Katy Smith - Free Men

THE SOUND MADE an echo in my head that won’t go away. We sit by the side of the road, three in a row, looking straight before us. Cat stands up, spits in his hand, runs it through his hair, but when he sees we’re not budging, sits down again.

The Indian isn’t saying anything, but he knows and I know what’s in those sacks, and it’s not cloth and it’s not corn cakes, and we both know what a little coin would do in our straits.

I start to say something, but stop. What is a free man except a man with money? I’ll lay it down in taverns from here to the Pacific Ocean, and every man among them will take it with a grin. There is no farm that can’t be bought with money, black or white.

We whisper, like we think God’s watching.

“What do you think?” I say.

“There’s nothing to think.”

“This is freedom here,” I say. “This is what it looks like, those bags.”

“It’s not ours.”

There’s a hunger in the Indian and I smell it. “No,” I say, “just like your money doesn’t belong to you, but to whoever’s the man who took it. Just like I don’t belong to myself but to my master, or at least Treehorn, who treats my body like his own dog.”

He doesn’t look at me, is thinking.

“And those fellows weren’t even good men, were they? You knew them, didn’t you?”

Cat has stood up again and is pacing behind us, shaking his head.

“That Thomas Cowbell—”

“Colhill,” he interrupts me.

“He did something bad to you once?”

Half of Istillicha’s face twists up, as if he’s trying to remember finally the difference between good and bad, if there’s one at all. “This is not my plan.”

“We do it while they’re sleeping,” I say. “No harm.”

Cat sits down and is frowning now, his arms across his chest, his hands pulled tight into his armpits. I think he says no a couple of times, but it’s hard to tell. Could just be a cough.

“He’s the father of a woman I know,” the Indian says.

“He take your money?”

He chews at the inside of his cheek, his eyes wet and dark. “I think she did.”

There’s a deeper story there, and I let him have it, let him flip through it over and over again, because I can see that each time he does, his anger gets hotter. I scratch up a stick from the dirt and roll it between my palms, looking up at the sky to see how the clouds are tumbling together and counting how two sacks split between three men. My mother before she was stolen taught me not to steal, but this is not because she didn’t want me to have cake from the kitchen. It’s the whip she was saving me from, not my own conscience, not right or wrong. Slavery’s all wrong, no matter what went on, and clambering out of it is nothing but right. If she is watching me clamber from up on high, then she is surely nodding her head.

“This is a god-given right,” I say, just now getting a sense of what God might be. “This is a right from God himself, who hid me in his folds the night I left and who’s shining his light down on an Indian and a murderer — apologies, Cat — and if there were signs in the world then surely this would be one. Out of everything you’ve ever seen in life, all the animals running across your path and the shooting stars and the women put in front of you, have you ever been a witness to so clear and loud a sign? To finally see the thing you most want in the world, prancing around and chiming like a goddamn bell? You think a god as great as him doesn’t know how to send a sign?”

Cat coughs again, no .

“And then?” The Indian wants me to tell him it’s all right, that’s what I hear him asking.

“And then we start great lives,” I say. Free lives .

My brother Primus is swimming in my mind, swimming in the creek below the rope that hangs loose from the willow, his brown limbs dipping through summer water, his laugh a long string of joy. My mother is bent in a knot in her garden, scrabbling out cabbages, and looks up at me with a smile, her hands packed with green, a chicken pecking at her bare heels. My grandfather Abraham is running fast, is running by a bank of grasses that hides a cool stream, is running without stopping because the crocodiles are asleep, the white men are ghosts, and the big house burned down, burned down at the hands of his grandson, who is not dead and hanging but is swimming in my mind, and all are free.

BY THE TIME the sky has turned from red to black, we’ve sorted our packs and marked a plan. The white men and their guides and their horses and their laden mules will be laid up snoring for the night and our steady silent hands will sneak into their bags, taking a few guns also for just-in-case, and when they awake with the first birds, they’ll find themselves a few pounds the lighter. By then I’ll be halfway to the west, Istillicha will have bought himself a chiefdom or a rum empire or whatever it is he wants, and Cat will probably be lying under some tree, still thinking about his wrongs. I imagine quick what that money could do for Winna, how she once said in the fuzzy middle part between loving and sleeping that I better come buy her once I’m a rich man, but she’s a good woman and I know she’ll find another man to fill the bed, one who isn’t already in love. This is my money, Winna , I say, as if she’ll hear and understand. I’m a bad husband, but I’m a better man.

We turn back north in the dim light of nighttime and retrace the trading path, which is now scuffed with the steps of well-fed men on horseback, and I smooth my shout to a whisper. “You sure we heading the right way? You don’t think they can hear us coming? You think they’ll be asleep by now? What if—” I think maybe this time Cat will answer. Istillicha grabs my arm and squeezes me silent, and in his grasp I can feel his heartbeat running even faster than my own.

I can’t tell why I’m nervous all of a sudden except it’s suddenly occurring to me how close everything is to touching and how quick it could be snatched away again, and this here is the lock on the door past which is all I ever wanted, at least as a grown man, for all I wanted when I was young is already dead and can’t be had. My chest feels about to shatter.

And then I hear the creek waters running, little bells.

TODAY CONTINUES WARM. One of the Indians has a pretty habit of humming that keeps our search lighthearted, though the slave who is ostensibly guiding us, and who was present during the murders, continues to glower at the back of our train. The tunes are mostly Indian, using a limited range of notes, but occasionally he slips into a European song he must have picked up from a trader’s fiddle. I must prevent myself from singing along.

At first light, we passed near the creek where the atrocity took place. The slave asked if I would care to view the site, but I could tell he wasn’t eager to see the bodies again, and time compelled me to keep moving. I strained my ear but the water must have been too far distant. When the other slaves had straggled back to camp yesterday with their borrowed horses — none of the blacks having fled, I must compliment the Creeks — they said it sounded as though the killers had headed south. Was it terrible that I chose to leave the dead uncovered so long? As I am not much for Fate, neither do I trust much in God, or at least in the version of him that demands weekly service, honest confession, and prompt burial. I told my men to ride on.

We were well fed and watered last night at one of the public houses along the trail. These taverns are always of great interest, as they gather a wide spectrum of men beneath their roofs and construct a sense of security that permits thieves and gentlemen to lie down in the same bed come nightfall. That the taverns are always chock-full, in spite of the high rates of pickpocketing and brawls, suggests that this security is easily blinked over in favor of more valued offerings — conviviality, perhaps.