Free Men (24 page)

The first step was to move close. Make him believe I had forgotten. It was a night during little spring moon, the warmth just seeping into the air again. He stood outside his house, looking up at the clouds across the stars, his hand against the skin flap. My hands had made that house, I thought. That was my uncle’s house, the one in the center of town with its roof higher than the others, beside the chunkey ground and near the council house, where wars were plotted and travelers slept. I had squatted with my mother and buried my hands in pots of daub, spread the coolness over the cane frame, smoothed it between the woven vines, roughed it with grass and my own collected hair. I handed straw bundles to men who were taller to coat the roof in a spiny fur. The man who killed my uncle was living in the house I built.

The words that came from me were small and squeaked. I said I wanted to be a trader.

“You’ve grown tall,” he said. “Your aim is improved.” He let down the door flap and moved a few steps past me, farther into darkness. “A trader? You want to get out of this village, you’re tired of hunting. I can understand that. You’ll need to
know their language, of course, and must learn not to steal.” He seemed to think this was humorous. I needed him to trust me, so I said nothing. “And Polly?” he asked.

Had I known he was watching? I said I knew some English. Wanted to make a profit. Wanted to move beyond the split hickories hanging by the river.

“Earn a little bride price, perhaps. I see. But you leave her alone for a few weeks here and there, and she may get loose from you. That’s my advice. Women, you know. I think your mother was the same.” He laughed again.

I remembered her face when I told my mother what he’d done. Seloatka hadn’t killed my uncle, she said. She erased that night between us. Had she loved him? Had he broken something of hers? I didn’t know what drove a woman to act, what made her shrink. I let my mother go that night. I lived with her still and we spoke of nothing more than detail. I told Seloatka now not to speak of her, though I didn’t know what I was defending.

“You have fought, I think,” he said.

The burning in my insides seeped to my skin. I told him I had seen men fight.

“And now you want to deal in Englishmen. Seeing how men die is the fastest way to understanding how they live.” The stars were now fully beneath their cloud blanket, and I could not see whether his eyes were cold or if he was still laughing at me. “What else do you know? You’ve lived so many years here, and I hardly remember anything you’ve done.”

I said I would be useful to him, that I was strong and fearless and could learn the paths. Would never steal. Was fearless, I said again. Some pots were strewn by the door, still wet from cooking, and in my anxiety I wanted to pick them up and stack them.

He turned and moved away from the wide night, put his hand against the house I built. “Visit me again in a few days,” he said, and went inside.

I came back in the morning, my hands still held before me, and he told me of the man I would follow to learn the paths and of the goods I would earn in exchange for skins.

But I was a young man, and ambitious, and saw a future to which he was blind. “I don’t want the goods,” I said. Not the powder or hatchets or vermilion or pots. I didn’t yet have a wife or a home, and I saw how little the white men valued those saddles, those looking glasses. “I want the coins.”

“They’re no use here,” he said.

“This town is not all there is in the world.” Let him think that I would move away, release his conscience, and meanwhile I would stockade a currency that white men, who were taking acres from us faster than we could plant them, would kill for. When Oche told me what the future looked like, I was no longer too afraid to listen.

He raised his hand and let it drift onto my shoulder, resting it like a fly there. My mind swirled with the vision of my hands and the knife and his belly, but through his warmth I felt his common need. We were men of mirrored desperation, though being still young, I couldn’t guess at his fear. His power was built on the shaky backs of us all. I wanted him to suffer and perhaps he wanted me to leave, and thus we sealed our bargain.

I told Polly I was collecting her bride price and my mother that I was forging our way back to the center of the town and Oche that I was headed out adventuring. They all, in their way, let me go.

THE PATHS TO
Pensacola—to Panton, Leslie, and Company and the independent traders—wound south through hardwoods, burned clearings, the beginnings of swamp. The Muskogee man that first guided me crouched on his horse like a man at a fire, and I rode my pony behind, leading the pack mule with a rope. We stopped by rivers to drink and rest and soften our ring-shaped bread in water, and he told me short tales of boyhood. There was a woman he had loved, for there are always women. “And what did you do for her?” I asked.

