Katy Smith - Free Men

And here in these woods, in these endless, wall-less woods, not a soul can say I do not belong.

I play a game with myself: How did a white man meet a black man meet an Indian? The white man is the negro’s master, and the Indian a hired guide. The Indian and the white man are trading partners, and they purchased a black man to do the shooting. The black man and the Indian are both slaves, fugitive, and they found some low drunkard in a tavern to join their scheme. They are all sons of the same mother, born of three separate fathers. If this story is ever told, will someone ask what a Frenchman was doing on their trail? Will this become the sort of tale where even the name of my horse is remembered?

I could stay here and never return to any company and become a man entirely attuned to the seasons, who after several years loses the gift of speech, then of empathy; maybe that’s what it would take to make me miss my mother’s garden.

And then I see them.

The light is still dim, but the figures moving at the farthest edge of the forest are bipedal and slow. They are each earth-colored, as though the dirt has ballooned up into the shapes of men.

I HAVE SPENT my life looking for them.

I said I left my wife because I was bored and unhappy with our privacy, lonely again within our walls, but this was only a partial truth; I made these confessions to her but had no firm thought of escape until she left on a Tuesday and came back on a Thursday and said she had been in another man’s bed. What did I expect? I had been the first to profit from her disloyalty, and surely could not assume a complete reform. I asked her to explain her behavior, and she asked me to explain mine. Love is not giving up, she said. I felt, with some righteousness, that she had gone further in the direction of giving up than I, but she believed that mine was the first offense and deserved repayment.

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked her. “Are you unhappy?”

“Ask yourself that,” she said.

I wanted to inquire if she loved me but could not bring myself to, not wanting to hear her deny it. I felt newly forsaken.

“You’re a decent man,” she said, “and moderately clever. You’ll sort it all out. You’ll see what I mean. Then, if you like, we can try again.”

We fought for three days and, despite using all the reason and passion at our disposal, came to no conclusion.

I was brokenhearted, not because I lost her particular love, but because now there was no one to call me theirs.

I packed two sturdy suitcases and threw myself recklessly onto the world, searching for a place free from the strict classifications of France so that I might write about it with the sheen of discovery and rebuild my self-esteem. I was more than just a lover, and grew grateful that she had freed me to become what I considered the apex of modern society: that is to say, a scholar.

Because the earliest ship out of Dunkerque was northern bound, I went first to Norway, where the atlas of my childhood had shown mountains that looked as frothy as waves or piling clouds. I believed the Arctic ice would hold something elemental, but I found a society little different from the one I left, with each man in his house and frightened of what he didn’t know. I can’t say much of my time there because I was still engaged mostly in my own misery, a condition that is anathema to pure observation. I was cold, and the women reminded me of her, their every glance suggesting infidelity. Tiring of the snow, I boarded a boat for the New World. We were told that the American was calling himself an individual, that there at last was a country free from the fetid strictures of the past. At each juncture I did write a letter to my wife, without return address, to inform her that no matter what she might imagine, I adored her.

The great eastern cities of America were priming for rebellion when I arrived, and this was heady, to watch the lines between men dissolve — or rather, to wait for their dissolution. Despite the rhetoric, I saw few encounters between poor and rich; even at the most impassioned talks on liberty, a slave would circulate with glasses of wine. Nights, I would open the window of my rented rooms and listen to drunkenness on the street, repeating the anger and ardor to myself until I’d found the paper to write it down. One evening men stormed out of a tavern with a large doll and set it alight beneath my window, though the smoke from the burning cloth sent the rioters away coughing. I was left alone to watch the body turn to cinders, and despite it being inanimate, its abandonment pained me. I turned to maps again, saw the borders of the colonies bleed out into forest and field, and so departed the coast for the interior twelve years ago, just as war was breaking out, for it wasn’t war I wanted to see, not even if it promised something new; what seemed to set this country apart from its cousins was not its ache for a republic but rather the hearts that held that ache. And in Boston and Philadelphia, even under the sway of drink, few men opened those to me.

I continued to be a young man, full of weary hubris. I was warned that any journey into the interior of this country would bring me to savages, so I nodded and swore to keep to the coasts and then hired a horse and servant to take me into the darkest forests, where I found the Creeks in Hillaubee and now am married and a Great War Chief; though the title is honorary, I believe the wife is genuine. What the Creeks gave me was a respite from the expected, at least while I studied how they were bound to each other and defined their enemies. The wife was simply so I could sink into daily life unremarked; I was not prepared to give my heart to anyone new, if indeed it had ever been given. I once sent my French wife a basket that my Indian wife made. But before long even the novelty of Indians began to follow paths that I knew: a man defended the men who resembled him.

So a week ago, when the chief of my adopted village asked if I’d sit in on a diplomatic meeting that evening with visitors from the Carolinas — the white men’s war had come and gone and I had confirmed the Creeks’ good opinion — I said yes, of course, but returned to my cabin and opened the wooden trunk I arrived with years ago, to imagine what it might look like if I filled it again. Endless talk of war, even after the fighting had settled, merely reminded me of everything I’d already seen. I wondered if all men lived by the same self-preserving code. If guilt was foregone. If it was no hardship to grow up alone, because all men are fundamentally so.

I CONTINUE AT a generous distance, keeping them in my sight but only just. I am interested in how they walk, the Indian leading mostly but sometimes the black man striding ahead, both of them turning every minute or so to confirm the others’ presence. These are not men trying to lose each other. Have they made some pact? Is there a sense that if one escapes, he’ll turn the others in? What do they have to hold over each other’s heads? Though they are not always silent, they do not converse in an easy enough manner to convince me of a prior relationship. There are no trading partners here, and I doubt even that the slave belongs to one of these men, for they do not make him carry the bags or prepare the food. Of course, it is possible that he is not a slave but a Creek, as they have sometimes been known to adopt negroes into their clans if the circumstances allow. But he does not seem to speak their language beyond a phrase or two. I suspect the white man of leaving the plainest signs on the trail behind him. The leaves are shuffled up in trenches as if he were not fully lifting his feet but rather being pulled by a force mildly stronger than the force bidding him to collapse. Though he may have shot the travelers, he certainly did not plan the attacks, and doesn’t appear to have any aim but to watch for flowers and keep close to the others. He is almost a child.