Free Men (26 page)

“Care for the news?” he says.

I shake my head politely. I could pretend not to speak his language, but strangers can be quick to act out against Indians who appear stupid. There is no reason to take chances.

“You heard it already?” He sets down his cart and takes a step closer.

“What city is it from?” Bob asks.

I turn around with a stern face, but my companions, even with heavy bags on their shoulders and a feral mix of dirt and blood on their skin, look surprisingly innocent. It is not unlikely, in fact, that this newspaper man has done even worse things.

“No city,” he says. “This is the news from the stars.”

Bob, pulled briefly from his fear, now begins to trudge on.

“Wait, boy, you’ll want to hear it.”

“What stars?” Cat asks.

“We must keep walking,” I say. “We’re expected in town.”

“Those that point your fates. Wouldn’t you like to know if you travel the wrong way?” With the ribbon still attached, he walks to the back of his cart and lifts up a rock, pulling out a paper with one hand and unfolding it. He turns through it as if inside its corn husk there is meat. “Where were you born?”

“The Carolinas,” Cat says.

“What day?”

Cat shakes his head. The man keeps turning the pages.

“Your mother’s name? No? What about yours?”

“Prudence,” Bob says.

“Lovely. Here it is, then.” The man’s eyebrows crunch together. “No, no, this isn’t the right path for you at all.”

“What’s it say?”

“Shh. The twins are meant to guide you, but this time of year finds them in another part of heaven altogether.”

“Twins?”

“Come,” I say, trying to walk on.

“Hold on, now, which way am I supposed to go?”

The man closes the paper and fans his own face. “Only a sixpence, boy.”

Bob opens his mouth as if to say,
We have sixpence and more!
, but Cat grabs his arm and pulls him forward, and we walk quickly on while the woolly paper man clucks his tongue loudly.

“I just wanted to know,” Bob says.

WE MAKE THE
western spur by afternoon. There have been recent burns; the sun cuts through the canopy and the collapsed underbrush and into our eyes. Young palmettos stretch out from the soot. We are obvious here, three fast walkers with loud bags amid a low charred scrub. Bob shouts out whenever a muscle twinges in his arm. According to Oche, the woman’s house is two days on, and another few miles on a northern branch. She lived in a village next to ours for many years, but was not born Muskogee, may not have had any Indian blood. She was dark and small-nosed and always had white hair, though she never seemed to age. In that village, she sat in council meetings near the front like a man, and captives would be brought to her to learn their fate. This one she’d lightly touch and send off to the Bird clan, a daughter to make up for the son lost at war; this one she’d grip by the shoulders and send off to be killed; this one she’d hold in her lap and tie strands of rope around his wrists and pat his bottom when he walked away, sent off to be sold into slavery. When she tired of her role, she took herself and her pots and a bag of seeds into the woods to start a lonelier life. There were stories of a brave past, some kind of warrioring, but I never knew where she came from. Perhaps she was a captive girl from another tribe, or a Spanish servant, or a colonist’s daughter. As children, we knew somehow that she, a village away and not quite of our world, floated above the prejudices of our own kin. We saw her during Green Corn, at ball play between towns. Oche said if I
ever needed saving, I should find her. I am finding her.

The land is still charred where we bed down for the night, so I build a small fire; its smell is no different from the earth-smell here. We cook a rabbit and I find some roots beneath the ash that are still whole and good. Cat finds a spot beside Bob, his body a cocoon, his head near Bob’s knee as if that were the real fire. Bob is hungry for the meat, but shakes his head when I offer him cooked roots. He gives his share to Cat. When Bob belches, he excuses himself. Our bags sit just beyond the circle of firelight. My muscles still tremble with the rush of blood, and I can see the jerks of the others’ limbs; we haven’t calmed yet. There hasn’t been time to think.

“What’ll you do with yours?” Bob asks. “You have plans for the money? You’re already free, right, you’re not bound up in any way? Don’t need to buy yourself?”

“You don’t need to buy yourself either.”

“No, that’s right, I took what was mine. This is for the next part of life, the setting up of a house and taking care of a big piece of land with some crops on it—corn, probably, no sugar. I hear it’s too dry out there for rice or much.” He pauses. “You think I still deserve it?”

