Free Men (21 page)

I loved him because he was there. He was younger than me and earnest, only doing what he liked, and he spent time with me because he loved me back and he saw no gain in denying this. He didn’t mind that I liked to line things up and put things in order. But I pretended not to love him because he was a baby and never tried to be better than he was. At night, when men were smoking or watching the women dance with their turtle shell shakers, we would sneak to the chunkey ground and roll the stone. Though young and lanky as a mantis, Oche threw his spear closest to where the round stone came to rest. Mine went
too far. I wanted him to see how strong I was, how if there was a Choctaw or an Englishman, my strength would stab his heart before he ever made it to the rolling stone. My brother was not violent, and always won.

Oche had a way of telling truth that I never understood. Time didn’t matter so much to him; the world circled around in his knotty head. He could tell myths like they had happened to him. Once on the night-lit ball field, as I stretched my spear back, he said he’d found the dog I had lost years before. I gaped at him.

“Red Dirt?” I asked.

“I gave him food and told him where you were.”

“Quick. Was he by the river?” I dropped my spear and let the ball roll into the far ditch.

“He was with the men riding out against the Choctaws. Perhaps he fought with them.”

I bent over and placed my fingertips on the grass. “That was two years ago, brother.”

“Yes, when you lost your dog.”

The others laughed at Oche, the way our mother coddled him, fed him secret foods on moony nights to call the spirits onto him. Our three older brothers, all still learning to hunt, had little faith in priests. They would speak to the animal they killed, or had to kill twice for poor aim, but then would laugh between themselves when the priest riddled the meat with prayer. Oche wasn’t hurt by this, couldn’t be hurt. He simply liked to be alone. He wandered in the woods searching not for deer or demons but for mushrooms. He told me his dreams, and they were little different from my dreams, except that in his brush-soft voice they sounded like prophecy. I wanted to whisper with him, even as I
was chasing after my older brothers to punch and claw them and soak up their valor and learn how to be grown. Being grown meant doing things one was afraid of, meant not being afraid. If I wasn’t quaking or sweating or twisting the inside of my cheek between my teeth, then I wasn’t yet brave.

During mulberry moon, Oche made
sofkee
as my mother guided his hands. He took the cracked hominy she had already pounded and sifted from the corn hulls, and he stirred it in our iron pot with water and wood-ash lye until it turned to soup. I asked him questions about animals and what they did and who they were friends with until he paused to think and the hominy started to stick and our mother slapped him on the bottom with a broom.

He took me from the men’s world to the women’s, for he seemed to be neither, something in between. And the women held a world that was still soft with my youth and pungent with something new. In the early spring before the deer were moving, Oche and I would crouch beyond the girdled stumps marking the crop meadow and watch the girls planting. They bent like saplings in a strong wind, their hair floating in wings around their faces. Oche would draw them in mud ink on bark, admire his work, and set it floating on the river, bored. I stared at them. I was a warrior hidden behind shrubs, peering into an enemy camp, finding the gaps in their defenses. Taking in details. Small waists, twisted hair, a hand scratching at an ankle. I asked Oche to pick his favorite, and he pointed to the one farthest away, who was round and faceless. I waited, patient, till he asked me mine, and I showed him Polly, the girl who stood above the others and whose skin looked like something you could eat. Polly I had seen before, had always been half seeing. I didn’t tell him how
she planted seeds in my head long after the fields were empty. He would not have been interested.

When Oche was old enough, my mother sent him off to learn the priesthood. He went across our river to a far creek with the old priest and a few other boys and stayed for four days, and when he came home, he was greenish and damp and his hair was a knotted mat. He said they drank
mico hoyanidja
from a willow root and threw up their bellies and went without food, and while the priest was whispering the secret formulas and showing them the making of medicine, he only thought how hungry he was and wished for his mother’s fry bread. I patted his shoulder as if I had never had the same loneliness. The priest sat them in a steam hut and then made them swim, and one of the boys cried a little. But he was proud too and boasted that he could fix me if I were shot through with arrows from eyes to toes.

“Did you see things?” I asked, meaning monsters or his own future.

