Citizens Creek (11 page)

Cow Tom went among them, walking freely, talking to them in their own tongue and giving what reassurances he could, which weren’t many.

“You will be fine,” he repeated, in English, in Hitchiti, in Miccosukee, in Mvskoke.

Their need was great and immediate. The newly boarded from Tampa Bay were close to starving. After existing in holding camps for months, with food scarce and hunting scarcer, they’d brought their hunger and camp diseases with them. Most just wanted their ordeal over, to reconnect with the people they’d lived among for years, sometimes as landlord, sometimes as husband or father or warrior. This was a different breed of Negroes to be sure. Poor, yes, defeated, yes, adrift, yes, and visibly afraid of the future, but with
a history and mind-set of independence unlike the Negroes Cow Tom had run across in Alabama.

On deck, two old men fought over a ragged blanket, more pushing and shoving than bare-knuckled or weaponed skirmish. Cow Tom didn’t get between them, but instead decided to find the Indian agent on board and make an appeal. He started his search at the wheelhouse, and before showing himself, heard several voices from inside.

“We should lock them belowdecks,” said one. “Creeks are restless with so many aboard. As am I.”

“I’ll not run a slaver,” the captain said.

“No one wants that. But that man won’t be last to make claim.”

“Cheeky bugger. Not all bad, though. This way, they know better the possibilities. My ship is the safest place to be for now.”

“They could mutiny.”

The captain gave a snort of incredulity. “And go where?”

Cow Tom made himself visible. The room itself was small, dominated by the navigation wheel and a windowed view off into the distance on three sides. In addition to a mute helmsman were four men in the small space, including the captain of the
Paragon
, the Indian agent, one of the military men who had embarked at Fort Brooke, and another who had just come aboard at Tampa Bay. They were so engrossed in their conversation they didn’t see him. He cleared his throat and gave a small cough and one of the military men finally turned. He stared at Cow Tom, and after a bit, his face betrayed a moment of recognition.

“You were General Jesup’s man at Fort Brooke, yes?” he asked.

“Yes, the general’s man,” Cow Tom repeated in English. “Linguister.”

“You and the fiddler fellow.”

“Harry Island. Yes.”

“The fiddler was useful with that Seminole,” the military man said. “Poor bastard.”

Cow Tom wasn’t sure what he meant.

“What happened?” the new soldier asked.

“Gripping guts. Didn’t last the day. Nothing for it but to put him over the side.”

Neither he nor Harry followed up on the sick Seminole from the first leg of the trip, but he wasn’t surprised. He’d seen enough cases of bloody flux to fear the consequences, both for the sick and those around them. A sudden turn of dice could determine one man’s swift decline and watery grave, and another’s good fortune to view the rising of tomorrow’s sun. If Amy were here, she surely would have drawn a circle around both their heads to ward off such tragedy.

“Come in,” the captain said.

Cow Tom advanced into the small room. The setting sun sparkled off the blue water, and the whitecaps broke before the bow’s steady progress. From this vantage point, with the captain next to the big wooden wheel and armed white men in uniforms flanking him, it seemed as though these men had control of the sea and, by extension, the land. He could understand why such men felt powerful, with tools such as these at their command.

“State your business,” said the Indian agent. He was a tall white man gone part native, with a coonskin cap and worn moccasins.

“Blankets and corn,” Cow Tom said. “Negroes will settle if we give supplies straightaway.”

He was no more sure this was true than his reassurances to the Seminole Negroes that they would be fine on board this vessel. He purposefully said “we” instead of “you” to hold himself apart, to be an element of solution instead of lumped in as problem.

The Indian agent studied Cow Tom, assessing his worth, his age, probably calculating the risks of listening to his theories. Cow Tom must have passed the test, because the agent didn’t order him gone. “Supplies are scarce and must last. We have more stops.”

Cow Tom had advantage in knowing how much was on the ship, and where stored. His muscles still ached with the transport of them. He thought of these men in the same way he did in deal
ings with the general, or Chief Yargee, the need to plant a seed now in the hopes that if it didn’t catch immediately, it might still bear fruit later. “Even a few blankets now, a show of good faith. And the promise of a quick meal. Corn, a little bacon for flavor. Maybe some of the women assigned to prepare.”

