Free Men (28 page)

“My grandmother’s recipe,” she says.

“Who was she?” I ask.

She rolls the paste into balls, walnut-sized, and stuffs them down the throats of the crows. Their beaks spread wide for her dark hands. “There now,” she says, cradling their bodies and sliding them under the bed beside the truant onion. She tosses the remaining paste in the trash heap outside and pours a ladle of water over her hands to clean them.

Bob and Cat look at each other like children, afraid and also wanting to smile.

We eat what she serves us, uncertain now what’s in it, but swallowing because it’s warm and not burned and tastes like lives we had before.

“I haven’t gotten enough from
you
,” she says, pointing a delicate claw at Cat. “Let’s say this tracker falls off the scent, doesn’t find you bunch of misfits. You’re free and clear, and this one, if his arm don’t fall off, is going west, he won’t stop talking about it, and that one’s circling back to his village one day, though, darling,” turning to me, “I think you’d best wait a year or so to build a name for yourself, take over some of the trade from the upper towns before you approach the Chickasaws. That way you’ll have more pull going in. But
you
. Where are you headed?”

We all wait. We’re sitting on the floor again, and he puts down his plate and rubs his fingers across his lips as if trying to feel for the taste that was just there.

“Carolina,” he says. His voice cracks, and he swallows. “My wife was there.” He digs a hand into his pocket and pulls out a brownish letter. The woman takes it, looks at the address and the scribbles on the back, but when she raises her eyebrows at him and fingers the seal, he takes it back. “Where is it going?” he asks.

She points to the writing on the front. “Camden,” she says. “That’s closer to the upcountry. What’s that river it’s right along?” She’s taking her time, fiddling in her cap, to give him room to find his courage. “Wateree. We had some people from there in the lower towns,” she adds, looking at me.

She finishes her stew and pushes the plate away. Her fingers work at the knot beneath her cap and she pulls it off, stretches her legs out straight, tries to grab her toes. Bob is unusually quiet again, giving Cat space.

“I want to deliver the letter. This.” He shakes the envelope once.

“If you want to take it yourself, you’re heading the wrong way, son. You need to be going east.”

He smiles, the first smile I’ve seen that seems at ease, that comes from some emotion I might find familiar. “I’m afraid,” he says, turning his hands palm up.

She returns his smile and mimics his gesture. I am reminded of a game Oche and I would play after our mother fell asleep. My brother, who today is probably weaving baskets and seeing spirits, all very gently. This quiet exchange is making me sleepy, and I reach for one of the quilts in the pile on the woman’s bed and fold it beneath my head. A black feather floats along the floor next to me. I brush it aside. Bob leans back against the bedpost, and though we are inching away from their intimacy,
we’re listening. This silent man that we have protected, dragged along, refused to abandon, is speaking.

He reaches out for her open hand and holds it in the space between them. He smooths the pink palm with his thumb and then leans close to inspect the lines and scars there. She lets him, as one would humor a child.

“Your hands are even smaller than hers,” he says.

She turns hers over and enfolds his, giving it a squeeze. “Let’s see if I have something here,” she says, hoisting herself up, showing beneath her extravagant skirts that she is shoeless. She bustles into a corner of the kitchen where a stack of rolled and folded papers seems to slide with every loud sound. After shuffling through them, she pulls out a long white scroll and brings it back to Cat, pinning down its corners with a few stones from her windowsill.

“There we are. Now this is us here,” she points, “and this is the trail you fellows came down, and fast, I’m betting. Now,” and she snakes her finger up and to the right like it was traveling in a boat on a river, “way up here is the Carolinas, north and south, and there’s Camden somewhere in this woody part. That’s where you want to go.” She looks up at his face to see if he’s understanding the distance.

He slows his fingers across the map, feeling for mountains.

“Where are your parents, son?”

“Her parents are dead.”

She pulls his hand away from the map. “No, yours.”

“Hers died in a cart on the way to see her. Said it wasn’t her fault.”

