Free Men (25 page)

I HAD BEEN
on the paths for a year when spring rolled open again with the first wood flowers and airy nights. Polly caught a basket of new dandelion leaves and fed me their crispness on a
grass bank by the river, just out of sight of the fields. She watched me sideways as I chewed through the bitter, and when I reached for her hand she tucked hers between her knees. In watching my purse fill, we sometimes forgot how to love each other, or our love was just siphoned into different ruts. There were times when I came back grimed and weary after a week’s absence and she flinched at my touch. She said my skin was getting rougher, my skin hurt her skin. I’d step away and sleep that night on the floor beside her bed, reaching out to brush her cheek only after I knew she was asleep. I asked my mother, whose eyes were milking over with age, if this was a normal thing between a man and a woman, and she raised her eyebrows and turned down the corners of her mouth as if to say,
You think I’d remember?
Her heart had fallen out after one, two, three of her children died.

On that new spring night, Polly fed me greens but wouldn’t give me her kiss. I don’t think it hurt me when she pulled her hand away.

Plucking grasses and skinning the reeds between her long fingers, she told me of her uncle’s guests, a fresh party of Englishmen, loyalists they named themselves, heading south for Spanish lands and safety.

“I thought you might guide them,” she said. “The man who leads them, Kirkland, has enough money to purchase half of Pensacola.”

I lay back and crossed my hands on my stomach. The sky was dying away, purple now and sad. Night too was lovely, but it stole something from the day, and even when this theft was quiet, there was a violence in the act that made dusk a sorrowful thing to watch. A loss.

Polly was describing the quantity of Kirkland’s silver.

An owl flew large and thick above us, two beats of the wing before we lost it to the dark again. It had heard the rustle of a shrew, too fine a sound for my ears to catch. My body seemed as fallible lately as my mind.

“He’s staking out lands for his family, a wife and daughter he left behind somewhere. In the Carolinas, near Charleston, I think. Maybe as far as Richmond.”

“That’s not in the Carolinas,” I said.

“He’s very handsome and fat and dresses neat—you should see him, get a nice waistcoat like that—and has skin like a cloud. Did you hear what I said about his silver?” She waited to see if my eyes would catch the fire in her own, but I was looking up, watching for the owl to fly back with the shrew in its mouth.

“Last night I saw him in the council house. He stayed after the others left and smoked no pipe at all but drew out thin paper and ink in a bottle, and he scrawled along line after line in these tight bunches on the page. If he were staying longer, I’d ask him to teach me to read English, which I’m perfectly good at otherwise. Looks like the marks spiders leave through the dust. What do you think he was writing?”

I felt the reed she flung at me bounce against my neck. She knew I hated things out of place. I half listened, trying to decide if I loved her voice.

“I think it was a message to his family. All white men have families somewhere else.” I could have reached out to her then, but didn’t. “‘My wife! My children!’ he’d write. ‘Bounteous English love is yours!’ Don’t you think that’s how they sound? ‘I will build a Pensacola paradise, and you will join me in the summer when the red flowers bloom, and you will never again have to plant corn or pound hominy, for we will be choked in riches.’”

I shook my head. “English women don’t eat hominy.”

“How do you know? Have you met some?” She crawled over to me and hovered her face above mine so her long hair brushed in my eyes. “Who do you see down there when you go? Do you keep an English lady whore? Do you buy her cotton dresses, which is why your purse sometimes seems smaller than it should?”

I sat up, pushing her aside, and decided that I did love her, though no one had told me what love meant, and maybe it wasn’t wholly sweet or giving but just the way two people needed each other. I wanted Polly in my life, with all her flits and needling, because without her I’d be even more alone, one step farther away from what it is I wanted. My days were better with her than without her, though my days were never fully good. I assumed she thought the same of me. So I said, “My love,” holding her shoulders, “it’s just us, no English lady whores. I show you each coin I get. You’ve seen them. I’ll have enough to marry you by the next Green Corn.” I held her shoulders until she nodded.

