The doctor came and tasted his blood and told us it was poison.
My mother’s tears dried into fury. She said she’d finger every man and woman who had stepped past our door until one confessed and was burned alive. When the doctor was gone and Oche was asleep and my mother was making lists of suspects and rivals and bloody methods of revenge, I stepped outside my body and saw that our family had been hacked at until it was splinters. We were of the Wind clan, and we were lying split in our home, in broken poses: asleep, afraid, raving, dead.
So I told her what I knew. I told her of the singing soft arrow in my uncle’s back and Seloatka’s pointed menace, and asked her not to tell a soul, especially Oche, who would be afraid. I didn’t guess, though, how much fear would be my mother’s part. I thought she would burst from the house in a crusade, might even strangle Seloatka with her knuckly hands. But when I finished my story, her eyes went dead. She did not cook for the feast to break the Green Corn fast. She did not speak to me anymore that night and slept silently. In the morning when she roused me, she said, “My son, you have had such a dream. A terrible dream has come to you, but it’s all right now. Your mother is here now.” We never spoke of it again.
With my uncle shot through and my brother poisoned, I was the next to claim mico, but the council agreed I was unfit and green. Seloatka told them he saw me crouched behind a tree during the river fight, my breechcloth soaked with urine. I didn’t contradict this version of myself, valuing my life as a boy does, though when Oche asked if I was angry, I said I was ready to crash heads and set fire to the meeting house. In the last seasons of my boyhood, we would battle with wooden axes in the ditches behind the cornfields, one of us the mico, the other the usurper. Perhaps all this false anger prepared me for a realer kind.
One of our cousins became chief, the one who was married to Seloatka’s sister. Within a year, the elders had stopped bringing us meat to fill the hole of my uncle’s loss, and by the time my voice dropped and I was mostly a man, we were pushed to a smaller house on the edge of town farthest from the fields. My grandmother had passed three years before from some kind of pox, and with fewer numbers and less sway, our family handed away our home. Like my brother, we were shrinking. When our cousin the new mico died hunting — no one knew how, no one asked — Seloatka seized power. The feather was now in his hands.
The elders painted his face ghost-white and sat him on a white skin and reminded him what white meant, that it was his duty ever to hunt for peace, even in our warring town. He nodded and was grave, but sitting on the back bench of the council house, I could see the firing of his hungry heart, which pumped not white but red. Then he took the white drink, and we all drank with him. He gulped the roasted holly water until he vomited. I could not sleep that night, and though my mother said I was too young for the white drink and now I’d have dreams, I only thought of the man in white with the beating red heart and wondered how to pull that out of him.
AND POLLY WAS his other sister’s daughter. Her eyebrows ran straight across her face, above eyes that were black with mischief. She wore a blue bead in her hair. She played with the boys when she was young and no one took notice of her until she stole her slenderness away and stayed in a hut with women and brought back something full. We threw sweetgum balls at her, and she simply stared and walked off. My affection for her, or was it awe, grew with the same breaths that fed my anger at her uncle. There was something in her that I wanted, and though it felt sincere and young, I cannot swear that my love for her wasn’t born of a greater hatred.
I began to leave presents by her door — feathers wrapped in a bunch with twine, sweet cakes my mother made — and to watch from behind a shrub as she stepped out into the mist of morning to discover she was admired. Her face melted from the last of sleep into a quiet pleasure. She would put down the water pot to hold the feathers close, bite the cake, and I thought she was pressing me to her, nibbling at my mouth. In the days before she knew it was me, I felt a limitless power over her welfare. Not knowing who I was, she could not refuse me. One day I left her nothing, just to watch her face pinch in disappointment. If I was cruel, I blamed the great loathing that simmered under all my movements.
I went down to the river where the women were fishing, roping in the last of the rockfish and red drum, to ask Oche his wisdom. While he washed out his clothes, he told me that girls are no mystery. They are not spirit people, not ghost children, not creatures to be shot or skinned. He laughed at my gifts and my skulking, and when I told him I didn’t know where the love came from, he told me all love was good and pure and I let myself believe him. Oche knew nothing of Seloatka, disliked him because he took more grain than was his chiefly share and fought sometimes for sport rather than revenge, and I could not tell him any different. He asked if I wanted Polly forever.
I did not respond, but watched a young man paddle by in a newly dug canoe, testing it for a summer journey.
“Would you ever tire of her?” He squeezed the water from his shirt and laid it on a rock, smoothing out its folds. “Could you hold her when she’s unhappy or when she makes no sense? Would you hold her if she hit you? If you saw another woman that you loved and Polly said no, you could not have her, would you listen? If you lost all your children so there were no more threads between you, would you love her still?”
I had been growing into a panic until he mentioned this last. “I won’t have children,” I said. I took my feet out of the water and dried them on the grass. “Unless I had a son like you, to do the washing for me.”
He looked so slim standing there by the young trees along the bank. His chest small, his hair long as a girl’s. I asked him if he was old enough yet to love, and he smiled and held up his leggings dripping from the river.
The first time I spoke to her, I started coughing so she had to fetch me water, and all I could do was thank her and hurry back to my knife-sharpening, cheeks on fire. The second time, she asked if I was all right, as if I were an old man with little time to live, the light in her eyes gone soft and comforting, and I said I was perfectly fine in a deep voice. My mother had given me honey to smooth my throat, and I glared at Polly and walked on.
The third time, I found her crouched in the notch of a hickory. She said she was hiding from a friend and begged for my silence, so I crawled up and sat beside her. We didn’t speak as the blackbirds flocked to a branch above us and settled in a beating of wings. I ventured that she might be too old for hiding and stared anywhere but at her body. Her arm pressed against mine. I closed my mouth until the blackbirds had all flown off, in search of a tree less fraught. A girl appeared from the fields, paused to glance between the rows, and then ran to the river on the tallest pointed feet, as though wanting to be admired. We kept our places, shoulders locked. I asked her in a whisper if she liked the gifts. She looked at me quick and said, “You?” I nodded, feeling like a man again, and she squinted her eyes at the gathering dark.
We stayed in the tree through nightfall and star-rising. We could hear the town’s murmur from the council ground, the ball field. I never asked about her uncle, so she told me of her mother and her brothers and the father who was an Englishman she’d never seen.