“Was she driving the cart?”

“No.”

“Well, there you have it.”

He leaned into a whisper. “But she was bleeding out. I might have stitched her up.”

“That’s maybe a half fault at best, certainly not a whole one. And what can you do now?”

“Suffer.”

“No, no, what can you
really
do? Bring her back? Throw yourself off a tall tree? Crawl into her grave? Think for a minute, son.”

He waits, his hand still draped on her knee where she left it, the map between them. Beside me, Bob has drifted into a doze on the floor. Her voice alone makes us feel blameless. I am proud that I know what can and cannot be done. Though the creek muddled me briefly, and though Polly still has no solution, I need only keep on the same path I’ve been walking; my plans make sense. There is a difference between killers and leaders, though both may take men’s lives. I am neither yet, but I must tell myself there’s a difference so that I can keep following the good path, in hopes of ending up at a good end. Life keeps going, and no man is lost until the end. I must remember to tell Cat this. He is not yet lost.

“Who is still living?” she asks him.

Bob snores lightly with a smile. Cat looks around the room, taking us in. The woman, the once-slave, myself.

“Wash yourself of that,” she says. “Give yourself a good washing. Do only what can be done.” She stands up, pulls him up beside her, takes him to the basin in the corner of the room. She tilts his head above the bowl and pours a jug over his hair, and then digs her fingers into his scalp, pulling out the wet tangles. I expect him to protest, but he stands limply. She is not
gentle with him. “Guilt is a dead weight,” she says. “Get it on out. Hup, hup.” His head jerks with each rough motion of her hands. He murmurs something that sounds like a white man’s prayer.
Our father
.

When she is done, he stands up straight, his hair smooth and plastered against his skull. She holds her tiny face in her hands with pride.

“Feel nicer?”

Bob has woken up with all the splashing. “What’s he getting the fine treatment for?” he asks me. “I wouldn’t mind a scrub.”

Cat, with wide-open hoping eyes, formally kneels on the ground. “I don’t want to have done what I did,” he says.

Bob snorts and shakes his head. “All you did was go swimming.”

“I don’t want to have done it.” Cat is still gazing up at the woman.

“We’ve got a half dozen bodies on our souls,” Bob says, “and you just went paddling around that creek like it was a summertime swim hole.” He pulls his knees up, looks at the woman to convince her. “We’re the ones who killed them all, who got shot for it. He didn’t touch them. He who’s probably the murderer they’re looking for, who knows how to murder, and him even carrying the gun. Just went swimming!” His laugh is uneasy.

I am seeing all this sideways, my head down on the quilt, and I see how much Cat’s jawline is like Bob’s, how their elbows both jut. Their waists meet their hips in a skinny bend. Everyone’s shoes are collapsing.

The woman folds herself down on the floor and pulls Cat’s head into her lap, fidgeting her fingers through the last knots in his hair, and he lets her do this and closes his eyes as he collapses
into the puddle of her skirts, beneath which is just a pile of thin bones.

“I let people die,” he says.

“Shh,” she says. “I know.”

Bob sighs and settles down again.

We fall asleep in crooked shapes on the floor.

IN THE MORNING,
the woman—wearing the same dress, unwrinkled, but capless—pulls the crows from beneath the bed and sets their ruffled bodies on the table and with the strength of someone younger, she tears the birds to pieces. She pulls their wings until they pop darkly and rip free; she twists their heads off, the brimstone paste sending a foul burned smell through their open throats; she yanks at their feet until they come off like fleshy twigs in her hands. Then with grace she gathers the broken pieces and takes them into the garden, where she ties them to sticks with twine and plants them around her fresh stalks of young corn.

She washes her hands from the barrel of rainwater and makes us a pan of fried potatoes for breakfast. The salt smells like everything is all right in the world, or at least in this embrace of a house. When she changes Bob’s bandage, we see that the hole in his skin is starting to scab. Cat touches it.

“What’s it to be, my bandits?”