He stayed quiet while they took his suggestion under advisement. The newly boarded military man, so fresh-faced he brought to mind a schoolboy, spoke up for immediate distribution. But the Indian agent worried about Creek hostility, some already arguing to withhold rations from the slaves of their enemies. At the end, the men in the wheelhouse decided on half measure. Cow Tom promised to round up four women to prepare the first onboard meal, and he followed the military man to a padlocked storage area. Pulling a key from his jacket pocket, the soldier opened the room.

The storage area was packed from ceiling to floor, with foodstuffs and blankets, wooden crates and burlap sacks, and loose medical supplies in baskets—adhesives, sponges, Epsom salts, castor oil, a corkscrew, a spatula, a dental tooth key, even a pair of forceps. While the military man located a stack of wool blankets against the far wall, Cow Tom fixed on the contents of a poorly constructed crate on the floor, the top pried off and askew, as if someone had recently taken inventory of what was inside. Manacles. Chains. A metal nightmare of iron cuffs and shackles. He hadn’t carried this crate on board, Cow Tom knew that for certain; he would have buckled under the weight, heard the rattle. He stared at the crate, unable to avert his gaze, as the military man returned with the blankets.

They locked eyes for only an instant, and then both looked away. Cow Tom made a show of fixing now on the blankets, the bins of corn, the bags of flour, anything but the crate. The military man said nothing. Cow Tom expected no different. Cow Tom was, after all, one of over a hundred Negroes here, and he had heard before of ships headed west where they chained not only the slaves but the Indians as well. He thanked the military man, and, a little awkward under the bulk and weight of blankets now his to distrib
ute, set out to put distance between himself and the storage area, before any change of mind.

He tried to shake off the image of the chains, instead putting his mind to work calculating how most fairly to hand out blankets. They were small, but adequate, of a fairly coarse wool, a bit moth-eaten, but decent quality. Good enough to wrap the upper body against the wind and cold, good enough to use as a pad beneath a sleeping head, good enough to warm cold legs and feet, but not all of those at once. Cow Tom had only additional blankets for one of every ten of the Negroes aboard the
Paragon
. Some, such as himself and Harry, already had sufficient covers, and some from the wooded camp brought along both adequate and inadequate blankets in various stages of disrepair. All would want additional warmth if they could get it, especially as winter inched closer. Cow Tom was king of the blankets, an awkward position, as he hadn’t met many of the new people. He had neither an understanding of their individual circumstance nor knowledge of who might be a leader among them capable of making decisions of this kind.

But he did know where he wanted the first blanket to go. He sought out the young mother he’d seen earlier when she first set foot on the boat, the tall woman with three small children and only one threadbare blanket between them. He warmed to her at once, envious of the tightness of their family. She reminded him of Amy, not in physical presence, but in her determination. He remembered how she made a place for herself without wavering, a place to keep vigilant watch over her children. She had a sharp, pinched face and bony frame, and she was filthy from head to foot, but she gave off an air of toughness, a strength born of protectiveness. She was barefoot, as were the children.

“A blanket for you,” said Cow Tom in Miccosukee. “And the little ones.”

She didn’t hesitate, snatching the blanket from his arms. After a small nod in his direction to acknowledge her good fortune, she rearranged herself and her brood to accommodate the unexpected
gift. Her oldest, a boy about five, lightly touched Cow Tom’s jacket. The boy’s longing look made him uncomfortable, as if the child carried around some hollowness he expected Cow Tom to fill. The way Cow Tom supposed he had looked toward Old Turtle when he himself was small. The way the two small boys had looked to their black Seminole father before Cow Tom shot him.

“Thank you, mister,” the boy said in English.

Cow Tom caught the gaze of the mother again. Her face softened.

“I’m Ilza,” she said.

“Cow Tom.”

“Like my oldest,” the woman said. “His name is Tom too.”

The boy followed his every move, eyes wide.

“Tom Too,” said Cow Tom, and the boy beamed, as if given a present.

“We all thank you,” Ilza said.

He saw resolve on her dirty face. He’d seen deference to this woman by the others, and befriending her could prove prudent.

