their will on this place.
It was she who brought together the filaments of their feeling. She survived in him, in his refusal to accept the evidence which lay before him, that she had been thrust into the earth, into oblivion. He saw her still yet , treading toward the house, carrying a bucket in each hand, filled with water from the branch off Honey Creek. She scoured everything in her zeal to affirm herself: her home, her children.
Jeff removed his hat. He knelt beside the rough stone set to mark a grave. He laid an arm across the stone, bowed his head to examine the mound, and, muttering, "gadohi," earth, he dug, with the fingers of his free hand, a small hole at the center.
Jeff reached inside his shirt collar and found the pouch which hung from a thong around his neck. He lifted the thong over his head, opened the pouch, and took from it a single kernel of yellow corn. With his thumb and finger, he placed the kernel in the earth and said, barely above a whisper, "Selu."
He stood, replaced his hat, and turned away. There seemed to be a fragrance of warm milk, freshly drawn, falling in a froth, spilling into the soft earth. As a boy, he carried the milk pail through a spring garden freshly dug, his feet sinking into the soft earth. A band of red-winged blackbirds burst from the trees above him, darkening the sky for an instant. He stalked toward the creek, and there he tore off his clothing, to take the waters. He stood in the angular light of a now westering sun, and as if in prayer, he bowed his head, basking like a creature gorged with existence, and then he walked slowly into the stream.
In the ancient ways from which his mother had come, against which his father once had fought, Jeff MacKay dipped himself seven times into this stream which tied him to his past, in this place where all that flowed was a testimony of all that abides. Through the trees lining the stream came declining sunshine, casting shadows briefly broken by a small white deer which, coming to drink, saw the man and gazed, undaunted, searchingly into his strange eyes. Jeff, instinctively, knew the word needed, the vow and compact required. Hisblood raced in that instant toward the line where commitment called and, as he uttered, "Awi Usdi," little deer, it disappeared.
It was on his account that his mother had died. About his father's death he had sharply defined images deeply lodged, for he dug the grave, in a soil not yet softened by early Spring winds, near the waters of their settlement at Fort Dodge. His sisters, who knew from immediacy the details of her going, did not wish to speak of it. They were in a league of quiet fury against the sex of those who had murdered their mother.
When their mother sent Jeff to join Watie's soldiers, she had sacrificed her last-born son and then she sacrificed herself. Jeff was the last in the line of her husband's name, repellant to many and strange to herself. It was a trouble for Jeff to think such thoughts. Yes, on that cold March day when he dug his father's grave, Jeff found no bottom for his fears. He thrust Father Abraham deep into the past.
He would speak again with his sisters, who found their mother dying.
After Watie surrendered, Jeff had wandered the hills and prairies of the Cherokee Nation for nearly ten months, and then he found the courage to come home. First he went to Susie's house, his grown sister now a mother herself, and, then, at last, from Susie he heard details about their mother's death.
"Jeff, you know I wasn't there. Not when they took her." Thus did Susie begin.
"Only when she was dead?"
"Dying."
"Yes. I was there for that. They called me to take her away."
"Does Elizabeth tell you things? About Mama, about what happened?" Jeff touched upon the point of delicacy. "She were there."
"Yes," Susie said. "Yes, she was there."
"So? Does she say?"
Jeff pressed her, and Susie told him what she believed was owed to him, what was given for the family to know. Elizabeth had been there when the soldiers came, had been there to hear and see.
Lively and athletic, though slight of build, with dark auburn hair, Elizabeth was thirteen when it happened. She had been much favored by their father. He said she reminded him of his mother back in Georgia. Despite her worry that "Elizabeth blues too much," her mother saw in her a reliable and conscientious child, one whom she could entrust with major responsibilities, such as gathering the eggs, feeding the guineas. Elizabeth had long made friends of the guineas. They were her favorite animals, until Jeff asked her to watch his hunting dog, Peggy. Then she undertook to discharge her duties there with as much dedication as any assigned her by her mother. She had sympathetic chords with Jeff, so close and so far. He safe in war, she endangered without him. Elizabeth saw and then shaped what she saw to explain what she witnessed when the soldiers came and took away her mother.
No longer a child, not yet a woman in the year 1863. A spindly thing, with a certain beauty in her smile which made one ignore the absence of other attractions in her physical makeup, she was uncertain of much except her passion for pets and her despair of her father, whose absence she felt as a flaw in her breathing. Of her mother she had no need to think, for her mother was a being who was, quite simply, there. Her mother was a presence, through which Elizabeth realized her own being. To have asked her if she loved her mother would have been taken as an insult, for it would have implied the possibility of an alternative, such an unnatural and unspeakable contingency that it could have had no importation or determination for the girl.
Not until the day the soldiers took her mother.
* * *
I told Jeff I'd take care of Peggy. I promised. So, when Mama called me that's what I was doing. Peggy was going to have puppies again, so I watched her real careful like. She was kind of old and I knew she needed lots of help. That's what Jeff knew too. I was lying down with her under the house where Jeff fixed her a place. I brung her some biscuits which Susie had brung with her and baby. ThatPeggy sure was happy and I was happy, too. I know why Jeff loved her so, because she was so slick. All over, and when she got mad her hair stood up on her neck. That's how I knew something was wrong. When Mama called me that's when Peggy's hair stood up stiff on her neck and I was sure there was something wrong so I patted her and told her not to worry and then I crawled out to see what Mama wanted.
When I got to the door where Mama and Susie was standing, I thinking Peggy'd have them puppies purt'near anytime now, and if that was why she had hair standing on her neck, Mama was looking not at me but beyond, over my shoulder. She said, not looking at me, "You come in here now, Elizabeth." I turned and tried to see what she was seeing through if not beyond me.
I couldn't see much, ‘cause the old hackberry got in the way.
Mama went out the door and back to the kitchen.
Susie called me and we went outside to the tree. Susie said to me, "You climb up there and tell me what you see."
I said, "Push me up, ‘Susie." She lifted me to the first branch so she'd get started. And she did.
So I climbed up into the tree to the second limb. Susie said she watched the dirty bottom of my drawers. Then she couldn't see me. She could hear the tree thrashing.
I hollered, "There, down toward the creek, where them hickories are." I meant where we cut through the sassafras to get the cattails, that's where they was.
I mean them boys who came that day, late as it was, getting on to dark.
Susie said, "You! ‘Lizbuth better git down here before Mama catches you!"
And I scrambled down.
Mama called Susie and me to get a bucket and take some water to them boys. I was proud to do it. Both of us was, I think. Mama, unsmiling, said, "Wado," thank you.
So we took it between us and carried it down the path to them boys under the tree, near the spring-house.
They was mostly lounging about, peaceful like and all, so I didn't think anything except wonder why they was there instead of up at the house like the rest of us. At first, I was so full of feeling for Peggy, I guess, I thought it might have been maybe Jeff and the boys down there, and that's why I thought it was strange, I guess, that they was there instead of with us. Where Mama and I was. They was layin' so peaceful like, like at a picnic when you're full and happy, that I wanted to go there, but Mama said no, to come back in the house.
Now it's like a picture for me. They layin' there in the shade of them big old hickories, them sassafras weeds behind and the creek behind them. They was some lilacs in the air, too.