We are lazily sprawled around the house, waiting for the next task she assigns us. I blink at her slowly, thinking I will offer to find us fresh meat for dinner tonight, something wilder than her hogs.

“I can’t keep you forever. A bunch of highwaymen and a spinster like me, how do you think the neighbors would gossip?
No, sons, I’ve my own business to be about.” She digs in her shelves now, pulling down new powders and ground roots.

Bob is the first to sit up. “I don’t mind,” he says. “It’s time enough for us to be heading on.” He looks at Cat. “Time for me, that is. Right? My shoulder’s fixed, or will be, so— This is how we said it would be.” He stands up and starts sorting his belongings, scooping out a small hand of silver for the woman pounding a poultice in her bowl. “I thank you much for what you’ve done.”

“So you’re just splitting up like strangers?”

“That’s what we are,” I say.

Bob turns to me, determined. “If you go back and take over your town or whatever it is you hope to do, and if you find yourself trading down Pensacola way and you see my woman on my master’s land, tell her that I’m free now, that I know what it is now, that if it means death, I’ll pay. And tell her I’ll come for her.” He looks at Cat again. “And you. There is no crime so black that God don’t see the goodness in us, though it be deep and buried.”

Cat rises and takes Bob’s wrist in his hand and then drops it. He says something so quiet we make him say it again. “I’m not ready.”

“You’ve got the map, don’t you? Aren’t you going to give that letter to the captain’s lady and woo her, or serve her, or bed her, or whatever the plan is?”

“I want to do that after.”

“After what?” I ask.

“Bob,” he says. “Probably can’t buy a farm without a white man’s X. I can do that.”

“You want to come west with me?” After their arguments,
I would’ve thought Bob would be happy to let Cat go, but we have let too many people go. Bob’s face and Cat’s face match, both open. None of us have the language for saying what we need.

We’re all standing now, the woman slowly stirring and smashing, and the safe, sleepy air is being pulled like smoke out the windows.

“If you were to ask me,” she says, pulling her hands from the bowl, wiping them on her apron and rumpling them through her woolly white hair, “and some men don’t, I’d say this is no time yet to be carving yourselves into bits, especially with one of you still healing.” She looks particularly hard at Cat. “Carry on west, I say, keep putting miles between you and the men out there, and when you’ve gone as far as you can without squabbling, without one man saying, ‘I’ve got to be heading the other way entirely!’ then you fall into your separate selves. But you ask me, I’d say you’re still all mushed together.” She funnels the powder into a small glass jar and then brushes her hands over the braided rug, the anonymous dust drifting in a faint cloud to the ground. Would mice later find it and turn to stone?

I falter on the edge of something. After all I’ve done, wanting now to do better.

“At the very least,” she adds, “someone needs to change Bob’s plaster.”

We look at each other, and maybe it’s the sureness of the woman’s voice, how strong it comes out of her small body. Maybe there’s a new weakness in us, or a resistance to do more wrong. We sort our bags, pack them, feel their heaviness on our shoulders again. Cat gives me back the gun.

He folds himself onto the woman, stoops down, small as he
is, to wrap her frailness in his arms, and she laughs and pats his back. Her dark face, pocked and pitted, sits like a bird in the crook of his neck. Bob pulls him away.

We have left her with a supply of wood and a basket of dug vegetables, and her garden now is orderly, except for the bits of stinking crow strapped to poles and flapping in the breeze.

Our shadows slide west between the white oaks and hickories as the light catches in the brambles. All that’s left after the shepherding of these men is to rule my people, and it is the greatest thing I will ever want, and it is the only act that can redeem the blood I’ve spilled and the blood I’ve witnessed, and though I wait for months or years, I will come to it and become a white, white sun for my nation. History is like a map for where to go.

