Katy Smith - Free Men

WHEN MY COURAGE had grown into a full-sized fruit, I asked Seloatka for a favor. The Englishmen’s war was over now, and the Muskogee towns, along with the Cherokee towns, were lashing out against the new Americans pouring into the spaces opened by peace. How we traded, how we fought: it all deserved rethinking. We had fresh enemies, found allies in old rivals. Our once-solid world seemed to be rafting out on a black river, but I had forgotten nothing. For years I had watched him, from my boyhood to my manhood, and though he had committed no great treacheries since taking the mico ’s feathers, none but the minor abuses of all rulers, I hadn’t once abandoned my plans. That my village might not believe what I had seen — that Seloatka himself may have long since discounted me — did not concern me. I would unseat him and reclaim what was my family’s.

The first step was to move close. Make him believe I had forgotten. It was a night during little spring moon, the warmth just seeping into the air again. He stood outside his house, looking up at the clouds across the stars, his hand against the skin flap. My hands had made that house, I thought. That was my uncle’s house, the one in the center of town with its roof higher than the others, beside the chunkey ground and near the council house, where wars were plotted and travelers slept. I had squatted with my mother and buried my hands in pots of daub, spread the coolness over the cane frame, smoothed it between the woven vines, roughed it with grass and my own collected hair. I handed straw bundles to men who were taller to coat the roof in a spiny fur. The man who killed my uncle was living in the house I built.

The words that came from me were small and squeaked. I said I wanted to be a trader.

“You’ve grown tall,” he said. “Your aim is improved.” He let down the door flap and moved a few steps past me, farther into darkness. “A trader? You want to get out of this village, you’re tired of hunting. I can understand that. You’ll need to know their language, of course, and must learn not to steal.” He seemed to think this was humorous. I needed him to trust me, so I said nothing. “And Polly?” he asked.

Had I known he was watching? I said I knew some English. Wanted to make a profit. Wanted to move beyond the split hickories hanging by the river.

“Earn a little bride price, perhaps. I see. But you leave her alone for a few weeks here and there, and she may get loose from you. That’s my advice. Women, you know. I think your mother was the same.” He laughed again.

I remembered her face when I told my mother what he’d done. Seloatka hadn’t killed my uncle, she said. She erased that night between us. Had she loved him? Had he broken something of hers? I didn’t know what drove a woman to act, what made her shrink. I let my mother go that night. I lived with her still and we spoke of nothing more than detail. I told Seloatka now not to speak of her, though I didn’t know what I was defending.

“You have fought, I think,” he said.

The burning in my insides seeped to my skin. I told him I had seen men fight.

“And now you want to deal in Englishmen. Seeing how men die is the fastest way to understanding how they live.” The stars were now fully beneath their cloud blanket, and I could not see whether his eyes were cold or if he was still laughing at me. “What else do you know? You’ve lived so many years here, and I hardly remember anything you’ve done.”

I said I would be useful to him, that I was strong and fearless and could learn the paths. Would never steal. Was fearless, I said again. Some pots were strewn by the door, still wet from cooking, and in my anxiety I wanted to pick them up and stack them.

He turned and moved away from the wide night, put his hand against the house I built. “Visit me again in a few days,” he said, and went inside.

I came back in the morning, my hands still held before me, and he told me of the man I would follow to learn the paths and of the goods I would earn in exchange for skins.

But I was a young man, and ambitious, and saw a future to which he was blind. “I don’t want the goods,” I said. Not the powder or hatchets or vermilion or pots. I didn’t yet have a wife or a home, and I saw how little the white men valued those saddles, those looking glasses. “I want the coins.”

“They’re no use here,” he said.

“This town is not all there is in the world.” Let him think that I would move away, release his conscience, and meanwhile I would stockade a currency that white men, who were taking acres from us faster than we could plant them, would kill for. When Oche told me what the future looked like, I was no longer too afraid to listen.

He raised his hand and let it drift onto my shoulder, resting it like a fly there. My mind swirled with the vision of my hands and the knife and his belly, but through his warmth I felt his common need. We were men of mirrored desperation, though being still young, I couldn’t guess at his fear. His power was built on the shaky backs of us all. I wanted him to suffer and perhaps he wanted me to leave, and thus we sealed our bargain.

I told Polly I was collecting her bride price and my mother that I was forging our way back to the center of the town and Oche that I was headed out adventuring. They all, in their way, let me go.

THE PATHS TO Pensacola — to Panton, Leslie, and Company and the independent traders — wound south through hardwoods, burned clearings, the beginnings of swamp. The Muskogee man that first guided me crouched on his horse like a man at a fire, and I rode my pony behind, leading the pack mule with a rope. We stopped by rivers to drink and rest and soften our ring-shaped bread in water, and he told me short tales of boyhood. There was a woman he had loved, for there are always women. “And what did you do for her?” I asked.

“Do! What did she do for me ? What a prize I am!” He chuckled as he dug behind his knees for itches. He was old and raisined. “I made her carry water, fry me cakes, sing me ditties—‘ Oh handsome man, sun-faced man, dance around the fire on your pigeon legs, pigeon man .’” I said I didn’t believe him, and he rolled up his breeches to twist his calves in the purple dusk. “Don’t you let a woman grab you, no, you let them stay in the field and you go prancing woodward and when you come two-by-two in the evening, you tell her what’s going, and if she tells you what’s going, well, then you just let it be, for she’s no worse than the mother that bore you. ‘ Pig legs, pig girl, dance close for a squeeze, snorting girl. ’”

“Where is she now?”

“Dead,” he said. “Dead, for I didn’t love her.” He settled back with a pipe and wouldn’t say more.

In Pensacola, we brought our skins to a trader who lived in a wooden house near the Spanish cemetery, where I wandered while the exchange was politely argued over tasting cups of whiskey. Live oaks leaned down on wooden crosses and stone humps. The wind from the gulf sent the fallen leaves scuffling around the markers, some so small they must have been babies, lost to the world before the world turned foul. These were the homes of the ghost children who brushed against my bare legs at night. I sat on one half-sized stone, fresh-faced and free of moss, and tried to remember being so young. When I sought to remember myself, I remembered my uncle. Narrow-shouldered. He had grown inside my heart like a fungus, and even my lover had taken on his hue. When she looked at me through two eyes, I saw his one eye peering.

A woman in red drifted through the graveyard and paused when she saw me. She spoke to me in Spanish. She pointed to the grave I was crouched upon, her eyebrows now furrowed, and as I sensed that I should not be there, her eyes became wet. She covered her face with white-gloved hands, and her hiccups blended with the wind catching in the low branches. I stood and snuck away, ashamed, and when I turned back to look, she had fallen in a heap over the grave, one hand grasping the small stone, quiet now. We are all killed by somebody, and the deaths live forever. But there is something precious in a woman’s grief; it’s the twin, the remnant, of loyalty. I slipped through the graves to the peddler’s cabin, where my pigeon-legged guide had loaded the mule with jugs of whiskey and rum and was holding my pony’s reins in one hand, waiting for me. As I mounted, he handed me a few shillings, the first of the coins — English, Spanish, American — I would collect to capture my future. Pennies for my bride, pounds for her uncle. My plan was not that of a wise man: I believed my wealth would bloodlessly unseat him.