American Struggle

by Veda Boyd Jones

  Of course Edoda was right. Of course. On the long road the rest of that day, Nellie repeated in her mind that they had a lot to be thankful for. She asked God to help her see the happy side of life.

  That evening, the sunset was spectacular as clouds had moved in, and half the sky glowed with pinks and purples. But the clouds moved on without dropping one speck of rain. And after the sun’s colorful display disappeared, the evening seemed gray, and Nellie again felt dispirited.

  After the evening prayer service led by Reverend Bushyhead, Edoda stayed at the gathering spot to talk with him. The rest of the family walked back to their wagon. It was too hot to go right to sleep, so Nellie sat leaning against a wagon wheel. Old Rivers sat down beside her. “Did you find any eagle feathers today?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you look hard?”

  “We looked very hard. We rode up and down the river, but there was not one sign of eagles.”

  “I found a feather.” He had been holding his left hand to his side, and he held it out to her—a golden eagle feather. “You may give this to your friend.”

  “Thank you.” She took the feather. “But I can’t give it to him.” She didn’t want to say more. She had promised. But weren’t John and his family now beyond the long reach of the Light Horse? She couldn’t imagine some of the Cherokee policemen leaving their responsibilities to the wagon train to trail after the Deerborn family. Edoda came back to the wagon and squatted in front of Nellie. “Do you know anything about the Deerborn family?” he asked. “Reverend Bushyhead says the evening report shows their wagon is missing. Should we send out a search party to help them?” “I do not believe they need help,” Nellie said. “What do you know, Nellie?” Edoda asked softly. “I have given my promise not to say anything. Wouldn’t it be wrong to break that promise?”

  “There have been deserters on other wagon trains,” Edoda said. “And there will be more on the trains behind us. Some people do not think they can live away from our homelands. But they are wrong. We must,” he said. “We must.”

  Old Rivers spoke up. “Many people fear the unknown, but we must face our fears and go forward. All of us. The Deerborn family faces the unknown going away from the trail, as we do who go along the trail.”

  “I do not believe we should send out a search party,” Nellie said. Saying that didn’t violate her promise, did it?

  She handed the feather back to Old Rivers.

  “Keep it,” he said. “It will remind you of your friend. He is gone, but you have memories that will always be with you.”

  “Thank you,” Nellie said. She would keep the feather with her writing materials, and each time she saw it, she would say a little prayer that John and his family were finding their way, although it was down a different path than the one she was traveling.

  “I must tell Jesse Bushyhead,” Edoda said. “Good night, Nellie.”

  “I cannot tell—”

  “You did not tell me anything I didn’t already know,” he said. “You kept your promise. But sometimes it is best not to make a promise.”

  After Edoda left to find their leader, Nellie made her pallet on the ground so she could again watch the stars. How much had happened since she looked up at these same stars last night. John was somewhere back in the old land, never to be seen again. But John could be looking up at the same stars as she. So they were not that far apart, were they?

  When she looked at the stars tomorrow night, where would they be, and what would have changed by then? If only she could see the future, she could be sure that things would be fine in the new land. Old Rivers said they must face their fears, and she guessed she would have to do that.

  A voice in her head, her own voice, told her that she was not alone facing the future. God was with her wherever she went. She took peace from the thought and went to sleep.

  The next morning, the routine was the same as the day before. Women fixed breakfast. Men hitched the livestock to the wagons. Children carried water buckets to wagons. The slit ditches were covered, and they were off for another day of riding and walking in the ceaseless sun.

  The third day of the journey turned into the fourth and the fifth and the sixth. The only thing that distinguished one day from the next was the availability of supplies. On the sixth day, the food supply merchant had only moldy crackers to disperse. Quickly, the routine was set to cook at communal fires. The order came to use firewood cautiously as more wagon trains were coming behind them.

  Already there was less game to be found along the trail. Those who had passed this way before them had sent rabbits and squirrels and deer scampering to safer areas. Lewis and Smoke Cloud rode farther and farther from the train in search of game for supper. Their skill with blowguns saved them from eating the same fare as the rest of the wagon train. Salt pork and corn bread every meal. Of course, now there were moldy crackers, too.

