The Going Back Portal Read online

  He paid for a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun, then sat across from me, the total opposite of what I expected. He was a little older than me, about six feet, dark hair, not exactly leading man handsome, but with character actor good looks. Looking every bit the avid bicyclist, he didn’t reek of sweat, so he must not have ridden far, or the strong aroma of coffee masked his scent.

  “First things first,” he said. “Call me Eric.”

  “And you can call me Kathryn.”

  “Deal. Now tell me what you’re hoping I can translate. You said it might be right up my alley?”

  “I think it may be a diary. Possibly written by a Cherokee woman.”

  “Written in the Cherokee Syllabary?”

  “I think so.”

  “How’d you come into possession of it?”

  He took a bite of his cinnamon bun.

  “Found it in a wooden box on an abandoned homestead along the Broad River. On my grandmother’s property.”

  “Any idea when it dates from?”

  “I’m hoping you can tell me.”

  He sipped his coffee, watching me as I retrieved a sturdy shoebox from beneath my chair and set it on the table. His eyebrows shot up as I opened the lid.

  He promptly removed the coffee mugs, plates and silverware from the table, setting them by the trash can. He held his finger up, indicating he’d return in a moment, then ducked into the men’s room.

  “I washed my hands,” he said as he rejoined me a moment later.

  Carefully lifting the book, he held it gingerly with both hands.

  “Doesn’t look overly worn,” he said, but he was obviously intrigued. He slowly opened the cover. “It’s definitely the Cherokee Syllabary. Interesting, there’s not much sign of age. No yellowing, no fraying. I don’t see any indication of fungus in the paper.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the pages. While he read, I wandered up to the counter and got a second cup of coffee. I stood and sipped, watching him as he silently mouthed some of the words to himself. After a few minutes, I sat down again, pulling my chair away from the table and holding my coffee in my lap.

  “The narrative reads like it’s from the era of the Trail of Tears,” he said. “If that’s true, she might’ve attended one of the mission schools where they taught the Syllabary. That could be of historical interest. The question is: is it authentic? I’d want an expert to examine the paper and ink. It doesn’t look modern, but there are ways people can fake it. Although, in this case, I don’t know what the motive might be. Unless, of course, you’re the counterfeiter and this is a ruse to meet me.”

  There was mischief in his eyes and a slight twitching at the corners of his mouth.

  “I’ll have you know I thought you were a dry, middle-aged academic when I emailed you.”

  He let loose with a big laugh. “Touché!” he said, returning the book to the shoebox like he was handling a bomb.

  “So, I was right. It’s a journal.”

  “It appears to be a woman’s story about how her family was forced off their land and rounded up with other Cherokees for removal to the west. She talks about her mother arranging her marriage to a white man so she wouldn’t have to make that long trek to Oklahoma, apparently because of some kind of physical infirmity.”

  I took a deep breath, anxious to know everything in the diary.

  “Interesting you found it in Madison County,” he continued. “By the time of the Trail of Tears, most Cherokee lived in north Georgia. But at one time the Broad River was the dividing line between the Cherokee and Creek Indians. Some Cherokees may have still lived in that area on family farms.”

  “So you’ll do the translation?”

  “I need to get confirmation the manuscript is authentic. If it’s a fake, it’s rather well done. The antiquated language, the style of the script, the leather cover. If it’s for real, I might be interested in writing about it. By the way, her name was Amadahy.”

  “Ama…?”

  He pronounced it slowly for me. “Ah-ma-dah-hee. That means Forest Water in Tsalagi.”

  Which sent a little shiver down my spine.

  “Tsalagi?” I said.

  “That means Cherokee. The language and the people. It’s a word the white man got from the Creek Indians who used it to refer to the Cherokee people. The Cherokee called themselves Aniyunwiya – the Principal People.”

  He pulled out his phone, filling in a receipt form for the diary, and emailed it to me on the spot. Then he closed the shoebox and tucked it under his arm as he rose to leave.

