Katy Smith - Free Men

The next year, the boy left in regimentals. Was blown apart in some larger battle. Sterrett never wept, though I did. It made no sense that those I halfway loved were stolen. I’d go where they went, if only they showed me the way. The two of us remained. He didn’t urge me to pick up my gun, so I stayed. Beside each other, we worked through bodies. I came nearer the table. Began to dig bullets from muscle, from pillows of yellow bile. My world was a red world, and green with decay. He was careful to teach me nothing. He never named the parts, never pointed out the cure. This would be my only job, he said. I’d be useless if I left. I nodded and dug my fingers deeper in flesh. My hunger was not for the dead but for the living. I never said.

When the war paused, seemed to have ended, I was older than my indenture. I knew this, I knew my own age. Remembering it was remembering my father. A day came without any sick, and Sterrett told me to follow him to the woods to look for herbs. He knowing them, naming them silently, gauging their powers, and me picking them. I had a pouch and papers and I would lay the weeds between sheets so they would not touch. I saw which ones he pulled powdery from jars to give the fevered, the nauseous. I wasn’t wholly blind. But because he would have me so, I let him think it. Would point at a tiny tufted pine and ask if it was dogbane. These trips, we didn’t speak much. But it was damp and my clothes were thin.

“I’m plenty old now,” I said. “Think I’m free of any papers.”

He pointed out some large, flat leaves for me to sever.

“Whatever you signed to take me. I’m older than that now. Can’t keep me without pay.”

He stopped and dug a hard straw in his teeth. “You got somewhere to get to?”

“A wage is all, not much. I’m a white man, and old enough.”

He watched me fold up the leaves and pack them in my pouch. I stayed extra quiet now, to let him think. I pressed the leaves so soft they were like locks of lady hair. I fastened the pouch deliberate. I did not look at him but kept walking. Slow. The holes in my shoes let the chill in. Birds didn’t sing much in a drizzle.

He stopped me. Laid the terms. He’d feed me, house me, clothe me, teach me a little more. I told him I wanted paper money. I wanted pounds. He held up his hands — empty, for he carried nothing into the woods — and said that’s all he could do. We looked at each other, older and younger. I don’t think he either had somewhere to get to. I nodded. It’s hard to ask for something the first time.

He held me another year, filling me with meat. Not shouting so much. Offered me pence on Sundays. I kept them in a wooden box that once held barks, slipped beneath my bed. A year, and I started to feel like I might die the same man I started as. Full of holes, empty-handed, no-hearted. On the same wheel, nothing left to forgive. With no sins, how would God remember me? If I didn’t move, he’d forget. When we died, he’d forget to call my name. If I had no one to love, I’d have nothing to show for this life. I was a wilty plant, dried up to nothing.

A woman came who’d had a child and could not stop her bleeding, and all were there, the woman, the man, the screaming infant, three other children. All were crying. Sterrett stuck his hands deep within her and blood came flowing down his arms, running along his own raised veins. He turned something or pulled something, and then staunched it and took a needle and thread below and made a fancy stitch, and though she was white as bones she was not dead. The man fell across her chest and held her tight. Kissed her shoulders and neck and breasts because her face was still too white and wide to touch. The children could not stop crying. We sent her home, where she may have died soon after, but in that room there was a family, whole, and I was awed by everything I didn’t have.

A whole year passed.

I was twenty-one and a man and not a son. In November the sawgrass glowed. The air was cool salt as it slid in and out of windows. The last of the duck flocks settled. Sterrett was sharpening his knives when a man came. I was in the field coaxing peas. His head was pumpkin-sized. His eyes labored to open. A line of red ran from one ear. A man had struck him in the public house. Words about a woman. We laid him down, me with his hand in mine. Sterrett trepanned him. Cut a burr hole in his head and let his mind swell. I patched him with cloth, stroked his cheek as he slept. Sterrett washed his needle and handed it to me and asked me would I stitch him together.

“I am not a surgeon,” I said.

“And when you leave, what will you do? Hold the ill and whisper to them?”

“I will not be a surgeon,” I said.

He laid the needle on the man’s chest, heaving slow, and dug his fingers in his beard. “And what will you do?”

“Whatever makes a living,” I said.

“Am I not a wealthy man?” He left the needle on the chest and walked to the door.

“I know nothing,” I said. “I am not your son.”

“I do not want a son,” he said, and left.

I looked at the man, whose hand I still held, whose head was turning paler. I shaved where Sterrett had cut, stitched his scalp to itself. I washed the wound in water and whiskey. The pepper smell recalled my father. This man was living still. I crossed his hands upon his chest, removed his shoes. Washed the tools and mopped the blood. Set a candle burning for the odors. Sat with him until he woke. In the silence, I thought of the living I had said I’d make. It was arms holding me, and nothing more.

Sterrett came back after dark, after the man with a hole in his head had risen and gone, after I sat moonlit with my peas, watching the shoots tremble. He ate some corn cake from breakfast and slept. I stole my box from beneath my bed. Took the cake’s remainder and a knife from the surgery. I had seen him cut bone with it. These wrapped in a sack, I heaved myself through the kitchen window. I could have used the door but wanted to leave another way. Three miles past town I found a hollow. The darkness settled on me. I clutched a rambling root and let myself fall away.

IN THE MORNING I climbed a cart and rode north and east. The man said he wouldn’t mind the company. I spoke in bits at first, for payment, but then was silent. I seemed to lose something each time my mouth opened. Saw bits of myself floating off. He took me through sun and night and brought me to Dorchester near the city. So I came close by the cities, to Savannah and now Charleston, but never saw them. When I was sturdier I would go, when I was not so afraid of men. He asked where I was bound, and I pointed, a little farther. But then I saw a church in a field, a house and a tower and a cross, and the field was gold and purpled with flower, and the sun was enough to touch, and so I spoke, and when the cart stopped I fell to the ground again. The church was small and brick and bare, and if anything made by man would not hurt me, that was it. I thanked the driver and said I was a servant of God. Which was a lie, as God knows. He nodded, blessed me, rode on, his bags of rice molded to my sleeping shape.

The doors were open to me, and on the wooden bench I lay, my sack beneath my head. I didn’t sleep, but dreamed. The windows gold and green, sun shaking through the glass. I let my legs melt, my arms around myself, my eyes open to the light. No man came to visit, no hazy vision. No lord on a cross dripped blood upon my cheek. Nothing there but light, and I swallowed it and it filled my limbs. I was hungry and forgot my hunger and though I never slept, I never felt so still. The air deepened. I kept swallowing. No one had come to prod me, none to save me. The light inched away. Still dense enough for a child to ride on. It did not take away the hope when it was gone. In the dark, I chewed the edge of my sleeve, sweat-salted, and my tongue whispered me away. I was a well man, wrapped in the windows of God.