“Do! What did she do for
me
? What a prize I am!” He chuckled as he dug behind his knees for itches. He was old and raisined. “I made her carry water, fry me cakes, sing me ditties—‘
Oh handsome man, sun-faced man, dance around the fire on your pigeon legs, pigeon man
.’” I said I didn’t believe him, and he rolled up his breeches to twist his calves in the purple dusk. “Don’t you let a woman grab you, no, you let them stay in the field and you go prancing woodward and when you come two-by-two in the evening, you tell her what’s going, and if she tells
you
what’s going, well, then you just let it be, for she’s no worse than the mother that bore you. ‘
Pig legs, pig girl, dance close for a squeeze, snorting girl.
’”

“Where is she now?”

“Dead,” he said. “Dead, for I didn’t love her.” He settled back with a pipe and wouldn’t say more.

In Pensacola, we brought our skins to a trader who lived in a wooden house near the Spanish cemetery, where I wandered while the exchange was politely argued over tasting cups of whiskey. Live oaks leaned down on wooden crosses and stone humps. The wind from the gulf sent the fallen leaves scuffling
around the markers, some so small they must have been babies, lost to the world before the world turned foul. These were the homes of the ghost children who brushed against my bare legs at night. I sat on one half-sized stone, fresh-faced and free of moss, and tried to remember being so young. When I sought to remember myself, I remembered my uncle. Narrow-shouldered. He had grown inside my heart like a fungus, and even my lover had taken on his hue. When she looked at me through two eyes, I saw his one eye peering.

A woman in red drifted through the graveyard and paused when she saw me. She spoke to me in Spanish. She pointed to the grave I was crouched upon, her eyebrows now furrowed, and as I sensed that I should not be there, her eyes became wet. She covered her face with white-gloved hands, and her hiccups blended with the wind catching in the low branches. I stood and snuck away, ashamed, and when I turned back to look, she had fallen in a heap over the grave, one hand grasping the small stone, quiet now. We are all killed by somebody, and the deaths live forever. But there is something precious in a woman’s grief; it’s the twin, the remnant, of loyalty. I slipped through the graves to the peddler’s cabin, where my pigeon-legged guide had loaded the mule with jugs of whiskey and rum and was holding my pony’s reins in one hand, waiting for me. As I mounted, he handed me a few shillings, the first of the coins—English, Spanish, American—I would collect to capture my future. Pennies for my bride, pounds for her uncle. My plan was not that of a wise man: I believed my wealth would bloodlessly unseat him.

A certain kind of face filled the paths snaking between the Muskogee towns and the once-English, now-Spanish settlements. They were hungry men, all hunting something. I saw
white men burned so sun-brown they looked little different from the slaves that trailed behind. Scars crossed faces like maps. Bodies smelled of dirt and decaying food caught between teeth. As men passed me, the pines breathed after them, exhaling a sweetness into their wake, washing the path clean of their scent. Gnat clouds hovered at the mountaintops of men’s shoulders. On the southern trips with my guide, I couldn’t keep my gaze from these walking desperates, curious to spot their own bitterness, but when I began to journey alone, I kept my eyes down and away like the others.

Some of the travelers I came to know by sight. The one with his sleeve pinned to his chest who growled about the heat. The girl who dressed as a boy and bartered her preserves, the trail walkers keeping her pretense. The slave who was the color of creek silt and could not stop his tongue. We all were waiting for the end of our trails, for whatever lay there, and yet we only saw each other in the coming and going, as though we only traveled, never arrived.

The money I kept in a deerskin purse Polly made, with a moon cut into one side—to remind me of her face, she said. She at first was baffled by my plan but came to relish the sight of the shiny coins. They were a path out. In my mother’s house beyond the circle of our town, I dug a little hole in the dirt beneath my bed, buried my purse, and marked it with a red stone. This was where I planted my growing fortune. The coins began to sprout when I took on the route alone, Seloatka trusting me, the rum sellers in Pensacola knowing the sound of my step and the quality of our skins. Certain men came to our town to be taken south, with our traders as guides and our slaves—purchased blacks or captured Indians—as guards. They paid well for the privilege, and from
the little I was allowed, my purse began to bulge. I needed it to burst before I could claim Polly, could silence the protests of her uncle. After I took her, the steps were few to chiefdom and revenge. I would buy an alliance with poorer neighbors, some Chickasaw or distant Muskogee towns, even American traders, and with the money show them my strength and my intentions. They would back me, would refuse to treat with my wife’s uncle, and then my wife and I would rise in his stead and he would like a puffball turn to nothing. Was I naive?

