Katy Smith - Free Men

Late in the morning, I hear the stranger’s approach before they do; another Indian appears through the trees and my party halts, the black man taking long steps backward so he will no longer appear to be in charge.

The two Indians stumble for a bit to find a common lexicon, and after some gesturing and nods, the foreign man gives a short, hard laugh and walks on, looking back once with amusement. I hold my breath against a tree and am pale enough in the paleness of the woods to go unnoticed.

“He knows something,” Bob says, flicking his head over his shoulder to make sure the distance between the parties grows. “You tell him who I was?”

“Yes, that you were a slave, and that your master here had lost the way.”

The other man appeared to be Shawnee; they are lucky not to have encountered an enemy. Though what is an enemy if a man will turn on his own people? I am also waiting for more word of this. That an Indian was of this raiding party was particularly galling to Seloatka and his men, who assumed he was Choctaw until the witness slave said, “No, Creek; certain.” One of their number had vanished several days prior to the incident at the stream, and though the man’s mother had reported his absence, the chieftain of the village had not chosen to pursue this information. I asked what sort of punishment he required, and Seloatka said that the man wasn’t of much value, that whether I killed him on the road or brought him back made little difference.

“And the silver?” I asked.

Get it if I could, he said, but it was a white man’s conceit, and for them to lose something precious in Creek territory was not the worst outcome, as long as we made plausible efforts. I did not tell him that if the traitor was hoarding coins, he had a better sense of the southern territories’ trajectory than the chief did.

It is difficult to conceive why a man would desert and betray men of his own stripe and band instead with foreigners. Though of course here I am.

Now that the Shawnee is out of sight, the black man is louder. “Where did you tell him we were going?”

“As far as we could before you ran out of coin to pay me.”

“Ah, yes, yes,” he says, “make him laugh, take our money. Indian jokes. But you didn’t tell him about the Mississippi?”

I can’t guess what that river held for them.

“I believe he knows of it,” the Creek man says.

“But what’s beyond . Tell me, did you tell him where to find us? What all we’re going to set up? You told him what I’ve done.”

“I said nothing. What’s there is yours.”

This seems to calm Bob, and they walk a while longer in silence, sometimes shifting the weight of the silver from one shoulder to the other.

“That man know who you were?”

“No,” the Indian says. “I gave another name.”

“Would they kill you if you went home? That’s where those men were from, huh?”

“They might.”

Cat comes close then, as if to hear what horrors the Indian will face when forced to account for his sins.

“We did a wrong thing maybe by trying to take that money, but wasn’t any wrong in saving our own lives by taking theirs, because their guns were up and they’d have killed us, you saw them.” He shifts his bag emphatically. “And wasn’t much a wrong taking this money, because you know what they’d have done with it, just add it in a pile to what they already had, and look at what we’re doing instead.”

In days prior, the Indian scoffed at this same language, attempting to distance himself from the act by the creek, but increasingly he seems to give in to this reasoning — if not to implicate himself, at least to excuse the other men. They are, by some inscrutable means, sliding into a version of his kin, though I know how strict the Creeks draw their clans, how any family sets itself apart from strangers. He now touches the black man on the shoulder.

“We need to change your dressing soon.”

The white man smiles.

We walk into the afternoon, and still they talk of the homes they left, of what they’ll do tomorrow and a month hence. Where the Indian will store his coins and skins while he rallies neighboring towns. If there is room between the Spanish and the Comanche for a black man’s farm. How Cat will look upon a donkey. They grow louder as they seem to put distance between themselves and consequence. Even the Shawnee let them pass. Their bodies move more easily, and the white man begins spilling a few words, which the others eagerly pick up. When they change the black man’s bandages even I can see that he is mostly healed. I trail them, every hour less like a pursuer and more like a pilgrim. I can no longer justify my delay in seizing them unless I admit to myself that here before me is everything I once believed to be a dream. Three men, none alike, asking to see each other, to be seen. Each pursuing a wild fancy that only this country, with all its contradictions, can permit.

IN THE DARK of the night, Bob’s voice hovers above the resting men like a moth.

“How will I know where to go after you split off?”

“I’ll draw you a map.”

“You sure you’re not coming?”

They are camped on one side of a field, forcing me to stop on the periphery, though their voices carry in the dry air. I climb up a tall pecan, making no more noise than a squirrel, and affix myself in the crook of a limb to wait for morning. The clouds that have drawn over the sky are splitting up, and stars break through. My eyes move idly from those constellations to the one below me and back. Even Canis Major, the bounding dog, looks no different than he did in France.

“So you’re really going back to the cheats that kicked you out?” Bob is easily vexed, I have learned, by abuses of authority, but this is an easy mask for his developing guilt; he has taken to rubbing at the skin on his face and keeps his eyes on the ground when he is walking, when I can tell this is not ordinarily in his nature. If he is not aware of these changes, I am.

“They didn’t kick me out.”

“Or took your money or whatever it was. Doesn’t sound like folks I’d want to live around. But you’ll fix them, I know. Throw the old man out of town. See if the hussy’s already gone. What I wouldn’t give to walk back onto that plantation and beat my master’s back.” When the Indian doesn’t immediately respond, he adds quickly, “Though I wouldn’t, of course.”

“This is all far down the road.”

“He has to gather friends first,” Cat says, in a thin voice.

“Allies,” the Indian corrects. “It may be five years before I have the forces to return.” He sounds as confident as any French courtier.

“And Polly?”

“He’ll have nothing to do with her, that’s what,” Bob says.

The Indian shakes out his blanket before arranging it studiously around his limbs. “It’s not easy to forget someone.”

“But a thief?”

“We’re thieves,” Cat says.

They are quiet for long enough that I think they’ve closed their eyes, but then Bob says, “Here,” turning onto his side to dig in his knapsack. He brings out something small and hands it over. “There’s a cook I knew made the best cookies, just as good a week later. Go on, it’s all right. There. You like it?”

I can’t hear how the Indian replies, but it makes the black man laugh. The cookie is passed to the white man, and Bob knots his bag again and pulls his coat in closer.

“Funny how you don’t really look at the sky till you’re on your back. I bet your people got all kinds of stories for what’s going on up there. Women chasing men, a bunch of snakes. See over there? Kind of looks like a wolf on his hind legs.”

Bob’s arm rises, pointing up, a dark shadow in the darkness. A brief flag.