Free Men (31 page)

WALKING FOR SUCH
distances invariably leads to intimacy; if I had not already known it from watching the three men I was following, these days with Cat have proven it. In the mornings he asks to be given some privacy, so I walk him on his lead to a thicket, tie his rope anew, and then allow him fifty paces of distance for his evacuations. He calls me after he has covered his shit with leaves, and we proceed. When the sun has warmed the afternoons, we share the same canteen of water, and any belch or flatulence on the part of one man is heard, without comment, by the other. We stride across land that belongs to neither of us and in this vacuum of possession blooms some primitive fellow feeling. If a panther were to leap from a high branch and tussle my prisoner, I suspect that I would rush to find a heavy stick and beat the creature ruthlessly and
when the white man was free, I would attempt to address his wounds. And to all this effort I would go though my intent, unchanging, is eventually to kill the man. I cannot explain this logic, though I make a note of it.

“Tomorrow we’ll find the road again,” I say, over a measly supper of dried ham and meal. I did not pack sufficiently; or rather, I failed to have a sufficient sense of my own susceptibility. But every time I start to squirm at the indulgence of trailing these men so long, I merely glance at my fattening notebook and swallow my half share of salt pork without complaint.

“Are you prepared for your fate?” I ask. “I expect we’ll take you back to Hillaubee for the execution.”

He does not respond, so I pick up some of the food he’s left uneaten.

“It would be helpful to me if you’d speak a little of your history. Did you know the black man and the Indian for very long? You see, I’m writing an account of your adventure to be shared with men on the other side of the ocean, men who are interested in unusual things. If you’ll share your story, I promise to convey it with accuracy.”

“There’s no story.”

“That’s hardly true, since my guess is that you were born without having murdered anyone, and now here you are with at least several souls on your account. Unless I’ve got it wrong?” I offer him the canteen.

“Do you have any whiskey?”

“Pardon?” As it happens, I’ve saved a small flask in my sack for occasions of great need, and I tippled from it once or twice before I found the men, but about half remains. After a moment of consideration, I dig it out and hand it over.

He has to reach up with both hands to take it. Only one sip, and his face tightens into a grimace. His eyes squeeze shut and open wide again, and after this contortion a little peace comes. “Tastes like my father.”

I acknowledge this with a nod. “I did not have a father.”

“They are remarkable unkind.”

“I hear that sometimes is the case.” I stretch out a hand for the flask.

“I have to piss, is why I remembered.”

My face must be blank with question.

“You had a son?” he says. “Who pissed the bed?”

“No, no children.” Not for lack of trying, certainly. There are men who would be concerned about impotence, but I am grateful for the domestic limitation.

“It’s right a father should be mad. Better I had no son.”

I offer him the spirits again, but he declines. “I must say, family is given more credit than I believe it’s worth. The blood relation seems to give folk a license for cruelty.”

“But worse to be lonely.” He lies back now, stares up at the sinking sky. The dusk birds are coming out of their holes and hollows, lithe black shapes against the twilight. We must walk a little more before we settle for the night.

“Is it worse, indeed? I have built a life mostly for myself these past two decades, though I have certainly had wives and once a mother, and there is a freedom to it I find very pleasant.”

“Free from what?”

“Well, one needn’t grieve so much at the inevitable losses, for instance, or get one’s heart knotted up in someone who will abandon you or punish you, or someone who will simply not love you the same.”

“You haven’t been in love.”

“Certainly I have.” I flicker back through all the early moments of my Parisian wife: the dancing, the long kisses beneath the stairs, my hands wrapping her limbs around me, the fresh bread shared in the morning. Lust, lust.

“And you haven’t done anything to be sorry for?”

I stand up, stretch my neck from side to side, brush the debris of wilderness from my pants. “We’ve another hour before we can rest. Come.”

