Last night I found a blister on my heel that had bloomed into a pink bubble with the same sheen as mother-of-pearl. I pricked it with my knife to let the pus out and made a pancake of wet leaves that I stuck between the skin and my stocking. All these years of walking and I am unaccustomed to blisters. My feet have traditionally been as sturdy as my psyche. I am glad I stopped the Creeks from walking with me on this spur, for in such moments I have a small fear that something within me unravels. But a blister is a natural growth, an obvious outcome from hard walking in springtime.
When the men turn north at a large dead oak, I pause. I did not expect any movements that would point to a coherent plan. So they are not aimless wanderers; do they head for the camp of some ringleader? Is there an architect of the scheme that will explain the miscellany of these particular individuals? Are they merely men-for-hire, without the free will that would justify my own justice? No, I will catch them regardless. If there is a man orchestrating their actions, he will simply be folded into the guilty. The Indian is leading them now through the tall grass in this unburned territory between rival nations. It’s he who knows the way.
Just as I resolve to follow, they stop. The white man and the black man are turned toward each other with some intensity. My body is behind a young sassafras, one of the last bits of cover on the edge of the field, and my eyes peering out are dark enough to look like nothing, though no one glances my way. After a moment of apparent speech, the black man’s arm explodes outward, punching Cat in the shoulder, the sound of which reaches me a half second later, and the white man falls back a step, his whole body in a convulsion of surprise.
This is it, the moment when they will fall to pieces, a rotten structure like all the other rotten structures that men have built from Europe to the New World. What misguided faith I had in them, if faith is even an appropriate term to describe my hunger for these men to be unlike others. In any country in the world they could not subsist together, yet here they were, wandering in a polite clump through woods that belonged apparently to no one, ignoring all the reasons to strike out on their own, to take the money and fall back into their segregated homes, for even America has rules. Their initial act of violence, of course, has voided any rational sympathy, so by all rights they should crumble now, should abandon the inexplicable amity of the past few days, should permit me to stop wondering. Let me capture you and put this to rest.
I take my musket off my back.
But when the black man walks on, shaking his arms in frustration, the white man follows him, and then the Indian.
Damn them.
BY NOON THEY come to a house in the woods. I sit at a distance and wait for whatever might happen, and in this moment I am admittedly content. The Indian knocks at the door.
Istillicha
I AND MY MOTHER and her kin belonged to the Wind clan, which is why our people so often led the others. My mother told me this story when I was young and still went to sleep in tears. In the time when everything was born, the Muskogee awoke in a fog cloud. They had been asleep for centuries, buried in mud and mist. In this new world, they reached out with tender fingers, for they could not see their own noses. They clutched at mushrooms growing among damp roots, stroked the flanks of passing deer. Scratched at the ground until squirrels burrowed into their hands, curious for nuts. The people in their blind search lost each other, but calling out only drove the animals away, so they kept silent. After years of grasping in the fog, a strong wind rolled through the forests with the scent of mountains and blew the mist out in wisping bursts. The first people to see each other in the new clarity were my people, and they called themselves the Wind clan. We led the others from the white cloud, and we lead them still. This is your responsibility, my mother would say, kneeling as she kissed my nose and smoothing my damp cheeks with the side of her thumb.
My stars were split in two: one half painted me as a hunter, fighter, chief. The other half was dark.
IN OUR HOUSES off the square, my mother lived and my father before she sent him away and her brother my uncle and their mother who was old and salty and my three older brothers and one younger. Our town was like an eddy in a river. War parties came through, and trading parties, English and French and Spanish, and Muskogee leaving other towns, and Choctaws or Cherokees bound as slaves, to be carried off to another eddy when the moon turned. Some people came like sticks and stuck in our current, cleaving to the water that turned round and round — Natchez, Yuchi, Shawnee, Coosa, all who’d lost their homes because our country was increasingly not our own. I saw men doing great things and what happened to men who were caught. Mostly I saw my mother, who tended us all with squeezes and slaps and knew more about the ways of birds and the passage of clouds than any man I met. We had endless questions, and she faced them all with a story. When we asked why the alligator looked so frightening with his crooked snout, she said he once played in a ball game with the eagle and the crane, four-foots against two-foots, and they hammered him on the nose to make him drop the ball. “Nothing to be afraid of,” she said, “just bad at ball.” So the world was laid clear to us. Each piece had its place, and what we did shaped those next to us. There was no such thing as independence.
I fetched water, I helped in our vegetable patch, I fed my grandmother hominy. I chased my little brother through the thickets of river cane, across the fallow fields, and up the terraces that climbed away from the broad, clear river. My mother threw me crabapples in the summer, high enough so their blurring pink spun into patterns of blue. When they reached their peak, my mind slowed them down and they fell soft as feathers while my bowstring stretched back. Hit one clean through and she’d give me breakfast. She kept throwing until I stopped missing. I said hello to my father whenever I saw him, before my mother set his belongings outside and told him to move on, but the man I loved most was my uncle, who was chief, who was golden.
I loved my mother’s brother as a boy will love a bear he sees through spaces in the forest. His shoulders were sharp and narrow and though he was young yet, he had been in enough wars to lose an eye and wear the mico’s feathers. To be chief was to hold the town in your hands, to soothe it and to battle for it both. His missing eye was a trouble to me; I wanted my world to be ordered and clean and here was a hole in the man I most loved. He moved faster than other men, spoke more gently. He touched women on the arm like a moth, alighting and then moving on. He cut my older brothers boy-sized bows and told them stories of meddling rabbits while I knelt in the shadows and sopped up his words. I was too young, but when I was older, his gaze would fall on me, and — I thought — we would rule the town together. His justice, my heart.
My older brothers were next in line, and they were rough and cruel and would have battled with a crow if it cawed while they were sleeping. They pummeled each other on the ball field and inked their arms with spirals and skulls, signs of the animal world. We lived in a red town, a war town, and they were built for their fate. I would follow them to the open council house some summer nights and we would crouch beyond the cast of firelight and listen to the men, smell the smoke of their tobacco. The old men talked about their wives, about the flood twenty years before, about how best to turn antlers into powder. They’d share the priest’s new prophecy and some would nod and warn and others would laugh and say the time for prophecy had come and gone. It was a new age, that was what the men were always saying, one that required not courage but cunning. The next man to be mico would find himself with strange duties. Listening in the dark, my brothers sucked on fish, and I swept up the bones they tossed aside.