Katy Smith - Free Men

I left my brother and slipped into our house, stooped low by my bed. I needed to count the coins again, count out the distance between now and what was to come. My fingers were in the packed dirt under the red stone, digging. I fished out the purse.

It was empty.

It hung like a spent stomach in my hand.

WE CROSS BACK over the creek, our shoulders weighted down with new silver, and crash through trees to find the trail again. Our boots are filled with silt. This is not what we intended. Not these lives lost. A deer skitters as we push through the woods, heedless of sound now. The blood on my hands smells like the fawn, like something young and newly broken. Bob and I keep pace, hurrying, our breath heavy. I turn my head once to make sure Cat is keeping up. Why, I’m not sure — because he belongs to Bob, because he is a witness. Is this how my brothers felt when they brought down men in war? No, because that was just, and this is not, this is merely bandits stealing. I am not a thief. I was convinced that this had some nobler purpose, and I can admit that I was easy to convince, thinking of myself, as I did, as noble. This theft is not for me, but for my people, for whoever I decide are my people. They deserve a good man for a mico. If I am still a good man.

We climb the bank again, skid down onto the trading path. It’s empty of life. Cat comes behind us with his mouth open, his eyes numb. I am sweating in the cool night, my thoughts splintering on what little I saw as I hurt men in the dark, taking their money while saving my life. Self-defense. I try to settle on some image of peace. Forgetting my suspicions, I think first of Polly, of her father’s-daughter face, but on her slim body perches the fat head of Kirkland, the ruddy-cheeked man, her laughter melting to a scream. He sounded like a calf dying. I shake my head to blur the image. In all that fury, I saw my uncle. The bodies of everyone I’ve known are becoming the bodies of everyone else I’ve known.

When I first saw Thomas Colhill on the road, saw how his dark eyes danced like Polly’s and then heard his name, I thought, Here is the man who fathered my girl and then abandoned her, she who is not sweet but who in all likelihood stole my purse from me, here is the man who left a rotten woman for me. I cannot believe that she admired him, or his white blood, beneath her hatred. And yet she talked of Richmond. No one wronged her family, so what is she hunting for? It is no use trying to fathom her, because she is a liar and a thief.

I am a young man, but not a stupid one. In the panic after finding the empty hole beneath my bed, I remembered my brother’s words: that Seloatka, and then she, had come to see me. What had been my plan in packing a bag and marching through the dawn, horseless, blood behind my eyes? I feared if I stayed in the village I would kill him. I would kill him that day. So I would leave and on my own find a path to wealth and with that wealth come back, in two years or five years or ten, and topple his kingdom. Bloodlessly. I’m a good shot and I know English and many of the white traders, and I could become a middleman, earning a wage for my services in negotiating trades, guiding travelers, evaluating goods, before using that money to build alliances; I know there are Muskogee chiefs who want to extend their reach, and Chickasaws who could use assurances. The revenge I wanted was a clean one, a triumph not of strength but of power. He had taken my uncle, he had taken my money, my means to marry, and now I would take his chiefdom, my birthright.

Except that as I walked, as I waited for deer, as I met these men who would pull me down their own uncertain paths, it seemed less and less true that Seloatka had taken my money. He, after all, was the one who had given it to me. I was his servant on the trails, he paid my wage without complaint, all because he wanted me close, wanted to have his hands on my strings. Could I imagine him bent and scrabbling in a hole beneath my bed? The mico dirtying his fingers for a purse? He didn’t even know where I kept it. No, he didn’t need my money. I lost track of the features of the trail — the tall sweetgum that marked the path to the watering hole, the signs men carved for each other — because I was circling through every word she ever said to me.

She told me about Kirkland, knew about his fortune, knew about my purse, counted the coins I brought her, wanted more. As we grew older, everything Polly knew was what we didn’t yet have. I couldn’t see this, didn’t mind this, because I was the same.

I can picture her with them, with Kirkland and his kin, flirting with her shoulders in the dark near the council house, the fire lighting the gleams of her teeth as she asks them what ten pounds can buy in the city. Whether she can pass for a white woman. She must have already fled, not knowing that her theft would scatter me too. So the pony she took from me was as borrowed as the purse. What is the first thing she will spend my coins on? A mirror?

Not until I saw the trading party and stood before Kirkland, who was as white and fat as she promised, and met her father, who must have walked through our town without even remembering he had a child, not until I heard the mule’s clink did the full weight of my loss fall on me, and my shock at what she’d done turned to anger, the kind that flurries your head and makes you follow a black man into the night. If I’d had a horse, I would not have met these men I’m walking with. And if I hadn’t met these men?

We stop in the middle of the road, not knowing whether to turn north or south. We didn’t take the horses because we didn’t think, because they were noisy, would be easier to track. We haven’t thought. I drop the bag from my back just to breathe, to try to settle my sense of wrongdoing. I was not the one to shoot Thomas Colhill to his knees, but I saw it and felt the split of love and rage burn me. Will she blame me for this? She called him bastard.

Bob claws at his shoulder, asks, “Where are we going? How do we hide? Should we split the money now, huh?” as if all his shame was turned to words, but I can see the darkness on his shirt. We don’t answer him, and Cat moves to pull the man’s hand away from his shoulder. Beneath is the blood that comes from a hole in his arm.

“It’s nothing,” Bob says. “We’ve got to move, come on now.”

Cat looks at me. The nighthawks bleat. The trees drooping over the road are black and shapeless, the night sky beyond still purpling, the trail empty in its starred and violet stare. It has an ugliness that I never saw before. Bob shifts his load to his other shoulder and heads south again. There isn’t time. We follow.

I am marking all the future steps in my head, deciding what will happen based on what I choose to do. What I want now, if not her. If she were here, I don’t know that I could keep my hands from her body. If she betrayed me, took my money, loved my money more than me, drove me in mindlessness and desperation to send a trading party off to the dark world, all to replace the coins she stole, is it possible to still want her?

We pause at dawn. I steer them behind a grove of oaks hanging on with root fingers to the clay bluffs. A mosquito has been following Bob and the smell of his blood. He itches at his neck with his good arm, swats at himself because it is something to do with shaky hands. These men crouch among thorns and stare at me for answers. I ache to wash the red off me; it’s all disorder.

I tell them what I guess: the mico Seloatka, who sent those white men down from our nation with his blessing and protection, will learn of this by tomorrow and will hunt us, within reason, until we are dead and scalped. I don’t tell them that I would be an easy man for him to kill, that my torture would not disturb his sleep. But we have torn a hole in a flimsy fabric, and the death of named men in West Georgia must be addressed, will be addressed, or else strangers will take arms again. I have created mischief, chaos, where I meant to solve it. Bob’s hand is passing over the back of his head in waves, smoothing, worrying.