She stood up and danced to the river with small foot-stomps, brushing with the toes, digging in the heels, until she reached the water and let her feet sink in an inch of muck. She looked back across a bare shoulder. “Kirkland is leaving in a few days. You should ask my uncle to join them.”

We were both thinking then of money. If an owl had flown by again, I wouldn’t have seen it. Polly didn’t return to me and I thought she might want to bathe alone or else be silent, so I stood and left her, walked down the river to the set of stones that made a path across the water and stepped from one to the next, pausing in the middle of the stream. It was almost full dark now, and the rocks beneath the water, round and brown when
the sun scissored through, were invisible in the wash of black. If I put my foot in, the water would be cool, but there seemed a long distance between my wanting to feel the coolness and the heaviness of my feet, so I stood still, my head dropped to my chest like I had been newly created, no bones yet, and left to dry. I needed to think of my love for a woman, to sort out whether she was as good as my mother, but I only wanted to deal with the world of men, where good and evil were evenly split, red town from white town, boy from ghost, and where destroying the killer of my uncle was so little complicated that it allowed me to stand perfectly still in a river at night, my muscles slumping into peace.

I don’t know how long I was gone. I didn’t watch the stars to see how they’d moved; I didn’t feel a creeping dew on my skin. I came back to my house and my mother and brother were sleeping, so I left again, my feet not done with wandering, this time taking me into the cornfields, picking through the rows of new sprouts. They were tangled in the threads of cowpeas. It took me hours of not-knowing, of looking hard in my heart for feelings I couldn’t find, of trying to see a version of myself that had nothing to do with Polly or Seloatka, with my uncle or my purse, before I gave up. My path so far had taken me unharmed and with increasing purpose to this night wandering, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t continue to carry me through. Doubt had little nobility in it. And what felt selfish at times—love, anger—wasn’t at all, because I did it in another’s name. My life was not my own, but my clan’s. After the storms that unsettled my village and my people and after the wars that had taken away the very steadiness of our ground, there was a great void that begged to be filled.

I didn’t see anything living that night because I wasn’t watching. This blindness returned me to my purpose, which had nothing to do with the ghost children that Oche saw, or the turtle shells we gathered to rattle on our ankles, or the clouds we studied to see whether they’d bring water to our fields.

Not till dawn did I return to my mother’s house with fired eyes, to dig under my bed, to gauge my money, and to chart the next step—marriage and then alliances and then Seloatka’s seat, my mother in his house, his body bent and wretched in our cabin, pushed to the outside edge of belonging until he slipped off entirely. This all depended on power, which, without violence, only came from wealth. This was the new world we lived in.

I passed Oche at the door, who was taking his hide and needle to a cousin’s, still wiping the sleep from his eyes. He stopped with his face open in a question and said, “The
mico
came looking for you last night. Mother was still in the fields. You weren’t here.”

I was surprised, and asked if he was sure this hadn’t happened years ago.

“I told Polly when she came by later, but he was gone and you were gone, and this all seemed to make her pleased, so we shared dinner with her. She borrowed your pony.”

Seloatka must have come to beg my help, to place Kirkland and the English in my hands, to crawl on his belly like a night worm. If he was afraid I’d plant that vision-knife in him, he didn’t understand. I wanted his dignity, not his life. I wanted the traitor to watch my power spread from field to river to hunting ground, to see an untasted peace settle on the town for a century.

I left my brother and slipped into our house, stooped low by
my bed. I needed to count the coins again, count out the distance between now and what was to come. My fingers were in the packed dirt under the red stone, digging. I fished out the purse.

It was empty.

It hung like a spent stomach in my hand.

