Free Men (32 page)

“Well, that certainly doesn’t describe you.”

“Was he honey-colored?”

It’s the first Cat has spoken since his narrative of the previous night.

The slave gently rocks his head from one shoulder to the other, considering. Timing his response. “May have been.”

“Did she give her name?” Cat asks.

“You know a black lady?”

“Lord, oh lord.” The white man rises up in his seat with a straight back, his face straight out and open as I have never seen it.

“Traveled some piece, she said. Looking out her man.”

“Their children.”

“As I reckon.”

“You don’t mean to suggest,” I interrupt, “that those women had anything to do with the fugitive we have been hunting for over a week.”

“
You
been hunting.”

“My good man, you said yourself you felt some injury from these criminals, that they offered you none of the profits; you seemed equally intent on a reckoning.”

“You didn’t catch him. Seems fair to give the lady a try.”

“And should we let her on her merry way? Has she not escaped from some plantation to which we ought to return her?”

“No,” Cat says, and offers the first piece of biographical information on his coconspirators since I began pestering him four days ago. “They were free blacks.”

I cannot explain the frustration that arises from having every man surrounding you become suddenly a liar. So Bob has a wife and children chasing after him. So my negro told them which path to follow. What possible hope do they have of finding a man in the western woods, and one especially who has no interest in being found, perhaps particularly not by his own family, whom he with clear sight chose to abandon? The only reason they have not already been detained is that they’re crossing borders. The American slave patrols rarely communicate with their Spanish neighbors, and it would take an acute interest in a particular fugitive to coordinate her capture. In this wilderness, the assumption is that a slave’s fate will be punishment enough. I am not swayed; I cannot believe that after such behavior a woman would chase her husband. Disloyalty is death to marriage, and in this regard the sable race is in no way more enlightened than the French. Perhaps she does it for the daughters’ sake, but regardless, she will not find him. He will be halfway to his farm by now with a sack of silver to buy a new self. I know his hunger. Nothing shackles an independent man.

“Lord, oh lord,” Cat says, and he is smiling.

MY FIRST WIFE
did not die, as I have told the Christians in this country. Nor did I stop loving her, despite those days she was absent from the marriage. I left because adoring her was not profession enough, and her betrayal seemed to justify my release. I announced I was leaving to pursue a vague idea of scholarship, she threw herself into another man’s bed in retribution, and, doubly childish, I thanked her for making my decision so effortless. I had thought these wounds were not mortal. I wrote letters from every town I visited, unanswered except in my thoughts, and with some swallowing of pride I reassured her that Fate, which I do not believe in, would somehow knit us together again after this adventuring had run its course. There would be forgiveness. But it is not my task alone to mend our fractures, and seeing an enslaved woman break from every bondage and risk the welfare of her children to pursue her husband—whether out of love or duty, I cannot be certain, but I am not convinced it matters—this sight has shown me what little I have left.

No woman will have me and keep me; no men will welcome me into their fold, awkward and suspicious as I am, raised as I have been on thin milk from a cold mother. Nor can I return to my country to scrub down the failures of the last thirty years, for it is crumbling into war. The irony of this is not lost on me; dissatisfied with the old order, I sought out the new, the republican, the individual, and while I circle around ciphers in a forest that is almost primeval, my countrymen are clamoring against both oligarchy and the tyranny of debt. I cannot go home, and I cannot stay another year with the Creeks. If I am honest with myself, I have failed in my errand. I was sent to catch and kill
three men who attacked a trading party unprovoked, and I have used them for my own ends. Justice became secondary to wisdom, and what have I really learned? I am caught in the open, a man in a clearing but with no one calling to him.

Growing up in my mother’s garden, walls around her plotted and knotted beds, the yew hedges cutting off sight of the wild fields beyond, I imagined that the creatures around me, the kitten and the damselflies, went off and saw such marvelous sights that they must have pitied me, shut up as I was in a rimmed paradise. I had no playmates, no other children to show me what it was that children were like. And so when I was grown and had done the things that young men do—had scuffled and gambled and seized a wife—I was left with the individual print of myself, which I did not recognize, or could not conceive of how to cultivate. How was I different than any other man? Now those differences confound me. I may take a dozen more wives before I find my way home.

