He said nothing. I clenched my knees around my pony’s chest and bent my head. He rode with me till camp that night. I heard all the threats he never made. You are a boy who tells lies. My broad hands could break your body in two. He slept next to me and our breaths sounded like a boy running and a man walking slow behind. In my half-dreams, his hand was around my throat; I kept waking to pull at it. He didn’t touch me. I couldn’t sleep for pushing his hands away. In the nadir of night when my mind was usually lost in girls, in the curves of Polly, I found myself believing that this life was done. That my boyhood had been a fancy. I was too young to think of killing, could not have killed Seloatka if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to: I was not the man who killed, but the other. I wanted to be as good as the mico.
Not until we reached home and my mother saw the body dangling and shook herself with wails did I understand that I had lost my uncle, simple, and I fell from my pony and wept, nothing like a man. No sleep could comfort, and the stew that had simmered since dawn went uneaten. My first secret began eating into my heart.
THE MOURNING STRETCHED over days, for a mico is greater than a man. I saw him buried below our house, saw the round hole in which they lowered his body. He sat up in his grave, a blanket over his shoulders and a pipe in his hand, because he was a warrior and was always watching, though he’d never have more than one eye. I looked away when they threw dirt around him, my slim brave kin. Where my uncle went, where the spirit of him traveled, I was never certain. Some said he was in the hole, or the house, or was back at battle, ghost-fighting his enemies. Oche said he saw him waiting.
“Waiting for what?” I asked.
He waved his fingers gently above his head, making loose loops.
If we could choose where our spirit goes, mine wouldn’t rest. Mine would hunt and battle. Mine would haunt the wicked. I said this in a quiet voice so Seloatka, who was with us filling the grave, wouldn’t hear.
“What wicked?” Oche said.
I opened my eyes wide. We could speak at each other silently like this, and neither would understand.
The night before Green Corn, a smaller council gathered in the meeting house and threw conversation about a successor. It was the last day of the year’s fire; tomorrow the flame would be doused and all debts and wrongs would be forgiven, though by whom I never knew. The next in line in the Wind clan was the one left of my older brothers, who was panting for the reins. He had ridden with us in the river fight against the Choctaws and had claimed several lives, but he didn’t speak to me on that journey, for we were not friends but kin. I could have told him what I saw, but he was older and fiercer and laughed at jokes too coarse for me to understand. When he saw me in the town or practicing with my bow in the fields, he would pelt me with stones and husked-out shells. Had I told him of Seloatka’s careful aim and the dreamlike path of the arrow through summer air to deep between our uncle’s shoulders, I would have had to tell him of my vantage, my cowardly crouch behind the sap-sticky pine. Being still stuck between boyhood and courage, this I could not reveal. I also worried Seloatka might be a spirit, or at least a man who could read my wishes, so when I found myself thinking of the slow arrow, I pushed my mind to something safer. Girls planting seeds, or fishing. Polly, whose form I always returned to. My mind divided neatly between politics and her, between imagining myself chief and wondering what I would say if I found myself alone with her, our hands nested.
I stood outside the meeting house and listened for my brother’s voice. All I heard was Seloatka’s, burrowing blunt-headed through the conversations. He didn’t question my brother’s place, or claim some greater strength. He didn’t object to the elders’ reasoning. But he made his voice carry low across all debate, so that when the men went home that evening to tell their sisters and wives, all they would remember was Seloatka, Seloatka.
This was not a time when any man could be made mico. The British were begging for our allegiance and our sole custom. A white man’s war was disordering the deer trade. The skins we got sometimes could not be sold, and if we turned elsewhere — to the French or Spanish — the British withheld their rum. No one knew what games the others were playing. And who we were was quickly changing. Cattle now roamed through our fallow fields, herded by uncertain warriors. Our town became home to two white traders, several men from a Cherokee village that had lost its fields, some Seminole women, and slaves who were Choctaw, Chickasaw, African. To be Muskogee in those years was to hear your name in a half-dozen languages. How could you lead when you didn’t know who your people were, much less your enemies? I waited to hear how the elders, who were around when white men were rare, would push us into a future. But all I heard was Seloatka.
My brother walked out of the council house pale and sweating, a cough trembling his chest. He was the tallest of us, broader than the brothers who were already in the ground. His body was one that admitted no suffering. After the council fire was snuffed and the Beloved Men were sleeping next to the Beloved Women and only the possums and ghost children were left on the ball field, my brother, next in line, lay in his bed coughing.
Oche said he tasted evil on it. I was afraid to know what evil was. I said there was no such thing — if there were, surely I’d find it in myself — and that it was nothing more than a summer fever. Whichever it was, Oche didn’t mind. He just spoke things aloud and then turned over into sleep. The peace in his heart was bottomless.
And so when I saw my brother growing sicker as the Green Corn days passed, I tried to think of something else, tried not to think the one who should lead our town was wasting. A doctor looked him over, opened his eyelids, kneaded his stomach. He gave him pasa and wormseed. The night the council met, my brother could not go. His skin was wet and nearly white. His eyes fluttered about the room but never settled. His limbs began to twitch like a rabbit in a trap. The council determined he would not live. We stayed quiet one more day, and as the women dressed themselves in rattles for the dance and Oche walked with the priests to start the year’s new fire, my brother slipped into an unawareness. He would not respond to touch, to pinch, to slap. We sat around his bed and gave pieces of melon to the guests: men who stopped by to see a brother warrior, women who swore they loved him, had almost been his wife. They came through in quiet lines like shadows, their small stories thrown into silhouette by the great fire that was my mother. She didn’t move. Her eyes didn’t move from his face, which was paling away, one step from ghost. I sat with her not because I loved my brother but because I wanted to see the moment when he passed from man to something else. When my uncle was dying, when the arrow I had not prevented was holing his heart, letting the blood find all the empty spaces of his body, my eyes were closed. Now I kept my hands on the sides of my face, holding my eyes on my brother, imagining what I missed before. He grew smaller and smaller, like a weed without water, crumpling in the faintest ways. I had to blink, and at some instant when I was blinking or not blinking, his spirit walked away.