Citizens Creek (7 page)

Their horses were still there, put up for the night, and they claimed them, saddling quickly and walking them out toward the front gate of the fort, where they mounted and waited.

“Our chances are better in plain sight than trying to hide until Osceola clears out,” Harry said to Cow Tom.

The night wind played havoc with Cow Tom’s ear, a strange humming set to tune.

“If they leave us our horses, we might beat this yet,” Cow Tom said.

Chapter 9

COW TOM MOUTHED
a silent prayer, his pony solid beneath him as they waited by the fort’s gate. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been there, he and Harry, but surely two hours at least. The pain on the right side of his head had settled to a constant thrumming, as if his heart sought escape through the absent ear. But they were still alive.

“We aren’t clear yet,” said Harry.

Harry stated the obvious, and Cow Tom found amusement in the man’s seriousness. Something wasn’t working quite right with Cow Tom’s mood, as if he’d stumbled into some territory beyond fear whose mother tongues were acceptance and fate. Prudence seemed to have fled in the memory of Osceola waving his bloody ear flap before the crowd.

“If spared, I pledge the rest of my life to the Negro cause,” Cow Tom said. “Freedom and justice for every black man in the tribe. Bar none.”

A grand gesture. He imagined himself reflected in Harry’s gaze, his head leaking blood, grossly outnumbered, but offering up negotiation points. A true bargainer. A true linguister. He was almost dizzy with his boldness.

“I join you in that pledge,” said Harry. “A pact.”

“A pact.”

Cow Tom and Harry kept themselves unthreatening but visible,
watching passively as the detainees emptied the storehouse, took military rifles, gathered their few belongings and meager, hoarded supplies, and prepared for escape into the Everglades.

By the hundreds, the Seminoles spilled out of the camp and into the nearby woods, where horses and wagons waited, Cow Tom and Harry atop their ponies at the fort’s gate as they streamed past. Osceola gave an order and two of his braves slit the throats of the captured soldiers, including the Fort King dragoon. They didn’t take time to scalp, but left them for dead, unceremoniously sprawled on the ground where they fell. Osceola seemed surprised to see Cow Tom and Harry as he passed through the Fort Brooke entrance, but finally nodded, as if remembering his earlier act of leniency.

They remained motionless until they were sure Osceola was gone. Only then did they dismount, and Harry doubled over, retching, and stayed down for some time. Cow Tom fought hard not to follow suit, waiting for Harry to right himself. He touched his ear, the blood no longer aflow, but soft-crusting, the steady throb familiar to him now.

They checked for survivors among the prisoners, but the soldiers were dead, and Harry and Cow Tom left them where they fell. They searched the rest of the camp, leading their horses. Among the detritus left behind, they came across a young Seminole woman who had stayed, ragged and frightened, hiding on the far side of an overturned wagon, holding a small, naked baby.

“Why didn’t you leave with Osceola?” Harry asked in Miccosukee.

She wouldn’t meet his eyes, continuing to look down. Harry asked again, less gently.

“Tired,” the woman finally said, and clutched her listless baby tighter to her bony chest. She refused to say more, rocking her baby, rocking herself, claiming her patch of littered, sandy ground.

They moved on, and secured the horses to a hitching post.

“We have to check inside,” said Cow Tom.

In the first of the fort’s outer buildings, they discovered several small bands of Seminole women in hiding who hadn’t fled. They eyed Cow Tom and Harry with caution, and the translators left them undisturbed, and entered the main building. They found a lantern with a small reservoir of kerosene in a side office, and struck a match to light their way. Osceola’s people had stripped the storage room of its contents. Spilled flour and stray husks of corn were scattered about. The lantern threw ghostly shadows against the walls, and they proceeded slowly, delaying the moment. Cow Tom went first, and then Harry, and they entered the outbuilding at the rear, set aside for the sick.

They heard groans as they entered the hallway, and braced themselves for the worst. The odor of sulfur and putrefying flesh hung heavy in the air. One swing of the lantern revealed at least two dozen single cots pushed close together, some elevated, some on the damp floor, some with more than one man inhabiting the space. By beard and look, Cow Tom assumed them all soldiers, although none were in military dress, stripped down to their dirty, sweat-stained civvies. The room was packed with the sick—moaning, feverish, calling out for water, trapped in troubled sleep, but alive, throats uncut, scalps attached.

