Free Men (20 page)

Last night I found a blister on my heel that had bloomed into a pink bubble with the same sheen as mother-of-pearl. I pricked it with my knife to let the pus out and made a pancake of wet leaves that I stuck between the skin and my stocking. All these years of walking and I am unaccustomed to blisters. My feet have traditionally been as sturdy as my psyche. I am glad
I stopped the Creeks from walking with me on this spur, for in such moments I have a small fear that something within me unravels. But a blister is a natural growth, an obvious outcome from hard walking in springtime.

When the men turn north at a large dead oak, I pause. I did not expect any movements that would point to a coherent plan. So they are not aimless wanderers; do they head for the camp of some ringleader? Is there an architect of the scheme that will explain the miscellany of these particular individuals? Are they merely men-for-hire, without the free will that would justify my own justice? No, I will catch them regardless. If there is a man orchestrating their actions, he will simply be folded into the guilty. The Indian is leading them now through the tall grass in this unburned territory between rival nations. It’s he who knows the way.

Just as I resolve to follow, they stop. The white man and the black man are turned toward each other with some intensity. My body is behind a young sassafras, one of the last bits of cover on the edge of the field, and my eyes peering out are dark enough to look like nothing, though no one glances my way. After a moment of apparent speech, the black man’s arm explodes outward, punching Cat in the shoulder, the sound of which reaches me a half second later, and the white man falls back a step, his whole body in a convulsion of surprise.

This is it, the moment when they will fall to pieces, a rotten structure like all the other rotten structures that men have built from Europe to the New World. What misguided faith I had in them, if faith is even an appropriate term to describe my hunger for these men to be unlike others. In any country in the world they could not subsist together, yet here they were, wandering
in a polite clump through woods that belonged apparently to no one, ignoring all the reasons to strike out on their own, to take the money and fall back into their segregated homes, for even America has rules. Their initial act of violence, of course, has voided any rational sympathy, so by all rights they should crumble now, should abandon the inexplicable amity of the past few days, should permit me to stop wondering. Let me capture you and put this to rest.

I take my musket off my back.

But when the black man walks on, shaking his arms in frustration, the white man follows him, and then the Indian.

Damn them.

BY NOON THEY
come to a house in the woods. I sit at a distance and wait for whatever might happen, and in this moment I am admittedly content. The Indian knocks at the door.

I
AND MY MOTHER
and her kin belonged to the Wind clan, which is why our people so often led the others. My mother told me this story when I was young and still went to sleep in tears. In the time when everything was born, the Muskogee awoke in a fog cloud. They had been asleep for centuries, buried in mud and mist. In this new world, they reached out with tender fingers, for they could not see their own noses. They clutched at mushrooms growing among damp roots, stroked the flanks of passing deer. Scratched at the ground until squirrels burrowed into their hands, curious for nuts. The people in their blind search lost each other, but calling out only drove the animals away, so they kept silent. After years of grasping in the fog, a strong wind rolled through the forests with the scent of mountains and blew the mist out in wisping bursts. The first people to see each other in the new clarity were my people, and they called themselves the Wind clan. We led the others from the white cloud, and we lead them still. This is your responsibil
ity, my mother would say, kneeling as she kissed my nose and smoothing my damp cheeks with the side of her thumb.

My stars were split in two: one half painted me as a hunter, fighter, chief. The other half was dark.

IN OUR HOUSES
off the square, my mother lived and my father before she sent him away and her brother my uncle and their mother who was old and salty and my three older brothers and one younger. Our town was like an eddy in a river. War parties came through, and trading parties, English and French and Spanish, and Muskogee leaving other towns, and Choctaws or Cherokees bound as slaves, to be carried off to another eddy when the moon turned. Some people came like sticks and stuck in our current, cleaving to the water that turned round and round—Natchez, Yuchi, Shawnee, Coosa, all who’d lost their homes because our country was increasingly not our own. I saw men doing great things and what happened to men who were caught. Mostly I saw my mother, who tended us all with squeezes and slaps and knew more about the ways of birds and the passage of clouds than any man I met. We had endless questions, and she faced them all with a story. When we asked why the alligator looked so frightening with his crooked snout, she said he once played in a ball game with the eagle and the crane, four-foots against two-foots, and they hammered him on the nose to make him drop the ball. “Nothing to be afraid of,” she said, “just bad at ball.” So the world was laid clear to us. Each piece had its place, and what we did shaped those next to us. There was no such thing as independence.