“Lots of light,” he said, “but I was sick so maybe this was nothing.”

I began to worry that what I knew about the world, he knew too. Maybe even knew better.

THE RIVER HELD
our secrets, before and after, was the clear thread that tied our town to all the other Muskogee towns, tied us to ourselves. Its wetness swallowed our bare feet, our bitten ankles, and when Oche first dove under, I would pretend he’d rise as a fish. For these visits to the water, I would borrow his imagination.

“Look,” he’d say, always
look
, and hold up a crawfish by its tail. He found stone teeth from the ancient animals, fish eggs
in strings. “We’ll be otters,” he said, and I crouched in the fast water with him, the two of us rubbing our paws together, flapping around our tails, ottering. He was the quick minnow and I was the shark, and we chased until the current tired us. We were rabbits hiding from each other in the towering, knocking thickets of cane. We were not boys, but wild.

On the bank, the glory of our abandon seeped away.

“Did Uncle ever play like this?” I asked. “Were even his games better than our games?”

“Would you love Polly so much if she had only one eye?”

Oh, Polly. No, I wouldn’t. What were women but their faces?

Oche thought our uncle was just another
mico
and Polly nothing but a girl. He had larger concerns.

“What animal do you think you used to be?” he asked. “And would you change back?”

I was hot now that the water had dried from my skin. I wiped my feet clean and pushed the leaves beside me into a pile. There was little to control besides debris.

“Would you rather be a fish or a bird? What if you could live a thousand years as a turtle or ten years as a boy?”

As I tired, I always tired of him. “A man,” I said. “Why would you not want to be a man?” The scales had flaked off me. I left him by the bank.

WAR SWUNG AROUND
our town in those years, whirlpooling the familiar. The English were fighting each other now, and some of our towns chose sides and others stuck with older enemies. Our diplomats traveled east to the Carolinas, north to the Great Lakes. What we needed from the English we mostly had, and if we found ourselves wanting for more guns, more rum, the
Spanish lay just below us and the French beyond the Choctaws. We lived in the middle of chaos, and all we had to do was stay right where we were and the storm would blow by. But we were a red town, and the
mico
was a young man, and the trade was growing so hungrily that we couldn’t pull back without losing some pride. My brothers, with bows and knives and muskets, took their undirected fury to distant fields, and season by season, fewer returned.

When my first brother died in war, I thought,
No more. I have no interest in this
. I was terrified, my family having lost a limb. A whole man was suddenly absent, and I could not find where he had gone; not even Oche would tell me, though I was certain he saw things in other worlds. We buried him beneath our house. I retreated. And when my second brother died in war, I thought,
I want it. I want to be a
mico. This was how we whipped ourselves into froth. Revenge played in our hearts, weaseled down our arms into our hands, which could not stop clenching. No man could take my brothers and not in turn be taken, or I was not a man. So my mind rolled over, nightly turning redder. I snuck beside the council house and listened for the next plans, the war that would happen the following week, the one that would rage by the summer. In the shadows, I squatted and stood, lifted stones in my hands, punched the tense of my stomach. I willed myself to grow stronger. I no longer found comfort in Oche, who by then was pounding corn with women, tending them in their bleeding huts, abandoning raids for nut harvests. Even through the loss, he could not see what war we were fighting.

But my third brother, the last between the
mico
and me, was hungry for control. I watched him closely, mimicked his long steps. I drew a snake on my ankle, like his, with ink, though it
washed off in the next storm. He had the same narrow shoulders as our uncle, that compact strength of a coil, an arrow flying, but had thicker limbs. The elders saw a solid future in my brother, from his fight-broken nose to his legs, which were long enough to cross creeks. Once I heard him whispering with my mother—he was angry and she put her words into questions, and she seemed to be guiding him away from me, pushing his fierceness out of our house, beyond the quiet of the home, away from the children.

