Katy Smith: Free Men

I pull the quilt close around me, though it is not cold, and find myself hoping he falls quiet again. I remember too how I used to wait by the door of that empty room in Thin-le-Moutier, praying that my mother would kneel on the other side and speak to me, soothe me, tell me she was sorry.

“I am guilty,” he says, “of everything man is guilty of. You won’t believe me. All I wanted were her arms around my neck.”

Downstairs a brawl breaks out. Someone throws a mug against a wall.

“She said it wasn’t her fault, the way her parents went, and I believed her. That death born of love is a small death. But I could not believe her. When she was gone, and the baby was gone, I went where my feet went and they followed those men, who did not know my wife, who did not look like my father either but like men I might have been. They still wanted things. And then I began again to want.”

He stops, and in the space I can hear myself waiting.

“Here is a letter,” he shows me, though of course I can see nothing from my bed, “that a man wrote to his wife. A wife like a woman, like the woman I had. And now he is gone, and I am here. What do you think?”

I can’t comprehend all this webbing, why men keep reaching out for others. “I think perhaps you’re sorry you killed him, and now you want me to save your life.”

“No, you haven’t understood at all.”

“Do you want to live?”

“I want whatever is worst.”

“But your companions, who I’m prone to believe share some of this guilt, they deserve no punishment?”

“I am here because they are good in the marrow and I forgive them.”

I wait for him to explain, but he is silent. Who are all the bodies he mentions? In what life is a man not his own protagonist? I am tired of the mystery, am simply tired. Want to know the answers, but no one will tell me. Those brigands who are no less men than me. Sticks in search of grace . I wait until I can no longer keep my eyes open, and then I ask, in the quietest voice of a French man in a foreign country, merely because it is still the task before me, “So how did you meet them?”

He is already asleep.

When I wake in the morning he is sitting against the wall, and my shoes that have tramped through wet leaves and red dirt for the past ten days have been polished to a shine and sit next to each other by the door like new friends.

AFTER WE BREAKFAST and the Creeks assure me that the bodies have been returned to Hillaubee and the horses and mules reclaimed, leaving the creek a blank slate, we mount up in the stables. Cat climbs on one of the mules that carried the missing coins; I wonder if the beast can tell one cargo from another. We wait beyond the open gate while the negro is sent with our debt to the proprietor, and after I have finished securing the white man’s ropes to the mule’s reins, which I intend to hold myself, I turn back to the tavern to see what is keeping the slave.

He is standing in front of the low door, looking up at a horse that has crept so quietly from the south that I heard no approaching sound. Cat turns in his seat to watch. On the horse sit three women, or girls, or two women and one girl — it is hard to be certain — all dusky dark. These Yazoo lands are distinctive in offering a range of opportunity for individuals who, in the American states, would be tied firmly to a single patch of land. This must factor into my analysis of recent events, though I sense that the time when a black woman can speak to a black man in a public place without causing some outrage is finite. The negro glances at me as if for confirmation, but when I shout at him to hurry along, he speaks quickly to the women or the girls, bundled tight together on that poor horse’s back, and they turn their heads south in unison like three owls after a mouse.

“What directions were you giving?” I ask the man when he has mounted the other mule.

He is watching the overburdened horse trot off in the direction from whence we came and does not offer an immediate reply.

“Oh,” he says, turning the mule north and setting the pace for our company. We are heading home to face judgment, unless I decide to let the axe fall sooner. Justice, though collective, is still personal, and part of me would rather end this hunt before Seloatka has a chance to touch the fraying thread of the white man’s life. “Mm,” he says, drawing it out. He turns once in his seat to confirm that the women are out of sight. “A lady looking for her man, is all.”

Cat gives a kick to his mule and draws up on my left side, now between me and the negro.

“A philandering husband, I suppose, gone all night and not come home?”

“Mm. Could be.”

“But you knew where to find him?”

“I had a guess.”

“There’s no point in circumlocuting. We have an empty road before us and could use an amorous tale.” I have to lean around the white man to convey my impatience.

“Just a particular negro she was after.”

“What were the details?”

He pulls a pine needle from the litter in his saddle and jabs one point between his bottom teeth. “One that talked a lot.”

“Well, that certainly doesn’t describe you.”

“Was he honey-colored?”

It’s the first Cat has spoken since his narrative of the previous night.

The slave gently rocks his head from one shoulder to the other, considering. Timing his response. “May have been.”

“Did she give her name?” Cat asks.

“You know a black lady?”

“Lord, oh lord.” The white man rises up in his seat with a straight back, his face straight out and open as I have never seen it.

“Traveled some piece, she said. Looking out her man.”

“Their children.”

“As I reckon.”

“You don’t mean to suggest,” I interrupt, “that those women had anything to do with the fugitive we have been hunting for over a week.”

“ You been hunting.”

“My good man, you said yourself you felt some injury from these criminals, that they offered you none of the profits; you seemed equally intent on a reckoning.”

“You didn’t catch him. Seems fair to give the lady a try.”

“And should we let her on her merry way? Has she not escaped from some plantation to which we ought to return her?”

“No,” Cat says, and offers the first piece of biographical information on his coconspirators since I began pestering him four days ago. “They were free blacks.”

I cannot explain the frustration that arises from having every man surrounding you become suddenly a liar. So Bob has a wife and children chasing after him. So my negro told them which path to follow. What possible hope do they have of finding a man in the western woods, and one especially who has no interest in being found, perhaps particularly not by his own family, whom he with clear sight chose to abandon? The only reason they have not already been detained is that they’re crossing borders. The American slave patrols rarely communicate with their Spanish neighbors, and it would take an acute interest in a particular fugitive to coordinate her capture. In this wilderness, the assumption is that a slave’s fate will be punishment enough. I am not swayed; I cannot believe that after such behavior a woman would chase her husband. Disloyalty is death to marriage, and in this regard the sable race is in no way more enlightened than the French. Perhaps she does it for the daughters’ sake, but regardless, she will not find him. He will be halfway to his farm by now with a sack of silver to buy a new self. I know his hunger. Nothing shackles an independent man.

“Lord, oh lord,” Cat says, and he is smiling.

MY FIRST WIFE did not die, as I have told the Christians in this country. Nor did I stop loving her, despite those days she was absent from the marriage. I left because adoring her was not profession enough, and her betrayal seemed to justify my release. I announced I was leaving to pursue a vague idea of scholarship, she threw herself into another man’s bed in retribution, and, doubly childish, I thanked her for making my decision so effortless. I had thought these wounds were not mortal. I wrote letters from every town I visited, unanswered except in my thoughts, and with some swallowing of pride I reassured her that Fate, which I do not believe in, would somehow knit us together again after this adventuring had run its course. There would be forgiveness. But it is not my task alone to mend our fractures, and seeing an enslaved woman break from every bondage and risk the welfare of her children to pursue her husband — whether out of love or duty, I cannot be certain, but I am not convinced it matters — this sight has shown me what little I have left.