Katy Smith - Free Men

A certain kind of face filled the paths snaking between the Muskogee towns and the once-English, now-Spanish settlements. They were hungry men, all hunting something. I saw white men burned so sun-brown they looked little different from the slaves that trailed behind. Scars crossed faces like maps. Bodies smelled of dirt and decaying food caught between teeth. As men passed me, the pines breathed after them, exhaling a sweetness into their wake, washing the path clean of their scent. Gnat clouds hovered at the mountaintops of men’s shoulders. On the southern trips with my guide, I couldn’t keep my gaze from these walking desperates, curious to spot their own bitterness, but when I began to journey alone, I kept my eyes down and away like the others.

Some of the travelers I came to know by sight. The one with his sleeve pinned to his chest who growled about the heat. The girl who dressed as a boy and bartered her preserves, the trail walkers keeping her pretense. The slave who was the color of creek silt and could not stop his tongue. We all were waiting for the end of our trails, for whatever lay there, and yet we only saw each other in the coming and going, as though we only traveled, never arrived.

The money I kept in a deerskin purse Polly made, with a moon cut into one side — to remind me of her face, she said. She at first was baffled by my plan but came to relish the sight of the shiny coins. They were a path out. In my mother’s house beyond the circle of our town, I dug a little hole in the dirt beneath my bed, buried my purse, and marked it with a red stone. This was where I planted my growing fortune. The coins began to sprout when I took on the route alone, Seloatka trusting me, the rum sellers in Pensacola knowing the sound of my step and the quality of our skins. Certain men came to our town to be taken south, with our traders as guides and our slaves — purchased blacks or captured Indians — as guards. They paid well for the privilege, and from the little I was allowed, my purse began to bulge. I needed it to burst before I could claim Polly, could silence the protests of her uncle. After I took her, the steps were few to chiefdom and revenge. I would buy an alliance with poorer neighbors, some Chickasaw or distant Muskogee towns, even American traders, and with the money show them my strength and my intentions. They would back me, would refuse to treat with my wife’s uncle, and then my wife and I would rise in his stead and he would like a puffball turn to nothing. Was I naive?

Polly was my accountant, and made me tally my gains after each trip, which she would mark in little lines on a stick she kept by her bed. She said she needed to know when she’d be mine. She’d then toss the stick below her bed and pull me down and I would find all her goodness there, waiting, just as she promised. With my arms beside her, around her, in her hair, she listed what we’d do with our wealth. Richmond , she said. She wanted to live in a white man’s city. Her father had left her without an image of himself but a silver chain and a sense of something other, and she had not found her right place in this small village, doing what our mothers and uncles did, and their mothers and uncles before them. She said she felt half her limbs were pulled by white strings, and if her bastard father thought they were better than Indian strings, maybe they were. Richmond , I said, and didn’t tell her my fate was here, where the dead were still unsettled. She too may have picked things not to tell me. Richmond , she said, and my arms were vines around her neck, her waist, her legs.

As the trails became worn beneath my feet, the mico slept worse at night. I saw little of his suspicion, but Oche told me on my rests from riding that Seloatka kept a band of men tightly circled about his house to keep the ghosts from stealing his skins, though there was little to trade them for besides rum, which ghosts could not swallow. He was saving for something, perhaps for the pleasure alone of saving, which is an early symptom of a greater sickness, but perhaps for some scheme against me. We may have been hoarding in opposite corners of the same town, both to destroy the other. Both waiting for our fortunes to burst and the plans we made to spill into action. I hoped his plot was as little formed as mine.

Oche said he was worried, said that long ago when I was in trouble I had gone to a woman in the country for help, one of the hut women, but farther out, west of the trading path. She used to live in a nearby town, and I remembered her, tiny and dark, without family. But I told him this had never happened, so he gave me directions— and then turn north at the dead oak —so I would remember that moment in time, whether it had happened or not. He saw the game we men were playing for what it was.

Just before winter Seloatka hired a Frenchman who had been living among the Muskogee and leading war parties against the colonists, and he paid him to be a double pair of eyes. Le Clerc sat at the mico ’s table and filled his belly hard with pawpaw and persimmon and found himself a girl to keep, one who was motherless and could not tell the white men she could use from the white men who would use her. His eyes were black, like my lover’s, but when I shook his hand, I could not see into them. He never learned my name, for Seloatka kept him among the elites, passing him from cousin to warrior to guard, all trusted men who greased the visitor with rum and showed him how to throw the spear on the chunkey field. Oche and I stood under a walnut shadow and watched his small French body coil itself behind his throwing arm. The spear always went wide.

Le Clerc was not a dangerous man. He seemed to already have whatever it was he wanted. Stories to carry with him when he returned home. Women and whiskey, an adventure. He was too vague to be menacing. Like most white men, he’d pass through. That Seloatka never introduced his trail man to his Frenchman reminded me that though we were connected in business, the mico never fit me within his circle. He had not forgotten. He only kept me near so he could watch my movements, could predict when I would finally strike. We both knew that cowards and the quiet were the ones whose hands would eventually turn.

Early mornings, when Oche was in the fields with our mother and I was home and had nothing to do but carve a new bow and wait for Polly to find me, I would see Le Clerc wending through the river trees, one hand out to brush the bark as he passed. He walked slowly, but never aimlessly. Was that what Polly’s father looked like? A white man walking through an Indian town, on his way to somewhere else? Except the Frenchman was not impatient. I never saw him hurry, and even when he missed the chunkey stone, over and over, he never angered. And when he was alone and thought no one was watching, he chose to walk among basswood and sycamore at dawn, feeling their skin, occasionally looking up into their branches as if hoping to see someone beloved there. If I were a superstitious man, I’d worry he saw my own past body, crouched there years ago with Polly, or else some future version of myself.

I HAD BEEN on the paths for a year when spring rolled open again with the first wood flowers and airy nights. Polly caught a basket of new dandelion leaves and fed me their crispness on a grass bank by the river, just out of sight of the fields. She watched me sideways as I chewed through the bitter, and when I reached for her hand she tucked hers between her knees. In watching my purse fill, we sometimes forgot how to love each other, or our love was just siphoned into different ruts. There were times when I came back grimed and weary after a week’s absence and she flinched at my touch. She said my skin was getting rougher, my skin hurt her skin. I’d step away and sleep that night on the floor beside her bed, reaching out to brush her cheek only after I knew she was asleep. I asked my mother, whose eyes were milking over with age, if this was a normal thing between a man and a woman, and she raised her eyebrows and turned down the corners of her mouth as if to say, You think I’d remember? Her heart had fallen out after one, two, three of her children died.