The land is still charred where we bed down for the night, so I build a small fire; its smell is no different from the earth-smell here. We cook a rabbit and I find some roots beneath the ash that are still whole and good. Cat finds a spot beside Bob, his body a cocoon, his head near Bob’s knee as if that were the real fire. Bob is hungry for the meat, but shakes his head when I offer him cooked roots. He gives his share to Cat. When Bob belches, he excuses himself. Our bags sit just beyond the circle of firelight. My muscles still tremble with the rush of blood, and I can see the jerks of the others’ limbs; we haven’t calmed yet. There hasn’t been time to think.
“What’ll you do with yours?” Bob asks. “You have plans for the money? You’re already free, right, you’re not bound up in any way? Don’t need to buy yourself?”
“You don’t need to buy yourself either.”
“No, that’s right, I took what was mine. This is for the next part of life, the setting up of a house and taking care of a big piece of land with some crops on it — corn, probably, no sugar. I hear it’s too dry out there for rice or much.” He pauses. “You think I still deserve it?”
I can’t respond.
“Have you done it before, what we did? Is it easy to forget? Or maybe you just put it away like all the other things you have to put away.”
What I have tried to put away are other men’s deeds. Years spent seething against men I considered evil. What is the worst thing I have ever done?
“Did you leave anyone behind?” I ask. My family. “Someone to purchase?”
He shifts his legs as if to unfold them and stretch them out, but sees that Cat is there and settles back into place. He seems to know his knee is comfort. He raises his bandaged arm up instead, twisting his hand at the sky, one way and then the other. “What about you, is that woman you mentioned some kind of family?”
“I have a mother and a brother,” I say, “and cousins. A father too, but he’s not the same to us as he is to your people.”
“No, not my people either.”
We look at Cat.
“I’m sorry I made you do it,” Bob says. “If I made you do it, go after that money.”
I shake my head.
“I wanted it so bad,” he says, “something got in my eyes that I couldn’t blink back. And there we were, all three of us wanting things, and the men — well, you seemed to know them and knew they weren’t worth being friendly with, the way you froze up, it was like a sign, and then the way we’d all been wanting things.”
I nod. Wanting too much.
“Are you sorry?” he asks.
I roll out the skin on which I sleep. Lie down so the last sparks from the fire fly up before Bob’s face, and Cat disappears altogether, just a pile of clothes hazy through the smoke. Pull up my blanket.
“I’m not sorry I did it,” he says, “because we were just saving ourselves, first with the money and then when they woke, they would’ve killed us if we hadn’t killed them. We didn’t kill anyone who wasn’t trying to kill us. You know that? Look here, they shot me in the arm and probably wished it was the heart. I tell you, you just think of all my people, all your people, who’ve been cut down for nothing, not even so men can be better but so they can be richer, and richness just twists their hearts so after all that, they’re worse men than they were. And what about us? Now we can make better people of ourselves, and we will, and isn’t that something to justify — to justify— We’ve done everything right for so long, and we’ve — well, maybe not you, but me — I’ve lost most everything good and never done a thing bad. Never. And what have I lost? Isn’t this a sign that we deserve it? That God is watching and doesn’t mind?”
I can’t see his mouth moving for the sparks. Cat stands up, moves away from the fire, stutters into the darkness. His arms are wrapped around his stomach. I can’t think of what to say to Bob or how to read signs that are not from the natural world. I don’t know what deserving means. I wait until Cat is finished heaving up whatever little he ate and crawls back to his patch of dirt. I don’t sit up; if I see these men in any sort of clarity, I fear I’ll turn on myself for everything I’ve failed to do correctly. As it is, I don’t know how to distinguish us, and in the haze of smoke, with the burned smell muffling everything we say, we are a strange and indestructible creature. Many-headed, various, the good in our hearts — put together — weakly outweighing the bad.
“It’s a stone past,” I say. “It’s over.”
Bob doesn’t believe this, I don’t believe this, but there’s nothing else to say. “So tomorrow we’ll try not to shoot anyone, that’s what you’re saying?”
“Go to sleep.”
“You might want to get your gun back from Cat here. To my mind, I’m thinking now he’s the only one of us hasn’t killed yet, and him being the murderer all along. You still got that gun, Cat?”
He doesn’t answer. I turn onto my stomach, dig my feet into the soft ash of the ground, hide my hands in the late winter leaves. I am no longer afraid of Seloatka now that we both are villains, I am not afraid of losing Polly or loving Polly, I do not fear the tracker who’s now already on our trails, who soon will spot our six-footed steps, but I am afraid of the ghost children. Those haunted little souls who come soft out of the night and brush the skin, breathe through the tiny hairs. I’m not afraid of death but of the dead.
IN THE MORNING, Bob is silent. We eat in silence, he goes into the woods to do his business and returns in silence, and when I point us onward, he says nothing, just follows. Cat now leads him on the trail, and the white man’s face has changed from sorrowful to troubled. Ashamed of his own cowardice at the creek, perhaps. I know what it is to be a coward, and I fear it’s nobler than shooting a gun. Sleep has changed us, a day too late.
For those two days on the western trail, am I hoping someone finds us? I am missing my mother again, and wanting to erase what I’ve done, and feeling the press of the coins on my back like something sacred and good. I’ll be using this to do something right. But I also want someone to stop us, to take us in, to unclench the choices from our hands so we don’t have to make them. I don’t say anything, because Bob and Cat say nothing, and we march on together because in this moment that’s the simplest decision.
Once I ask if his shoulder is hurting worse.
“It’s a bad shoulder,” he says. “We’ve done bad.”
I don’t know whether we should walk quickly or take the time to clear our tracks, to brush branches in animal patterns where our feet have gone. We cross a few hills but mostly flatland, and the burned stretch grows green again farther west. The dogwoods curve over the hummocks, white-saucered, and the redbuds are just lighting their winter branches with pink. The land smells like it’s been reborn. I look for the signs to the woman’s house that Oche made me remember. Signs again.
That first day I left my home, my town, I walked straight south, past Seloatka’s house and the council house and the ball field, not looking at the women on their way to the fields or the men smoking pipes in the square, my one thought to control the anger on my face. Of course it wasn’t anger at all, which is the only emotion young men claim, but despair, embarrassment. I wished Polly hadn’t taken my horse, but if I had been on a horse someone would have asked where I was going. In marching away from my family, I thought of money first: the deer I would kill, the skins I would take to Pensacola on my own back, the purse I would make from a wild boar’s belly to hold the coins, the chiefs I would sway to my side, the bloodless war we’d fight. All I needed was money.