Katy Smith: Free Men

“Maybe some of us aren’t good enough for all that,” he said.

“WHAT WILL YOU name it?” he asks. “Do Indians give horses names?”

I am stacking the burned firewood beneath a holly bush, though we may well use it again tonight. If not today, then surely tomorrow will be our last, and if I can teach him a little cleanliness before we part — though he does not call it cleanliness, but superstition. Whatever farm he finds will look like a hovel within a week. We rode our new mounts the few miles back to camp instead of staying in town; our presence caused some whispering, as if they knew of someone looking for us. I asked for the names of Houma and Chitimacha men who might be interested in new unions, but people only looked at Bob and asked where he was from.

“What about Cat?” he says.

I drop the last piece of kindling and look over at him. He’s running a set of pine needles through the scruff of hair clustered on his chin. We haven’t mentioned the white man, though in some sense we know he was just a spirit — not a real white man at all — trailing us like a mute or a saint, sent to save us.

“There’s nothing we could have done.”

“I mean as a name for a horse,” he says.

Our meals have improved since we stayed with the Choctaw — after filling us with sweet potatoes, they gave us field peas wrapped in husks for the road. We stuff ourselves and speak of crops and tilling, and I lie down beneath a tree while he wanders to the Mississippi to gaze out at the western edge of land and build houses in his head. Perhaps I can catch us a turtle for supper.

He is throwing rocks into the river, digging out the biggest he can find and heaving them over the bluff, when I hear the horse behind us, coming north on the road from Natchez. I have my hand on the knife before I turn; Bob of course is deaf to any noise he doesn’t make himself. It is a man and two children, not white, and the girls’ mouths are open in fear or hunger. They cling to each other on the horse’s back, arms locked around waists. Their clothes have no color, but are gray and brown with dust and rain, so that they resemble a wash of dark cloud above the mirror-black horse. Because the man carries no gun, I look at him directly. Certain lines of the face, a softness around the thin cheeks, suggest that he is, of all things, a woman.

I lift my hand from my knife and raise it in greeting. The money has made us cautious of strangers, but if she doesn’t have a weapon aimed at us, she’s not yet an enemy. We can offer them meat and they’ll move on. Bob is sitting on his heels now, lost in some soundless thought.

The girls are crawling down from the back of the horse, falling like limp sacks, and the woman dressed as a man lets them go without calling out. Either they are not her children or she too knows what danger is and has seen enough to know that this is not it. Their horse folds down its neck and starts in on the grass, glad for the pause. The younger girl stumbles past me. Perhaps they are mad, or the road has made them wild. Under her hat, the woman’s face is drawn and stark, and she licks her lips once. She has a fresh cut stretching from her cheek to her chin that is too precise and deep to have come from a passing branch. Her eyes narrow on the man at the river, and in her gaze is determination, not anything as weak as hope.

The girl is at his back now and not even having seen his face, her arms clutch at his neck. He jumps up and she dangles down and he turns, half guessing what’s about him in spite of the impossibility of it, and her voice cries out so he can hear it, and the man who has so long protested against the chains of his own family circles himself on the bluff, trying to grasp at the daughter on his back, and takes in his wife and children with wet eyes. It is the surprise of them, I think.

When he has captured the crab of his daughter, the other comes shyly forward and he kneels and she bends to his ear to chastise him. The woman drops off the horse and walks past me with no acknowledgment. He holds out his arms to her, and their embrace suggests that the meaning of it is still to be made.

She turns back to me and says, “Sir, this is my husband.”

September 19, 1788

YOU CANNOT TELL a man’s origin in New Orleans. Each messy street unfolds a different scene: men of all shades bartering in English or Spanish or French, around a corner a darker woman slipping her hand into a white man’s pocket while he holds her bottom, two blocks away a swarthy man offering a tray of sweets to a fair-haired girl, and in the center of the town, an oiled black man standing on a block while men call out prices and women, from milk-colored to midnight, parade the lace shawls that someone has bought them. Everything turns on money. Desire is stronger here than pedigree.

With the coins that I have, it is easy to call myself the rightful chief of a small Muskogee town. I gave every detail of Seloatka’s perfidy to the Tunica, for whom I’m serving as an interpreter and middleman, but over the months the intricacies of the story have boiled away, and when I come to the city to sell the Tunica’s salt, I only tell men what I myself want to hear. I have two suits of clothing now, one my own and one with buttons and ties, tight in the armpits and with hard buckled shoes, and that’s the suit I wear to call upon the Spanish traders. They’re interested in Muskogee deerskins and don’t mind stealing a little of the trade from their cousins in Pensacola. They ask how I and my town propose transporting goods across the hostile territories of the Choctaw, and I say, “I’m here, am I not?”

For my ability to pick up languages easily, I must thank the woman I loved and the English words that looked so full in her mouth. For the ease with which I forget the atrocities I’ve committed, I thank Bob. When we parted at the Mississippi in a thin mist of rain, we did little more than shake hands. He took one of his daughters on his new chestnut horse and his wife took the smaller one on hers, and they rode off toward the ferry with nearly four hundred pieces of silver between them. The little one looked back at me and wiped the warm rain from her face with a smile; she needed nothing but what she had in this moment. Her name too was Polly.

In March, while we were parting, this city burned to the ground. Through the makeshift houses and storefronts and the bustling of merchants and wives and the calling out of all these busy tongues in the heavy heat of summer’s end, the wind still carries the scent of cinders. I take my letter of agreement from the Spaniard’s hand and fold it in my bag with a half dozen others. These say men are interested in my commerce and political goodwill, whenever I should return to my town and see fit to send skins their way. Each letter costs no more than a conversation and a few coins, and turns strangers into brothers in trade.

After I have finished the Tunica’s business I find a room for the night in an inn where a woman always knocks on the door after dark. I have never opened it before, but tonight I am heady from the day’s work. She has large black eyes and wild curls tied in many knots on her head and her long neck is the color of wet sand by a creek. The creek where I played as an otter, or the creek where I saw my lover’s father crumple to his knees. He was white, was only white and nothing else, and in this country that was his ruin. The girl at the door holds out her hand, and I put one of her fingers in my mouth to taste if there is any of my Polly in her, and then I give her a piece of eight and send her back into the night.

June 8, 1789

IAM WOKEN BY a child, a young boy who’s been sent to see if I’m still alive after last night’s dancing. When I roll over, he tugs on my feet.