Free Men (9 page)

The sun’s starting to creep its way up the sky. Planting time’s already past, and I suck on a bone trying to picture the others bending down, feeling their creaking backs and the sweat coming down their necks. I don’t like that we’re turning on our heels and heading right back toward those sugar poles. Cat bares his teeth and I flinch, but he’s just fiddling out his food again. The Indian folds his sleeping cloth, and when he starts brushing straight the needles beneath the trees, wiping away the mess of us, I remember there’ll soon be men on my trail. And the kind of men they are—well, they’re the ones who wouldn’t blink to kill you, who don’t have any sort of poor dreams at night, who look at you and see not a man but a runaway pig. Now that I’m outside the fence I’m in the range of their guns, and everything I left behind suddenly seems like the worst thing a man could ever meet. I don’t know why I stayed so long, except leaving has brought me to this: a fearful panic in my bones. I think of myself as a decent man—good to the woman that was given me and good to the little ones too, and I took my whippings lying
down—but I start to see how a man could want to kill, how a man might be driven to it, how goodness is measured in all sorts of ways. If I saw a white man with a whip coming through the trees, apologies to Cat, I’d shoot him through the eye without thinking twice.

We finish up making camp look like a regular old dust wallow and move on quiet down the trail, the Indian looking ahead and Cat looking down and me every few steps turning my head around to see who’s coming. Cat doesn’t ask once why we’ve turned right around again, and this gives me some comfort, though I’ll keep my rope ready for the day I need to tie him up and leave him, another white man to put aside.

What do three mostly-strangers talk about on a long road with nothing to see but sometimes a knocked-down log in the path or a drunken man with one leg shorter than the other or a woodpecker flying over, the size of a child? I talk about all the stories of my life and leave enough spaces in the telling to hear their own, if they ever want to speak on it. I wouldn’t want to make Cat say whether or not he murdered a man, but I’d like a little detail, some wife, some child, something of what it was like growing up as a white boy. Sometimes the Indian stops to listen for a far-off noise, and sometimes Cat just stops to think, but we keep catching up to each other. I learn a few small things: the Indian has a name, Ispallina or Istillosha, and when I asked if either of them had a lady at home, their faces both got funny. I learn that wherever the snappy sticks and leaf piles are, my feet find them right away, while Cat and the Indian seem to walk right around them, though they don’t appear to be studying the path more than me. And so whenever horse hooves sound from far off, they’re the first to clamber off the road, and those are the
times when I’m glad they’re so quiet and I’m attached to their oddness by some strange accident and not all on my own.

You’d think a day of walking after days of planting cane wouldn’t be so wearisome, but I find the slower you go, the more your legs catch on and start to have some contrary thoughts. I miss the horse my master gave me, and wonder what happened to these other men’s rides. Maybe they aim to shrink, to show men walking past no more than the smallest sliver of their guilty selves. Now that we’re creeping backward, my feet are nervous and I’m holding my breath until we make that western spur.

We’re getting closer to Winna now, and her voice comes weaving in again, saying if she were going to run, she’d head south to the free towns and the pockets of Florida maroons, not straight into the belly of the Brits, but I said they aren’t Brits anymore and who knows but maybe they’ll be confused now about who belongs to who. Lord knows I asked her to come. Leave the children with the granny, that’s what she’s there for. Winna’s a good woman, even if I can’t quite remember how her face fits together just now, and I think of how to get her out of there, save her skin. I’d buy her if I had the money, and maybe that’ll come once my crops are planted all straight in a row. I don’t try to think of how things would be different if Beck had married me—if she’d be here now, or if I’d’ve been so dulled with love that I’d never have found myself on such a brazen path.

Up ahead, I can hear the Indian asking Cat the same questions I’ve asked him. Who he is, what he’s about, why all the moping around and the following strangers. But more delicate than I did. Like if he turns the right key, all the man’s secrets will come tumbling out. I’ve only known the white man for a day, and I know better than that.

