Free Men (29 page)

Late in the morning, I hear the stranger’s approach before they do; another Indian appears through the trees and my party halts, the black man taking long steps backward so he will no longer appear to be in charge.

The two Indians stumble for a bit to find a common lexicon, and after some gesturing and nods, the foreign man gives a short, hard laugh and walks on, looking back once with amusement. I hold my breath against a tree and am pale enough in the paleness of the woods to go unnoticed.

“He knows something,” Bob says, flicking his head over his shoulder to make sure the distance between the parties grows. “You tell him who I was?”

“Yes, that you were a slave, and that your master here had lost the way.”

The other man appeared to be Shawnee; they are lucky not to have encountered an enemy. Though what is an enemy if a man will turn on his own people? I am also waiting for more word of this. That an Indian was of this raiding party was particularly galling to Seloatka and his men, who assumed he was Choctaw until the witness slave said, “No, Creek; certain.” One of their number had vanished several days prior to the incident at the stream, and though the man’s mother had reported his absence, the chieftain of the village had not chosen to pursue this information. I asked what sort of punishment he required, and Seloatka said that the man wasn’t of much value, that whether I killed him on the road or brought him back made little difference.

“And the silver?” I asked.

Get it if I could, he said, but it was a white man’s conceit, and for them to lose something precious in Creek territory was not the worst outcome, as long as we made plausible efforts. I did
not tell him that if the traitor was hoarding coins, he had a better sense of the southern territories’ trajectory than the chief did.

It is difficult to conceive why a man would desert and betray men of his own stripe and band instead with foreigners. Though of course here
I
am.

Now that the Shawnee is out of sight, the black man is louder. “Where did you tell him we were going?”

“As far as we could before you ran out of coin to pay me.”

“Ah, yes, yes,” he says, “make him laugh, take our money. Indian jokes. But you didn’t tell him about the Mississippi?”

I can’t guess what that river held for them.

“I believe he knows of it,” the Creek man says.

“But what’s
beyond
. Tell me, did you tell him where to find us? What all we’re going to set up? You told him what I’ve done.”

“I said nothing. What’s there is yours.”

This seems to calm Bob, and they walk a while longer in silence, sometimes shifting the weight of the silver from one shoulder to the other.

“That man know who you were?”

“No,” the Indian says. “I gave another name.”

“Would they kill you if you went home? That’s where those men were from, huh?”

“They might.”

Cat comes close then, as if to hear what horrors the Indian will face when forced to account for his sins.

“We did a wrong thing maybe by trying to take that money, but wasn’t any wrong in saving our own lives by taking theirs, because their guns were up and they’d have killed us, you saw them.” He shifts his bag emphatically. “And wasn’t much a wrong taking this money, because you know what they’d have
done with it, just add it in a pile to what they already had, and look at what we’re doing instead.”

In days prior, the Indian scoffed at this same language, attempting to distance himself from the act by the creek, but increasingly he seems to give in to this reasoning—if not to implicate himself, at least to excuse the other men. They are, by some inscrutable means, sliding into a version of his kin, though I know how strict the Creeks draw their clans, how any family sets itself apart from strangers. He now touches the black man on the shoulder.

“We need to change your dressing soon.”

The white man smiles.

We walk into the afternoon, and still they talk of the homes they left, of what they’ll do tomorrow and a month hence. Where the Indian will store his coins and skins while he rallies neighboring towns. If there is room between the Spanish and the Comanche for a black man’s farm. How Cat will look upon a donkey. They grow louder as they seem to put distance between themselves and consequence. Even the Shawnee let them pass. Their bodies move more easily, and the white man begins spilling a few words, which the others eagerly pick up. When they change the black man’s bandages even I can see that he is mostly healed. I trail them, every hour less like a pursuer and more like a pilgrim. I can no longer justify my delay in seizing them unless I admit to myself that here before me is everything I once believed to be a dream. Three men, none alike, asking to see each other, to be seen. Each pursuing a wild fancy that only this country, with all its contradictions, can permit.