  On the seventh day—Sunday—they rested. Reverend Bushyhead said they would not travel on the Sabbath. Exhausted, the old and young alike lay around the large camp, rubbing sore muscles and taking catnaps, trying to restore lagging energy.

  Nellie and her family attended the Sunday morning service and sang hymns in the Cherokee language, just as they had with the evening services.

  “A week we’ve been on the trail,” Edoda said while the family ate supper that evening. Salt pork and corn bread, again.

  “There are many sick ones,” Old Rivers said. “We will make room in the wagon to carry the sick.”

  They piled some of Old Rivers’s belongings in the crowded Starr wagon and made room for an old woman, She-Who-Sings, and a young boy, not three years old, and his mother to ride in the back.

  The next morning, they began the journey again.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Illness Strikes

  I am plenty old enough to nurse,” Nellie said. Etsi had wanted to nurse She-Who-Sings in Old Rivers’s wagon, but Nellie and Edoda put up a fuss. Nellie did not want Etsi around any sickness. If she caught the sickness, the baby might be harmed.

  As the dry dusty days rolled by, the Cherokee walkers grew more exhausted. Putting one foot in front of the other was an effort, and Reverend Bushyhead called for several rest stops during each day.

  Each time the wagons stopped, Nellie would climb into Old Rivers’s wagon and force She-Who-Sings to take an herbal drink. She bathed the old woman’s face and hands in water that grew warm as the sun rose high in the sky. The boy coughed the deep hack of whooping cough, and his young mother bent over him, holding him close to her heart.

  As the days passed, Nellie watched the old woman grow weak and thin. She should have known She-Who-Sings would not get better, but she was unprepared when she was bathing her and the woman’s breathing changed. Long gaps of time passed between breaths. Her breathing slowed and slowed and slowed, until Nellie heard a rattle in her throat. She-Who-Sings drew one final breath. Then nothing.

  Nellie screamed.

  She didn’t realize she was still screaming when Old Rivers pulled her out of the wagon. Etsi rushed to her side and held her tight.

  “It is hard, I know,” she crooned. “But it was time for She-Who-Sings to cross to the other side.”

  Edoda rode Midnight to tell Revered Bushyhead what had happened. Old Rivers covered the body with a blanket. The wagon train continued on until it reached the evening campgrounds near a spring.

  Several men took turns digging the grave, while others built a rough coffin from young saplings. The old woman’s body was wrapped in the covering blanket and placed in the casket.

  “We can’t just leave her alongside the road,” Nellie said through her tears. She sat on the ground beside the wagon.

  “We will give her a proper burial, but that is all we can do,” Edoda said.

  “I will make her a marker,” Lewis said. He patted Nellie on the shoulder. “I imagine she is singing a pretty tune in heaven now. She never was much of a singer here on earth.”

  “L
ewis!” Nellie gasped. “That is speaking unkindly of the dead.”

  “That is speaking the truth,” Lewis said.

  “Lewis is right,” Old Rivers said. “She-Who-Sings always had a melody in her heart, but it didn’t come out of her mouth in a pleasant way. Still, her songs were joyful.”

  “We should celebrate that she has finally found a real voice,” Lewis said.

  Nellie shook her head, but her cheeks were dried of tears, and she felt better. Certainly She-Who-Sings was better off. She was a Christian woman who was ready to meet her Maker, and she was no longer trapped in a sick, old body in a hard, jarring wagon.

  “Do you think an angel gave her a harp?” Nellie asked.

  “Made of pure gold,” Lewis said.

  Nellie smiled. She had not known the old woman until this wagon train. But she had grown attached to her, and she would miss her.

  That evening, Reverend Bushyhead led the funeral service. When it was time to sing the hymns, Nellie sang her sweetest and strongest in honor of She-Who-Sings. Some men shoveled dirt on top of the coffin.

