Polly was my accountant, and made me tally my gains after each trip, which she would mark in little lines on a stick she kept by her bed. She said she needed to know when she’d be mine. She’d then toss the stick below her bed and pull me down and I would find all her goodness there, waiting, just as she promised. With my arms beside her, around her, in her hair, she listed what we’d do with our wealth. Richmond, she said. She wanted to live in a white man’s city. Her father had left her without an image of himself but a silver chain and a sense of something other, and she had not found her right place in this small village, doing what our mothers and uncles did, and their mothers and uncles before them. She said she felt half her limbs were pulled by white strings, and if her bastard father thought they were better than Indian strings, maybe they were. Richmond, I said, and didn’t tell her my fate was here, where the dead were still unsettled. She too may have picked things not to tell me. Richmond, she said, and my arms were vines around her neck, her waist, her legs.
As the trails became worn beneath my feet, the mico slept worse at night. I saw little of his suspicion, but Oche told me on my rests from riding that Seloatka kept a band of men tightly circled about his house to keep the ghosts from stealing his skins, though there was little to trade them for besides rum, which ghosts could not swallow. He was saving for something, perhaps for the pleasure alone of saving, which is an early symptom of a greater sickness, but perhaps for some scheme against me. We may have been hoarding in opposite corners of the same town, both to destroy the other. Both waiting for our fortunes to burst and the plans we made to spill into action. I hoped his plot was as little formed as mine.
Oche said he was worried, said that long ago when I was in trouble I had gone to a woman in the country for help, one of the hut women, but farther out, west of the trading path. She used to live in a nearby town, and I remembered her, tiny and dark, without family. But I told him this had never happened, so he gave me directions—and then turn north at the dead oak—so I would remember that moment in time, whether it had happened or not. He saw the game we men were playing for what it was.
Just before winter Seloatka hired a Frenchman who had been living among the Muskogee and leading war parties against the colonists, and he paid him to be a double pair of eyes. Le Clerc sat at the mico’s table and filled his belly hard with pawpaw and persimmon and found himself a girl to keep, one who was motherless and could not tell the white men she could use from the white men who would use her. His eyes were black, like my lover’s, but when I shook his hand, I could not see into them. He never learned my name, for Seloatka kept him among the elites, passing him from cousin to warrior to guard, all trusted men who greased the visitor with rum and showed him how to throw the spear on the chunkey field. Oche and I stood under a walnut shadow and watched his small French body coil itself behind his throwing arm. The spear always went wide.
Le Clerc was not a dangerous man. He seemed to already have whatever it was he wanted. Stories to carry with him when he returned home. Women and whiskey, an adventure. He was too vague to be menacing. Like most white men, he’d pass through. That Seloatka never introduced his trail man to his Frenchman reminded me that though we were connected in business, the mico never fit me within his circle. He had not forgotten. He only kept me near so he could watch my movements, could predict when I would finally strike. We both knew that cowards and the quiet were the ones whose hands would eventually turn.
Early mornings, when Oche was in the fields with our mother and I was home and had nothing to do but carve a new bow and wait for Polly to find me, I would see Le Clerc wending through the river trees, one hand out to brush the bark as he passed. He walked slowly, but never aimlessly. Was that what Polly’s father looked like? A white man walking through an Indian town, on his way to somewhere else? Except the Frenchman was not impatient. I never saw him hurry, and even when he missed the chunkey stone, over and over, he never angered. And when he was alone and thought no one was watching, he chose to walk among basswood and sycamore at dawn, feeling their skin, occasionally looking up into their branches as if hoping to see someone beloved there. If I were a superstitious man, I’d worry he saw my own past body, crouched there years ago with Polly, or else some future version of myself.
I HAD BEEN on the paths for a year when spring rolled open again with the first wood flowers and airy nights. Polly caught a basket of new dandelion leaves and fed me their crispness on a grass bank by the river, just out of sight of the fields. She watched me sideways as I chewed through the bitter, and when I reached for her hand she tucked hers between her knees. In watching my purse fill, we sometimes forgot how to love each other, or our love was just siphoned into different ruts. There were times when I came back grimed and weary after a week’s absence and she flinched at my touch. She said my skin was getting rougher, my skin hurt her skin. I’d step away and sleep that night on the floor beside her bed, reaching out to brush her cheek only after I knew she was asleep. I asked my mother, whose eyes were milking over with age, if this was a normal thing between a man and a woman, and she raised her eyebrows and turned down the corners of her mouth as if to say, You think I’d remember? Her heart had fallen out after one, two, three of her children died.
On that new spring night, Polly fed me greens but wouldn’t give me her kiss. I don’t think it hurt me when she pulled her hand away.
Plucking grasses and skinning the reeds between her long fingers, she told me of her uncle’s guests, a fresh party of Englishmen, loyalists they named themselves, heading south for Spanish lands and safety.
“I thought you might guide them,” she said. “The man who leads them, Kirkland, has enough money to purchase half of Pensacola.”
I lay back and crossed my hands on my stomach. The sky was dying away, purple now and sad. Night too was lovely, but it stole something from the day, and even when this theft was quiet, there was a violence in the act that made dusk a sorrowful thing to watch. A loss.
Polly was describing the quantity of Kirkland’s silver.
An owl flew large and thick above us, two beats of the wing before we lost it to the dark again. It had heard the rustle of a shrew, too fine a sound for my ears to catch. My body seemed as fallible lately as my mind.
“He’s staking out lands for his family, a wife and daughter he left behind somewhere. In the Carolinas, near Charleston, I think. Maybe as far as Richmond.”
“That’s not in the Carolinas,” I said.
“He’s very handsome and fat and dresses neat — you should see him, get a nice waistcoat like that — and has skin like a cloud. Did you hear what I said about his silver?” She waited to see if my eyes would catch the fire in her own, but I was looking up, watching for the owl to fly back with the shrew in its mouth.
“Last night I saw him in the council house. He stayed after the others left and smoked no pipe at all but drew out thin paper and ink in a bottle, and he scrawled along line after line in these tight bunches on the page. If he were staying longer, I’d ask him to teach me to read English, which I’m perfectly good at otherwise. Looks like the marks spiders leave through the dust. What do you think he was writing?”
I felt the reed she flung at me bounce against my neck. She knew I hated things out of place. I half listened, trying to decide if I loved her voice.