I will take my lead from the black man, head west. Purchase another notebook. I hear there are men exploring the islands of the Pacific.

The man on the mule with bound hands doesn’t ask where we’re going or what will be done with him. The glow on his face has not subsided since we heard of the black man’s wife. Was this what he looked like when he still believed in love? If so, I can sympathize with his wife; he is a handsome fellow, with kind eyes. Does he believe that though a man may leave his woman, or wrong her treacherously, she will love him past any bounds, past life? That a man may always be salvaged?

Why don’t I ask him these questions?

I tell my men that we’ll turn east at the path to the creek, fin
ish the business where it started, wash our hands in that water, and return to the Indian towns without the weight of doubt on our shoulders.

“NEXT MAYBE THE
Iroquois girl will turn up.”

“You joke, but no one would come for you.”

“Settle down. It’s a good thing, have something to hope for.”

“And what’s yours? Say you weren’t born Muskogee at all, but a man with no allegiance.”

“Or an animal,” says the third.

“All right then. What would you make of all this? What would you want?”

“You mean would I be the first bird to make a stone pot, or a flint tip? An inventor bird?”

“I’m not asking so you can mock me.”

“No such thing! I only ask what you mean.”

“I know what he means,” says the third.

“If you had no uncle to please, no mother to bring game for, no pretty cousin to court, no Choctaws to fight, no friend to make jokes of all day long, what would you do?”

“Mm. Yes.” He slows his horse down so he is well behind us all, puffs of red dust floating up from the animal’s hooves; when I look back, his head is leaned back as far as it will go, so far that his mouth of necessity hangs a little open. With each step of the horse, his chin bobs. Oh, for the luxury of imagination.

“I’d catch frogs,” the third says. “Stockpile them, and sell them to the other birds.”

“And then you’d starve, idiot.”

“Here it is,” and he rides up to match his pace with ours again. “I’d make other people out of clay, all different kinds, and
give them fingers and toes—maybe gills for underwater, we’re lacking that—and I’d breathe life into them and set them loose in the woods around me, though they’d be smaller so that I need only take a few steps to see everything they did.”

“You’d be a god, then.”

“Would I?”

“All the world before you with not a single duty to man or woman, and you’d make a set of men and women to play with?”

“Not to play with; no, just to watch. They’d be free to do as they like.”

“Well, it sounds tiresome.”

“No, you see, they’re much smaller.”

“Smaller than frogs?” asks the third, already calculating how his own dream will intertwine with another’s.

WE CROSS THE
creek on our horses and dismount where the corpses of Kirkland and his relations and Thomas Colhill and their servants have been removed. There are still smudges in the sand, between the clumps of grass and the young sycamores sprouting, wide dips that once held weight. I untie Cat from the saddle of his mule and pull him down. His knees buckle on the sand and he looks about him with concern, as if expecting to see ghosts. The lingering smile is gone. He doesn’t move as we tie the horses up and my men search for a sturdy tree.

I fix a pipe with a little tobacco that has stayed dry in my bag. The smoke in my mouth soothes me. I offer it to Cat, but he shakes his head. He doesn’t know what we are doing here. A dozen yards downstream from where we crossed, a fallen limb thick with new shoots creates a washboard eddy in the stream. The water, which here is mirror-still, breaks over the branch in rippling whitecaps.
The rhododendrons tumble over the red bluffs like brush fires. Cat rubs the pocket of his shirt, where through the thinness of the fabric I can see paper, a small envelope.

When the men are ready and have strung the noose, I turn to Cat, close enough for him to reach for my throat, and tell him of what crimes he’s been accused.