  In other places in the camp, shamans danced around campfires and threw powder into the flames to ward off evil spirits of illness.

  Nellie prayed the other Cherokee who believed in the shaman’s magic would believe in the one true God, who was surely listening to the songs of She-Who-Sings.

  The next morning, Lewis placed a cross made of two strong twigs bound with ivy in the brown dirt atop the grave. Nellie stood beside him, whispered a prayer, and wiped tears. Then she climbed on Midnight and rode alongside the Starr wagon as the wagon train moved on down the trail. She did not look back.

  Two weeks had passed since Nellie had first nursed She-Who-Sings. She felt as if two months had passed, instead. She had not seen Morning Sun during that time, except briefly at the evening services and at the funeral, and now she sought the comfort of her friend.

  The two girls walked side by side down the dusty road. On this day, they were solemn as Nellie told Morning Sun about watching She-Who-Sings die.

  “Were you scared?” Morning Sun asked.

  “Yes, and I am ashamed that I screamed.”

  “You should not be ashamed of that. The next time, you won’t scream.”

  “I pray there is no next time,” Nellie said.

  “There are so many sick. My etsi says it’s amazing that there has not been a death before now.”

  Nellie nodded in agreement. “I know. But this is hard.”

  “It is good for She-Who-Sings and hard for you.”

  “You are right. We should celebrate for her.”

  “And we should sing,” Morning Sun said. She linked arms with Nellie and sang, “One foot in front of the other and switch and switch and switch.”

  Nellie raised her voice in song, but she felt much older than the girl she had been weeks earlier when they had first made up the song and danced down the dusty road.

  That night, Nellie looked up at a dark sky. No twinkling silver stars. For several weeks, she had gazed at the same stars in the same sky. But tonight clouds blocked the stars and the moon. The night was solid black. Nellie awakened early the next morning. The birds weren’t singing, but she could hear the wind blow the branches of trees.

  The sky growled as the Cherokee broke camp. The normal chores were done, and the wagons had begun moving forward when the wind drew strength and howled.

  A few moments later, the first drops of rain touched her face, her arms, and her legs, clamped against Midnight’s lean sides.

  “Rain!” Lewis shouted from his position beside Old Rivers’s wagon.

  “Rain!” Nellie echoed.

  “Want in the wagon?” Old Rivers called.

  “No!” Nellie wanted to shout and dance. Thunder boomed. And where she normally shied away from the sound, she reveled in it. Jagged lightning crackled overhead, but she did not cringe from the sight. Rain poured from the sky as if She-Who-Sings was dumping buckets from heaven.

  “The drought is broken!” Edoda shouted above the sound of the furious storm. “Praise the Lord, the drought is broken!”

  It felt that way to Nellie, too, and to other Cherokee who stomped in the deep ruts that had turned to puddles of water. She splashed and laughed and put her head back for the rain to hit her eyes, her cheeks, her chin. She opened her mouth and let the rainwater quench a deep thirst she didn’t know she had.

  Etsi hung every pot they had off the sides of the wagon to catch the rain. With the springs being low from the drought, water had been very dear, and its use limited to drinking and cooking.

  “We’re washing clothes tonight!” she called to Nellie.

  How wonderful it would be to wear clean clothes. At the first part of the journey, they had changed every couple of days, but that quickly ended. Nellie had been in the same yellow cotton dress for a week now. With the days repeating the same heat, the miles that seemed like the same as the ones before, and the same chores, she had done as the others on the wagon train and just laid down on a blanket to sleep, then gotten up and started the next day.

  Last year at this time, she would never have dreamed she would be wearing the same dress for a week. Mending clothes, which used to be one of her chores, was a thing of the past. Her dress was torn where it had caught on nails inside the wagon when she was nursing She-Who-Sings. She had spilled broth on it, too, but it didn’t matter.

  The rain kept up most of the day, but the wagons kept rolling forward. The walkers, who were used to wiping sweat off their foreheads, now wiped off cool water.