Let me shut my eyes just a moment. Yes, they was, one, two, maybe four of them standing around one tree. I can see more, on the ground, I remember. Let's see. Seven or eight. Cause they was some layin' there like they was asleep and all in a shade. So I can't see all of them for sure. But I think seven or eight more. One was leaning his back on the tree. He looked right at me. He sort of smiled at me and that's when Mama told me to come in the house and I did it right away because them other was starting to smile too. Oh, yes, one of them was leaning on a stick, like he was hurt. Mostly they didn't have any hats, but two or three did. They was standing in the sun that was going down so's it was in their eyes just beyond the tree. They was all Pins, you know, which Mama told us about, cause she knew they don't like people like us and they wore pins as a sign.
Anyway, I went in like she told me. But I didn't go all the way in. I stood so's I could see around her and watch them boys lying out there so peaceful like. They was just yattering and smiling so I couldn't see no harm, but Mama could, I know that now, but not then. You see they was boys and they was Pins and she knew that. Iffen they was really friends they wouldn't ‘ve been out there so far away, was something I didn't at first recognize, but I did and when I did I was worried bout Peggy having them pups right then. I could hear her growling under us, where I left her. She'd not bark, though, unless'n she was real angry or skeert. She was just growling right then and that was consoling.
They had dragged some of our fire logs down and made them a fire like they was going to camp there for some time. And I didn't see no horses. Like they just come out of nothing, landing there so quiet and soft under that old hickory. Maybe they come off the creek, up that path we made to the cattails.
One of them was crippled all right. He leaned on a stick and he had one arm in a sling he made around his neck. All the others was whole, though. I should've been sorry for the hurt one but I wasn't I have to confess. He looked the meanest of all. Like he deserved to be hurt. He wasn't the one who smiled at me. He sort of sneered, I'd say. His teeth shined.
I think them others was just plain tuckered out. They used up their energy smiling at us.
I wasn't so proud when one of them, the one leaning his back on the tree, his feet stretched out from him along the ground toward the hurt one, said to me he wanted something to eat, too. We didn't have that much, I knew. But Mama was already bringing it herself. She had more of them biscuits and a bucket with the meat gravy in it we made with possum and it was real good but I didn't think she should give it to them boys cause they could get their own I thought.
Mama was coming with what they wanted but she seen them boys keener than me. She seen how they touched me too. I didn't mind much, neither.
Anyways, when she got there, she put that bucket of gravy down on the ground, lifted off the cover and gave them each a biscuit and said to eat it. Which they did and I was only sorry I didn't give Peggy gravy too.
It was pretty dark by when they stopped and they et every drop, too. I know, cause I took the bucket back to the house when they was finished.
"Mama," I said when I got in the house. "Mama, can I go get Peggy?"
It were my job. Like the Commandments. But Mama said no and I told myself that was best cause Peggy ought to stay there where Jeff fixed her a place to have them pups.
Yes, it was dark then. Mama told Susie she better take baby on back home. I was too worked up to be sleepy and I didn't go to bed when Mama told me to do that. I took off my dress. "Just look at your drawers," she said, and then she wadded my panties and scrubbed my behind with them. "It done soaked clean through onto you." Well, then Mama told me to go and sleep up in the loft which pleased me mighty much. But I didn't sleep much. I peeked out a knot-hole at them boys round their fire, then I heard a voice below, so I shimmied down the ladder so's I could hear secrets.
"Nothing." Mama said this quietly. I didn't see at first who she was talking to, but later I did and it was four of them boys who came right in there where we lived. Right under us.
"Nothing here you want," she said. "Hunger and that girl's all I got here."
"Yeah, we sure noticed that gahooch."
I looked close at the one who said that. I didn't like anyone calling me that. That one ought to knowed better, ‘cause a Cherokee girl is agehutsa. Mama had just a candle lighted but I could see him real clear, cause he was standing so that light gave off his face just fine. He was the one looked almost white and civilized. Them other three was rough I thought, not just peaceful and smiling like outside before. They was all sure Pins I could see that, but he looked at first to me like a civilized boy, which it turned out he sure wasn't, but I didn't know that just then.
"The Colonel said you got a rebel boy ridin' with them bushwhackers."
"I have this girl here, like you seen already."
"We done saw two of'em out there."
"I sent Susie on home with her baby."
"Yes, but how ‘bout that breed boy, too?"
My mother didn't want them to know but they already knew. They knew Jeff was off fighting somewhere. They wanted to know where. Mama only told them about Susie and me.
"Would yer bastard be over in Arkansas with Stand Watie, maam?" This was another man speaking now. He had a rough, low voice, to go with his face, so dark and ugly with lots of hair all over, not at all like you expect of a Pin.
"I know you got a breed somewhere, old woman. I know ‘bout Jeff MacKay." This was spoken by another, who was too far in the shadows for me too see, but I sure could hear him. He was so loud I just knew he got Peggy's hackles up.
"Who're you talking about?" Mama pretended she didn't know such a name.
"I'll tell you this, we know you aint' saying the truth and we'll be back here in the morning to ask you again. We'll all sleep on it and then we'll see what you can remember after we all get ourselves some rest. And we'd appreciate some more of that gravy for breakfast, with biscuits, too, and dig out some eggs cause we know you got them chickens hid out in them woods somewheres."
The four of them left and Mama turned her back on them, so I couldn't see her face but I knew she must've been close to tears because that's the way I was feeling too, because I knew she was not telling them the truth. She said she didn't even have any boy named Thomas Jefferson, which I knew she did, and so I wondered why she would deny her own flesh and blood like that.
Somehow I did go to sleep cause when I next knew anything it was morning and Mama was stirring about below.
Mama had eggs too, and that made me real hungry so I went down and got a bite for me and Peggy but mama told me not to go outside yet. So I kept my egg on a biscuit and put it in my pocket so I could give it to Peggy when I got to go outside.
"Can I see if Peggy is all right, Mama?"
"Unh unh."
I was sure she would have them pups right then and I didn't want nothin' to happen or go wrong.
Soon's I saw that Peggy was takin' good care of herself, I done took that food down to them boys who was already stirring and awake, but they didn't look like they was in a hurry to leave. Some of them was off in the weeds relieving themselves so's I couldn't see but I could hear and one of them wasn't even in the weeds so ‘s I could see him real clear. It wasn't a real treat to watch a man peein' like that just when I was so hungry and ready to eat and all. He must've thought he was special too, cause he didn't hurry to hide hisself even when he finished. Them others just laughed.
They et all we had. They even grabbed the biscuit I had for Peggy in my pocket. The smooth-face one who looked civilized in the candlelight patted me all over and that's when he found Peggy's biscuit.
"What's this, gal?" he smirked. "You bring this special for me, did you?"
"No! That's for Peggy!" I told him right out. "She's got to have her strength."
"Yeah? So do I, gal. Let's have it." And he took it right out from my pocket. "Who is this Peggy? Is that your pretty sister there?" That's when I first noticed how all them boys was speculatin' on Susie.
"No! Peggy is my dog. She's going to have puppies and she needs her food."
"Well, I do like dogs myself," he said. "And I like tight little breeds like you, too."
He went right on and et that biscuit hisself, like he really didn't care ‘bout dogs or anything else in the world but hisself.
I just wanted to cry but I didn't give him no satisfaction.
The pretty boy just laughed at me and patted me on my behind so I turned and ran off back to the house where Mama was standing in the door watching us.
