Free Men (30 page)

“How soon’s the Mississippi?” The black man’s whisper is remarkably loud.

The Indian bends to speak to him so I cannot hear. The white man is not paying attention, but has untied one of the sacks and removed a coin.

“And after we cross, then we cut loose?”

The Indian nods, pouring water from his jug onto the remnants of the fire and covering it with leaves and dirt. He makes a comment I cannot hear and the black man throws a stick at him, not without affection, then buttons his ragged coat with dignity and takes himself into the woods for a private toilet. The Indian kneels by the white man. His voice is soft, but I cup my ear and catch it.

“If I survive whatever comes,” he says, pausing, dipping his head to meet the white man’s oblique gaze, “then one day I’ll
go back. I could protect you there.” His hand is on the other’s shoulder.

I slowly remove the strap of the gun from my shoulder, bring it into my crooked lap.

The white man makes a sound like a startled horse, which may be a laugh. He pats the Indian’s shoulder, and the Indian, to my surprise, pats back.

“Don’t think too much of this,” Cat says, gesturing toward the bags. “You’ll go mad.”

I had struggled to understand how criminals could find comfort in one another, how men in America could bear to be tied up in this dependence, but perhaps this was always only temporary. This brief camaraderie must merely be the odd knot in the loom—soon, their paths will be fanning out again. Except, of course, that this knot is the end, for I am here.

I shift in the tree, and a twig falls. The Indian does not hear.

There is a pleasure in watching men who believe themselves unwatched—to see the frustration on the Indian’s face when he turns away from the black man, or to hear the lullabies the white man half murmurs when the others are asleep—but it is the pleasure of the voyeur, not the participant. And even after what I’ve seen, I am convinced that in the moment of crisis, these men must dissolve. That the connective thread I’ve been looking for must inevitably fray. The whole idea of mine was childish.

After the men finish their breakfast, the Indian shows the white man how to hold a bow.

“Your hands just here,” he says.

Bob, who is laughing, nocks the arrow in. “Don’t point that at me. You get my other arm, you’ll have to carry the sack yourself.”

The white man’s hands are clenched so tight the bow shivers when he breathes.

The Indian points at a tree trunk across the clearing, where a lizard pumps his chest. Their bags and gun are scattered by the fire. The Indian kicks Cat’s leg to draw him out into a proper stance.

I wait, but the white man cannot release the bowstring. The lizard skits away.

Bob touches him once on the back, says, “It’s not a man.”

He drops the bow to his side and the others turn away.

I do not believe in innocence. I have watched men for years, both out of curiosity and for pay, and each one of them wants something so profoundly that he would abandon his own constructed sense of righteousness to pursue it. Desire breeds guilt.

I silently draw up the musket from my lap and point it not at the men, whose flesh is vulnerable through the tatters in their clothes, but straight ahead, at the middle branches of a chestnut across the clearing where a woodpecker is inching up the bark, pausing to flash its head left and right, the red blaze along its crown like a signal to fire.

I fire.

BELOW, THEY FALL
to the earth, scrabbling, hands in dirt, hands seeking blind for bags, feet kicking at the dust beneath them, insects in a shadowbox. The Indian runs toward tree cover, his eyes hunting flicker-fast above him, searching for the shot’s origin, but the black man is already rampaging into a thorn thicket, heedless, shouting.

“Get! Get!” he says. “Cat!”

The white man has dropped the bow and is standing by the
dead fire looking at his hand, which he flexes out and in as if looking for the bullet hole. The Indian has his gun pointed up now, but he’s found nothing.

“Cat,” the black man whispers now. “Please, please, please, we have to get.”

The white man turns his head up slowly and in the arm of the pecan finds me, or what pieces he can see behind the network of new greenery. He watches me, my gun. His eyes, pale blue, search me for some answer. I am trying to measure his culpability, and he is trying to determine if his life merits saving.

I should climb down from the tree, should shoot at least one of them before the silver disappears, but they are the most vital things in this vast forest, and I cannot.

“Come on,” he says, “come on, Cat, we got you, over here, please, Cat.”

The white man shakes his head, his eyes still on me.

I am witness to the threads between them snapping. In the gaps my gun has opened there is pain. When I hear the sounds of the Indian giving up, slipping away with small crashes through the young trees, I feel a warmth in the back of my jaw like my own mother has turned her back on me.

