Free Men (8 page)

A shuffling up ahead sends us over the bank, and while we’re waiting there I think,
Good thing we lost the horse
, which is of course foolishness because if we had the horse we’d maybe already be where we’re headed, and once again Cat strikes me as a useless sort. This close, his smell scratches at my nose, all sweaty and sad.

“You need a good washing.” He doesn’t answer. “Why don’t
you stay in these parts and get a bed somewhere? Some place near a river you can splash in? Ain’t you got any money?”

“Not enough to last.”

“So you want to start over, be a frontier man, like me.” I put my finger to my lips, but it’s just a woodpecker flailing away somewhere up high. Always wondered where all the bits go when he pecks that hole. Guess they’re so little they land on leaves and sit there till it’s windy.

“I’m just waiting,” he says.

The traders have passed now, and we’re holding our breath a few minutes before we get back on the trail again. This is part of being cautious. “On what? A letter? News from home? Your daddy’s sick, and you waiting on his fortune?”

He shakes his head. “On God. I suppose.”

I don’t even know what question you ask after that. If he killed a man, maybe he’s worrying about judgment, but then if he’s got God on his mind, doesn’t seem like he’d have killed a man. I stare at him out the corners of my eyes, not turning my head, hoping he won’t notice I’m staring. A handsome face, if you look at it sideways, though it could sure use some cleaning.

“He’s going to send you a message?”

“Kill me. Or save me.”

That right there is why I won’t have no part of Christian nonsense. I do a quick prayer in case there is a God, of black men and not just white, and then I slide down the bank again and promise myself I won’t ask anything else for at least an hour.

I’m telling some story about the time Old Joe taught me and Primus how to pull a thread out of a shirt so we could tie it around a fishhook without the whole shirt coming undone when Cat stops and I see the white man coming south on foot, which is
why we didn’t hear him. I’m trying to think whether we should play deaf-master again, but Cat puts a hand on my arm and says that he would like to try.

“Hold up,” I say.

He raises his hand in a salute, and the man up the road waves back.

“No, no, no,” I say, but can’t spit out the rest:
You a white man, and cannot be trusted
. This is all a fine journey until the white man gets chatty, and white men together will always vote two against me, no matter how different their mothers were. But now the other fellow’s too close for me to say more, or to slap Cat once across the face, so I think about just running. Just starting to run, and seeing what happens.

The other man’s got a heavy beard and smells like he hasn’t put down the bottle in a while. “If you ain’t got a horse, why don’t you ride your boy?” He grins, and one tooth is purple-black.

“Safe travels to you,” Cat says. By his stiffness I reckon he’s pretending to be a master. I’m holding my breath, waiting for what else he’s going to say.

“You all don’t look much better off than me. Got any money to you?”

Now’s the time when we both should run, but I doubt Cat knows that, and if I hie off alone, there may be a musket ball waiting for me somewhere in that man’s coat. Or maybe the road’s just full of kindly robbers today, and we’ll all latch together and sing songs. If he reaches in that coat, doesn’t matter, I’m gone.

“No money but the coin of the Lord,” Cat says.

The man twists his head around like he’s tasted something bad.

“Missionaries. Myself and this, my slave. Can you count the last day you heard the Gospel?”

“Shit,” the man says.

Cat looks over and flicks his hand at me like he wants my bag, so I toss it to him and he starts rustling through it. “If you will stay and hear a little of the Word,” he says, but the other man’s already edging off.

This white man has picked me, all-black, over that white man. May not have been me exactly that he was picking, but he didn’t turn me in or shoot me or ride me like a lost horse, not yet, and that is something to remember.

The other man’s coattails flap around the bend and he’s gone. I laugh and give old Cat a hard whack and say, “Doing the Lord’s work!” but his smile is small, like it took all his energy to play that short game. We trudge north again and my heart is a little more steady, for whatever raggedy doomed dream this is, at least I know it’ll last a few hours more than I figured.

