Katy Smith - Free Men

I stood outside the meeting house and listened for my brother’s voice. All I heard was Seloatka’s, burrowing blunt-headed through the conversations. He didn’t question my brother’s place, or claim some greater strength. He didn’t object to the elders’ reasoning. But he made his voice carry low across all debate, so that when the men went home that evening to tell their sisters and wives, all they would remember was Seloatka, Seloatka.

This was not a time when any man could be made mico . The British were begging for our allegiance and our sole custom. A white man’s war was disordering the deer trade. The skins we got sometimes could not be sold, and if we turned elsewhere — to the French or Spanish — the British withheld their rum. No one knew what games the others were playing. And who we were was quickly changing. Cattle now roamed through our fallow fields, herded by uncertain warriors. Our town became home to two white traders, several men from a Cherokee village that had lost its fields, some Seminole women, and slaves who were Choctaw, Chickasaw, African. To be Muskogee in those years was to hear your name in a half-dozen languages. How could you lead when you didn’t know who your people were, much less your enemies? I waited to hear how the elders, who were around when white men were rare, would push us into a future. But all I heard was Seloatka.

My brother walked out of the council house pale and sweating, a cough trembling his chest. He was the tallest of us, broader than the brothers who were already in the ground. His body was one that admitted no suffering. After the council fire was snuffed and the Beloved Men were sleeping next to the Beloved Women and only the possums and ghost children were left on the ball field, my brother, next in line, lay in his bed coughing.

Oche said he tasted evil on it. I was afraid to know what evil was. I said there was no such thing — if there were, surely I’d find it in myself — and that it was nothing more than a summer fever. Whichever it was, Oche didn’t mind. He just spoke things aloud and then turned over into sleep. The peace in his heart was bottomless.

And so when I saw my brother growing sicker as the Green Corn days passed, I tried to think of something else, tried not to think the one who should lead our town was wasting. A doctor looked him over, opened his eyelids, kneaded his stomach. He gave him pasa and wormseed. The night the council met, my brother could not go. His skin was wet and nearly white. His eyes fluttered about the room but never settled. His limbs began to twitch like a rabbit in a trap. The council determined he would not live. We stayed quiet one more day, and as the women dressed themselves in rattles for the dance and Oche walked with the priests to start the year’s new fire, my brother slipped into an unawareness. He would not respond to touch, to pinch, to slap. We sat around his bed and gave pieces of melon to the guests: men who stopped by to see a brother warrior, women who swore they loved him, had almost been his wife. They came through in quiet lines like shadows, their small stories thrown into silhouette by the great fire that was my mother. She didn’t move. Her eyes didn’t move from his face, which was paling away, one step from ghost. I sat with her not because I loved my brother but because I wanted to see the moment when he passed from man to something else. When my uncle was dying, when the arrow I had not prevented was holing his heart, letting the blood find all the empty spaces of his body, my eyes were closed. Now I kept my hands on the sides of my face, holding my eyes on my brother, imagining what I missed before. He grew smaller and smaller, like a weed without water, crumpling in the faintest ways. I had to blink, and at some instant when I was blinking or not blinking, his spirit walked away.

The doctor came and tasted his blood and told us it was poison.

My mother’s tears dried into fury. She said she’d finger every man and woman who had stepped past our door until one confessed and was burned alive. When the doctor was gone and Oche was asleep and my mother was making lists of suspects and rivals and bloody methods of revenge, I stepped outside my body and saw that our family had been hacked at until it was splinters. We were of the Wind clan, and we were lying split in our home, in broken poses: asleep, afraid, raving, dead.

So I told her what I knew. I told her of the singing soft arrow in my uncle’s back and Seloatka’s pointed menace, and asked her not to tell a soul, especially Oche, who would be afraid. I didn’t guess, though, how much fear would be my mother’s part. I thought she would burst from the house in a crusade, might even strangle Seloatka with her knuckly hands. But when I finished my story, her eyes went dead. She did not cook for the feast to break the Green Corn fast. She did not speak to me anymore that night and slept silently. In the morning when she roused me, she said, “My son, you have had such a dream. A terrible dream has come to you, but it’s all right now. Your mother is here now.” We never spoke of it again.

With my uncle shot through and my brother poisoned, I was the next to claim mico , but the council agreed I was unfit and green. Seloatka told them he saw me crouched behind a tree during the river fight, my breechcloth soaked with urine. I didn’t contradict this version of myself, valuing my life as a boy does, though when Oche asked if I was angry, I said I was ready to crash heads and set fire to the meeting house. In the last seasons of my boyhood, we would battle with wooden axes in the ditches behind the cornfields, one of us the mico , the other the usurper. Perhaps all this false anger prepared me for a realer kind.

One of our cousins became chief, the one who was married to Seloatka’s sister. Within a year, the elders had stopped bringing us meat to fill the hole of my uncle’s loss, and by the time my voice dropped and I was mostly a man, we were pushed to a smaller house on the edge of town farthest from the fields. My grandmother had passed three years before from some kind of pox, and with fewer numbers and less sway, our family handed away our home. Like my brother, we were shrinking. When our cousin the new mico died hunting — no one knew how, no one asked — Seloatka seized power. The feather was now in his hands.

The elders painted his face ghost-white and sat him on a white skin and reminded him what white meant, that it was his duty ever to hunt for peace, even in our warring town. He nodded and was grave, but sitting on the back bench of the council house, I could see the firing of his hungry heart, which pumped not white but red. Then he took the white drink, and we all drank with him. He gulped the roasted holly water until he vomited. I could not sleep that night, and though my mother said I was too young for the white drink and now I’d have dreams, I only thought of the man in white with the beating red heart and wondered how to pull that out of him.

AND POLLY WAS his other sister’s daughter. Her eyebrows ran straight across her face, above eyes that were black with mischief. She wore a blue bead in her hair. She played with the boys when she was young and no one took notice of her until she stole her slenderness away and stayed in a hut with women and brought back something full. We threw sweetgum balls at her, and she simply stared and walked off. My affection for her, or was it awe, grew with the same breaths that fed my anger at her uncle. There was something in her that I wanted, and though it felt sincere and young, I cannot swear that my love for her wasn’t born of a greater hatred.

I began to leave presents by her door — feathers wrapped in a bunch with twine, sweet cakes my mother made — and to watch from behind a shrub as she stepped out into the mist of morning to discover she was admired. Her face melted from the last of sleep into a quiet pleasure. She would put down the water pot to hold the feathers close, bite the cake, and I thought she was pressing me to her, nibbling at my mouth. In the days before she knew it was me, I felt a limitless power over her welfare. Not knowing who I was, she could not refuse me. One day I left her nothing, just to watch her face pinch in disappointment. If I was cruel, I blamed the great loathing that simmered under all my movements.