Free Men (27 page)

“Nothing to eat there, huh?” Bob asks.

I look at its front legs, still whole, stretched in a gallop.

Cat moves, red-eyed, behind Bob. A firefly begins beaming in the twilight, and then two. I could get a scrap of skin from this body, maybe a quarter, and though it couldn’t be sold, I could make it into a belt or a sheath for one of these men. I’ve watched Oche cleaning skins with women enough to know what steps to take to prevent rot and maggots. It’s as if I want them to remember me, though why would I? We’re together only as long as it takes to erase the scent, to plot our safety, to save the black man’s arm before it falls off, and then we’ll spin away, each of us carrying our own guilt.

I thought Cat had tried to drown himself that night, that he had slipped into the creek to slip away, and I didn’t blame him. Even as I was using my knife on human bodies, fighting
to keep their knives away, fighting for these bags that are little more than signposts to a future, I thought,
Yes, let him slip away; there is nothing of life that is good, and maybe we should follow.
But when the night was quiet again, the bodies still, the slaves in the trees silent and awed, we called for him and he bobbed up from the water like a bubble of hope.

“A wolf, probably,” I say, turning from the carcass.

“And just eaten the back half?” Bob hops over the high grasses after me. His flailing startles a flock of sandhill cranes, who beat up into the sky with an angry rattle, their red caps catching the last light. The brass of their voice is louder even than our bags. Bob’s tongue is awake again. “Maybe it wasn’t hungry, or was a young one with a little stomach. Somehow it doesn’t seem so bad if it’s a young one. Makes me think of how hard it is to feed a litter of little ones, especially when the food goes rotten so fast or they don’t give you much of it. I’ve a daughter who’s so greedy she’ll eat green fruit off any bush she finds, and then keeps Winna up all night with her aching.”

His voice gets swallowed by the swish of our legs through grass. I hang back to let him walk ahead, and I match paces with Cat. I put my hand on his shoulder so he turns his face to me. The blue of his eyes burns through the wet of tears.

“Just a deer,” I say.

He pulls his eyebrows down and nods: yes, of course he understands.

“You did nothing wrong.”

I SIT THE
night watch and watch the night turn. The pig sounds of my sleeping companions braid into the echoes of the lovesick barred owl and the twangs and thrums of the earliest tree
frogs, men calling out for women. The cookfire is still churning through the piled ash; smoke coils at eye level and vanishes. I should be more careful, but I know already we have not moved fast enough. I have a creeping sense that the man who was sent to find us is following us, is on this western spur. But I have learned to think the worst. I spread water on the ash.

I lean my head against the sapping bark and, my eyes open, imagine Polly in her calico dress, her phantom coming to me across the distance.

It’s ten days ago, and she’s asking if I love her. “Am I not beautiful?” she says, stepping back from the shaded underbelly of a magnolia into the slant sun. Her black eyes have gold thrown in them. I have known that body since it was shapeless as a sapling. I slide the back of my hand down the smooth of her arm. When she dances, her toes dig into the earth. There are times she doesn’t want me to touch her, but now I can. I used to think that love was need, but now that she’s sunk out of my plan, I find I want her. I want to tell her how well I’m doing in spite of her, how I’ve made my money back in a night. But this is ten days ago, and she dances close and kisses a line across my forehead, down to one ear, and I think I’ve always wanted her.

The empty purse still lies beside the pit beneath my bed, and Oche must know, my mother must know. My uncle, turning in the sky, his back still holed, is waiting. It’s too late to undo crimes; the criminals must keep adjusting. I’ve now killed a man, but I’ve shot no one in the back. The path must stay the same: justice, despite the mistakes I have made. I will start this journey a hundred times before I allow myself to fail. Power is an ugly thing—to be conquered, not deserved. Yes, it is like a woman.

In the woods now with hope, it is not Seloatka’s twisted face
that fills the space before me, not my uncle’s one-eyed wink, but Polly, whose love was always part of something darker. She lies down and snakes her long body around my back and rests her head on my knee, her eyes gazing at my eyes. I stroke her hair, which knots around my fingers, and she sings a song. She puts me to sleep in these last moments before the sun returns, and I curse her name.

