Free Men (19 page)

They don’t respond.

“Only time you make a noise is if you fall off.”

Silence.

I kick the horse a couple of times before it senses what I’m after. In the tarry dark, no sun to follow, I aim it for the north road, away from Pensacola, toward Indian lands, toward paths that go west and somewhere near my daughters’ father.

After about a mile the horse figures out how to gallop, and we all make little noises like women and clutch each other hard.

I
ADMIT TO BEING
lonely for my horse. Though she did not speak, she seemed to understand me with her muscles and fur, and now that I’m alone in the woods, peering at the little breakages of sticks that suggest a man’s footstep, I think how much better it is to be seen even by a beast than not at all. How lucky these men are that I am hunting them.

I am already disheveled from a night in the open air, though I have a sturdy blanket that wraps beneath and above me, just the size to warm one person. The forest here has been burned by Indians within the past year, so a fine layer of ash still lies under the winter leaves, and my breeches are sooty. I address my hair, but without a glass I cannot confirm its arrangement. The criminals will not care how I look; they’ll only see me for a minute at most as free men. Then, depending on their instincts and response, they will either be killed by my own hand or taken back to Hillaubee to be killed by Seloatka, who in these uncertain
territories happens to be the chief of all of us. I use a dogwood twig to clean my teeth.

My Indian wife has covered the bottom of my boots with a soft felt, and I walk quickly on the balls of my feet into the dawn. A casual listener might interpret the noises I make as a dry wind, or the distant patter of a riverbed. Birds that avoid me on horseback congregate when I’m on foot, as though I leave uncovered seeds in my wake. You cannot love a bird as you love a horse, perhaps because the eyes have no rest in them, but I assume some tissue connects them just as the species of humans are joined. Do both feel no sorrow? I scare up a barred owl, the only kind I know that can hunt his prey with light, and I pause as it falls from its branch in a heavy swoop, gliding off through the beams of March. It would have been easier to study the animals of the New World than its inhabitants. I would face less resistance, and would by now be already published. It is not wild to imagine that my father, wherever he is, might read my name in a borrowed journal and feel some pride. But I pursue my interests not because of but in spite of my lineage. I am tired of its stale order; surely I am not the first to see that it has no future in a world increasingly scientific and democratic.

And here in these woods, in these endless, wall-less woods, not a soul can say I do not belong.

I play a game with myself: How did a white man meet a black man meet an Indian? The white man is the negro’s master, and the Indian a hired guide. The Indian and the white man are trading partners, and they purchased a black man to do the shooting. The black man and the Indian are both slaves, fugitive, and they found some low drunkard in a tavern to join their scheme. They are all sons of the same mother, born of three separate fathers. If this story is ever told, will someone ask what a Frenchman was
doing on their trail? Will this become the sort of tale where even the name of my horse is remembered?

I could stay here and never return to any company and become a man entirely attuned to the seasons, who after several years loses the gift of speech, then of empathy; maybe that’s what it would take to make me miss my mother’s garden.

And then I see them.

The light is still dim, but the figures moving at the farthest edge of the forest are bipedal and slow. They are each earth-colored, as though the dirt has ballooned up into the shapes of men.

I HAVE SPENT
my life looking for them.

I said I left my wife because I was bored and unhappy with our privacy, lonely again within our walls, but this was only a partial truth; I made these confessions to her but had no firm thought of escape until she left on a Tuesday and came back on a Thursday and said she had been in another man’s bed. What did I expect? I had been the first to profit from her disloyalty, and surely could not assume a complete reform. I asked her to explain her behavior, and she asked me to explain mine. Love is not giving up, she said. I felt, with some righteousness, that she had gone further in the direction of giving up than I, but she believed that mine was the first offense and deserved repayment.

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked her. “Are you unhappy?”

“Ask yourself that,” she said.

I wanted to inquire if she loved me but could not bring myself to, not wanting to hear her deny it. I felt newly forsaken.

“You’re a decent man,” she said, “and moderately clever. You’ll sort it all out. You’ll see what I mean. Then, if you like, we can try again.”