I can’t respond.

“Have you done it before, what we did? Is it easy to forget? Or maybe you just put it away like all the other things you have to put away.”

What I have tried to put away are other men’s deeds. Years spent seething against men I considered evil. What is the worst thing
I
have ever done?

“Did you leave anyone behind?” I ask. My family. “Someone to purchase?”

He shifts his legs as if to unfold them and stretch them out, but sees that Cat is there and settles back into place. He seems to know his knee is comfort. He raises his bandaged arm up instead, twisting his hand at the sky, one way and then the other. “What about you, is that woman you mentioned some kind of family?”

“I have a mother and a brother,” I say, “and cousins. A father too, but he’s not the same to us as he is to your people.”

“No, not my people either.”

We look at Cat.

“I’m sorry I made you do it,” Bob says. “If I made you do it, go after that money.”

I shake my head.

“I wanted it so bad,” he says, “something got in my eyes that I couldn’t blink back. And there we were, all three of us wanting things, and the men—well, you seemed to know them and knew they weren’t worth being friendly with, the way you froze up, it was like a sign, and then the way we’d all been
wanting
things.”

I nod. Wanting too much.

“Are you sorry?” he asks.

I roll out the skin on which I sleep. Lie down so the last sparks from the fire fly up before Bob’s face, and Cat disappears altogether, just a pile of clothes hazy through the smoke. Pull up my blanket.

“I’m not sorry I did it,” he says, “because we were just saving ourselves, first with the money and then when they woke, they would’ve killed us if we hadn’t killed them. We didn’t kill anyone who wasn’t trying to kill us. You know that? Look here, they shot me in the arm and probably wished it was the heart. I
tell you, you just think of all my people, all your people, who’ve been cut down for nothing, not even so men can be better but so they can be richer, and richness just twists their hearts so after all that, they’re worse men than they were. And what about us? Now we can make better people of ourselves, and we will, and isn’t that something to justify—to justify— We’ve done everything right for so long, and we’ve—well, maybe not you, but me—I’ve lost most everything good and never done a thing bad.
Never
. And what have I lost? Isn’t this a sign that we deserve it? That God is watching and doesn’t mind?”

I can’t see his mouth moving for the sparks. Cat stands up, moves away from the fire, stutters into the darkness. His arms are wrapped around his stomach. I can’t think of what to say to Bob or how to read signs that are not from the natural world. I don’t know what deserving means. I wait until Cat is finished heaving up whatever little he ate and crawls back to his patch of dirt. I don’t sit up; if I see these men in any sort of clarity, I fear I’ll turn on myself for everything I’ve failed to do correctly. As it is, I don’t know how to distinguish us, and in the haze of smoke, with the burned smell muffling everything we say, we are a strange and indestructible creature. Many-headed, various, the good in our hearts—put together—weakly outweighing the bad.

“It’s a stone past,” I say. “It’s over.”

Bob doesn’t believe this, I don’t believe this, but there’s nothing else to say. “So tomorrow we’ll try not to shoot anyone, that’s what you’re saying?”

“Go to sleep.”

“You might want to get your gun back from Cat here. To my mind, I’m thinking now he’s the only one of us hasn’t killed yet, and him being the murderer all along. You still got that gun, Cat?”

He doesn’t answer. I turn onto my stomach, dig my feet into the soft ash of the ground, hide my hands in the late winter leaves. I am no longer afraid of Seloatka now that we both are villains, I am not afraid of losing Polly or loving Polly, I do not fear the tracker who’s now already on our trails, who soon will spot our six-footed steps, but I am afraid of the ghost children. Those haunted little souls who come soft out of the night and brush the skin, breathe through the tiny hairs. I’m not afraid of death but of the dead.

IN THE MORNING,
Bob is silent. We eat in silence, he goes into the woods to do his business and returns in silence, and when I point us onward, he says nothing, just follows. Cat now leads him on the trail, and the white man’s face has changed from sorrowful to troubled. Ashamed of his own cowardice at the creek, perhaps. I know what it is to be a coward, and I fear it’s nobler than shooting a gun. Sleep has changed us, a day too late.

