Citizens Creek Read online

  “Someday,” he said, barely giving thought to her complaint. A stronger notion had begun to crowd his mind of late. His life was bound too tight, and he dreamed more and more of some world where he could roam wherever the winds blew, exploring new territory, meeting new challenges. It confused and frustrated him, this cruel aspiration, impossible as the slave of another man.

  “There’s a baby,” she said, pulling away from him, but she didn’t break her gaze, searching his face.

  Just at the copse line of trees at Amy’s back, an emboldened hawk dipped and sliced the air close to the ground before it continued its rapid upward flight and disappeared from view. Cow Tom brought his attention back to Amy.

  He felt the long, flat line of his life crowd in, settling heavy around his shoulders. Cows. Wife. Children. Crops. Cows. Something deep inside him chafed.

  “One day soon they’ll move the Creeks from this place,” Cow Tom said. “The government wants the land.”

  “Did you not hear? There’s to be a child.”

  “I saw the assigned territory as scout with Chief Yargee a few years back,” Cow Tom said. “North and west beside a river, not so rich as this. Some Lower Creeks are already gone there.”

  “What of their slaves?” Amy asked. She placed one hand on her stomach and held it protectively, but there was nothing Cow Tom could see that was any different from yesterday. Not a bulge, not a bump, not the familiar waddle of women he’d seen all his life, black or Indian or white.

  “Some taken along, some sold and left behind.”

  “Chief Yargee’s never sold any of us,” Amy said.

  “But if he does, we’d be white owned. Scattered.”

  Amy stripped a low-hanging willow’s branch of some of its leaves, balled them together, spit on them, and threw them over her shoulder.

  He’d become used to her not-quite ways—not quite black, not quite Creek, not quite Seminole, not quite white. Sometimes Cow Tom recognized a starting point, could trace from which of her ownership lives a warding-off superstition stemmed, but other times he suspected she made it up as she went along.

  “There’s nothing we can do about it,” she said.

  “There’s always something to do,” snapped Cow Tom. Amy winced, but he didn’t try to smooth it over, fighting to hang on to his belief that his words were true. Her humbugs sometimes made him uneasy.

  Cow Tom could still recall the fierceness of the free black man who visited years before, carrying freedom papers with him like a shield. From that day, Cow Tom had scrounged and saved, but he didn’t have enough yet to buy himself, let alone a wife and baby. For every quarter or dollar Cow Tom earned on the side, Chief Yargee deducted his share and held the rest against Cow Tom’s future purchase. Cow Tom sold over fifteen scrub cattle he’d raised as a small herd on his own, for three to four dollars apiece. He knew given more time, he would negotiate a far better price for the two fine calves recently presented to him by Chief McIntosh as a reward for saving the lives of the mother cows last year. Chief Yargee held over one hundred dollars to put toward freedom papers. A start, but not enough. His price was $400.

  “What of us, today?” Amy asked.

  “I’m going to be free,” said Cow Tom.

  “Maybe,” said Amy. “But your son comes on his own time, no matter.”

  Amy was so sure of her place with him, he was tempted to believe he could be content. Cow Tom wavered. Attachment was risky. People always left in the end, whether their fault or no. But a son, a physical mingling of himself and Amy, a well-built boy he could teach to hunt and track. Another sudden image replaced the last, and rolled through him, hot and sharp. A port-wine-stained woman, spirited away as Cow Tom watched.

  Torment still came upon him often, regardless of years passed, and if not careful, pitched him into foul darkness for days, strong flashes of memory he couldn’t purge. Himself as a young boy, staring across a field of cotton, full bucket of water in his hands. Two men, two horses at a gallop away from the back of the main plantation house, his mother thrown across the saddleless blanket in front of the larger man and held down tight. Tom didn’t move right away, frozen, registering a random smattering of detail. The men didn’t seem Creek, neither one, but wore cloth turbans, and one sported a silver gorget across his chest. His terrified mother, screaming, the birthmark stain at her temple red and flaring, a short, dark woman in worn homespun and a head scarf, with rope at her wrists and the paper-thin cracked leather of one shoe exposed beneath her skirt. The other foot bare and kicking until the man shouted something in a language Cow Tom didn’t know, and silenced her somehow. Finally, Tom’s legs propelled him across the wide expanse in their direction, and he took up the screams his mother no longer uttered, but the gap between them steadily widened until the two men rounded a bend in the road and disappeared from view. By the time Tom found the Graysons, his mother was long gone, and his master’s pursuit of the abductors only resulted in failure.