“The murder of six men, and the seizing of private property, to wit, two large bags of silver worth eight hundred pounds, and the wanton flight from justice resulting in your capture. I am aware that this act of violence was abetted by two other men who have thus far eluded arrest. Did they take any lives by their own hands?”

He shakes his head.

“You are solely responsible for the death of six men?”

“I,” he says, but his throat is dry and his voice catches on itself like cloth on a nail. He could not have killed six men alone, but I allow this.

“What is your defense?”

“None,” he says. His eyes move around—from creek to flowers to the negro standing at a quiet distance—as if to seek some explanation for his recent swing from guilt to hope and now abruptly to confession. “Though I am sorry.”

“Through the authority of Seloatka,
mico
of Hillaubee, I redeem the blood of his guests with the blood of their assailant.”

I can afford no deliberation.

I tie his hands tight with rope again, this time behind his back, and lead him to the noose, which hangs from a thick blackgum branch over an empty spot of sand where a wading bird left diamond-shaped tracks. I take the man’s chin in my hand, look into his watery blue eyes.

There is nothing there but depth and endless sorrow, pain like threads of silk drowned in the depths of that sorrow. And floating above, a flicker of desire.

I move him by gentle pushes to stand before the noose. His breath quickens. At the base of the blackgum, where its roots run into sand, a dark stain spreads over the wood. His cracked lips move.

It is the closing of the afternoon and the sun warms the bank; some of my men remove their coats.

He opens his mouth again, and I cock my head. A jenny wren sings in the branches of the blackgum.

I watch his lips but they make no sense. His face, recently washed with optimism, pinches again at its removal—has he not already endured this blow a hundred times? Is it not already familiar? The criminal in him has evaporated, leaving behind a mist. This is what I will describe to the chairbound scholars: a murderer, faced with judgment and the final breath of a meager life, cruel and wrecked as it is, yearns for more. The spirit, however malformed, is hungry for itself, will always fight for its own defense. He doesn’t want justice, or the appropriate meting out of the world’s endowment; he doesn’t want to face his wrongs but to evade them, to cower away from civilization so that he may live unreckoned. For all he followed in the others’ company like a loyal dog, he was born alone and lived a lonely life and will perish as an individual—as an American.

After all that I have recently seen of brotherhood, or thought I saw, I am returned to my original impression: that men are selfish, that they fight only for themselves, that this country is their birthright and their promise. I who watch everything, who know men’s hearts because they are too busy to watch them
selves, can find a partial mirror of myself here—admittedly—but this loneness is no more than a fraction. I have my freedom, employment, the trust of nations, a keen and investigative mind that outstrips a merely empathetic one. I am not beholden to the whims or burdens of familial ties, whether natural or constructed. I cannot be undone at the sight of a wife searching for her husband. If this is what allows me to produce dispassionate scholarship, this too will allow me to take another’s life with tranquil conscience.

Justice is not flawed, though its handmaidens may be.

The noose snugs around his neck and he is heaved up, his shoes kicking above the sand. He is gasping for speech, sucking at the air, his blue eyes watering. A man drinking the last of his life.

But five feet in the air his neck bulges and by some final miracle of the dying form, the muscles in his throat press out against the rope and he is breathing still, swallowing the words he is now frantic to speak.

His body is in a twist, legs quivering. In his choking throat is stuck some sentence of explanation, all I’ve ever wanted to hear, withheld from me.

I signal to one of the Indians, who hands me a pistol. I raise it, point it at the hanging man’s chest. In his kicking, one of his shoes has fallen off.

I think not of the murders or the stolen silver or the trail he cut into the wilderness with such sorry steps, but of the men he’ll leave behind. Where will we go?

I hear the jenny wren’s wings as she flies off her branch, startled.