WE’RE CLOSE. BOB
complains of hunger, though he has eaten twice what the white man has. He isn’t walking as fast as he was, and sometimes when he speaks his eyes can’t seem to find us. I can’t tell what is the pain and what is his mind, reacting against the creek. We turn north at the dead white oak towering over the spread of open grass, its empty limbs reaching out, wanting always to be a sign for someone. Their feet drag behind me. The silver sometimes seems not worth bearing, but if we didn’t have it we wouldn’t be running, and if we weren’t running, where would we be going?

Cat asks, “Have you been here before?”

“No,” I say, surprised, thinking again of Oche.

He takes in the oak and the field and Bob, coming slowly behind us. “I thought I saw her.”

“Who?”

“My wife. I thought maybe they came here.”

“Women?”

He shakes his head. “Ghosts.”

Bob catches up, asks what we’re saying. I think Cat will fall back into silence, but he looks at the other man with more concern than I’ve seen him show.

“Are you ready not to see her again?”

We’ve all stopped now, and the question Cat’s asked hangs between them. Bob can’t make it out. If I knew our theft would turn us mad, I would not have done it.

“Your wife,” Cat says.

And before I understand what’s happening, Bob’s fist has shot out and slammed Cat in the shoulder, the same one that holds an injury on Bob, and though Cat shudders back and opens his mouth once, he doesn’t cry out. There is a recognition between them that something has broken, a politeness, on the other side of which might lie a deeper attachment. Bob walks on without apologizing, his face still twisted, and Cat holds his shoulder and follows him.

It isn’t a woman I see the ghost of in this field but Le Clerc, who is slow and measured but who, I now feel, hasn’t stopped following.

HER HOUSE COMES
like a pond out of nowhere. A low wood cabin under shingles and a trough to the side with a roof over it. This is a house a white man built and she curled into like a snail. Bob is nervous, asking if she’ll turn him in, want to keep him for her own, asking could he stay outside. I knock. No answer. We wait, Cat drifting to a peach tree fat with buds. Both men now touch their shoulders from time to time. I start around back and the others follow, but when we see her crouched in the garden, shrouded in a billow of dress and apron, her white hair hidden beneath a dun-colored cap, I hear Cat suck his breath and turn away. Bob stops in a half panic, not knowing where the white man’s going, and then I’m alone in the garden with her and her face turns to me like a dark bowl, rimmed in cap.

“Son,” she says, speaking English. In her hand is a white carrot no larger than a thumb.

“I’ve come from the Muskogee towns. We’ve a man with us who’s been shot. He needs something for the wound. Tell me if you want us to move on.”

“Psh. Come help me up. Look at you, standing on ceremony.” She puts the carrot half in her mouth and raises her bony hand. A dark bird resting atop a shrunken pile of linen.

Inside, she puts a pot on the hearth for coffee and makes me sit in her one cane chair while she snatches up the odds and ends of living alone, making the room orderly. Stockings off her bed and shoved under, a spiderweb brushed from the window ledge, a crust of bread on the table tossed through the back window. She pours me a bitter cup and then raps twice on the front window.

“You!” she shouts, presumably at my companions. “Get in here!” Her hand jerks violently toward her as if to manually pull them in.

The door creaks open, and Bob pokes his head an inch inside.

“It’s all right,” I say, but she is already at the door, yanking it open, Bob tumbling through.

“Sit, sit, sit. You and the scaredy one.” She sticks her head outside and yells again.

When Cat comes in, I can see an awe in his eyes that restores some of the handsomeness his face must have had. Something in this woman is recognizable to him. His breathing is deep now.

The three of us sit on the floor so she can have the chair but she folds her legs and floats down to us, ballooning, her head a small darting brilliance on the sack of her body.

“Tell me.” She pats her knees once. She looks from my face to his face to his face, hoping to see the story there.

AFTER SHE WASHES
out Bob’s wound with water and whiskey and swaddles it in a green plaster, we spend the afternoon in her garden pulling weeds, and in the meadow around the house clearing limbs downed by the last thunderstorm, and in the woods calling
sooee
to her hogs, some of which return. Bob fills the trough with water and brushes the leaves from their bristle-black backs. She sidles up behind us to see how we’re getting on, making the other men jump. The clouds jostle each other and tumble down low. I told her we should stay in the house, that there were men behind us, that I could sometimes smell Le Clerc, but she took one look down the trail we’d come from and said, “They’ll keep,” and then handed me a hoe. “And anyway, we’ve got guns.”