He is always obedient. We turn east again, my men now less than a day off, undoubtedly wondering what’s taking so long. A bat tosses between the trees as if in a high wind. The sky is soon asleep, and I can see nothing but the sound of Cat’s footsteps shuffling behind me. After several minutes of silence, he pauses, speaks up.

“I don’t think being free means being alone.”

IN THE MORNING,
we slide down the banks to the main trail and turn toward the tavern, where we rejoin my men, who have drunken themselves into a sorry state in the time I’ve been absent. They raise their eyebrows to see me with a single hostage, but I tell them this is the killer, that this weak and woebegone man is the one whose punishment will redeem the murders. It is no use whether I believe it, for he won’t say otherwise.

That night, Cat sleeps on the floor of my room, his leg tied to the foot of the bed. He watches as I remove my shoes and stockings, and when I wince pulling the leaves off my blister, he asks if he can help.

“I used to know some medicine.”

“Just too much walking,” I say, though I am convinced
the canker has some other cause than mere walking. “If you lot had wandered less, it would have been a welcome preventative.”

“If you had not pursued us, we might not have wandered.”

What the devil? I lean over to see if this is humor or philosophy, but his eyes reveal nothing. I fear this statement will keep me awake.

We both smell of days without so much as a rinsed face. But my sheet is clean and he has none, and perhaps if either of the other criminals had been on my floor I would not have minded, but this man begs tenderness. Is it his whiteness that is easier to feel sorry for? There, but for the grace of God, goes Louis Le Clerc? No, because I have known plenty of Creeks who share more with me in temperament and ideology than this man. He is just a subject of study grown too dear. I throw him a pillow and blow out the candles, so that when I ask him where the other men are bound, I don’t have to see his face.

“I don’t know,” he says.

In fact, we both know quite well; the black man has shared a detailed scheme for his western farm, and the Indian has explained that the long journey to seizing his village and wreaking dignified vengeance—on his betrothed, on his chief, on any man who allowed his ostracism—that his journey begins with politics. Using coins to build alliances out of modern-minded Indians who will support his claim on his town and will carry him on a red wave back to Hillaubee, may Seloatka beware.

“Then what did the silver mean to you?” I ask. That is what I haven’t heard.

“I was already dead. I had no need.”

“But you took it.”

“Life is for those still alive.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand. You took it so that the black man and the Indian would have a healthy start in their pursuits? You’d kill six men to assist two strangers?”

“Whatever is wrong has already happened. I can blame them only once for what they did. You heard; she said to do only what can be done.”

“Are you saying the others participated in the murders?”

“I’m saying they’re still alive.”

I am losing patience. If this man were a butterfly, I would not have toyed with him for so many days, and to such vague purpose; my duty as a scientist is merely to pin him, and let others marvel.

“Tell me, for pity’s sake, what possessed the three of you to fall into a common story and hold to it past all reason. I have been in this country for twelve years, and from every angle I can only see that Americans have made a religion of the individual—it’s seeping already into the discontent slaves and the Indian factions, you must see it too—but if all humans have a common element, a sublayer I call it, it cannot be fear or faith or even charity because none of these explain why your intentions overlapped into violence and out of it again intact.”

I wait for him to speak, but he is like a mirror, only reflecting or failing to reflect what I most wish to see. I wonder what the Creeks are up to in their room, whether they are torturing the negro with Indian jokes.

“I can’t tell any story but my own,” he finally says.

“That’s all I ask.”

Finding a place to begin takes him several moments. “My
wife was this beautiful,” he says, as if I can see what gesture he is making, if there is even a gesture for beauty. “We had a son. Sons, I think.”

I have no children, not even a faithful wife. The room is airless, and the ceiling above me has a spreading stain.

“My memory won’t go away. I remember all the bodies that passed before me. My father, and every other one until my wife. My life was mostly losing people.”

I pull the quilt close around me, though it is not cold, and find myself hoping he falls quiet again. I remember too how I used to wait by the door of that empty room in Thin-le-Moutier, praying that my mother would kneel on the other side and speak to me, soothe me, tell me she was sorry.

