Katy Smith - Free Men

“You need something?”

I shake my head. I don’t have many friends on this plantation, but not enemies either. “What kind of foolishness are you doing to that post?”

“Rot,” he says. “Digging it out.”

“Thought you were making some kind of statue.”

“Any word of Bob?”

“No word. And good riddance.”

He seems a little more surprised than he should. “They send out the dogs yet?”

“Master’s still on his trip. They’re waiting till he’s back. For all I know, they’ll wait even longer. It’s planting time, and he’ll have visitors that don’t like hearing of runaways.”

“They won’t tell you, but it’s harder to find a man once he crosses out of Spanish lands. Never build a farm near a border.”

“Never dig good wood out of a bad post.”

He throws one of his tools onto the porch. “You ever need some warming up at night, you know where to come.” He does a little swivel with his hip that I believe is supposed to be sexual.

“I’d bed your wife first,” I say, and walk off.

After a slim supper I make the girls practice their best quiet faces. I sit them in the middle of the floor while I tinker around, cleaning up the dishes, sweeping the dirt out, mending a torn shirt. Delphy must have promised some treat to Polly, because neither are making a sound. When I’m done with this torture, I kneel down in front of them. Between my daughters and my mistress, my knees are as callused and dry as stumps.

“I think you’re right,” I say. “About your daddy.”

“That we need him,” Delphy says.

“That you don’t need all of this.” I mean yams, dirt, cut skin.

“You find the key?”

“The fastest horse?” Polly says, then puts her hand over her mouth, not sure if she’s allowed to be talking yet.

“If we get caught, I don’t have to tell you what happens.”

“Beaten and sold,” Delphy says.

“Or killed .” She claps her hand up again, this time smiling. Look at this world they’re in; listen to their jokes.

WE DON’T HAVE to wait long for the party. Three days later the master’s back from a trip and brings with him a half-dozen Spaniards who are new to the New World and who trip over themselves flattering my mistress. She runs her hands across her belly as if to goad them further. We serve food on trays, fill glasses, carry coats and hats from room to room. Even our children are dressed up and paraded; one of them knows French, I can’t figure how, and she garbles out a few words so the guests can marvel at the negroes and curse their enemies. After a few hours of this, everyone is very drunk.

The key is kept on a loop by the mirror in my master’s room, which is not my mistress’s room. The only people upstairs are a Spaniard and a slave, halfway to fornication, though I can see that her hands massaging his backside are actually in his pockets, fumbling for whatever’s there, and I keep walking. No one stops me. On my way down the stairs, one man grabs my breast, pressing me hard toward the banister, but I slide limply down onto the step and he assumes I’m as fuddled as he is; unable to reach down for me and still keep his balance, he moves on. The children are in the front room, watching a man snore on the sofa, and I nod at my girls and they follow me out and down the front steps. I stop when I hear her voice from the porch.

“Winna!”

I turn around, my legs prickling.

“Where’s my watering can?”

“Ma’am?”

“Just look at all the sad roses!”

She looks like a white toad dressed in black, happy and sad the way toads sometimes seem, both at once.

“I put it in the attic,” I call back, and she smiles and nods and teeters back inside.

In an hour, they will fall down in their places and sleep until they don’t remember what they swallowed or who they screwed.

“Maybe when you’re a hundred you’ll forget all of this,” I say, but my daughters are too far ahead of me to hear, jogging on their short legs toward home.

I’ve sewn straps onto sacks so they can carry their bags more easily. I don’t know how much food or water we’ll need, not knowing how far we’re going. I made the bags heavy enough that they’ll feel some confidence, like I’ve provided for them and we’re going to be all right. I feel more like a mother these days, even as I’m sending my children into the wilderness, away from shelter, toward bounty hunters and maybe wolves. I don’t even know if wolves would eat a girl, but I’m sending us toward them anyway.

There’s no way to tell which is the fastest horse in the dark. I let Polly pick her favorite. It’s a black one, sturdy enough, who doesn’t protest as I lead him out and throw a blanket and saddle over his back and slip a bit through his teeth. I learned all this from Bob, who brought me here to show off what he knew. Everything’s heavier and harder than he made it seem. With a little grudge I give him some respect. I pull a stool over to hoist the girls up. Polly is giggling like mad and Delphy’s eyes are wide, scared. I crawl up, the horse sidestepping from the weight of me, and fix myself between them, holding Polly in front of me and making Delphy hold me from behind.

“Now we’re quiet,” I say.

They don’t respond.

“Only time you make a noise is if you fall off.”

Silence.

I kick the horse a couple of times before it senses what I’m after. In the tarry dark, no sun to follow, I aim it for the north road, away from Pensacola, toward Indian lands, toward paths that go west and somewhere near my daughters’ father.

After about a mile the horse figures out how to gallop, and we all make little noises like women and clutch each other hard.

IADMIT TO BEING lonely for my horse. Though she did not speak, she seemed to understand me with her muscles and fur, and now that I’m alone in the woods, peering at the little breakages of sticks that suggest a man’s footstep, I think how much better it is to be seen even by a beast than not at all. How lucky these men are that I am hunting them.

I am already disheveled from a night in the open air, though I have a sturdy blanket that wraps beneath and above me, just the size to warm one person. The forest here has been burned by Indians within the past year, so a fine layer of ash still lies under the winter leaves, and my breeches are sooty. I address my hair, but without a glass I cannot confirm its arrangement. The criminals will not care how I look; they’ll only see me for a minute at most as free men. Then, depending on their instincts and response, they will either be killed by my own hand or taken back to Hillaubee to be killed by Seloatka, who in these uncertain territories happens to be the chief of all of us. I use a dogwood twig to clean my teeth.

My Indian wife has covered the bottom of my boots with a soft felt, and I walk quickly on the balls of my feet into the dawn. A casual listener might interpret the noises I make as a dry wind, or the distant patter of a riverbed. Birds that avoid me on horseback congregate when I’m on foot, as though I leave uncovered seeds in my wake. You cannot love a bird as you love a horse, perhaps because the eyes have no rest in them, but I assume some tissue connects them just as the species of humans are joined. Do both feel no sorrow? I scare up a barred owl, the only kind I know that can hunt his prey with light, and I pause as it falls from its branch in a heavy swoop, gliding off through the beams of March. It would have been easier to study the animals of the New World than its inhabitants. I would face less resistance, and would by now be already published. It is not wild to imagine that my father, wherever he is, might read my name in a borrowed journal and feel some pride. But I pursue my interests not because of but in spite of my lineage. I am tired of its stale order; surely I am not the first to see that it has no future in a world increasingly scientific and democratic.