I was hot now that the water had dried from my skin. I wiped my feet clean and pushed the leaves beside me into a pile. There was little to control besides debris.
“Would you rather be a fish or a bird? What if you could live a thousand years as a turtle or ten years as a boy?”
As I tired, I always tired of him. “A man,” I said. “Why would you not want to be a man?” The scales had flaked off me. I left him by the bank.
WAR SWUNG AROUND our town in those years, whirlpooling the familiar. The English were fighting each other now, and some of our towns chose sides and others stuck with older enemies. Our diplomats traveled east to the Carolinas, north to the Great Lakes. What we needed from the English we mostly had, and if we found ourselves wanting for more guns, more rum, the Spanish lay just below us and the French beyond the Choctaws. We lived in the middle of chaos, and all we had to do was stay right where we were and the storm would blow by. But we were a red town, and the mico was a young man, and the trade was growing so hungrily that we couldn’t pull back without losing some pride. My brothers, with bows and knives and muskets, took their undirected fury to distant fields, and season by season, fewer returned.
When my first brother died in war, I thought, No more. I have no interest in this. I was terrified, my family having lost a limb. A whole man was suddenly absent, and I could not find where he had gone; not even Oche would tell me, though I was certain he saw things in other worlds. We buried him beneath our house. I retreated. And when my second brother died in war, I thought, I want it. I want to be a mico. This was how we whipped ourselves into froth. Revenge played in our hearts, weaseled down our arms into our hands, which could not stop clenching. No man could take my brothers and not in turn be taken, or I was not a man. So my mind rolled over, nightly turning redder. I snuck beside the council house and listened for the next plans, the war that would happen the following week, the one that would rage by the summer. In the shadows, I squatted and stood, lifted stones in my hands, punched the tense of my stomach. I willed myself to grow stronger. I no longer found comfort in Oche, who by then was pounding corn with women, tending them in their bleeding huts, abandoning raids for nut harvests. Even through the loss, he could not see what war we were fighting.
But my third brother, the last between the mico and me, was hungry for control. I watched him closely, mimicked his long steps. I drew a snake on my ankle, like his, with ink, though it washed off in the next storm. He had the same narrow shoulders as our uncle, that compact strength of a coil, an arrow flying, but had thicker limbs. The elders saw a solid future in my brother, from his fight-broken nose to his legs, which were long enough to cross creeks. Once I heard him whispering with my mother — he was angry and she put her words into questions, and she seemed to be guiding him away from me, pushing his fierceness out of our house, beyond the quiet of the home, away from the children.
THE SUMMERS WERE hot, no wind. The summers, then, were when we fought. My first battle was before Green Corn, when even the nights were no relief and men boiled outside, their bodies too hot to be still. My uncle the mico said the nearest Choctaw towns had struck a deal with the Spanish and would soon be raiding our fields, but the town above us refused to fight. The men there were grayer and honored old alliances. Our mico was young, and had his name still to forge. We all came to the council houses then, I in the back, behind my mother even, whose seat closer to the fire was meant to remind me how little I knew. The farthest ring was crowded with boys and girls. We sometimes watched the speakers and sometimes stared at the carvings on the posts, animals with their mouths open, claws outstretched. I searched for Polly, just to see the flame reflected on her cheek.
The elders voted to move out first, to cross the river, to goad the enemy. Those who disagreed threw up their hands and called my uncle names. This was democracy. We had been warring with the Choctaws in bursts for as long as there had been Muskogee to gather arms, for our lands overlapped and our deer ran into each other’s woods. In the smoky dark as we were leaving, I told my uncle I wanted to hold a gun in this war. If my last brave brother would be there, so would I. He tilted his head and cupped my chin in his hand and shook it till my teeth rattled.
“Eager to die?” he asked.
“I’m ready to defend my people.” My voice sounded louder than it should have.
“We’re defending nothing, boy. We’re killing Choctaws.”
“I’m prepared to die,” I said.
“And welcome to it. Being prepared is halfway there.” He laughed and left me standing clench-fisted.
My mother didn’t much like the sound of my bravery when I told her that night I’d be fighting. Oche retreated to the storage house to allow us the space for argument. Her bread was half in her mouth when she pulled it out again. Did she ever wish for daughters? She scooted over to me and placed her hands on my crossed knees and bent her head until it almost touched the dirt floor. For a moment, I thought she might be weeping. I should be ashamed to bring my own mother, the woman who’d taught me to shoot, to such tears, and yet her sorrow seemed a further line between us — if she was not a crying woman, then I was not a brave man. But when she sat up, I saw a strange fire in her face that wasn’t anger and wasn’t pride either.
“Do you know how many of your brothers have died?”
“Two,” I said. I always answered questions.
“What are your reasons?”
“To protect the village and seek justice. The Choctaws are our enemies.” The smoke from the cooking meat looped up and through a hole in the ceiling, and the smell of it made my stomach jump. I wanted my dinner. My uncle’s rhetoric sounded hollow in my mouth. “They’ve killed so many of our men, Mother, what else can we do? Your own sons, and you don’t want vengeance?”
“And where do you think your body goes when it is dead?”
“In the ground,” I said.
“What do you think I will do when you are dead?” The bread was still in her hand, half gnawed. When she spoke, her hands fluttered with her words and the bread dragged in the dirt. Her hair was untied.
I thought about this. I had seen her grieving my older brothers, elaborate ceremonies but few tears, no loud emotion. But they had been grown, one was married, and were not my mother’s pets anymore. My third brother, the one warrior left, wasn’t here tonight because he was chasing a woman, playing night ball with his friends, gambling under a tree somewhere. What did it matter if we were dead? She spent more time in the crop fields, in her own garden, shaping square baskets and round pots, than she did tending us, asking about our feelings, sewing up the splits in our leggings. She seemed to me not so much a mother as a farmer. When we were gone, she would keep turning the earth over. The squash would still ramble from the dirt. The corn would still grow high and pale in summer. The hickory trees would still drop the nuts that she would gather and grind for oil. And when the men brought deer home from the forest, she would sit with the other women around a fire and scrape at the skin with knives until the hair and gristle fell away and the hide was water-smooth.
“If I die, you will love Oche more,” I said. “And perhaps you will have another child.”
She laughed. “Yes, I will love Oche more.”
My mother was not a pacifist.
I RODE OUT with them on a bay pony, her reluctant head pointed west. Her back was sweated thick before too many miles, and by then my bones were scared. The dogs had already turned back toward town. Beneath my blanket the night before, which I hid under hot or cold to stop the ghost children from touching me, I heard my uncle speak to my mother by the fire outside our house. His low voice I could not make out, but hers rose high into the thick night air. “I will not. Do you remember?” she said, and then, “It’s your head if he’s harmed.” She made sounds of protest and then laughter, and in the morning she let her brother take me to war.