March 23, 1788

T
HE MISSISSIPPI IS
wide, blue-brown, and has a deep hush for a current. Compared to the clear rivers and singing creeks of home, it is like a bear, sleeping and solemn. Men in long canoes row near the banks where the current is slower. Their paddle songs carry like a drumbeat above the water. The birds have fine fishing here; gulls and ibises and big-bellied pelicans wheel around in jagged patterns. Near the bluff, a dead tree juts out of the river, and on one of its crooked arms sits a cormorant, its black wings spread wide to catch the sun. The spring that was warm is growing hot. Even with the breeze off the water, I feel sated and lizard-like. It will be good to wash the clothes that are now thick with dust and sweat. The sun is at my back, and though I look north and south, the river is all one unending net of light. I am not used to seeing so far.

Our camps have grown more disheveled since Bob convinced me that no one else is on our trail. We holed up in a Choctaw
town for three days, waiting for the inevitable army, but no one came, no Creeks or bounty hunters, not Le Clerc. Even with what we’ve done, there are always worse men to be chasing. The Choctaws, though ready to defend us, had no intention of adopting us, so with a mixture of relief and disappointment we moved on. They were a small village, cut off from the politicking of the larger towns, and forgave us our heritage. Praise to the villages who know no better. Now our cookfires are large and we don’t bury our dung. If we tire after a noon meal, we nap a little. I believe this loosening is a part of our molt; we slough off our earlier selves, those that became vile. A bathe in the Mississippi, and perhaps we will be ready to forgive ourselves.

When we reached the river yesterday, I shot a deer, and we spent the evening butchering it, roasting every cut, gorging ourselves. After repeating one of Oche’s prayers, I rolled the extra meat in the skin and held it closed with a stone. The deer’s head, its eyes still wet, we perched in the crook of a tree to watch for enemies. The river’s loud mouth put us to sleep like infants. No ghost children came to take my hand, and in my dreams only fresh things.

We walked to Natchez this morning to purchase two horses with a share of our money, now that our coins are far enough from their source. Both are chestnut but one has a bald face and a blue, Cat-colored eye. On our way back to camp, we passed a man on the trace who had stained his face black. He rode bareback with a white woman perched behind him, and the air around them smelled of berries. Bob, on his own new horse, called after him, “If I paint myself white, can I catch a black woman?” Bob said the day we bought horses we’d be leaving something behind, and though I am not sentimental, this was true.

Curious how a man could live so long without his liberty, I asked one afternoon why it took him nearly three decades to free himself.

“And why didn’t you just kill the chief?” he said. He had found a stick along the trail long enough for a cane, and sometimes he leaned on it as he walked and other times he used it to knock against the trunks of trees, which was a pointless and irritating habit. I could hear the birds startling off a hundred yards ahead of us. “When you’re in a life, all you do is live it,” he said. “You don’t make decisions every damn day.”

“But then one day you did.”

“I can talk about it till summer comes, you still won’t follow. Look out at this forest; all the trees look the same to you, right?”

In fact, they didn’t. It was a mixed woods, with new saplings and shrubs crowding in beneath the canopy of longleaf and turkey oak, the palmettos clapping in the wind like children.

“But if this was a white man’s land, there’d be the trees that get cut down because they’re in the field and the trees that stay because they shade the big house. Trees don’t get a say in which is which—they just are. One or the other. That’s what white folks do, say, ‘You are like this, for as long as God sees fit to shine a light on us, and you are something else.’ They give you a name that’s not your own and convince you it’s the only one you’ve ever had. And if you’re a tree in the field, well—” He gave a passing pine a hard whack with his stick.

“But to leave, you had to leave them too.”

He didn’t respond.

“And now?” I should not have kept asking, but there was little else to speak of on the trail and we had lost the need for quiet.
“You’ll continue to plant crops and harvest them, and struggle to feed yourself.”

“Yes, but that’s
me
struggling to feed
my
self.”

“And when you die, who will bury you?”