When we were inside, Mama said, "I guess you better stay away from them soldiering boys. They've sleep rested and they et their fill. Don't go near them no more. You hear?"
I hid me and Peggy real good, cause them boys never could find us down under the floor.
They did try, though.
I think they was so mad at Mama for hiding me that they got rough on her when they came back in to find what they was looking for.
This time they was just two of them. The ugly one and the pretty face did not return. It was a boy with a beard and the one who kept his coat buttoned all the way up to his neck. He talked the most.
"You tell us where that boy be, old lady, or we'll just have to hurt you and both them girls you got. Baby, too, if we have to."
Mama did not flinch.
"E-e-e! I already done told you. Last night."
"Listen, old bitch, I'm not wasting no more time on you."
He didn't raise his voice, but he did slap her on her face. I was skeert I was next.
The boy with the beard, who must have being trying to hide his bein full-blood, said in a voice I will never forget ‘cause it was so mean-soundin', "You old traitor bitch! You ain't seen nothin yet! Wait till we git them two gahooches you got hid from us! We'll show you real stuff then. We might just start with you."
"Devils!"
"We heard that so much, old lady, we'll be shudderin' in our boots till we die, if we was to take it half serious. Don't you mistake us, cause we are already more damned than you'll ever know, you old bitch, and we'll take our pleasure right here if you keep pushing us any more."
Then Mama lowered her voice so's I almost couldn't hear her at all, but I knowed what she said cause she says it always when there's bad things happening. She said , "Sedani dijadlosv nigesvna yigi kohi iga, eligwu ijulaha yisdai," Satan's not opposing you today; you are both walking together in the same direction.
Beard-boy heard her. He snarled, "Alesta!" Cunt!
The man with the buttons grabbed her by her arm and started going with her out the door.
Mama's last word, which I heard, as she was dragged out the door, was "Howa!" Agreed! And someone outside said, "Wado, agawela," thanks, old woman.
I crawled through that dirt and saw them pulling Mama along the path, down to the tree where them boys was still malingerin'. When they saw Mama they started laughin and hootin at her, and one of them threw a rope up over a limb and started makin' a noose. I was almost scared to death, cause Mama was falling down and they was dragging her and then she screamed cause they was pulling her hair to drag her. I ran outside and yelled at them, but they just laughed some more, and Mama yelled to me go git back in the house, so I did, but I watched them and they tied her hands behint her and pulled her up with that rope on the limb so's her arms was behind her and stretched over her head.
She screamed and I cried hard.
Beard-boy was saying something to her and then he pulled out his knife and I thought he was goin to stab her, but he cut her dress off. And I couldn't see no more, cause I was crying too hard, and crawled back under where Peggy was. We put our heads down I heard a racket as they rode off and I crawled out and saw they took Mama with them.
I got hold of Peggy and stopped her crying.
"Mama told me to take care of things while she is gone."
Them pups was borned right then and I had my hands full.
* * *
So that's what Elizabeth had told Susie and what Suzie told Jeff when he finally came back home after Stand Watie surrendered. So's Jeff couldn't do nothing about it. None of it.
He asked, "How did you learn about Mama?"
"‘Lizbuth pushed open the door and said, "Mama's gone! They took her!"
Elizabeth crashed into Susie's cabin, making the baby scream, and Susie beside herself with worry and all anyway. There wasn't food enough for anybody. Her breasts, swollen with untaken milk, ached.
Susie fought back panic. She knew how the Pins and Yankees were doin' people on the Creek. She looked at Elizabeth, worn from running. Then she saw the pups as well. Elizabeth had three cradled in her arms.
Susie put her sick baby in the cradle, still crying and burning with fever.
Susie had figured out that the soldiers were a bunch of them Pins that came down from Kansas with Phillips and his Yankee invaders. They were looking for Jeff. Would have killed him on the spot if they found him. Susie knew that to be a true fact.
Pins had a zeal for killing all breeds, for anyone they suspected of following the Ridges and the Treaty Party that gave away the Old Nation. Pins didn't care about the Confederacy so much as they cared about killin' breeds.
"Where is Mama, ‘Lizbuth? Do you know where they took her?"
Elizabeth didn't know.
Susie guessed Fort Wayne.
She knew it well. Stand Watie mustered his army there. Now the Yankees were there. There wasn't much left to it, though. Some old log sheds falling down. People used them for their horses and cows and pigs when they stopped over going to Fayetteville or Southwest City. Mostly dung and dirt.
"I must go. Now." Suzie was determined.
She thrust her baby into Elizabeth's bony arms and off she hurried them over to her mother's house.
"I want you to watch baby." Suzie snapped. "I am going to find Mama."
There was no protest. Susie examined Elizabeth closely. She asked, "Did them soldier boys hurt you?"
Elizabeth told how one of them had slapped their mother.
Susie shrugged and then she left the house. She walked over to old Fort Wayne.
There Susie found her mother.
The Yankee soldiers laughed. There were two of them, young and ugly, thought Susie, they standing on the rickety porch of the only cabin that looked almost habitable for any human creature. One of them, leaning against a post that might break at any moment, shouted, "now you come on in here, breed gal, cause we got somethin' you'll like better even than your mammie's tittie."
The other one, lying on his back along the boards, his galluses pulled down and his boots off, feet naked to the breeze, snickered as he said, "Yer mammie's shur a fahn lay fer an ole gahooch! Them boys did her a wurld uv gude. I holped'em too. She's over in that there shed wait'en fer more, I reckon. "
She shaded her eyes with her hand. The shed was lit by a late afternoon sun and it reflected a light which hurt.
She considered what she saw. Surely it had been built for animals. Not for people. A pig pen. Logs, some rotting, others slipping from their notches, were laid on top of one another and held there by posts driven in the earth. A roof of dirt and straw thrown over more logs. The roof was falling in several places. Three walls. On its south side, open to the air, there were two adjoining pens, also made of logs. Nothing in the first but hard packed earth, smelling slightly of onions and manure. Susie felt panic again, as she heard snuffing and grunting.
She put her elbows to her sides, dug them in and clenched her fists drawn across her aching breasts, and marched toward the shed. The closer she drew, the more her muscles relaxed, threatening surrender.
She called out, "Mama, you there? Mama, it's me."
Immediately there was an answering call, thin but firm, "E-e-e! Susie! Here, girl."
"It is Tsuta," said Susie aloud.
For there she was.
Judy MacKay had been a robust woman, strong of will and firm of figure. All iron, it had been said by several. Now not so. What Susie found was a shadow of her mother, who lay huddled , alone, in a far, darkened corner of the shed. Nothing else there, except the slanting roof holes full of spinning yellow, falling in beams that crossed her mother's prostrate form.
Susie climbed the fence and hurried to kneel beside her, where Susie was met by a new smell of waste.
"Mama, are you hurt? Did they hurt you? Did they feed you? Come with me now."
But her mother could not move, not speak coherently. She moaned, "Gadaha!" dirty!
Susie said, as she reached out to touch her mother, "Mama, we'll get you clean. Real soon." Then when she felt the forehead, she instantly drew back from the fire of it. She felt her mother's stomach, and felt there a rigidity, as if passing through a phase of slow petrification. Susie recognized the symptoms. Flux! She thought, in Cherokee, "sgwahldi," the runs. She would need medicines.