Cat comes up from the back slope of the meadow to show a bone he found.

“Used to keep chickens,” she says, turning it over in her hands, tapping it along her forearm. “Till the hogs ate ’em. There might be one left around here somewhere.”

Cat snakes back through the high grasses with it.

I help Bob roll a nurse log back into the woods, its fungus and grubs clinging on to the wet bark. When it’s well off her field, Bob sits on the trunk, wipes his face.

“You know I didn’t mean it with Cat,” he says. He picks off a raft of lichen growing by his hip and flicks his fingernail in it.

“You couldn’t have made the journey with a woman.” I don’t believe that Cat’s marriage was with a real woman, a woman who complained and changed her mind and had her own will. His frailness could not have withstood her. Whatever wife he’s carrying with him in his mind is no match for a walking wife.
What would Bob’s woman have done on this trail? She would have told us to go this way and not the other, would have raised her eyebrows at how I cooked the rabbit, would have stopped us from thieving. Or after we thieved, would have stolen our bags. No, I cannot blame Bob for not bringing his wife.

“I think I like her more now,” he says. He sounds sorry for this. “She wasn’t the one I’d’ve chosen, but she was the best for me and let me run off after all. I wouldn’t have gone if I thought she couldn’t manage for herself, but she’s as tough as they come and made friends with the missus. Could be I wasn’t the family she wanted either.” He tosses the lichen and scratches off another piece. “I don’t want to think about the other stuff. Damn it.” The silver is still in its bags. Our women are still somewhere else. He looks up. “What about your girl?”

I wait as a sound in the forest becomes not a man but a squirrel. “We should get back.”

At night I dream up scenes between us. She drops to her knees and cries and I comfort her; she asks me to come east with her and I do; she tells me to let Seloatka go and I consider it until I’m asleep, and when I wake up I say no, no. Could she have killed a man, or would she have saved me?

We walk back just as the clouds begin to empty. Cat has found a flower and is waving it at us. A signal.

The rain washes over us in long, light sweeps. We finish our stacking and sorting and harvesting and come inside wet, our road-sweated clothes rich with the earthiness of rain. We drop our handfuls of onions on her wooden table, the carrots, two heads of lettuce, all rolling around in search of the edge. One onion drops off and bounces beneath the woman’s bed, and she tells us to leave it, it’s good luck.

“We’ve been bothered by crows,” she says. The carrots fall apart into coins under her knife. Bob stands at the window, watching for men, and Cat and I sit on her bed. “They get worse in the summer, but now’s the time when they’re going around with their babies and teaching them what’s food and what’s not.”

She throws the vegetables into the kettle with salt and fat, and I miss my mother’s corn.

“We have an old woman,” I say, “who sits in our field and keeps the crows away.” I’m surprised to see her in the clothes of white people, leading such an alone life. But she may have been Spanish before she was Indian, or black.

“I’ve too much to do to sit around all day, and anyway, I’m not hardly old yet.” She snaps her head around, eyes wide, so we can see the youth still in her face. She gives a final hard stir to the stew and then puts down her spoon and lifts the musket from the back of her door. “Excuse me, sons.”

Bob moves to the back window and watches her walk into the garden. We hear a blast, a pause, and then another blast, and I am stuck to my seat, knowing it is just the woman with her gun, catching a rabbit or a dove for dinner, but thinking still of Le Clerc and his nearness. A warbler flashed through the woods while I was gathering kindling, and I thought it was the gleam on his rifle. She comes back inside, wet again, with two dead crows dripping from her hands.

She clears the table of the tin plates and flour sacks and tufted carrot tops and replaces them with a large wooden bowl. She hums as she gathers ingredients from her shelves. I stand beside her while she rolls them into a paste.

“That’s not for bread,” I say.

“One ounce asafoetida, four ounce flour brimstone, four ounce gunpowder, two ounce hog’s lard.”

We all three watch her arm turn in circles, knowing that this is witchiness but unable to leave this house. Even with the dampness of our bodies, it holds an uncommon warmth.