Katy Smith - Free Men

The elders voted to move out first, to cross the river, to goad the enemy. Those who disagreed threw up their hands and called my uncle names. This was democracy. We had been warring with the Choctaws in bursts for as long as there had been Muskogee to gather arms, for our lands overlapped and our deer ran into each other’s woods. In the smoky dark as we were leaving, I told my uncle I wanted to hold a gun in this war. If my last brave brother would be there, so would I. He tilted his head and cupped my chin in his hand and shook it till my teeth rattled.

“Eager to die?” he asked.

“I’m ready to defend my people.” My voice sounded louder than it should have.

“We’re defending nothing, boy. We’re killing Choctaws.”

“I’m prepared to die,” I said.

“And welcome to it. Being prepared is halfway there.” He laughed and left me standing clench-fisted.

My mother didn’t much like the sound of my bravery when I told her that night I’d be fighting. Oche retreated to the storage house to allow us the space for argument. Her bread was half in her mouth when she pulled it out again. Did she ever wish for daughters? She scooted over to me and placed her hands on my crossed knees and bent her head until it almost touched the dirt floor. For a moment, I thought she might be weeping. I should be ashamed to bring my own mother, the woman who’d taught me to shoot, to such tears, and yet her sorrow seemed a further line between us — if she was not a crying woman, then I was not a brave man. But when she sat up, I saw a strange fire in her face that wasn’t anger and wasn’t pride either.

“Do you know how many of your brothers have died?”

“Two,” I said. I always answered questions.

“What are your reasons?”

“To protect the village and seek justice. The Choctaws are our enemies.” The smoke from the cooking meat looped up and through a hole in the ceiling, and the smell of it made my stomach jump. I wanted my dinner. My uncle’s rhetoric sounded hollow in my mouth. “They’ve killed so many of our men, Mother, what else can we do? Your own sons, and you don’t want vengeance?”

“And where do you think your body goes when it is dead?”

“In the ground,” I said.

“What do you think I will do when you are dead?” The bread was still in her hand, half gnawed. When she spoke, her hands fluttered with her words and the bread dragged in the dirt. Her hair was untied.

I thought about this. I had seen her grieving my older brothers, elaborate ceremonies but few tears, no loud emotion. But they had been grown, one was married, and were not my mother’s pets anymore. My third brother, the one warrior left, wasn’t here tonight because he was chasing a woman, playing night ball with his friends, gambling under a tree somewhere. What did it matter if we were dead? She spent more time in the crop fields, in her own garden, shaping square baskets and round pots, than she did tending us, asking about our feelings, sewing up the splits in our leggings. She seemed to me not so much a mother as a farmer. When we were gone, she would keep turning the earth over. The squash would still ramble from the dirt. The corn would still grow high and pale in summer. The hickory trees would still drop the nuts that she would gather and grind for oil. And when the men brought deer home from the forest, she would sit with the other women around a fire and scrape at the skin with knives until the hair and gristle fell away and the hide was water-smooth.

“If I die, you will love Oche more,” I said. “And perhaps you will have another child.”

She laughed. “Yes, I will love Oche more.”

My mother was not a pacifist.

I RODE OUT with them on a bay pony, her reluctant head pointed west. Her back was sweated thick before too many miles, and by then my bones were scared. The dogs had already turned back toward town. Beneath my blanket the night before, which I hid under hot or cold to stop the ghost children from touching me, I heard my uncle speak to my mother by the fire outside our house. His low voice I could not make out, but hers rose high into the thick night air. “I will not. Do you remember?” she said, and then, “It’s your head if he’s harmed.” She made sounds of protest and then laughter, and in the morning she let her brother take me to war.

We camped partway, and being an older boy now, I didn’t cower among the roots or think about my home. I didn’t even sleep next to my brother, not giving him the chance to push me away, though I did straighten his arrows when he wasn’t watching and clean the dirt off his quiver with spit. I ate the peaches and boiled bean bread with bites large enough for a scalper of men. In the dark I covered my legs with leaves — the ghost children are everywhere — and dreamed of axe-wielding. My dream-hands spun like maple seeds and men fell down before me in baths of blood. My uncle stood to one side, applauding.

The next day, by the time the sun was straight above us, we were in the borderlands, the forests where no one hunted. The growth was thicker here, unburned and wild. There was a beaten path for war and trading, but we stayed to the north of it, weaving our ponies through the brush to mask our coming. Once or twice we passed a little hut where a woman — neither Muskogee nor Choctaw but someone whose tribe had been worn to nothing — sat with a pipe and sold rope and meal and bullets to the white men who were always moving. They had their cities and still they yearned for the forests and fields, the emptiness that we filled, and so they marched back and forth between these places without end, taking what they found, writing down what they saw when they passed by. We raised our hands to the women at the posts, and they waved their pipes at us. War did not touch the traders. All men needed food, needed guns.

At a river, we dismounted, tied our ponies to the basswoods. We drank and rested and sat still for hours. I crept to my uncle, whose face was painted red and black, and asked when we were raiding. He told me to settle myself, to find a tree to fit my back and practice waiting. I did until I began to doze. The air was so honeyed with heat that the mosquitoes were drowsing. It was easy to dream of Polly in this idleness. I let my mind dance away. Beneath my legs the earth hummed with the tiny movements of underground animals — worms and grubs and the snakes that held up the very foundations of the world — all turning over themselves in brown darkness, the steps of men above them nothing more than thunder. We didn’t mind their wars, and they cared little for ours, except when we scooped out their heavens to lay a dead man in their midst. To have the power of a god — to be anybody’s god — and to bend the paths of little beings to your own vision, this was the peak of all living. No matter that I had no vision, could bend no paths but that of my pony, who only listened to my heels when she had been well fed. The first step was to prove my strength. To kill men, to woo a woman, to direct a town, more towns, a confederacy. To hold dominion.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead and dried it on the bony ridge of my shins, just fleecing with hair. Dragonflies were dipping on the river, lined on its bottom with skipping stones and spikemoss and the whole black leaves of sycamores, rotten but not dissolved. Everything around us made a sound: water, stone, fly, spider on bark, sparrow. What I didn’t know was that the river was a border, and that Choctaw men crossed it to hunt when they shouldn’t have, and that such crossing justified attack. I thought my kin were lazing, and as I drifted into a heated sleep, I wished I were the child of a braver town. I was certain the Choctaws didn’t sit for hours staring at their toes on the warpath. My uncle wouldn’t even stripe my cheeks in red.