Katy Smith - Free Men

I woke from sleep when something sharp grazed my ear. The forest was moving, the river swirling up around bodies and motion. Stealth had been abandoned and it was loud, shapes were moving loudly, and I saw they were men, and the sounds were war cries and the stick that scraped my ear was an arrow. My fathers and my cousins were fighting — men were getting struck in the open skin of their chests and thighs — and no one had shaken me awake. I rose raging, the sleep still in my eyes, my bow arm tingling and woozy from a cramp. I yelled out, and in the calling all around me, in the shots that echoed among the twangs of bows, I seemed to make no sound. I had seen Choctaws in our town before, sitting in peace talks, bringing cloth or kettles to trade, and now they were like so many deer for my arrows to find. I had been deemed too young for a gun. I shot three arrows straight and watched them snake between the swarming men. For all I wanted to kill, and with the killing prove myself, I couldn’t even hit a body. My ears were full up with blood. The animals had gone, and we were all that was left. I was not afraid. I was not afraid. Some men had knives now and were upon each other. I could see faces. I hid myself behind a pine and pulled my arms in and thought how much I didn’t want to die. From close came a choking scream. I peeked out sideways, afraid to miss the gore, and saw a Choctaw drop to his knees and pull one of our feathered arrows from his gut, its bent point trailing his innards like a hook drawing an eel from the stream.

My eyes were fixed, my mouth still parted and tasting of sour brine. I wanted my uncle. I wanted him to come and find me, take me up in a bundle, and tell me this was all a game. Before I could undo myself, could turn back in to safety, I saw a man in our red smudges stand behind the line of fighting, his string drawn taut. I looked to see where he was shooting. If there was a man running at us, I would have climbed the tree, straight up like a bear. There were Choctaws across the river, right and left, a few mired in the banks, pulling at their hatchets. There were none in the clearing before us. So why did the man’s arrow point straight? There were no backs to shoot there but Muskogee. I saw his fingers unclench as slow as growing grain.

In the days it took the arrow to fly the string, in the time I took searching for its target, not finding a body where it belonged, I saw a Choctaw scramble the banks and run knifeward to our party, caught in the heavy syrup that held the moment still. My eyes left the creeping arrow. I called out in a broken boy voice, “To the right!” Beside me, the man with the sprung bow turned — Seloatka of the Wolf clan — and took my face in his gaze. I turned from him to watch the arrow coursing. It stayed true. As I stared, Seloatka twisted around, arm raised to meet the coming enemy, and in the gap between their nearing bodies, I saw the arrow’s point pierce the back of my uncle’s chest and plunge until it crossed his heart. He fell to his knees. Seloatka wrestled with the Choctaw. I turned back to the pine and closed my eyes. My eyes have seen a murder .

In the darkness, with the sounds of blood far and faint, I saw again the man, the arrow, my uncle — the man, the arrow, my uncle — and wondered what sort of a life he’d had all those years when I was watching him and wishing to be his mirror. He hadn’t lost his life because he was a one-eyed man, or a narrow-shouldered man, or a man whose soft face looked sweet to women. He was lying with an arrow in his back because he told men what to do. He helped sort the grain in the winter, said yes or no to plans of war, got first tasting at Green Corn. He couldn’t make us act, but he was wise and strong enough to earn our nods. Would I have killed him for this privilege? Could I kill? Most every night, I felt black boils inside me. I was cowardly and starved and boiling over with unpointed desire. My uncle wasn’t dark with evil or white with peace, but red. We lived in a red town. We all wanted to be the mico .

I wished a ghost boy had found me and swallowed me. I opened my eyes. I turned from the pine trunk and saw my uncle on the spot where he fell, an arrow in his back, his hand cupped.

I waited until the last brave Choctaw had been killed and the sounds of the cowards’ feet faded in the shuffling brush before I pulled the arrow from my uncle’s back and snapped it. The men lashed the bodies of our own to our ponies’ backs and wept over my uncle, who had simply fallen in war like others had. We rode east in silence, leaving behind the slain that made up for our warriors, raided and surprised two seasons ago. Our blood had been quieted, and none knew that a fresh claim on vengeance was riding slumped across a pony’s shoulders. I rode behind, my young blood tingling. The battle we had begun was now my battle. I could hoard my darkness, pet the cowardice in me, become nothing, or I could carry this rare chance to retribution. Carry it to manhood. This was the moment when fates were turned. But my fingertips were sore from clenching bark, and it hurt to ride, and my cheeks were reddened with my hands’ bloodlessness, and I was hungry once again for home. I thought of Oche, tending the fire beneath a summer stew. I closed my eyes to better taste the image, and when I opened them, Seloatka’s pony was in step with mine.

He said nothing. I clenched my knees around my pony’s chest and bent my head. He rode with me till camp that night. I heard all the threats he never made. You are a boy who tells lies. My broad hands could break your body in two. He slept next to me and our breaths sounded like a boy running and a man walking slow behind. In my half-dreams, his hand was around my throat; I kept waking to pull at it. He didn’t touch me. I couldn’t sleep for pushing his hands away. In the nadir of night when my mind was usually lost in girls, in the curves of Polly, I found myself believing that this life was done. That my boyhood had been a fancy. I was too young to think of killing, could not have killed Seloatka if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to: I was not the man who killed, but the other. I wanted to be as good as the mico .

Not until we reached home and my mother saw the body dangling and shook herself with wails did I understand that I had lost my uncle, simple, and I fell from my pony and wept, nothing like a man. No sleep could comfort, and the stew that had simmered since dawn went uneaten. My first secret began eating into my heart.

THE MOURNING STRETCHED over days, for a mico is greater than a man. I saw him buried below our house, saw the round hole in which they lowered his body. He sat up in his grave, a blanket over his shoulders and a pipe in his hand, because he was a warrior and was always watching, though he’d never have more than one eye. I looked away when they threw dirt around him, my slim brave kin. Where my uncle went, where the spirit of him traveled, I was never certain. Some said he was in the hole, or the house, or was back at battle, ghost-fighting his enemies. Oche said he saw him waiting.

“Waiting for what?” I asked.

He waved his fingers gently above his head, making loose loops.

If we could choose where our spirit goes, mine wouldn’t rest. Mine would hunt and battle. Mine would haunt the wicked. I said this in a quiet voice so Seloatka, who was with us filling the grave, wouldn’t hear.

“What wicked?” Oche said.

I opened my eyes wide. We could speak at each other silently like this, and neither would understand.

The night before Green Corn, a smaller council gathered in the meeting house and threw conversation about a successor. It was the last day of the year’s fire; tomorrow the flame would be doused and all debts and wrongs would be forgiven, though by whom I never knew. The next in line in the Wind clan was the one left of my older brothers, who was panting for the reins. He had ridden with us in the river fight against the Choctaws and had claimed several lives, but he didn’t speak to me on that journey, for we were not friends but kin. I could have told him what I saw, but he was older and fiercer and laughed at jokes too coarse for me to understand. When he saw me in the town or practicing with my bow in the fields, he would pelt me with stones and husked-out shells. Had I told him of Seloatka’s careful aim and the dreamlike path of the arrow through summer air to deep between our uncle’s shoulders, I would have had to tell him of my vantage, my cowardly crouch behind the sap-sticky pine. Being still stuck between boyhood and courage, this I could not reveal. I also worried Seloatka might be a spirit, or at least a man who could read my wishes, so when I found myself thinking of the slow arrow, I pushed my mind to something safer. Girls planting seeds, or fishing. Polly, whose form I always returned to. My mind divided neatly between politics and her, between imagining myself chief and wondering what I would say if I found myself alone with her, our hands nested.