Citizens Creek (3 page)

Every morning, Cow Tom led Old Turtle out of his cabin, and settled him in the out-of-doors with his corncob pipe and guiding stick. He propped him up at the stout base of the same cypress tree
by the river, in the shade, spreading a blanket over his legs, and left Old Turtle to fend for himself while he worked, leaving a supply of river water and a bean pie or slab of cold
sofki
. Toward evening, Cow Tom returned him to his shack. Either he or Amy looked in on Old Turtle as best they could throughout the day.

Amy looked up first, and Cow Tom quickened his step to join them.

“Ready?” he asked Old Turtle.

Completely blind, his hands in constant tremble, Old Turtle turned toward Cow Tom. “Time for me and you to talk,” he said.

Amy stood. “I’d best be getting to fixing supper,” she said, and she slipped away, leaving him alone with Old Turtle. Cow Tom squatted in the dirt and waited.

“She gone?” Old Turtle asked.

“Yes.”

“She’s the right one for you. Amy.”

“So she swayed you to her side,” said Cow Tom.

“You jumped the broom, married now, a man full-grown. And soon enough, a father.”

Cow Tom nodded, though Old Turtle couldn’t see it, sure there was death talk to follow. Old Turtle lived less and less in this world, and more within his preparations to depart.

“My time is coming. Everybody needs somebody on this earth, ’specially you. Choose wise, but careful to give back in kind. You’re not the motherless child no more.”

Cow Tom held himself tight. After his mother was snatched from the Old Place, Old Turtle never talked about her, or said her name, or referred to her even in passing, and Cow Tom didn’t push, as if by asking, his mother might slip from his grasp entirely.

“You’re the closest I got to family, and now you’ve age enough to bind my claim of fours,” Old Turtle said. “I been watching, all these years, from the Old Place to this. You got your ways to make things come out one way over another. When my time comes, you the one to do the digging. Don’t let them leave me alone until I go in
the ground, four days later. The night before, hold service and talk good about me. Bury my walking stick and my drinking gourd and a cup of coffee and an apple with me, and you and Amy give me the farewell handshake. Make sure the grave is covered complete, and keep the rain from over my head till I’m gone west. Build a house over the grave so when my spirit wanders for a bit and makes the last visits, it knows where to come back to. And gunshots, four, one in each direction.”

“I can do most,” said Cow Tom, “but Chief Yargee won’t shoot guns for us.”

Old Turtle lit his pipe, a slow process. He had to feel for the dent of the bowl, tap in the pinch of tobacco. He didn’t want Cow Tom’s help, except to marry the flame.

“We might get Saturdays and Mondays for ourself, and could do worse owned by other than Upper Creek and Massa Yargee, but slave is still slave. Don’t forget it.” A bit of tobacco spilled from the bowl of the pipe and fell down the front of his shirt. “That said, you got powers to do what I ask,” Old Turtle insisted. “Those shots give my spirit time to go the way of the sun, to join family and friends gone before.”

“Why would Chief Yargee listen to me?”

“Don’t talk foolish. I don’t have time enough,” said Old Turtle. “You know you got something big in you, boy.”

“What I know of cattle I learned from you,” Cow Tom admitted.

“I showed you this and that, and you took to it, but it’s not cattle I’m talking about,” Old Turtle said. “Maybe that’s most what Massa Yargee notices right now, but it’s matching up words to people and meanings and happenings that serves you best.”

Old Turtle felt around, his trembly hand patting at the blanket. Cow Tom thought he’d lost his pipe in the folds until he realized the blind man was searching for him, for the touch of him. Cow Tom leaned close, and awkwardly put his hand on the quilt covering the old man’s knees.

“Your mama, she was smart that way too,” Old Turtle said.

Cow Tom quickly drew his hand back. He covered his confusion by hoisting Old Turtle and helping him to his feet.

“Time to get you inside,” Cow Tom said. He led Old Turtle to his cabin, matching his gait to the old man’s, and got him settled.

“Remember what I ask,” said Old Turtle as he left.

Next morning, Cow Tom came to collect Old Turtle for the day. The small cabin, always dim, seemed a different shade of black inside, cold and foreboding. A dim glow of embers remained in the fireplace, mostly ash now, but there was a stillness hung over the room. Cow Tom stepped slowly into the darkness, and knew before he came to the narrow cot that the figure under the threadbare cover had crossed to the other side. He didn’t have the right to touch or handle the dead, not until he drank the red root and purged, but he sat on the old three-legged stool next to the cot for a moment to collect his heart, permitting himself to stare once more at the old man’s face. He couldn’t stay, a day of chores and the herd needing his attention, but he couldn’t leave just yet. He waited until the last ember in the fireplace turned black, and the fire ceased to be.

Old Turtle was dead. His mentor had left him.

And Cow Tom’s last link to his mother was gone.

Chapter 4

COW TOM THRASHED
about the better part of the night trying to figure how to persuade Chief Yargee to fire guns at a slave’s funeral.

“You’ll find a way,” Amy said into the darkness beside him, but his mind still churned after she fell into a soft snore.

The next day in the pasture, he practiced first one speech and then another on his cows, the knot of his stomach pulling ever tighter than a fist, but no argument seemed quite right, quite convincing enough, and time ran short.

He came straight from his work in the pasture to Yargee’s log house, and presented himself at the back door. Sarah, the cook, let him in, a skinny Negro woman twice Cow Tom’s age who ate better than anyone black or Indian, but never put on the weight of someone whose stock and trade is food. He stood in the kitchen for quite some time until Yargee was through with his evening meal, reminded the while by the rumbling of his stomach that he should have stopped for his own supper first.