  “You can’t carry it on your bicycle,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. The bike’s on the back of my car. I’m driving to a park to join a group ride. I’ll drop the book off at my condo first.”

  We said our good-byes and he drove away, leaving me with knots in my stomach. I should’ve felt some relief, I suppose, but a sliver of dread lodged in my gut. I had a feeling the translation wouldn’t cheer me up.

  Dr. Murray – Eric – said he’d keep me posted. I was pleased we hit it off. Made me feel more comfortable letting him take the manuscript, as he called it.

  I cranked my Camry and took off toward the Loop, but when I got to the interchange, I veered east, not west toward Atlanta. I felt like I was being pulled back to Madison County. I called Jeannette and offered to bring barbecue.

  “Good,” she said. “That’ll distract her for a while. She’s chomping at the bit to go down to the river.”

  We had a nice lunch at the kitchen table. But as soon as Nana lay down for her afternoon nap, I was out the back door.

  “Don’t let her follow me,” I whispered to Jeannette.

  “Why are you going down there again?”

  “I wanna poke around.”

  “You know her mind is playing tricks on her. And if you keep talking about it, it’s not going to help.”

  “Mother emailed me she’ll fly home soon, but she couldn’t give me an exact timetable yet,” I said, hoping that would satisfy her.

  By the time I reached the riverbank, I’d worked up a sweat with the temperature hovering in the low nineties. I lifted my hair off my neck, fanning myself with my other hand as I took in the view from the shade of a tall hickory tree close to the water’s edge. I waited a few minutes before making my way to where the little hut used to be. My mouth was dry as I walked nervously around the fig bushes. My plan had been to find out what was in the book before taking any action. But I couldn’t ignore the sense of urgency inside me.

  My hands balled into fists as I got into position. Before I could change my mind, I plucked a fig from the bush, biting into it as I walked through what I’d come to think of as the time portal.

  The shack was like an oven. An empty oven that smelled like cornbread. I held my breath, afraid to move, waiting till the buzzing in my ears and the dizziness eased. Then a shriek split the silence. It was a woman’s voice. And there was the sudden wailing of a baby and a man’s voice shouting. Then a different woman’s voice saying something and a woman crying.

  Without thinking I reached for the door but caught myself. Looking down at my outfit – khaki capris, a pale green top and sandals – there was no way I could pass myself off as a traveler stopping to drink from the river.

  “I told you!” the man shouted, but I couldn’t understand the rest of his words.

  The baby’s bawling grew louder and there was that unfamiliar woman’s voice saying something.

  I couldn’t hide here and do nothing. Glancing about, I saw the shawl I’d covered myself with the last time and wrapped it around me. I pushed the front door open a fraction of an inch, but only the garden was visible. I nudged it a tiny bit more. What I saw was an unsettling tableau. A man towered over Amadahy while a young black woman in a long brown dress stood a few feet away holding Amadahy’s baby in her arms. Nana’s description hadn’t prepared me for the sight of this barbarian with the ragged beard.

  “I ain’t eatin’ no cold cornbread!”
He lunged at her, shoving what looked like half a loaf of cornbread in her face, causing her to lose her balance and fall to the ground.

  The baby reached out for her mother, trying to escape the other woman’s arms.

  “Make her shut up!” the man barked.

  The woman struggled mightily to maintain her grip on the thrashing child while Amadahy pulled herself to a sitting position, brushing crumbs from her eyes.

  “Cooking a bunch a food in the morning to eat cold the rest of the day might be the Cherokee way,” he yelled, “but it ain’t my way!”

  Amadahy rose with difficulty. As she did so, her eyes were drawn to the hut, looking straight into my eyes. She instantly averted her gaze but fear was obvious in the set of her jaw.

  Hardly breathing, I gently drew the door closed. Any notion I’d had of intervening in the volatile situation completely evaporated. It dawned on me I might make things much worse. I removed the shawl and folded it, realizing I needed to leave immediately. But as I set it down, I knocked a cup from its nail on the wall. It landed with a clank on a blackened pot.

