Free Men (22 page)

We camped partway, and being an older boy now, I didn’t cower among the roots or think about my home. I didn’t even sleep next to my brother, not giving him the chance to push me away, though I did straighten his arrows when he wasn’t watching and clean the dirt off his quiver with spit. I ate the peaches and boiled bean bread with bites large enough for a scalper of men. In the dark I covered my legs with leaves—the ghost children are everywhere—and dreamed of axe-wielding. My dream-hands spun like maple seeds and men fell down before me in baths of blood. My uncle stood to one side, applauding.

The next day, by the time the sun was straight above us, we were in the borderlands, the forests where no one hunted. The growth was thicker here, unburned and wild. There was a beaten path for war and trading, but we stayed to the north of it, weaving our ponies through the brush to mask our coming. Once or twice we passed a little hut where a woman—neither Muskogee nor Choctaw but someone whose tribe had been worn to nothing—sat with a pipe and sold rope and meal and
bullets to the white men who were always moving. They had their cities and still they yearned for the forests and fields, the emptiness that we filled, and so they marched back and forth between these places without end, taking what they found, writing down what they saw when they passed by. We raised our hands to the women at the posts, and they waved their pipes at us. War did not touch the traders. All men needed food, needed guns.

At a river, we dismounted, tied our ponies to the basswoods. We drank and rested and sat still for hours. I crept to my uncle, whose face was painted red and black, and asked when we were raiding. He told me to settle myself, to find a tree to fit my back and practice waiting. I did until I began to doze. The air was so honeyed with heat that the mosquitoes were drowsing. It was easy to dream of Polly in this idleness. I let my mind dance away. Beneath my legs the earth hummed with the tiny movements of underground animals—worms and grubs and the snakes that held up the very foundations of the world—all turning over themselves in brown darkness, the steps of men above them nothing more than thunder. We didn’t mind their wars, and they cared little for ours, except when we scooped out their heavens to lay a dead man in their midst. To have the power of a god—to be anybody’s god—and to bend the paths of little beings to your own vision, this was the peak of all living. No matter that I had no vision, could bend no paths but that of my pony, who only listened to my heels when she had been well fed. The first step was to prove my strength. To kill men, to woo a woman, to direct a town, more towns, a confederacy. To hold dominion.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead and dried it on the bony ridge of my shins, just fleecing with hair. Dragonflies were dipping on the river, lined on its bottom with skipping stones
and spikemoss and the whole black leaves of sycamores, rotten but not dissolved. Everything around us made a sound: water, stone, fly, spider on bark, sparrow. What I didn’t know was that the river was a border, and that Choctaw men crossed it to hunt when they shouldn’t have, and that such crossing justified attack. I thought my kin were lazing, and as I drifted into a heated sleep, I wished I were the child of a braver town. I was certain the Choctaws didn’t sit for hours staring at their toes on the warpath. My uncle wouldn’t even stripe my cheeks in red.

I woke from sleep when something sharp grazed my ear. The forest was moving, the river swirling up around bodies and motion. Stealth had been abandoned and it was loud, shapes were moving loudly, and I saw they were men, and the sounds were war cries and the stick that scraped my ear was an arrow. My fathers and my cousins were fighting—men were getting struck in the open skin of their chests and thighs—and no one had shaken me awake. I rose raging, the sleep still in my eyes, my bow arm tingling and woozy from a cramp. I yelled out, and in the calling all around me, in the shots that echoed among the twangs of bows, I seemed to make no sound. I had seen Choctaws in our town before, sitting in peace talks, bringing cloth or kettles to trade, and now they were like so many deer for my arrows to find. I had been deemed too young for a gun. I shot three arrows straight and watched them snake between the swarming men. For all I wanted to kill, and with the killing prove myself, I couldn’t even hit a body. My ears were full up with blood. The animals had gone, and we were all that was left. I was not afraid. I was not afraid. Some men had knives now and were upon each other. I could see faces. I hid myself behind a pine and pulled my arms in and thought how much I didn’t want to die. From close came a choking scream. I
peeked out sideways, afraid to miss the gore, and saw a Choctaw drop to his knees and pull one of our feathered arrows from his gut, its bent point trailing his innards like a hook drawing an eel from the stream.

