Katy Smith - Free Men

My stars were split in two: one half painted me as a hunter, fighter, chief. The other half was dark.

IN OUR HOUSES off the square, my mother lived and my father before she sent him away and her brother my uncle and their mother who was old and salty and my three older brothers and one younger. Our town was like an eddy in a river. War parties came through, and trading parties, English and French and Spanish, and Muskogee leaving other towns, and Choctaws or Cherokees bound as slaves, to be carried off to another eddy when the moon turned. Some people came like sticks and stuck in our current, cleaving to the water that turned round and round — Natchez, Yuchi, Shawnee, Coosa, all who’d lost their homes because our country was increasingly not our own. I saw men doing great things and what happened to men who were caught. Mostly I saw my mother, who tended us all with squeezes and slaps and knew more about the ways of birds and the passage of clouds than any man I met. We had endless questions, and she faced them all with a story. When we asked why the alligator looked so frightening with his crooked snout, she said he once played in a ball game with the eagle and the crane, four-foots against two-foots, and they hammered him on the nose to make him drop the ball. “Nothing to be afraid of,” she said, “just bad at ball.” So the world was laid clear to us. Each piece had its place, and what we did shaped those next to us. There was no such thing as independence.

I fetched water, I helped in our vegetable patch, I fed my grandmother hominy. I chased my little brother through the thickets of river cane, across the fallow fields, and up the terraces that climbed away from the broad, clear river. My mother threw me crabapples in the summer, high enough so their blurring pink spun into patterns of blue. When they reached their peak, my mind slowed them down and they fell soft as feathers while my bowstring stretched back. Hit one clean through and she’d give me breakfast. She kept throwing until I stopped missing. I said hello to my father whenever I saw him, before my mother set his belongings outside and told him to move on, but the man I loved most was my uncle, who was chief, who was golden.

I loved my mother’s brother as a boy will love a bear he sees through spaces in the forest. His shoulders were sharp and narrow and though he was young yet, he had been in enough wars to lose an eye and wear the mico ’s feathers. To be chief was to hold the town in your hands, to soothe it and to battle for it both. His missing eye was a trouble to me; I wanted my world to be ordered and clean and here was a hole in the man I most loved. He moved faster than other men, spoke more gently. He touched women on the arm like a moth, alighting and then moving on. He cut my older brothers boy-sized bows and told them stories of meddling rabbits while I knelt in the shadows and sopped up his words. I was too young, but when I was older, his gaze would fall on me, and — I thought — we would rule the town together. His justice, my heart.

My older brothers were next in line, and they were rough and cruel and would have battled with a crow if it cawed while they were sleeping. They pummeled each other on the ball field and inked their arms with spirals and skulls, signs of the animal world. We lived in a red town, a war town, and they were built for their fate. I would follow them to the open council house some summer nights and we would crouch beyond the cast of firelight and listen to the men, smell the smoke of their tobacco. The old men talked about their wives, about the flood twenty years before, about how best to turn antlers into powder. They’d share the priest’s new prophecy and some would nod and warn and others would laugh and say the time for prophecy had come and gone. It was a new age, that was what the men were always saying, one that required not courage but cunning. The next man to be mico would find himself with strange duties. Listening in the dark, my brothers sucked on fish, and I swept up the bones they tossed aside.

Our uncle the mico was always getting older.

IT WAS BECAUSE he promised to watch me that my mother let me hunt with him, my first time. The men were preparing for their months-long winter trip, not for food but for the trade, from which they would return heavy with skins for the women to scrape and cure, so this would be a short journey, just to give the younger boys a taste. I still saw him as mine alone. His one eye, I thought, would follow me as I followed him; the love I had — though it was a more desperate feeling than love — would draw him like a pulling moon. How could he look at me and look away? My heart was loud.

We left in the afternoon, and he was tall and his arms swung an inch farther than any other man’s. The stripe of his hair was pulled up tight, and the ring in his nose gleamed silver. His feet in shoes were silent, almost no feet at all. I knew the short paths we took that crossed each other through the village and into the farming land that lay along the river. But when we moved past the cornfields and beyond the burned woods into land that was new to me, I abandoned my human self, my upright legs, and I was a creature. No matter the men I was with. I swam through pine needles. My thoughts floated off from me before they ever made a noise. I was cold at first, for it was the slow drift into winter and the trees that had been golden were now muddy. The wet leaves clung to my heels. But my skin turned into something else, something like a shell or hide. I no longer felt the thorn vines clutching, the buried pointed rocks, the pricks of the pine cones. I had eyes, and fingers enough to hold my bow, and a heart that steadied me onward, the blood pumping in drums through my chest and in my ears, beating the thoughts to fragments. Only the beeches still held their leaves. In the light of afternoon, the forest ahead was fiery brown, the color of a deerskin in sun, the sky beyond cut with winter branches and the russet of the shaking beech leaves. Our sounds were the sounds of the wood. Wet leaves stepping, squirrels flipping acorns, the chatter of the chickadees in the low branches, the wind matching the water. The sun’s crispness as it fell, a faint ringing as it marked our path and gave us to the dusk.

We lay down to rest in this new land, taking our women’s food from our bags for supper and then lying in a mass under skins for warmth, the damp scrub like a slick beneath us. I swept my spot clean and piled the broken branches at my feet for luck. The night sounds were different here, the owls with a dialect. My hands balled into fists in case the animals were evil or the ghost children found us. I took pleasure in my fear because it gave me yet another thing to conquer and possess. I slept for the first time without my mother, and in the ring of bodies, hunters all, I smelled myself a man, or the beginning of one, and when I fell asleep at last, I had creature dreams. I was running far and fast, I was climbing and falling, I dove and buried. There was no thought but movement. We were animals in an animal world, and I was the newest of them.

I woke with a low growl in my belly to the grayness before dawn. The men were already rubbing out the leaves where we slept, and I, the last to rise, felt like a child again. Someone had kicked aside my pile of branches, so I bunched them back up. We were moving before I remembered where we were and who my mother was. I was cold, and I no longer felt like an animal, and no one had given me anything for breakfast. There was a thin fog that dampened our clothes and misted my eyelashes. I envied my little brother Oche and his nearness to the women. How much more sense it made to plant seeds and coax their stalks to the sun and pick their fruits to grind into meal than to be a lone boy in the woods, searching for food you cannot see. At home, my mother would have clean blankets.