Free Men (7 page)

When the sun was straight up, I fell back from the trail into a patch of scrub to eat the hoecakes Winna made for me, and I wondered why she didn’t cry and I wondered if I wished she would’ve. It was a warm day with clouds, which I noticed when I was thinking of things to be grateful for. When the sun sank again, I was back in an English world. Turns out all you needed was a knife and an open road and a choice. I passed a group of boys, six or seven of them, who were laughing and leaping on each other and tripping along the sides of the trail and I wasn’t sure whether they were white or Indian, but they were headed south and unconcerned, and even when their small bodies were gone I heard their voices like they were caught in the brambles, slowly unraveling.

That night, I tied my horse to a branch before I lay down in the lap of a live oak and burrowed my legs in wet leaves, for in March the night still had wind in it. I slept for a little while, then woke to rustling, then slept longer and dreamed of treeless land stretched out like a green quilt forever, past the edge of any land, so there wasn’t even a horizon, just land and land.

I woke into full sun and I opened my still-tired eyes into the blue eyes of another man who had my arms clamped to my chest between his knees and was crouched over me like a lover, holding my knife to my throat.

H
IS EYES ARE
blue as beads and his wrist bone so small I think of biting to snap it but his chest is going fast and I reckon he might have the dog madness so I stay rock still and let his short breaths puff in my face, the knife dizzy in his hands. He doesn’t speak and I don’t speak and we sit there for a while, each figuring, and when his face goes in shade from the sun passing behind a cloud, his knees droop and he drops his hand down and with his un-knifed hand he wipes beneath his nose like a boy. I breathe in big to watch his thin self rise on my chest and he looks such a sight perched like a bird with one claw that I try not to laugh, though having a white man this close has dried up all the shit in me. I roll him over and we stand up and brush our dust off and his hand is loose enough that it doesn’t seem to mind me easing the knife back into my own.

I pull out my pass to show him, my hand still shaking, but his hand still shaking won’t take it, and I reckon neither of us can read anyway. I don’t know which of us should be most scared, a slave or a robber.

“You ain’t patrol?” I ask.

He opens his mouth, but a rumble from his stomach rolls out of it and he claps his hand to cover it like he still has shame.

“Doesn’t take a knife to get some food,” I say. I break out some bread and hand it over and he eats head down.

When I look around to pour some water for the horse is when I notice there isn’t a horse left or right. “What the hell? You take my horse?”

He shakes his head. “Tried to,” he says. “Ran away.”

“You tried to crawl up on it with your skinny arse and it bolted? That it? Good
lord
.” I walk out into the road and try a few whistles and a
hey-up
to see if it’s near, but even when I’m quiet I can’t hear the sound of a leaf break anywhere. “How long ago’d you pull this?”

“Still night when I did.”

“Damn it. And you just been sitting on me since?”

“Thinking, one way or the other.”

I’m two days into running away and lost my horse. If I believed in God very much or anything like signs, I’d take this as a bad one. Nothing to do but walk now.

He follows me quiet when I move back onto the path with my road-hungry feet.

“Where you going?” I ask, but he has a finger in his mouth, poking around at the food that’s left, not wanting to miss a bite. “Scoot!”

I don’t look back for a quarter of an hour, and I try to whistle a little to show how unconcerned I am about white men. But soon someone passes us on a horse—not mine, I check—and gives us such a peculiar twice-over look that I worry I’m standing out worse than ever this way, with no better than a hound
dog trailing after me. I turn around, and he stops so sudden I think he might tilt over.

What cause does a white man have to be hungry?

“I’m going up this way,” I said, pointing ahead, “and then that way,” my finger crooking off to the left.

He nods.

If I tell him to go away, or if he doesn’t and I knock him on the head, he’ll wake up and tell someone there’s a nasty slave on the loose, pass or no pass. And if I let him drag on behind me without paying any mind, he’ll try to kill me again as soon as I sleep. Maybe he’s hungry or maybe he’s crazy, or might be he’s just looking for a way to get close to a soul, and I know what that’s like after you walk a road for days without speaking. It’s a relief I’m half again as big as he, and that my knife’s back in my own pocket.

“You got a family?”

He nods his head, then shakes it.

“No? You own any slaves?”

Shakes it.

“Not one? Okay. Me neither. You going to try to kill me again?”

Nope.

“What do they call you?”

He looks up in the trees like he heard an uncommon rustling, eyebrows pinched, and then says, still looking, “Cat.”

I never knew if that’s what he saw or that’s who he was.

