Katy Smith - Free Men

I am trying to clean myself. I am walking so many days away from the woman and the boy and even the horse that died beneath me so that I will come to a place where I am reminded of nothing. Am empty. The first two days were crying. The third was burning need for her, to touch her again, her face, to bury her. The shame at not having buried her. I turned back. Walked a few miles back. Why didn’t I put them in the ground? Because if she is not below ground, she is not fully dead. I could not put dirt on her white body, though it is worse to have left her. I know. Turned around again. On the fourth day I had cried all the water out of me and so the world went hazy. My mouth stayed open, my eyes lost their blink. This was close to empty. Then I thought how good it was that she was gone. Peace now, Anne and boy. I was not meant to be a father. I hurt my wife, I would have hurt my son. Yes, better they are sleeping.

I was not walking for penance until I was. Forgive me, clean me, save me. Everything I knew of myself I had to break. Love was all I knew of myself, so I would let this go. What had it brought me? Go away, heart and need, flee. When that was gone, I would be blank, and then — then could I die?

This I kept asking.

But I am poorly trained. The first sleeping man I saw I held to.

I should have let the man with the mule take me. The one who asked if I had killed. Yes yes yes . Can no longer count the times. So what if I wasn’t the one he was looking for. I too have sins to pay. I sat there in my home, on every chair a flower, and held my son in my hands while my wife lay on her bed, my son blue, my wife red. I could not move, and neither lived.

I am needing to be alone, but wanting these men to never lose me.

After the dark had settled on the path, they nodded. The Indian worn down, or the black man wanting to see his own courage. Decisions made that would’ve been dust if we’d been fewer than three. We turned to trace their steps, always turning on this path, walked, are walking, and now we crawl up from the trail in silence. The black man stops his chatter. We creep, and I creep because I have given up, would follow anything alive, am waiting to see what God does to me. Have been waiting for eight days.

South from South Carolina, west from West Georgia. I rode with nothing but my fear and ghosts riding behind. I rode the horse until it dropped. Left it by the trail, a dead pile, wishing I could crawl into its deadness. I hid from men until it came to me that I could not kill myself. My hands could not kill one more thing. My arms missed holding. I was weak. I found a black man sleeping, his knife in a sheath, and I took that knife so when I crouched above him to feel his warmth, he would wake to something ordinary. A highway robber, or a man pretending to be. The black man brought me to an Indian, and here we are, after a day, creeping like brothers.

Never had a brother, but a wife. Soft. My loves were lost to me before they even lived. My son in my hands, his own young brother who I never saw. His mother crablike on the bed, red sheets swimming her. I could not leave one for the other. I was alone for all my life and then there was one and then there was two and myself frozen to the floor, my son in my hands, and I hadn’t the strength to move. Strength, courage. Courage, muscle. I didn’t have muscle to move. I was given too much. Now the world fixes itself.

I don’t know where I am, some miles above Florida, but it smells like home. Part salty. Small palms. The air goes on forever. In the dark, the pine spindles under my feet feel like the pine spindles of Carolina. I have lost the best part of me and the earth makes no difference. I want no money. If I do one more wrong thing and God is watching, I will explode into fire.

Have always had men watching me. Been plagued by them. My father, my priest, Sterrett, the minister. Saying move just so on this narrow path or I will hurt you. Not the minister, but he passed his rod to God, and there was punishment enough. God worst of all. I have found more men to watch me but they are poor at it, for they are drawing me down a bad path, and never having led, I do not know how to save them. I cannot save them, who am so rotten. Clean me, save me .

Eight days on the road and I never asked for food. Never looked for water. A woman on a farm saw me and gave me a jug to swallow. A child held out a cake. I shook my head, but the child would not drop its arm. I took the cake and it watched me eat. Eyes like stars. I fell asleep in a horse yard behind an inn and when I woke a carrot had rolled before me, kicked in the night by a mule. I ate it. Tried to throw it up, but it clung inside. When it rained, I opened my mouth. I passed a slave in Georgia without a shirt. He leaned on a fence by the road, his mouth working on some tobacco. He asked me if I knew his master. I shook my head. If I needed work. I shook my head. If I was from these parts. No. He laughed and said he’d give me supper if I wanted, but his master was out, wouldn’t come back any time soon, maybe wouldn’t ever. A line of slaves stood in the trees behind the field. Two of them were dancing. He saw me looking. He had a gun slung on his back. You hardly a white man , he said. Pulled an apple from his pocket, rubbed it once along his bare arm, his arm that was too dark to show whether there was blood on it, and passed it over the fence to me. I ate. I could not throw it up. I walked eight days and tried not to live and kept living.

Grief carried me here but now is tired. Is sliding me from its shoulders. I cannot hold on because my hands are broken. I am a spoiled man. I cannot live without someone’s warmth against me. Cannot become alone again. After all this, I am my father. My mouth as spiked and sour as his. My want has brought the end of me. These hands have burned a girl alive, left a hundred bodies bleeding on the slab, killed my own and only hope. Now when they grasp a branch to pull my body up the bank, I think the branch will turn to ash.

We are away from the path now, quiet. Our feet like doves in the leaves. The sweat on my lip tastes like her lips.

“Are you sure?” one says.

“This is your plan,” the other says.

“We do it together, right?”

“We take the bags, guns if we can, and walk out.”

“Horses?”

“Too noisy. Leave them.”

“We’re doing the right thing?”

“You told me we were.”

“What about Cat?”

“Give him my gun.”

“So you don’t think he’d kill us both?”

“You said—”

“What do I know!”

I linger in their wake. My feet heavy from lifting. My son still blue in my arms. His mouth an open bubble. His eyelashes long against his cheeks. Anne, unreachable. What creeks I would not cross to touch her. To prove that I can move, can hold, can save. I climb back on my grief. I have killed my wife and God will not kill me.

THIS IS HER story. Grew up in Dorchester, went to school, went away. Lived in Charleston, came home. In the big city was a plague, like ours. A pox. She followed a cousin to a house by the shore, her parents coming after. They wrote letters. Coming soon, putting the shop to rights . Her childhood was nothing sad, all sun. Her father rich and her mother kind. No brothers and sisters, not even dead ones. Just her in blue dresses. Hold on, be good . Believed in God, and won a prize for penmanship. She had dolls with real hair and wood faces. Little doll shoes. Dreamed of being a mother. Her own mother like an angel, putting sugar on Anne’s fruit. Be patient . She took a doll to the shore, though she was too old. Men eyed her, and one had asked. But she knew that somewhere I was waiting so said no. I said she could not have known. She said she did. The doll sat on the sill, her face out to sea. On Sunday, we’ll be there . The plague was spreading, though she didn’t know. When the rider came to the house he couldn’t speak at first. It’s Sunday , she said, where are they? He breathed heavy, having ridden fast. Today is Sunday. Are they sick? He shook his head. They have no fever? He shook his head. Did they leave the city? Yes, yes. Where is my mother? Where is my father? Oh, her mother and her father, they climbed in a carriage with their trunks and two wild horses and halfway to the shore, a fox ran out and startled them, and oh, those wild horses broke apart in panic and the carriage shuddered and smashed, and in the broken wood and axles, her mother and her father fell apart, were dragged with the splinters half a mile before the horses calmed and the fox found its den, and then they weren’t her mother and father but were bodies, and did not belong to her. This is not true , she said, but it was.