Free Men (23 page)

And so when I saw my brother growing sicker as the Green Corn days passed, I tried to think of something else, tried not to think the one who should lead our town was wasting. A doctor looked him over, opened his eyelids, kneaded his stomach. He gave him
pasa
and wormseed. The night the council met, my brother could not go. His skin was wet and nearly white. His eyes fluttered about the room but never settled. His limbs began to twitch like a rabbit in a trap. The council determined he would not live. We stayed quiet one more day, and as the women dressed themselves in rattles for the dance and Oche walked with the priests to start the year’s new fire, my brother slipped into an unawareness. He would not respond to touch, to
pinch, to slap. We sat around his bed and gave pieces of melon to the guests: men who stopped by to see a brother warrior, women who swore they loved him, had almost been his wife. They came through in quiet lines like shadows, their small stories thrown into silhouette by the great fire that was my mother. She didn’t move. Her eyes didn’t move from his face, which was paling away, one step from ghost. I sat with her not because I loved my brother but because I wanted to see the moment when he passed from man to something else. When my uncle was dying, when the arrow I had not prevented was holing his heart, letting the blood find all the empty spaces of his body, my eyes were closed. Now I kept my hands on the sides of my face, holding my eyes on my brother, imagining what I missed before. He grew smaller and smaller, like a weed without water, crumpling in the faintest ways. I had to blink, and at some instant when I was blinking or not blinking, his spirit walked away.

The doctor came and tasted his blood and told us it was poison.

My mother’s tears dried into fury. She said she’d finger every man and woman who had stepped past our door until one confessed and was burned alive. When the doctor was gone and Oche was asleep and my mother was making lists of suspects and rivals and bloody methods of revenge, I stepped outside my body and saw that our family had been hacked at until it was splinters. We were of the Wind clan, and we were lying split in our home, in broken poses: asleep, afraid, raving, dead.

So I told her what I knew. I told her of the singing soft arrow in my uncle’s back and Seloatka’s pointed menace, and asked her not to tell a soul, especially Oche, who would be afraid. I didn’t guess, though, how much fear would be my mother’s
part. I thought she would burst from the house in a crusade, might even strangle Seloatka with her knuckly hands. But when I finished my story, her eyes went dead. She did not cook for the feast to break the Green Corn fast. She did not speak to me anymore that night and slept silently. In the morning when she roused me, she said, “My son, you have had such a dream. A terrible dream has come to you, but it’s all right now. Your mother is here now.” We never spoke of it again.

With my uncle shot through and my brother poisoned, I was the next to claim
mico
, but the council agreed I was unfit and green. Seloatka told them he saw me crouched behind a tree during the river fight, my breechcloth soaked with urine. I didn’t contradict this version of myself, valuing my life as a boy does, though when Oche asked if I was angry, I said I was ready to crash heads and set fire to the meeting house. In the last seasons of my boyhood, we would battle with wooden axes in the ditches behind the cornfields, one of us the
mico
, the other the usurper. Perhaps all this false anger prepared me for a realer kind.

One of our cousins became chief, the one who was married to Seloatka’s sister. Within a year, the elders had stopped bringing us meat to fill the hole of my uncle’s loss, and by the time my voice dropped and I was mostly a man, we were pushed to a smaller house on the edge of town farthest from the fields. My grandmother had passed three years before from some kind of pox, and with fewer numbers and less sway, our family handed away our home. Like my brother, we were shrinking. When our cousin the new
mico
died hunting—no one knew how, no one asked—Seloatka seized power. The feather was now in his hands.

The elders painted his face ghost-white and sat him on a white skin and reminded him what white meant, that it was his duty ever to hunt for peace, even in our warring town. He nodded and was grave, but sitting on the back bench of the council house, I could see the firing of his hungry heart, which pumped not white but red. Then he took the white drink, and we all drank with him. He gulped the roasted holly water until he vomited. I could not sleep that night, and though my mother said I was too young for the white drink and now I’d have dreams, I only thought of the man in white with the beating red heart and wondered how to pull that out of him.