So I call him Cat, and it feels a comfort to have another body on my side, as if someone said my journey was all right, no harm in it, no folks abandoned. Lonely, one can feel a guilt, can even forget where the road ends, but this little white man keeps me
thinking of each hour as it comes, wondering if he’ll turn me in or say he’s a murderer or do a shuffle dance with a smile on his face, for all are as likely as the others.

He walks always a couple feet to the side and back, making me look like the master, which suits me fine. If you put a confidence on your face, people stop looking at you. There are enough funny-colored men on this path that I’m not so clear a runaway, and having a white man along never hurts. I’ve seen Indians dark as me trading slaves who looked like they had two white parents. Down here, color all depends on who you know, what people you can call your kin. But my plan is to walk until kin doesn’t matter either, way out where the only colors are blue sky and brown ground and us humans are so little on the land, gnats, that you can hardly tell whether we’re dark or light. When I find the westward road, it won’t be any problem just shooing Cat on his way, and if he begs to come, I’ll rope him to a tree and leave him with a solid meal and maybe a whistle so he can call for help when I’m well enough away. For now, he’ll suit.

I set us up under an old oak for lunch, its roots billowing out like a dress mid-swing, and I give him a side of bread though not half, me being the leader of this all. He’s gnawing away quiet, teeth not even meeting teeth, when a man looking more properly white drags a mule past us and then stops and turns on his heel right around, the mule backing up startled on its legs. He looks at Cat and me with pointy eyes and says, or more like growls, that he’s looking for a man run away from murder, small and blue-eyed, who’s known to have blood on his breeches and comes from up north, maybe Carolina, or else Delaware.

He’s talking to Cat, who’s still chomping on his bread and doesn’t say anything. I won’t lie and say my heart didn’t go cold a little. But
it only takes me a minute to look at one white man, dirt-thin and quiet, and then the other, who looks like he’d arrest any man who was cross-eyed, and figure out which one I’ll line up with. I give a big spit like I don’t care and say, “Haven’t seen no man with such breeches. This here’s my master, deaf and dumb. Been his slave for twenty-odd year and never left West Florida, him or me.”

“You in West Georgia now, boy.”

“Never left West Georgia neither.”

“What’s your farm called?”

I say a few words in Spanish that translate to something like “Sugar Whip God,” and that sounds enough like a plantation to make him ask next where we’re headed.

“Horse market,” I say. “Couple mares died on us. Run ’em rough down there.” I don’t know where you get horses, but I suppose at a market like anything else. “That’s a nice one,” I say, pointing at his patchy old mule. “You selling?”

He squints at me and his bottom lip is tucking in and out of his teeth like he’s thinking on it and he turns to Cat and asks, “You deaf?”

I hold my breath, but Cat doesn’t even glance at him. I don’t know whether he’s protecting me or himself, or if he’s as much an idiot as I’m pretending.

“
You deaf?
” he asks again louder, and Cat just sitting there chewing that damn piece of bread a hundred times.

“He was fine for many years, sir, but afore he was out of short pants he stood too close to a church bell and the ringing busted his ears all up. Hasn’t said a word since.” I’m real polite, not knowing at that point how high up church bells are, but the man must not know either because he says, “That right,” like it isn’t every day he sees such a thing, and he spits and turns again and
drags that mule right on down the road, the two of them kicking up shoots of dust behind.

I send up a praise to Jesus and study Cat, whose white arms are hatched now with the branch shadows from above, this place we’ve stopped looking more, in fact, like church than trail. His brows don’t even bend, his eyes still as stones under clear water.

“You kill a man?” I ask, and he doesn’t look at me but shakes his head slow, back and forth.

“Not a man,” he says, and his voice is hoarse.

“Well, that’s a relief,” I say and decide not to bully the point, though he is small and blue-eyed and I did first meet him when he was trying to cut my throat. That’ll teach a man to fall asleep on the road. “You from Carolina?” I ask, but this is bullying, which I said I wouldn’t do, and sure enough he doesn’t make a peep to answer. I’ll figure it out in time. If he had a reason to kill some old man up in Carolina, doesn’t mean he’ll go around shooting people willy-nilly. Just because I ran away from one place doesn’t mean I’ll run from another.