“I’m ready,” the white man says to the black man, who still clings to a thorn bush. “Mine are the sins.”

“You didn’t lift a finger,” Bob says. “Come on, come on, you’ve got no sins.”

“You’re just as good,” Cat says. “I’ll stay.”

The bags of silver are gone, clutched up in their frantic scrambling, none left for the white man. Though if he moved now, if he went to his companion by the shrub, I am certain they would share the plunder evenly, no matter their disparity in strength,
in worth. He looks smaller in the emptiness around the remnant fire. He was always a small man.

With my gun held shoulder-high, I climb down from my perch, sloth slow, and watch as the black man sees a stranger, white, and trades his devotion for terror. He is gone, and Cat is alone.

I stand opposite him in the clearing and he looks at me with blank eyes. I am not human to him, but spirit. I begin reconstructing my composure. This is what I was sent to do; I will write this all down. What I have witnessed will be duly recorded and these men will endure in the annals of humanistic scholarship, and so it is all right that I have botched the assignment from my employer because justice will still claim her quarry. I am sorry that this experiment of mine lost me the other two men and the silver, the worth of which Seloatka couldn’t guess, but this one after all had the bloodstains on his cuffs; his was the guilt that was most palpable. I wish he had not forfeited himself.

After putting down my gun, I pull a rope from my bag and hold it out to show him. He stands, folds his wrists together. I tie it in several knots around the bumps of his bones. I look in the bags left behind for anything of value but find only a dirty cloth and a handful of biscuits cut in lace-like patterns. I offer one to Cat, but he shakes his head.

We turn east now. The low sun is in our eyes.

THE FIRST THING
I ask is where he comes from. When he doesn’t respond I offer that I was raised in a small town in France, and when he remains mute I take it as a sign that he would rather spend these hours contemplating his soul, or evaluating some of the inexplicable choices he’s made over the last few days or weeks or whenever this brotherhood began. I can no
more worm into his thoughts than I can require him to speak, but I have not already shot him because I am patient, and can wait for explanations. It’s fortunate I can easily follow the trail I myself have left, for the white man seems insensible to his surroundings. I suppose I can no longer call him the white man, there being none others now to distinguish him.

When we bed down for the night I tie his ropes to a tree.

“I won’t run,” he says.

I tell him I believe this, though how can I? Anyone would attempt escape. When society is stripped away, when we are adrift in the ungovernable forest, man is alone, and intent on survival.

Though if there were a criminal less interested in survival, perhaps this is he. I could swear that Cat was growing lighter over the hours I spent with them, that a burden was being gradually laid down while he nurtured a small contentment, but my appearance has oppressed him again. The sins he has claimed are creeping back.

I tie the rope in a sailor’s knot.

“Did you shoot the men?” I ask.

He is quiet, so I pull out my blanket and smooth a patch of dirt for myself. It is hard to find a space in this forest that isn’t interrupted by a surfacing root or a patch of fungus that must be kicked aside, and though I prefer to leave little trace, I must also secure some comfort. Sleeping on puffballs won’t do. By a spitting fire I read back through my notebook and find nothing intelligible.
Is awake when others sleep. Gnaws at the fingernail. Enjoys the black man’s humor. Is alert when others speak of women.

“Did you shoot the men?” I ask again.

He is wedged into the base of the tree, his tied hands up by his shoulders in a limp prayer.

“Are you the one who has no mother?”

When I lie down, I turn my back to him, knowing that he will be up for most of the night with nothing much to look at but my own form, and though I have been watching him without compunction for two days, the reverse causes me some unease.

THE MEADOW WHERE
the woman lives is quiet. The bits of flesh have been pulled from the poles, no doubt causing mischief to the carrion eaters who found them. But with the dead beasts have gone the living, and even the usual snuffle of hogs in the surrounding woods has been stilled. We do not knock at the door but walk on, and if she is at her window I will never know.

I wonder if she was a dream, if she was equally a dream to these men, if somehow we’re embroiled in the same illusion that necessarily exists when men step beyond the bounds of their countries. I could visit her again and ask directly those questions that would prove whether she’s a soothsayer or a prophet, demand that she reveal the truths I’ve been tracking since I first left Paris, ask what in God’s name is liberty if we are all bound to step only where our ancestors have, but she would merely crawl beneath that fragmented quilt and jangle rings at me that probably every man thinks are his mother’s.