W
E CROSS BACK
over the creek, our shoulders weighted down with new silver, and crash through trees to find the trail again. Our boots are filled with silt. This is not what we intended. Not these lives lost. A deer skitters as we push through the woods, heedless of sound now. The blood on my hands smells like the fawn, like something young and newly broken. Bob and I keep pace, hurrying, our breath heavy. I turn my head once to make sure Cat is keeping up. Why, I’m not sure—because he belongs to Bob, because he is a witness. Is this how my brothers felt when they brought down men in war? No, because that was just, and this is not, this is merely bandits stealing. I am not a thief. I was convinced that this had some nobler purpose, and I can admit that I was easy to convince, thinking of myself, as I did, as noble. This theft is not for me, but for my people, for whoever I decide are my people. They deserve a good man for a
mico.
If I am still a good man.

We climb the bank again, skid down onto the trading path.
It’s empty of life. Cat comes behind us with his mouth open, his eyes numb. I am sweating in the cool night, my thoughts splintering on what little I saw as I hurt men in the dark, taking their money while saving my life. Self-defense. I try to settle on some image of peace. Forgetting my suspicions, I think first of Polly, of her father’s-daughter face, but on her slim body perches the fat head of Kirkland, the ruddy-cheeked man, her laughter melting to a scream. He sounded like a calf dying. I shake my head to blur the image. In all that fury, I saw my uncle. The bodies of everyone I’ve known are becoming the bodies of everyone else I’ve known.

When I first saw Thomas Colhill on the road, saw how his dark eyes danced like Polly’s and then heard his name, I thought,
Here is the man who fathered my girl and then abandoned her, she who is not sweet but who in all likelihood stole my purse from me, here is the man who left a rotten woman for me.
I cannot believe that she admired him, or his white blood, beneath her hatred. And yet she talked of Richmond. No one wronged her family, so what is she hunting for? It is no use trying to fathom her, because she is a liar and a thief.

I am a young man, but not a stupid one. In the panic after finding the empty hole beneath my bed, I remembered my brother’s words: that Seloatka, and then she, had come to see me. What had been my plan in packing a bag and marching through the dawn, horseless, blood behind my eyes? I feared if I stayed in the village I would kill him. I would kill him that day. So I would leave and on my own find a path to wealth and with that wealth come back, in two years or five years or ten, and topple his kingdom. Bloodlessly. I’m a good shot and I know English and many of the white traders, and I could be
come a middleman, earning a wage for my services in negotiating trades, guiding travelers, evaluating goods, before using that money to build alliances; I know there are Muskogee chiefs who want to extend their reach, and Chickasaws who could use assurances. The revenge I wanted was a clean one, a triumph not of strength but of power. He had taken my uncle, he had taken my money, my means to marry, and now I would take his chiefdom, my birthright.

Except that as I walked, as I waited for deer, as I met these men who would pull me down their own uncertain paths, it seemed less and less true that Seloatka had taken my money. He, after all, was the one who had given it to me. I was his servant on the trails, he paid my wage without complaint, all because he wanted me close, wanted to have his hands on my strings. Could I imagine him bent and scrabbling in a hole beneath my bed? The
mico
dirtying his fingers for a purse? He didn’t even know where I kept it. No, he didn’t need my money. I lost track of the features of the trail—the tall sweetgum that marked the path to the watering hole, the signs men carved for each other—because I was circling through every word she ever said to me.

She told me about Kirkland, knew about his fortune, knew about my purse, counted the coins I brought her, wanted more. As we grew older, everything Polly knew was what we didn’t yet have. I couldn’t see this, didn’t mind this, because I was the same.

I can picture her with them, with Kirkland and his kin, flirting with her shoulders in the dark near the council house, the fire lighting the gleams of her teeth as she asks them what ten pounds can buy in the city. Whether she can pass for a white woman. She must have already fled, not knowing that her theft
would scatter me too. So the pony she took from me was as borrowed as the purse. What is the first thing she will spend my coins on? A mirror?

Not until I saw the trading party and stood before Kirkland, who was as white and fat as she promised, and met her father, who must have walked through our town without even remembering he had a child, not until I heard the mule’s
clink
did the full weight of my loss fall on me, and my shock at what she’d done turned to anger, the kind that flurries your head and makes you follow a black man into the night. If I’d had a horse, I would not have met these men I’m walking with. And if I hadn’t met these men?