A
FTER THE MEN’S
steps have faded into the general rustling of the woods, I comb my hair back into a decent ribbon, brush the burrs from my stockings, and knock on the door of the lady’s cottage. I briefly consider putting down my gun and sack but would rather appear intimidating than unarmed. I follow not their bodies now but the trail of their intention: I have to speak to the woman myself, in the hopes that she can tell me what my own senses cannot. I have hidden in the brush for most of a day and a night, orbiting this extraordinary household, comprehending nothing. Because I cannot piece together the details I’ve witnessed, it is time to insert myself into the narrative.

The woman who answers is shrunken and balloonish, a lively mix of dark and light. I bow and ask if she can spare water in which to wash my hands.

She blinks once, and just once. “I’d be honored,” she says, sweeping back the door to allow my passage. The ceiling is low, but a fire in the hearth keeps the room warm and snug. Quilts
of all colors pile on the bed. On the shelves along the wall sit an array of vials and sacks, each appearing to contain no more than a few ounces of herb. I place my hand on the back of the chair, my eyebrows raised, and she nods an assent. I sit while she fills a bowl with water from a ewer and carves a sliver of soap for me. After my ablutions, I pick up the black feather on her table and twirl it, first forward then back, between my fingers.

“This is a handsome cottage. You live here alone?”

“Oh,” she says, reaching to relieve me of my bag and gun, placing them against the back wall when I acknowledge that this is acceptable, “it’s a pleasure to have guests. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing keeps me from dying.” She takes the bowl, opens the window into the garden, and throws the dirty water out in a loud splash. She touches a thin necklace that falls into the top of her dress as if to confirm it hasn’t sailed out too.

I rise from the chair, noticing that she has nowhere to sit.

“No, no,” she says, “this is me right here,” and she perches on the edge of her bed, taking a corner of the quilt to play with in her hand.

“You must have seen a wealth of men pass through these woods. What a remarkable vantage for a woman to possess.”

She looks around as if to verify this, and then agrees. “There’s more to be seen than what they tell me, that’s for certain. Men, you know, don’t tend to chat much about their hearts.”

“Well, it’s a delicate organ.”

Her fingers are strumming in the quilt as if she were writing down the words I spoke, but I come to understand that she is picking out the threads of the joining squares, plucking them free with her fingernails and then suggesting her thin finger beneath the loops to finish the job of pulling. She does this remark
ably fast; after just a short monologue of mine on the weather, two squares have already become detached from the scheme. She never looks at what she does, but sits there quite calmly, her feet dangling youthfully from the edge of the bed, kicking into the covers, while this lovely construction comes apart under the idle spell of our conversation. Will she stitch it back together after I’ve gone? If I stay long enough, will she disassemble the remaining pieces of her house? Unpeg her meager furniture, unleaven her bread?

Below her dress, her toes spread so wide, each wandering off in its own particular direction, that I have to assume she’s never worn shoes.

I point to a calumet she has above her hearth, an object I’ve not seen before in the house of a woman, and displayed so idly. “Were you long with the Creeks?”

She leans onto her knees, which are hardly discernible under the delta of her skirts. “I’d guess you had a very proper mother.”

I sift through my stories of her, hoping to land upon a kind one, but all I can recall is the sound of the closing door and the hard beat of her shoes as she walked away, leaving me to confront myself. I smile. “We lived in the Ardennes, and I’m afraid were rather distant.”

“Sons,” she says, and shakes her head. “There was a man just here who never had a mother.”

I sit up. “I imagine men here don’t even need mothers, nor any other prop.”

“Here?” she says. “Where’s here? What gave you to think that?”

“Did the man say where he was bound?”

“Where are men bound who have no mothers?”

“I meant that there is such infinite space in this country. It would seem that only someone free from encumbrances could properly claim it, someone free of family, or class. I’ve traveled extensively and—”

“Is that a riddle? I’m a woman who likes sense.”

“I’d merely suggest that—”

“Are you a sheriff?”

I laugh. “No, madame.”

“Are you afraid of justice?”

I cannot prevent my brow from furrowing. “Not of a certain variety, no.”

When the squares of the quilt are entirely unattached, she stacks them in a short tower on her lap and then fans herself with them.