Soothing Judy, she told her she would get help, and then she ran back to the Yanks, who refused to release her mother. Then they pushed Susie down on a bench and the two big Pins stood each side of her, looking down as if they would wring her neck like a chicken.
One of them chewed and leered while the other threatened, "You breed bitch got no hope here. Tell us where's your breed brother with that traitor outlaw Stand Watie."
One spat tobacco on her forehead. It ran in a sticky trickle down beside her nose and, when she raised her hand to wipe it away, the other Pin grabbed her elbow and forced her hand to rub it in her eye.
For several minutes she could see nothing.
She pleaded with them. "My Mama's sick. You got to let her go. She'll die in there."
The Pins were implacable.
Susie appealed, "I think she's starving, too. What's she et?"
One of the Yankees answered, "Nothing. No food. Not for anyone."
Another snickered and said, low but loud enough for Susie to hear, "She'd make good feed herself maybe."
Susie stiffened but only said she could bring something. Medicines, but broth, too. They said no and sent her away.
Next morning, she went marching back to the old fort.
To her great surprise, she discovered the soldiers ready to let her take her mother away.
In the shed, Judy was still burning to the touch, and she was wet from sweating. She lay in waste. Cramps gripped her and she doubled into a foetal position, moaning low and with no surcease.
One of the Yankee soldiers strolled down and leaned against the fence. He said, "Dysentery, I reckon. So, you go along with her now."
Wordless, Susie climbed past him and walked homewards. When she was out of sight of the fort, she broke into a run. She must have help.
Elizabeth asked, "What's wrong? Is Mama all right?"
No heart to say all, Susie nodded and said, "Get the herbs and roots."
Elizabeth scurried into action, to bring honeysuckle bark, blackberry root, and red raspberry leaf.
They together made a stretcher and trooped through a cold spring rain to rescue their mother. They pulled it by ash poles which they had stripped of leafing branches to drag behind them.
When they reached the shed, Elizabeth gasped at what she saw there. But she, always the bold one, led the way, as Susie watched.
Elizabeth ripped off the dirty skirt crumpled across her mother's thighs. She threw it into a dark corner. She snapped off her own shawl to use as a cloth to wipe away the foul matter. She rubbed slippery elm on Judy's stomach. She dissolved powdered blackberry root in a jug of water, which she gently, ever so carefully, dripped past her mother's parched lips. She sang softly, "Mommie, we'll get you home. You'll be all right, you'll see. We need you. Mommie, we'll get you home."
Elizabeth's sentiments were fresh and true; her passions not yet deep enough from too much experience to paralyze in despair. Intensely she labored to save her mother.
Judy, motionless, did not speak.
When Elizabeth was finished, she summoned her sister and they rolled their mother onto the stretcher.
A crow sat on one of the rails of the fence and squawked at them as more crows flew in to watch. The hogs raised their snorts and grunts into squeals of protest.
The rain was turning the earth into a black sea of mud. Bare of foot, they pulled the body free of the shed, then through the fence where Susie had removed two of the logs.
They overcame the earth itself in their determination. They persevered.
From the shelter of the cabin porch, Yankees and Pins watched as the woman and girl strained with their burden, drew against gravity, overcame the inertia of mud and rain, and dragged that old breed their mother away. The soldiers thought of their homes.
Elizabeth said, "I hate rain."
Susie reproached her sister, saying, "Heaven weeps."
Elizabeth countered, "I like sunshine, when the sky smiles."
They were soaked by the cold rain. They were washed by it. Out of the mud they drew their mother. Earth groped against them, grasping for her. Their feet pushed away through puddles, lifted with enormous labor against black sloughs of ancient, primeval, claims.
Susie fought her memories. Her mother's gaunt figure, sunken cheeks, protruding eyes, and balding scalp, summoned images unsought. From the camps in the Old Nation. From the weeping of the removal. Only a child then, she still had a child's fears. Always. They could never leave Nunadaul'tsuni, the Trail of Tears.
The daughters paused only by force of necessity, when mud commanded. They became a silhouette of serenity. They moved as one, bent forward to their single task, loving out of all reason, unflagging in their resolve.
What Suzie thought was . . .
She smiled for us through her sadness for us. I kissed her on the forehead, and I felt fear of reproach. We spoke in whispers. I paced. Her eyes died. We buried her.
What Jeff thought was . . .
Ended it. Earth received her. She did not know she was dead. I would lie by her in the dark, hearing the dark land talking like the crows until all was dark. Our father said the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead. Our mother did not live to stay dead.
What Elizabeth said was . . .
We pulled her free. We took her home.
What Juda said was . .
I thought you'd never come. Osdadv. Wado. It's all right. Thank you.
by Richard McGhee
Half-breeds; men born of Indian women by white fathers. The race has much of the depravity of civilization without the virtues of the savage. The Prairie, by James Fenimore Cooper (1827)
Thomas Jefferson MacKay, ex-Confederate soldier, half-breed Cherokee, urged his pony across Honey Creek on a warm April morning in the year 1866. Bonds broken, brotherhood dissolved, passions spent, he was returning home for the first time since he left it to join Stand Watie's soldiers. It was the place where he had been born in 1844 and grew to the manhood which, as if by an arrant destiny, made him an actor in the renewal of civil war between Cherokees. His father, Abraham MacKay, white American long distanced from hardly confessed Scots-Irish progenitors forgotten and lost in their Shenandoah graves along the Wilderness Trail, built a cabin on Honey Creek in 1839, after Jeff's Cherokee mother, Tsuta (Judy) Cockburn, took him as her man.
He laid his hand softly along the pony's neck, lending confidence as they forded the swollen stream to reach feebly glaring uplands. He was easy with her, this one which had been with him in the last weeks of the war. She and he rode as one. His limbs could find no rest, his arm dispersing insects around his face and the neck of his horse.
He lifted a hand toward his neck, found a small leather pouch there, lifted it on its thong and dropped it back inside the collar of his shirt.
He kept keen eyes focused ahead.
The house waited on a rise a quarter mile from the banks of the creek. His father had dug a cellar nearby the original cabin and that became the start of a foundation. Jeff could smell lilac in the air and he thought of the old cellar as he rode beneath aged branches of great oaks and ancient elm, through newly leafed forest paths, leading him past signs of deer. Hunting had trained him well. Uncle Jesse always said, "Good hunters make good warriors."
He, conscious of animal alarms, lapsed past a treacherously well-worn side-path, one to which he gave a lingering glance. It led off, beneath impending boughs, into a pasture where lay, so unspeakably insensate, both his parents. He had himself dug the grave for his father six years earlier, on a harsh day in March.
He had been far away, ignorant and still innocent, when his mother's corpse was interred. He was with Watie when she died. His sisters buried her beside their father. They lay together, out there, down that path, on a bank of Honey Creek, in a meadow embraced by trees, watched by birds and deer.
He would visit his mother's grave before he returned to Jaytown.
He broke free from the shading woods, into the clearing which made a yard for the house. He remembered to avoid the sink hole. Around its edges, where once a log fence had stood, with remnants still visible, stood wildly blossoming lilac. An ancient hackberry, in mockery, fronted him where it once held targets he had practiced for hunting. Taught not by his unsolicitous father but, as was natural for Aniyvwiyai, the Real People, by their Uncle Jesse, as he himself had been trained by his Uncle Bushyhead. Jeff expected at any moment to hear the bark, the yaps, the greeting of their hunter that had made its way over the creek alone, a splendid bitch whose puppies his sister Elizabeth had helped bring into the world.