He was silent for a moment, and then he slowed his pace. I slowed mine to match. When my uncle was buried sitting up in the hole beneath our cabin, I didn’t cry because he wasn’t fully gone. He would be always within our walls, below that room. Oche said he was waiting, and so we waited with him. Only when Seloatka took our home after he took the council house did I feel all the force of my uncle’s death, for now I had lost his body. A man broken from his kin is the only thing I can call unfree. Give me my mother and brother again, but give me too my clan, and my uncle’s buried bones, and Hillaubee.

“Maybe some of us aren’t good enough for all that,” he said.

“WHAT WILL YOU
name it?” he asks. “Do Indians give horses names?”

I am stacking the burned firewood beneath a holly bush, though we may well use it again tonight. If not today, then surely tomorrow will be our last, and if I can teach him a little cleanliness before we part—though he does not call it cleanliness, but superstition. Whatever farm he finds will look like a hovel within a week. We rode our new mounts the few miles back to camp instead of staying in town; our presence caused some whispering, as if they knew of someone looking for us. I asked for the names of Houma and Chitimacha men who might be interested in new unions, but people only looked at Bob and asked where he was from.

“What about Cat?” he says.

I drop the last piece of kindling and look over at him. He’s
running a set of pine needles through the scruff of hair clustered on his chin. We haven’t mentioned the white man, though in some sense we know he was just a spirit—not a real white man at all—trailing us like a mute or a saint, sent to save us.

“There’s nothing we could have done.”

“I mean as a name for a horse,” he says.

Our meals have improved since we stayed with the Choctaw—after filling us with sweet potatoes, they gave us field peas wrapped in husks for the road. We stuff ourselves and speak of crops and tilling, and I lie down beneath a tree while he wanders to the Mississippi to gaze out at the western edge of land and build houses in his head. Perhaps I can catch us a turtle for supper.

He is throwing rocks into the river, digging out the biggest he can find and heaving them over the bluff, when I hear the horse behind us, coming north on the road from Natchez. I have my hand on the knife before I turn; Bob of course is deaf to any noise he doesn’t make himself. It is a man and two children, not white, and the girls’ mouths are open in fear or hunger. They cling to each other on the horse’s back, arms locked around waists. Their clothes have no color, but are gray and brown with dust and rain, so that they resemble a wash of dark cloud above the mirror-black horse. Because the man carries no gun, I look at him directly. Certain lines of the face, a softness around the thin cheeks, suggest that he is, of all things, a woman.

I lift my hand from my knife and raise it in greeting. The money has made us cautious of strangers, but if she doesn’t have a weapon aimed at us, she’s not yet an enemy. We can offer them meat and they’ll move on. Bob is sitting on his heels now, lost in some soundless thought.

The girls are crawling down from the back of the horse, falling
like limp sacks, and the woman dressed as a man lets them go without calling out. Either they are not her children or she too knows what danger is and has seen enough to know that this is not it. Their horse folds down its neck and starts in on the grass, glad for the pause. The younger girl stumbles past me. Perhaps they are mad, or the road has made them wild. Under her hat, the woman’s face is drawn and stark, and she licks her lips once. She has a fresh cut stretching from her cheek to her chin that is too precise and deep to have come from a passing branch. Her eyes narrow on the man at the river, and in her gaze is determination, not anything as weak as hope.

The girl is at his back now and not even having seen his face, her arms clutch at his neck. He jumps up and she dangles down and he turns, half guessing what’s about him in spite of the impossibility of it, and her voice cries out so he can hear it, and the man who has so long protested against the chains of his own family circles himself on the bluff, trying to grasp at the daughter on his back, and takes in his wife and children with wet eyes. It is the surprise of them, I think.

When he has captured the crab of his daughter, the other comes shyly forward and he kneels and she bends to his ear to chastise him. The woman drops off the horse and walks past me with no acknowledgment. He holds out his arms to her, and their embrace suggests that the meaning of it is still to be made.

She turns back to me and says, “Sir, this is my husband.”

