Free Men (10 page)

The Indian sees me looking at Cat and asks again if I think the white man’s a killer. I whistle and throw up my hands. Out of his bag he pulls some bread that’s hard as stone and calls Cat over, showing us how to dip it in water to soften it up, and then it tastes nice and beany and we thank him for it, or I do and Cat just gobbles it like a wild person. The sun’s getting low, so he starts back to the road and we fall in line, Cat coming close behind me. Sometimes he walks near enough that I think he’s about to reach out for my hand. The dirt here is so red that it lights our way.

We crest the bank and climb back down to the road and are about a mile farther south when Istillicha stops and Cat stops and even I hear it:
tomp, tomp
, the sound of metal shoes on earth.

A trading party, or travelers, Istillicha says, coming behind us, down the road we took but faster. I start toward the bank, but he holds up his hand like this time he wants to see who it is. We wait.

Four white men in English coats, two brownish men, the poor kind who carry or haul or dig, and three black like me, but wearing Indian clothes. They must be Creek slaves coming along to tell the other men where to step. The white man on the first bay horse has a heavy, pleased face. He pulls up and the others stop, the men on horses prancing, the mules behind shifting around with the heavy weight of loaded bags. Istillicha, who’s standing in front of me, has his head pointed at that first white man like a bloodhound. He must know him, or think he
knows him. One of the black men says hello to Istillicha, shaking him out of himself, and they talk for a bit in Creek tongue, him pointing south and them nodding.

The white man interrupts. “Can he tell us where to find fresh water? A stream or other clear place.”

Later, the Indian will tell me this is Kirkland, a man he’d heard of, who’d passed through his town a few days before, and the young folks with him he figures are his son and nephew, all bound for Pensacola.

The white man shouts like we’re all hard of hearing. “We are travelers from Carolina bound for West Florida. These men from Hillaubee, near the Tallapoosa, are guiding us. We have no trade, but only wish to move forward in peace. Do you know where we can find water, sir?”

Istillicha points to the fourth white man, the one who isn’t Kirkland or his son or his nephew. He still doesn’t say anything, hiding that he speaks English fine, and I shift back and forth on my feet, wondering if this is how wars start, with rude fingers.

Kirkland turns awkwardly in his saddle, looking back at the man in question. “Thomas Colhill,” he says, “trader to the Creeks.”

Istillicha drops his arm and I’m still standing behind him so I can’t see his face, but his knees take a quick dip, less than a bend even, but just like something suddenly went soft beneath him. Who is Thomas Colhill to shake my Indian’s knees? Just looks like a regular medium white man, with quick dark eyes. His face is blank, like he’s never been guilty of anything. We all wait for Istillicha to say something, to stop standing in the middle of a road like a warrior, stiff, heart-fast. I look at Cat to make sure he doesn’t run.

One of the mules hears a rustle in the bush, maybe a fox, and when it skips to one side, its bags go
clink clink
, clear as bells, and the black and brown men look down and off to one side and the white men keep looking at Istillicha like nothing has happened, that sound doesn’t sound like anything to them, and as I freeze up, something melts in Istillicha, and somehow without anyone saying a word but that little fox in the woods, the game has changed.

“There is water a mile back,” Istillicha says. “The creek flows east of the road. A path in the brush will lead you there.”

He points north again, politely now. Kirkland glances at me and Cat skulking in the back. His bay snorts, and Kirkland nods. The men turn their beasts around and with every shuffle and sidestep the bags go
clink clink clink
.

THE SOUND MADE
an echo in my head that won’t go away. We sit by the side of the road, three in a row, looking straight before us. Cat stands up, spits in his hand, runs it through his hair, but when he sees we’re not budging, sits down again.

The Indian isn’t saying anything, but he knows and I know what’s in those sacks, and it’s not cloth and it’s not corn cakes, and we both know what a little coin would do in our straits.

I start to say something, but stop. What is a free man except a man with money? I’ll lay it down in taverns from here to the Pacific Ocean, and every man among them will take it with a grin. There is no farm that can’t be bought with money, black or white.