I fetched water, I helped in our vegetable patch, I fed my grandmother hominy. I chased my little brother through the
thickets of river cane, across the fallow fields, and up the terraces that climbed away from the broad, clear river. My mother threw me crabapples in the summer, high enough so their blurring pink spun into patterns of blue. When they reached their peak, my mind slowed them down and they fell soft as feathers while my bowstring stretched back. Hit one clean through and she’d give me breakfast. She kept throwing until I stopped missing. I said hello to my father whenever I saw him, before my mother set his belongings outside and told him to move on, but the man I loved most was my uncle, who was chief, who was golden.

I loved my mother’s brother as a boy will love a bear he sees through spaces in the forest. His shoulders were sharp and narrow and though he was young yet, he had been in enough wars to lose an eye and wear the
mico
’s feathers. To be chief was to hold the town in your hands, to soothe it and to battle for it both. His missing eye was a trouble to me; I wanted my world to be ordered and clean and here was a hole in the man I most loved. He moved faster than other men, spoke more gently. He touched women on the arm like a moth, alighting and then moving on. He cut my older brothers boy-sized bows and told them stories of meddling rabbits while I knelt in the shadows and sopped up his words. I was too young, but when I was older, his gaze would fall on me, and—I thought—we would rule the town together. His justice, my heart.

My older brothers were next in line, and they were rough and cruel and would have battled with a crow if it cawed while they were sleeping. They pummeled each other on the ball field and inked their arms with spirals and skulls, signs of the animal world. We lived in a red town, a war town, and they were built
for their fate. I would follow them to the open council house some summer nights and we would crouch beyond the cast of firelight and listen to the men, smell the smoke of their tobacco. The old men talked about their wives, about the flood twenty years before, about how best to turn antlers into powder. They’d share the priest’s new prophecy and some would nod and warn and others would laugh and say the time for prophecy had come and gone. It was a new age, that was what the men were always saying, one that required not courage but cunning. The next man to be
mico
would find himself with strange duties. Listening in the dark, my brothers sucked on fish, and I swept up the bones they tossed aside.

Our uncle the
mico
was always getting older.

IT WAS BECAUSE
he promised to watch me that my mother let me hunt with him, my first time. The men were preparing for their months-long winter trip, not for food but for the trade, from which they would return heavy with skins for the women to scrape and cure, so this would be a short journey, just to give the younger boys a taste. I still saw him as mine alone. His one eye, I thought, would follow me as I followed him; the love I had—though it was a more desperate feeling than love—would draw him like a pulling moon. How could he look at me and look away? My heart was loud.

We left in the afternoon, and he was tall and his arms swung an inch farther than any other man’s. The stripe of his hair was pulled up tight, and the ring in his nose gleamed silver. His feet in shoes were silent, almost no feet at all. I knew the short paths we took that crossed each other through the village and into the farming land that lay along the river. But when we moved past
the cornfields and beyond the burned woods into land that was new to me, I abandoned my human self, my upright legs, and I was a creature. No matter the men I was with. I swam through pine needles. My thoughts floated off from me before they ever made a noise. I was cold at first, for it was the slow drift into winter and the trees that had been golden were now muddy. The wet leaves clung to my heels. But my skin turned into something else, something like a shell or hide. I no longer felt the thorn vines clutching, the buried pointed rocks, the pricks of the pine cones. I had eyes, and fingers enough to hold my bow, and a heart that steadied me onward, the blood pumping in drums through my chest and in my ears, beating the thoughts to fragments. Only the beeches still held their leaves. In the light of afternoon, the forest ahead was fiery brown, the color of a deerskin in sun, the sky beyond cut with winter branches and the russet of the shaking beech leaves. Our sounds were the sounds of the wood. Wet leaves stepping, squirrels flipping acorns, the chatter of the chickadees in the low branches, the wind matching the water. The sun’s crispness as it fell, a faint ringing as it marked our path and gave us to the dusk.

We lay down to rest in this new land, taking our women’s food from our bags for supper and then lying in a mass under skins for warmth, the damp scrub like a slick beneath us. I swept my spot clean and piled the broken branches at my feet for luck. The night sounds were different here, the owls with a dialect. My hands balled into fists in case the animals were evil or the ghost children found us. I took pleasure in my fear because it gave me yet another thing to conquer and possess. I slept for the first time without my mother, and in the ring of bodies, hunters all, I smelled myself a man, or the beginning of one, and when
I fell asleep at last, I had creature dreams. I was running far and fast, I was climbing and falling, I dove and buried. There was no thought but movement. We were animals in an animal world, and I was the newest of them.

I woke with a low growl in my belly to the grayness before dawn. The men were already rubbing out the leaves where we slept, and I, the last to rise, felt like a child again. Someone had kicked aside my pile of branches, so I bunched them back up. We were moving before I remembered where we were and who my mother was. I was cold, and I no longer felt like an animal, and no one had given me anything for breakfast. There was a thin fog that dampened our clothes and misted my eyelashes. I envied my little brother Oche and his nearness to the women. How much more sense it made to plant seeds and coax their stalks to the sun and pick their fruits to grind into meal than to be a lone boy in the woods, searching for food you cannot see. At home, my mother would have clean blankets.