September 19, 1788

Y
OU CANNOT TELL
a man’s origin in New Orleans. Each messy street unfolds a different scene: men of all shades barter
ing in English or Spanish or French, around a corner a darker woman slipping her hand into a white man’s pocket while he holds her bottom, two blocks away a swarthy man offering a tray of sweets to a fair-haired girl, and in the center of the town, an oiled black man standing on a block while men call out prices and women, from milk-colored to midnight, parade the lace shawls that someone has bought them. Everything turns on money. Desire is stronger here than pedigree.

With the coins that I have, it is easy to call myself the rightful chief of a small Muskogee town. I gave every detail of Seloatka’s perfidy to the Tunica, for whom I’m serving as an interpreter and middleman, but over the months the intricacies of the story have boiled away, and when I come to the city to sell the Tunica’s salt, I only tell men what I myself want to hear. I have two suits of clothing now, one my own and one with buttons and ties, tight in the armpits and with hard buckled shoes, and that’s the suit I wear to call upon the Spanish traders. They’re interested in Muskogee deerskins and don’t mind stealing a little of the trade from their cousins in Pensacola. They ask how I and my town propose transporting goods across the hostile territories of the Choctaw, and I say, “I’m here, am I not?”

For my ability to pick up languages easily, I must thank the woman I loved and the English words that looked so full in her mouth. For the ease with which I forget the atrocities I’ve committed, I thank Bob. When we parted at the Mississippi in a thin mist of rain, we did little more than shake hands. He took one of his daughters on his new chestnut horse and his wife took the smaller one on hers, and they rode off toward the ferry with nearly four hundred pieces of silver between them. The little one looked back at me and wiped the warm rain from her face
with a smile; she needed nothing but what she had in this moment. Her name too was Polly.

In March, while we were parting, this city burned to the ground. Through the makeshift houses and storefronts and the bustling of merchants and wives and the calling out of all these busy tongues in the heavy heat of summer’s end, the wind still carries the scent of cinders. I take my letter of agreement from the Spaniard’s hand and fold it in my bag with a half dozen others. These say men are interested in my commerce and political goodwill, whenever I should return to my town and see fit to send skins their way. Each letter costs no more than a conversation and a few coins, and turns strangers into brothers in trade.

After I have finished the Tunica’s business I find a room for the night in an inn where a woman always knocks on the door after dark. I have never opened it before, but tonight I am heady from the day’s work. She has large black eyes and wild curls tied in many knots on her head and her long neck is the color of wet sand by a creek. The creek where I played as an otter, or the creek where I saw my lover’s father crumple to his knees. He was white, was only white and nothing else, and in this country that was his ruin. The girl at the door holds out her hand, and I put one of her fingers in my mouth to taste if there is any of my Polly in her, and then I give her a piece of eight and send her back into the night.

June 8, 1789

I
AM WOKEN BY
a child, a young boy who’s been sent to see if I’m still alive after last night’s dancing. When I roll over, he tugs on my feet.

“Chief, it’s morning time! There are birds awake!”

Summer in Iroquois country is like spring at home. I pull the blanket tighter around me. At home I cannot say how I’m remembered; I am a runaway, a traitor, or entirely forgotten. Here, in this dry cool, I am the chief of Hillaubee.

The feast was in my honor, for I arrived not only with my bald-faced horse and my belongings but with a reputation. From the Tunica I had traveled north to the Shawnee towns and then east to the old center of power among the Iroquois. In a pillowcase given to me by a girl in a prairie fort, I had letters and promises neatly stacked from the Spanish, French, Americans, and a dozen tribes from the Caddo to the Miami. My coins were dwindling, so it was the pillowcase that I kept now beneath my bed at night. If I could ally myself with the nations of the Iroquois, dissolving though they were, or this Oneida village alone, I could not be turned away from my home. This was the last stitch needed in my suit of war, if I chose to wear it.

The boy has found one of my shoes—not the kind with buckles—and is trying to drag it onto my foot, though the leather keeps catching on my toe. There is something about children and shoes. Was Cat anything like this as a boy? Or would he have been, if he were born into a family?