I will take my lead from the black man, head west. Purchase another notebook. I hear there are men exploring the islands of the Pacific.
The man on the mule with bound hands doesn’t ask where we’re going or what will be done with him. The glow on his face has not subsided since we heard of the black man’s wife. Was this what he looked like when he still believed in love? If so, I can sympathize with his wife; he is a handsome fellow, with kind eyes. Does he believe that though a man may leave his woman, or wrong her treacherously, she will love him past any bounds, past life? That a man may always be salvaged?
Why don’t I ask him these questions?
I tell my men that we’ll turn east at the path to the creek, finish the business where it started, wash our hands in that water, and return to the Indian towns without the weight of doubt on our shoulders.
“NEXT MAYBE THE Iroquois girl will turn up.”
“You joke, but no one would come for you.”
“Settle down. It’s a good thing, have something to hope for.”
“And what’s yours? Say you weren’t born Muskogee at all, but a man with no allegiance.”
“Or an animal,” says the third.
“All right then. What would you make of all this? What would you want?”
“You mean would I be the first bird to make a stone pot, or a flint tip? An inventor bird?”
“I’m not asking so you can mock me.”
“No such thing! I only ask what you mean.”
“I know what he means,” says the third.
“If you had no uncle to please, no mother to bring game for, no pretty cousin to court, no Choctaws to fight, no friend to make jokes of all day long, what would you do?”
“Mm. Yes.” He slows his horse down so he is well behind us all, puffs of red dust floating up from the animal’s hooves; when I look back, his head is leaned back as far as it will go, so far that his mouth of necessity hangs a little open. With each step of the horse, his chin bobs. Oh, for the luxury of imagination.
“I’d catch frogs,” the third says. “Stockpile them, and sell them to the other birds.”
“And then you’d starve, idiot.”
“Here it is,” and he rides up to match his pace with ours again. “I’d make other people out of clay, all different kinds, and give them fingers and toes — maybe gills for underwater, we’re lacking that — and I’d breathe life into them and set them loose in the woods around me, though they’d be smaller so that I need only take a few steps to see everything they did.”
“You’d be a god, then.”
“Would I?”
“All the world before you with not a single duty to man or woman, and you’d make a set of men and women to play with?”
“Not to play with; no, just to watch. They’d be free to do as they like.”
“Well, it sounds tiresome.”
“No, you see, they’re much smaller.”
“Smaller than frogs?” asks the third, already calculating how his own dream will intertwine with another’s.
WE CROSS THE creek on our horses and dismount where the corpses of Kirkland and his relations and Thomas Colhill and their servants have been removed. There are still smudges in the sand, between the clumps of grass and the young sycamores sprouting, wide dips that once held weight. I untie Cat from the saddle of his mule and pull him down. His knees buckle on the sand and he looks about him with concern, as if expecting to see ghosts. The lingering smile is gone. He doesn’t move as we tie the horses up and my men search for a sturdy tree.
I fix a pipe with a little tobacco that has stayed dry in my bag. The smoke in my mouth soothes me. I offer it to Cat, but he shakes his head. He doesn’t know what we are doing here. A dozen yards downstream from where we crossed, a fallen limb thick with new shoots creates a washboard eddy in the stream. The water, which here is mirror-still, breaks over the branch in rippling whitecaps. The rhododendrons tumble over the red bluffs like brush fires. Cat rubs the pocket of his shirt, where through the thinness of the fabric I can see paper, a small envelope.
When the men are ready and have strung the noose, I turn to Cat, close enough for him to reach for my throat, and tell him of what crimes he’s been accused.
“The murder of six men, and the seizing of private property, to wit, two large bags of silver worth eight hundred pounds, and the wanton flight from justice resulting in your capture. I am aware that this act of violence was abetted by two other men who have thus far eluded arrest. Did they take any lives by their own hands?”
He shakes his head.
“You are solely responsible for the death of six men?”
“I,” he says, but his throat is dry and his voice catches on itself like cloth on a nail. He could not have killed six men alone, but I allow this.
“What is your defense?”
“None,” he says. His eyes move around — from creek to flowers to the negro standing at a quiet distance — as if to seek some explanation for his recent swing from guilt to hope and now abruptly to confession. “Though I am sorry.”
“Through the authority of Seloatka, mico of Hillaubee, I redeem the blood of his guests with the blood of their assailant.”
I can afford no deliberation.
I tie his hands tight with rope again, this time behind his back, and lead him to the noose, which hangs from a thick blackgum branch over an empty spot of sand where a wading bird left diamond-shaped tracks. I take the man’s chin in my hand, look into his watery blue eyes.
There is nothing there but depth and endless sorrow, pain like threads of silk drowned in the depths of that sorrow. And floating above, a flicker of desire.
I move him by gentle pushes to stand before the noose. His breath quickens. At the base of the blackgum, where its roots run into sand, a dark stain spreads over the wood. His cracked lips move.
It is the closing of the afternoon and the sun warms the bank; some of my men remove their coats.
He opens his mouth again, and I cock my head. A jenny wren sings in the branches of the blackgum.
I watch his lips but they make no sense. His face, recently washed with optimism, pinches again at its removal — has he not already endured this blow a hundred times? Is it not already familiar? The criminal in him has evaporated, leaving behind a mist. This is what I will describe to the chairbound scholars: a murderer, faced with judgment and the final breath of a meager life, cruel and wrecked as it is, yearns for more. The spirit, however malformed, is hungry for itself, will always fight for its own defense. He doesn’t want justice, or the appropriate meting out of the world’s endowment; he doesn’t want to face his wrongs but to evade them, to cower away from civilization so that he may live unreckoned. For all he followed in the others’ company like a loyal dog, he was born alone and lived a lonely life and will perish as an individual — as an American.
After all that I have recently seen of brotherhood, or thought I saw, I am returned to my original impression: that men are selfish, that they fight only for themselves, that this country is their birthright and their promise. I who watch everything, who know men’s hearts because they are too busy to watch themselves, can find a partial mirror of myself here — admittedly — but this loneness is no more than a fraction. I have my freedom, employment, the trust of nations, a keen and investigative mind that outstrips a merely empathetic one. I am not beholden to the whims or burdens of familial ties, whether natural or constructed. I cannot be undone at the sight of a wife searching for her husband. If this is what allows me to produce dispassionate scholarship, this too will allow me to take another’s life with tranquil conscience.