Katy Smith - Free Men

Cat asks, “What do we do?”

His first words since before the creek. There is a brightness to him now that is either hope or mania.

“What do we do?”

Bob and I look at him, a man asking for comfort, and say nothing. I should be least worried about him, a white fugitive surely hardened to violence, but I am somehow not surprised to see his panic. He has in his eyes a stretching, beaten-down need. He must have loved, and been punished, a hundred times. I try to tell the truth. How a man will come for us, the chief’s Frenchman, a hungry-eyed tracker, wiry. The Clerk, they call him. How some say he has no mercy, has never held a baby, but I soothe them. He is smart and sure, but he doesn’t strike me as a killing man, and anyway he moves so turtle-slow that if we walk quickly and rest little, even horseless, he cannot find us. He is a white man, after all, and these are not his woods. Bob looks at me with such worry, as though I were holding his fate like a whip, and Cat murmurs to himself, pats his shirt pocket. He is afraid of something, but I don’t believe it’s death.

The first light is rain-shower gray. Cat crawls to Bob and presses his hand against the other man’s chest until Bob stretches back, lies flat on the red earth. Cat touches his forehead to feel for fever. He takes off his own shirt, twists it, squeezes the creek water out, drapes it across Bob’s eyes. When the slave is masked and Cat’s fingers have been washed with his own spit, he tears the sleeve from Bob’s arm, rubs away the blood and dirt with a slow palm, and then snakes his finger into the shoulder’s wet wound. I turn away at Bob’s scream. Surely a doctor would have put the rag in his mouth instead. When I turn back, Cat is holding the bullet in his hand, shifting it like a pearl to catch the light.

“That’s all?” I ask.

Bob’s breaths now come out loud, each a huff. Even I can see that the bullet is the least of it.

“I can’t clean it,” Cat says. He wraps Bob’s sleeve around the injury and ties it tight, but the cloth is thick with dirt.

“So we get him a doctor.”

Cat looks up at me with surprise. Nods.

“You want to leave me, that’s fine,” Bob calls out from under the mask. “No reason to take me on in this state, I’d just be a weight. If you leave me—” His voice is getting higher, so he stops, breathes deep. “If you leave me—”

Cat wipes the damp shirt in circles on Bob’s face, cleaning the emotion, and then draws it off, puts it back on his pale chest. Bob opens one eye. Cat offers a hand to pull him up and then we are all three standing again. The white man holds the bullet out on his palm, but Bob shakes his head, so he throws it into the woods, where some creature will come hours later to smell the human on it.

“We need to find someone,” I say.

“I can’t hide.” Bob wraps one hand around his chest, trying to clutch out the pain. “I’m a free man. I’m a free man.” He looks behind him as if this were being contested. The dawn birds are twittering, a high wet sound, and we are all listening for the heavier sounds of feet.

“We need to get off the trail — either you die of that hole, or the tracker finds us.”

“That’s what I’m saying, go west. I have it all figured. Plenty of land out there. My brother, the one I told you about, told me.”

“And your arm?”

I glance at Cat, who looks puzzled. Or content. He’s like water the way his face holds moods.

“We should do something,” Cat says. In his voice is not our present predicament but a longer vision of events. He is like Oche, for whom time was nothing but a small mat to set your shoes on. The whole world lay beyond it.

Bob scratches at his knee.

I know what we need to do: split the silver, shake hands, share a drink for luck, and leave. There is no reason to go on together. I have nothing to do with these men. I met them two nights ago, and I’m not even sure that the white man’s name is his name. But my skin flinches at the thought of parting, as though they’re the blanket between my body and the ghosts. They’re the sticks that need arranging. Does violence rope the wicked together? If I leave them, who else will understand me? And where will they go without me? The black man will die, and the white man will be scooped up in a day by Le Clerc. None of that is deserved. I have been a coward already too many times.

“There’s a woman, an old trader who knows some medicine and keeps a house off the western spur. You want to head west, I’ll take you as far as that. And there are some paths branching off that Le Clerc won’t know. Give us time to plan, to fix you up.”

“You’re coming with me?” Bob says.

“Look at you.” I can’t describe how scared I am of what has happened. “We can’t scatter like mice. We’ve done this, and if we mean what we’ve done, we need to finish it.” I watch him move his tongue inside his mouth, puffing out his cheeks, thinking about what the it is.

“You can come,” he says, looking at the ring of us. “Get your own land out there.”

“We head west, we stop at the woman’s house, we decide from there. But we move now. Le Clerc isn’t the only one trailing us.”

Bob looks at Cat, at the man who maybe already murdered, and I look at Bob, who stole his own body away from slavery. Who knows what bounty hunters and slave patrols are already sniffing out our scent. We are a circle of glances. What we have for each another is not trust, but need, and there is no future to it.

I grab my bag, heavy with everything I can’t put down, and start walking fast. South. I don’t look back, but soon hear their footsteps behind me, one half jogging and one in a shuffle as rhythmed as my mother’s voice, my mother who has already lost so many sons. We kick up the dust of mingled day and night.

THE TRAIL IS empty this morning, but just as I am beginning to consider it good luck, a man comes over a hill before us. He has a tangle of woolly hair and is dragging a cart with two wheels behind him. Inside are stacks of newspapers weighted down with rocks. I have seen a few in Pensacola, and traders on occasion bring a paper to Hillaubee, but they are usually several months old and say little that we have not already heard. He draws the cart to a stop when he sees us. The handle of the conveyance is attached to his wrist by a long red ribbon. I keep walking, head down, hoping the men behind me will follow my lead without speaking, but the stranger holds out a hand as we approach. I stop. I can see a pistol stuck in the waist of his trousers.

“Care for the news?” he says.

I shake my head politely. I could pretend not to speak his language, but strangers can be quick to act out against Indians who appear stupid. There is no reason to take chances.

“You heard it already?” He sets down his cart and takes a step closer.

“What city is it from?” Bob asks.

I turn around with a stern face, but my companions, even with heavy bags on their shoulders and a feral mix of dirt and blood on their skin, look surprisingly innocent. It is not unlikely, in fact, that this newspaper man has done even worse things.

“No city,” he says. “This is the news from the stars.”

Bob, pulled briefly from his fear, now begins to trudge on.

“Wait, boy, you’ll want to hear it.”

“What stars?” Cat asks.

“We must keep walking,” I say. “We’re expected in town.”

“Those that point your fates. Wouldn’t you like to know if you travel the wrong way?” With the ribbon still attached, he walks to the back of his cart and lifts up a rock, pulling out a paper with one hand and unfolding it. He turns through it as if inside its corn husk there is meat. “Where were you born?”