The legs of my uncle looked like stone, carved in muscle shapes. How had he ever come from a woman’s body? He stood up fast, he ate little, he wiped no sleep from his eyes. He was wrapped around this forest like strangler vine, like there was no difference between his breaths and the breathing leaves. I trailed behind him, putting my feet in the prints his feet left. One of the other men was wearing a deerskin on his back, and in one hand he held a head: a dried deer face that he raised and pivoted, becoming a strange two-legged half-dead animal that was meant to seem ordinary to the wild deer watching. My uncle looked more deer than him.

We crossed another creek as the sun spread on the edge of the land, and through the last of the mist—which would live on
my clothes all day, the sun never rising high enough to reach its heat—I saw the stand of deer. They hadn’t heard us, our wet-leaf footsteps or my belly. In the dawn their skin was as golden as beech leaves, as smooth and unbroken as the bark. Two bucks, four does, and a fawn. A family, like my family, a band of woods warriors, like my woods warriors. A surge of something warm tripped in my throat. I wanted to protect them and seize them in the same childish instant. As we paused to watch them blow through the leaf litter with their muzzles, the fawn reaching back to lick her shoulder, I drew an arrow, fit its notch to my bow, aimed it as I would at a flying crabapple, and loosed it at the baby.

It cut a line through her flank and fell away and the stand of them exploded in a flurry of thin legs so fast the first thing my eyes could settle on was the leaves drifting down from where they’d been kicked. One of the men cuffed me across my face and another took my bow. In the clearing, we found a vein of salt and a spatter of dropped blood from the fawn. I took a leaf that had been curdled red and slipped it in my shirt. This was my blood, blood that I had drawn. The men laughed at me and called me the names of women and one twisted my ear until it rang, but I could not be shamed. My brother, girlish, attached to my mother’s leg, had never done what I had done, would never understand the swell of possession.

We found more deer to catch. I stood behind the others without my bow and touched my shirt where the leaf was hidden, and grown men brought down the animals with guns, clean shots to save their skins. We carried the bodies back on sleds. Half-homeward, we stopped to eat and I sat beside my uncle as naturally as if there were no other space in the woods. He didn’t
look at me or grab my shoulder, but unlooped a pouch from his breeches and opened it on his lap, pulling out his charms.

“A foot,” he said, and I looked over, pretending that I hadn’t been looking all along. “You take it from the last kill to trick the new deer. They smell it and think their brother is still running.”

I rubbed it with a soft finger. It had been cut off at the ankle, was thin-boned and cleft. The hoof was black and milky, like dark water. I touched it quickly to my lips.

“Physic-nut,” he said. The yellow fruit rolled around his palm.

“What does it do?”

He shook his head. “Slips in their minds and fuddles them. I don’t know. Draws them near.” He turned to the three small stones and tumbled them beneath his thumb.

“They trip the deer,” I said. “They keep them from running far.”

He laughed. “No, these are from my grandmother’s grave. Just bits from her grave.”

A woman’s spirit on a stone didn’t sound like a deer charm. There weren’t women on the hunt, except to cook for us and strip the bodies we caught; their smells and the red richness of them were too potent to be masked. Even wrapped in skins, they were never less than women, less than intoxicating. I didn’t press my uncle further, because I didn’t yet want to know their secrets, which I knew he knew.

He let me hold his talismans, and I kept them safe and clammy. He dug his fingers into his scalp, feeling along his neck for ticks. Other men were standing. They wanted to get home that night and give the kill to their wives and sisters for cleaning, for pulling the skin from the flesh and scraping it, smoking it. But my
uncle the
mico
sat still against a tree and waited for me to finger his charms and so all the men waited. I saw his power and it was greater than anything in his pouch. I held the pieces as long as I dared and then slid them back. He patted his thigh.

When I returned home, cold with scratches across my legs, I told my mother I was a man. She slipped her fingers in my hair to tug out the tangles and said, “And what good is a man?”

MY SMALLEST BROTHER
,
Oche, was the one who didn’t want the
mico
’s feathers, who kept sick animals in a little bower near the fields, who some said would be a priest. He wouldn’t let my mother shave any part of his hair. Some said ghosts followed him, but I never saw them, and he said ghosts followed everyone. Every village holds the spirits of those who pass on, ancestors ready to help, but it’s the dead children who move around, who are too restless to lie still and who search for playmates when all the living go to sleep. Oche, who could not concern himself with war, with the ways of life and men, whispered when others shouted; he spoke of things that had happened seasons before, as though his memory was a slow runner.