Katy Smith - Free Men

I pull out my pass to show him, my hand still shaking, but his hand still shaking won’t take it, and I reckon neither of us can read anyway. I don’t know which of us should be most scared, a slave or a robber.

“You ain’t patrol?” I ask.

He opens his mouth, but a rumble from his stomach rolls out of it and he claps his hand to cover it like he still has shame.

“Doesn’t take a knife to get some food,” I say. I break out some bread and hand it over and he eats head down.

When I look around to pour some water for the horse is when I notice there isn’t a horse left or right. “What the hell? You take my horse?”

He shakes his head. “Tried to,” he says. “Ran away.”

“You tried to crawl up on it with your skinny arse and it bolted? That it? Good lord .” I walk out into the road and try a few whistles and a hey-up to see if it’s near, but even when I’m quiet I can’t hear the sound of a leaf break anywhere. “How long ago’d you pull this?”

“Still night when I did.”

“Damn it. And you just been sitting on me since?”

“Thinking, one way or the other.”

I’m two days into running away and lost my horse. If I believed in God very much or anything like signs, I’d take this as a bad one. Nothing to do but walk now.

He follows me quiet when I move back onto the path with my road-hungry feet.

“Where you going?” I ask, but he has a finger in his mouth, poking around at the food that’s left, not wanting to miss a bite. “Scoot!”

I don’t look back for a quarter of an hour, and I try to whistle a little to show how unconcerned I am about white men. But soon someone passes us on a horse — not mine, I check — and gives us such a peculiar twice-over look that I worry I’m standing out worse than ever this way, with no better than a hound dog trailing after me. I turn around, and he stops so sudden I think he might tilt over.

What cause does a white man have to be hungry?

“I’m going up this way,” I said, pointing ahead, “and then that way,” my finger crooking off to the left.

He nods.

If I tell him to go away, or if he doesn’t and I knock him on the head, he’ll wake up and tell someone there’s a nasty slave on the loose, pass or no pass. And if I let him drag on behind me without paying any mind, he’ll try to kill me again as soon as I sleep. Maybe he’s hungry or maybe he’s crazy, or might be he’s just looking for a way to get close to a soul, and I know what that’s like after you walk a road for days without speaking. It’s a relief I’m half again as big as he, and that my knife’s back in my own pocket.

“You got a family?”

He nods his head, then shakes it.

“No? You own any slaves?”

Shakes it.

“Not one? Okay. Me neither. You going to try to kill me again?”

Nope.

“What do they call you?”

He looks up in the trees like he heard an uncommon rustling, eyebrows pinched, and then says, still looking, “Cat.”

I never knew if that’s what he saw or that’s who he was.

So I call him Cat, and it feels a comfort to have another body on my side, as if someone said my journey was all right, no harm in it, no folks abandoned. Lonely, one can feel a guilt, can even forget where the road ends, but this little white man keeps me thinking of each hour as it comes, wondering if he’ll turn me in or say he’s a murderer or do a shuffle dance with a smile on his face, for all are as likely as the others.

He walks always a couple feet to the side and back, making me look like the master, which suits me fine. If you put a confidence on your face, people stop looking at you. There are enough funny-colored men on this path that I’m not so clear a runaway, and having a white man along never hurts. I’ve seen Indians dark as me trading slaves who looked like they had two white parents. Down here, color all depends on who you know, what people you can call your kin. But my plan is to walk until kin doesn’t matter either, way out where the only colors are blue sky and brown ground and us humans are so little on the land, gnats, that you can hardly tell whether we’re dark or light. When I find the westward road, it won’t be any problem just shooing Cat on his way, and if he begs to come, I’ll rope him to a tree and leave him with a solid meal and maybe a whistle so he can call for help when I’m well enough away. For now, he’ll suit.

I set us up under an old oak for lunch, its roots billowing out like a dress mid-swing, and I give him a side of bread though not half, me being the leader of this all. He’s gnawing away quiet, teeth not even meeting teeth, when a man looking more properly white drags a mule past us and then stops and turns on his heel right around, the mule backing up startled on its legs. He looks at Cat and me with pointy eyes and says, or more like growls, that he’s looking for a man run away from murder, small and blue-eyed, who’s known to have blood on his breeches and comes from up north, maybe Carolina, or else Delaware.

He’s talking to Cat, who’s still chomping on his bread and doesn’t say anything. I won’t lie and say my heart didn’t go cold a little. But it only takes me a minute to look at one white man, dirt-thin and quiet, and then the other, who looks like he’d arrest any man who was cross-eyed, and figure out which one I’ll line up with. I give a big spit like I don’t care and say, “Haven’t seen no man with such breeches. This here’s my master, deaf and dumb. Been his slave for twenty-odd year and never left West Florida, him or me.”

“You in West Georgia now, boy.”

“Never left West Georgia neither.”

“What’s your farm called?”

I say a few words in Spanish that translate to something like “Sugar Whip God,” and that sounds enough like a plantation to make him ask next where we’re headed.

“Horse market,” I say. “Couple mares died on us. Run ’em rough down there.” I don’t know where you get horses, but I suppose at a market like anything else. “That’s a nice one,” I say, pointing at his patchy old mule. “You selling?”

He squints at me and his bottom lip is tucking in and out of his teeth like he’s thinking on it and he turns to Cat and asks, “You deaf?”

I hold my breath, but Cat doesn’t even glance at him. I don’t know whether he’s protecting me or himself, or if he’s as much an idiot as I’m pretending.

“ You deaf? ” he asks again louder, and Cat just sitting there chewing that damn piece of bread a hundred times.

“He was fine for many years, sir, but afore he was out of short pants he stood too close to a church bell and the ringing busted his ears all up. Hasn’t said a word since.” I’m real polite, not knowing at that point how high up church bells are, but the man must not know either because he says, “That right,” like it isn’t every day he sees such a thing, and he spits and turns again and drags that mule right on down the road, the two of them kicking up shoots of dust behind.

I send up a praise to Jesus and study Cat, whose white arms are hatched now with the branch shadows from above, this place we’ve stopped looking more, in fact, like church than trail. His brows don’t even bend, his eyes still as stones under clear water.

“You kill a man?” I ask, and he doesn’t look at me but shakes his head slow, back and forth.

“Not a man,” he says, and his voice is hoarse.

“Well, that’s a relief,” I say and decide not to bully the point, though he is small and blue-eyed and I did first meet him when he was trying to cut my throat. That’ll teach a man to fall asleep on the road. “You from Carolina?” I ask, but this is bullying, which I said I wouldn’t do, and sure enough he doesn’t make a peep to answer. I’ll figure it out in time. If he had a reason to kill some old man up in Carolina, doesn’t mean he’ll go around shooting people willy-nilly. Just because I ran away from one place doesn’t mean I’ll run from another.