The house was deserted, but not ruined, as so many had been throughout Delaware District. The early white sunlight reflected off its emptiness. The porch, dull in its floor, sagged in its roof. An iron pot lay, rusting, on one of the steps. Fruit trees, thinned by undisciplined growth and nibbled of leaf by deer both young and old, stood for attention. Thistle grew through the gaps of hewn logs, not yet rotted, which served as a walkway to the steps. Burrs littered the yard, occupied by advancing hordes of weed. Poppies threatened the iris beds.
Jeff halted the pony, briefly surveyed the scene, saw the spring house decaying half-covered with willow flowers and grass, and then he dismounted, easily in his youth and with experienced efficiency of early maturity. In the same motion did he tether her reins to a post of the porch. The leather of his military boots was suppled and pliant to his tread as he lifted himself up the steps, noticing how a weed, responding to a morning breeze, tapped against the side of the house and briars, grown along the corners, greeted him in their vigor on a fresh spring morning. Honeysuckle, the saddest odor of all filled the air. It clung to window frames which, once holding clear glass, now gone, stood innocently open on each side the doorway, where no door hung. Inside he passed.
This outwork of humanity stood defenseless. Inside he found signs of encroaching nature, no longer at bay. Sunlight streamed, assaulting dreams of strong women. The floor was dry and dusty. He rebelled against disappearance.
Jeff knew again the pain of failed vision.
This had been a house full of articulated passions. Now, there were things up there, in the attics, rotting in drawers and along shelves, where they had been left by a disbelieving family in shock. Mid-morning sunshine beamed into the room, ironically innocent of any murderous intent, as it looked with equanimity on the leavings of rats and children alike.
In this moment of uncertain vision, Jeff foresaw sinking and falling, when the house would pitch downward, when the roof would sink, briars and nettles would blot out the path, growing lustily over the mound where the house once stood. He would bring the force necessary, leering and lurching, into this place calling for dignity, for solemnity. Because truce and some peace had come. Nature would be forced back.
He went to the pasture, to visit his mother's grave.
Against all reason, he expected a sign, from the forest, the water, the earth. He raised his fist, and then he relaxed into self-scorn. Resigned to mockery, he shuddered as blackbirds stirred into the sky from the trees and pastures, circling at a distance from the man alone in the clearing.
There, beneath that sunken mound, lay the body of his mother. Beside that of his father, who always said a man is the product of his fortune, a woman of her misfortunes. She, at the center of their lives, at the circumference which defined their being, knew no limit to her powers. She resolved everything into simplicity for them, for her children, who had been silly, spiteful, squabbling and sparring in their inevitable and determined efforts to assert their will on this place.
It was she who brought together the filaments of their feeling. She survived in him, in his refusal to accept the evidence which lay before him, that she had been thrust into the earth, into oblivion. He saw her still yet , treading toward the house, carrying a bucket in each hand, filled with water from the branch off Honey Creek. She scoured everything in her zeal to affirm herself: her home, her children.
Jeff removed his hat. He knelt beside the rough stone set to mark a grave. He laid an arm across the stone, bowed his head to examine the mound, and, muttering, "gadohi," earth, he dug, with the fingers of his free hand, a small hole at the center.
Jeff reached inside his shirt collar and found the pouch which hung from a thong around his neck. He lifted the thong over his head, opened the pouch, and took from it a single kernel of yellow corn. With his thumb and finger, he placed the kernel in the earth and said, barely above a whisper, "Selu."
He stood, replaced his hat, and turned away. There seemed to be a fragrance of warm milk, freshly drawn, falling in a froth, spilling into the soft earth. As a boy, he carried the milk pail through a spring garden freshly dug, his feet sinking into the soft earth. A band of red-winged blackbirds burst from the trees above him, darkening the sky for an instant. He stalked toward the creek, and there he tore off his clothing, to take the waters. He stood in the angular light of a now westering sun, and as if in prayer, he bowed his head, basking like a creature gorged with existence, and then he walked slowly into the stream.
In the ancient ways from which his mother had come, against which his father once had fought, Jeff MacKay dipped himself seven times into this stream which tied him to his past, in this place where all that flowed was a testimony of all that abides. Through the trees lining the stream came declining sunshine, casting shadows briefly broken by a small white deer which, coming to drink, saw the man and gazed, undaunted, searchingly into his strange eyes. Jeff, instinctively, knew the word needed, the vow and compact required. Hisblood raced in that instant toward the line where commitment called and, as he uttered, "Awi Usdi," little deer, it disappeared.
It was on his account that his mother had died. About his father's death he had sharply defined images deeply lodged, for he dug the grave, in a soil not yet softened by early Spring winds, near the waters of their settlement at Fort Dodge. His sisters, who knew from immediacy the details of her going, did not wish to speak of it. They were in a league of quiet fury against the sex of those who had murdered their mother.
When their mother sent Jeff to join Watie's soldiers, she had sacrificed her last-born son and then she sacrificed herself. Jeff was the last in the line of her husband's name, repellant to many and strange to herself. It was a trouble for Jeff to think such thoughts. Yes, on that cold March day when he dug his father's grave, Jeff found no bottom for his fears. He thrust Father Abraham deep into the past.
He would speak again with his sisters, who found their mother dying.
After Watie surrendered, Jeff had wandered the hills and prairies of the Cherokee Nation for nearly ten months, and then he found the courage to come home. First he went to Susie's house, his grown sister now a mother herself, and, then, at last, from Susie he heard details about their mother's death.
"Jeff, you know I wasn't there. Not when they took her." Thus did Susie begin.
"Only when she was dead?"
"Dying."
"Yes. I was there for that. They called me to take her away."
"Does Elizabeth tell you things? About Mama, about what happened?" Jeff touched upon the point of delicacy. "She were there."
"Yes," Susie said. "Yes, she was there."
"So? Does she say?"
Jeff pressed her, and Susie told him what she believed was owed to him, what was given for the family to know. Elizabeth had been there when the soldiers came, had been there to hear and see.
Lively and athletic, though slight of build, with dark auburn hair, Elizabeth was thirteen when it happened. She had been much favored by their father. He said she reminded him of his mother back in Georgia. Despite her worry that "Elizabeth blues too much," her mother saw in her a reliable and conscientious child, one whom she could entrust with major responsibilities, such as gathering the eggs, feeding the guineas. Elizabeth had long made friends of the guineas. They were her favorite animals, until Jeff asked her to watch his hunting dog, Peggy. Then she undertook to discharge her duties there with as much dedication as any assigned her by her mother. She had sympathetic chords with Jeff, so close and so far. He safe in war, she endangered without him. Elizabeth saw and then shaped what she saw to explain what she witnessed when the soldiers came and took away her mother.
No longer a child, not yet a woman in the year 1863. A spindly thing, with a certain beauty in her smile which made one ignore the absence of other attractions in her physical makeup, she was uncertain of much except her passion for pets and her despair of her father, whose absence she felt as a flaw in her breathing. Of her mother she had no need to think, for her mother was a being who was, quite simply, there. Her mother was a presence, through which Elizabeth realized her own being. To have asked her if she loved her mother would have been taken as an insult, for it would have implied the possibility of an alternative, such an unnatural and unspeakable contingency that it could have had no importation or determination for the girl.