Cat never asks me what our destination is or why we’re retracing their steps, nor does he pick up his legs and flee in a mad dash to north or south, deep into the woods and beyond my reach; I don’t know that I could catch him if he did, being a decade older and not as desperate. Occasionally he hums—or murmurs, although it sounds musical. Where am I taking him? Back to Seloatka? I’m merely taking him with me, as the black man and the Indian did. There is value in a quiet companion; he makes one consider anew one’s own monologue.

That night, when I ask what role he played in the murders and he greets my inquiry with further silence, I tell him that I too have killed a man. (Many, actually, on behalf of my employers, but only one on my own account, and I consider there to be a difference.)

“He cooked bread for the king, and we loved the same woman. I assume you understand how that is; that love prompts one to act in unusual ways. No? Well, I had not received a great deal of affection in my life and saw this woman as perhaps a unique opportunity to rectify that. Duels are a matter of honor, and so my actions were justified. I felt slightly queasy when I saw the man’s body, for there was some blood, but it was instantaneous and no one blamed me. I recovered. But death is not the most satisfactory solution to a problem. I understand that you may be feeling some guilt at what you’ve done, and this is to be expected. Even when we believe we’re in the right, we have a voice within that knows better; some call it God. Are you religious?”

“Where is she?” He does not look at me, but bends his head down to his wrists, where he sucks the sweat from the rope. “Your wife.”

I feel a shiver of fear, unaccountably. If I believed he was a murderer, shouldn’t I always have been afraid?

“France. I was tired of home life, and she was unfaithful.”

“Will you go back?”

I picture the door opening, her slim figure poised between two steps, her black hair mid-swing. With her husband gone, she must rarely put up her hair, or wear all her petticoats, or powder her face till it’s white. What is her expression upon seeing me? Does it approach gratitude? My bags make a dark sound when they fall to the marble floor. Nothing belongs.

“I have not decided,” I say. I remember my notes.
Is alert when others speak of women.
“Can I assume, being a man, that you were also wronged by a lady?”

He lifts his head, almost in accusation. To be perfectly frank, I cannot imagine a woman loving him, though his features are regular and he has a trusting, open demeanor. There is simply no fire in him, and if men do not present a little danger in the dance between the sexes, then what’s the good of them? The craftier I’ve been, the more girls have offered their favors; they, like us, merely request some adventure in their lives. Cat, for all his murdering, exhibits a meekness that only a sainted woman could endure. But he did several nights ago mention a wife. Perhaps he once had some wealth and she married him out of greed and pity, and the moment a soldier rode through town, she hopped his horse and bade farewell.

“Bless them all,” he says and, closing his eyes emphatically, turns away.

I try not to record speculations in my notebook—only observations and fact—but I hope one day some other man will tell the stories.

I have tethered him close tonight, calculating the distance between a fully stretched rope and my own blanket so that they are separated by no more than two feet. This is a trial to determine whether, given the opportunity, the white man will gravitate toward any other sleeping body, even that of his captor. As I prepare for sleep, Cat at a distance by his anchoring shrub, I crowd my mind with questions and concerns so as to ensure a shallow rest. I think of the citations I will need to prop up my writing, of the overdue missive to my wife and what this one should say, of curiosity itself and whether it is fundamentally noble, repre
senting as it does man’s taste for knowledge beyond his sphere, or whether it undermines the simplicity of daily life and breeds displeasure. With these clunky gears in motion, my mind is too unsettled to fully abandon me, and every half hour or so my eyes flick open to gauge the placement of my prisoner. Mostly he is awake, of course, lying on his back and scanning the heavens, but close to dawn I feel a new warmth, and there he is, finally asleep, coiled like a crawfish at the farthest stretch of his rope, two feet from me. The poor fellow is an unwitting magnet. At this proximity I feel new concern for his comfort—is he warm enough without a heavier coat? Are those lice causing the scabs around his hairline? So this is what the black man must have felt, this dependency that turns the heart. But any repeatable experiment only verifies a biological trend; there is nothing personal or mystic about a man’s desire for closeness.