We stop under one of the endless stretching oaks for biscuits. Mother of god, I can hardly keep my knees from bouncing. I’m antsing to get away, to break west, and every little pause sounds like the men with guns are coming, though there’s not a soul yet has cause to be suspicious, other than the two men who sit right here. I say how hungry I am in a dozen ways, but no one is listening, not even my own self. I gnaw on a biscuit knowing my lace cookies are still hidden in the bottom of my sack. I’m holding on to them like there’ll be a tomorrow when I’ll eat them up. Cat is sitting next to me against the trunk, making little patterns in the dirt with his fingernail, and the Indian—Istillicha, he corrected me—is hunched a few paces off, just where the longest branches start to dip down, somehow eating without crumbs. We’ve only passed a few traders; some we’ve let walk right past us, I figure because the Indian can smell from a mile off whether they’re trouble or not, and the others we’ve watched from our perch in the shrubs. Whether we’re walking or sitting, I can’t stop talking, and even though the others seem to need this rest, I ramble on. I don’t even care that I’m giving myself away to two strange-eyed men.

“When I get there,” I say, “everybody’ll know about it. Everybody’ll stop and say ‘Who, Bob? Never have thought,’ and maybe they’ll get to thinking of things on their own power, so as I’ll see them out there one day, plowing a little field alongside mine, and our donkeys’ll greet and we’ll set up on the porches and share water.” All this, though I can’t bear the thought of sharing. The only man I’d welcome on my porch is long since dead.

“And you?” the Indian asks Cat. “What man will you tell these secrets to?” Meaning not just mine but the Indian’s, though he certainly hasn’t given us much to tell.

“Lay off him,” I say.

Cat scrapes up a fingerful of dirt to taste it. “I don’t know any men.”

“You’re sneakier than he is, we want to go talking about sneaks.”

“No sneaks,” the Indian says. “I want to know the risks. What risk is this man. He has no weapon, but he has a tongue.”

“Some fellows are just fellows,” I say.

“You are still young.”

“No younger than you, the way I see it. Just because I don’t tie the man to a tree doesn’t mean—” But I don’t know what it doesn’t mean, because tying Cat to a tree is very much still part of my plan. “I’ve got it all figured,” I say. “So you keep to your own worries.”

“And if he is a murderer?”

Poor Cat, watching all this and not blinking. Just sad.

“Then he’d have done us in already,” I say, not really knowing.

We finish up our biscuits without talking, our eyes moving from one body to the other and back again.

The farther we walk, the dimmer it gets, not because the clouds are congregating but because the trees start standing in closer together, all in a pile, breaking up the daylight. I’ve spent too much time plowing that western field in my head, feeding my donkey gold-rimmed hay while I pat its fat belly with my hand spread out wide, and not enough time wondering about why no woman has seen the same, why no woman has believed in that patch of free land that’s waiting for the man who’ll plant it. Spending a day with two men will make you miss a lady.

Istillicha says there’s a creek ahead where we’ll stop for wa
ter, and I’m wondering if he or Cat’s ever had troubles with women. Maybe they too are poor understood and want to rope themselves a mule and come on out, though I’ll ask them to sit on their own porches, all three of us of an evening watching the same sun that sets on my captive brothers set over me.

COUPLE HOURS LATER
we stop again, and I tire of stopping, but this place is as peaceful as it comes. We’re about a half-mile east of the trail down a red dirt path and can’t hear any footsteps here, just the gurgle of smooth water as it goes shallow over sand. The bottom’s got pebbles and caught leaves and slippery greens, and the water is sometimes fast and sometimes slow, and I wouldn’t be paying it much attention if it didn’t remind me some of the creek by my old home in Virginia, the one that tickled Primus’s toes. On the red banks are bright yellow flowers on leggy stalks that flop toward the water like they’re thirsty. Remembering, I can’t say there were any flowers by the water when I was young, but that may be because I wasn’t looking. Sometimes things go right through you and sometimes you just want to sit and watch for as long as the daylight lasts. A pudgy bird swings blue over the water, flying low to look for fish. The chirpers that sounded like saws on the plantation now come together like chimes. Everything here has a sweet sound, kind of distant.

I try to slap some water into my mouth, but Istillicha stops me and shows me how to cup it, waiting for the tadpoles to swim out. We’re all a little calmer here, less like strangers.

“I must’ve walked past this two dozen times,” I say, “same as you, but never knew such a nice place was here.” I wipe my hands on my shirt and smile at the way the water still cools my throat. “Where does this go?”

“A few miles down, it falls into the Conecuh.”