I’m all done eating before he’s finished with those slow chews so I clean up our little patch, brushing crumbs from the root hollows like it was a table with linen to keep clean. I told myself I wouldn’t get too wild, wouldn’t lose those things that made me a man, like talking civil and cleaning myself and watching out for the weaker ones. Winna claimed I’d turn back to animal, hunched over creeks like a dog for water and tearing at raw bones, but she never saw I was climbing up from slave, not down from man. I won’t say she was happy being bound on that land, which maybe wouldn’t be fair, but she did see herself as living a life, like anyone else would, which I couldn’t see for trying. Wasn’t a life at all, just a way of dying.

The leaves of the live oaks, fallen last, start rustling up in the afternoon, it still being March and tending toward cool when the sun dips out. In the walking, I’m working my way toward a direction. It’s not as straight as you’d first figure, for though the farm in my head lies between here and where the sun dies, the trail runs north, and my story of still being my master’s man will fade out not many miles farther, and then what face will I put on, what food on my tongue? So I reckon as I walk, and I’m just as glad for the cover of a white man, however stickish and shifty.

Only when we collapse into the evening, color of a mourning dove, and shuffle our leaf piles for pillows a tossed rock’s distance from the road do I think more carefully of the man looking for the murderer, the white man with his mule and his eyes searching. He could’ve been a man looking for me, there’d surely soon be men looking for me, and I hadn’t even been sharp enough to know to be afraid. Of Cat, yes, but not of him. Mingo could’ve said something easy, or maybe Winna gave me up to get better bread for the girls. I’m not a brave man, though I’ve done what brave men do, and if I spoke to myself and was honest, I’d say I haven’t thought things through. I think I can scamper off some-hundred miles and no one’ll mind? No one will come hunting to fetch back their property, what they paid plenty dollars for? I’ll be found and dragged, sure enough, straight back to the cane fields, and when I’m there, all worn out from the dragging, they’ll make Winna watch my whipping and give her whatever bits of me they slice off. I lie down fidgety and in three seconds Cat is snoring and the sky has dressed itself in fast black and a rabbit is thumbing its nose through the scramble of brush between my feet, and I am now fully afraid. I can’t shake the picture of my fingers, one by one, getting lopped off and
passed on to my wife, who’s long since disowned me. And it’s not a guess or a what-if, but a firm truth, that I will die if here and now I don’t prevail. And even short of death, what chance do I have without a single coin to pay my way? Am I just going to take that farm for free? My dream grew like a straight tall weed in the dirt around the slave cabins, bloomed as yellow as a hope, and I plucked it and stuck it in my breast patch and carried it gleaming down the road of my deliverance, and now, two days’ hard walk from home, or the opposite of home, my weed is slumped and wilting and through its browning petals asks me what the hell I expect.

A night bird lets out a whistle above my head, its call stretched thin at the end, like someone was squeezing it through his hands. I tuck up my legs tight to my chest, scaring off the rabbit, and know my flower’s dead; only God and his miracles will see me through alive.

The people I have loved aren’t taking this walk—my mother, stolen from me; my brother, who stole himself; my children, who don’t know what it means to steal. My outside eyelids are closed tight, because it’s nighttime and I should be sleeping, knowing what a long walk I have tomorrow and every day after that, but there are some kind of inside eyelids that keep fluttering up and won’t close, no matter how hard I try to squeeze them. Winna’s in my head now, the woman I never loved more than myself, and she’s pointing straight on, away from her belly, away from white sugar, from black bodies, westward, and I am going, if the Lord doesn’t take me first, and I’m starting to think he will.

I WALK MORE
timid in the morning. I am almost resolved that Cat will kill me after all, and then I turn my head quick and
he’s wiping a tear from his eye or gnawing on the side of his thumb, and if he’s not an idiot then I’m the one fooled. I tell him what the plan is, which is that even though we’re both free and honorable men, with a wink, best that we hide ourselves if ever there’s likely to be trouble. No telling how many bounty hunters are maundering around, or who they’re keeping eyes out for. So instead of pretending to be mighty today, we step a little more quiet and over to one side, in the dip that runs along the trail, so that we can scoot up the bank into the bushes if we hear a horse train coming. The plan is really that I’ll just keep putting feet in a long straight row toward north, hoping I’ll know when the left turn’ll be. I ask Cat if he’s ever been in this part of the world before, and he shakes his head.

“Your home look anything like this?” I try to picture where he comes from, what rocky hills or barren plain gave rise to such a flint of a man, because he’s sure been traveling days. “You ever see a big old stretch of meadow, no trees or anything, with no white folks anywhere near? Maybe west of here? You been west of here?”

He shakes his head.

I don’t push him. Sometimes it looks like he’s been crying for a week and just left off. I keep talking to him, because talking is how to cross over all the big holes in the world.