  That night, Nellie helped Etsi with the laundry. They hung clothes on makeshift clotheslines and gathered them in the next morning, even though they had not completely dried in the air, humid from the rain. Etsi spread them over the furniture in the wagon for them to dry.

  The heat of summer disappeared with the rain, and the air turned chilly. The next night, Nellie curled up in her blanket, and when daybreak came, she didn’t want to turn out of her cozy cocoon to face the day.

  What before was a dusty rutted road had now turned into a mud pit. Even on Midnight, Nellie did not escape the mud bath the walkers endured. Wagon wheels threw mud up behind the wagons, and that was when they were turning well. Mud sucked the wheels deeper and deeper. Once, Edoda had to double-team the wagon to pull it out of a deep, muddy rut. Their wagon was not the only one to get stuck and have to be pulled out. Until autumn’s brisk winds dried the mud into deeper ruts, the wagon train made a dismal three miles a day, and those few miles seemed to take forever.

  Autumn had come, and with it came rains. Where before, Nellie had wanted relief from the heat and dryness, now she wanted the rains that came every three or four days to stop. Especially did she hate the rain at night. They slept under the wagon to stay out of the weather, but it still blew in on stormy nights, and her blanket was wet and her clothes were wet and her hair was wet. She was chilled to the bone.

  The deep sound of whooping cough came from everywhere. The young boy who rode in Old Rivers’s wagon got well. But others were sick with it, the very young and the very old especially.

  The first frost came mid-October, and with it, the leaves magically changed from green to gold and scarlet and glowing orange. Nellie tried to feed her spirit with nature’s show of colors, but other thoughts pushed her joy aside.

  “I have always liked autumn,” she told Old Rivers, who sat beside her near the campfire one night after the worship service. Many Cherokee huddled near the warmth of the flames, and as before, there were only a few campfires allowed to save firewood. “I like the brilliant colors of leaves, but now I think of them as the colors of death. No sooner do the leaves change colors than they fall off. Dead.”

  “It is the way of all things,” Old Rivers said. “Everything has its season, just as the Bible says.” “But it is so sad,” Nellie said.

  “It is the way of all things,” he repeated. “It is better you accept the ways of nature than fight them.”


  “Nellie.”

  She looked up when she heard her name to see Etsi holding the sleeping blankets. Quickly Nellie stood and took one end of a blanket and held it toward the fire. As soon as it warmed, Nellie rushed it to Sarah, so she could start the night with a warm blanket. They continued to hold blankets to the fire until all were heated, and the family bedded down under the wagon. This night they were camped in a large field of thick grass. Nellie thought the ground was like a straw tick mattress, maybe even softer. The night before, they had been on hard, rocky soil.

  Reverend Bushyhead had complained that a farmer had charged them for camping on his land, but Nellie thought the cost was worth it as she drifted off to sleep.

  In the morning, the cost of sleeping on a soft bed of grass went way up. The Starrs’ oxen as well as others’ livestock had gorged themselves on poisonous plants and were sick. The animals were moved to another area and tended by their owners. The wagon train was stranded until the animals either got well or were replaced.

  One of Edoda’s oxen died. The other suffered mightily but regained strength. Old Rivers’s oxen were staked well away from the poisonous plants, but Jesse Bushyhead said no one was going on until all were ready to travel.

  While they waited for the oxen to recover, their wagon train was passed by a three-mile-long train on which Reverend Evan Jones was serving as a leader. Nellie watched the Cherokee pass by and saw that the faces of the travelers were as dispirited as the ones in her group.

  The delay caused by slow travel on rainy days and the sick animals made Nellie think once more of her plan to be in the new land by the time Etsi’s baby was born.

  Etsi was looking thin, even though her belly was getting bigger. Nellie feared she was not eating enough, and sometimes she said she was not hungry and gave her meager share of salt pork and corn bread to her etsi.

  Edoda was able to buy an ox from a nearby farmer, but the price was more than the ox was worth in the old days. That’s how Nellie was now thinking of the days before the journey. The old days. As if she were an old-timer now at twelve years old.