I try to sound that out, but let the word go. It occurs to me what a handsome man too this Indian is, and how big he must be among his people. Where is he going all by himself, with not even a horse? I know plenty of Creeks, and I’ve never seen one hang around a black man, showing him the way, passing time. I hope he isn’t looking for a fee.

“How much farther?” I ask. I stick my feet in the water, try to rub the sore out of them. Istillicha looks around for Cat, who’s squatted by a tree and is gnawing at something. I always know where the white man is. Sometimes he feels like a child of mine, another one I’ll have to leave.

“Half a day’s walk, maybe less,” he says, “before the western spur.”

“You can just point me what to look for, you know, and I can manage on my own.” I had to say this to see what he’d say, but something went a little funny in me waiting for his answer. I’d hate to give up a man who knows how to shoot things. First time I get to be alone in all my life, and here I am hoping he’ll stick with me a few hours more.

He’s looking off to the north, still standing, waiting for the sound of something, but after a second or two he looks down and rubs his knuckles in his eyes, digging the tired out. “It’s near enough to some border land with good hunting,” he says.

“You got a gun?” I ask.

He nods.

“So which one you use?” I point to the bow that curves around his back.

“Whatever is—what do you say, handy? Closest to hand. It depends also who is around to hear.”

“And you’re doing this all by yourself? Where are the others? Don’t the women come sometimes and cook you meals?”

He stops and listens again. I’d get tired of hearing as many things as an Indian does.

“Where exactly you running to?”

He snaps his head back to me like I was a deer crunching through the wood. “I’m merely hunting,” he says.

“Doesn’t seem to me like you’d get much on your own. Say you nab a deer and then another, how you expect to tote them around? You’re strong, I’d bet, but I don’t see you dragging a bouquet of carcasses all around. Maybe you’re still hammering out your plan, that it? Waiting to see what opportunities walk past? I’ll tell you now, I don’t have none of my master’s money on me. Check my coat.” I start tugging it off, but he frowns.

“I have no interest in you.”

Cat is looking over at us, a wash of fright on his forehead.

“Unless you know a chief of the Chickasaws or Seminoles.”

“What’s going on with them?” I wish he’d sit down, because it’s giving my neck an ache to be peering up at him. Makes him look even more like a statue.

“Eventually I’ll seek an alliance.”

“This is some Indian war foolery. That’s all right, then.”

But he’s not done telling. “I had money from the trade and lost it. Should have led my town, but lost that.”

“How’d you lose the money?” That being more interesting to me.

“It was taken.”

“Stolen? You plan on fetching it back?”

“I need someone to support my cause. And whether that’s
another Muskogee town eager for an unseating, or a garrison of Americans, I must buy my way into those talks.”

“I told you,” I say, laughing, but quieter now, “you can’t carry all those skins. Cat’d help you, but he weighs less than a deer.”

“It’s not skins I’ll barter with. Money. It’s coins that move nations now.”

“And how’re you going to get those coins?”

“Ah.” He nearly smiles, I swear he does. “Selling skins?”

Cat is lifting up water with his right hand and pouring it over his left, and back again on the other side. He’s easier now that the Indian has loosened.

I say maybe he could work his way into the employ of my master, since there’s a man who’ll be hard up for a trader soon. I’ve known Indians who got snatched into slavery, though, so he’d need to strike a deal on his tiptoes. He listens and nods, and it’s almost a relief to know he’s still figuring. Same as me.

“And once you get that money and a bunch of men to get your town back, what’re you going to do then? Start yourself a little shop?”

He finally sits down beside me, letting go of whatever the forest was sounding like, and breaks off some tall grass to roll between his fingers. “Become chief,” he says.

I nod.
There’s a dream
, I think.
Running away, running to—all dreams.

I pick at him with a few more questions but he won’t talk about it anymore. I tell him I’d vote for him for chief. If I look half as handsome and proud in my foolishness as he does, well, it’s enough to make you think we’ll get wherever it is we’re going, nothing to be scared of, no bother that we’re fugitives and
penniless. I peek over at Cat to see how he compares and decide if you gave him a new suit and a haircut and slapped a smile on his face he’d be no less than a ladies’ man, with those big blue eyes and that moony way. The Lord doesn’t make ugly fates for such good-looking men.