Katy Smith - Free Men

“You want to come west with me?” After their arguments, I would’ve thought Bob would be happy to let Cat go, but we have let too many people go. Bob’s face and Cat’s face match, both open. None of us have the language for saying what we need.

We’re all standing now, the woman slowly stirring and smashing, and the safe, sleepy air is being pulled like smoke out the windows.

“If you were to ask me,” she says, pulling her hands from the bowl, wiping them on her apron and rumpling them through her woolly white hair, “and some men don’t, I’d say this is no time yet to be carving yourselves into bits, especially with one of you still healing.” She looks particularly hard at Cat. “Carry on west, I say, keep putting miles between you and the men out there, and when you’ve gone as far as you can without squabbling, without one man saying, ‘I’ve got to be heading the other way entirely!’ then you fall into your separate selves. But you ask me, I’d say you’re still all mushed together.” She funnels the powder into a small glass jar and then brushes her hands over the braided rug, the anonymous dust drifting in a faint cloud to the ground. Would mice later find it and turn to stone?

I falter on the edge of something. After all I’ve done, wanting now to do better.

“At the very least,” she adds, “someone needs to change Bob’s plaster.”

We look at each other, and maybe it’s the sureness of the woman’s voice, how strong it comes out of her small body. Maybe there’s a new weakness in us, or a resistance to do more wrong. We sort our bags, pack them, feel their heaviness on our shoulders again. Cat gives me back the gun.

He folds himself onto the woman, stoops down, small as he is, to wrap her frailness in his arms, and she laughs and pats his back. Her dark face, pocked and pitted, sits like a bird in the crook of his neck. Bob pulls him away.

We have left her with a supply of wood and a basket of dug vegetables, and her garden now is orderly, except for the bits of stinking crow strapped to poles and flapping in the breeze.

Our shadows slide west between the white oaks and hickories as the light catches in the brambles. All that’s left after the shepherding of these men is to rule my people, and it is the greatest thing I will ever want, and it is the only act that can redeem the blood I’ve spilled and the blood I’ve witnessed, and though I wait for months or years, I will come to it and become a white, white sun for my nation. History is like a map for where to go.

AFTER THE MEN’S steps have faded into the general rustling of the woods, I comb my hair back into a decent ribbon, brush the burrs from my stockings, and knock on the door of the lady’s cottage. I briefly consider putting down my gun and sack but would rather appear intimidating than unarmed. I follow not their bodies now but the trail of their intention: I have to speak to the woman myself, in the hopes that she can tell me what my own senses cannot. I have hidden in the brush for most of a day and a night, orbiting this extraordinary household, comprehending nothing. Because I cannot piece together the details I’ve witnessed, it is time to insert myself into the narrative.

The woman who answers is shrunken and balloonish, a lively mix of dark and light. I bow and ask if she can spare water in which to wash my hands.

She blinks once, and just once. “I’d be honored,” she says, sweeping back the door to allow my passage. The ceiling is low, but a fire in the hearth keeps the room warm and snug. Quilts of all colors pile on the bed. On the shelves along the wall sit an array of vials and sacks, each appearing to contain no more than a few ounces of herb. I place my hand on the back of the chair, my eyebrows raised, and she nods an assent. I sit while she fills a bowl with water from a ewer and carves a sliver of soap for me. After my ablutions, I pick up the black feather on her table and twirl it, first forward then back, between my fingers.

“This is a handsome cottage. You live here alone?”

“Oh,” she says, reaching to relieve me of my bag and gun, placing them against the back wall when I acknowledge that this is acceptable, “it’s a pleasure to have guests. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing keeps me from dying.” She takes the bowl, opens the window into the garden, and throws the dirty water out in a loud splash. She touches a thin necklace that falls into the top of her dress as if to confirm it hasn’t sailed out too.

I rise from the chair, noticing that she has nowhere to sit.