THE SUMMERS WERE
hot, no wind. The summers, then, were when we fought. My first battle was before Green Corn, when even the nights were no relief and men boiled outside, their bodies too hot to be still. My uncle the
mico
said the nearest Choctaw towns had struck a deal with the Spanish and would soon be raiding our fields, but the town above us refused to fight. The men there were grayer and honored old alliances. Our
mico
was young, and had his name still to forge. We all came to the council houses then, I in the back, behind my mother even, whose seat closer to the fire was meant to remind me how little I knew. The farthest ring was crowded with boys and girls. We sometimes watched the speakers and sometimes stared at the carvings on the posts, animals with their mouths open, claws outstretched. I searched for Polly, just to see the flame reflected on her cheek.

The elders voted to move out first, to cross the river, to goad the enemy. Those who disagreed threw up their hands and called my uncle names. This was democracy. We had been warring with the Choctaws in bursts for as long as there had been Muskogee to gather arms, for our lands overlapped and our deer ran into each other’s woods. In the smoky dark as we were leav
ing, I told my uncle I wanted to hold a gun in this war. If my last brave brother would be there, so would I. He tilted his head and cupped my chin in his hand and shook it till my teeth rattled.

“Eager to die?” he asked.

“I’m ready to defend my people.” My voice sounded louder than it should have.

“We’re defending nothing, boy. We’re killing Choctaws.”

“I’m prepared to die,” I said.

“And welcome to it. Being prepared is halfway there.” He laughed and left me standing clench-fisted.

My mother didn’t much like the sound of my bravery when I told her that night I’d be fighting. Oche retreated to the storage house to allow us the space for argument. Her bread was half in her mouth when she pulled it out again. Did she ever wish for daughters? She scooted over to me and placed her hands on my crossed knees and bent her head until it almost touched the dirt floor. For a moment, I thought she might be weeping. I should be ashamed to bring my own mother, the woman who’d taught me to shoot, to such tears, and yet her sorrow seemed a further line between us—if she was not a crying woman, then I was not a brave man. But when she sat up, I saw a strange fire in her face that wasn’t anger and wasn’t pride either.

“Do you know how many of your brothers have died?”

“Two,” I said. I always answered questions.

“What are your reasons?”

“To protect the village and seek justice. The Choctaws are our enemies.” The smoke from the cooking meat looped up and through a hole in the ceiling, and the smell of it made my stomach jump. I wanted my dinner. My uncle’s rhetoric sounded hollow in my mouth. “They’ve killed so many of our men,
Mother, what else can we do? Your own sons, and you don’t want vengeance?”

“And where do you think your body goes when it is dead?”

“In the ground,” I said.

“What do you think I will do when you are dead?” The bread was still in her hand, half gnawed. When she spoke, her hands fluttered with her words and the bread dragged in the dirt. Her hair was untied.

I thought about this. I had seen her grieving my older brothers, elaborate ceremonies but few tears, no loud emotion. But they had been grown, one was married, and were not my mother’s pets anymore. My third brother, the one warrior left, wasn’t here tonight because he was chasing a woman, playing night ball with his friends, gambling under a tree somewhere. What did it matter if we were dead? She spent more time in the crop fields, in her own garden, shaping square baskets and round pots, than she did tending us, asking about our feelings, sewing up the splits in our leggings. She seemed to me not so much a mother as a farmer. When we were gone, she would keep turning the earth over. The squash would still ramble from the dirt. The corn would still grow high and pale in summer. The hickory trees would still drop the nuts that she would gather and grind for oil. And when the men brought deer home from the forest, she would sit with the other women around a fire and scrape at the skin with knives until the hair and gristle fell away and the hide was water-smooth.

“If I die, you will love Oche more,” I said. “And perhaps you will have another child.”

She laughed. “Yes, I will love Oche more.”

My mother was not a pacifist.

I RODE OUT
with them on a bay pony, her reluctant head pointed west. Her back was sweated thick before too many miles, and by then my bones were scared. The dogs had already turned back toward town. Beneath my blanket the night before, which I hid under hot or cold to stop the ghost children from touching me, I heard my uncle speak to my mother by the fire outside our house. His low voice I could not make out, but hers rose high into the thick night air. “I will not. Do you remember?” she said, and then, “It’s your head if he’s harmed.” She made sounds of protest and then laughter, and in the morning she let her brother take me to war.