Not until the day the soldiers took her mother.
* * *
I told Jeff I'd take care of Peggy. I promised. So, when Mama called me that's what I was doing. Peggy was going to have puppies again, so I watched her real careful like. She was kind of old and I knew she needed lots of help. That's what Jeff knew too. I was lying down with her under the house where Jeff fixed her a place. I brung her some biscuits which Susie had brung with her and baby. ThatPeggy sure was happy and I was happy, too. I know why Jeff loved her so, because she was so slick. All over, and when she got mad her hair stood up on her neck. That's how I knew something was wrong. When Mama called me that's when Peggy's hair stood up stiff on her neck and I was sure there was something wrong so I patted her and told her not to worry and then I crawled out to see what Mama wanted.
When I got to the door where Mama and Susie was standing, I thinking Peggy'd have them puppies purt'near anytime now, and if that was why she had hair standing on her neck, Mama was looking not at me but beyond, over my shoulder. She said, not looking at me, "You come in here now, Elizabeth." I turned and tried to see what she was seeing through if not beyond me.
I couldn't see much, ‘cause the old hackberry got in the way.
Mama went out the door and back to the kitchen.
Susie called me and we went outside to the tree. Susie said to me, "You climb up there and tell me what you see."
I said, "Push me up, ‘Susie." She lifted me to the first branch so she'd get started. And she did.
So I climbed up into the tree to the second limb. Susie said she watched the dirty bottom of my drawers. Then she couldn't see me. She could hear the tree thrashing.
I hollered, "There, down toward the creek, where them hickories are." I meant where we cut through the sassafras to get the cattails, that's where they was.
I mean them boys who came that day, late as it was, getting on to dark.
Susie said, "You! ‘Lizbuth better git down here before Mama catches you!"
And I scrambled down.
Mama called Susie and me to get a bucket and take some water to them boys. I was proud to do it. Both of us was, I think. Mama, unsmiling, said, "Wado," thank you.
So we took it between us and carried it down the path to them boys under the tree, near the spring-house.
They was mostly lounging about, peaceful like and all, so I didn't think anything except wonder why they was there instead of up at the house like the rest of us. At first, I was so full of feeling for Peggy, I guess, I thought it might have been maybe Jeff and the boys down there, and that's why I thought it was strange, I guess, that they was there instead of with us. Where Mama and I was. They was layin' so peaceful like, like at a picnic when you're full and happy, that I wanted to go there, but Mama said no, to come back in the house.
Now it's like a picture for me. They layin' there in the shade of them big old hickories, them sassafras weeds behind and the creek behind them. They was some lilacs in the air, too.
Let me shut my eyes just a moment. Yes, they was, one, two, maybe four of them standing around one tree. I can see more, on the ground, I remember. Let's see. Seven or eight. Cause they was some layin' there like they was asleep and all in a shade. So I can't see all of them for sure. But I think seven or eight more. One was leaning his back on the tree. He looked right at me. He sort of smiled at me and that's when Mama told me to come in the house and I did it right away because them other was starting to smile too. Oh, yes, one of them was leaning on a stick, like he was hurt. Mostly they didn't have any hats, but two or three did. They was standing in the sun that was going down so's it was in their eyes just beyond the tree. They was all Pins, you know, which Mama told us about, cause she knew they don't like people like us and they wore pins as a sign.
Anyway, I went in like she told me. But I didn't go all the way in. I stood so's I could see around her and watch them boys lying out there so peaceful like. They was just yattering and smiling so I couldn't see no harm, but Mama could, I know that now, but not then. You see they was boys and they was Pins and she knew that. Iffen they was really friends they wouldn't ‘ve been out there so far away, was something I didn't at first recognize, but I did and when I did I was worried bout Peggy having them pups right then. I could hear her growling under us, where I left her. She'd not bark, though, unless'n she was real angry or skeert. She was just growling right then and that was consoling.
They had dragged some of our fire logs down and made them a fire like they was going to camp there for some time. And I didn't see no horses. Like they just come out of nothing, landing there so quiet and soft under that old hickory. Maybe they come off the creek, up that path we made to the cattails.
One of them was crippled all right. He leaned on a stick and he had one arm in a sling he made around his neck. All the others was whole, though. I should've been sorry for the hurt one but I wasn't I have to confess. He looked the meanest of all. Like he deserved to be hurt. He wasn't the one who smiled at me. He sort of sneered, I'd say. His teeth shined.
I think them others was just plain tuckered out. They used up their energy smiling at us.
I wasn't so proud when one of them, the one leaning his back on the tree, his feet stretched out from him along the ground toward the hurt one, said to me he wanted something to eat, too. We didn't have that much, I knew. But Mama was already bringing it herself. She had more of them biscuits and a bucket with the meat gravy in it we made with possum and it was real good but I didn't think she should give it to them boys cause they could get their own I thought.
Mama was coming with what they wanted but she seen them boys keener than me. She seen how they touched me too. I didn't mind much, neither.
Anyways, when she got there, she put that bucket of gravy down on the ground, lifted off the cover and gave them each a biscuit and said to eat it. Which they did and I was only sorry I didn't give Peggy gravy too.
It was pretty dark by when they stopped and they et every drop, too. I know, cause I took the bucket back to the house when they was finished.
"Mama," I said when I got in the house. "Mama, can I go get Peggy?"
It were my job. Like the Commandments. But Mama said no and I told myself that was best cause Peggy ought to stay there where Jeff fixed her a place to have them pups.
Yes, it was dark then. Mama told Susie she better take baby on back home. I was too worked up to be sleepy and I didn't go to bed when Mama told me to do that. I took off my dress. "Just look at your drawers," she said, and then she wadded my panties and scrubbed my behind with them. "It done soaked clean through onto you." Well, then Mama told me to go and sleep up in the loft which pleased me mighty much. But I didn't sleep much. I peeked out a knot-hole at them boys round their fire, then I heard a voice below, so I shimmied down the ladder so's I could hear secrets.
"Nothing." Mama said this quietly. I didn't see at first who she was talking to, but later I did and it was four of them boys who came right in there where we lived. Right under us.
"Nothing here you want," she said. "Hunger and that girl's all I got here."
"Yeah, we sure noticed that gahooch."
I looked close at the one who said that. I didn't like anyone calling me that. That one ought to knowed better, ‘cause a Cherokee girl is agehutsa. Mama had just a candle lighted but I could see him real clear, cause he was standing so that light gave off his face just fine. He was the one looked almost white and civilized. Them other three was rough I thought, not just peaceful and smiling like outside before. They was all sure Pins I could see that, but he looked at first to me like a civilized boy, which it turned out he sure wasn't, but I didn't know that just then.
"The Colonel said you got a rebel boy ridin' with them bushwhackers."
"I have this girl here, like you seen already."
"We done saw two of'em out there."
"I sent Susie on home with her baby."
"Yes, but how ‘bout that breed boy, too?"
My mother didn't want them to know but they already knew. They knew Jeff was off fighting somewhere. They wanted to know where. Mama only told them about Susie and me.
"Would yer bastard be over in Arkansas with Stand Watie, maam?" This was another man speaking now. He had a rough, low voice, to go with his face, so dark and ugly with lots of hair all over, not at all like you expect of a Pin.