  The voices in the yard changed and I heard heavy footfalls approaching. I leapt out the back door, grabbed a fig from the bush and stepped back inside long enough to pop it in my mouth. As I bit down, I fled through the doorway.

  My ears filled with buzzing as I found myself standing on the edge of the clearing. The hut was gone. Only then did it occur to me that I might be in danger from that brute.

  4

  It was a challenge focusing at work on Monday. Our first order of business was requesting an interview with Ed Hobbs. Usually, it would’ve fallen to me to place the call. But since I was the one who recorded the incriminating video, we decided Mallory would reach out instead. I sat in a chair by her desk so I could hear the conversation and take notes. She told him we were doing a story about his private tutorials while drugging and filming underage victims.

  “We tested the drink you served one of your clients and confirmed it contained Rohypnol,” she said.

  There was silence on the other end. Then the call went dead.

  We got to work writing our story. That afternoon we met with the station attorney who went over our script with a fine-toothed comb before we put our report together. A decision was made to air the story the following evening, which meant another hectic day editing the package and letting the lawyer eyeball it mid-afternoon before demanding last minute tweaks. Mallory had to re-record one of her standups and a couple of sections of the voice-over. But she was ready to do her live shot for the five o’clock show, looking as cool as a chilled Roma tomato in her signature red dress, which, of course, accentuated her feminine charms.

  But once the report was broadcast, we couldn’t relax for a minute. The rest of the week was a frenzy of follow-up reports. Police got a search warrant and confiscated Hobbs’ computers and smartphone, and charges were filed. We did a slew of interviews and reports covering reaction from the school board, parents and students. A dozen more girls came forward, admitting they’d been suckered by that degenerate, worried sick he’d release those embarrassing videos.

  ~

  Despite my fatigue, I awoke before dawn Saturday morning, eager to drive to Athens. As promised, Eric had some pages ready for me. We met again at Jittery Joe’s, which seemed appropriate since I’d already chugged two cups of coffee before I got there, and had ordered what would be my third as he sauntered through the door.

  “We think it’s the genuine article,” he said, his misgivings of the week before now replaced with unabashed enthusiasm. “Although the manuscript is amazingly well preserved.”

  That’s the first thing out of his mouth, even before he got his coffee, and before we sat down at the same window table where we’d talked the first time. Today, he was dressed in navy deck shorts and a button-up shirt. Not the colorful I’ve-got-something-better-to-do cycling togs.

  “Tragic story,” he said, placing the shoebox on the table. “The part I translated covers events of 1838 as the Cherokees were rounded up and marched west, and continuing into 1839. I scanned it so I could return the journal to you. My first few pages of translation are in here too,” He patted the shoebox. “I’ll also email them to you.”

  Tucking a wayward strand of hair behind my ear, I decided not to ask him to tell me more. I needed to read it for myself. In private.

  “Amadahy was very likely full-blooded Cherokee,” he continued. “Quite a riveting first-person narrative.”

  I reached across the table, lifting the box to my chest, and rose from my chair.

  Surprise mixed with disappointment washed over his face as he stood too. My guess is he wanted to talk about the diary with me. But there was no way I could engage in small talk when I was anxious to start reading.

  “I translated it into Standard English rather than trying to recreate the Cherokee speech pattern,” he said. “I added the month and year in parentheses for you. I was so fascinated by the story, I spent a lot more time on it than I planned to.”

  He gave a small shrug.

  “Which means a lot to me,” I said.

  It was obvious he was giving me and my project extra attention. And the way he looked at me, I wasn’t sure which he was more interested in.

  “I have to get back to Atlanta,” I added, anxious to leave.

  “Right, well, I’ll email you more pages as I translate them.”

  “S’gi,” I said, pleased I’d looked up the Eastern Cherokee word for ‘thank you.’