AND POLLY
WAS
his other sister’s daughter. Her eyebrows ran straight across her face, above eyes that were black with mischief. She wore a blue bead in her hair. She played with the boys when she was young and no one took notice of her until she stole her slenderness away and stayed in a hut with women and brought back something full. We threw sweetgum balls at her, and she simply stared and walked off. My affection for her, or was it awe, grew with the same breaths that fed my anger at her uncle. There was something in her that I wanted, and though it felt sincere and young, I cannot swear that my love for her wasn’t born of a greater hatred.

I began to leave presents by her door—feathers wrapped in a bunch with twine, sweet cakes my mother made—and to watch from behind a shrub as she stepped out into the mist of morning to discover she was admired. Her face melted from the last of sleep into a quiet pleasure. She would put down the water pot to hold the feathers close, bite the cake, and I thought she was pressing me to her, nibbling at my mouth. In the days before she
knew it was me, I felt a limitless power over her welfare. Not knowing who I was, she could not refuse me. One day I left her nothing, just to watch her face pinch in disappointment. If I was cruel, I blamed the great loathing that simmered under all my movements.

I went down to the river where the women were fishing, roping in the last of the rockfish and red drum, to ask Oche his wisdom. While he washed out his clothes, he told me that girls are no mystery. They are not spirit people, not ghost children, not creatures to be shot or skinned. He laughed at my gifts and my skulking, and when I told him I didn’t know where the love came from, he told me all love was good and pure and I let myself believe him. Oche knew nothing of Seloatka, disliked him because he took more grain than was his chiefly share and fought sometimes for sport rather than revenge, and I could not tell him any different. He asked if I wanted Polly forever.

I did not respond, but watched a young man paddle by in a newly dug canoe, testing it for a summer journey.

“Would you ever tire of her?” He squeezed the water from his shirt and laid it on a rock, smoothing out its folds. “Could you hold her when she’s unhappy or when she makes no sense? Would you hold her if she hit you? If you saw another woman that you loved and Polly said no, you could not have her, would you listen? If you lost all your children so there were no more threads between you, would you love her still?”

I had been growing into a panic until he mentioned this last. “I won’t have children,” I said. I took my feet out of the water and dried them on the grass. “Unless I had a son like you, to do the washing for me.”

He looked so slim standing there by the young trees along
the bank. His chest small, his hair long as a girl’s. I asked him if he was old enough yet to love, and he smiled and held up his leggings dripping from the river.

The first time I spoke to her, I started coughing so she had to fetch me water, and all I could do was thank her and hurry back to my knife-sharpening, cheeks on fire. The second time, she asked if I was all right, as if I were an old man with little time to live, the light in her eyes gone soft and comforting, and I said I was perfectly fine in a deep voice. My mother had given me honey to smooth my throat, and I glared at Polly and walked on.

The third time, I found her crouched in the notch of a hickory. She said she was hiding from a friend and begged for my silence, so I crawled up and sat beside her. We didn’t speak as the blackbirds flocked to a branch above us and settled in a beating of wings. I ventured that she might be too old for hiding and stared anywhere but at her body. Her arm pressed against mine. I closed my mouth until the blackbirds had all flown off, in search of a tree less fraught. A girl appeared from the fields, paused to glance between the rows, and then ran to the river on the tallest pointed feet, as though wanting to be admired. We kept our places, shoulders locked. I asked her in a whisper if she liked the gifts. She looked at me quick and said, “You?” I nodded, feeling like a man again, and she squinted her eyes at the gathering dark.

We stayed in the tree through nightfall and star-rising. We could hear the town’s murmur from the council ground, the ball field. I never asked about her uncle, so she told me of her mother and her brothers and the father who was an Englishman she’d never seen.

His name was Thomas Colhill and he had married her mother in a traditional way, which is to say not in the churches that he knew, so when he left a few months later, he thought he took his freedom with him. This was not uncommon, and her mother kept no bitterness. Just an old rifle he had given her as a bride gift, a silver chain that she passed to Polly, rudimentary English, and the use of his name in trade. His use of hers proved more valuable, and with his Muskogee kinship waving like a flag before him, he took his whiskey to the Indians and brought back skins. The fortune he made must have kept his white family in fine clothes. How would it be to travel between nations with nothing to lose? There seemed a certain power in that, and I admired the absent Thomas Colhill for choosing his own life.

