Authors: Lalita Tademy
“Have you come to listen to my sermon this fine day?”
“I’m fresh from the sale of a brood cow in North Fork,” said
Cow Tom. “But I’m come to visit my old friend Harry Island.”
“Then welcome, brother.”
“Too long past, Harry.”
Harry jumped off the porch, his belt buckle clanking against the bone necklaces down his chest, and with great gusto, clapped Cow Tom on the back. Neither of the men could be considered tall, but Cow Tom had at least a couple of inches on Harry Island, and Harry circled him slowly several times, studying him head to toe.
“You’ve filled out since Florida,” he said. “Not easy where good land is scarce and food scarcer.”
“Not so many meals missed on your side either,” said Cow Tom to Harry.
“Five years,” said Harry. “Come to check our pledge?”
Cow Tom still remembered the damp of the evening at the gate of Fort Brooke, the uncertainty of whether he and Harry would end the night minus their scalps or as future agents of justice. Without thinking, he touched the nub of his right ear.
“Chief Yargee settled along the Canadian River, but I been too hard-pressed living to show much pledge progress,” said Cow Tom. “You?”
“Doing my best,” said Harry. He accepted Cow Tom’s whiskey jug offering and set it next to his fiddle. “Away from home, wandering alone. You free?”
“Not yet. Chief Yargee lets me go off for business, but on a short leash. But this sale puts me almost to $400 in the clear for my papers; a few months, then I come to be my own.” He’d already have the cash if not for Yargee deducting Bella’s price coming into Indian
Territory. And if one of his blasted cows hadn’t wandered off before he sold her while he slept off a drunk. Amy deviled him about the loss, as if his fault. They’d argued.
“You always were a man to make good on intention.”
“After me is to buy Amy, before more children come. There’s four already, all girls. Better born free than bought free.”
“And Bella?” Harry seemed tentative, as if afraid to poke a wound.
“One of us now. She goes by Sarah, and cooks for Chief Yargee.”
“Glad to hear,” Harry said, grinning big. “How did you find me?”
“Harry Island is a name of great reputation,” said Cow Tom. “Old Gouge is unhappy with you. He went to Council, red turban shaking, asking why the praying people abandon old Indian ways.”
“I have a different path to follow.”
“He wants Christian worshippers striped, and called you by name as the preacher from Tuckabatchee.”
“We been beat, yes, but no striping yet,” said Harry. “And still we preach. And still the faithful come. Today is special. Will you attend?”
Cow Tom studied his friend. The same feverish cast to his eyes as when they warriored together in Florida, the same sly defiance pushing at the bounds of abandon, but somehow always tamed to grit and calculated gamble.
“And the danger?”
“Waking to morning is danger,” Harry said.
“You believe you do good for Negroes?”
Harry considered this. “It isn’t only us attending my sermons,” he said. “If past is judge, there’ll be Creeks, half-breeds, and Negroes, both slave and free. See for yourself.”
“You can’t be persuaded otherwise?”
“We made us a pledge. And now I been saved, and am the better man. You can be saved too. I hold service this morning.”
There wasn’t a flicker of doubt on Harry’s face. The wild man Harry was when they first met had developed into something different, a more focused instrument.
“Yes,” Cow Tom said. “I’ll come.”
Harry offered
puska
and jerky, and they ate together. When Cow Tom pointed to the jug, Harry passed it to him.
“To getting out alive,” said Cow Tom, and took a long swig. Before the alcohol itself had a chance to do its work, he untensed at the promise of it.
Harry didn’t take the jug when offered, but toasted anyway. “To no more Florida,” he said.
“To no more alligators.”
“No more sand fleas.”
“No more treaties.”
“There will always be more treaties.”
They lapsed into silence. It bothered Cow Tom that Harry wasn’t drinking, but he hoisted the jug with his two-fingered hand and let the liquid wash through him.
“You miss it?” asked Harry. “Florida?”
Cow Tom thought about the life he lived on Tiger Mountain, domesticated, confined. The land along the banks of the Canadian River was fertile but uncultivated when they Removed five years prior, and conditions were harsher than Alabama. Homes washed away during violent storms, and warm, sunny days suddenly turned to freezing-cold nights. He’d devoted backbreaking years helping Chief Yargee develop the new plantation in Indian Territory, already almost the rival of the spread in Alabama, and built up a new herd. Chief Yargee allowed him freedoms, but Cow Tom was restless. He had much, but something was lacking.
