Katy Smith - Free Men

“Your mother dead?” he asked in the morning.

My mother. I didn’t have a mother.

“Father?”

“Sir, he was a drunkard,” for that is what the crows had called him.

We rode two miles more. I sat up this time, kept my eyes wide. I was mostly grown, not the worm I was when last I rode in such a cart. Everything I saw could be used for when I next escaped. A creek there, blackberry bushes, a trunk with a hole in it, perfect for hiding. I knew I would never see them again. I was too lonely to go where there were not men. I sat tall next to Brother Sterrett and tried to guess how hard he’d hit.

“Are you much religious?” I asked.

He turned to me, surprised. The reins looked so easy in his hands, I wanted to hold them.

“I am not much,” I answered myself, staring straight forward, man-like.

“You haven’t seen a lot one way or the other,” he said.

He was stupid. “You can’t see God.”

“You’ll see plenty before you’re done. Squeamish?”

I didn’t know the word. Didn’t answer.

He patted his belly. “Does your stomach turn easy?”

Whiskey’ll do it, I thought. Dead men. Fires. Serving girls. Men with lashes. Urine. Wooden closets. Moles.

“You work hard,” he said, “you’ll earn your dinner, so no fear I’ll starve you. I don’t know what the nuns gave you, you’re a sack of bones, but any tool needs its oil. This is a job, though, not a home. Just stay on the right side of that.”

Not a home. How should I live in a house with a man and his son and eat their corn and sleep with dreams and shit in the same distant hole and not have a home? Where was it? The woman who was my friend before I killed a girl would say all that will come when I am dead. The good comes later, when we claim it from heaven. So long as we keep coming back to our forgiveness wheel. Nothing to do but wait. Nothing for me now. I only worried how long I’d live.

WE WERE BACK in South Carolina, where I may have been from. Near Beaufort, he had a house. Small and wood and washed white. A woman had lived there but was dead or gone. The boy had not my years but fewer. We matched in thinness, in wary stares. The three of us shared a room. A second held the hearth and an old quilt frame, boards across it to make a table. The third was where the bodies came. Broken and bruised. Cracked skulls, festering feet. Spider bites. They’d said he was a doctor, but I never guessed the ailments. How twisted the body could get and stay alive long enough to reach his office. So there were no ladies with sweet coughs, I didn’t mind. I was brave enough for worse. And, secret, I wanted to learn how to heal a man who was choked with drink. Who was lying in a puddle of his filth, cramped in a blackberry dip by a copper pot. I wanted to know if that was a man you could save.

The first day I thought I’d learn to heal. I had my hands out straight, strong. I was not to hold the binds or bandages, though, but to empty the basins. Blood, piss, puke. The little one watched me from the corner of the house, squatting. He wore a shirt that touched his knees and nothing else. Sterrett said it was a negro shirt, left over from the man they used to have. The negro had held the binds and bandages until he cut himself on a little knife and his veins boiled open. The boy chewed his hands in sorrow. I was no negro, and they would not care for me. The boy whistled at me as I scrubbed the pot out with elm leaves, rough to catch the clots. I once flung piss at him sideways, but he ducked rabbit-fast behind the house. I thought for days he might be mute.

I had practice in being quiet. I knew to listen. Knew my own voice was weak and not worth hearing. No surprise that another boy knew this too. We were mirrors of each other, broken. But I was holding the offal and he had no duties. Seemed almost wild. I thought, that is because his father is not dead yet. There was no affection between them, no touched hands, and if I could have written a story of fathers and sons, this is what it would have been: he lashed us both when we mischiefed, but hit his son harder. I could’ve told the boy things but didn’t. In the surgery, there was no talk of kinship. Bodies came in, bodies went out. Men tied to nothing, not even their own limbs. Just pieces to be sewn up, skin to be patched. No heart, no thoughts, unless there really was a heart, or a brain split wide. We were not meant to feel.

The first man I saw die on the slab in the surgery had been shot with a musket by his wife. She wanted to give a fright, Sterrett said. Half his chest had torn open, his left arm hung by a cord to his shoulder. His eyes still flickered. His heart, bare, shuddered. Sterrett gave him something, whispered in his ear, pressed his eyes shut, closed his own. I saw him flinch and breathe and then expire. Like nightfall, fast. Sterrett left the room and I stayed quiet. I watched the dead man and waited. I touched him once before he was cold. I slipped my fingers under his thumb and bounced it. It fell heavy each time, turning paler. I backed away. The blood was leaving through the hole Sterrett cut in his back, a thick leak into the white bowl below. When it filled, I could not yet move, and watched from the corner as it flooded over. I rubbed my fingers on the scratch of my pants. I worried the dead would stay on them.

I was not jelly-kneed. I was not a child, or a coward. I had seen dead men, had buried some, had touched one, had killed a girl. But I knew of hauntings. Vapors in a man come out when he has passed, and body or not, they linger. They cling. You can smell them like old eggs. The crows had said this was not true, that the spirit was invisible and anyway was holy, it did no wrong but went up to heaven direct, no dallying, to be with our father. I knew better. What spirit would want to be with its father? I took to washing myself in the marshes. Taking on the swamp smell to drown out the dead. Nor did I go walking at night. The ghosts would not know me to haunt me. They must have draped around Sterrett like ivy. He did not mind when men came in and old flesh went out. When a man walked up with “My chest is sore” and left with pennies on his eyes.

Suppers were silent but not without sound. Sterrett chewed his meat open-mouthed and swallowed loudly. The boy ground his teeth, scraped his spoon across the tin plate, and sucked his food from cheek to mouth and back again, making pulp from solid. I made my mouth work as hushed as I could. I was a deer, safe among the wolves. We ate meat every night, and my belly slowly pouched. Bread, cabbage, and on Sundays, pudding. Neighbor women brought the dish as payment for his presence. My first taste of raisins. They drank a cider that was sweeter than my father’s whiskey, and if we were well fuzzled, Sterrett would play his fiddle in the dusk and the boy and I would wrestle or sleep. There was nothing wrong, or lacking. Nothing that hurt. But I was cold every night, on the floor, under wool, in the summer dark.

WHEN THE HOUSE was empty, the father lying half drunk beneath a tree, as fathers do, the son would walk me to the shore and show me bones. Was this the first time I had seen the ocean? I wouldn’t know it, for how familiar it was. Like my home creek running clear through the still, like the rotten backwater marshes by the lake where I dipped to hide, like rain coming down, except wide, wide, wide. The boy thought me a fool, but I knew what to do. I ran in up to my knees, then dove. What boys do with water. I remembered every cut I didn’t know I had. I couldn’t see below, not with my eyes open, so I let him show me. He made the dead horseshoe crabs dance, the empty mussels play. If I laughed, he’d kick me in the calves. If I spoke, he’d run into the sea until his head was under. Some things are so thick with marvel, one person is not enough to see them. I wanted to show someone the ocean. There was no one near. I pointed to the waves, still coming, never not coming, but the boy didn’t follow my hand.