He let me hold his talismans, and I kept them safe and clammy. He dug his fingers into his scalp, feeling along his neck for ticks. Other men were standing. They wanted to get home that night and give the kill to their wives and sisters for cleaning, for pulling the skin from the flesh and scraping it, smoking it. But my uncle the mico sat still against a tree and waited for me to finger his charms and so all the men waited. I saw his power and it was greater than anything in his pouch. I held the pieces as long as I dared and then slid them back. He patted his thigh.
When I returned home, cold with scratches across my legs, I told my mother I was a man. She slipped her fingers in my hair to tug out the tangles and said, “And what good is a man?”
MY SMALLEST BROTHER, Oche, was the one who didn’t want the mico’s feathers, who kept sick animals in a little bower near the fields, who some said would be a priest. He wouldn’t let my mother shave any part of his hair. Some said ghosts followed him, but I never saw them, and he said ghosts followed everyone. Every village holds the spirits of those who pass on, ancestors ready to help, but it’s the dead children who move around, who are too restless to lie still and who search for playmates when all the living go to sleep. Oche, who could not concern himself with war, with the ways of life and men, whispered when others shouted; he spoke of things that had happened seasons before, as though his memory was a slow runner.
I loved him because he was there. He was younger than me and earnest, only doing what he liked, and he spent time with me because he loved me back and he saw no gain in denying this. He didn’t mind that I liked to line things up and put things in order. But I pretended not to love him because he was a baby and never tried to be better than he was. At night, when men were smoking or watching the women dance with their turtle shell shakers, we would sneak to the chunkey ground and roll the stone. Though young and lanky as a mantis, Oche threw his spear closest to where the round stone came to rest. Mine went too far. I wanted him to see how strong I was, how if there was a Choctaw or an Englishman, my strength would stab his heart before he ever made it to the rolling stone. My brother was not violent, and always won.
Oche had a way of telling truth that I never understood. Time didn’t matter so much to him; the world circled around in his knotty head. He could tell myths like they had happened to him. Once on the night-lit ball field, as I stretched my spear back, he said he’d found the dog I had lost years before. I gaped at him.
“Red Dirt?” I asked.
“I gave him food and told him where you were.”
“Quick. Was he by the river?” I dropped my spear and let the ball roll into the far ditch.
“He was with the men riding out against the Choctaws. Perhaps he fought with them.”
I bent over and placed my fingertips on the grass. “That was two years ago, brother.”
“Yes, when you lost your dog.”
The others laughed at Oche, the way our mother coddled him, fed him secret foods on moony nights to call the spirits onto him. Our three older brothers, all still learning to hunt, had little faith in priests. They would speak to the animal they killed, or had to kill twice for poor aim, but then would laugh between themselves when the priest riddled the meat with prayer. Oche wasn’t hurt by this, couldn’t be hurt. He simply liked to be alone. He wandered in the woods searching not for deer or demons but for mushrooms. He told me his dreams, and they were little different from my dreams, except that in his brush-soft voice they sounded like prophecy. I wanted to whisper with him, even as I was chasing after my older brothers to punch and claw them and soak up their valor and learn how to be grown. Being grown meant doing things one was afraid of, meant not being afraid. If I wasn’t quaking or sweating or twisting the inside of my cheek between my teeth, then I wasn’t yet brave.
During mulberry moon, Oche made sofkee as my mother guided his hands. He took the cracked hominy she had already pounded and sifted from the corn hulls, and he stirred it in our iron pot with water and wood-ash lye until it turned to soup. I asked him questions about animals and what they did and who they were friends with until he paused to think and the hominy started to stick and our mother slapped him on the bottom with a broom.
He took me from the men’s world to the women’s, for he seemed to be neither, something in between. And the women held a world that was still soft with my youth and pungent with something new. In the early spring before the deer were moving, Oche and I would crouch beyond the girdled stumps marking the crop meadow and watch the girls planting. They bent like saplings in a strong wind, their hair floating in wings around their faces. Oche would draw them in mud ink on bark, admire his work, and set it floating on the river, bored. I stared at them. I was a warrior hidden behind shrubs, peering into an enemy camp, finding the gaps in their defenses. Taking in details. Small waists, twisted hair, a hand scratching at an ankle. I asked Oche to pick his favorite, and he pointed to the one farthest away, who was round and faceless. I waited, patient, till he asked me mine, and I showed him Polly, the girl who stood above the others and whose skin looked like something you could eat. Polly I had seen before, had always been half seeing. I didn’t tell him how she planted seeds in my head long after the fields were empty. He would not have been interested.
When Oche was old enough, my mother sent him off to learn the priesthood. He went across our river to a far creek with the old priest and a few other boys and stayed for four days, and when he came home, he was greenish and damp and his hair was a knotted mat. He said they drank mico hoyanidja from a willow root and threw up their bellies and went without food, and while the priest was whispering the secret formulas and showing them the making of medicine, he only thought how hungry he was and wished for his mother’s fry bread. I patted his shoulder as if I had never had the same loneliness. The priest sat them in a steam hut and then made them swim, and one of the boys cried a little. But he was proud too and boasted that he could fix me if I were shot through with arrows from eyes to toes.
“Did you see things?” I asked, meaning monsters or his own future.
“Lots of light,” he said, “but I was sick so maybe this was nothing.”
I began to worry that what I knew about the world, he knew too. Maybe even knew better.
THE RIVER HELD our secrets, before and after, was the clear thread that tied our town to all the other Muskogee towns, tied us to ourselves. Its wetness swallowed our bare feet, our bitten ankles, and when Oche first dove under, I would pretend he’d rise as a fish. For these visits to the water, I would borrow his imagination.
“Look,” he’d say, always look, and hold up a crawfish by its tail. He found stone teeth from the ancient animals, fish eggs in strings. “We’ll be otters,” he said, and I crouched in the fast water with him, the two of us rubbing our paws together, flapping around our tails, ottering. He was the quick minnow and I was the shark, and we chased until the current tired us. We were rabbits hiding from each other in the towering, knocking thickets of cane. We were not boys, but wild.
On the bank, the glory of our abandon seeped away.
“Did Uncle ever play like this?” I asked. “Were even his games better than our games?”
“Would you love Polly so much if she had only one eye?”
Oh, Polly. No, I wouldn’t. What were women but their faces?
Oche thought our uncle was just another mico and Polly nothing but a girl. He had larger concerns.
“What animal do you think you used to be?” he asked. “And would you change back?”