Free Men (17 page)

Bob reaches out. Brushes my arm with two fingers. His head tilts across the creek. Toward the sand, the men in their scatter. I shake my head. He nods. In the dark, he glows like coal. Everything about him warm. He wants me to want to do this. The Indian on his other side is cold. His eyes straight out, not down, not at us. If I made guesses, it would be that he has no family, moves only because he tells himself to. No loyalty. Not like Bob, who once he loves would not leave. I, who have lost wanting, wonder what men want. I shake my head. If my legs were not criminals, I would slide down into a squat, but they are bound to do bad things if left alone, so when the black man and the Indian creep one foot by one foot from the brush into the water, I creep behind them, not liking to creep, not wanting the gun in my hand, not knowing where to put it. It isn’t mine, and they would be angry if I lost it. It is a scalpel that my master won’t let me touch, that I don’t know how to use.

The night bugs are rattling. The air tastes sweet. We time our steps so that the water past our knees sounds like wind. The creek pulls on my legs, begs them to buckle. What fishes are
beneath us. To get to land, I think of nothing at all. Empty out. Slow steps. No thought. When we are on sand again, our legs between cots, I clutch at Bob. His skin jumps. I can see stars through his eyelashes. He crouches beside the heavy sleeping man and lifts his gun. As he bends and then rises, my hand on his shoulder goes with him. The Indian stands over the white body of the man with dark eyes, the one who froze him on the path. The one who is some woman’s father. He waits for him to answer an unasked question, but the man is asleep. The Indian takes his musket. They slip their hands between the white men’s hands, putting gentle fingers on the bags. Listening. One goes
clink
. They both stand straight, nod through darkness. Nodding to say,
We three will be the same person in this instant
. I shake my head. I am not ready to be one with anyone but her. I let Bob go and go slow in backward steps, back to the water. Listening for her voice.

I see them drag out the bags. A rustle on the cot. An arm drawn in. I stop. We hold our breath. A turning.

A slow world turning.

The fat man starts up first. His shout like a muffled dog. The men are awake. God damn it. I had said no.

The sand scrambles. They are up now, sitting, standing, crouched, all the men who are kin to those coins. Arms crooked, knees bent. Moving like someone lifted the rock that was hiding them. The moon floating in the creek lights their jaws.

Somebody shoots. Bob’s gun explodes. The horses in the trees kick against bark. The shadows of the black men slip below bushes. What was I to do? Was I meant to use this gun? They are moving fast, and I am slow. I step again backward. My feet are in the creek. I look at Anne, her eyes surprised. Her
calling to me from the red sheets. Asking could I save her. Her straw hair wet against her cheek. I’m waist-deep in water now. I must be too thin to see, because everyone is shooting but no one is shooting at me. I still have a gun in my hand. It says nothing. We are quiet. A young man runs toward me, fleeing, but the dark lights up again with powder and he skids, wavers. His body crumples on the sand. His ankles in the water, bobbing. Too late for a boy to finger out that bullet. He would be dead on any slab. There are empty spaces while men reload their muskets. Is this what war was like? Shots, and then noisy grabbing. Their breaths heavy, their hands reaching out to clutch hair, to smash in noses. Cries like birds. They look for their knives. Bob and the Indian shoot again. Now I can’t tell man-shout from gunshot. The moon on the creek is red.

For two nights now, I’ve slept near a body, first one and then two. I fell asleep while they were talking because they were not talking to me. But when it was still and dark I woke and watched them. I crawled to their sides. The black man boneless, loose pile of limbs. Skin dirt-colored. Not any dirt, but what you find when you scuff off the top layer of rot, dark, and dig an inch down to where it’s dry, where it’s brown and orangey and sheens if you spit on it. I brushed his arm, the skin beneath the arm hairs. His body flopped so open, like it once had a wife and was glad now to be free. I wanted to scoot him back together. Make him make room for somebody. I could not touch the Indian, though I smelled his hair. Watched his tattoo to see if it would move. If a breeze brushed the blanket off, he’d snatch it close again. Hated his skin to be uncovered. These men and I, we had not hurt each other. I smiled and then felt guilty for it. I sat deeper in the trees to wait for a rat or a deer, but nothing warm
walked by. The woods were cold. The fire was out. I found my spot again, not too close, and closed my eyes.
Do not let me dream of her
, I begged. I was too afraid to sleep. I took the shoes of the other men, holed brown boots and leather slip shoes, and wet them from my mouth and smoothed them clean with the tail of my shirt.
There
.

