Katy Smith - Free Men

I went down to the river where the women were fishing, roping in the last of the rockfish and red drum, to ask Oche his wisdom. While he washed out his clothes, he told me that girls are no mystery. They are not spirit people, not ghost children, not creatures to be shot or skinned. He laughed at my gifts and my skulking, and when I told him I didn’t know where the love came from, he told me all love was good and pure and I let myself believe him. Oche knew nothing of Seloatka, disliked him because he took more grain than was his chiefly share and fought sometimes for sport rather than revenge, and I could not tell him any different. He asked if I wanted Polly forever.

I did not respond, but watched a young man paddle by in a newly dug canoe, testing it for a summer journey.

“Would you ever tire of her?” He squeezed the water from his shirt and laid it on a rock, smoothing out its folds. “Could you hold her when she’s unhappy or when she makes no sense? Would you hold her if she hit you? If you saw another woman that you loved and Polly said no, you could not have her, would you listen? If you lost all your children so there were no more threads between you, would you love her still?”

I had been growing into a panic until he mentioned this last. “I won’t have children,” I said. I took my feet out of the water and dried them on the grass. “Unless I had a son like you, to do the washing for me.”

He looked so slim standing there by the young trees along the bank. His chest small, his hair long as a girl’s. I asked him if he was old enough yet to love, and he smiled and held up his leggings dripping from the river.

The first time I spoke to her, I started coughing so she had to fetch me water, and all I could do was thank her and hurry back to my knife-sharpening, cheeks on fire. The second time, she asked if I was all right, as if I were an old man with little time to live, the light in her eyes gone soft and comforting, and I said I was perfectly fine in a deep voice. My mother had given me honey to smooth my throat, and I glared at Polly and walked on.

The third time, I found her crouched in the notch of a hickory. She said she was hiding from a friend and begged for my silence, so I crawled up and sat beside her. We didn’t speak as the blackbirds flocked to a branch above us and settled in a beating of wings. I ventured that she might be too old for hiding and stared anywhere but at her body. Her arm pressed against mine. I closed my mouth until the blackbirds had all flown off, in search of a tree less fraught. A girl appeared from the fields, paused to glance between the rows, and then ran to the river on the tallest pointed feet, as though wanting to be admired. We kept our places, shoulders locked. I asked her in a whisper if she liked the gifts. She looked at me quick and said, “You?” I nodded, feeling like a man again, and she squinted her eyes at the gathering dark.

We stayed in the tree through nightfall and star-rising. We could hear the town’s murmur from the council ground, the ball field. I never asked about her uncle, so she told me of her mother and her brothers and the father who was an Englishman she’d never seen.

His name was Thomas Colhill and he had married her mother in a traditional way, which is to say not in the churches that he knew, so when he left a few months later, he thought he took his freedom with him. This was not uncommon, and her mother kept no bitterness. Just an old rifle he had given her as a bride gift, a silver chain that she passed to Polly, rudimentary English, and the use of his name in trade. His use of hers proved more valuable, and with his Muskogee kinship waving like a flag before him, he took his whiskey to the Indians and brought back skins. The fortune he made must have kept his white family in fine clothes. How would it be to travel between nations with nothing to lose? There seemed a certain power in that, and I admired the absent Thomas Colhill for choosing his own life.

“Do you think of him?” I asked.

She paused, as if thinking of what thinking of him would be like.

“Or wonder if he has the same chin?” I looked out into the dark fields so as not to stare at her chin, which fell into a little bowl at the base of her face. Just the size for rubbing a thumb across.

“No,” she said. She put her hand to her face, feeling her features. Not as slowly as I would have. “He’s just another bastard. White man, Muskogee man, all you want is more than the man next to you has.”

“What will you do if he comes back?”

“Kill him.”

I laughed, swallowed my laugh into a cough. I was grateful the night hid the sweat on my face. “For leaving you?”

“For not taking me with him.”

I didn’t know what to say. I understood how someone young could grow such an old bitterness, but I lost the sense of myself as a rare hero when I heard that anger lie so easily in someone else’s mouth.

In the unraveling night, she had already moved on. She wondered about an animal that was gnawing at the squash, a friend who had taken her favorite comb. She taught me some English words, said she’d teach me more. She came to her uncle in her own wanderings. Seloatka took no interest in her, she said, but spent his empty hours with her brothers, teaching them the arts of war. Cruelty, she called it. He was an old-fashioned Muskogee, had no vision, knew nothing of the English like her father. My heart was thumping hard at the image of Seloatka resting his hand on my shoulder. As she worried aloud that her hair would not grow fast enough, I saw the spirit of the man dig his fingers into my arm. I took my knife from its sheath and cut at his chest, gently, as if I were planting seeds in soft dirt.

The owls began calling in whispers while we shivered in the night cold. I was sleepy and could smell the cooking fish from town and began to think Polly was childish for hiding so long. The bark felt dirty to me; I couldn’t straighten the sticks up here. The sound of a sliding in the tree made her shiver and grab my hand. I said I thought it was a snake, so she laced her fingers into mine. If only Seloatka found us here, his niece stuck to his enemy like ash on a hoecake. But I could smell her hair in the moonlight and it smelled like the warmth of a deer when it is still alive. She told me she liked an older boy, one who had his first scars already, but I didn’t listen, and it must have been just a game because later when she put her mouth on my mouth it felt real and I had no more questions about my love.

The battle had been fought, though at that hour I couldn’t have named the victor. We climbed down, or rather slipped and scrambled, scraping our palms, and at the base of the hickory she took me in her arms and squeezed — the embrace of a comrade, a fellow warrior — and evaporated into the night. I walked home, my arms wrapped around my chest to mimic her warmth, and my mother shook me and fed me cold meat. I slept for the first time without dreaming of Seloatka.

We were lovers in the youngest sense, and I brought her back the hearts of deer from hunting. One summer she spent wooing another boy, and for a few days they escaped into the forest to play a game of togetherness, but she came home bored and swore she still loved me. When I began to look less like a tangle of sticks and more like something that could grip and twist and shoot, I told her I would marry her. She said she was worth a lot, and I would owe her uncle a great sum in gifts, and she wasn’t even sure she’d say yes. I said it wasn’t a question. I just wanted to warn her. She said she’d be ready, then, and good luck to me. I told my brother and he laughed and said the same. He knew her well from farming with her, pounding grain, the things that Oche does with women. He said she built baskets from piles of wet stripped cane faster than the others. I never knew whether to worry over him or to envy what he had, something like the clarity of a river in spring. He said he saw something in my heart larger than love, and to watch for it. I said he was still a boy.