“I am guilty,” he says, “of everything man is guilty of. You won’t believe me. All I wanted were her arms around my neck.”

Downstairs a brawl breaks out. Someone throws a mug against a wall.

“She said it wasn’t her fault, the way her parents went, and I believed her. That death born of love is a small death. But I could not believe her. When she was gone, and the baby was gone, I went where my feet went and they followed those men, who did not know my wife, who did not look like my father either but like men I might have been. They still wanted things. And then I began again to want.”

He stops, and in the space I can hear myself waiting.

“Here is a letter,” he shows me, though of course I can see nothing from my bed, “that a man wrote to his wife. A wife like a woman, like the woman I had. And now he is gone, and I am here. What do you think?”

I can’t comprehend all this webbing, why men keep reaching
out for others. “I think perhaps you’re sorry you killed him, and now you want me to save your life.”

“No, you haven’t understood at all.”

“Do you want to live?”

“I want whatever is worst.”

“But your companions, who I’m prone to believe share some of this guilt, they deserve no punishment?”

“I am here because they are good in the marrow and I forgive them.”

I wait for him to explain, but he is silent. Who are all the bodies he mentions? In what life is a man not his own protagonist? I am tired of the mystery, am simply tired. Want to know the answers, but no one will tell me. Those brigands who are no less men than me.
Sticks in search of grace
. I wait until I can no longer keep my eyes open, and then I ask, in the quietest voice of a French man in a foreign country, merely because it is still the task before me, “So how did you meet them?”

He is already asleep.

When I wake in the morning he is sitting against the wall, and my shoes that have tramped through wet leaves and red dirt for the past ten days have been polished to a shine and sit next to each other by the door like new friends.

AFTER WE BREAKFAST
and the Creeks assure me that the bodies have been returned to Hillaubee and the horses and mules reclaimed, leaving the creek a blank slate, we mount up in the stables. Cat climbs on one of the mules that carried the missing coins; I wonder if the beast can tell one cargo from another. We wait beyond the open gate while the negro is sent with our debt to the proprietor, and after I have finished securing the white
man’s ropes to the mule’s reins, which I intend to hold myself, I turn back to the tavern to see what is keeping the slave.

He is standing in front of the low door, looking up at a horse that has crept so quietly from the south that I heard no approaching sound. Cat turns in his seat to watch. On the horse sit three women, or girls, or two women and one girl—it is hard to be certain—all dusky dark. These Yazoo lands are distinctive in offering a range of opportunity for individuals who, in the American states, would be tied firmly to a single patch of land. This must factor into my analysis of recent events, though I sense that the time when a black woman can speak to a black man in a public place without causing some outrage is finite. The negro glances at me as if for confirmation, but when I shout at him to hurry along, he speaks quickly to the women or the girls, bundled tight together on that poor horse’s back, and they turn their heads south in unison like three owls after a mouse.

“What directions were you giving?” I ask the man when he has mounted the other mule.

He is watching the overburdened horse trot off in the direction from whence we came and does not offer an immediate reply.

“Oh,” he says, turning the mule north and setting the pace for our company. We are heading home to face judgment, unless I decide to let the axe fall sooner. Justice, though collective, is still personal, and part of me would rather end this hunt before Seloatka has a chance to touch the fraying thread of the white man’s life. “Mm,” he says, drawing it out. He turns once in his seat to confirm that the women are out of sight. “A lady looking for her man, is all.”

Cat gives a kick to his mule and draws up on my left side, now between me and the negro.

“A philandering husband, I suppose, gone all night and not come home?”

“Mm. Could be.”

“But you knew where to find him?”

“I had a guess.”

“There’s no point in circumlocuting. We have an empty road before us and could use an amorous tale.” I have to lean around the white man to convey my impatience.

“Just a particular negro she was after.”

“What were the details?”

He pulls a pine needle from the litter in his saddle and jabs one point between his bottom teeth. “One that talked a lot.”