I step back through the water, watching the light from guns and the sides of knives, watching the shoes of strangers dance around each other, slide into the sand, kick at other men’s legs. The heavy man is on his bottom, the cot pulled against him for a shield. The Indian’s arm coddles the neck of the dark-eyed man, like they were brothers, choking. Someone young is slashing at Bob with a knife, and Bob is cringing back. He lifts his gun and beats the other man on the head with the barrel. I am walking away from them, from their heat. I need them to live. The gun in my hand is loaded.

The black men are in the trees. I can see their shiny eyes. They wait to see who will win and claim them. Wait to see if in the loudness of the killing they can step back into the deeper night and take themselves. Someone’s bullet passes near my head, a fast exhale, soft, and I sink. I let my body dip down. Chest, neck, chin. Only my eyes above cool water. My shirt is slow and billows out. My pants cling. I ask someone to watch my brothers. I close my eyes and let my knees collapse. My face sinks below. My hair floats away from my face. Sounds like armies marching. Sounds like towns on fire. I hear a high yell that clutches in a gargle. I open my eyes beneath the water.

My father floats past upon his back, feet bare. His mouth trails whiskey. In his hand a wooden gnarl that is my soul. A flock of crow women soar smoothly through the water. Their robes
wide as wings, their mouths open like fish. Behind them walk a thousand dead. Heads open, guts untwirled, their blood turning the water dark. I think I must be dying, to see this march. Anne swims before me. Her eyes surprised. She circles her legs slow to stay in place. Her dress rivering around her body, the blood floating up in strands like smoke. I say how perfect her face is, that she is the woman I loved before I knew what a woman was, in all the darkness of my youth, there, do you see my father floating past, how little like a woman he is? All the shapes I hungered for, and none were mine but you. My words come out in bubbles. Her hands on her belly. I say I never touched a piece of earth but I thought of her. All my life.
But listen
, she says. Eyes wide. She cannot hear me. I reach my hand for her.
It is you now
, she says,
not me.
Her mouth opens slow. Her hair floats in fingers toward me. It is always her. What can I do but fail to reach her again, again. There is nothing of me left. I squeeze my eyes shut. My heart is hot as simmering fat.

The first time she came to church. The yellow of her hair, the blue of her dress. She was a summer sky. She would rest the soft of her hand on my cheek. Her murmur. When she was fully mine and I rode home on the horse that now was dead, she’d spot me from the window and whistle like a jenny wren. A bird that flew into my hands. My body could not be loved, I thought. I thought, until she put her arms around my neck. The water comes in at my cracks. Finds my heart and cools it. Water pumping in my heart until the beast of grief I’m riding drowns. Our son was just a shard of her, and I could not put him down. I should have put him down, crawled over to sew up the holes in my wife, saved the holy heart of me. I was mistaken. I was a mistake. She was the one of all.

You cannot cry at the bottom of a creek.

I am almost empty. Am almost stripped to nothing.

I wait below the water until the sounds still. It is too dark for anything worth seeing. None of these men are killing for women. None have killed their wives. Love is not above this water, and there is only sin beneath. Minnows. Some find my legs inside my pants and pick at my hairs. Kiss me. I wish for a fish to swallow me. To hold me in its belly the way she held my child. I want to give up my senses, one by one. To lose the taste of her. Forget the feel of her scalp on my fingers. How long does it take to drown?

I hear a man shout
Cat!

Cat!

Someone wants me.