We whisper, like we think God’s watching.

“What do you think?” I say.

“There’s nothing to think.”

“This is freedom here,” I say. “This is what it looks like, those bags.”

“It’s not ours.”

There’s a hunger in the Indian and I smell it. “No,” I say, “just like your money doesn’t belong to you, but to whoever’s the man who took it. Just like I don’t belong to myself but to my master, or at least Treehorn, who treats my body like his own dog.”

He doesn’t look at me, is thinking.

“And those fellows weren’t even good men, were they? You knew them, didn’t you?”

Cat has stood up again and is pacing behind us, shaking his head.

“That Thomas Cowbell—”

“Colhill,” he interrupts me.

“He did something bad to you once?”

Half of Istillicha’s face twists up, as if he’s trying to remember finally the difference between good and bad, if there’s one at all. “This is not my plan.”

“We do it while they’re sleeping,” I say. “No harm.”

Cat sits down and is frowning now, his arms across his chest, his hands pulled tight into his armpits. I think he says
no
a couple of times, but it’s hard to tell. Could just be a cough.

“He’s the father of a woman I know,” the Indian says.

“He take your money?”

He chews at the inside of his cheek, his eyes wet and dark. “I think
she
did.”

There’s a deeper story there, and I let him have it, let him flip through it over and over again, because I can see that each time he does, his anger gets hotter. I scratch up a stick from the
dirt and roll it between my palms, looking up at the sky to see how the clouds are tumbling together and counting how two sacks split between three men. My mother before she was stolen taught me not to steal, but this is not because she didn’t want me to have cake from the kitchen. It’s the whip she was saving me from, not my own conscience, not right or wrong. Slavery’s all wrong, no matter what went on, and clambering out of it is nothing but right. If she is watching me clamber from up on high, then she is surely nodding her head.

“This is a god-given right,” I say, just now getting a sense of what God might be. “This is a right from God himself, who hid me in his folds the night I left and who’s shining his light down on an Indian and a murderer—apologies, Cat—and if there were signs in the world then surely this would be one. Out of everything you’ve ever seen in life, all the animals running across your path and the shooting stars and the women put in front of you, have you ever been a witness to so clear and loud a sign? To finally see the thing you most want in the world, prancing around and chiming like a goddamn bell? You think a god as great as him doesn’t know how to send a sign?”

Cat coughs again,
no
.

“And then?” The Indian wants me to tell him it’s all right, that’s what I hear him asking.

“And then we start great lives,” I say.
Free lives
.

My brother Primus is swimming in my mind, swimming in the creek below the rope that hangs loose from the willow, his brown limbs dipping through summer water, his laugh a long string of joy. My mother is bent in a knot in her garden, scrabbling out cabbages, and looks up at me with a smile, her hands packed with green, a chicken pecking at her bare heels. My grandfather Abra
ham is running fast, is running by a bank of grasses that hides a cool stream, is running without stopping because the crocodiles are asleep, the white men are ghosts, and the big house burned down, burned down at the hands of his grandson, who is not dead and hanging but is swimming in my mind, and all are free.

BY THE TIME
the sky has turned from red to black, we’ve sorted our packs and marked a plan. The white men and their guides and their horses and their laden mules will be laid up snoring for the night and our steady silent hands will sneak into their bags, taking a few guns also for just-in-case, and when they awake with the first birds, they’ll find themselves a few pounds the lighter. By then I’ll be halfway to the west, Istillicha will have bought himself a chiefdom or a rum empire or whatever it is he wants, and Cat will probably be lying under some tree, still thinking about his wrongs. I imagine quick what that money could do for Winna, how she once said in the fuzzy middle part between loving and sleeping that I better come buy her once I’m a rich man, but she’s a good woman and I know she’ll find another man to fill the bed, one who isn’t already in love.
This is my money, Winna
, I say, as if she’ll hear and understand. I’m a bad husband, but I’m a better man.