We fought for three days and, despite using all the reason and passion at our disposal, came to no conclusion.

I was brokenhearted, not because I lost her particular love, but because now there was no one to call me theirs.

I packed two sturdy suitcases and threw myself recklessly onto the world, searching for a place free from the strict classifications of France so that I might write about it with the sheen of discovery and rebuild my self-esteem. I was more than just a lover, and grew grateful that she had freed me to become what I considered the apex of modern society: that is to say, a scholar.

Because the earliest ship out of Dunkerque was northern bound, I went first to Norway, where the atlas of my childhood had shown mountains that looked as frothy as waves or piling clouds. I believed the Arctic ice would hold something elemental, but I found a society little different from the one I left, with each man in his house and frightened of what he didn’t know. I can’t say much of my time there because I was still engaged mostly in my own misery, a condition that is anathema to pure observation. I was cold, and the women reminded me of her, their every glance suggesting infidelity. Tiring of the snow, I boarded a boat for the New World. We were told that the American was calling himself an individual, that there at last was a country free from the fetid strictures of the past. At each juncture I did write a letter to my wife, without return address, to inform her that no matter what she might imagine, I adored her.

The great eastern cities of America were priming for rebellion when I arrived, and this was heady, to watch the lines between men dissolve—or rather, to wait for their dissolution. Despite the rhetoric, I saw few encounters between poor and rich; even at the most impassioned talks on liberty, a slave would circulate
with glasses of wine. Nights, I would open the window of my rented rooms and listen to drunkenness on the street, repeating the anger and ardor to myself until I’d found the paper to write it down. One evening men stormed out of a tavern with a large doll and set it alight beneath my window, though the smoke from the burning cloth sent the rioters away coughing. I was left alone to watch the body turn to cinders, and despite it being inanimate, its abandonment pained me. I turned to maps again, saw the borders of the colonies bleed out into forest and field, and so departed the coast for the interior twelve years ago, just as war was breaking out, for it wasn’t war I wanted to see, not even if it promised something new; what seemed to set this country apart from its cousins was not its ache for a republic but rather the hearts that held that ache. And in Boston and Philadelphia, even under the sway of drink, few men opened those to me.

I continued to be a young man, full of weary hubris. I was warned that any journey into the interior of this country would bring me to savages, so I nodded and swore to keep to the coasts and then hired a horse and servant to take me into the darkest forests, where I found the Creeks in Hillaubee and now am married and a Great War Chief; though the title is honorary, I believe the wife is genuine. What the Creeks gave me was a respite from the expected, at least while I studied how they were bound to each other and defined their enemies. The wife was simply so I could sink into daily life unremarked; I was not prepared to give my heart to anyone new, if indeed it had ever been given. I once sent my French wife a basket that my Indian wife made. But before long even the novelty of Indians began to follow paths that I knew: a man defended the men who resembled him.

So a week ago, when the chief of my adopted village asked if I’d sit in on a diplomatic meeting that evening with visitors from the Carolinas—the white men’s war had come and gone and I had confirmed the Creeks’ good opinion—I said yes, of course, but returned to my cabin and opened the wooden trunk I arrived with years ago, to imagine what it might look like if I filled it again. Endless talk of war, even after the fighting had settled, merely reminded me of everything I’d already seen. I wondered if all men lived by the same self-preserving code. If guilt was foregone. If it was no hardship to grow up alone, because all men are fundamentally so.

I CONTINUE AT
a generous distance, keeping them in my sight but only just. I am interested in how they walk, the Indian leading mostly but sometimes the black man striding ahead, both of them turning every minute or so to confirm the others’ presence. These are not men trying to lose each other. Have they made some pact? Is there a sense that if one escapes, he’ll turn the others in? What do they have to hold over each other’s heads? Though they are not always silent, they do not converse in an easy enough manner to convince me of a prior relationship. There are no trading partners here, and I doubt even that the slave belongs to one of these men, for they do not make him carry the bags or prepare the food. Of course, it is possible that he is not a slave but a Creek, as they have sometimes been known to adopt negroes into their clans if the circumstances allow. But he does not seem to speak their language beyond a phrase or two. I suspect the white man of leaving the plainest signs on the trail behind him. The leaves are shuffled up in trenches as if he were not fully lifting his feet but rather being pulled by a force
mildly stronger than the force bidding him to collapse. Though he may have shot the travelers, he certainly did not plan the attacks, and doesn’t appear to have any aim but to watch for flowers and keep close to the others. He is almost a child.