We’ve almost run out of good food, and I’m starting to wonder how we’ll keep feeding ourselves. I’m not much for catching wild animals. I knew boys who got good at hunting things at night so they wouldn’t have to eat only the dull corn and half-rotten meat the master threw at us, but I never fought against what was. If my food was bad, that meant food was bad, and maybe you’d sneak a peach from the basket delivered to the big house, but that was only if no one was around and no one had been around for at least an hour. It took me how many years after my brother took his life before I said enough? I try counting on my fingers. One, two, five, over to the other hand, some more years, seventeen. I’ve missed my brother for seventeen years.

I smell smoke, and then Cat’s stomach comes at me loud as an
overseer. I let my nose sniff us toward it until the smoke smell turns salty and warm. I’m feeling new confident after Cat’s antics and figure we can take whatever mystery’s waiting around that fire. We scramble up through the brush and over the bank and there, sunk in a clearing, is a pigeon roasting on a spit, as haloed as the baby Jesus, and behind the fire is an Indian standing with his bow drawn and his arrow pointed straight at one of our faces, I can’t tell which.

I grab Cat’s arm. We must look like two statues, just waiting. The Indian waits. It’s too early on the trip to perish, so I call halloo. He brings his arms down so the arrow’s pointing at our feet, and then I can see his face, which looks like maybe something I’ve seen before.

“You a trader?” I ask, but too quiet because I’m scared of frighting him, so he doesn’t hear. “You trade skins?” I say louder, and he puts down his bow. I heard Indians aren’t afraid of anyone but Indians.

We come half-stepping closer, or I do and pull Cat behind me. “I bring rum up to the villages,” I say, miming a drink with my hand,
glug glug
. “Tuckabatchee, Tallassee.” He blinks a few times, so I go on. “This here’s a friend who’s awful hungry. Don’t want to impose, but smelled the fine cooking and could offer something in exchange.” I look back at Cat, whose eyebrows go up. “Or we could just be good company, tell you a tale.” I don’t know how much of this he’s getting, but I’m doing various things with my hands to put him at ease, making peaceable gestures and whatnot.

“Sit down,” he says, and then takes his bow and walks off into the woods—as it turns out, to shoot us another couple pigeons.

“Now there’s a man for you can hunt animals,” I tell Cat.

When we’re all cozy with meat in our mouths, he and I talk about the journeys we’ve made on this one path, back and forth. He does English very well. Some of the Creeks I’ve met, especially on the road, are remarkable good at this and I only know a few words in their tongue. As our bellies fill up, I say maybe we should be getting along, no point dilly-dallying. But the Indian nods over at Cat, and I’ll be damned if that white man isn’t fast asleep, cross-legged, his hands folded neat in his lap, his head bobbing along on his chest like a nut in a stream. I come all over with a kind of affection for him, sitting so quiet there though he’s with two strangers who carry killing weapons. It’s enough to think that he wouldn’t mind being killed, and because I myself am nowhere near so much despair, it makes me sad for him. Makes me wonder what all he lost, to have nothing left to hold on to.

So I sit a little longer with the Indian and we get to talking about this and that, whatever subjects we both have words for, and I tell him he looks familiar. He looks at me and nods and then sure enough, I say you’re the one I’ve traded rum for skins with once or twice, and he says you’re the one that goes on and on with tales once you get started; you’re the one that bargains so hard, I say, and you’re the one who rides a horse, he says, like it was a rare pleasure.

Maybe Cat’s got me in the mood for getting close to folks, or maybe it’s how the hot food steams up my belly, but I drop a hint like I’m looking for another path altogether.

“This isn’t your master?” he says. He has scooped together all the leaves close by and stacked them in a pile, neat, with the edges matching.

“Well, no, not when you put it quite so. We’re just walking
alongside for a bit. I’m headed up to your people with some letters—that is, I was until old fool here set my horse free—but my plan, roundabout, is to take myself on a longer route. For reasons.”

“You’re escaped.”

“No, no, I’m doing my duty. Just a little extra in mind.” His coolness is waking me up fast, and the leaves trouble me. “For my master back home. He’s the one wants me to head west, afterward.”

I can usually tell an Indian at peace, and this one here has something twitchy going on in his eyes that’s not ordinary; he may snatch me up, after all that, with Cat asleep and none the wiser.

“It’s not my concern,” he says, “what you do.”

“I’m not doing but what my master ordered. Straight and narrow.”

“I’m escaped too.”