  Later, Old Turtle brought him supper, but he couldn’t eat. Unable to hold back choking sobs, he described the Indians he’d seen. The old man speculated from clothes and speech that Seminoles stole Cow Tom’s mother, and most likely took her somewhere in the wilds of Florida to hide among themselves. One day Cow Tom had a mother, and the next he had none.

  Tom battled the image gone, and blinked away the searing residue, bringing himself back to Yargee’s plantation.

  “There’s got to be more than cows,” Cow Tom said to Amy.

  “Family,” she said. “Now we make a family.”

  “I want . . .” He stumbled to find the words. “I want to be part of the world, not just here.”

  Amy was unfazed. She looked so young, her hair wrapped tight in a cotton scarf, a sureness in her dark eyes that seemed to catch sight of parts of him he didn’t recognize himself. The tiny mole on the right side of her face pulled him toward her lips as if he had no say.

  “I know who you are,” said Amy.

  But did she really? Did she understand how much he wanted something he couldn’t name or describe, something more than passing an empty life doing someone else’s bidding, tending a herd not his own, trapped on a patch of land, no matter how large, the landscape too soon familiar and the circumstance too hedged? How he yearned to make good on his mother’s prophecy before she was ripped from him, that he become, somehow, a man special enough for her pride? Did Amy understand how the soles of his feet itched and his heart ached when outside visitors came to talk to Chief Yargee for one reason or another, and he couldn’t mount a pony and follow when the time came for them to leave, off to someplace fresh, and unknown, somewhere with new things to learn?

  “I won’t always be slave,” he said.

  Amy nodded. “We fit, you and me.”

  It was true. After his mother was taken, he had never been drawn to another person, or opened himself to any other, except Old Turtle.

  “Family,” he repeated.

  “And soon our son joins us.”

  Cow Tom was struck by the beginnings of a longing that muted the image of the port-stained woman. A boy. His boy. He wanted a son. He wanted to be part of his growing up, to protect him. And Amy was right. The two of them fit well. His unease shifted. He met Amy’s gaze.

  “The time is come for us to marry,” he said. The words tumbled out, and he wasn’t sorry. She bewitched him.

  Amy smiled, not wide, but definitely a smile, and Cow Tom found his voice again. “You’ve no parents for permission, and your brother is too young to seek agreement there, and my people are gone. We’ll get Chief Yargee’s consent to jump the broom.”

  “But not before the full moon,” said Amy.

  Cow Tom was used to her injunctions. She’d been right when the stikini screeched all night in the tree close to Lucinda’s cabin, and Amy predicted death close by. Sure enough, they’d found Lucinda’s baby stopped o
f breathing in the morning.

  “Bad luck for us to marry before passing of the first moon,” she said. “After, my brother takes your bed in the men’s cabin, and you move into ours with me.”

  He didn’t mind that she’d already worked this through. He was content she was so capable. Although marriage came sooner than expected, the transition didn’t have to be difficult. Amy would make a fine wife.

  Marriage. A son. Freedom. He wanted all of it.

  Chapter 3

  ON A BRIGHT summer Tuesday, Cow Tom found them together on the banks of the river, Old Turtle seated, shoulders hunched, his back against the cypress tree and stout stick on the ground next to his feet, and Amy holding a gourd to his lips, the fullness of her jutting belly straining at the fabric of her tunic. Three women, two Negroes and one Creek, washed clothes farther downstream, their voices rising occasionally above the slapping of wet cloth on the rocks.