Polly was my accountant, and made me tally my gains after each trip, which she would mark in little lines on a stick she kept by her bed. She said she needed to know when she’d be mine. She’d then toss the stick below her bed and pull me down and I would find all her goodness there, waiting, just as she promised. With my arms beside her, around her, in her hair, she listed what we’d do with our wealth.
Richmond
, she said. She wanted to live in a white man’s city. Her father had left her without an image of himself but a silver chain and a sense of something other, and she had not found her right place in this small village, doing what our mothers and uncles did, and their mothers and uncles before them. She said she felt half her limbs were pulled by white strings, and if her bastard father thought they were better than Indian strings, maybe they were.
Richmond
, I said, and didn’t tell her my fate was here, where the dead were still unsettled. She too may have picked things not to tell me.
Richmond
, she said, and my arms were vines around her neck, her waist, her legs.

As the trails became worn beneath my feet, the
mico
slept worse at night. I saw little of his suspicion, but Oche told me on my rests from riding that Seloatka kept a band of men tightly circled about
his house to keep the ghosts from stealing his skins, though there was little to trade them for besides rum, which ghosts could not swallow. He was saving for something, perhaps for the pleasure alone of saving, which is an early symptom of a greater sickness, but perhaps for some scheme against me. We may have been hoarding in opposite corners of the same town, both to destroy the other. Both waiting for our fortunes to burst and the plans we made to spill into action. I hoped his plot was as little formed as mine.

Oche said he was worried, said that long ago when I was in trouble I had gone to a woman in the country for help, one of the hut women, but farther out, west of the trading path. She used to live in a nearby town, and I remembered her, tiny and dark, without family. But I told him this had never happened, so he gave me directions—
and then turn north at the dead oak
—so I would remember that moment in time, whether it had happened or not. He saw the game we men were playing for what it was.

Just before winter Seloatka hired a Frenchman who had been living among the Muskogee and leading war parties against the colonists, and he paid him to be a double pair of eyes. Le Clerc sat at the
mico
’s table and filled his belly hard with pawpaw and persimmon and found himself a girl to keep, one who was motherless and could not tell the white men she could use from the white men who would use her. His eyes were black, like my lover’s, but when I shook his hand, I could not see into them. He never learned my name, for Seloatka kept him among the elites, passing him from cousin to warrior to guard, all trusted men who greased the visitor with rum and showed him how to throw the spear on the chunkey field. Oche and I stood under a walnut shadow and watched his small French body coil itself behind his throwing arm. The spear always went wide.

Le Clerc was not a dangerous man. He seemed to already have whatever it was he wanted. Stories to carry with him when he returned home. Women and whiskey, an adventure. He was too vague to be menacing. Like most white men, he’d pass through. That Seloatka never introduced his trail man to his Frenchman reminded me that though we were connected in business, the
mico
never fit me within his circle. He had not forgotten. He only kept me near so he could watch my movements, could predict when I would finally strike. We both knew that cowards and the quiet were the ones whose hands would eventually turn.

Early mornings, when Oche was in the fields with our mother and I was home and had nothing to do but carve a new bow and wait for Polly to find me, I would see Le Clerc wending through the river trees, one hand out to brush the bark as he passed. He walked slowly, but never aimlessly. Was that what Polly’s father looked like? A white man walking through an Indian town, on his way to somewhere else? Except the Frenchman was not impatient. I never saw him hurry, and even when he missed the chunkey stone, over and over, he never angered. And when he was alone and thought no one was watching, he chose to walk among basswood and sycamore at dawn, feeling their skin, occasionally looking up into their branches as if hoping to see someone beloved there. If I were a superstitious man, I’d worry he saw my own past body, crouched there years ago with Polly, or else some future version of myself.