Katy Smith - Free Men

She was the only one in the fields who wouldn’t sing, and I figured she was saving her voice for something else, for someone, and I thought this very dignified. Maybe it was her being older that I found most lovable. I trailed her when she walked back to the cabins at night, I stood small behind a tree outside her window, hoping to catch the shadow of her undressing, I wrote a song for her that I never shared, believing she didn’t like singing altogether. I wanted to hear another person’s dreams again, for I had none of my own.

One night she came out with a cloth bundled up in her hand and warm. “For your vigil,” she said, and walked back inside. I was hollowed out with shame; I unwrapped the cloth and found fried plantains, fresh from her skillet. She always knew I was there, since being a woman she had eyes in a ring around her head and could smell a man at fifty paces, but she didn’t ask me to leave. I knocked on her door and she let me in and we ate plantains because I was too shy to feed them to her. She had skin that looked like she was always sitting near a fire, and I wanted so badly to put both my hands on her cheeks, just to feel them. She let me lie down on her pallet while she cleaned her dishes and tidied the two or three things she owned. It was dark, and the only home I had to return to was full of men, dank bodies stretched out, none of them knowing any piece of my past, despite having heard the whole story a hundred times. Here at least there was a woman, and didn’t women hold the histories of all of us? I told her all sorts of things, stories about catching lizards by their tails, pretending to lose two of my fingers to scare my mother, about being six years old, and seven, and she puttered around, humming a little under her breath, like she knew I just needed to flush it all out of me and once I was done I’d be harmless again. I didn’t even really notice that she was humming, which if I had thought about it was a kind of song. A while later she kicked me awake and told me to get on with myself, to scoot back to where I came from. I leaned in to kiss her, and she pushed me back and herded me right out of her cabin. I wonder what it is about these women that they put up with us for so long, don’t ask for anything, just abide our selfishness. Maybe it’s not so different from having a pet, an old hound dog that just licks itself and barks at snow.

I came back as often as I remembered something I had forgotten to tell her (I kept a list), and she’d listen and scrub her clothes in a pot of water and then hurry me along, and after a few weeks of this I had determined to marry her. She was already family, having all the knowledge now that any of my siblings did, and she was never unkind. This is all a man wants: familiarity and peace.

The first time I asked her I brought a fistful of yellow flowers and sat us down on the stoop of her cabin.

“What is this?” she said, pinning the purple cloth around her hair.

I made swampy eyes at her and handed over the sweat-heavy bouquet. I made more swampy eyes.

“Come on, now,” she said. “Spit it or move along.”

Did I say how kindly she was? Like Mother Mary herself, only firmer. I made my eyes get brimful of intention, I was so intentioned that all she’d have to do was say yes. But she kept looking at me like I was being peculiar, and I figured that maybe we didn’t speak the same eye language after all, which wasn’t a mark against her, it only made her more exotic. So I had to come right out and say it, with a lot of hacking and a hot face, not from being nervous but from being so certain.

“Marry you?” she said. “Marry you?” I repeated it to myself a hundred more times. She smiled and shook her head — not in a no kind of way, but because she was charmed — and I decided that we had reached an agreement.

“I’ll call on you tomorrow,” I said, to be formal.

“You can call whenever you like, little pup, it won’t get you very far.”

“We don’t have to marry right away,” I said, “but I’d better go ahead and tell Master, and then we can think about where our house should be.” In other words, should our house be at my house, which was wall to wall with men, or her house, where there was a pallet and a pan for the fireplace and a good broom she already knew how to use. But I believed it was important to be polite in these matters.

She shook her head again, like a horse at the fence, like a mother over a cradle, and I knew better than to try again for a kiss, seeing as our love was holier than that, so I just squeezed her hand and stood and said, “We’ll be happier than any man and wife has rights to be,” and I marched off into the night again, proud, with only a hint left of loneliness.

I don’t know how long she would have let me believe we were going to be married. When Treehorn found me in the fields and mentioned offhand that Master was going to wed me to one of Mr. Cunningham’s negroes, I said that was all right, I had already picked a woman out for myself. I didn’t know, for no one had ever told me, and my back took the brunt of it. When I slipped into Beck’s cabin to have her hands soothe my wounds, she laughed and looked sad and said she wouldn’t have me on no count and I should’ve made certain before making such a fool of myself. I told her she knew I loved her and she said she knew no such thing and that I better go find myself someone who would suit, for she had given up, at least in this world, on having any feeling again that even tasted like love.

I said I had feeling enough for both of us. And wasn’t it my right, in the end, to love her? What did I know of rights?

On one of our last nights I asked her why she wouldn’t have had me when there was a chance, and she took my chin in her hand and gave me her full direct stare, not swampy at all, but as kind as the best sort of lover. “Bob,” she said, “little Bob. I’ve had my joy.”

“You don’t want any more than that?” I said, having never asked about the man who was her husband, never asked the widow any questions at all, really. (Months later, I’d learn from a gossipy old woman that Beck had had a baby, that the baby had lasted a year, and then one morning coddled in the quilt the baby just didn’t open its eyes and its little chest stopped going up and down and though Beck and her still-alive husband shook it and shook it, it didn’t wake up again. Oh, what did I know of children?)

“You’ll see,” she said. “Soon you’ll be old enough to know what you want, and it’ll take all of you to get it and hold it. It’ll take all of you to keep on holding it, even after nothing’s left. That’s what all this is, just finding and then holding.”

I thought her very stupid, because being young, I knew that the heart could hold a thousand things, that desire was endless, endless.

A MAN WANTS to communicate. There’s no such things as stories told to no one. For a week or so after Beck said she wouldn’t have me, I thought my heart would burn out of me, leaving an ashy hole in my chest. I laid down my cane knife so many times in the fields that my back bled each night from Treehorn’s whip. I was in love with her, I told myself, full in love, and this is any man’s broken heart. But that was only half true, because Beck was just a fancy in the end, just a marker I had used to measure how much I belonged, and when she didn’t claim me I was cut loose, my lungs filling with water.

I lay in my cabin at night, cloths pressed to my back to soak up the splits in me, and it came to me that this world was a broken one, that all the humans I had ever loved were scarecrows, that all that was real was your own self. Beck was not a woman but just another test of myself, and I had failed. I didn’t need a lover, or a mother, or a brother, because I had none and wasn’t I still alive? Didn’t the blood on my back prove it? This was what I learned those nights, that I am the only thing I can ever know. And this life, the way it was set up with its cabins and fields, its rounded women and its whips, this was all meant to put you in a kind of order, to connect you to a bunch of other things with little strings that called themselves fondness and fear. Those strings weren’t real at all, because someone else strung them up. I wouldn’t’ve chosen to hack all day at cane stalks with a dull knife. Wasn’t my rum or money that went back and forth between white hands and Indian hands. Come to think of it, I thought, bent in a crook of pain between two snoring men, this wasn’t my life at all.