We stop in the middle of the road, not knowing whether to turn north or south. We didn’t take the horses because we didn’t think, because they were noisy, would be easier to track. We haven’t thought. I drop the bag from my back just to breathe, to try to settle my sense of wrongdoing. I was not the one to shoot Thomas Colhill to his knees, but I saw it and felt the split of love and rage burn me. Will she blame me for this? She called him bastard.

Bob claws at his shoulder, asks, “Where are we going? How do we hide? Should we split the money now, huh?” as if all his shame was turned to words, but I can see the darkness on his shirt. We don’t answer him, and Cat moves to pull the man’s hand away from his shoulder. Beneath is the blood that comes from a hole in his arm.

“It’s nothing,” Bob says. “We’ve got to move, come on now.”

Cat looks at me. The nighthawks bleat. The trees drooping over the road are black and shapeless, the night sky beyond still purpling, the trail empty in its starred and violet stare. It has an
ugliness that I never saw before. Bob shifts his load to his other shoulder and heads south again. There isn’t time. We follow.

I am marking all the future steps in my head, deciding what will happen based on what I choose to do. What I want now, if not her. If she were here, I don’t know that I could keep my hands from her body. If she betrayed me, took my money, loved my money more than me, drove me in mindlessness and desperation to send a trading party off to the dark world, all to replace the coins she stole, is it possible to still want her?

We pause at dawn. I steer them behind a grove of oaks hanging on with root fingers to the clay bluffs. A mosquito has been following Bob and the smell of his blood. He itches at his neck with his good arm, swats at himself because it is something to do with shaky hands. These men crouch among thorns and stare at me for answers. I ache to wash the red off me; it’s all disorder.

I tell them what I guess: the
mico
Seloatka, who sent those white men down from our nation with his blessing and protection, will learn of this by tomorrow and will hunt us, within reason, until we are dead and scalped. I don’t tell them that I would be an easy man for him to kill, that my torture would not disturb his sleep. But we have torn a hole in a flimsy fabric, and the death of named men in West Georgia must be addressed, will be addressed, or else strangers will take arms again. I have created mischief, chaos, where I meant to solve it. Bob’s hand is passing over the back of his head in waves, smoothing, worrying.

Cat asks, “What do we do?”

His first words since before the creek. There is a brightness to him now that is either hope or mania.

“What do we do?”

Bob and I look at him, a man asking for comfort, and say
nothing. I should be least worried about him, a white fugitive surely hardened to violence, but I am somehow not surprised to see his panic. He has in his eyes a stretching, beaten-down need. He must have loved, and been punished, a hundred times. I try to tell the truth. How a man will come for us, the chief’s Frenchman, a hungry-eyed tracker, wiry. The Clerk, they call him. How some say he has no mercy, has never held a baby, but I soothe them. He is smart and sure, but he doesn’t strike me as a killing man, and anyway he moves so turtle-slow that if we walk quickly and rest little, even horseless, he cannot find us. He is a white man, after all, and these are not his woods. Bob looks at me with such worry, as though I were holding his fate like a whip, and Cat murmurs to himself, pats his shirt pocket. He is afraid of something, but I don’t believe it’s death.

The first light is rain-shower gray. Cat crawls to Bob and presses his hand against the other man’s chest until Bob stretches back, lies flat on the red earth. Cat touches his forehead to feel for fever. He takes off his own shirt, twists it, squeezes the creek water out, drapes it across Bob’s eyes. When the slave is masked and Cat’s fingers have been washed with his own spit, he tears the sleeve from Bob’s arm, rubs away the blood and dirt with a slow palm, and then snakes his finger into the shoulder’s wet wound. I turn away at Bob’s scream. Surely a doctor would have put the rag in his mouth instead. When I turn back, Cat is holding the bullet in his hand, shifting it like a pearl to catch the light.

“That’s all?” I ask.

Bob’s breaths now come out loud, each a huff. Even I can see that the bullet is the least of it.