Neither Cow Tom nor Harry wanted to enter. The room itself was dark, and as they approached, a man on the cot closest to the door threw up his hand to shield his face, closing his rheumy eyes tight against the lantern’s light. His face was a swollen swirl of lesions, red and angry, and followed a line of advance down his body, speckling his arms and legs.

“Water,” he rasped, voice barely audible, the words almost lost in a round of brassy coughing.

Something fell and clattered on the floor, and Cow Tom swung the arc of lantern light toward an interior door.

“Come out,” Cow Tom warned. He felt for his knife but it had been taken by one of Osceola’s braves. The door slowly swung toward them, revealing the young soldier who had handled their
horses in the stable yesterday. He couldn’t be more than eighteen, still in uniform, a pistol in his unsteady hand.

“What are you about there?” Cow Tom asked.

“They let them go then?” the young soldier asked.

“No,” said Cow Tom. “The soldiers are dead.”

A twitch played havoc about his mouth. “The Indians?”

“Most followed Osceola to the swamps. All Seminoles with fight are gone.” Cow Tom spoke slowly, his eye on both the gun and the boy’s face.

The soldier lowered his pistol. “Seemed best to hide,” he said. “Better measles than a lost scalp. They took one look and left this room be.” The soldier raised his pistol again and pointed. “Why didn’t Osceola kill you?”

“Didn’t consider us soldiers, I guess,” Harry said.

“What name you go by?” asked Cow Tom.

“Billy.”

Cow Tom took a step backward, farther out of the darkened room.

“Well, Billy, I’ve no interest in measles,” Cow Tom said.

The boy considered. What little resolve he possessed evaporated, and he lowered the gun a second time. He kept to the outskirts of the room, walking toward them, and sat down on the floor near the open door. “I couldn’t truck being left like this, no food, no water,” he said. “A week ago, was me on that cot.”

“Harry and I can fetch water, and you give it to the men. Osceola’s people pretty much bankrupted the storeroom, but we’ll bring round what’s left, and scout for more.”

The boy agreed and Harry and Cow Tom left him there, relieved to be outside, away from the stink of disease and misery. Outside was death’s leavings, inside was toxic affliction. They preferred outside.

Harry and Cow Tom salvaged what they could find scattered around the deserted camps. They weren’t the only ones foraging. Some of the Seminoles who stayed behind had already lit fires, and
huddled wordlessly in small groups. They didn’t talk to Cow Tom or Harry, and the translators didn’t talk to them. Each went about their business, waiting for daylight. Cow Tom and Harry found containers, drew buckets of fresh water from the tower, and dragged them to the door of the infirmary. Each time they returned, they saw Billy holding to his part of the bargain, distributing water to those crying out for it, although the boy had no real talent at the sickbed, and stopped often to rest. He left food by the cots, but most of the sick’s appetites had fled, and the corn bits and hardtack were as likely to be consumed by rats as by the fevered men.

After a last delivery, Cow Tom and Harry returned outdoors. They skirted the slaughter ground, avoiding the soldiers’ corpses, resigned to leave them where they lay until morning, and found a remote spot, not too far from the protective walls of the fort but not too close to the infirmary, and spread their blankets for a second time that night. One kept watch while the other slept. Although the straggler Seminoles left behind seemed passive in their decision to Remove peaceably, neither Cow Tom nor Harry had desire to be caught by surprise a second time.

Come morning, they tackled the gruesome task of burial. There were eleven in all to be put to ground, including the dragoon the general sent with them from Fort King, and an unlucky soldier from the infirmary who spat up blood before his choked breath stopped in the middle of the night. Billy helped them dig, and Harry said some impressive words over the bodies, but Cow Tom was so tired he could barely remember from one moment to the next. Without the dragoon as escort, they knew they had to return directly to Fort King, along the military trail. They couldn’t risk being caught alone, two slaves with neither Indian nor white to claim them, vulnerable to slave catchers, vulnerable to hostiles, vulnerable to road thieves.

And how could Cow Tom maneuver a trip to Fort Volusia now, to search for his mother? He feared that opportunity as vanished as Osceola.

