Citizens Creek (2 page)

His star called to him. First, he wished his mother safe. He wished she would come back. He wished for guidance on how to be special. And now he had something new to add to his list. He wished he was paper-free.

Chapter 2

COW TOM STARED
at the sway of Amy’s hips as she walked toward him. She carried a slab of warm Indian bread on a wooden paddle, and extended the flat loaf to her brother, who tore off a sizable chunk and squatted in the dirt to eat. Only after did she come to him, her eyes not bold but without surrender. Eyes dark and deep, sable brown, like he remembered his mother’s.

“Water,” said her brother, barely looking up. She produced a cowhide container, which he tipped to his lips and almost emptied. Tending the herd was hot, thirsty work, but for one so young, Cow Tom thought, the boy had promise. He displayed a real feel for cattle and showed almost as much potential as he himself had once demonstrated at Old Turtle’s side. But as a man of twenty-three, Cow Tom had other things on his mind than cattle.

She brought the container to Cow Tom. Her walk was solid, as if she were a part of the earth. He had water left in the flask at his hip, but accepted her offering, if only to be closer to the warmth and scent of her, and took his time in the drinking. He’d watched her ripen, just a few years behind his own maturation, from the time of girls’ stickball in the compound to her joining the circle of women at their baskets. He had known for some time she would be his, long before she put up her braids and assumed her duties. She was the girl closest to his age in the slave population on Chief Yargee’s ranch, but his attraction was deeper than
that. His approval as she developed mastery at bread making and tending the vegetable gardens and the time-consuming task of dressing deer hides had lately developed into an accompanying ache each time he saw her, a fever to explore the planes of her face and the curves of her ample body. Sometimes the effect she had on him overwhelmed, and he had to guard against falling too deeply under her spell.

Months before, when Cow Tom asked Old Turtle what he thought of Amy, he poked out his lips and made his pronouncement.

“She’ll do,” his mentor had said. Old Turtle’s specialty may have been the peculiarities and diseases of cattle, but he had a firm opinion about every other topic under the sky.

But Amy would more than just do, an easy pairing. If Cow Tom was
hilis haya
for the herd, Amy had the makings of
hilis haya
for the People. She was young yet, but learned the art of healing with herbs from her time with the Seminoles, before Yargee. Already some members of the tribe sought her out for the strength of her potions. And she’d taught him all the Hitchiti phrases she knew, the words fresh and crucial to Cow Tom’s ear.

In the last years, Old Turtle’s health, already poor, had failed further, and Cow Tom took the lead in managing the herd. He thought of his mentor each time he saw Hadjo out to pasture, old, slow, and spent, as Old Turtle was now. He pushed away the thought of either selling or slaughter as he would any other milk cow past her prime. She’d served the tribe well, and he’d protect her now in her last days. Times were, for the most part, good at the plantation in Alabama, with sufficient food for anyone willing to hunt or forage or plant. If the tribe ever had true need of Hadjo’s meat, Cow Tom would deliver her up without complaint.

Amy stood in the dust of the oak tree, slowly spinning the beaded bangle on her arm, neither settled into staying nor attempting to leave. Cow Tom pointed to a far-off spot in the south field and ordered the girl’s brother to look after a calf too close to the
woods. The boy bounded off at a fast clip. The calf was in no danger, but Cow Tom wanted to show Amy that he was in charge of the herd. That he was in charge of her brother.

“I have to go back,” said Amy, but she made no move to return to the square.

“Meet me in the woods tonight after supper,” Cow Tom said.

She surprised him by saying nothing. She was usually as eager as he to find a place where the two of them could be alone, and they had a well-used meeting spot by the split oak where they could be together beyond the curious eyes of the tribe or the Negroes in the Commons. Her two-room Commons cabin housed three, including her brother and Sarah, the woman who did the cooking for Chief Yargee, and the log cabin where Cow Tom lived was little more than a pass-through point for single males on the way to manhood or beyond coupling, including Horse Tom and Poke-Eye. Amy’s brother would soon be too old to stay with the women and needed to take his place in one of the men’s cabins. Many nights Cow Tom slept under the expanse of the moon and sky, sending prayers upward to the stars, more content outdoors among the cattle than imprisoned in a dank room with snoring young males and liquor-soaked old men.

“What say you?” he asked.

She drew her mouth tight. “Spotted Deer is younger and already jumped the broom with Ezekiel.”

She bent to retrieve the flask from Cow Tom’s feet. He caught her hand in his, and moved his thumb upward slowly, past the bangles at the wrist, stroking her bare arm until he felt the resistance melt.

“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 of 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.