The afternoon sun that falls though the open doors and windows like a drunken guest begins dropping, the shadows stretching longer and the early gnats and mosquitoes hovering drowsily with the motes, coming periodically to examine our ears. I offer to prepare a light supper for us both, and she rises from the bed to give me a tour of her kitchen implements and to advise on the quality of the kindling, which this time of year burns slow on account of the damp. Her shelves of herbs intrigue me, but I restrict myself to what I know. In a flat iron pan I craft a simple omelette, the eggs from a lone chicken that she says has survived the rampaging of her hogs. I whip in sliced onions and a dash of pepper, coarser ground than I’m accustomed to, and in a separate pot beside the fire I roast some of the carrots and parsnips the lady has recently dug from her garden, or that the men dug for her. For the omelette, she offers some dried mushrooms from a jar, which politeness demands I add, and I stir a sauce of ground garlic and
nuts for the vegetables that adopts a flavor almost of cream. She lights the candles in the dark corners of the house and pushes the table up to the bed so we can dine at the same height. When we sit down with our tin plates, quilt squares for napkins across our laps, I can see I’ve sparked a dignity in her. She eats with punctilious grace, dabbing her mouth occasionally, her back straight, her elbows light, as though she were sitting before a sheet of music. We do not speak while we eat; food here, as in France, has a sacrosanct quality to it. In the moment of consumption, we are connected through all the layers of linen and leather, of wood and iron, right down to the soil beneath us and the bounty it produces from the muck of decay.

After, as she boils water for coffee and fiddles in her shelves, I lean back in my chair and stroke my fingers across my whiskers to clean them. Where did she come from, this raisin-faced lady with her rural grammar and indeterminate skin? Sometimes I feel my life is carrying me from refinement, with its handmaidens of hypocrisy and loneliness, deeper and deeper into a purity of both landscape and temperament. From my mother’s fastidious gardens I have traveled first to Norway and then to America, to the riotous Boston and the southern colonies and then the southern wilds, where Indians control both war and trade, and I have landed on the western edge of all my travels, here, in a house in a meadow with a lady mystic. I am charmed. I am arriving at the heart of something.

“I must thank you for this hospitality,” I say, setting down my empty mug. The coffee tasted richer than any I’ve had, almost as though a fine loam had been stirred in.

“And you for the victuals,” she says. “I should kill that chicken, for every other egg’d be a disappointment.”

“The man you mentioned—you never saw him before?”

“I only see the men you see,” she says, and her face becomes momentarily dim, so that I can’t quite recall if she’s wearing a wild white cap or if that is just her hair. “Is it better to have a man visit, knowing he’ll pick up and leave and not come back, or not to have a man at all?”

I tilt my head to one side, feeling uncertain in my stomach. Vases that I thought held flowers are actually stuffed with palm spines.

She throws the dishes out the window where the water went before, and climbs into her disordered, dequilted bed, voluminous skirts and all. She pulls her necklace free from the folds of her dress, and I can see the two rings there, knocking against each other as she settles herself. One a heavy band, and one thin with a green stone. When I thought of the empty room in the manor house, did this creature creep into the memory and watch? I cannot ask how she came by my mother’s rings. She pulls an old wool blanket beneath her chin. “Would you rather die, mister, or not have been born?”

I stand and push my chair beneath the table.

“Are you looking for something, or are you running from something?”

I pull on my coat and find my gun and sack by the door.

“Do you judge another by how he looks, or what he does, or what he means?”

I snap my feet together and, despite some unsteadiness, give the lady a gracious bow.

“What kind of knowing could get you to what a man means?”

Her eyes are closed now, though she continues to pose questions to herself. I blow out the candles but leave the embers warm in the hearth.

“All of us broken before our mothers bore us, crows and men alike. Sticks in search of grace.”

I kiss her forehead, which smells of cedar, and depart.