  Exhausted from a long day in the pasture tending a sickened heifer, Cow Tom wanted nothing more than to collect Old Turtle and lead the blind man back to his cabin for the night before taking supper. But the sight of Amy and Old Turtle, the two people he most prized, caused him to pause, and he hesitated, considering them both. Amy had become even more grounded in the carrying of the child, more attuned, as if she heard a song in her mind to which only she knew the notes. She talked so softly to Old Turtle that Cow Tom couldn’t make out her words. Usually Old Turtle rambled on, and Amy patiently listened, but today Old Turtle was calm and compliant, without his usual grousing, allowing her to guide the gourd without struggle. But he only sipped, laboring under each swallow.

  Every morning, Cow Tom led Old Turtle out of his cabin, and settled him in the out-of-doors with his corncob pipe and guiding stick. He propped him up at the stout base of the same cypress tree by the river, in the shade, spreading a blanket over his legs, and left Old Turtle to fend for himself while he worked, leaving a supply of river water and a bean pie or slab of cold sofki. Toward evening, Cow Tom returned him to his shack. Either he or Amy looked in on Old Turtle as best they could throughout the day.

  Amy looked up first, and Cow Tom quickened his step to join them.

  “Ready?” he asked Old Turtle.

  Completely blind, his hands in constant tremble, Old Turtle turned toward Cow Tom. “Time for me and you to talk,” he said.

  Amy stood. “I’d best be getting to fixing supper,” she said, and she slipped away, leaving him alone with Old Turtle. Cow Tom squatted in the dirt and waited.

  “She gone?” Old Turtle asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s the right one for you. Amy.”

  “So she swayed you to her side,” said Cow Tom.

  “You jumped the broom, married now, a man full-grown. And soon enough, a father.”

  Cow Tom nodded, though Old Turtle couldn’t see it, sure there was death talk to follow. Old Turtle lived less and less in this world, and more within his preparations to depart.

  “My time is coming. Everybody needs somebody on this earth, ’specially you. Choose wise, but careful to give back in kind. You’re not the motherless child no more.”

  Cow Tom held himself tight. After his mother was snatched from the Old Place, Old Turtle never talked about her, or said her name, or referred to her even in passing, and Cow Tom didn’t push, as if by asking, his mother might slip from his grasp entirely.

  “You’re the closest I got to family, and now you’ve age enough to bind my claim of fours,” Old Turtle said. “I been watching, all these years, from the Old Place to this. You got your ways to make things come out one way over another. When my time comes, you the one to do the digging. Don’t let them leave me alone until I go in the ground, four days later. The night before, hold service and talk good about me. Bury my walking stick and my drinking gourd and a cup of coffee and an apple with me, and you and Amy give me the farewell handshake. Make sure the grave is covered complete, and keep the rain from over my head till I’m gone west. Build a house over the grave so when my spirit wanders for a bit and makes the last visits, it knows where to come back to. And gunshots, four, one in each direction.”

  “I can do most,” said Cow Tom, “but Chief Yargee won’t shoot guns for us.”

  Old Turtle lit his pipe, a slow process. He had to feel for the dent of the bowl, tap in the pinch of tobacco. He didn’t want Cow Tom’s help, except to marry the flame.

  “We might get Saturdays and Mondays for ourself, and could do worse owned by other than Upper Creek and Massa Yargee, but slave is still slave. Don’t forget it.” A bit of tobacco spilled from the bowl of the pipe and fell down the front of his shirt. “That said, you got powers to do what I ask,” Old Turtle insisted. “Those shots give my spirit time to go the way of the sun, to join family and friends gone before.”

  “Why would Chief Yargee listen to me?”

  “Don’t talk foolish. I don’t have time enough,” said Old Turtle. “You know you got something big in you, boy.”

  “What I know of cattle I learned from you,” Cow Tom admitted.

  “I showed you this and that, and you took to it, but it’s not cattle I’m talking about,” Old Turtle said. “Maybe that’s most what Massa Yargee notices right now, but it’s matching up words to people and meanings and happenings that serves you best.”