“Some parts,” Cow Tom replied. “The spark of living in the heart of a thing. You?”
“It was a letdown, coming back,” Harry said. “I lost my way for a while, but found a new calling.”
They sat on the porch for the next hour. Cow Tom described his life on Tiger Mountain, and Harry his in Tuckabatchee village.
“Couldn’t do without Amy and the girls,” said Cow Tom. “And Sarah fit right in.”
“Ah, our Bella.”
“She and Amy thick as thieves. Only now they both on me any time I slack off for a minute to unknot and spend a little time with the jug, talking about how I should be doing extra work toward freedom money instead.”
“I had to let drink go,” said Harry.
“Makes the day and night tolerable, but sometimes morning comes faster and harder than I thought,” Cow Tom admitted. He took another swig from the jug. “I think Amy’s trying to hex me from liquor when I sleep. Even Chief Yargee’s started giving me the stink eye.”
“You ever think serious on letting go of drink?” asked Harry.
“I’d no more give up drink than you’d give up the fiddle,” said Cow Tom. He’d heard Harry was village fiddler of Tuckabatchee. “Say, what of a tune? For old times.”
Cow Tom had trouble reading Harry. There was seriousness, a hardness just beneath the surface, but Harry finally smiled a sheepish smile, and picked up his fiddle and bow.
“For old times,” he said.
Harry veered from one maniacal tune to the next without pause, as if chased by the devil himself, in the same frenzy Cow Tom remembered from Florida. When he finally put down his fiddle, he seemed a man transformed, calmer, settled.
“It’s time,” Harry said. “They’ll be gathered.”
He grabbed his fiddle and the jug of liquor. The south wind was high, but the sun dominated, and they set out in only their tunics, no need for blankets, traveling by foot, not far, to a bigger homestead farther outside the center of the village. A Creek rancher, a
sympathizer, had given over his house to the service, and fourteen Creeks, half-breeds, and Negroes waited inside.
Harry set his jug and his fiddle in the corner, and took to the center of the room. When he sang a hymn in Creek to Creek music, his congregation joined in. More plaintive than solemn, Cow Tom felt himself pulled into the curious rhythm, reassured by its familiarity. Harry’s voice was strong and infectious, if not always tuneful, and he led a series of Baptist hymns in English, the words simple and shaped to fit the tune. Cow Tom assumed the songs made up, as Harry repeated “Farewell Father,” with a chorus, followed by “Farewell Mother,” and on and on until he exhausted sister, brother, and preacher. It was easy to participate, which Cow Tom did, including the final tune, whose only words were “I’m bound to go on,” in English.
Harry held up his hand at the last note, calling for silence. He started his sermon, slowly, but built the tone and speed as he spoke of a wrathful God, a God who tolerated neither sin nor disobedience. He asked those in the room to show their commitment. A young Negro named Silas came forward.
“I want to be saved,” Silas said.
“Do you fear God?” Harry asked, the same words he’d asked Cow Tom that morning.
“I fear God,” Silas said.
“Will you give up ardent spirits for God?”
Silas shuffled his feet, his eyes downward toward the floor. “I am weak,” he said.
“If you do not, you cannot enter the house of the Lord.”
Silas hesitated.
Harry went to the corner, snatching up both the jug and his fiddle. “I am a sinner,” he said, holding the jug in one hand and the fiddle in the other. “I am weak, but He is strong. I have drunk to excess. I have idled away my time for my own amusement. But no more.”
“Come out to the sunshine,” he called, and marched outdoors. “Follow me.”
Silas was first to go after him, out into the waiting wind, and they all followed, one after the other, as did Cow Tom. Harry staked his ground fifty yards from the house, the small crowd gathered round him.
“The Lord condemns whiskey,” he said. He poured the contents of the jug on the ground, until the brownish liquid weakened to a dribble. The act shocked Cow Tom. The Harry he knew would never waste a jug of liquor. Harry’s eyes were fire bright, as if in fever. “And so I will drink no longer. Spirits poison our minds and weaken our body. We forget our better selves. We forget our pledges.”
He looked to Cow Tom, as if no one else was there. Cow Tom looked away.
