Katy Smith - Free Men

I watch his lips but they make no sense. His face, recently washed with optimism, pinches again at its removal — has he not already endured this blow a hundred times? Is it not already familiar? The criminal in him has evaporated, leaving behind a mist. This is what I will describe to the chairbound scholars: a murderer, faced with judgment and the final breath of a meager life, cruel and wrecked as it is, yearns for more. The spirit, however malformed, is hungry for itself, will always fight for its own defense. He doesn’t want justice, or the appropriate meting out of the world’s endowment; he doesn’t want to face his wrongs but to evade them, to cower away from civilization so that he may live unreckoned. For all he followed in the others’ company like a loyal dog, he was born alone and lived a lonely life and will perish as an individual — as an American.

After all that I have recently seen of brotherhood, or thought I saw, I am returned to my original impression: that men are selfish, that they fight only for themselves, that this country is their birthright and their promise. I who watch everything, who know men’s hearts because they are too busy to watch themselves, can find a partial mirror of myself here — admittedly — but this loneness is no more than a fraction. I have my freedom, employment, the trust of nations, a keen and investigative mind that outstrips a merely empathetic one. I am not beholden to the whims or burdens of familial ties, whether natural or constructed. I cannot be undone at the sight of a wife searching for her husband. If this is what allows me to produce dispassionate scholarship, this too will allow me to take another’s life with tranquil conscience.

Justice is not flawed, though its handmaidens may be.

The noose snugs around his neck and he is heaved up, his shoes kicking above the sand. He is gasping for speech, sucking at the air, his blue eyes watering. A man drinking the last of his life.

But five feet in the air his neck bulges and by some final miracle of the dying form, the muscles in his throat press out against the rope and he is breathing still, swallowing the words he is now frantic to speak.

His body is in a twist, legs quivering. In his choking throat is stuck some sentence of explanation, all I’ve ever wanted to hear, withheld from me.

I signal to one of the Indians, who hands me a pistol. I raise it, point it at the hanging man’s chest. In his kicking, one of his shoes has fallen off.

I think not of the murders or the stolen silver or the trail he cut into the wilderness with such sorry steps, but of the men he’ll leave behind. Where will we go?

I hear the jenny wren’s wings as she flies off her branch, startled.

THE MISSISSIPPI IS wide, blue-brown, and has a deep hush for a current. Compared to the clear rivers and singing creeks of home, it is like a bear, sleeping and solemn. Men in long canoes row near the banks where the current is slower. Their paddle songs carry like a drumbeat above the water. The birds have fine fishing here; gulls and ibises and big-bellied pelicans wheel around in jagged patterns. Near the bluff, a dead tree juts out of the river, and on one of its crooked arms sits a cormorant, its black wings spread wide to catch the sun. The spring that was warm is growing hot. Even with the breeze off the water, I feel sated and lizard-like. It will be good to wash the clothes that are now thick with dust and sweat. The sun is at my back, and though I look north and south, the river is all one unending net of light. I am not used to seeing so far.

Our camps have grown more disheveled since Bob convinced me that no one else is on our trail. We holed up in a Choctaw town for three days, waiting for the inevitable army, but no one came, no Creeks or bounty hunters, not Le Clerc. Even with what we’ve done, there are always worse men to be chasing. The Choctaws, though ready to defend us, had no intention of adopting us, so with a mixture of relief and disappointment we moved on. They were a small village, cut off from the politicking of the larger towns, and forgave us our heritage. Praise to the villages who know no better. Now our cookfires are large and we don’t bury our dung. If we tire after a noon meal, we nap a little. I believe this loosening is a part of our molt; we slough off our earlier selves, those that became vile. A bathe in the Mississippi, and perhaps we will be ready to forgive ourselves.

When we reached the river yesterday, I shot a deer, and we spent the evening butchering it, roasting every cut, gorging ourselves. After repeating one of Oche’s prayers, I rolled the extra meat in the skin and held it closed with a stone. The deer’s head, its eyes still wet, we perched in the crook of a tree to watch for enemies. The river’s loud mouth put us to sleep like infants. No ghost children came to take my hand, and in my dreams only fresh things.

We walked to Natchez this morning to purchase two horses with a share of our money, now that our coins are far enough from their source. Both are chestnut but one has a bald face and a blue, Cat-colored eye. On our way back to camp, we passed a man on the trace who had stained his face black. He rode bareback with a white woman perched behind him, and the air around them smelled of berries. Bob, on his own new horse, called after him, “If I paint myself white, can I catch a black woman?” Bob said the day we bought horses we’d be leaving something behind, and though I am not sentimental, this was true.

Curious how a man could live so long without his liberty, I asked one afternoon why it took him nearly three decades to free himself.

“And why didn’t you just kill the chief?” he said. He had found a stick along the trail long enough for a cane, and sometimes he leaned on it as he walked and other times he used it to knock against the trunks of trees, which was a pointless and irritating habit. I could hear the birds startling off a hundred yards ahead of us. “When you’re in a life, all you do is live it,” he said. “You don’t make decisions every damn day.”

“But then one day you did.”

“I can talk about it till summer comes, you still won’t follow. Look out at this forest; all the trees look the same to you, right?”

In fact, they didn’t. It was a mixed woods, with new saplings and shrubs crowding in beneath the canopy of longleaf and turkey oak, the palmettos clapping in the wind like children.

“But if this was a white man’s land, there’d be the trees that get cut down because they’re in the field and the trees that stay because they shade the big house. Trees don’t get a say in which is which — they just are. One or the other. That’s what white folks do, say, ‘You are like this, for as long as God sees fit to shine a light on us, and you are something else.’ They give you a name that’s not your own and convince you it’s the only one you’ve ever had. And if you’re a tree in the field, well—” He gave a passing pine a hard whack with his stick.

“But to leave, you had to leave them too.”

He didn’t respond.

“And now?” I should not have kept asking, but there was little else to speak of on the trail and we had lost the need for quiet. “You’ll continue to plant crops and harvest them, and struggle to feed yourself.”

“Yes, but that’s me struggling to feed my self.”

“And when you die, who will bury you?”

He was silent for a moment, and then he slowed his pace. I slowed mine to match. When my uncle was buried sitting up in the hole beneath our cabin, I didn’t cry because he wasn’t fully gone. He would be always within our walls, below that room. Oche said he was waiting, and so we waited with him. Only when Seloatka took our home after he took the council house did I feel all the force of my uncle’s death, for now I had lost his body. A man broken from his kin is the only thing I can call unfree. Give me my mother and brother again, but give me too my clan, and my uncle’s buried bones, and Hillaubee.