Katy Smith: Free Men

But I yearn to be surprised. It is perhaps the sole reason I’m pursuing these uncommon bandits, for I cannot make sense of their acting in concert. My notebooks are swollen with sketches of Indian life, descriptions of council meetings, meetings with foreign emissaries, meetings between lovers, but this country, like the countries I’ve known before, has its patterns; after a while, they can be summarized with some ease. What has been reinforced to me is that human existence is both practical and predictable. There are those who find themselves sunk in the little vicissitudes of life, who feel brought low by fortune, but I am skeptical of Fate, of anything imperceptible. What happens to us can be easily mapped by what has come before, this being a decidedly functional world, one of cause and effect. Men pursue their own interests and stick to their kind, simply. We grow walls and hide behind them. I knew this even as a boy.

AS A CHILD, if my mother were at her sewing or scolding the maids, I would creep out to her garden, kneel before a bud, and wait through the slow hours until it began to split. The flowers in that hedged garden in Thin-le-Moutier were each a promise of some other world, God-wrought and composite, which I dreamed about as one might dream of women one hasn’t met. A single bursting stamen could remind me that there was life independent of my mother, that intricacy existed equally in man, and that I was merely observing the palest version of both in those tended beds. The more my mother complained of my dirtied knees, the more I saw the space beyond our house as splendidly transgressive. Disorder was intoxicating.

On the lowest shelf in the library, we had a few volumes of philosophy and a Dutch atlas, and though I couldn’t make sense of Cicero, I found a match for my flowers in the maps of distant lands. The Orient, the New World, Nouvelle Hollande floating half drawn above the white blank of Terres Australes . I knew boys lived there; I knew there were mothers and perhaps fathers and certainly rivers winding through woods. What a glory to travel the world, cataloging every variance. I tore out the broad page with the Antilles, rough crumbs of islands, and folded it beneath my pillow so that I might sleep on its expanse.

It was a serving girl who found it and reported my crime. I only regret that I don’t know her name to curse it; I was never taught their names. My mother did not believe in beating me, as a father might have done, but understood discipline to be a foundation for a righteous life, and so at every misdeed she locked me in an empty room at the end of a hallway on the third floor. She wore her wedding rings on a chain around her neck, and they chimed as she shut the door behind her. Boards had been nailed where the window once was, so that there was nothing for a child to gaze upon: none of the rich accoutrements of the other rooms, the gilt mirrors or glowering portraits, but also nothing of the world beyond. No sky, no distant green. I came to despise the bare floors and bare walls, for the emptiness forced my gaze within, where there was nothing I wished to consider. I did not admire myself then. She took her time; two or three hours always brought me to tears and back again, so that when she came to fetch me I seemed calm and penitent. I thought my mother must have hated me, and I could not discover why.

My father, who might have been a different breed of parent, was a soldier, and I was told by a sympathetic cook that one day when I was a baby he marched away from the house as if a battle were calling him, and he never marched back. If there was a pattern of men leaving my mother, I took pleasure in the thought of joining them.

The only joy was in my mother’s garden. I don’t know why I call it hers; I rarely saw her there, and certainly she never dug holes or hoisted around a watering can, though when young men would visit she sometimes took it upon herself to wear an apron and hold a trowel daintily. She did enjoy the sight of cut flowers inside. The garden was larger than the house and more elaborate, with rooms and knotted hedges and a canal that ran through the roses, the earth between each plant covered in a cold snow of stones. Beyond the regimented grounds was an actual river, which a boy could hear gurgling if he put his ear to the yew wall, and near it was a spread of lawn where she experimented with a paysager that eventually grew too wild, the sloping grasses and artfully scattered rocks returned, by a patient servant, to herb beds. My mother was not quite romantic enough to abide a winding path. But these flashes of the undomesticated soothed me, almost made up for the hours in the bare room, the lack of any friend.

When I felt lonely, which was certainly not all the time, I was imaginative enough to find my own company. We had a kitten once who was afraid of its tail, who would skulk among the vegetable rows and try to burrow in the dirt whenever a sparrow twittered by. I adored this cat, I wanted it to sleep in my bed with me and learn tricks, like shaking hands. Mother said it was no use, the creature was feral and should be left in peace, but I saw it wasn’t wild at all, only deathly afraid of the natural world. It needed rescue. So for a summer I stalked the gardens. Between the box hedges there were countless places to hide; I walked slowly, and later crawled, along the borders of yew, through the delphiniums and love-in-a-mist, behind the stone pools where the lilies grew. Sometimes all I’d gain for my troubles was the end of a tail, slippering through a hedge, or the sound of its paws on the gravel path behind me. It could move beyond the borders of the garden, as I could not. But as the summer waned, I think it grew more accustomed, or I less obvious, and we would sit in the same leafy room for an afternoon, it dozing at the base of a rose while I chased away the lizards. When it first offered its back to be touched, I did so with one finger only, and watched with joy as it ran away bewildered and then returned a few moments later, standoffish and intrigued. I have had to work for few things in life, and nothing has been sweeter than this first struggle. I never touched its belly, or rubbed its ear between my fingers, or twirled its tail with affection, and I certainly never coaxed it into my bedchamber, but my stealth improved so that I could always find it, wherever in the garden it was cowering, and I suppose my temperament was quiet enough that it allowed me to coexist. I had told no one about my pursuits by the time I was sent to school at the end of the summer, and when I returned home that winter for a holiday, the kitten was gone, and there was no one to whom I could have conveyed my grief. My mother died a few years later, and so I began my acquaintance with the world. I have grown past this artlessness because men always move beyond such gardens.

THE THREE CREEKS behind me chatter, knowing that I will stop them when I spot the first sign of our fugitives. They are secondaries, not cousins to our chief but at one remove, men trusted with the smaller tasks of running a town’s politics. For my purpose, they are merely extra arms to use for apprehending, but I enjoy listening to their little scandals. One of them seems to have met a woman on a recent trip to the Iroquois and is plotting their reunion.

“Next summer we’ll go again, the mico said.”

“Not that way, our treaties there are done. We’ll go west if we go any way at all. The Caddo are bumping against the French.”

“They’re an ugly lot!” says the third.

“He means you’ll find no woman there.”

“It’s not any bit I want, it’s the one I already found. You’re not listening.”

“Whoever she was, a year goes by and she’ll have found a dozen men instead, and taller too.”