We turn back north in the dim light of nighttime and retrace the trading path, which is now scuffed with the steps of well-fed men on horseback, and I smooth my shout to a whisper. “You sure we heading the right way? You don’t think they can hear us coming? You think they’ll be asleep by now? What if—” I think maybe this time Cat will answer. Istillicha grabs my arm and squeezes me silent, and in his grasp I can feel his heartbeat running even faster than my own.

I can’t tell why I’m nervous all of a sudden except it’s suddenly occurring to me how close everything is to touching and how quick it could be snatched away again, and this here is the lock on the door past which is all I ever wanted, at least as a grown man, for all I wanted when I was young is already dead and can’t be had. My chest feels about to shatter.

And then I hear the creek waters running, little bells.

T
ODAY CONTINUES WARM
.
One of the Indians has a pretty habit of humming that keeps our search lighthearted, though the slave who is ostensibly guiding us, and who was present during the murders, continues to glower at the back of our train. The tunes are mostly Indian, using a limited range of notes, but occasionally he slips into a European song he must have picked up from a trader’s fiddle. I must prevent myself from singing along.

At first light, we passed near the creek where the atrocity took place. The slave asked if I would care to view the site, but I could tell he wasn’t eager to see the bodies again, and time compelled me to keep moving. I strained my ear but the water must have been too far distant. When the other slaves had straggled back to camp yesterday with their borrowed horses—none of the blacks having fled, I must compliment the Creeks—they said it sounded as though the killers had headed south. Was it terrible that I chose to leave the dead uncovered so long? As I am not much for Fate, neither do I trust much in God, or at least
in the version of him that demands weekly service, honest confession, and prompt burial. I told my men to ride on.

We were well fed and watered last night at one of the public houses along the trail. These taverns are always of great interest, as they gather a wide spectrum of men beneath their roofs and construct a sense of security that permits thieves and gentlemen to lie down in the same bed come nightfall. That the taverns are always chock-full, in spite of the high rates of pickpocketing and brawls, suggests that this security is easily blinked over in favor of more valued offerings—conviviality, perhaps.

The Creeks shared a common room with several other traveling Indians, and I permitted the negro to have a cot in my private quarters so that I might question him further about the events of the preceding night. I could tell that he was either rattled or naturally taciturn, so I began by inquiring about the details of his life, hoping to ease him into conversation.

“And how long have you belonged to the chief Seloatka?”

“I don’t belong to him.”

“But you have lived in the Creek nation for some time as a slave. Were you born here?”

“No.”

I was undressing at this juncture and asked him politely to fold my clothes, which he did with some haste. He was back on the floor beneath his blanket before I was quite in bed, so I had to fetch my own candle and pull down my own sheets. I am fairly self-sufficient in the Indian towns because there is a shortage of domestic help, either feminine or indentured, but being once again in a civilized room with a proper bed and a negro who refused to assist me made me peevish.

“You seem to have quite a bit of freedom,” I said, once I was
in my sheets and enjoying the softness of the mattress, however lumpy. “I would think many of your black brothers would be envious.”

“I have no brothers.”

“Well, in a figurative sense, of course. And guiding parties of travelers must give you many opportunities to study your fellow man. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were also wiser than the average negro.” I laughed softly so he could catch on to my good humor, but he did not respond. “At the very least, you must be observant. Can you not remember any other details about the men you saw that night?”

Was he already asleep?

“I know it must have been a shock to witness the gruesome deaths of four innocent Englishmen and their servants—perhaps you were even pretending to be dead yourself—but surely you must have seen something of their faces.”

“It was dark.”

“Ah. Were you frightened?” The candle was guttering down—the proprietor in his cheapness had given me only a stub—and I was beginning to question my wisdom in inviting this surly man into my room. “You would not be sorry to see these men brought to justice, would you?”

“I’m showing you the way, aren’t I?”

“You are hardly cooperative.” The candle went out. I plumped my pillow once more and pulled the quilt to my chin. “It would be reassuring if you were to give some indication that you have the same goals as the rest of this party.”

“You’re here to catch the men. I want to catch the men. They took eight hundred dollars worth of silver and didn’t offer me none.”

I UNDERSTAND FEELING
cheated in life.