Finally, Yargee met him on the back porch. The chief towered over Cow Tom, unusually tall for a Creek. He seemed in a foul mood, annoyed at being called out, and Cow Tom considered coming back in the morning, when he might be more receptive. The chief was changeable, ill-tempered and rigid one day, and full of humor the next. But Cow Tom plunged ahead.

“Old Turtle’s dead,” Cow Tom said.

Chief Yargee softened a bit. “I am sorry to hear,” he said. “We’ll put him to ground tomorrow, before sundown.”

“He asked after the Creek way. Buried in four days.”

Chief Yargee considered. “That’ll be all right.”

“I’ll dig the hole,” said Cow Tom. “People be coming by the cabin to see him the night before. He’ll be ready.”

“All right.” Yargee turned to go, their business finished.

Cow Tom thought of Old Turtle, how sure he’d been his charge could represent him.

“He wanted shots fired,” Cow Tom said, before he lost Yargee back into the house. A throbbing started up at his temple, gaining speed. He wondered if Chief Yargee could see it. He had to fight to keep his voice even. “A service with shots fired. I thought to clear that by you.”

Yargee squinted at Cow Tom, his face clouded. “Shots are for warriors. Upper Creek warriors.”

Cow Tom tasted a sickening sourness at the base of his tongue. “Old Turtle served the tribe,” he said. “Served the tribe better than most.” The words pushed out hard and fast, far louder than he expected.

The tightness in Chief Yargee’s face deepened, and he folded his arms across his chest.

Cow Tom knew then that he was done, that he’d been denied, but he couldn’t seem to stop. “Old Turtle saved the whole herd from milk sickness after we first came here. He thought himself Creek. Like the rest of us.”

Yargee’s voice turned cold. “He’ll have a fitting service. Go along now.”

The throbbing turned to a hammer and pounded out everything else. “We
are
Creek. We
are
. Old Turtle earned those burying shots.”

“You forget yourself, boy. Back down or pay the price.”

Cow Tom looked down at his hands, balled into tight fists. What Chief Yargee meant was that Old Turtle would have a fitting service for a slave, despite his the high-handed talk about how
they were members of the tribe too. Yargee loved a good celebration, whether for life or death or any reason in between, and Cow Tom should have appealed to that instinct in seeking permission for gunshots. Instead, he’d squandered his one opportunity without figuring out how to read the man properly. It was a mistake. His mistake. A coward’s mistake. Slowly, he unclenched his fists and contorted his face to a docile mask. He backed out of the house and made his way back to the Quarter.

Coward, he told himself. He was a coward. He couldn’t show anger. He was slave. But still. He didn’t have it in him to be special.

Cow Tom failed. He’d failed Old Turtle.

After the burial, they gathered outside Old Turtle’s cabin, all the slaves, but Cow Tom’s mood turned dark. Once Amy performed the purification, he went back to his cabin and fell onto the thin mattress as if drunk, although he hadn’t a drop to drink. Something had been severed, a ragged incision that left him without defense. He was alone, pinned in place on the sweated cot. Old Turtle was gone, his faith in his young charge misplaced. The bitter sickness eating at Cow Tom’s insides reminded him of those days just after his mother was taken, and the world around him turned more and more gray, until little had meaning. He finally fell asleep, or something close to it, but jerked awake in terror, searching out something familiar. The night was pitch-black, no light coming through the small window, and Amy sat beside the bed. She had put a poultice on his forehead, and he grabbed at the wrapping cloth and flung it across the room. She was talking to him, but he didn’t hear what she said, he didn’t care what she said. He turned his back to her and curled up into himself, his hands over his ears until the talking stopped.

“Tom.”

Amy again. Must be morning this time. No difference, so long as he didn’t slip back into sleep, and his mother’s port-stained face, mouth open in scream, awaiting him in every dream. His limbs seemed too leaden to lift, his eyes hurt too much to open, and his ears were too tired to listen.

“You have to get up. I told him I’m treating you for the fever, but Chief Yargee can’t be put off much longer. You have to go back to work.”

Dark. It was all too dark for Cow Tom to see.

“Tom.”

Her voice was far away.

“If not for you, or for me, for your son,” Amy said.

His wife’s voice was measured, impossible for him to block.

“Get up for your son, so he knows from the start how a man does.”

If she had shown panic, or desperation, or anger, if she had pleaded, Cow Tom wasn’t sure she could have broken through his fog. But as she repeated herself, over and over, he considered the curious possibility of following the clear, bright line of her voice from the depths of the hole in which he found himself, just for awhile, just to see where it led, and then he opened his eyes, bringing her into focus. She was calm, in a chair by the bedside, sweating lightly, one hand on the high bump of her overripe belly, a strange intensity in those sable-brown eyes that held him steady.

With the connection made, she spoke new words.

“I will give you sons,” Amy said in Mvskoke.

“We are your family,” she said in Hitchiti.

“I will give you sons. We are your family,” she repeated in English. “Go on. Get up now.”

Cow Tom struggled to his feet, fighting the pull to crawl back under the covers. The sun had barely broken the seal of the night. He was still in his grieving clothes, shirt and leggings, his moccasins on the floor, close to the bed. Amy must have removed them. Cow
Tom put them on slowly, and set off to the pasture to relieve his wife’s brother in the tending of the herd. He was bone tired, and he was hungry, but comforted that Amy would bring his breakfast out to the field to him soon enough, surely before the sun rose too far in the sky.