IN THE DARK
of the night, Bob’s voice hovers above the resting men like a moth.

“How will I know where to go after you split off?”

“I’ll draw you a map.”

“You sure you’re not coming?”

They are camped on one side of a field, forcing me to stop on the periphery, though their voices carry in the dry air. I climb up a tall pecan, making no more noise than a squirrel, and affix myself in the crook of a limb to wait for morning. The clouds that have drawn over the sky are splitting up, and stars break through. My eyes move idly from those constellations to the one below me and back. Even Canis Major, the bounding dog, looks no different than he did in France.

“So you’re really going back to the cheats that kicked you out?” Bob is easily vexed, I have learned, by abuses of authority, but this is an easy mask for his developing guilt; he has taken to rubbing at the skin on his face and keeps his eyes on the ground when he is walking, when I can tell this is not ordinarily in his nature. If he is not aware of these changes, I am.

“They didn’t kick me out.”

“Or took your money or whatever it was. Doesn’t sound like folks I’d want to live around. But you’ll fix them, I know. Throw the old man out of town. See if the hussy’s already gone. What I wouldn’t give to walk back onto that plantation and beat my master’s back.” When the Indian doesn’t immediately respond, he adds quickly, “Though I wouldn’t, of course.”

“This is all far down the road.”

“He has to gather friends first,” Cat says, in a thin voice.

“Allies,” the Indian corrects. “It may be five years before I have the forces to return.” He sounds as confident as any French courtier.

“And Polly?”

“He’ll have nothing to do with her, that’s what,” Bob says.

The Indian shakes out his blanket before arranging it studiously around his limbs. “It’s not easy to forget someone.”

“But a thief?”

“We’re thieves,” Cat says.

They are quiet for long enough that I think they’ve closed their eyes, but then Bob says, “Here,” turning onto his side to dig in his knapsack. He brings out something small and hands it over. “There’s a cook I knew made the best cookies, just as good a week later. Go on, it’s all right. There. You like it?”

I can’t hear how the Indian replies, but it makes the black man laugh. The cookie is passed to the white man, and Bob knots his bag again and pulls his coat in closer.

“Funny how you don’t really look at the sky till you’re on your back. I bet your people got all kinds of stories for what’s going on up there. Women chasing men, a bunch of snakes. See over there? Kind of looks like a wolf on his hind legs.”

Bob’s arm rises, pointing up, a dark shadow in the darkness. A brief flag.

The Indian turns toward him, away from me, and recounts a legend I can’t hear, perhaps about how the stars crawled into the sky from some primordial swamp and arranged themselves in stories so that centuries later men would find reason to speak even after it was dark.

I pick my way half down the pecan before I know what I am doing. The ground below me is now close enough to fall upon without sound. I stretch one leg out, just to feel it, and wonder what such a leg might do independent of my better judgment. Might it hop down from this tree and creep over to the fire to warm its foot? Sneak between the men’s bodies to claim its spot
in the circle, near enough now not only to hear every swallowed word but to offer its own modicum of worldly perspective? It too has dreams; it too has a past that has shaped it like a slow drip of water in a lime cave, and which it too wishes to slough off. Across the proscenium of my mind trots an idea so swiftly that I almost miss it: to once more abandon my previous existence and join these bandits as a brother-in-arms, though perhaps their days of being armed are mostly done.

What stops me? My other leg, the one still notched in the lowest branch, protests. I am weak enough to yearn for fame, the variety that’s enshrined in learned texts and passed down as wisdom so that bolder men might adjust their empires. I am brave, but I am not bold; I am curious, but my curiosity needs a purpose. And though I can confess to wanting these men to see me as kin, foolishly, I am still unconvinced that the human family is really so broad. This is the irony of the scholar; though I intend to convince the world of a universal truth, my own heart lags behind. I climb back up the tree silently, and with a certain diminishment of pride.

The black man flops over, letting out a breath loud enough to scare the foxes.