I taste the water one more time. Then I let the little current push me up. The dark has settled, the moon white again. The fat man, the young men, the brown men lie in blood. The black men roped to a tree. The horses still tied in the brush, fluttering. The night smells like smoke. Bitter. Bob and the Indian rummage in sacks. They empty out silver. A thousand extra moons. I crawl up wet on the bank, the gun wet in my hand.
I thought he was a killer
, I hear Bob say of me. He groans through his teeth, one arm clutching the other. I lean down to touch the fat man’s face. How did they find him behind his cot? His heavy body soft. Rude to treat it so. They slide the money back in bags, shuffle through the other packs for food and bits of scrip. Bob one-handed. Even in no light, moonlight, I can see their hands shaking. This was not the plan.

I sit by the fat man and wait. I can tell by his eyebrows he wasn’t cruel. Wasn’t a bad father. I put my fingers beneath his.
Lean down to check his breath, but there is none. I am almost sad, but I remember there is no justice. God takes, or man takes, what he wants. Heavy gentlemen, and wives. Girls. Soldiers on both sides. I don’t want to see the other bodies. Just this one. The Indian said he was from Carolina, where I’m from. I wonder did he have a father with a still, did he not see the ocean till he was old, did he know a boy who went to war and never came back. Did he love. He is on his back, one hand by his side, the other reaching far out as if to say
Help
or
Stop
. His legs bunched up. Eyes half open and sleepy. I close them so as not to see their blue. I cross his hands on his chest. I stretch out his legs. I take off his shoes. He is not in his nightshirt but all his clothes, for it is March and cool and he was shy among all these men. I unbutton his waistcoat that is squeezing tight, to let him breathe. I pat him now like a pet or a donkey. His coat looks warm. I only have a shirt, which now is soaked with creek and crying, and I am still alive enough to feel the cold. I rub the wool. Slip my fingers wet into his pockets.

Inside his coat is a letter, rimmed in red. I save it from his blooming side and wipe the blood away. An address on the front, four lines in loops. Unsent. He has drawn a tree on the back. A little house beneath. A man and woman scratched in beside it. The man and the woman and the house and the tree. Inked hands touching. I wonder if he had a woman and a house and a tree, like I had a woman and a house and a tree. Now someone will be alone, like I am alone. It is my fault for burying myself in water when I could have stood by his cot and saved him. Saved the woman from having lost a man. Who am I to know why the black man and the Indian did what they did. What they needed. I only sit here holding a man’s heart in the night cold. I feel a roll of blood uncurl down my arms. A little aliveness.

They tell me to stand up, come on, their backs heavy with silver. Their hands still shaking. I look up the bank at the black men tied to the tree. They have no faces in the dark. They are not scared, this being the least of what they’ve seen. Of men not knowing what they do. They wait for the next slow turn. We leave them the horses. Behind me, Bob and the Indian are splashing slow across the creek. The minnows scatter.
Cat!
They want me. Even the Indian waits.

That they call my name, that they have killed these strangers and not myself, that they do not leave me here. What is this country?

There are men killed today, and I am not to blame. The Indian must carry it, who has no town or home. Bob must carry it, who has no wife. Or if he does she is weak or cruel, else he could not have left. This I know about my brothers.

I put the wet red letter in my pocket. I will eat it if I am hungry. If not, and when have I been hungry, I will find a man to carry it. He will bear it to Carolina, where Anne too lies waiting. Her body still on the bed, my hands still red with the blood I didn’t touch. Our child, the flower of us, waiting. If God is watching, let him quiet that blood shed with this blood saved and sent.

M
Y MASTER’S SPANISH
wife is stretched beneath an open bedroom window, her fat feet propped on the sill so when the wind comes it goes straight down her skirts. I wait in the door until she decides to see me. My husband, who was not of my picking, has been gone more than a week. Someone finally thought to fetch me. She raises a hand, fidgets her fingers. I come over, stepping around the noisy spot where the floor is weak, and sit on the stool that puts my head about at a level with her raised ankles. She plops them on my lap.