“Do you think of him?” I asked.

She paused, as if thinking of what thinking of him would be like.

“Or wonder if he has the same chin?” I looked out into the dark fields so as not to stare at her chin, which fell into a little bowl at the base of her face. Just the size for rubbing a thumb across.

“No,” she said. She put her hand to her face, feeling her features. Not as slowly as I would have. “He’s just another bastard. White man, Muskogee man, all you want is more than the man next to you has.”

“What will you do if he comes back?”

“Kill him.”

I laughed, swallowed my laugh into a cough. I was grateful the night hid the sweat on my face. “For leaving you?”

“For not taking me with him.”

I didn’t know what to say. I understood how someone young
could grow such an old bitterness, but I lost the sense of myself as a rare hero when I heard that anger lie so easily in someone else’s mouth.

In the unraveling night, she had already moved on. She wondered about an animal that was gnawing at the squash, a friend who had taken her favorite comb. She taught me some English words, said she’d teach me more. She came to her uncle in her own wanderings. Seloatka took no interest in her, she said, but spent his empty hours with her brothers, teaching them the arts of war. Cruelty, she called it. He was an old-fashioned Muskogee, had no vision, knew nothing of the English like her father. My heart was thumping hard at the image of Seloatka resting his hand on my shoulder. As she worried aloud that her hair would not grow fast enough, I saw the spirit of the man dig his fingers into my arm. I took my knife from its sheath and cut at his chest, gently, as if I were planting seeds in soft dirt.

The owls began calling in whispers while we shivered in the night cold. I was sleepy and could smell the cooking fish from town and began to think Polly was childish for hiding so long. The bark felt dirty to me; I couldn’t straighten the sticks up here. The sound of a sliding in the tree made her shiver and grab my hand. I said I thought it was a snake, so she laced her fingers into mine. If only Seloatka found us here, his niece stuck to his enemy like ash on a hoecake. But I could smell her hair in the moonlight and it smelled like the warmth of a deer when it is still alive. She told me she liked an older boy, one who had his first scars already, but I didn’t listen, and it must have been just a game because later when she put her mouth on my mouth it felt real and I had no more questions about my love.

The battle had been fought, though at that hour I couldn’t
have named the victor. We climbed down, or rather slipped and scrambled, scraping our palms, and at the base of the hickory she took me in her arms and squeezed—the embrace of a comrade, a fellow warrior—and evaporated into the night. I walked home, my arms wrapped around my chest to mimic her warmth, and my mother shook me and fed me cold meat. I slept for the first time without dreaming of Seloatka.

We were lovers in the youngest sense, and I brought her back the hearts of deer from hunting. One summer she spent wooing another boy, and for a few days they escaped into the forest to play a game of togetherness, but she came home bored and swore she still loved me. When I began to look less like a tangle of sticks and more like something that could grip and twist and shoot, I told her I would marry her. She said she was worth a lot, and I would owe her uncle a great sum in gifts, and she wasn’t even sure she’d say yes. I said it wasn’t a question. I just wanted to warn her. She said she’d be ready, then, and good luck to me. I told my brother and he laughed and said the same. He knew her well from farming with her, pounding grain, the things that Oche does with women. He said she built baskets from piles of wet stripped cane faster than the others. I never knew whether to worry over him or to envy what he had, something like the clarity of a river in spring. He said he saw something in my heart larger than love, and to watch for it. I said he was still a boy.

WHEN MY COURAGE
had grown into a full-sized fruit, I asked Seloatka for a favor. The Englishmen’s war was over now, and the Muskogee towns, along with the Cherokee towns, were lashing out against the new Americans pouring into the spaces opened by peace. How we traded, how we fought: it all
deserved rethinking. We had fresh enemies, found allies in old rivals. Our once-solid world seemed to be rafting out on a black river, but I had forgotten nothing. For years I had watched him, from my boyhood to my manhood, and though he had committed no great treacheries since taking the
mico
’s feathers, none but the minor abuses of all rulers, I hadn’t once abandoned my plans. That my village might not believe what I had seen—that Seloatka himself may have long since discounted me—did not concern me. I would unseat him and reclaim what was my family’s.