At noon they sit down in the brush and pull food out of their sacks, which is oddly domestic for men on the run. In the noise of chewing I am able to approach closely enough to pick up a little conversation.

“How is it?” the white man asks.

The black man rubs his upper arm and nods.

The Indian passes a cloth bag of parched corn to his left and each man takes a handful.

“What was the best thing you ever ate, Cat?” the black man asks.

The white man’s smile is shy. “My wife had a garden,” he says.

“She was a fine cook?” The Indian spits out a kernel of corn, which without boiled water must be painfully hard.

“No,” the one called Cat says.

“I had a ham once, or part of it at least, that my mother stole from the master’s kitchen on Christmas—told him the pig wasn’t near as big as he thought it was, which is why there weren’t more cuts. It wasn’t hot, but lord it was juicy. I wrestled my brother for the last piece and lost, but that taste sat in my mouth for days.” He runs his tongue across his upper lip. “There’s good moments and bad moments.”

“Not good men and bad men,” Cat says.

The others seem surprised, as if they were not accustomed to the white man speaking, or at least not speaking philosophically. He reaches out a hand and pats the black man’s knee.

“As we get worse, you seem better,” the Indian says.

“No. But even the people we love can fail.”

“Who’s failed? Us two? Or you? Don’t start spouting forgiveness like you’re some kind of saint, because that bounty hunter’d say otherwise.” He turns to the Indian. “I told you, didn’t I? Said there was a blue-eyed man wanted for murder, and seemed to think Cat was it.”

“Was he?”

“What do you think?”

They look at the white man, who seems unconcerned. He apparently said his piece.

“You’re not getting off from this,” the black man says. “We all did it.”

They halt again at dusk in a broad meadow, congregate around something in the weeds. They stand so close together it almost looks as if their arms are linked, or they are praying. The distant figure of Cat moves behind the black man, whom I now know to be Bob, and after a further pause, all three move back onto the main path, the white man casting a last glance at the spot in the prairie. A half dozen sandhill cranes fly up near the tree line like some ancient species.

WHEN THEY STOP
for the night, I stop well behind them. They make a fire to cook something and although the flame is small, I am surprised that the Indian lets his guard down to this extent. I am too far to hear any of their whisperings, but an hour after they settle for the night, I creep closer. The slave’s snoring bursts through the underbrush. From behind a holly, I look at each in turn. Oh, to always see man when he is unaware of being watched. Their faces give away so much: the black man,
though he snores through an open mouth and his arms and legs are flung wide, has a furrow to his brow that interrupts his sleep, causing him occasionally to flip and moan; the Creek’s face is stone, is sadness, and he is tucked tight beneath a blanket so that his hands and feet are not exposed; and the white man—he is awake. His eyes are open and flit back and forth, as if watching meteors, but the sky is cloudy and he is heedless of my presence. I could take him now, but that would answer none of my questions. He does not look as ferocious as I’d imagined, but there are bloodstains on his cuffs, so I assume he took the lead in the killings. They are universally unkempt but oddly trusting. What guarantee do these men have that one of them will not steal the money from the others?

I crawl back to my camp and sleep as light as a bee, which is to say in dozes, and hardly at all.

ON THE SECOND
day they are beginning to slow; Bob has an injury that is making his steps uneven, and the others attempt to keep pace. If I did not trust in my own stealth, it would be almost unfathomable that they hadn’t yet felt my presence. I have moments of wanting to step hard on a branch, or throw a walnut, just to enter into their sanctuary. I should have roped their wrists by now, but they are leading me like a tide, deeper into the west.