Katy Smith - Free Men

So I made no friends. None among the made-up kin would let me hold them.

There were girls too, things as small and straight as we. They rooted in their own rooms, bent above their own chores. Our broken clothes were given to them, sewn to be split again. Negroes shared the field with us, Indians brought meat and hides and went away with bundles. I was the only one who resembled myself. The only one still brought to tears by women’s breasts. Who’d never seen a kiss, could not guess the placing of lips to skin was kindness. There may have been others. I never asked. I never spoke. The matron crows would hum in foreign words. The negroes dipped their calls in something brown and wet so I couldn’t tell the sounds apart. The Indians barked deep. My father stopped listening. I took my bread as it came. When I was told to ask the Lord to differ us from evil, I asked myself. Myself answered, “Yes.”

Two girls were not negro or Indian or orphan. They lived in the attic, closest to heaven, and served our master and the crows. Brought and took dishes, helped with linens, sewed things with their young fingers. A girl with few teeth, who nightmared us all, and a girl with red hair. Children, but with parents somewhere. For a week they’d be gone, and we knew. They came back fatter, like they had slept sound, like someone had kissed their faces before sleep. The one who wasn’t ugly was beautiful. She didn’t walk but skipped. Everything was dancing, and it was light, nothing like the men in my father’s cabin who pounded till the plates fell down. She talked with her hands, and they danced. Little fingers dancing. None of us knew her name.

There was a day when she cupped my chin and said, “Look at that face. Who was your mother, to leave you?”

I whispered. “My mother, I believe, is dead. I believe my father knocked her head.” A rhyme, though it was true.

One robed woman felt almost kind, and to her I gave my thoughts and whatever I found, the summer blackberry, the winter nest. She was mostly still, moved only if poked. Dry and old. Her cheeks hung in pockets. The day I brought her a dead mole, its dunness for her boned hand, she asked me what I hoped for, roundabout. “Where are you going after this world?” is what she asked.

“To the next to see my father.”

“And where is your father?”

“Asleep.”

“In heaven?”

“He didn’t say.”

“What will you do to get there?”

I hadn’t known there was a map. My head I lay on her hard thin legs and clutched her knees. The mole was on the ground. She hadn’t touched it. I watched its hand, stiff and scaled, grasping in its last breath, as she told me how to go.

“God loves those who love,” she said. She steered me from hitting, biting, from telling lies, from stealing rolls. She never said what love was. I dug my fingers in her leg, my eyes shut tight, till she pried them free.

As she stood to leave, her skirts hushing, I said, “You are who I love.”

Her pouched face hardened. “No. God is who you love.”

In bed beneath the summer linen, I wondered had I met a man named God. Or didn’t he care to meet me. What was love but a touch. My hands around her knees. His belt against my back. Love being warm fingers, hate being cold. God had no hands. When we woke at night, dream-sweated, we were meant to pray to fall asleep. I stopped praying. I wept instead.

ABOVE ALL THE women was a man. Men I knew. He marked our comings and goings in a little gold book. In the belt around his robe lived a leather lash. He was a fancy man, who used his belt not for whippings but to hold a whipper. His nose was so long it almost touched his mouth, though I never saw his tongue come out to lick it. Some days he wasn’t there, some days he was. Mornings, he stood over prayer. With all our mouths mumbling, even the crows, he didn’t speak. He had wet eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was sad. The less I remember him, the more I think he was.

He brought me to his room once. Gave me a cross made out of sticks. I started, for I was no fool and knew about sticks. He smiled and opened up my fist. The sticks were smooth, all the nubbins worn off. When his eyes were closed and he was speeching, I looked about. A small room for a grown man. White walls, no dirt. A bed and a table and a jug. I was thirsty so I stepped over on soft toes. His eyes snapped open when I spit it all over the white wall.

“Stronger than my father’s,” I said for apology.

He kept staring, there on his knees with his hands together and his nostrils wide. I inched out.

I inched in again. “Thank you,” I said, holding up the cross. I ran.

When next I saw the woman my friend, I butted against her. She was washing plates in the yard. All the dirty water smelled of fat. Hungry, I gnawed soft on her arm. She pushed me away. She didn’t want my too-big shoes to get wet.

“Where do you make the whiskey?” I asked.

She looked like I had something foul on my face.

“I can help.” Though really I knew nothing. I couldn’t start a fire. Fires started in spite of me.

“We don’t drink whiskey, son,” she said. Me and Jesus were sons, and everyone else was a father. I told her about the jug of the long-nose man and she put her hand across my mouth and shook her head.

“We tell our own sins,” she said, “not others’.”

Sin was not a word I knew.

Some of us were worse than I was. Would go down pondways on full moons and swim clothesless, boys and girls. Would drag their shirts back wet to bed. I followed them once, young as I was, and climbed a tree to stare. The red-haired girl was there, laughing. Their forms mirrored out in the night water. They pushed, they ducked, I thought they’d drown. I held to my branch and waited for ants. An owl hooted by and they gasped and dove, all bodies down. Bubbles surfaced and the girls’ hair. Wet mats of muddy brown and gold. Then they were serpents, dolphins. In lessons, they told us of the ocean, as if we’d seen it. We smelled it. The creek here ran straight to sea. There were boys who could swim it. But here the cattails shivered round the wallow, and we were in the middle of ourselves. No sea to see, no mountain, not even flatness. Just our bodies in the water, in the arm of the marsh. You could smell brine on the dusk wind. Beyond that edge was nothing human. A mile of swamp, untouched. Unheld. The creeks snaking toward each other and darkness. To the ocean where dolphins flew.

The red-haired girl climbed out first, shook herself, saw me on the branch. “I’ve never seen a lizard like you,” she said, and twisted her hair in loops so the water seeped out. She put a finger to her lips. I nodded, and she laughed again. Danced back up the slope to the house that was not her home. Her head like a flicker of light.

In my watered thoughts, I fell asleep. I could almost hear the creeping of the children, their sloshed footsteps in August dirt. But I could not open my eyes. My branch was my father, my arms held close. In my dreams I was walking hand in hand, him in one, death in the other. I think it was the mole. Its hand was furred. I woke to not a wren but an angry blackbird, her hands clapping in the air beneath me, yelling damnation, cold breakfast. I crawled down and didn’t speak. I traced the footprints of the night demons, their toes still spread in the muck. I got no dinner but welts, no supper but a dark small room. I was left to sorrow and to pray. I thought of sins, but they were not my own. I thought mostly of the water, wondering could I swim if taught. I thought it was something like running. Only you must do it faster than the water runs downward, for at the bottom was nothing but more water, and deep. When the other children huddled to bed, I was put to mine and told to pray. The one who once seemed kind said, “And think what could’ve snatched you in that tree,” so I knew she was kind again. I thought about what could have snatched me, hawks and foxes and mice, till I fell asleep, dreamless.