The death of a mother such as I had was not an occasion for great grief. I inherited the manor in Thin-le-Moutier, still a half-haunted place to me, and promptly sold it to a cousin, taking my fortune with me to Paris and knocking about the city, investigating all the pleasures that a country upbringing denied me. The more I saw, the more I was curious: the depravity, the stench, the sweep of carriages riding high above the muck, the mansard roofs with dormers jutting out like eyes. It was all very ugly and grand, but as a young man privileged with money, I found myself still pacing a narrow path. My driver would not take me to a tavern unless paid extra, and then my attire drew such glances that there was no hope of silent study. I tried to pick up dialects so I could eavesdrop on discontent, but I understood nothing. I wandered the city with a ready system of classification, but few scenes would let me near enough to dissect.

Some called me idle, but I toyed with a genuine sense of purpose. I wanted to prove that there was a sublayer to humanity that was common across the classes, and that no matter the station one was born to, some universal concern made one recognizable as a man as opposed to any other beast. I suppose I believed in this not because I felt pity for the poor but rather pity for myself: I wanted to belong. Oh, to be embraced by those who shunned me, and to prove my mother wrong for keeping me locked up and out of sight of all that was roiling in the world. If I could only find that common marrow—I vacillated between thinking it was grief and thinking it was love—then I could propose a new system of laws, a twist to justice, a revision of education that would lead, one day, to the end of wars. The end of walls.

This was the age when men thought such things.

But being young, I was also easily dissuaded. What little I saw merely confirmed my assumptions about my country; it was old, and nearly rotten. I retreated from my philosophy and allowed myself to be a noble, adopting what might be considered a typical schedule. I invested some of my fortune in schemes, I learned how to shoot pistols, I drank until I was drunk enough to throw scarves from my window at women on the streets, all of which was accompanied by the laughter of a dozen other rakes. And just when I thought I was immune to feeling, I fell into something that resembled love.

She was soft-throated and already engaged to a
boulanger
in the king’s service, but she had a pedigree and a lively eye, and had been sent to the city by her kin to find a match. He wasn’t her equal, and I told her so. A cousin of hers was a friend of mine, and she still enjoyed dancing, so we would find ourselves often in the same debauched rooms of the wealthy. There are men who love girls solely for their beauty and who think little of the endless days beyond that mask, the days that require conversation and good humor and sympathy, so it is hardly surprising that the state of marriage in France is dismal. Our parents cannot speak to each other and soon we won’t be speaking to our wives. But though she was beautiful, I flattered myself that I saw deeper than that, though what I saw was wit, and this has no relation to kindness.

Her betrothed soon learned of my attentions and sent me a neatly written challenge via a
sous chef
in the pastry kitchen. It smelled faintly of anise, and I accepted. In the ensuing duel, his became the first life I took, and far from damning my soul, the act won me her. Small and dark, an eel when she wore my
sheets. She ribboned her black hair around her bird-like head, and when I unwound it after the candles were snuffed, it fell flat as bowstrings. We felt no compunction.

The night of our wedding, I wondered what my mother would think of her; I felt unmoored in the happiest sense.

But days turned to months, and life resumed an ordinary course, which is to say we breakfasted late, bought more mirrors than were necessary, and hired carriages to take us a quarter of a mile.

The canker that I began to nurse perhaps first bloomed on the night the peasant woman came to our door. My new wife and I had moved to a small villa beyond the city to bear children and collect servants, to build flower beds for others to tend. The poor, whom I once approached in the dirty inns of Paris, were here quieter and better fed. We saw them through the gaps in the garden, though every season the yew hedges that my wife planted grew taller. The peasant said her husband’s leg had been caught beneath the plow and the manager was absent, and though she needed my assistance there was terror on her face: not of her husband’s plight, but of me, of my position. I did not take the time to wonder if fear could be the human sublayer. I rushed to the field, summoning a few other men, and while we displaced the plow she stood some meters distant, insistently looking away—at the dark hay fields beyond, at the stars, at her wooden shoes. When her spouse had been rescued and the damage was seen to be minimal, I tried to inquire after her children and the condition of her dwelling. Her immediate need having been met, she refused to speak any more to me. The pair hobbled away, ashamed or proud. I let her go back to her life with her uncounted children, and I saw my home for what it was: still an empty room, boarded-up and bare, nothing to be seen.