"I know you got a breed somewhere, old woman. I know ‘bout Jeff MacKay." This was spoken by another, who was too far in the shadows for me too see, but I sure could hear him. He was so loud I just knew he got Peggy's hackles up.
"Who're you talking about?" Mama pretended she didn't know such a name.
"I'll tell you this, we know you aint' saying the truth and we'll be back here in the morning to ask you again. We'll all sleep on it and then we'll see what you can remember after we all get ourselves some rest. And we'd appreciate some more of that gravy for breakfast, with biscuits, too, and dig out some eggs cause we know you got them chickens hid out in them woods somewheres."
The four of them left and Mama turned her back on them, so I couldn't see her face but I knew she must've been close to tears because that's the way I was feeling too, because I knew she was not telling them the truth. She said she didn't even have any boy named Thomas Jefferson, which I knew she did, and so I wondered why she would deny her own flesh and blood like that.
Somehow I did go to sleep cause when I next knew anything it was morning and Mama was stirring about below.
Mama had eggs too, and that made me real hungry so I went down and got a bite for me and Peggy but mama told me not to go outside yet. So I kept my egg on a biscuit and put it in my pocket so I could give it to Peggy when I got to go outside.
"Can I see if Peggy is all right, Mama?"
"Unh unh."
I was sure she would have them pups right then and I didn't want nothin' to happen or go wrong.
Soon's I saw that Peggy was takin' good care of herself, I done took that food down to them boys who was already stirring and awake, but they didn't look like they was in a hurry to leave. Some of them was off in the weeds relieving themselves so's I couldn't see but I could hear and one of them wasn't even in the weeds so ‘s I could see him real clear. It wasn't a real treat to watch a man peein' like that just when I was so hungry and ready to eat and all. He must've thought he was special too, cause he didn't hurry to hide hisself even when he finished. Them others just laughed.
They et all we had. They even grabbed the biscuit I had for Peggy in my pocket. The smooth-face one who looked civilized in the candlelight patted me all over and that's when he found Peggy's biscuit.
"What's this, gal?" he smirked. "You bring this special for me, did you?"
"No! That's for Peggy!" I told him right out. "She's got to have her strength."
"Yeah? So do I, gal. Let's have it." And he took it right out from my pocket. "Who is this Peggy? Is that your pretty sister there?" That's when I first noticed how all them boys was speculatin' on Susie.
"No! Peggy is my dog. She's going to have puppies and she needs her food."
"Well, I do like dogs myself," he said. "And I like tight little breeds like you, too."
He went right on and et that biscuit hisself, like he really didn't care ‘bout dogs or anything else in the world but hisself.
I just wanted to cry but I didn't give him no satisfaction.
The pretty boy just laughed at me and patted me on my behind so I turned and ran off back to the house where Mama was standing in the door watching us.
When we were inside, Mama said, "I guess you better stay away from them soldiering boys. They've sleep rested and they et their fill. Don't go near them no more. You hear?"
I hid me and Peggy real good, cause them boys never could find us down under the floor.
They did try, though.
I think they was so mad at Mama for hiding me that they got rough on her when they came back in to find what they was looking for.
This time they was just two of them. The ugly one and the pretty face did not return. It was a boy with a beard and the one who kept his coat buttoned all the way up to his neck. He talked the most.
"You tell us where that boy be, old lady, or we'll just have to hurt you and both them girls you got. Baby, too, if we have to."
Mama did not flinch.
"E-e-e! I already done told you. Last night."
"Listen, old bitch, I'm not wasting no more time on you."
He didn't raise his voice, but he did slap her on her face. I was skeert I was next.
The boy with the beard, who must have being trying to hide his bein full-blood, said in a voice I will never forget ‘cause it was so mean-soundin', "You old traitor bitch! You ain't seen nothin yet! Wait till we git them two gahooches you got hid from us! We'll show you real stuff then. We might just start with you."
"Devils!"
"We heard that so much, old lady, we'll be shudderin' in our boots till we die, if we was to take it half serious. Don't you mistake us, cause we are already more damned than you'll ever know, you old bitch, and we'll take our pleasure right here if you keep pushing us any more."
Then Mama lowered her voice so's I almost couldn't hear her at all, but I knowed what she said cause she says it always when there's bad things happening. She said , "Sedani dijadlosv nigesvna yigi kohi iga, eligwu ijulaha yisdai," Satan's not opposing you today; you are both walking together in the same direction.
Beard-boy heard her. He snarled, "Alesta!" Cunt!
The man with the buttons grabbed her by her arm and started going with her out the door.
Mama's last word, which I heard, as she was dragged out the door, was "Howa!" Agreed! And someone outside said, "Wado, agawela," thanks, old woman.
I crawled through that dirt and saw them pulling Mama along the path, down to the tree where them boys was still malingerin'. When they saw Mama they started laughin and hootin at her, and one of them threw a rope up over a limb and started makin' a noose. I was almost scared to death, cause Mama was falling down and they was dragging her and then she screamed cause they was pulling her hair to drag her. I ran outside and yelled at them, but they just laughed some more, and Mama yelled to me go git back in the house, so I did, but I watched them and they tied her hands behint her and pulled her up with that rope on the limb so's her arms was behind her and stretched over her head.
She screamed and I cried hard.
Beard-boy was saying something to her and then he pulled out his knife and I thought he was goin to stab her, but he cut her dress off. And I couldn't see no more, cause I was crying too hard, and crawled back under where Peggy was. We put our heads down I heard a racket as they rode off and I crawled out and saw they took Mama with them.
I got hold of Peggy and stopped her crying.
"Mama told me to take care of things while she is gone."
Them pups was borned right then and I had my hands full.
* * *
So that's what Elizabeth had told Susie and what Suzie told Jeff when he finally came back home after Stand Watie surrendered. So's Jeff couldn't do nothing about it. None of it.
He asked, "How did you learn about Mama?"
"‘Lizbuth pushed open the door and said, "Mama's gone! They took her!"
Elizabeth crashed into Susie's cabin, making the baby scream, and Susie beside herself with worry and all anyway. There wasn't food enough for anybody. Her breasts, swollen with untaken milk, ached.
Susie fought back panic. She knew how the Pins and Yankees were doin' people on the Creek. She looked at Elizabeth, worn from running. Then she saw the pups as well. Elizabeth had three cradled in her arms.
Susie put her sick baby in the cradle, still crying and burning with fever.
Susie had figured out that the soldiers were a bunch of them Pins that came down from Kansas with Phillips and his Yankee invaders. They were looking for Jeff. Would have killed him on the spot if they found him. Susie knew that to be a true fact.
Pins had a zeal for killing all breeds, for anyone they suspected of following the Ridges and the Treaty Party that gave away the Old Nation. Pins didn't care about the Confederacy so much as they cared about killin' breeds.
"Where is Mama, ‘Lizbuth? Do you know where they took her?"
Elizabeth didn't know.
Susie guessed Fort Wayne.
She knew it well. Stand Watie mustered his army there. Now the Yankees were there. There wasn't much left to it, though. Some old log sheds falling down. People used them for their horses and cows and pigs when they stopped over going to Fayetteville or Southwest City. Mostly dung and dirt.
"I must go. Now." Suzie was determined.
She thrust her baby into Elizabeth's bony arms and off she hurried them over to her mother's house.
"I want you to watch baby." Suzie snapped. "I am going to find Mama."
