Katy Smith - Free Men

On that new spring night, Polly fed me greens but wouldn’t give me her kiss. I don’t think it hurt me when she pulled her hand away.

Plucking grasses and skinning the reeds between her long fingers, she told me of her uncle’s guests, a fresh party of Englishmen, loyalists they named themselves, heading south for Spanish lands and safety.

“I thought you might guide them,” she said. “The man who leads them, Kirkland, has enough money to purchase half of Pensacola.”

I lay back and crossed my hands on my stomach. The sky was dying away, purple now and sad. Night too was lovely, but it stole something from the day, and even when this theft was quiet, there was a violence in the act that made dusk a sorrowful thing to watch. A loss.

Polly was describing the quantity of Kirkland’s silver.

An owl flew large and thick above us, two beats of the wing before we lost it to the dark again. It had heard the rustle of a shrew, too fine a sound for my ears to catch. My body seemed as fallible lately as my mind.

“He’s staking out lands for his family, a wife and daughter he left behind somewhere. In the Carolinas, near Charleston, I think. Maybe as far as Richmond.”

“That’s not in the Carolinas,” I said.

“He’s very handsome and fat and dresses neat — you should see him, get a nice waistcoat like that — and has skin like a cloud. Did you hear what I said about his silver?” She waited to see if my eyes would catch the fire in her own, but I was looking up, watching for the owl to fly back with the shrew in its mouth.

“Last night I saw him in the council house. He stayed after the others left and smoked no pipe at all but drew out thin paper and ink in a bottle, and he scrawled along line after line in these tight bunches on the page. If he were staying longer, I’d ask him to teach me to read English, which I’m perfectly good at otherwise. Looks like the marks spiders leave through the dust. What do you think he was writing?”

I felt the reed she flung at me bounce against my neck. She knew I hated things out of place. I half listened, trying to decide if I loved her voice.

“I think it was a message to his family. All white men have families somewhere else.” I could have reached out to her then, but didn’t. “‘My wife! My children!’ he’d write. ‘Bounteous English love is yours!’ Don’t you think that’s how they sound? ‘I will build a Pensacola paradise, and you will join me in the summer when the red flowers bloom, and you will never again have to plant corn or pound hominy, for we will be choked in riches.’”

I shook my head. “English women don’t eat hominy.”

“How do you know? Have you met some?” She crawled over to me and hovered her face above mine so her long hair brushed in my eyes. “Who do you see down there when you go? Do you keep an English lady whore? Do you buy her cotton dresses, which is why your purse sometimes seems smaller than it should?”

I sat up, pushing her aside, and decided that I did love her, though no one had told me what love meant, and maybe it wasn’t wholly sweet or giving but just the way two people needed each other. I wanted Polly in my life, with all her flits and needling, because without her I’d be even more alone, one step farther away from what it is I wanted. My days were better with her than without her, though my days were never fully good. I assumed she thought the same of me. So I said, “My love,” holding her shoulders, “it’s just us, no English lady whores. I show you each coin I get. You’ve seen them. I’ll have enough to marry you by the next Green Corn.” I held her shoulders until she nodded.

She stood up and danced to the river with small foot-stomps, brushing with the toes, digging in the heels, until she reached the water and let her feet sink in an inch of muck. She looked back across a bare shoulder. “Kirkland is leaving in a few days. You should ask my uncle to join them.”

We were both thinking then of money. If an owl had flown by again, I wouldn’t have seen it. Polly didn’t return to me and I thought she might want to bathe alone or else be silent, so I stood and left her, walked down the river to the set of stones that made a path across the water and stepped from one to the next, pausing in the middle of the stream. It was almost full dark now, and the rocks beneath the water, round and brown when the sun scissored through, were invisible in the wash of black. If I put my foot in, the water would be cool, but there seemed a long distance between my wanting to feel the coolness and the heaviness of my feet, so I stood still, my head dropped to my chest like I had been newly created, no bones yet, and left to dry. I needed to think of my love for a woman, to sort out whether she was as good as my mother, but I only wanted to deal with the world of men, where good and evil were evenly split, red town from white town, boy from ghost, and where destroying the killer of my uncle was so little complicated that it allowed me to stand perfectly still in a river at night, my muscles slumping into peace.

I don’t know how long I was gone. I didn’t watch the stars to see how they’d moved; I didn’t feel a creeping dew on my skin. I came back to my house and my mother and brother were sleeping, so I left again, my feet not done with wandering, this time taking me into the cornfields, picking through the rows of new sprouts. They were tangled in the threads of cowpeas. It took me hours of not-knowing, of looking hard in my heart for feelings I couldn’t find, of trying to see a version of myself that had nothing to do with Polly or Seloatka, with my uncle or my purse, before I gave up. My path so far had taken me unharmed and with increasing purpose to this night wandering, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t continue to carry me through. Doubt had little nobility in it. And what felt selfish at times — love, anger — wasn’t at all, because I did it in another’s name. My life was not my own, but my clan’s. After the storms that unsettled my village and my people and after the wars that had taken away the very steadiness of our ground, there was a great void that begged to be filled.

I didn’t see anything living that night because I wasn’t watching. This blindness returned me to my purpose, which had nothing to do with the ghost children that Oche saw, or the turtle shells we gathered to rattle on our ankles, or the clouds we studied to see whether they’d bring water to our fields.

Not till dawn did I return to my mother’s house with fired eyes, to dig under my bed, to gauge my money, and to chart the next step — marriage and then alliances and then Seloatka’s seat, my mother in his house, his body bent and wretched in our cabin, pushed to the outside edge of belonging until he slipped off entirely. This all depended on power, which, without violence, only came from wealth. This was the new world we lived in.

I passed Oche at the door, who was taking his hide and needle to a cousin’s, still wiping the sleep from his eyes. He stopped with his face open in a question and said, “The mico came looking for you last night. Mother was still in the fields. You weren’t here.”

I was surprised, and asked if he was sure this hadn’t happened years ago.

“I told Polly when she came by later, but he was gone and you were gone, and this all seemed to make her pleased, so we shared dinner with her. She borrowed your pony.”

Seloatka must have come to beg my help, to place Kirkland and the English in my hands, to crawl on his belly like a night worm. If he was afraid I’d plant that vision-knife in him, he didn’t understand. I wanted his dignity, not his life. I wanted the traitor to watch my power spread from field to river to hunting ground, to see an untasted peace settle on the town for a century.