“No, no,” she says, “this is me right here,” and she perches on the edge of her bed, taking a corner of the quilt to play with in her hand.

“You must have seen a wealth of men pass through these woods. What a remarkable vantage for a woman to possess.”

She looks around as if to verify this, and then agrees. “There’s more to be seen than what they tell me, that’s for certain. Men, you know, don’t tend to chat much about their hearts.”

“Well, it’s a delicate organ.”

Her fingers are strumming in the quilt as if she were writing down the words I spoke, but I come to understand that she is picking out the threads of the joining squares, plucking them free with her fingernails and then suggesting her thin finger beneath the loops to finish the job of pulling. She does this remarkably fast; after just a short monologue of mine on the weather, two squares have already become detached from the scheme. She never looks at what she does, but sits there quite calmly, her feet dangling youthfully from the edge of the bed, kicking into the covers, while this lovely construction comes apart under the idle spell of our conversation. Will she stitch it back together after I’ve gone? If I stay long enough, will she disassemble the remaining pieces of her house? Unpeg her meager furniture, unleaven her bread?

Below her dress, her toes spread so wide, each wandering off in its own particular direction, that I have to assume she’s never worn shoes.

I point to a calumet she has above her hearth, an object I’ve not seen before in the house of a woman, and displayed so idly. “Were you long with the Creeks?”

She leans onto her knees, which are hardly discernible under the delta of her skirts. “I’d guess you had a very proper mother.”

I sift through my stories of her, hoping to land upon a kind one, but all I can recall is the sound of the closing door and the hard beat of her shoes as she walked away, leaving me to confront myself. I smile. “We lived in the Ardennes, and I’m afraid were rather distant.”

“Sons,” she says, and shakes her head. “There was a man just here who never had a mother.”

I sit up. “I imagine men here don’t even need mothers, nor any other prop.”

“Here?” she says. “Where’s here? What gave you to think that?”

“Did the man say where he was bound?”

“Where are men bound who have no mothers?”

“I meant that there is such infinite space in this country. It would seem that only someone free from encumbrances could properly claim it, someone free of family, or class. I’ve traveled extensively and—”

“Is that a riddle? I’m a woman who likes sense.”

“I’d merely suggest that—”

“Are you a sheriff?”

I laugh. “No, madame.”

“Are you afraid of justice?”

I cannot prevent my brow from furrowing. “Not of a certain variety, no.”

When the squares of the quilt are entirely unattached, she stacks them in a short tower on her lap and then fans herself with them.

The afternoon sun that falls though the open doors and windows like a drunken guest begins dropping, the shadows stretching longer and the early gnats and mosquitoes hovering drowsily with the motes, coming periodically to examine our ears. I offer to prepare a light supper for us both, and she rises from the bed to give me a tour of her kitchen implements and to advise on the quality of the kindling, which this time of year burns slow on account of the damp. Her shelves of herbs intrigue me, but I restrict myself to what I know. In a flat iron pan I craft a simple omelette, the eggs from a lone chicken that she says has survived the rampaging of her hogs. I whip in sliced onions and a dash of pepper, coarser ground than I’m accustomed to, and in a separate pot beside the fire I roast some of the carrots and parsnips the lady has recently dug from her garden, or that the men dug for her. For the omelette, she offers some dried mushrooms from a jar, which politeness demands I add, and I stir a sauce of ground garlic and nuts for the vegetables that adopts a flavor almost of cream. She lights the candles in the dark corners of the house and pushes the table up to the bed so we can dine at the same height. When we sit down with our tin plates, quilt squares for napkins across our laps, I can see I’ve sparked a dignity in her. She eats with punctilious grace, dabbing her mouth occasionally, her back straight, her elbows light, as though she were sitting before a sheet of music. We do not speak while we eat; food here, as in France, has a sacrosanct quality to it. In the moment of consumption, we are connected through all the layers of linen and leather, of wood and iron, right down to the soil beneath us and the bounty it produces from the muck of decay.