I’m the good kind of slave, the kind that doesn’t talk too much or think. I start digging in, my thumb fiddling against the rough ball of her foot. I pull her skin hard enough so it won’t tickle. The bottom of her toes have caps on them, husks or horns that come to a fine edge. When she’s off on her topic and not paying attention, I run my fingers along them because she can’t feel. This time it’s my husband.

“José’s already had a letter from the Creeks; not there.”

“Mm.”

“Out nine hundred dollars, José. He’s a strong man, yes? Which one is he?”

I think of some way to describe him. I don’t think she’d know what a handsome black man is. “Six foot,” I say, “and then some.”

“Scars?”

“Not that you’d know to notice.”

“It does not matter to me, him missing. But José, of course.”

“Me neither.”

“He was a fool to lose the horse. Came right back to where it should. So we know, without a horse, either he is dead or run off. The trail is not that dangerous, so my guess is he went
shoo
. He say nothing to his wife?”

“He’s not much for talking.”

“Of course.” She frowns, then giggles and jerks a foot away.

I say sorry and lift it up again.

“You ever do this for him?”

I stop, my fingers laced between her toes.

“No, I think not. I wonder why a man run off and leave his lady, and here you go. You don’t serve him well.”

“I served him two babies.” I move up to her ankles, ringed in fine black hair.

“But love, no, that’s not in the bed.”

I cannot tell a white woman, however swarthy, that I do not love my husband, even if it isn’t true. “We get along fine,” I say.

“Mm, yes,” and she closes her eyes, dropping her fat round head to one shoulder. “You want to ask about José, but you are shy.”

I am not shy. I am very practical. I started off in the fields
and I worked my way to the kitchen. And then into the house and up the stairs until I got here. The Spanish lady blabbers, but she doesn’t whip, not much. I don’t mind hearing about another country, or even my own country, because whoever it belongs to now surely won’t keep it long. This woman, her head lolling around her neck like an orange about to drop, can name her kings as fast as she can name her husbands. When I’m tired of listening, I just think about other things.

“We talk little,” she says, “but when he visits the bed we say very much. He even likes my horny toes. Like you.”

I glance up.

“If these lands did not belong to me, I think he would like
mis
piernas
less. But who says this is no good? Foolish are the ones who wait, who pine, who say, ‘Is this how you feel?’ If love is not one way, it’s another.
Frente al amor y la muerte no sirve de nada ser fuerte.
Eh?”

“I agree,” I say.

“But here you are waiting! You Africans think too serious about everything. Think about you, not him. See what I do. Do I let José show me which way? No, no. I make commands.” She draws one of the curls from her head beneath her nose until it is straight, then lets it spring back. “But also do not let them go far, because the rope is shorter than you think and they will be off if you blink too long. Oh, I see. This is your case. Well, it is from being serious. Loving is very push-pull like that.”

I pretend not to hear. Her toenails are grown too long.

“You think he comes back?”

I don’t say anything, because I’m not a fool. But the truth is I don’t know. More importantly, I don’t know if I mind one way or the other.

She doesn’t like it when I’m quiet. She kicks her feet free and stands up, wrapping her shawl around her. “You do a terrible job. I see you tomorrow.”

DELPHY IS PEELING
potatoes on the steps. She is nine years old, but looks at me like a grandma would, haughty and suspicious. She hasn’t asked about her daddy today, so I’m waiting for it. The baby is taking the fallen peels and pushing them a few inches into the darkness beneath the house. She says cats live there, but she also says there are rabbits in her mattress.

“Up, Polly,” I say, and she hoists herself off the dirt, wiping at her knees. She gathers up the naked potatoes at her sister’s side and follows me into the cabin, where the fire has almost gone out. I throw some sticks on and poke at it. “Tell Delphy to get the water.”

“Let me,” she says. Her arms shake under the weight of four potatoes.

“Delphy!”