  “Hawa,” he replied.

  It was all I could do to drive home, dying to find out what was in those pages. As soon as I walked into my apartment, I kicked off my shoes, fixed a glass of iced tea and planted myself on the sofa. My silly cat, Pixie, meowed and nestled close beside me, purring softly as I lifted the translated pages from the shoebox.

  Amadahy’s Journal – Part 1 (May 1838)

  I do not blame my mother. Neither do I blame my father. I do not blame Selu, the Corn Mother. Nor Selu’s husband, Kana’ti, the hunter. I blame the white man who came from afar, forcing the Aniyunwiya from our Ancient Soil. I blame the white man for using trickery to rob us of our birthright and push our people toward the Darkening Land where Death awaits. I blame the white man for telling us we are sinners, when, in truth, it is they who are sinners.

  My mother believed the chiefs of the Cherokee Nation when they said white leaders in Washington City would let us stay on our Ancestral Land. But then she had a dream that soldiers would break down our door and take everyone away. So she and her sisters prepared for the journey. Old Noon Day said our family would receive land in the west.

  But my mother said I must stay behind. She judged I could not walk beyond the Great Mississippi River with my disfigurement. I begged her to let me go, but her mind was firm, like a mother hawk pushing her baby from the nest, forcing it to fly.

  One morning during the Planting Moon, she helped me onto the back of the mule and took me to call on the young white man who bought land along the Broad River where our family had lived for generations. He was not like the white men who would place their hard shoes upon the neck of the Cherokee. Learning that the land he purchased had once belonged to our family, and that we had been forced to leave so white settlers could take it, he came to our new home to speak of his regret. Mother told me that she saw a glimmer of desire in his eyes when he came to visit us that day, watching me translate English to Tsalagi and Tsalagi to English. She said his face grew red like a brilliant sunrise. His name was Isham Barnes.

  When we arrived, he wiped his hands on his overalls and pushed his unruly hair from his sturdy face. He was like a nervous squirrel, motionless, not sure which way to run. I slid from the mule and stood beside Agitsi as she spoke in our tongue. She nodded her head when she finished speaking, the signal for me to say her words in his language. But my mouth would not open.

  I looked into her eyes – the eyes that held the wisdom of our grandmothers – shaken by her
speech. She told me to say to Isham Barnes that I was sixteen years old – of marriageable age – and would make a good wife for him. She told him my bad leg did not keep me from being a strong woman who could work in the garden and the field. She said I could already cook, grind corn and do all manner of women’s work.

  She nodded again, more forcefully, flicking her eyes at Isham Barnes.

  So I turned her words into English, staring at his dusty shoes, feeling the heat in my cheeks like a rock warmed by the sun on a summer afternoon.

  When he did not reply, Mother spoke again. “Behold with your own eyes – Forest Water is a beautiful maiden with smooth skin and a well-formed body. My daughter can read and write in your language and our language after going to the white man’s Mission School. She also learned much from her grandmother who had Great Powers as a Medicine Woman and Conjuror. She will bear you many healthy children. But her crippled leg will not allow her to make the long journey our people must undertake. It would be best for her to remain here on our Ancient Soil with a white husband so your leaders will not force her to march.”

  As I translated, the words stuck in my throat like dry cornmeal. When I finished, Isham Barnes looked at my mother, then at me, then at my mother and then at me again, his mouth opening and closing like a fish in the river.

  “The soldiers will come very soon,” Mother said. “We can make her ready for the ceremony by the time the sun reaches its zenith.”

  I translated.

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

  I always dreamed of choosing my husband as my mother and her sisters did. I thought of Standing Together – Degataga – the boy who caught my eye at the Green Corn Ceremony. Of how I thought one day we might become man and wife. It was a great sorrow for Mother to give me away to a white man I did not know. But I understood I would cause my family many hardships on the long journey. I could not walk far without pain and I moved slowly. Although it made my heart heavy, I knew there was wisdom in her plan.