“I’m going to need some new clothes. No one’ll think I’m free looking like this. Can’t be free until folk believe it. Cat asleep?”

They wait.

“Who’s going to take him, you or me?”

THE BLACK MAN
and the white man and the Indian man are asleep under the blanket of dawn. Their chests rise and fall, a little organ in the woods.

In my notebook I mark the habits that have grown famil
iar. The way the black man begins his sleep with all his limbs out, then turns from his back to his stomach, then over again, each shift accompanied by loud snorts and then pleasant sighs. How the Indian man must cover himself with something, like a child afraid to let his hand slip from the quilt, and the white man is generally awake through the night. Yes, he’s awake now too. His eyes are closed, but his hands are at work, idly braiding strands of grass. Their campfire is black and cold, for it was small and didn’t keep. They needn’t have bothered hiding it.

Here I am, a man in a pecan, poised to strip these men of their liberty, all because I believe strongly in the principle of justice, which suggests that men come alike before the law and are punished alike. This fact seems to me a very leveling one and, executed properly, could serve as a primary route to dismantling the outdated oligarchy so rooted in European soil. Whatever I write, of course, will refrain from a political tone. But I remind myself that any nascent feeling of brotherhood I may have in this tree is but a blink compared to the enduring good of impartiality. These men have already negated their freedom through an act of violence, and empathy is nowhere in fashion.

Cat sits up, tossing his braided grass into the embers of the fire. On his hands and knees, he picks past his comrades and crawls into the ring of woods surrounding the clearing. I hear the stream of his urine and then his scuttling deeper in the pines, in search of food, perhaps. From my perch in the lower branches, I cannot be discerned but by the doves roosting above me. The black man and the Indian are still asleep; the Indian’s gun is resting between them, as if either could claim it. I wish they were awake and speaking. The hour is coming when this
hunt will be done, and I—the arbiter of their fates if Fate is to be believed in—am already sorry.

I once might have watched the white man’s absence more closely, but now I know he will never leave, that he is built like a barnacle. Yesterday morning, the others took a bow and a net into the forest to scare up breakfast, and Cat, left to guard the bags of silver, became nearly despondent as the minutes passed and brought no sign of their return. I was unconcerned—the Indian would not get lost and neither man would abandon the plunder—but the white one began gulping, and if I had not known it was fear from the raw smell of him, I would have thought the man was choking on a bone. By the time they returned, he was weeping.

He comes back now, still crawling, with a cluster of leaves in his shirt pocket. He squats by the fire, rolls a few of them into a thin tube, and lights the end of it in the embers. I have heard the other men discuss, in Cat’s absence, a bounty hunter that may have been after the white man for murder, even before the events at the creek. But crouched here—damp, lonely, and pipeless—he looks incapable of force. Just because he weeps doesn’t mean he is worth pity.

The scent of the smoke first wakes the Indian, who stands and stretches while glancing into the gaps in the surrounding trees, his lean arms still tense after a night of unrest. He kicks the black man, who begins mumbling loudly, complaining of his bandaged shoulder. The Indian takes a stick and digs in the embers. He tosses the wood to one side and nimbly scrabbles in the hot dirt with his fingers until he finds the cache of squirrel meat he had wrapped in leaves and buried the night before, roasted now. He pulls it into pieces for his companions. None speak until the meat is gone.

It is the slave who fully wakes to his surroundings last, and I say slave because I have learned that he fled a plantation in Florida, leaving behind wife and children. So he found the road more appealing than his bride—this is neither new nor criminal. His folly lies in lingering. If he were caught on the road they might bring him safe home, but now with the bags of silver to his name, he’s not worth keeping alive. After he finishes his roasted breakfast, he is reluctant to stand and looks confused until he rubs the sleep from his eyes and lets his memory settle around the past few days. Upon remembering, he softly shakes his head.

The black man brings his knees to his chest, dropping his hands down to his feet so he can pick in his toes. They haven’t eaten much in their travels; I expect the Indian to fell a deer soon. From my branch, I stretch one leg to shake out the numbness.