Katy Smith - Free Men

“Used to keep chickens,” she says, turning it over in her hands, tapping it along her forearm. “Till the hogs ate ’em. There might be one left around here somewhere.”

Cat snakes back through the high grasses with it.

I help Bob roll a nurse log back into the woods, its fungus and grubs clinging on to the wet bark. When it’s well off her field, Bob sits on the trunk, wipes his face.

“You know I didn’t mean it with Cat,” he says. He picks off a raft of lichen growing by his hip and flicks his fingernail in it.

“You couldn’t have made the journey with a woman.” I don’t believe that Cat’s marriage was with a real woman, a woman who complained and changed her mind and had her own will. His frailness could not have withstood her. Whatever wife he’s carrying with him in his mind is no match for a walking wife. What would Bob’s woman have done on this trail? She would have told us to go this way and not the other, would have raised her eyebrows at how I cooked the rabbit, would have stopped us from thieving. Or after we thieved, would have stolen our bags. No, I cannot blame Bob for not bringing his wife.

“I think I like her more now,” he says. He sounds sorry for this. “She wasn’t the one I’d’ve chosen, but she was the best for me and let me run off after all. I wouldn’t have gone if I thought she couldn’t manage for herself, but she’s as tough as they come and made friends with the missus. Could be I wasn’t the family she wanted either.” He tosses the lichen and scratches off another piece. “I don’t want to think about the other stuff. Damn it.” The silver is still in its bags. Our women are still somewhere else. He looks up. “What about your girl?”

I wait as a sound in the forest becomes not a man but a squirrel. “We should get back.”

At night I dream up scenes between us. She drops to her knees and cries and I comfort her; she asks me to come east with her and I do; she tells me to let Seloatka go and I consider it until I’m asleep, and when I wake up I say no, no. Could she have killed a man, or would she have saved me?

We walk back just as the clouds begin to empty. Cat has found a flower and is waving it at us. A signal.

The rain washes over us in long, light sweeps. We finish our stacking and sorting and harvesting and come inside wet, our road-sweated clothes rich with the earthiness of rain. We drop our handfuls of onions on her wooden table, the carrots, two heads of lettuce, all rolling around in search of the edge. One onion drops off and bounces beneath the woman’s bed, and she tells us to leave it, it’s good luck.

“We’ve been bothered by crows,” she says. The carrots fall apart into coins under her knife. Bob stands at the window, watching for men, and Cat and I sit on her bed. “They get worse in the summer, but now’s the time when they’re going around with their babies and teaching them what’s food and what’s not.”

She throws the vegetables into the kettle with salt and fat, and I miss my mother’s corn.

“We have an old woman,” I say, “who sits in our field and keeps the crows away.” I’m surprised to see her in the clothes of white people, leading such an alone life. But she may have been Spanish before she was Indian, or black.

“I’ve too much to do to sit around all day, and anyway, I’m not hardly old yet.” She snaps her head around, eyes wide, so we can see the youth still in her face. She gives a final hard stir to the stew and then puts down her spoon and lifts the musket from the back of her door. “Excuse me, sons.”

Bob moves to the back window and watches her walk into the garden. We hear a blast, a pause, and then another blast, and I am stuck to my seat, knowing it is just the woman with her gun, catching a rabbit or a dove for dinner, but thinking still of Le Clerc and his nearness. A warbler flashed through the woods while I was gathering kindling, and I thought it was the gleam on his rifle. She comes back inside, wet again, with two dead crows dripping from her hands.

She clears the table of the tin plates and flour sacks and tufted carrot tops and replaces them with a large wooden bowl. She hums as she gathers ingredients from her shelves. I stand beside her while she rolls them into a paste.

“That’s not for bread,” I say.

“One ounce asafoetida, four ounce flour brimstone, four ounce gunpowder, two ounce hog’s lard.”

We all three watch her arm turn in circles, knowing that this is witchiness but unable to leave this house. Even with the dampness of our bodies, it holds an uncommon warmth.

“My grandmother’s recipe,” she says.

“Who was she?” I ask.

She rolls the paste into balls, walnut-sized, and stuffs them down the throats of the crows. Their beaks spread wide for her dark hands. “There now,” she says, cradling their bodies and sliding them under the bed beside the truant onion. She tosses the remaining paste in the trash heap outside and pours a ladle of water over her hands to clean them.

Bob and Cat look at each other like children, afraid and also wanting to smile.

We eat what she serves us, uncertain now what’s in it, but swallowing because it’s warm and not burned and tastes like lives we had before.

“I haven’t gotten enough from you ,” she says, pointing a delicate claw at Cat. “Let’s say this tracker falls off the scent, doesn’t find you bunch of misfits. You’re free and clear, and this one, if his arm don’t fall off, is going west, he won’t stop talking about it, and that one’s circling back to his village one day, though, darling,” turning to me, “I think you’d best wait a year or so to build a name for yourself, take over some of the trade from the upper towns before you approach the Chickasaws. That way you’ll have more pull going in. But you . Where are you headed?”

We all wait. We’re sitting on the floor again, and he puts down his plate and rubs his fingers across his lips as if trying to feel for the taste that was just there.

“Carolina,” he says. His voice cracks, and he swallows. “My wife was there.” He digs a hand into his pocket and pulls out a brownish letter. The woman takes it, looks at the address and the scribbles on the back, but when she raises her eyebrows at him and fingers the seal, he takes it back. “Where is it going?” he asks.

She points to the writing on the front. “Camden,” she says. “That’s closer to the upcountry. What’s that river it’s right along?” She’s taking her time, fiddling in her cap, to give him room to find his courage. “Wateree. We had some people from there in the lower towns,” she adds, looking at me.

She finishes her stew and pushes the plate away. Her fingers work at the knot beneath her cap and she pulls it off, stretches her legs out straight, tries to grab her toes. Bob is unusually quiet again, giving Cat space.

“I want to deliver the letter. This.” He shakes the envelope once.

“If you want to take it yourself, you’re heading the wrong way, son. You need to be going east.”

He smiles, the first smile I’ve seen that seems at ease, that comes from some emotion I might find familiar. “I’m afraid,” he says, turning his hands palm up.

She returns his smile and mimics his gesture. I am reminded of a game Oche and I would play after our mother fell asleep. My brother, who today is probably weaving baskets and seeing spirits, all very gently. This quiet exchange is making me sleepy, and I reach for one of the quilts in the pile on the woman’s bed and fold it beneath my head. A black feather floats along the floor next to me. I brush it aside. Bob leans back against the bedpost, and though we are inching away from their intimacy, we’re listening. This silent man that we have protected, dragged along, refused to abandon, is speaking.