That evening I rode to a local public house and drank enough ale to drown a pig and decided that if ever I wanted to be a scientist in the manner of the cartographers I idolized in my youth, if I wanted to advance my own embryonic theories, then I must renounce the self that over the years had become a prison.

We had no child yet, so when I told my wife that I no longer wished to live in France, in any place where man was so impossible to measure, I had little guilt about what I abandoned. I adored her, genuinely, but this was not enough and even this she would not believe. I was bored, I was impatient, I was a shockingly young man who was hungry for any country but his own. I would have followed a river to the sea provided it was untamed.

I AM GAZING
off to the east, looking idly for signs of the old burial mounds that rise like cresting whales from the earth and contemplating what manner of precious icons might be found if the graves were uncovered, when the Indian behind me, who has sworn the Creeks are no relation to the mound builders, stops his humming.

A man comes toward us down the trail, dragging behind him a rickety two-wheeled cart that kicks up puffs of red dust. My best guess is that he is a Spaniard, or perhaps English with a small dose of African. His large dark eyes move over us as though we were nothing more than trees, but when my companion calls out to him, he pulls his cart up short.

“Care for the news?” he asks.

“I’ll take the news if it concerns the men I’m looking for.” My horse is nervous beneath me. I have learned he is quite sensitive to smell, and has a strong preference for well-groomed men.

“Where were they born?”

“That I cannot tell you.”

He pulls a folded paper from beneath a rock in his cart, and now I can see that his load is composed entirely of newspapers. He carries no other bag with him, so I cannot think where he keeps his personal effects.

As he opens the paper, it becomes evident that the darkness of his hands is due not to parentage but to smudging. “Well, do you know the times? Were they born in the early morning, or around dusk?”

“My good sir, I have merely their descriptions.” I turn around to the slave and nod.

He brings his mule up to the front and says without intonation, “One man Creek, some tattooed; one man white and thin; one man negro like me, but lighter. All dirty. Carrying heavy sacks.”

The newspaper man pivots his head back and forth. He is still engaged with the printed word, which at this distance is not distinguishable as one of the common papers of the day.

“Have you seen them or not?” I ask.

He looks up. “This is news from the stars,” he says. “Not of men. You’d do well to find out what it says.”

“Astrology?”

“I can see the twins here, but they’re not ready yet, and they’re only two men, not three. No, all that’s above you is the crab, and hear me, he’s ornery. He was sent to topple Heracles, but Heracles was many-muscled, much too strong, and stomped him once then kicked him to the heavens.” He turns his head up to the late morning sky, which is silken blue, empty of both clouds and stars. “Shh, he can hear us now.”

“I will be cautious,” I say. “But the three men we mentioned?”

“Yes, I did see three, not two, and with heavy sacks. But the news is sixpence.”

I shuffle in my pockets for the change and toss it to him.

“I saw them this time yesterday, headed south, as you’re headed south, on foot and very dirty.” He runs a hand through his hair as if to prove his own superior hygiene, but a moth flies out from one of his curls. “One was born in Carolina. You’ll catch up to them soon if they don’t head west.”

“And why would they head west?”

“Because that is where the heavens go.” He picks up his cart and trundles past us, heedless of the stamping horses.

WHO IS SETTING
their course? Are they aiming north toward freedom, east toward home, or merely circling around the Indian towns, hoping for asylum? I am keen now to every scuffle in the dust, each branch leaning over the trail that might have caught at a shirtsleeve. We eat while riding and we ride at a modest clip, not only because of the slave’s tetchy mule but also because speed inhibits perception. This has been a late lesson of my life, and if I could wind myself back and advance at half the speed, I believe I would derive significantly more pleasure from daily affairs.

The afternoon’s conversation centers on the afterlife, and whether the second Creek man will see the first Creek man once they are dead and under.