His name was Thomas Colhill and he had married her mother in a traditional way, which is to say not in the churches that he knew, so when he left a few months later, he thought he took his freedom with him. This was not uncommon, and her mother kept no bitterness. Just an old rifle he had given her as a bride gift, a silver chain that she passed to Polly, rudimentary English, and the use of his name in trade. His use of hers proved more valuable, and with his Muskogee kinship waving like a flag before him, he took his whiskey to the Indians and brought back skins. The fortune he made must have kept his white family in fine clothes. How would it be to travel between nations with nothing to lose? There seemed a certain power in that, and I admired the absent Thomas Colhill for choosing his own life.
“Do you think of him?” I asked.
She paused, as if thinking of what thinking of him would be like.
“Or wonder if he has the same chin?” I looked out into the dark fields so as not to stare at her chin, which fell into a little bowl at the base of her face. Just the size for rubbing a thumb across.
“No,” she said. She put her hand to her face, feeling her features. Not as slowly as I would have. “He’s just another bastard. White man, Muskogee man, all you want is more than the man next to you has.”
“What will you do if he comes back?”
“Kill him.”
I laughed, swallowed my laugh into a cough. I was grateful the night hid the sweat on my face. “For leaving you?”
“For not taking me with him.”
I didn’t know what to say. I understood how someone young could grow such an old bitterness, but I lost the sense of myself as a rare hero when I heard that anger lie so easily in someone else’s mouth.
In the unraveling night, she had already moved on. She wondered about an animal that was gnawing at the squash, a friend who had taken her favorite comb. She taught me some English words, said she’d teach me more. She came to her uncle in her own wanderings. Seloatka took no interest in her, she said, but spent his empty hours with her brothers, teaching them the arts of war. Cruelty, she called it. He was an old-fashioned Muskogee, had no vision, knew nothing of the English like her father. My heart was thumping hard at the image of Seloatka resting his hand on my shoulder. As she worried aloud that her hair would not grow fast enough, I saw the spirit of the man dig his fingers into my arm. I took my knife from its sheath and cut at his chest, gently, as if I were planting seeds in soft dirt.
The owls began calling in whispers while we shivered in the night cold. I was sleepy and could smell the cooking fish from town and began to think Polly was childish for hiding so long. The bark felt dirty to me; I couldn’t straighten the sticks up here. The sound of a sliding in the tree made her shiver and grab my hand. I said I thought it was a snake, so she laced her fingers into mine. If only Seloatka found us here, his niece stuck to his enemy like ash on a hoecake. But I could smell her hair in the moonlight and it smelled like the warmth of a deer when it is still alive. She told me she liked an older boy, one who had his first scars already, but I didn’t listen, and it must have been just a game because later when she put her mouth on my mouth it felt real and I had no more questions about my love.
The battle had been fought, though at that hour I couldn’t have named the victor. We climbed down, or rather slipped and scrambled, scraping our palms, and at the base of the hickory she took me in her arms and squeezed — the embrace of a comrade, a fellow warrior — and evaporated into the night. I walked home, my arms wrapped around my chest to mimic her warmth, and my mother shook me and fed me cold meat. I slept for the first time without dreaming of Seloatka.
We were lovers in the youngest sense, and I brought her back the hearts of deer from hunting. One summer she spent wooing another boy, and for a few days they escaped into the forest to play a game of togetherness, but she came home bored and swore she still loved me. When I began to look less like a tangle of sticks and more like something that could grip and twist and shoot, I told her I would marry her. She said she was worth a lot, and I would owe her uncle a great sum in gifts, and she wasn’t even sure she’d say yes. I said it wasn’t a question. I just wanted to warn her. She said she’d be ready, then, and good luck to me. I told my brother and he laughed and said the same. He knew her well from farming with her, pounding grain, the things that Oche does with women. He said she built baskets from piles of wet stripped cane faster than the others. I never knew whether to worry over him or to envy what he had, something like the clarity of a river in spring. He said he saw something in my heart larger than love, and to watch for it. I said he was still a boy.
WHEN MY COURAGE had grown into a full-sized fruit, I asked Seloatka for a favor. The Englishmen’s war was over now, and the Muskogee towns, along with the Cherokee towns, were lashing out against the new Americans pouring into the spaces opened by peace. How we traded, how we fought: it all deserved rethinking. We had fresh enemies, found allies in old rivals. Our once-solid world seemed to be rafting out on a black river, but I had forgotten nothing. For years I had watched him, from my boyhood to my manhood, and though he had committed no great treacheries since taking the mico’s feathers, none but the minor abuses of all rulers, I hadn’t once abandoned my plans. That my village might not believe what I had seen — that Seloatka himself may have long since discounted me — did not concern me. I would unseat him and reclaim what was my family’s.
The first step was to move close. Make him believe I had forgotten. It was a night during little spring moon, the warmth just seeping into the air again. He stood outside his house, looking up at the clouds across the stars, his hand against the skin flap. My hands had made that house, I thought. That was my uncle’s house, the one in the center of town with its roof higher than the others, beside the chunkey ground and near the council house, where wars were plotted and travelers slept. I had squatted with my mother and buried my hands in pots of daub, spread the coolness over the cane frame, smoothed it between the woven vines, roughed it with grass and my own collected hair. I handed straw bundles to men who were taller to coat the roof in a spiny fur. The man who killed my uncle was living in the house I built.
The words that came from me were small and squeaked. I said I wanted to be a trader.
“You’ve grown tall,” he said. “Your aim is improved.” He let down the door flap and moved a few steps past me, farther into darkness. “A trader? You want to get out of this village, you’re tired of hunting. I can understand that. You’ll need to know their language, of course, and must learn not to steal.” He seemed to think this was humorous. I needed him to trust me, so I said nothing. “And Polly?” he asked.
Had I known he was watching? I said I knew some English. Wanted to make a profit. Wanted to move beyond the split hickories hanging by the river.
“Earn a little bride price, perhaps. I see. But you leave her alone for a few weeks here and there, and she may get loose from you. That’s my advice. Women, you know. I think your mother was the same.” He laughed again.
I remembered her face when I told my mother what he’d done. Seloatka hadn’t killed my uncle, she said. She erased that night between us. Had she loved him? Had he broken something of hers? I didn’t know what drove a woman to act, what made her shrink. I let my mother go that night. I lived with her still and we spoke of nothing more than detail. I told Seloatka now not to speak of her, though I didn’t know what I was defending.