“I can’t clean it,” Cat says. He wraps Bob’s sleeve around the injury and ties it tight, but the cloth is thick with dirt.

“So we get him a doctor.”

Cat looks up at me with surprise. Nods.

“You want to leave me, that’s fine,” Bob calls out from under the mask. “No reason to take me on in this state, I’d just be a weight. If you leave me—” His voice is getting higher, so he stops, breathes deep. “If you leave me—”

Cat wipes the damp shirt in circles on Bob’s face, cleaning the emotion, and then draws it off, puts it back on his pale chest. Bob opens one eye. Cat offers a hand to pull him up and then we are all three standing again. The white man holds the bullet out on his palm, but Bob shakes his head, so he throws it into the woods, where some creature will come hours later to smell the human on it.

“We need to find someone,” I say.

“I can’t hide.” Bob wraps one hand around his chest, trying to clutch out the pain. “I’m a free man. I’m a free man.” He looks behind him as if this were being contested. The dawn birds are twittering, a high wet sound, and we are all listening for the heavier sounds of feet.

“We need to get off the trail—either you die of that hole, or the tracker finds us.”

“That’s what I’m saying, go west. I have it all figured. Plenty of land out there. My brother, the one I told you about, told me.”

“And your arm?”

I glance at Cat, who looks puzzled. Or content. He’s like water the way his face holds moods.

“We should do something,” Cat says. In his voice is not our present predicament but a longer vision of events. He is like Oche, for whom time was nothing but a small mat to set your shoes on. The whole world lay beyond it.

Bob scratches at his knee.

I know what we need to do: split the silver, shake hands, share a drink for luck, and leave. There is no reason to go on together. I have nothing to do with these men. I met them two nights ago, and I’m not even sure that the white man’s name is his name. But my skin flinches at the thought of parting, as though they’re the blanket between my body and the ghosts. They’re the sticks that need arranging. Does violence rope the wicked together? If I leave them, who else will understand me? And where will they go without me? The black man will die, and the white man will be scooped up in a day by Le Clerc. None of that is deserved. I have been a coward already too many times.

“There’s a woman, an old trader who knows some medicine and keeps a house off the western spur. You want to head west, I’ll take you as far as that. And there are some paths branching off that Le Clerc won’t know. Give us time to plan, to fix you up.”

“You’re coming with me?” Bob says.

“Look at you.” I can’t describe how scared I am of what has happened. “We can’t scatter like mice. We’ve done this, and if we mean what we’ve done, we need to finish it.” I watch him move his tongue inside his mouth, puffing out his cheeks, thinking about what the
it
is.

“You can come,” he says, looking at the ring of us. “Get your own land out there.”

“We head west, we stop at the woman’s house, we decide from there. But we move now. Le Clerc isn’t the only one trailing us.”

Bob looks at Cat, at the man who maybe already murdered, and I look at Bob, who stole his own body away from slavery.
Who knows what bounty hunters and slave patrols are already sniffing out our scent. We are a circle of glances. What we have for each another is not trust, but need, and there is no future to it.

I grab my bag, heavy with everything I can’t put down, and start walking fast. South. I don’t look back, but soon hear their footsteps behind me, one half jogging and one in a shuffle as rhythmed as my mother’s voice, my mother who has already lost so many sons. We kick up the dust of mingled day and night.

THE TRAIL IS
empty this morning, but just as I am beginning to consider it good luck, a man comes over a hill before us. He has a tangle of woolly hair and is dragging a cart with two wheels behind him. Inside are stacks of newspapers weighted down with rocks. I have seen a few in Pensacola, and traders on occasion bring a paper to Hillaubee, but they are usually several months old and say little that we have not already heard. He draws the cart to a stop when he sees us. The handle of the conveyance is attached to his wrist by a long red ribbon. I keep walking, head down, hoping the men behind me will follow my lead without speaking, but the stranger holds out a hand as we approach. I stop. I can see a pistol stuck in the waist of his trousers.