For those two days on the western trail, am I hoping someone finds us? I am missing my mother again, and wanting to erase what I’ve done, and feeling the press of the coins on my back like something sacred and good. I’ll be using this to do something right. But I also want someone to stop us, to take us in, to unclench the choices from our hands so we don’t have to make them. I don’t say anything, because Bob and Cat say nothing, and we march on together because in this moment that’s the simplest decision.

Once I ask if his shoulder is hurting worse.

“It’s a bad shoulder,” he says. “We’ve done bad.”

I don’t know whether we should walk quickly or take the time to clear our tracks, to brush branches in animal patterns
where our feet have gone. We cross a few hills but mostly flatland, and the burned stretch grows green again farther west. The dogwoods curve over the hummocks, white-saucered, and the redbuds are just lighting their winter branches with pink. The land smells like it’s been reborn. I look for the signs to the woman’s house that Oche made me remember. Signs again.

That first day I left my home, my town, I walked straight south, past Seloatka’s house and the council house and the ball field, not looking at the women on their way to the fields or the men smoking pipes in the square, my one thought to control the anger on my face. Of course it wasn’t anger at all, which is the only emotion young men claim, but despair, embarrassment. I wished Polly hadn’t taken my horse, but if I had been on a horse someone would have asked where I was going. In marching away from my family, I thought of money first: the deer I would kill, the skins I would take to Pensacola on my own back, the purse I would make from a wild boar’s belly to hold the coins, the chiefs I would sway to my side, the bloodless war we’d fight. All I needed was money.

Now the money is on my back, my sweat and its sweat mingling. I was going to wed, become the married nephew of the sonless chief of the town, the next in line. But that plan rested on Polly, who stole it from me. I am not concerned. The ground is shifting as if the snakes holding us up were shedding their skins. Powerful men live in this country who have no Muskogee mother, thin ties to clan. It is not so hard to imagine a day soon when my money will be worth more than my name, and I can buy relationships with traders, travelers, the government of whatever white country folds around our thousand-year hunting ground. All this story asks of me is patience. To forget the
rage of what I’ve seen and the shame of what I’ve done. To stop loving Polly. Polly with her beautiful skin. It was wrong of me to love a dead man more than her.

In the walking, without the low music of Bob observing the ironies of his past, I find I can hold on to a calm, the same stillness I felt on the first hunt when my body grew a creature’s quiet. This is my body moving, I say, these are my feet walking away from my village, toward my village, away from Polly who broke my trust, toward Polly who is limb-lovely and no different from me, both thieves.

I sometimes turn to make sure they too are calm, are not liable to dash off screaming to left or right. These men, they are as strangely faced as two lost fawns. One, honeyed brown, with hair bunched and clinging to the dry scraps of broken leaves, his shoulder turning yellow. The other with eyes washed the color of the sky when its blue is paddled out by the heat of late summer. If they were not here and I was not guiding them away from their fates, I might have crawled into a hollow and wept for myself. When will our hunters find us?

Day turns into night turns into day. I keep counting them in my head: Kirkland, his son, his nephew, Colhill, two servants. Six men, surely some with wives. Some with powerful bodies, powerful kin. It will warn a man against walking richly into the wild.

When I first understood Thomas Colhill’s face, the Polly in it, there was a space in which I spoke nothing and no other sounds were made, and I was already wondering where the grackles went that moments ago were flocked and chattering in the oak. He met my stare unflinching but mild. This was a ball I didn’t know how to throw. He was Polly and a traitor. He was
the echo of my love that was not love and my wrath that could not find its home. I didn’t know if she cared for him or wished him dead. Who will tell her? And what will she think?

Bob calls out at dusk. I first think it’s his shoulder, but he is pointing into the prairie, where a form has pressed a gap into the grasses. Our minds are worn, eager to see something simple. I say it’s an old deer bed, or a hawk’s dust wallow. Cat is already upon it, looking down with his new puzzlement, as if the whole world was wearing a new dress. A deer, its body splayed over the sharpness of the broken bluestem and broomsedge. Cat moves to stand near Bob, who bends down to brush its fur. The eye is open and empty, and the throat has a tear in it. A blur of flies circles its back half, which has been shorn of skin and meat, opening a window onto a white ribcage, the curve of a pelvic bone, a filmy sack of innards.