IT IS NOT
difficult to find the men’s trail again, though I am temporarily disordered by the lady’s vegetable garden, which smells strongly of gunpowder and has what appears to be shreds of flesh lashed to poles in between the lettuces. Though I am a generation removed from jumping to conclusions of sorcery, I cannot help wondering what mischief this woman gets up to in such a lonely place, surrounded by herbs and potions and carnivorous hogs. My forehead is touched with a faint sweat.

In the darkness, I regret leaving my horse on the main trail with the other men in my party. It is a wonder the outlaws came so far without steeds, and foolish, but I follow in their lead. I will be curious to see, when I return to the trailside tavern with my victims, if my Creek companions are still where I left them, or if they have tired of the Frenchman’s idiosyncrasies. Without the ability to watch their faces at close range, how would I have understood what these men were after, or known what course to take? I certainly don’t dispense justice blindly. But my feet are not so sure as a horse’s, and in crossing the meadow toward the woods, I fall once, my foot caught briefly in a dip of earth. I reassure myself that the woman is securely in her bed and the men I’m after are a few miles on; the only witness to my tumble is the vulture that’s circling the garden.

They still head west. Which one of them has no mother? The deeper I follow them, the wilder the woods become, the undergrowth craning up into thickets where the Indians have not burned in years. In March, everything is made new again. The
structure of the trees fills out greenly once more, and the beasts that hid in the winter come forth to show their young the tricks for finding nourishment. The old and the innocent, all bound in the same wheel of time that rolls over man and creature alike. What dies becomes born again; what we kill will feed the fungus. Any act, however cruel, will fold around until it buoys some other scheme.

There is something of America in all this. I know decrepit monarchy and how intoxicating the rot can be, but the ancient ties keep all men bound in an unassailable web of relation. My father was a minor noble because his father was, and back; I doubt there was a peasant among us. But we have duties to those peasants, and they to us, and so we are all mired in a hierarchy that, if not flexible, is at the very least explicable. We do not worry so much about who we are. There is a desperation about these men that suggests they do not reside on the rung of the criminal but, like all men here, are pursuing what might be called advancement, or hope. Their success or failure will, I can’t help but believe, be a reflection on the project of this country. And yet I am the only man on their trail, the only man who may behold their fates. This strikes me as peculiarly lonely.

I have a notebook and pencil with which I record such thoughts, but for these observations to rise to the level of argument, to become a treatise fit for a scientific journal, I must explain the why behind these men. And that I cannot yet do. My hypotheses are useless without more data.

A few hours before daylight, I find the smell of burned wood. Sweat mixed with sadness, and the musk of the unwashed. There they are, in a ring between a stand of trees, their bodies spreading out from the dead fire like spokes. The black man starfished,
the white man inches away from the other’s warmth, and the Indian, who has pulled a cage of branches over his blanketed body to defend himself from some invisible hand. Such various sheep from God’s flock, gone astray. I ache to see them still together.

My head is still mothy from the woman’s drink, and the bushes look bigger than they should, so I find a hollow not too distant and curl up for an hour or two, my body knowing how to never fully sleep.

THE FIRST DAY
after the cottage, the men are oddly quiet, as though they are embarrassed still to be walking the same path and yet too relieved to speak of it. The black man generally leads the party now, though it’s evident he has no sense of direction, for every few minutes when he cannot decide how to proceed he stops to let the Indian overtake him. I’m fortunate that the leaves along the ground are soft and damp with spring, so that the other men’s steps mask my own.

I learn little when they do not speak, so my mind drifts instead to my future: I return to Paris with my article on the foundation of man’s common nature, his natural and God-given equality, and am trumpeted by the king as a beacon of reform,
merci
, after which I ride to my villa to present my wife with gifts from the Indians, and we embrace and move to a house in the city where we can see all the people at once, nobles and poor, and can observe as they blend together over the years like a fine, shaken sediment, and I will cease being lonely in all that human array. And we shall have a cat. If it takes these criminals to get me there, so be it, and though I will look for kinship among them, I will not become attached. In the short term, they are merely a job I have been given by my employer.