  Old Turtle felt around, his trembly hand patting at the blanket. Cow Tom thought he’d lost his pipe in the folds until he realized the blind man was searching for him, for the touch of him. Cow Tom leaned close, and awkwardly put his hand on the quilt covering the old man’s knees.

  “Your mama, she was smart that way too,” Old Turtle said.

  Cow Tom quickly drew his hand back. He covered his confusion by hoisting Old Turtle and helping him to his feet.

  “Time to get you inside,” Cow Tom said. He led Old Turtle to his cabin, matching his gait to the old man’s, and got him settled.

  “Remember what I ask,” said Old Turtle as he left.

  Next morning, Cow Tom came to collect Old Turtle for the day. The small cabin, always dim, seemed a different shade of black inside, cold and foreboding. A dim glow of embers remained in the fireplace, mostly ash now, but there was a stillness hung over the room. Cow Tom stepped slowly into the darkness, and knew before he came to the narrow cot that the figure under the threadbare cover had crossed to the other side. He didn’t have the right to touch or handle the dead, not until he drank the red root and purged, but he sat on the old three-legged stool next to the cot for a moment to collect his heart, permitting himself to stare once more at the old man’s face. He couldn’t stay, a day of chores and the herd needing his attention, but he couldn’t leave just yet. He waited until the last ember in the fireplace turned black, and the fire ceased to be.

  Old Turtle was dead. His mentor had left him.

  And Cow Tom’s last link to his mother was gone.

  Chapter 4

  COW TOM THRASHED about the better part of the night trying to figure how to persuade Chief Yargee to fire guns at a slave’s funeral.

  “You’ll find a way,” Amy said into the darkness beside him, but his mind still churned after she fell into a soft snore.

  The next day in the pasture, he practiced first one speech and then another on his cows, the knot of his stomach pulling ever tighter than a fist, but no argument seemed quite right, quite convincing enough, and time ran short.

  He came straight from his work in the pasture to Yargee’s log house, and presented himself at the back door. Sarah, the cook, let him in, a skinny Negro woman twice Cow Tom’s age who ate better than anyone black or Indian, but never put on the weight of someone whose stock and trade is food. He stood in the kitchen for quite some time until Yargee was through with his evening meal, reminded the while by the rumbling of his stomach that he should have stopped for his own supper first.

  Finally, Yarge
e met him on the back porch. The chief towered over Cow Tom, unusually tall for a Creek. He seemed in a foul mood, annoyed at being called out, and Cow Tom considered coming back in the morning, when he might be more receptive. The chief was changeable, ill-tempered and rigid one day, and full of humor the next. But Cow Tom plunged ahead.

  “Old Turtle’s dead,” Cow Tom said.

  Chief Yargee softened a bit. “I am sorry to hear,” he said. “We’ll put him to ground tomorrow, before sundown.”

  “He asked after the Creek way. Buried in four days.”

  Chief Yargee considered. “That’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll dig the hole,” said Cow Tom. “People be coming by the cabin to see him the night before. He’ll be ready.”

  “All right.” Yargee turned to go, their business finished.

  Cow Tom thought of Old Turtle, how sure he’d been his charge could represent him.

  “He wanted shots fired,” Cow Tom said, before he lost Yargee back into the house. A throbbing started up at his temple, gaining speed. He wondered if Chief Yargee could see it. He had to fight to keep his voice even. “A service with shots fired. I thought to clear that by you.”

  Yargee squinted at Cow Tom, his face clouded. “Shots are for warriors. Upper Creek warriors.”

  Cow Tom tasted a sickening sourness at the base of his tongue. “Old Turtle served the tribe,” he said. “Served the tribe better than most.” The words pushed out hard and fast, far louder than he expected.

  The tightness in Chief Yargee’s face deepened, and he folded his arms across his chest.

  Cow Tom knew then that he was done, that he’d been denied, but he couldn’t seem to stop. “Old Turtle saved the whole herd from milk sickness after we first came here. He thought himself Creek. Like the rest of us.”

  Yargee’s voice turned cold. “He’ll have a fitting service. Go along now.”