Katy Smith - Free Men

“Who from?” I ask.

He looks straight up, but I don’t hear any birds. “Where do you want to go?”

“West,” I say. If I only speak in short words, maybe he’ll like me more.

“There’s a spur trail, just over a day’s walk south from here.” He shows me with his hands pointed forward, together. “You must have passed it and not seen. It heads west.”

“Reckon I better see it this time, then, or I’ll walk right into my master’s arms again, and I don’t think either of us’d be laughing at that. Thank you,” I add, going back to short words.

“I can show you. I’m going south too, for hunting. What about the white man?”

I look over and see what he means. Cat seems like no more than a pile of sticks, or fine china all broken up and put back together. I smile and stretch my legs out in front of me, so the fire will warm my feet. The Indian sits so still that if I didn’t know he was there, I’d think his shape was just a hunch of rock.

“Why does he follow you?”

“Some folks just have no place to go,” I say.

“You’re not traveling with him farther?”

“Well,” I say. Even an Indian knows better than to fall in with a white man. But he’s been useful twice now. “We leave him here and he won’t make it much longer than a day, the way I figure. I don’t even think he’d eat for himself. Saw a man coming up said they were looking for a fellow who fit that description, wanted for murder.” The Indian’s eyebrow seems to rise, but that may be just a trick of falling light, so I go on. “So either he’s a rascal and we’re best shed of him, in which case no worry here, or he’s just a poor kind of man who needs a hand up.” I stop, because what I’m saying is such foolishness, you don’t just pick up men on the road and carry them with you, no matter how bag-of-bones they are. But he’s a good listener, I tell the Indian, sharp ears, and if we’re spending any more time on the trail, why, it’s better to be three men than two.

I don’t know if this is true, but I push back from the fire and let my body sprawl out next to Cat, shuffling around a bit to settle myself in place. I made all that fuss to get away from folks, and here I am gathering up whoever I can find. Idiot Bob, that’s what they’ll call me. I have to close my eyes tight so I don’t see the Indian still sitting there, maybe thinking of how he can get rid of the two of us at once. If I were picking a man to sleep next to, I’d pick the maybe-murderer over the Indian any night, and I can’t say why except something about him makes me trust. A man that lonely-looking would do anything to be in company again.

SOME BLACK SMELL comes furrowing in and splits my dream in two, and before I even wake, I think, Damn you, Winna — double damn you , and I sit up like a dead man with my eyes still closed, flinging one arm out in remembrance of the night bugs, and pray that Primus hasn’t set the big house on fire, or maybe that he has. I open one eye, and I am not in my cabin with my brother’s shoes lying empty by the door, and I am not in my shack with a woman’s arm flopped across my chest. I’m in the woods, and a white man is pivoting a squirrel on the spit, its tail flopping through the fire, flicking around the sparks, and my heart is a little pained from not finding myself home. The Indian stands there watching, not an expression on his face, which leads me to think he must find something funny — or else he’s angry, I can’t tell which, damn Indians — and Cat’s quiet as ever, looking hurt, so I open the other eye and say, “You stop it now. Go on and give that beast a rest.”

I stretch up and grab yesterday’s shirt and wrap it around the black-burned tail with one hand while I saw it off the ass with the other. “No one teach a man how to cook,” I say, shaking my head, and toss the tail as far as it’ll go, which is about as far as the Indian, those things being all hair and not carrying much weight. The Indian looks at it and looks at me and sidles a few feet to the left, with that look of disdain, or maybe affection.

When the ground rat finishes cooking, Cat cuts it up in three and eats his share straight off the bone, a pocket of blood oozing out down his chin. He’s the savage here, no doubt. If he were a dog, he’d either be the one that’s been kicked too much and wants a pat or the one that’s about to start foaming. I finish my two bites of rangy squirrel and fiddle around in my sack to check for the lace cookies I nabbed from my master’s kitchen. The things are damn tough, but they hold up for days and sit in your stomach like guests waiting for company. I don’t plan to share.

The sun’s starting to creep its way up the sky. Planting time’s already past, and I suck on a bone trying to picture the others bending down, feeling their creaking backs and the sweat coming down their necks. I don’t like that we’re turning on our heels and heading right back toward those sugar poles. Cat bares his teeth and I flinch, but he’s just fiddling out his food again. The Indian folds his sleeping cloth, and when he starts brushing straight the needles beneath the trees, wiping away the mess of us, I remember there’ll soon be men on my trail. And the kind of men they are — well, they’re the ones who wouldn’t blink to kill you, who don’t have any sort of poor dreams at night, who look at you and see not a man but a runaway pig. Now that I’m outside the fence I’m in the range of their guns, and everything I left behind suddenly seems like the worst thing a man could ever meet. I don’t know why I stayed so long, except leaving has brought me to this: a fearful panic in my bones. I think of myself as a decent man — good to the woman that was given me and good to the little ones too, and I took my whippings lying down — but I start to see how a man could want to kill, how a man might be driven to it, how goodness is measured in all sorts of ways. If I saw a white man with a whip coming through the trees, apologies to Cat, I’d shoot him through the eye without thinking twice.

We finish up making camp look like a regular old dust wallow and move on quiet down the trail, the Indian looking ahead and Cat looking down and me every few steps turning my head around to see who’s coming. Cat doesn’t ask once why we’ve turned right around again, and this gives me some comfort, though I’ll keep my rope ready for the day I need to tie him up and leave him, another white man to put aside.

What do three mostly-strangers talk about on a long road with nothing to see but sometimes a knocked-down log in the path or a drunken man with one leg shorter than the other or a woodpecker flying over, the size of a child? I talk about all the stories of my life and leave enough spaces in the telling to hear their own, if they ever want to speak on it. I wouldn’t want to make Cat say whether or not he murdered a man, but I’d like a little detail, some wife, some child, something of what it was like growing up as a white boy. Sometimes the Indian stops to listen for a far-off noise, and sometimes Cat just stops to think, but we keep catching up to each other. I learn a few small things: the Indian has a name, Ispallina or Istillosha, and when I asked if either of them had a lady at home, their faces both got funny. I learn that wherever the snappy sticks and leaf piles are, my feet find them right away, while Cat and the Indian seem to walk right around them, though they don’t appear to be studying the path more than me. And so whenever horse hooves sound from far off, they’re the first to clamber off the road, and those are the times when I’m glad they’re so quiet and I’m attached to their oddness by some strange accident and not all on my own.

You’d think a day of walking after days of planting cane wouldn’t be so wearisome, but I find the slower you go, the more your legs catch on and start to have some contrary thoughts. I miss the horse my master gave me, and wonder what happened to these other men’s rides. Maybe they aim to shrink, to show men walking past no more than the smallest sliver of their guilty selves. Now that we’re creeping backward, my feet are nervous and I’m holding my breath until we make that western spur.