Katy Smith: Free Men

When the men arrive I tell them what they want to hear, that with the right sort of bribe the Indians can be convinced to stop killing the frontiersmen and their wives. We shake hands after I have their word that in all of this hunger for land, the Muskogee will not be touched. I know we both are lying. The room is too cold, and I want to be elsewhere. None of these men were born in this city, but then neither was I. My bones only begin to warm when I am outside, by the wide river, looking north to the meadows and swamps the Americans have not yet turned to stone.

Where did she walk in this city? By then, did she have her bonnet? I see her in all the corners here, as I saw her on the red bluffs and in a glance of sun on the Mississippi. She is not mine, she stole what was mine, and the sentence I return to is not her apology but a gentleman is giving me lessons. Damn her gentleman.

I am not, in fact, a coward. I was a coward when my uncle died, and when my brothers died, and when my mother lost her home I ran, and when I saw no way out I robbed a man, and when he raised a gun at me I shot him through, and when the white man and the black man left me, I floated across this country like a feather. But it was not cowardice, that search, because the others too were searching. What we did wrong was not from fear.

A sandpiper in the marshes calls out for its mate. There is no one in this city I know except myself.

I walk back through the winter streets toward the boarding-house, where my horses wait to be saddled again with bags. This, for the time being, is the nation’s capital — a nation that, to judge by the nations that came before it, will rise and subside in due time, to be sold or conquered or lost. I have no business here. The letter is in my pocket, where letters belong.

At home, my mother is mending the baskets for the spring seeds, and my brother is in the house of a sick man, brushing his forehead with oil and breathing warmth along his limbs. Polly is showing off the fabrics she was given by men from the eastern coast. No; she is down by the river, her toes in the cold water, the water that runs beneath the corn and the council fire and the trading path and the miles of land I have crossed, alone, not alone, alone again. The first bloodroot unfurls from the leaves and is white, as every flower of its kind has ever been. Someone there will bury me.

MURDER CREEK RUNS through Conecuh and Escambia counties in southern Alabama, and is named for the men who died on its banks in the spring of 1788. It is also, for the most part, just right for paddling. My father did it expertly; I was tipped over by a sunken branch. If anyone downstream finds a green towel, it’s the author’s.

That afternoon, dried off, I met with friends and scholars in the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, who generously opened their doors and shared their collective memory. I owe a great debt to the knowledge and kindness of Karla Martin, Robert Thrower, and Deidra Dees, and to Marcus Briggs-Cloud, who told me that Istillicha could mean “Man-slayer,” but could also mean “one who lays people to rest.” Mvto .

And on the same day I saw where Cat died, my own cat died, Eudora, a reminder that there is no line between the present and the past.

KATY SIMPSON SMITHwas born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She attended Mount Holyoke College and received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She has published a study of early American motherhood, We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835 , and a novel, The Story of Land and Sea . She lives in New Orleans.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.