No Resting Place by William Humphrey Page B

be free to take up where we were interrupted.”
    The appearance on the family farm of the lottery land surveyors that day in celebration of his son’s coming to manhood only crystallized into a decision sentiments long felt by Dr. Abel Ferguson. Here there was to be no manhood for that son of his.
    On a morning not long afterward, Noquisi was sent out to the farm. There he left his pony, driving back to town with a wagon and team. He felt himself being watched with hostile eyes from every house he passed along the street. For although the doctor had announced his intention to nobody outside his family, all the world knew about the wagon train then assembling and being provisioned, its departure date set.
    The job of packing the household goods was Noquisi’s and his mother’s. It took them a week, not because so many of their belongings went into the wagon but rather because so many of them, each requiring consideration, reluctant rejection, did not. The items of bare necessity for life, those permitting one no choice, declared themselves unarguably; from each of those little personal possessions that lighten living came its mute appeal. One had to be firm. Room for pots and pans, no room for playthings. Several times his mother came upon the boy handling something of his that she knew he treasured, and more than once she said, “I’m sure we can make space for that, Noquisi.” He refused, irritably after a while. She desisted when she realized that he was putting his childhood behind him and that his pride in his manhood more than compensated for any sorrow he might have felt. If she herself sometimes weakened and wept over parting from the home she had made, Noquisi was never allowed to see it. “What many of us never had I reckon we can learn to get along without,” he heard her say to his father. Mainly the wagon contained medical supplies.
    Of all the many people whose ailments he had treated, whose broken bones he had set, whose wounds he had stitched together, whose aching teeth he had extracted, whom his wife had nursed, none came to see the doctor off. At the edge of town, in the open door of one house, just one, a little girl, stood to wave good-bye. As she did so she was yanked inside by her mother.
    They rode on for a little way, then the doctor reined the team. For a while he sat silent. Then he said, “I delivered that child. Without me, the mother might have died and the child too.
    â€œI know that what I am doing is right and that it is only a matter of time before they must all follow me. I know that I am right. That is what worries me. A person in the wrong can never forgive the person in the right.”
    At the crossroads a mile outside of town they were met by the old folks. Their good-byes were kept brief because their separation would be brief. They would be reunited all too soon.
    While his parents proceeded on their way, Noquisi rode home with his grandparents. Entrusting him to their keeping would make this temporary separation of the family seem less of a separation. He was being left with them because he was a man now and would be a help to them both here and on the road when the time came. And because, pale of face though he was, Abel Ferguson had the Indian sense of the strong bond between children and their grandparents. Indeed, it was the parents’ duty to relinquish the child to them, that they might enjoy him in the time left them.
    For a while the drawings of the Georgia State lottery for the redistribution of Cherokee homes, farms, shops and stores were suspended. They had been suspended after it came to light that the supervisor of the lottery, one Shadrack Bogan, had, for a consideration, rigged them. Five winning tickets, all for highly valuable properties, were found to be fraudulent, forged by Bogan’s hand. There was no knowing how many more such had gone undetected, how many of the certified winners occupied their holdings through