Chapter 10

COW TOM AND
Harry kept mostly to the main military road, ducking into the woods if they heard a traveler. Often, on the trail, Cow Tom touched the makeshift bandage on his missing ear to reassure himself he was still alive. They arrived back at Fort Brooke in less than a day.

Cow Tom barely took the time to knock the dust of the trail from his moccasins before rushing to the general’s office. The general was a volatile man, lately more paranoid than ever, and Cow Tom didn’t want any parts of their story to drift back to the commander without explanation. When he entered the room Jesup used for business, the general sat behind his desk, cleaning the blade of his small boot knife. Though all the windows were open, the room carried a musty smell, and Cow Tom took a deep breath before announcing himself.

“Are the chiefs still ready to Remove?” the general asked, his tone mild. He didn’t bother to look up from his papers.

“No, sir,” said Cow Tom.

The general gave full attention then, and when he noticed the crude bandage where Cow Tom’s ear used to be, his manner changed. “Egads, man, what happened to you?”

“Osceola,” Cow Tom said. He hurried to share the worst news. “The Seminoles escaped. Almost all. And ten soldiers killed.”

The general pounded his desk, his eyes gone flinty. “How?”

Cow Tom launched into an accounting of the twenty-four hours spent at Fort Brooke, the lack of sentries, the measles outbreak, the hoarded rations, the midnight raid by Osceola and his braves, Micanopy’s change of heart, the slashing of his ear, the looting of the fort, the killing of the soldiers, the few straggler Seminoles, the confounding pardon of himself and Harry Island at Osceola’s hands, the infirmary, even young Billy. He waited for the general’s reaction.

“You and Harry Island were the only healthy men to escape—not by hiding or throwing in your lot with the soldiers, but by . . . ?” He stopped to light his cigar, and let his thought trail off. The general’s icy calm was not a good sign.

“It was whim,” Cow Tom said. “We’ve no notion why he spared us.”

“Remove the bandage.”

“Sir?”

“The bandage.” The general moved fast for a big man, around the desk and at Cow Tom’s side in a flash. He ripped the bandage from his head and examined the wound, poking at the exposed flesh. “So,” he said, “it’s real.”

Cow Tom knew better than to complain, though the general’s touch set off a deepening round of the stinging pain, and bleeding started afresh. He reattached the bandage as best he could.

“Osceola—” Cow Tom began, but the general interrupted.

“A year ago, I started out with over seven hundred Creek warriors to help round the Seminoles up for Removal.”

Cow Tom had no idea where the general might be going with this line of thought. When the general ranted, it was always best to stay silent until he calmed. But when the general went cold, it sometimes served better to introduce some new consideration before too late. He decided to respond. “Yes, sir, I rode east alongside them.”

“We thought to use the natural bad blood between the tribes, and match fierceness of Seminoles with fierceness of Creeks. But that is not the way it turned out.”

Cow Tom projected his listening face, assumed his attentive, ready-to-be-taught demeanor.

“I find the Creek warrior doesn’t have much stomach for the job we have here. Even toward a natural enemy. So the Creek warriors are suddenly tired. The Creek warriors are suddenly sick. The Creek warriors can’t find the Seminole camps or their trails. The Creek warriors drink so much they prove useless in the field. The numbers dwindle until there are only a hundred, not seven hundred. Like a fever, this attitude spreads. Like a contagion. And before you know it, everybody catches the fever. Instead of the discipline of a soldier, this weakness, this fever. From soldier on the horse to tracker and translator in the field. More and more, I’m forced to use non-Indians to round up Seminoles. Why is that?”

Cow Tom wanted a drink, something to steady himself. He pushed away the thought of the families of conscripted Creek warriors held hostage in camps somewhere as guarantee of their good behavior. He sent out another silent prayer about Amy and brought himself back to face the general.

Jesup jabbed a finger in Cow Tom’s chest, his face just inches from Cow Tom’s nose. “Are you in cahoots with Osceola?”

“No, sir.”

“I ask again. Did you help the Seminoles escape?”

“No, sir. We didn’t expect Osceola, but there he was. We counted on the Seminoles to Remove peaceably. You saw them sign the agreement at Capitulation. They swore to Remove when they turned themselves in.”