Katy Smith: Free Men

“Only Iroquois I saw was very short,” says the third.

“Was he a child? Listen, brother, don’t be a fool. There are plenty of girls within throwing distance who would take you into their beds. What about Sehoy?”

“But you didn’t see the Iroquois girl. They look very different up there. I think she’d even refused an Englishman.”

“So she has sense; doesn’t mean she’ll wait for a gawky Muskogee.”

“I heard there’s a spell to put muscle on your arms,” says the third.

The slave, through all of this, is silent.

“Listen, give her up. Be sensible. Did you even—”

“Yes! I’m not entirely without talent. I tell you, she loves me.”

“She said so?”

“Her eyes, that’s where it was. But very clear. She wants me to come again.”

“For another tumble in the longhouse, I’m sure, between tumbles with proper warriors.”

“I’ve fought too.”

“One summer.”

“And with a scar! This one.”

“From a falling walnut.”

“She’ll wait. She’ll want me again.”

“And you’ll learn the language? Bundle up on those winter nights next to a nasty fire smelling of fat, with all her cousins crammed around you lovers, so you couldn’t grab her bottom without pulling her sister’s hair?”

The third laughed out loud.

“That’s it, you have no sympathy.”

And they didn’t speak for ten minutes, during which I reminded myself to add this exchange to my section on inter-Indian relations.

Do I wish they included me in their banter? Perhaps for the same reason I don’t engage the silent slave bringing up the rear, the Creeks keep me well out of their conversation. Though Donne may have claimed that every man is a piece of the continent, I’d wager he never visited this one.

The afternoon is a pleasant one for riding; the sun comes in warm through the beeches and oaks, still mostly defoliated from the winter, and the new jacket my wife made me keeps the wind off, so that I exist in that perfect state of intermediacy wherein I neither sweat nor shiver. If I stopped my horse, I believe the air would feel like nothing on my face, as if there were no elements at all.

Some ground bird, a robin or towhee, hops before us through patches of light, flitting through the fingers of a low palmetto. I give my whip a light crack and it startles off, and I promptly regret this. Wherever I am, I can hear the calls of birds too afraid to show their feathers. Some of the men we pass on the trail know who I am and keep a generous berth or else nod extravagantly. Each one of them has some sin in his heart he wouldn’t wish me finding. But my primary role is not that of embodied justice but exploration. If they knew me better — if anyone did, from my mother to my wives to these half strangers — it would be evident that I merely wanted to understand them. Give me your actions for a day, and I can find the thoughts to match them.

I already picture the treatise this will make: three men of diverse but foul character have forged a union out of mutual greed — the Indian providing stealth and forest knowledge, the white man serving as both intelligence and firepower, and the negro with his black heart spurring them on — and have thereby revealed the various motives that make the American backcountry a landscape of merciless individual pursuit. My readers will blush to learn of this breed of criminal, of the tenor of this young nation, bumping along as it does without the comfort or cohesion of monarchy and of each man residing within his sphere: the poor thieving from the poor, and the rich imprisoned in their ancestral gardens. Readers will wonder what sort of future such a nation can anticipate; there will be a clamor for more rapportage . Will the Royal Society be taken aback when they learn that the author who holds this fresh mirror up to the machinations of humanity is not a pale pedant but the gentleman adventurer Louis Le Clerc Milfort?

That these three men will die at my hand at the end of this journey needn’t be included in my account. No matter how lawless the country, freedom must be contingent on innocence.

MY SHOULDER FEELS like an angry rat has burrowed in and is nibbling on the nerves. Cat got the bullet out, bless him, but something alive’s still in there, feeding itself. The others are walking faster than me now, for the rat in my arm doesn’t care for the silver on my back. Think of all the shit I’ve borne for twenty-eight years, the pounds and pounds of cane I’ve cut and lifted and boiled down, think of the scars on my skin that have grown on top of scars like a new language building itself, all put there by men who never cared to hear my own tongue, and you’d think the way those wounds burned into my innards would’ve prepared me for one gunshot to the shoulder, one heavy bag of coins. But since taking my own body out of Master’s reach, this is the one thing I’ve done. Those murders the one action on my new-freed soul. I twist my arm across my chest, stretch it back, roll my wrist a couple times. The day’s waking up, and all the little birds are coming out to scold us.

Though the new man of me is already damned, I am used enough to finding the good of things to be glad those two men are walking with me. We could’ve split after the creek, but that would’ve been a further ruin, and somehow they knew this too. I never learned how to be easy alone. My voice needs ears to hear it, even past when there’s nothing to say. Like now.

Cat’s carrying our knapsacks, since me and the Indian, being bigger, offered to take the silver. But he looks back once and sees a hiccup in my step — under the weight, he thinks, but really it’s the damn rat eating my flesh — and calls out in his soft sad voice, “You all right?”

Istillicha glances back, but I say, “Mm-hm, mm-hm, just got to get where we’re going,” and we keep on moving, and the only thing keeps me from setting down the bag is the sight of their shoes ahead. The Indian in his quiet moccasins, the white man looking like he wrapped a bunch of random leather around his feet.

We didn’t eat breakfast, being still fuddled from having taken men’s lives — lives that if we had the chance we’d patch back together with our own muscle and bone, or maybe that’s only me — and my stomach is doing somersaults, trying to figure out if it wants some food or wants to puke up all the food it’s ever in its whole life had. I’m just a man , I keep telling myself, which is to say, It’s all right to be hungry and It’s all right that I’m still walking while some men aren’t. What I love about the Indian is how good he is at catching meat. And he knows which parts of the pigeon taste better than you think they would. See, I’m already making a future for myself where I sit down for dinner, move my fingers to my mouth to fill my belly on purpose to keep living.

The red dust from the road has stuck to my wet legs, like I dragged blood out of that creek, and the grit is rubbing at my ankles. I set down the bag to scratch the muck off, and the others stop and wait. Cat comes and drops the sacks at my feet and lifts the bag of silver that’s about as big as he is, hoisting it on his back with a grunt. I make a half-hearted grab at it.

“I got it,” I say, and I think it’s a sign of something that after just three days no one’s suspecting that one of us’ll run off with the coins while the others aren’t looking.

Cat walks on with it, and I pick up our own small bags, filled with blankets and biscuits and a knife and whatever soil accompanied us from our various homes, soil that maybe our wives once walked on, though one of the many things I don’t know about these men is whether they left behind any ladies. I shake my head a couple times so I won’t start remembering mine.