Katy Smith - Free Men

“Hold up,” I say.

He raises his hand in a salute, and the man up the road waves back.

“No, no, no,” I say, but can’t spit out the rest: You a white man, and cannot be trusted . This is all a fine journey until the white man gets chatty, and white men together will always vote two against me, no matter how different their mothers were. But now the other fellow’s too close for me to say more, or to slap Cat once across the face, so I think about just running. Just starting to run, and seeing what happens.

The other man’s got a heavy beard and smells like he hasn’t put down the bottle in a while. “If you ain’t got a horse, why don’t you ride your boy?” He grins, and one tooth is purple-black.

“Safe travels to you,” Cat says. By his stiffness I reckon he’s pretending to be a master. I’m holding my breath, waiting for what else he’s going to say.

“You all don’t look much better off than me. Got any money to you?”

Now’s the time when we both should run, but I doubt Cat knows that, and if I hie off alone, there may be a musket ball waiting for me somewhere in that man’s coat. Or maybe the road’s just full of kindly robbers today, and we’ll all latch together and sing songs. If he reaches in that coat, doesn’t matter, I’m gone.

“No money but the coin of the Lord,” Cat says.

The man twists his head around like he’s tasted something bad.

“Missionaries. Myself and this, my slave. Can you count the last day you heard the Gospel?”

“Shit,” the man says.

Cat looks over and flicks his hand at me like he wants my bag, so I toss it to him and he starts rustling through it. “If you will stay and hear a little of the Word,” he says, but the other man’s already edging off.

This white man has picked me, all-black, over that white man. May not have been me exactly that he was picking, but he didn’t turn me in or shoot me or ride me like a lost horse, not yet, and that is something to remember.

The other man’s coattails flap around the bend and he’s gone. I laugh and give old Cat a hard whack and say, “Doing the Lord’s work!” but his smile is small, like it took all his energy to play that short game. We trudge north again and my heart is a little more steady, for whatever raggedy doomed dream this is, at least I know it’ll last a few hours more than I figured.

We’ve almost run out of good food, and I’m starting to wonder how we’ll keep feeding ourselves. I’m not much for catching wild animals. I knew boys who got good at hunting things at night so they wouldn’t have to eat only the dull corn and half-rotten meat the master threw at us, but I never fought against what was. If my food was bad, that meant food was bad, and maybe you’d sneak a peach from the basket delivered to the big house, but that was only if no one was around and no one had been around for at least an hour. It took me how many years after my brother took his life before I said enough? I try counting on my fingers. One, two, five, over to the other hand, some more years, seventeen. I’ve missed my brother for seventeen years.

I smell smoke, and then Cat’s stomach comes at me loud as an overseer. I let my nose sniff us toward it until the smoke smell turns salty and warm. I’m feeling new confident after Cat’s antics and figure we can take whatever mystery’s waiting around that fire. We scramble up through the brush and over the bank and there, sunk in a clearing, is a pigeon roasting on a spit, as haloed as the baby Jesus, and behind the fire is an Indian standing with his bow drawn and his arrow pointed straight at one of our faces, I can’t tell which.

I grab Cat’s arm. We must look like two statues, just waiting. The Indian waits. It’s too early on the trip to perish, so I call halloo. He brings his arms down so the arrow’s pointing at our feet, and then I can see his face, which looks like maybe something I’ve seen before.

“You a trader?” I ask, but too quiet because I’m scared of frighting him, so he doesn’t hear. “You trade skins?” I say louder, and he puts down his bow. I heard Indians aren’t afraid of anyone but Indians.

We come half-stepping closer, or I do and pull Cat behind me. “I bring rum up to the villages,” I say, miming a drink with my hand, glug glug . “Tuckabatchee, Tallassee.” He blinks a few times, so I go on. “This here’s a friend who’s awful hungry. Don’t want to impose, but smelled the fine cooking and could offer something in exchange.” I look back at Cat, whose eyebrows go up. “Or we could just be good company, tell you a tale.” I don’t know how much of this he’s getting, but I’m doing various things with my hands to put him at ease, making peaceable gestures and whatnot.

“Sit down,” he says, and then takes his bow and walks off into the woods — as it turns out, to shoot us another couple pigeons.

“Now there’s a man for you can hunt animals,” I tell Cat.

When we’re all cozy with meat in our mouths, he and I talk about the journeys we’ve made on this one path, back and forth. He does English very well. Some of the Creeks I’ve met, especially on the road, are remarkable good at this and I only know a few words in their tongue. As our bellies fill up, I say maybe we should be getting along, no point dilly-dallying. But the Indian nods over at Cat, and I’ll be damned if that white man isn’t fast asleep, cross-legged, his hands folded neat in his lap, his head bobbing along on his chest like a nut in a stream. I come all over with a kind of affection for him, sitting so quiet there though he’s with two strangers who carry killing weapons. It’s enough to think that he wouldn’t mind being killed, and because I myself am nowhere near so much despair, it makes me sad for him. Makes me wonder what all he lost, to have nothing left to hold on to.

So I sit a little longer with the Indian and we get to talking about this and that, whatever subjects we both have words for, and I tell him he looks familiar. He looks at me and nods and then sure enough, I say you’re the one I’ve traded rum for skins with once or twice, and he says you’re the one that goes on and on with tales once you get started; you’re the one that bargains so hard, I say, and you’re the one who rides a horse, he says, like it was a rare pleasure.

Maybe Cat’s got me in the mood for getting close to folks, or maybe it’s how the hot food steams up my belly, but I drop a hint like I’m looking for another path altogether.

“This isn’t your master?” he says. He has scooped together all the leaves close by and stacked them in a pile, neat, with the edges matching.

“Well, no, not when you put it quite so. We’re just walking alongside for a bit. I’m headed up to your people with some letters — that is, I was until old fool here set my horse free — but my plan, roundabout, is to take myself on a longer route. For reasons.”

“You’re escaped.”

“No, no, I’m doing my duty. Just a little extra in mind.” His coolness is waking me up fast, and the leaves trouble me. “For my master back home. He’s the one wants me to head west, afterward.”

I can usually tell an Indian at peace, and this one here has something twitchy going on in his eyes that’s not ordinary; he may snatch me up, after all that, with Cat asleep and none the wiser.

“It’s not my concern,” he says, “what you do.”

“I’m not doing but what my master ordered. Straight and narrow.”

“I’m escaped too.”

We watch each other for a minute or so, him wrought up in the eyes, but not on my account — he doesn’t have the least fear of either of us, simpletons that we are, and to any other man watching he’d probably seem mighty easy. But I know what it looks like.