Katy Smith - Free Men

After, as she boils water for coffee and fiddles in her shelves, I lean back in my chair and stroke my fingers across my whiskers to clean them. Where did she come from, this raisin-faced lady with her rural grammar and indeterminate skin? Sometimes I feel my life is carrying me from refinement, with its handmaidens of hypocrisy and loneliness, deeper and deeper into a purity of both landscape and temperament. From my mother’s fastidious gardens I have traveled first to Norway and then to America, to the riotous Boston and the southern colonies and then the southern wilds, where Indians control both war and trade, and I have landed on the western edge of all my travels, here, in a house in a meadow with a lady mystic. I am charmed. I am arriving at the heart of something.

“I must thank you for this hospitality,” I say, setting down my empty mug. The coffee tasted richer than any I’ve had, almost as though a fine loam had been stirred in.

“And you for the victuals,” she says. “I should kill that chicken, for every other egg’d be a disappointment.”

“The man you mentioned — you never saw him before?”

“I only see the men you see,” she says, and her face becomes momentarily dim, so that I can’t quite recall if she’s wearing a wild white cap or if that is just her hair. “Is it better to have a man visit, knowing he’ll pick up and leave and not come back, or not to have a man at all?”

I tilt my head to one side, feeling uncertain in my stomach. Vases that I thought held flowers are actually stuffed with palm spines.

She throws the dishes out the window where the water went before, and climbs into her disordered, dequilted bed, voluminous skirts and all. She pulls her necklace free from the folds of her dress, and I can see the two rings there, knocking against each other as she settles herself. One a heavy band, and one thin with a green stone. When I thought of the empty room in the manor house, did this creature creep into the memory and watch? I cannot ask how she came by my mother’s rings. She pulls an old wool blanket beneath her chin. “Would you rather die, mister, or not have been born?”

I stand and push my chair beneath the table.

“Are you looking for something, or are you running from something?”

I pull on my coat and find my gun and sack by the door.

“Do you judge another by how he looks, or what he does, or what he means?”

I snap my feet together and, despite some unsteadiness, give the lady a gracious bow.

“What kind of knowing could get you to what a man means?”

Her eyes are closed now, though she continues to pose questions to herself. I blow out the candles but leave the embers warm in the hearth.

“All of us broken before our mothers bore us, crows and men alike. Sticks in search of grace.”

I kiss her forehead, which smells of cedar, and depart.

IT IS NOT difficult to find the men’s trail again, though I am temporarily disordered by the lady’s vegetable garden, which smells strongly of gunpowder and has what appears to be shreds of flesh lashed to poles in between the lettuces. Though I am a generation removed from jumping to conclusions of sorcery, I cannot help wondering what mischief this woman gets up to in such a lonely place, surrounded by herbs and potions and carnivorous hogs. My forehead is touched with a faint sweat.

In the darkness, I regret leaving my horse on the main trail with the other men in my party. It is a wonder the outlaws came so far without steeds, and foolish, but I follow in their lead. I will be curious to see, when I return to the trailside tavern with my victims, if my Creek companions are still where I left them, or if they have tired of the Frenchman’s idiosyncrasies. Without the ability to watch their faces at close range, how would I have understood what these men were after, or known what course to take? I certainly don’t dispense justice blindly. But my feet are not so sure as a horse’s, and in crossing the meadow toward the woods, I fall once, my foot caught briefly in a dip of earth. I reassure myself that the woman is securely in her bed and the men I’m after are a few miles on; the only witness to my tumble is the vulture that’s circling the garden.

They still head west. Which one of them has no mother? The deeper I follow them, the wilder the woods become, the undergrowth craning up into thickets where the Indians have not burned in years. In March, everything is made new again. The structure of the trees fills out greenly once more, and the beasts that hid in the winter come forth to show their young the tricks for finding nourishment. The old and the innocent, all bound in the same wheel of time that rolls over man and creature alike. What dies becomes born again; what we kill will feed the fungus. Any act, however cruel, will fold around until it buoys some other scheme.

There is something of America in all this. I know decrepit monarchy and how intoxicating the rot can be, but the ancient ties keep all men bound in an unassailable web of relation. My father was a minor noble because his father was, and back; I doubt there was a peasant among us. But we have duties to those peasants, and they to us, and so we are all mired in a hierarchy that, if not flexible, is at the very least explicable. We do not worry so much about who we are. There is a desperation about these men that suggests they do not reside on the rung of the criminal but, like all men here, are pursuing what might be called advancement, or hope. Their success or failure will, I can’t help but believe, be a reflection on the project of this country. And yet I am the only man on their trail, the only man who may behold their fates. This strikes me as peculiarly lonely.

I have a notebook and pencil with which I record such thoughts, but for these observations to rise to the level of argument, to become a treatise fit for a scientific journal, I must explain the why behind these men. And that I cannot yet do. My hypotheses are useless without more data.

A few hours before daylight, I find the smell of burned wood. Sweat mixed with sadness, and the musk of the unwashed. There they are, in a ring between a stand of trees, their bodies spreading out from the dead fire like spokes. The black man starfished, the white man inches away from the other’s warmth, and the Indian, who has pulled a cage of branches over his blanketed body to defend himself from some invisible hand. Such various sheep from God’s flock, gone astray. I ache to see them still together.

My head is still mothy from the woman’s drink, and the bushes look bigger than they should, so I find a hollow not too distant and curl up for an hour or two, my body knowing how to never fully sleep.

THE FIRST DAY after the cottage, the men are oddly quiet, as though they are embarrassed still to be walking the same path and yet too relieved to speak of it. The black man generally leads the party now, though it’s evident he has no sense of direction, for every few minutes when he cannot decide how to proceed he stops to let the Indian overtake him. I’m fortunate that the leaves along the ground are soft and damp with spring, so that the other men’s steps mask my own.

I learn little when they do not speak, so my mind drifts instead to my future: I return to Paris with my article on the foundation of man’s common nature, his natural and God-given equality, and am trumpeted by the king as a beacon of reform, merci , after which I ride to my villa to present my wife with gifts from the Indians, and we embrace and move to a house in the city where we can see all the people at once, nobles and poor, and can observe as they blend together over the years like a fine, shaken sediment, and I will cease being lonely in all that human array. And we shall have a cat. If it takes these criminals to get me there, so be it, and though I will look for kinship among them, I will not become attached. In the short term, they are merely a job I have been given by my employer.