My eyes were fixed, my mouth still parted and tasting of sour brine. I wanted my uncle. I wanted him to come and find me, take me up in a bundle, and tell me this was all a game. Before I could undo myself, could turn back in to safety, I saw a man in our red smudges stand behind the line of fighting, his string drawn taut. I looked to see where he was shooting. If there was a man running at us, I would have climbed the tree, straight up like a bear. There were Choctaws across the river, right and left, a few mired in the banks, pulling at their hatchets. There were none in the clearing before us. So why did the man’s arrow point straight? There were no backs to shoot there but Muskogee. I saw his fingers unclench as slow as growing grain.

In the days it took the arrow to fly the string, in the time I took searching for its target, not finding a body where it belonged, I saw a Choctaw scramble the banks and run knifeward to our party, caught in the heavy syrup that held the moment still. My eyes left the creeping arrow. I called out in a broken boy voice, “To the right!” Beside me, the man with the sprung bow turned—Seloatka of the Wolf clan—and took my face in his gaze. I turned from him to watch the arrow coursing. It stayed true. As I stared, Seloatka twisted around, arm raised to meet the coming enemy, and in the gap between their nearing bodies, I saw the arrow’s point pierce the back of my uncle’s chest and plunge until it crossed his heart. He fell to his knees. Seloatka wrestled with the Choctaw. I turned back to the pine and closed my eyes.
My eyes have seen a murder
.

In the darkness, with the sounds of blood far and faint, I saw again the man, the arrow, my uncle—the man, the arrow, my uncle—and wondered what sort of a life he’d had all those years when I was watching him and wishing to be his mirror. He hadn’t lost his life because he was a one-eyed man, or a narrow-shouldered man, or a man whose soft face looked sweet to women. He was lying with an arrow in his back because he told men what to do. He helped sort the grain in the winter, said yes or no to plans of war, got first tasting at Green Corn. He couldn’t make us act, but he was wise and strong enough to earn our nods. Would I have killed him for this privilege? Could I kill? Most every night, I felt black boils inside me. I was cowardly and starved and boiling over with unpointed desire. My uncle wasn’t dark with evil or white with peace, but red. We lived in a red town. We all wanted to be the
mico
.

I wished a ghost boy had found me and swallowed me. I opened my eyes. I turned from the pine trunk and saw my uncle on the spot where he fell, an arrow in his back, his hand cupped.

I waited until the last brave Choctaw had been killed and the sounds of the cowards’ feet faded in the shuffling brush before I pulled the arrow from my uncle’s back and snapped it. The men lashed the bodies of our own to our ponies’ backs and wept over my uncle, who had simply fallen in war like others had. We rode east in silence, leaving behind the slain that made up for our warriors, raided and surprised two seasons ago. Our blood had been quieted, and none knew that a fresh claim on vengeance was riding slumped across a pony’s shoulders. I rode behind, my young blood tingling. The battle we had begun was now my battle. I could hoard my darkness, pet the cowardice in me, become nothing, or I could carry this rare chance to retribution.
Carry it to manhood. This was the moment when fates were turned. But my fingertips were sore from clenching bark, and it hurt to ride, and my cheeks were reddened with my hands’ bloodlessness, and I was hungry once again for home. I thought of Oche, tending the fire beneath a summer stew. I closed my eyes to better taste the image, and when I opened them, Seloatka’s pony was in step with mine.

He said nothing. I clenched my knees around my pony’s chest and bent my head. He rode with me till camp that night. I heard all the threats he never made.
You are a boy who tells lies. My broad hands could break your body in two.
He slept next to me and our breaths sounded like a boy running and a man walking slow behind. In my half-dreams, his hand was around my throat; I kept waking to pull at it. He didn’t touch me. I couldn’t sleep for pushing his hands away. In the nadir of night when my mind was usually lost in girls, in the curves of Polly, I found myself believing that this life was done. That my boyhood had been a fancy. I was too young to think of killing, could not have killed Seloatka if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to: I was not the man who killed, but the other. I wanted to be as good as the
mico
.

