No Resting Place by William Humphrey

for making plasters; another of flax, its blossoms the bluest of blues, its oil used in poultices and for bringing boils to a head. They knew the whereabouts of a toothache tree, rare in those parts, the nodules of its bark better even than cloves for deadening the pain. Wormwood, a garden escapee, they collected to be rendered into a vermifuge, mint for colds and coughs, licorice root for sore throats, larkspur for the ridding of head lice, hellebore for a sedative, Indian hemp for an anaesthetic, thorn apple for the spasms of asthma, willow bark for a tea to alleviate the miseries of rheumatism and headaches. Syrups, salves, creams, lotions, ointments, tinctures in flasks and crucibles cooking on the stove made of the laboratory by turns a perfumery and a pestilence—and always a fascination, an enchantment, a place where a profession was play. Had he not made himself so useful there, the boy would have made himself a nuisance. The path he had marked out for his own in following in his father’s footsteps ran as direct as the flight of an arrow. Now that the mission school had been closed, he was studying the textbooks his father had been taught from by his tutors when he was a boy. He would follow him next to William and Mary, and from there to King’s College in New York. Such at least had been the plan before the late worsening of the troubles. Now …
    Now what had been the satisfaction of curing people of the expected illnesses and the unexpected accidents of life turned more and more into the sorrow, the terror, the impotent outrage of treating people set upon and savaged. The doctor was called in to perform surgery upon a man shot in the back by a settler, to treat another one clubbed nearly to death. He was called in to assist at a difficult delivery, and he learned that the husband’s cattle had been stolen, his barn burned. One patient’s neighbor had been forced from his house at gunpoint, was subsisting now, he and his family, like wild animals in the woods. The doctor was torn between leaving his boy at home nowadays as he made his calls and sparing him these impressions, or taking him along so that he would never forget them, would pass them on to his last living descendant.
    The boy thus got to see the land and learn to love it; he saw his people and learned to love them—to love them for their endurance and their obstinacy, their resistance to deportation. He saw the desperation that turned them for hope and consolation to the Reverend Mackenzie’s teachings. His father loved the land and the people, too, but the more he saw of the ravages to the one and the trials of the other, the more convinced he was that to emigrate was now their only hope of survival. It was this exposure of his to the ever-worsening conditions, an exposure greater than any other man’s possibly excepting John Ross, that inclined him toward the Treaty Party. Meanwhile, however, he did not discourage his son’s attachment to his grandfather; on the contrary, he fostered it, although it made the boy a partisan on the other side in the running dispute between his father and himself.
    Dr. Ferguson and his family had suffered no molestation, neither by the authorities nor by the settlers. The district’s only doctor was far too precious to his people—and also to the settlers and the authorities, who, when they took sick, found themselves able to overlook his drop of Cherokee blood. It was understood that any mistreatment of him would have met with the terrible Indian retribution of two eyes for an eye. John Ross, when he was abused—arrested without charge, clapped into a one-room jailhouse where the body of a man (if a Cherokee could be so called) still hung from the rafters two weeks after his execution, run out of the state, his home confiscated—had restrained his people from retaliating; Dr. Ferguson would have been unable to do so. But they themselves could turn against him, and