“Cooks are needed,” he said. “A woman at the galley pot is sure to be in a better position to get a fair share for herself and her children.”

He watched her internal struggle, weighing the benefits of a guaranteed meal against the requirement to leave her children behind, alone. In the end, food proved the greater inducement.

“I can cook,” she said.

Cow Tom nodded. “Go down belowdecks to the galley. Tell them Cow Tom sent you.”

Ilza delivered quick directives to the oldest boy, wrapped her children against the cold settling in as the sun disappeared, and left them.

Cow Tom continued on, but already the word had spread that he controlled additional blankets. As he passed among the Seminole Negroes
,
he found three other women to report to the cooking area. At every step, reaching hands pulled at him, voices pressed,
and soon he lost his ability to distinguish between them. He gave out the next few blankets to those with the loudest claim, or most pitiable plea, until he had only one left, and went back to the military man to ask for more.

And then he saw her again. The woman with the printed scarf. Although he hadn’t seen her face, he remembered the scarf’s distinctive swirl pattern and was sure she was the one who disappeared into the crowd the day before when the slave hunter came to the boat. She sat alone amid the press of people on the open deck, her back to him, a thin swatch of cloth that looked like the tattered remnants of a flour sack pulled around her small frame, oblivious to the wind that drove gusts down the ship’s broad deck. She seemed delicate, but not altogether defenseless, and Cow Tom was drawn to whatever her story might turn out to be. There were so many tales that could be hers, so many variations—flight and escape from a cruel master into the swamps of Florida and adoption into the Seminole tribe as a young woman, or born among the Seminoles, second- or even third-generation free, with no memory of any other way than living off the land, or marriage to a Seminole warrior and half-blood babies. But here she was now, alone.

Cow Tom clutched tighter to the blanket, for a moment unwilling to speak or draw attention to himself in the uncertain silence. But she seemed to sense him standing there, and when she turned to face him, her profile, dark and sculpted, was as familiar to him as the missing piece of rawhide braid on his knife handle, as the veins crisscrossing the backs of his own hands, as the small mole on the right side of his wife’s face. The woman had a splash of color along her temple, a dullish port-wine stain from hairline to cheek, and it took every fiber of his being not to reach out to rub the pebbly texture of it.

She didn’t betray any knowledge of him, but she didn’t draw back from his frank stare either, meeting his gaze with an equal mix of vague curiosity and wariness.

Cow Tom swallowed hard.

“Do you not know me?” he said.

She focused on his face, as if in trance, but there was no recognition there. Her eyes were moist and sable brown, but with a flat blankness, and for a moment, Cow Tom questioned what he thought he knew. How could it be?

“I’m Tom. They call me Cow Tom now.”

She barely blinked, casually searching the planes of his face. She seemed a cipher, a ghost, levitating on a pocket of air, almost oblivious to her surroundings. A change came to her eyes then, small but distinct, both a softening and a new focus, as if she were returning to a long-abandoned homestead after an exhausting journey, only to find a stone-cold fireplace and tangles of dandelion weeds in the neglected yard. She seemed almost shy.

“Tom?” she repeated. “Where’s your ear gone, Tom?”

He sat down directly in front of her so they would be on the same level. “Gone,” he said. He reached out for her hand. She drew back from his touch, settling her hands in her lap in a tight, interlaced grip.

“Ma’dear?” Cow Tom said.

She stiffened her back, turned her face away, and stared out at something in the distance. A bird flying overhead? A monotonous strip of white-sand beach at the shore? The rare sparkle of November sunlight on the water’s churning surface? Her features set themselves back into vagueness, a disengagement. She’d left him behind. Again.

He tried another approach. “Are the slave catchers after you?” he asked. He kept his voice smooth and unchallenging.

She gave a small shudder, and turned back to face Cow Tom. “Yes,” she said. “And he won’t give up. He won’t ever give up.”

“Mayhaps I could help you,” said Cow Tom. Much as he wanted, he was careful not to lean too close, or to try again to touch her.

“Slave to slave. There’s nothing we can do against them,” she said, her defeat apparent. “They’ll have their way in the end.” She paused, as if piecing together a difficult puzzle. “Why would you risk on a stranger?”