We watch each other for a minute or so, him wrought up in the eyes, but not on my account—he doesn’t have the least fear of either of us, simpletons that we are, and to any other man watching he’d probably seem mighty easy. But I know what it looks like.

“Who from?” I ask.

He looks straight up, but I don’t hear any birds. “Where do you want to go?”

“West,” I say. If I only speak in short words, maybe he’ll like me more.

“There’s a spur trail, just over a day’s walk south from here.” He shows me with his hands pointed forward, together. “You must have passed it and not seen. It heads west.”

“Reckon I better see it this time, then, or I’ll walk right into my master’s arms again, and I don’t think either of us’d be laughing at that. Thank you,” I add, going back to short words.

“I can show you. I’m going south too, for hunting. What about the white man?”

I look over and see what he means. Cat seems like no more than a pile of sticks, or fine china all broken up and put back together. I smile and stretch my legs out in front of me, so the fire will warm my feet. The Indian sits so still that if I didn’t know he was there, I’d think his shape was just a hunch of rock.

“Why does he follow you?”

“Some folks just have no place to go,” I say.

“You’re not traveling with him farther?”

“Well,” I say. Even an Indian knows better than to fall in with a white man. But he’s been useful twice now. “We leave him here and he won’t make it much longer than a day, the way I figure. I don’t even think he’d eat for himself. Saw a man coming up said they were looking for a fellow who fit that description, wanted for murder.” The Indian’s eyebrow seems to rise, but that may be just a trick of falling light, so I go on. “So either he’s a rascal and we’re best shed of him, in which case no worry here, or he’s just a poor kind of man who needs a hand up.” I stop, because what I’m saying is such foolishness, you don’t just pick up men on the road and carry them with you, no matter how bag-of-bones they are. But he’s a good listener, I tell the Indian, sharp ears, and if we’re spending any more time on the trail, why, it’s better to be three men than two.

I don’t know if this is true, but I push back from the fire and let my body sprawl out next to Cat, shuffling around a bit to settle myself in place. I made all that fuss to get away from folks,
and here I am gathering up whoever I can find. Idiot Bob, that’s what they’ll call me. I have to close my eyes tight so I don’t see the Indian still sitting there, maybe thinking of how he can get rid of the two of us at once. If I were picking a man to sleep next to, I’d pick the maybe-murderer over the Indian any night, and I can’t say why except something about him makes me trust. A man that lonely-looking would do anything to be in company again.

SOME BLACK SMELL
comes furrowing in and splits my dream in two, and before I even wake, I think,
Damn you, Winna—double damn you
, and I sit up like a dead man with my eyes still closed, flinging one arm out in remembrance of the night bugs, and pray that Primus hasn’t set the big house on fire, or maybe that he has. I open one eye, and I am not in my cabin with my brother’s shoes lying empty by the door, and I am not in my shack with a woman’s arm flopped across my chest. I’m in the woods, and a white man is pivoting a squirrel on the spit, its tail flopping through the fire, flicking around the sparks, and my heart is a little pained from not finding myself home. The Indian stands there watching, not an expression on his face, which leads me to think he must find something funny—or else he’s angry, I can’t tell which, damn Indians—and Cat’s quiet as ever, looking hurt, so I open the other eye and say, “You stop it now. Go on and give that beast a rest.”

I stretch up and grab yesterday’s shirt and wrap it around the black-burned tail with one hand while I saw it off the ass with the other. “No one teach a man how to cook,” I say, shaking my head, and toss the tail as far as it’ll go, which is about as far as the Indian, those things being all hair and not carrying much
weight. The Indian looks at it and looks at me and sidles a few feet to the left, with that look of disdain, or maybe affection.

When the ground rat finishes cooking, Cat cuts it up in three and eats his share straight off the bone, a pocket of blood oozing out down his chin. He’s the savage here, no doubt. If he were a dog, he’d either be the one that’s been kicked too much and wants a pat or the one that’s about to start foaming. I finish my two bites of rangy squirrel and fiddle around in my sack to check for the lace cookies I nabbed from my master’s kitchen. The things are damn tough, but they hold up for days and sit in your stomach like guests waiting for company. I don’t plan to share.