But the quiet deepened, as Harry willed Cow Tom’s eyes back to him. Cow Tom couldn’t refuse.
Harry raised his fiddle and held it over his head, the same fiddle he’d carried into war, the same fiddle he’d played to cheer the warriors and console himself as their tour of duty in the swamps stretched beyond what any of them imagined. In Florida, Harry had slept under the stars with this fiddle cradled by his side, as careful with it as a newborn. He’d saved the fiddle when the
Monmouth
sank.
“One brother helps another be strong,” Harry said.
For a moment, Cow Tom thought he meant to play, in the sunshine, as he had this morning on the porch, but Harry brought the fiddle against the tree with such force that leaves from high branches rained down as wood splintered into pieces. The catgut strings stayed oddly intact. Once more, Harry smashed the face of the fiddle against the stout base of the tree, and then again, until hardly anything recognizable was left to destroy.
“I am saved,” he said into the silence. “And so can you be saved.
Who will follow?”
A tension ran through the small crowd, a hush, an almost imperceptible shuffling of feet. Silas stepped forward, holding his arms out toward Harry. “I am a drinking man, but after today, I’ll drink no more,” he said. He dropped his arms to his sides, his eyes red and moist, and although Cow Tom wasn’t convinced the man would keep to his promise, he was convinced Silas believed it himself at that moment.
“Welcome, brother,” Harry said. He looked around at the rest. “Who else will bear witness today? Who else will slough their corrupt ways?” He stared at Cow Tom and kept him in his gaze, waiting.
Cow Tom had attended more than one service put on by white missionaries passing through Yargee’s lands, but they had been dry affairs, droning and high-handed, nothing like this. He looked at the splintered pieces of Harry’s fiddle on the ground, the sure calm of his friend’s face. Here, today, he found himself flooded with a sense of possibility. With release. He felt a catch in his throat and the spread of an inner light that warmed him, as if a soothing hand held his heart. He was moved beyond measure. Surely he was the only one who could know what that fiddle meant to Harry.
Harry chose a different path and seemed more content. Why couldn’t he?
“I do,” said Cow Tom, although his voice almost failed him. He’d seen the waste of too many, caught in the clutches of alcohol. He’d felt the slip of Amy’s favor when she’d found him passed out in the corncrib, and he’d almost missed morning’s call to work. He’d seen the question on Yargee’s face where there had never been doubt of him before. If Harry could give up his fiddle, Cow Tom could give up the jug. Give up the shake of hand and the sour belly.
“I mean to leave off drink,” Cow Tom said.
Harry nodded, as if he’d known all the while it would come to this.
“Welcome, brother,” he said. “Anyone else?”
The rest of the congregation remained silent, and Harry launched into another hymn, this one in Mvskoke.
Cow Tom joined in, the reality of his pledge sinking in, already unsure if he could stay the course, thinking about the long trip home, back to Yargee’s plantation, back to Amy and their daughters and his mother and his cattle. Back to Tiger Mountain. He was determined to try to atone for his past failings, to be a better man, a sober man, to take up Harry’s good example.
He wasn’t yet free, but now, at least, he was saved.
Chapter 25
COW TOM RAPPED
at the back door of Chief Yargee’s log house. He straightened his jacket and brushed dirt from his leggings, took off his turban and gripped it in trembling hands, but thought better and placed it back on his head. Already he’d searched for Chief Yargee in his usual places, under the gnarled old oak by the river where the chief liked to enjoy a quiet smoke away from the domestic home front overfull with women and children, down at the gulch where braves gathered to swap stories, at the sweat lodge. The day was too blustery and the smokehouse too full for the chief to be on a hunt.
Facing the closed door, with the distant screech of a
stikini
and the whistling wind at his back, his nerves, already stretched to snapping, began to get the best of him. Times like this made him sorry he’d given up drink. He considered going round to the front, but a short black woman in a homespun dress swung the door wide.
“Morning, Sarah.” Cow Tom touched his turban in two-fingered salute with his good hand, as he’d seen the white man do. Though he called his mother by her second name, he thought of her still as Bella, and was pleased anew at the place she’d made for herself in Yargee’s house.
“Morning, Mr. Tom,” she said. She looked him directly in the eye, studying him, and although she threatened a broad wink, she kept her face solemn. “Come in,” she said, clearing a path for him. “Chief Yargee stayed close to home today.”