Not until we reached home and my mother saw the body dangling and shook herself with wails did I understand that I had lost my uncle, simple, and I fell from my pony and wept, nothing like a man. No sleep could comfort, and the stew that had simmered since dawn went uneaten. My first secret began eating into my heart.

THE MOURNING STRETCHED
over days, for a
mico
is greater than a man. I saw him buried below our house, saw the round hole in which they lowered his body. He sat up in his grave, a
blanket over his shoulders and a pipe in his hand, because he was a warrior and was always watching, though he’d never have more than one eye. I looked away when they threw dirt around him, my slim brave kin. Where my uncle went, where the spirit of him traveled, I was never certain. Some said he was in the hole, or the house, or was back at battle, ghost-fighting his enemies. Oche said he saw him waiting.

“Waiting for what?” I asked.

He waved his fingers gently above his head, making loose loops.

If we could choose where our spirit goes, mine wouldn’t rest. Mine would hunt and battle. Mine would haunt the wicked. I said this in a quiet voice so Seloatka, who was with us filling the grave, wouldn’t hear.

“What wicked?” Oche said.

I opened my eyes wide. We could speak at each other silently like this, and neither would understand.

The night before Green Corn, a smaller council gathered in the meeting house and threw conversation about a successor. It was the last day of the year’s fire; tomorrow the flame would be doused and all debts and wrongs would be forgiven, though by whom I never knew. The next in line in the Wind clan was the one left of my older brothers, who was panting for the reins. He had ridden with us in the river fight against the Choctaws and had claimed several lives, but he didn’t speak to me on that journey, for we were not friends but kin. I could have told him what I saw, but he was older and fiercer and laughed at jokes too coarse for me to understand. When he saw me in the town or practicing with my bow in the fields, he would pelt me with stones and husked-out shells. Had I told him of Seloatka’s careful aim and
the dreamlike path of the arrow through summer air to deep between our uncle’s shoulders, I would have had to tell him of my vantage, my cowardly crouch behind the sap-sticky pine. Being still stuck between boyhood and courage, this I could not reveal. I also worried Seloatka might be a spirit, or at least a man who could read my wishes, so when I found myself thinking of the slow arrow, I pushed my mind to something safer. Girls planting seeds, or fishing. Polly, whose form I always returned to. My mind divided neatly between politics and her, between imagining myself chief and wondering what I would say if I found myself alone with her, our hands nested.

I stood outside the meeting house and listened for my brother’s voice. All I heard was Seloatka’s, burrowing blunt-headed through the conversations. He didn’t question my brother’s place, or claim some greater strength. He didn’t object to the elders’ reasoning. But he made his voice carry low across all debate, so that when the men went home that evening to tell their sisters and wives, all they would remember was Seloatka, Seloatka.

This was not a time when any man could be made
mico
. The British were begging for our allegiance and our sole custom. A white man’s war was disordering the deer trade. The skins we got sometimes could not be sold, and if we turned elsewhere—to the French or Spanish—the British withheld their rum. No one knew what games the others were playing. And who we were was quickly changing. Cattle now roamed through our fallow fields, herded by uncertain warriors. Our town became home to two white traders, several men from a Cherokee village that had lost its fields, some Seminole women, and slaves who were Choctaw, Chickasaw, African. To be Muskogee in those years
was to hear your name in a half-dozen languages. How could you lead when you didn’t know who your people were, much less your enemies? I waited to hear how the elders, who were around when white men were rare, would push us into a future. But all I heard was Seloatka.

My brother walked out of the council house pale and sweating, a cough trembling his chest. He was the tallest of us, broader than the brothers who were already in the ground. His body was one that admitted no suffering. After the council fire was snuffed and the Beloved Men were sleeping next to the Beloved Women and only the possums and ghost children were left on the ball field, my brother, next in line, lay in his bed coughing.

Oche said he tasted evil on it. I was afraid to know what evil was. I said there was no such thing—if there were, surely I’d find it in myself—and that it was nothing more than a summer fever. Whichever it was, Oche didn’t mind. He just spoke things aloud and then turned over into sleep. The peace in his heart was bottomless.