Katy Smith - Free Men

During mulberry moon, Oche made sofkee as my mother guided his hands. He took the cracked hominy she had already pounded and sifted from the corn hulls, and he stirred it in our iron pot with water and wood-ash lye until it turned to soup. I asked him questions about animals and what they did and who they were friends with until he paused to think and the hominy started to stick and our mother slapped him on the bottom with a broom.

He took me from the men’s world to the women’s, for he seemed to be neither, something in between. And the women held a world that was still soft with my youth and pungent with something new. In the early spring before the deer were moving, Oche and I would crouch beyond the girdled stumps marking the crop meadow and watch the girls planting. They bent like saplings in a strong wind, their hair floating in wings around their faces. Oche would draw them in mud ink on bark, admire his work, and set it floating on the river, bored. I stared at them. I was a warrior hidden behind shrubs, peering into an enemy camp, finding the gaps in their defenses. Taking in details. Small waists, twisted hair, a hand scratching at an ankle. I asked Oche to pick his favorite, and he pointed to the one farthest away, who was round and faceless. I waited, patient, till he asked me mine, and I showed him Polly, the girl who stood above the others and whose skin looked like something you could eat. Polly I had seen before, had always been half seeing. I didn’t tell him how she planted seeds in my head long after the fields were empty. He would not have been interested.

When Oche was old enough, my mother sent him off to learn the priesthood. He went across our river to a far creek with the old priest and a few other boys and stayed for four days, and when he came home, he was greenish and damp and his hair was a knotted mat. He said they drank mico hoyanidja from a willow root and threw up their bellies and went without food, and while the priest was whispering the secret formulas and showing them the making of medicine, he only thought how hungry he was and wished for his mother’s fry bread. I patted his shoulder as if I had never had the same loneliness. The priest sat them in a steam hut and then made them swim, and one of the boys cried a little. But he was proud too and boasted that he could fix me if I were shot through with arrows from eyes to toes.

“Did you see things?” I asked, meaning monsters or his own future.

“Lots of light,” he said, “but I was sick so maybe this was nothing.”

I began to worry that what I knew about the world, he knew too. Maybe even knew better.

THE RIVER HELD our secrets, before and after, was the clear thread that tied our town to all the other Muskogee towns, tied us to ourselves. Its wetness swallowed our bare feet, our bitten ankles, and when Oche first dove under, I would pretend he’d rise as a fish. For these visits to the water, I would borrow his imagination.

“Look,” he’d say, always look , and hold up a crawfish by its tail. He found stone teeth from the ancient animals, fish eggs in strings. “We’ll be otters,” he said, and I crouched in the fast water with him, the two of us rubbing our paws together, flapping around our tails, ottering. He was the quick minnow and I was the shark, and we chased until the current tired us. We were rabbits hiding from each other in the towering, knocking thickets of cane. We were not boys, but wild.

On the bank, the glory of our abandon seeped away.

“Did Uncle ever play like this?” I asked. “Were even his games better than our games?”

“Would you love Polly so much if she had only one eye?”

Oh, Polly. No, I wouldn’t. What were women but their faces?

Oche thought our uncle was just another mico and Polly nothing but a girl. He had larger concerns.

“What animal do you think you used to be?” he asked. “And would you change back?”

I was hot now that the water had dried from my skin. I wiped my feet clean and pushed the leaves beside me into a pile. There was little to control besides debris.

“Would you rather be a fish or a bird? What if you could live a thousand years as a turtle or ten years as a boy?”

As I tired, I always tired of him. “A man,” I said. “Why would you not want to be a man?” The scales had flaked off me. I left him by the bank.

WAR SWUNG AROUND our town in those years, whirlpooling the familiar. The English were fighting each other now, and some of our towns chose sides and others stuck with older enemies. Our diplomats traveled east to the Carolinas, north to the Great Lakes. What we needed from the English we mostly had, and if we found ourselves wanting for more guns, more rum, the Spanish lay just below us and the French beyond the Choctaws. We lived in the middle of chaos, and all we had to do was stay right where we were and the storm would blow by. But we were a red town, and the mico was a young man, and the trade was growing so hungrily that we couldn’t pull back without losing some pride. My brothers, with bows and knives and muskets, took their undirected fury to distant fields, and season by season, fewer returned.

When my first brother died in war, I thought, No more. I have no interest in this . I was terrified, my family having lost a limb. A whole man was suddenly absent, and I could not find where he had gone; not even Oche would tell me, though I was certain he saw things in other worlds. We buried him beneath our house. I retreated. And when my second brother died in war, I thought, I want it. I want to be a mico. This was how we whipped ourselves into froth. Revenge played in our hearts, weaseled down our arms into our hands, which could not stop clenching. No man could take my brothers and not in turn be taken, or I was not a man. So my mind rolled over, nightly turning redder. I snuck beside the council house and listened for the next plans, the war that would happen the following week, the one that would rage by the summer. In the shadows, I squatted and stood, lifted stones in my hands, punched the tense of my stomach. I willed myself to grow stronger. I no longer found comfort in Oche, who by then was pounding corn with women, tending them in their bleeding huts, abandoning raids for nut harvests. Even through the loss, he could not see what war we were fighting.

But my third brother, the last between the mico and me, was hungry for control. I watched him closely, mimicked his long steps. I drew a snake on my ankle, like his, with ink, though it washed off in the next storm. He had the same narrow shoulders as our uncle, that compact strength of a coil, an arrow flying, but had thicker limbs. The elders saw a solid future in my brother, from his fight-broken nose to his legs, which were long enough to cross creeks. Once I heard him whispering with my mother — he was angry and she put her words into questions, and she seemed to be guiding him away from me, pushing his fierceness out of our house, beyond the quiet of the home, away from the children.

THE SUMMERS WERE hot, no wind. The summers, then, were when we fought. My first battle was before Green Corn, when even the nights were no relief and men boiled outside, their bodies too hot to be still. My uncle the mico said the nearest Choctaw towns had struck a deal with the Spanish and would soon be raiding our fields, but the town above us refused to fight. The men there were grayer and honored old alliances. Our mico was young, and had his name still to forge. We all came to the council houses then, I in the back, behind my mother even, whose seat closer to the fire was meant to remind me how little I knew. The farthest ring was crowded with boys and girls. We sometimes watched the speakers and sometimes stared at the carvings on the posts, animals with their mouths open, claws outstretched. I searched for Polly, just to see the flame reflected on her cheek.