I hear my older girl put down her knife and set out with the pail, and Polly drops her burden and begins to cry.

We’re quiet at dinner. I told them the day he left that family means nothing here. Men move around. They know that. Slave folks are brought together and busted up at the white man’s whim; it’s not our business. They asked didn’t I love them like a real mama would, and I said yes, but different too. I was raised to plant cabin gardens small so the master wouldn’t complain, to look down whenever I was looked at, to help folks around me but only so far. We don’t mourn Papa’s loss, I said, because crying draws attention.

When the plates are clean I wait for it, and it comes.

“You think he made it?”

“He’s only a week gone, Delphy, no telling.”

“But do you think he’ll come back for us?”

“Doesn’t help that he lost his damn horse.” I throw the plates in what’s left of the water in the pail. “Tell me why you want him to so bad. It doesn’t hurt your feelings that he left you behind?”

Polly screws up her face again, and her sister finds a roll of fat on the girl’s arm and pinches it. Polly takes a gulp of breath. “He’s my daddy,” she says.

“And I think he wanted to take us and you wouldn’t let him,” Delphy adds. “I think you were scared.”

“Or sensible. You know how many runaways get killed?”

Polly’s face falls into a shock. Damn it, what kind of mother has to say things like “killed” at supper? In what kind of life is that so ordinary? I lift her and rock her, and above her bawling head I lock eyes with Delphy, who raises her brows at me as if to say,
What kind of a mother indeed?

“Your father’s fine. He’s looking for some free land, and knows enough of roads and Indians to get through.”

“Then why can’t we be free too?”

Polly sticks her hand in my shirt, looking for comfort, though she hasn’t found milk there in months.

“If he can go off on his own so easy, then that’s not a family,” Delphy says.

When the
señora
first allowed the black preacher to visit the plantation, I thought nothing of it. But then the girls came home with stories that didn’t sound much like life. All about daddies looking out for their children, and mamas so sweet they can get a baby without even taking off their clothes. And now our own cabin doesn’t look so shiny to the girls.

With her arms crossed on her little flat chest, and her short hair a ragged halo around her head, Delphy asks me if her father is even a father, and why we give him that name.

“Because he loves you,” I say. I know she knows about love, because Jesus says it all the time.

Polly squirms to get down and bends over, squeezing her legs together. I send her outside to pee.

“If he loves us—”

“All right, listen.” I kneel down in front of her and reach up to her ears. I hold them in my hands like shells. “There is being a father, and there is being a man. And sometimes what makes sense to one isn’t right for the other. Sometimes you’re my daughter and have to think of me, and whether I’d like you to be getting the potatoes done, and sometimes you’re just a girl and you want to go climb the pecan. You hear?”

“So daddy wasn’t thinking of us when he left.”

“Well.” I want to say no, he was being a selfish son of a bitch, but I don’t know if that’s the whole truth.

Polly creeps back in—she’s always pleased with herself after peeing—and lies down on the mattress with a smile. “He plays hide and seek,” she says. “We find him.”

Delphy leans down to me and whispers. “You don’t even care that he’s gone.”

I have never heard such a cruel voice out of my girl. After all that, and he
was
being a son of a bitch, she’s disappointed not in her daddy but in me. How I failed to give them some kind of damn Holy Family. I am too tired to correct her. Tomorrow she’ll find another way to ask about him, and I’ll try to pretend that it doesn’t matter. Slaves don’t get families. There’s nothing to fight for.

I SHOULD BE
grateful to be out of the fields, away from the kettles, but my mistress is near as dangerous as the boiling sugar. She doesn’t want a foot rub today but a stroll in the garden, me carrying the wooden buckets sloshing with water to refill her tiny can. She likes to be the one to water her roses. They don’t do well, maybe because of the salt and sand in the dirt, maybe because she’s a fickle waterer. It comes out in five little streams from the wide head, sprinkling the limp petals, the curled leaves. Nowhere near the roots, but I don’t say anything.

