“So we get him a doctor.”
Cat looks up at me with surprise. Nods.
“You want to leave me, that’s fine,” Bob calls out from under the mask. “No reason to take me on in this state, I’d just be a weight. If you leave me—” His voice is getting higher, so he stops, breathes deep. “If you leave me—”
Cat wipes the damp shirt in circles on Bob’s face, cleaning the emotion, and then draws it off, puts it back on his pale chest. Bob opens one eye. Cat offers a hand to pull him up and then we are all three standing again. The white man holds the bullet out on his palm, but Bob shakes his head, so he throws it into the woods, where some creature will come hours later to smell the human on it.
“We need to find someone,” I say.
“I can’t hide.” Bob wraps one hand around his chest, trying to clutch out the pain. “I’m a free man. I’m a free man.” He looks behind him as if this were being contested. The dawn birds are twittering, a high wet sound, and we are all listening for the heavier sounds of feet.
“We need to get off the trail — either you die of that hole, or the tracker finds us.”
“That’s what I’m saying, go west. I have it all figured. Plenty of land out there. My brother, the one I told you about, told me.”
“And your arm?”
I glance at Cat, who looks puzzled. Or content. He’s like water the way his face holds moods.
“We should do something,” Cat says. In his voice is not our present predicament but a longer vision of events. He is like Oche, for whom time was nothing but a small mat to set your shoes on. The whole world lay beyond it.
Bob scratches at his knee.
I know what we need to do: split the silver, shake hands, share a drink for luck, and leave. There is no reason to go on together. I have nothing to do with these men. I met them two nights ago, and I’m not even sure that the white man’s name is his name. But my skin flinches at the thought of parting, as though they’re the blanket between my body and the ghosts. They’re the sticks that need arranging. Does violence rope the wicked together? If I leave them, who else will understand me? And where will they go without me? The black man will die, and the white man will be scooped up in a day by Le Clerc. None of that is deserved. I have been a coward already too many times.
“There’s a woman, an old trader who knows some medicine and keeps a house off the western spur. You want to head west, I’ll take you as far as that. And there are some paths branching off that Le Clerc won’t know. Give us time to plan, to fix you up.”
“You’re coming with me?” Bob says.
“Look at you.” I can’t describe how scared I am of what has happened. “We can’t scatter like mice. We’ve done this, and if we mean what we’ve done, we need to finish it.” I watch him move his tongue inside his mouth, puffing out his cheeks, thinking about what the it is.
“You can come,” he says, looking at the ring of us. “Get your own land out there.”
“We head west, we stop at the woman’s house, we decide from there. But we move now. Le Clerc isn’t the only one trailing us.”
Bob looks at Cat, at the man who maybe already murdered, and I look at Bob, who stole his own body away from slavery. Who knows what bounty hunters and slave patrols are already sniffing out our scent. We are a circle of glances. What we have for each another is not trust, but need, and there is no future to it.
I grab my bag, heavy with everything I can’t put down, and start walking fast. South. I don’t look back, but soon hear their footsteps behind me, one half jogging and one in a shuffle as rhythmed as my mother’s voice, my mother who has already lost so many sons. We kick up the dust of mingled day and night.
THE TRAIL IS empty this morning, but just as I am beginning to consider it good luck, a man comes over a hill before us. He has a tangle of woolly hair and is dragging a cart with two wheels behind him. Inside are stacks of newspapers weighted down with rocks. I have seen a few in Pensacola, and traders on occasion bring a paper to Hillaubee, but they are usually several months old and say little that we have not already heard. He draws the cart to a stop when he sees us. The handle of the conveyance is attached to his wrist by a long red ribbon. I keep walking, head down, hoping the men behind me will follow my lead without speaking, but the stranger holds out a hand as we approach. I stop. I can see a pistol stuck in the waist of his trousers.
“Care for the news?” he says.
I shake my head politely. I could pretend not to speak his language, but strangers can be quick to act out against Indians who appear stupid. There is no reason to take chances.
“You heard it already?” He sets down his cart and takes a step closer.
“What city is it from?” Bob asks.
I turn around with a stern face, but my companions, even with heavy bags on their shoulders and a feral mix of dirt and blood on their skin, look surprisingly innocent. It is not unlikely, in fact, that this newspaper man has done even worse things.
“No city,” he says. “This is the news from the stars.”
Bob, pulled briefly from his fear, now begins to trudge on.
“Wait, boy, you’ll want to hear it.”
“What stars?” Cat asks.
“We must keep walking,” I say. “We’re expected in town.”
“Those that point your fates. Wouldn’t you like to know if you travel the wrong way?” With the ribbon still attached, he walks to the back of his cart and lifts up a rock, pulling out a paper with one hand and unfolding it. He turns through it as if inside its corn husk there is meat. “Where were you born?”
“The Carolinas,” Cat says.
“What day?”
Cat shakes his head. The man keeps turning the pages.
“Your mother’s name? No? What about yours?”
“Prudence,” Bob says.
“Lovely. Here it is, then.” The man’s eyebrows crunch together. “No, no, this isn’t the right path for you at all.”
“What’s it say?”
“Shh. The twins are meant to guide you, but this time of year finds them in another part of heaven altogether.”
“Twins?”
“Come,” I say, trying to walk on.
“Hold on, now, which way am I supposed to go?”
The man closes the paper and fans his own face. “Only a sixpence, boy.”
Bob opens his mouth as if to say, We have sixpence and more!, but Cat grabs his arm and pulls him forward, and we walk quickly on while the woolly paper man clucks his tongue loudly.
“I just wanted to know,” Bob says.
WE MAKE THE western spur by afternoon. There have been recent burns; the sun cuts through the canopy and the collapsed underbrush and into our eyes. Young palmettos stretch out from the soot. We are obvious here, three fast walkers with loud bags amid a low charred scrub. Bob shouts out whenever a muscle twinges in his arm. According to Oche, the woman’s house is two days on, and another few miles on a northern branch. She lived in a village next to ours for many years, but was not born Muskogee, may not have had any Indian blood. She was dark and small-nosed and always had white hair, though she never seemed to age. In that village, she sat in council meetings near the front like a man, and captives would be brought to her to learn their fate. This one she’d lightly touch and send off to the Bird clan, a daughter to make up for the son lost at war; this one she’d grip by the shoulders and send off to be killed; this one she’d hold in her lap and tie strands of rope around his wrists and pat his bottom when he walked away, sent off to be sold into slavery. When she tired of her role, she took herself and her pots and a bag of seeds into the woods to start a lonelier life. There were stories of a brave past, some kind of warrioring, but I never knew where she came from. Perhaps she was a captive girl from another tribe, or a Spanish servant, or a colonist’s daughter. As children, we knew somehow that she, a village away and not quite of our world, floated above the prejudices of our own kin. We saw her during Green Corn, at ball play between towns. Oche said if I ever needed saving, I should find her. I am finding her.