Katy Smith - Free Men

The legs of my uncle looked like stone, carved in muscle shapes. How had he ever come from a woman’s body? He stood up fast, he ate little, he wiped no sleep from his eyes. He was wrapped around this forest like strangler vine, like there was no difference between his breaths and the breathing leaves. I trailed behind him, putting my feet in the prints his feet left. One of the other men was wearing a deerskin on his back, and in one hand he held a head: a dried deer face that he raised and pivoted, becoming a strange two-legged half-dead animal that was meant to seem ordinary to the wild deer watching. My uncle looked more deer than him.

We crossed another creek as the sun spread on the edge of the land, and through the last of the mist — which would live on my clothes all day, the sun never rising high enough to reach its heat — I saw the stand of deer. They hadn’t heard us, our wet-leaf footsteps or my belly. In the dawn their skin was as golden as beech leaves, as smooth and unbroken as the bark. Two bucks, four does, and a fawn. A family, like my family, a band of woods warriors, like my woods warriors. A surge of something warm tripped in my throat. I wanted to protect them and seize them in the same childish instant. As we paused to watch them blow through the leaf litter with their muzzles, the fawn reaching back to lick her shoulder, I drew an arrow, fit its notch to my bow, aimed it as I would at a flying crabapple, and loosed it at the baby.

It cut a line through her flank and fell away and the stand of them exploded in a flurry of thin legs so fast the first thing my eyes could settle on was the leaves drifting down from where they’d been kicked. One of the men cuffed me across my face and another took my bow. In the clearing, we found a vein of salt and a spatter of dropped blood from the fawn. I took a leaf that had been curdled red and slipped it in my shirt. This was my blood, blood that I had drawn. The men laughed at me and called me the names of women and one twisted my ear until it rang, but I could not be shamed. My brother, girlish, attached to my mother’s leg, had never done what I had done, would never understand the swell of possession.

We found more deer to catch. I stood behind the others without my bow and touched my shirt where the leaf was hidden, and grown men brought down the animals with guns, clean shots to save their skins. We carried the bodies back on sleds. Half-homeward, we stopped to eat and I sat beside my uncle as naturally as if there were no other space in the woods. He didn’t look at me or grab my shoulder, but unlooped a pouch from his breeches and opened it on his lap, pulling out his charms.

“A foot,” he said, and I looked over, pretending that I hadn’t been looking all along. “You take it from the last kill to trick the new deer. They smell it and think their brother is still running.”

I rubbed it with a soft finger. It had been cut off at the ankle, was thin-boned and cleft. The hoof was black and milky, like dark water. I touched it quickly to my lips.

“Physic-nut,” he said. The yellow fruit rolled around his palm.

“What does it do?”

He shook his head. “Slips in their minds and fuddles them. I don’t know. Draws them near.” He turned to the three small stones and tumbled them beneath his thumb.

“They trip the deer,” I said. “They keep them from running far.”

He laughed. “No, these are from my grandmother’s grave. Just bits from her grave.”

A woman’s spirit on a stone didn’t sound like a deer charm. There weren’t women on the hunt, except to cook for us and strip the bodies we caught; their smells and the red richness of them were too potent to be masked. Even wrapped in skins, they were never less than women, less than intoxicating. I didn’t press my uncle further, because I didn’t yet want to know their secrets, which I knew he knew.

He let me hold his talismans, and I kept them safe and clammy. He dug his fingers into his scalp, feeling along his neck for ticks. Other men were standing. They wanted to get home that night and give the kill to their wives and sisters for cleaning, for pulling the skin from the flesh and scraping it, smoking it. But my uncle the mico sat still against a tree and waited for me to finger his charms and so all the men waited. I saw his power and it was greater than anything in his pouch. I held the pieces as long as I dared and then slid them back. He patted his thigh.

When I returned home, cold with scratches across my legs, I told my mother I was a man. She slipped her fingers in my hair to tug out the tangles and said, “And what good is a man?”

MY SMALLEST BROTHER, Oche, was the one who didn’t want the mico ’s feathers, who kept sick animals in a little bower near the fields, who some said would be a priest. He wouldn’t let my mother shave any part of his hair. Some said ghosts followed him, but I never saw them, and he said ghosts followed everyone. Every village holds the spirits of those who pass on, ancestors ready to help, but it’s the dead children who move around, who are too restless to lie still and who search for playmates when all the living go to sleep. Oche, who could not concern himself with war, with the ways of life and men, whispered when others shouted; he spoke of things that had happened seasons before, as though his memory was a slow runner.

I loved him because he was there. He was younger than me and earnest, only doing what he liked, and he spent time with me because he loved me back and he saw no gain in denying this. He didn’t mind that I liked to line things up and put things in order. But I pretended not to love him because he was a baby and never tried to be better than he was. At night, when men were smoking or watching the women dance with their turtle shell shakers, we would sneak to the chunkey ground and roll the stone. Though young and lanky as a mantis, Oche threw his spear closest to where the round stone came to rest. Mine went too far. I wanted him to see how strong I was, how if there was a Choctaw or an Englishman, my strength would stab his heart before he ever made it to the rolling stone. My brother was not violent, and always won.

Oche had a way of telling truth that I never understood. Time didn’t matter so much to him; the world circled around in his knotty head. He could tell myths like they had happened to him. Once on the night-lit ball field, as I stretched my spear back, he said he’d found the dog I had lost years before. I gaped at him.

“Red Dirt?” I asked.

“I gave him food and told him where you were.”

“Quick. Was he by the river?” I dropped my spear and let the ball roll into the far ditch.

“He was with the men riding out against the Choctaws. Perhaps he fought with them.”

I bent over and placed my fingertips on the grass. “That was two years ago, brother.”

“Yes, when you lost your dog.”

The others laughed at Oche, the way our mother coddled him, fed him secret foods on moony nights to call the spirits onto him. Our three older brothers, all still learning to hunt, had little faith in priests. They would speak to the animal they killed, or had to kill twice for poor aim, but then would laugh between themselves when the priest riddled the meat with prayer. Oche wasn’t hurt by this, couldn’t be hurt. He simply liked to be alone. He wandered in the woods searching not for deer or demons but for mushrooms. He told me his dreams, and they were little different from my dreams, except that in his brush-soft voice they sounded like prophecy. I wanted to whisper with him, even as I was chasing after my older brothers to punch and claw them and soak up their valor and learn how to be grown. Being grown meant doing things one was afraid of, meant not being afraid. If I wasn’t quaking or sweating or twisting the inside of my cheek between my teeth, then I wasn’t yet brave.