“They have made nothing at all nice,” she says. The English, now Americans, are a favorite subject. The Spanish have had Florida again for a half-dozen years, but she can’t stop railing. They are all rural, knock-kneed, buck-toothed. “You go south more, or west, and see what the Spanish have built. No lazy farms. And you, you could walk to town in a pretty dress and no one to say a word. You are black, yes, but not that dark. Here is boring, all the same, nothing but master and slave.” She holds out her can for me to fill it. “I am sick of here.”

She always says she’s been here too long. She was born here, is what she means, though she likes to pretend she is true Spanish and not a colonial. Married off at fifteen to an Englishman because that’s the way the wars seemed to be going. She hates the blacks with dark skin, the Indians in our fields but not the princesses that visit with their chiefs, all the English, most of the French, and the convicts and the runaways and the hungry. She hates the poor and people who are richer than she is. She tells me all the time about the free blacks, how they’re soldiers and shopkeepers, all over Florida. She wants me to complain as much as she does, but I won’t out loud.

A wasp hovers down to see what’s going on with all this loose water. My mistress lets out a shriek, ducking away, and her short curls bounce. Her stomach leaps along with her. I wave my hand in the air a few times, and the wasp sighs and moves on. I am sick of here too. Maybe always was, but didn’t know the words to say it. Is it being a woman? Was I raised to bear things as they came? I take pride in putting up with shit. But I’m afraid to think what it would mean if Bob wasn’t a coward taking the easy way out, but a man finding a solution. Maybe being a woman isn’t the same as setting your teeth and taking what’s coming to you. Though I am a strong believer in that. Not because God tells us to, but because someone’s got to take the shit of the world, and I still think it’s a sneak who lets someone else carry that burden. But in my strength I seem to be carrying my children down with me. And I am not sure if that is being safe or being wrong.

“Have you ever thought to be prostitute?” She laughs. We have moved on to the yellow rose that she waters twice as much as the others. It was a cutting from her mother’s garden, back in Spain. “It is not so bad as you think, and money is good. Being wife is just the same, but no money. Look at these, my lands! What did my husband have? And everything he takes. Your husband just take himself, not so bad.”

I heave up one of the buckets to fill her can again. “You’d tell me if they found him?”

She pauses, clutches at the bag that dangles from her elbow. She is looking for her half whip, a lady-sized thing that some man before Josiah had made for her. Is it lambskin, even? I shift a few steps to the side, stare down at the gravel path. She can’t find it and moves on to the oleander flopping against the old
brick wall. She pulls off a leaf and looks at me. “Poison,” she says. I wish she wouldn’t laugh so much.

That night in bed while I arrange the cookies on her tray, my mistress says she’s written a letter to her cousin in Seville and is done with this petty New World, it is too confusing and she is given no respect.

“Where would you go?”

She considers this as I rub a cream into her plump cheeks, along the lines in her forehead. “To a true city,” she says, “or the Indies. Rich, rich.”

My back aches from where she whipped me two hours ago. Her little crop was hanging in the pantry, of all places.

“And the plantation?”

“Sold to high bidder!” Her laugh is more like a cackle. “Cane goes away, it doesn’t grow good here anyway. Slaves go away. My husband shrivels, comes begging for me. Don’t mistake me, I am a woman in love. It is right to make them work hard.”

Slaves go away
. It’s a miracle that after changing hands from Spanish to British to Spanish, my family has not already been broken down, sold in pieces. Though now, of course, I’m not sure about the word
family
. But my children. One more whim, one more shift in hands, and they’re gone. Shipped to Louisiana or Virginia, as Bob was once sent from Virginia to Florida, or as I was sent from—I don’t even remember where. Family for us is just what we can count today. It’s not memory, and it’s not future. And this is what I have given my children.

What is there to be practical about?

THE GIRLS ARE
in bed when I get home, late, but not asleep. Polly is sticking her finger in and out of her nose, waiting for
something to appear. With narrowed eyes, Delphy watches me undress. I crawl in.