There was no protest. Susie examined Elizabeth closely. She asked, "Did them soldier boys hurt you?"
Elizabeth told how one of them had slapped their mother.
Susie shrugged and then she left the house. She walked over to old Fort Wayne.
There Susie found her mother.
The Yankee soldiers laughed. There were two of them, young and ugly, thought Susie, they standing on the rickety porch of the only cabin that looked almost habitable for any human creature. One of them, leaning against a post that might break at any moment, shouted, "now you come on in here, breed gal, cause we got somethin' you'll like better even than your mammie's tittie."
The other one, lying on his back along the boards, his galluses pulled down and his boots off, feet naked to the breeze, snickered as he said, "Yer mammie's shur a fahn lay fer an ole gahooch! Them boys did her a wurld uv gude. I holped'em too. She's over in that there shed wait'en fer more, I reckon. "
She shaded her eyes with her hand. The shed was lit by a late afternoon sun and it reflected a light which hurt.
She considered what she saw. Surely it had been built for animals. Not for people. A pig pen. Logs, some rotting, others slipping from their notches, were laid on top of one another and held there by posts driven in the earth. A roof of dirt and straw thrown over more logs. The roof was falling in several places. Three walls. On its south side, open to the air, there were two adjoining pens, also made of logs. Nothing in the first but hard packed earth, smelling slightly of onions and manure. Susie felt panic again, as she heard snuffing and grunting.
She put her elbows to her sides, dug them in and clenched her fists drawn across her aching breasts, and marched toward the shed. The closer she drew, the more her muscles relaxed, threatening surrender.
She called out, "Mama, you there? Mama, it's me."
Immediately there was an answering call, thin but firm, "E-e-e! Susie! Here, girl."
"It is Tsuta," said Susie aloud.
For there she was.
Judy MacKay had been a robust woman, strong of will and firm of figure. All iron, it had been said by several. Now not so. What Susie found was a shadow of her mother, who lay huddled , alone, in a far, darkened corner of the shed. Nothing else there, except the slanting roof holes full of spinning yellow, falling in beams that crossed her mother's prostrate form.
Susie climbed the fence and hurried to kneel beside her, where Susie was met by a new smell of waste.
"Mama, are you hurt? Did they hurt you? Did they feed you? Come with me now."
But her mother could not move, not speak coherently. She moaned, "Gadaha!" dirty!
Susie said, as she reached out to touch her mother, "Mama, we'll get you clean. Real soon." Then when she felt the forehead, she instantly drew back from the fire of it. She felt her mother's stomach, and felt there a rigidity, as if passing through a phase of slow petrification. Susie recognized the symptoms. Flux! She thought, in Cherokee, "sgwahldi," the runs. She would need medicines.
Soothing Judy, she told her she would get help, and then she ran back to the Yanks, who refused to release her mother. Then they pushed Susie down on a bench and the two big Pins stood each side of her, looking down as if they would wring her neck like a chicken.
One of them chewed and leered while the other threatened, "You breed bitch got no hope here. Tell us where's your breed brother with that traitor outlaw Stand Watie."
One spat tobacco on her forehead. It ran in a sticky trickle down beside her nose and, when she raised her hand to wipe it away, the other Pin grabbed her elbow and forced her hand to rub it in her eye.
For several minutes she could see nothing.
She pleaded with them. "My Mama's sick. You got to let her go. She'll die in there."
The Pins were implacable.
Susie appealed, "I think she's starving, too. What's she et?"
One of the Yankees answered, "Nothing. No food. Not for anyone."
Another snickered and said, low but loud enough for Susie to hear, "She'd make good feed herself maybe."
Susie stiffened but only said she could bring something. Medicines, but broth, too. They said no and sent her away.
Next morning, she went marching back to the old fort.
To her great surprise, she discovered the soldiers ready to let her take her mother away.
In the shed, Judy was still burning to the touch, and she was wet from sweating. She lay in waste. Cramps gripped her and she doubled into a foetal position, moaning low and with no surcease.
One of the Yankee soldiers strolled down and leaned against the fence. He said, "Dysentery, I reckon. So, you go along with her now."
Wordless, Susie climbed past him and walked homewards. When she was out of sight of the fort, she broke into a run. She must have help.
Elizabeth asked, "What's wrong? Is Mama all right?"
No heart to say all, Susie nodded and said, "Get the herbs and roots."
Elizabeth scurried into action, to bring honeysuckle bark, blackberry root, and red raspberry leaf.
They together made a stretcher and trooped through a cold spring rain to rescue their mother. They pulled it by ash poles which they had stripped of leafing branches to drag behind them.
When they reached the shed, Elizabeth gasped at what she saw there. But she, always the bold one, led the way, as Susie watched.
Elizabeth ripped off the dirty skirt crumpled across her mother's thighs. She threw it into a dark corner. She snapped off her own shawl to use as a cloth to wipe away the foul matter. She rubbed slippery elm on Judy's stomach. She dissolved powdered blackberry root in a jug of water, which she gently, ever so carefully, dripped past her mother's parched lips. She sang softly, "Mommie, we'll get you home. You'll be all right, you'll see. We need you. Mommie, we'll get you home."
Elizabeth's sentiments were fresh and true; her passions not yet deep enough from too much experience to paralyze in despair. Intensely she labored to save her mother.
Judy, motionless, did not speak.
When Elizabeth was finished, she summoned her sister and they rolled their mother onto the stretcher.
A crow sat on one of the rails of the fence and squawked at them as more crows flew in to watch. The hogs raised their snorts and grunts into squeals of protest.
The rain was turning the earth into a black sea of mud. Bare of foot, they pulled the body free of the shed, then through the fence where Susie had removed two of the logs.
They overcame the earth itself in their determination. They persevered.
From the shelter of the cabin porch, Yankees and Pins watched as the woman and girl strained with their burden, drew against gravity, overcame the inertia of mud and rain, and dragged that old breed their mother away. The soldiers thought of their homes.
Elizabeth said, "I hate rain."
Susie reproached her sister, saying, "Heaven weeps."
Elizabeth countered, "I like sunshine, when the sky smiles."
They were soaked by the cold rain. They were washed by it. Out of the mud they drew their mother. Earth groped against them, grasping for her. Their feet pushed away through puddles, lifted with enormous labor against black sloughs of ancient, primeval, claims.
Susie fought her memories. Her mother's gaunt figure, sunken cheeks, protruding eyes, and balding scalp, summoned images unsought. From the camps in the Old Nation. From the weeping of the removal. Only a child then, she still had a child's fears. Always. They could never leave Nunadaul'tsuni, the Trail of Tears.
The daughters paused only by force of necessity, when mud commanded. They became a silhouette of serenity. They moved as one, bent forward to their single task, loving out of all reason, unflagging in their resolve.
What Suzie thought was . . .
She smiled for us through her sadness for us. I kissed her on the forehead, and I felt fear of reproach. We spoke in whispers. I paced. Her eyes died. We buried her.
What Jeff thought was . . .
Ended it. Earth received her. She did not know she was dead. I would lie by her in the dark, hearing the dark land talking like the crows until all was dark. Our father said the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead. Our mother did not live to stay dead.
What Elizabeth said was . . .
We pulled her free. We took her home.
What Juda said was . .
I thought you'd never come. Osdadv. Wado. It's all right. Thank you.
by Richard McGhee