Citizens Creek (19 page)

Cow Tom followed her into the darkness of the kitchen. He’d spent a fair amount of time here, waiting to confer with Chief
Yargee on one issue or another, and he mumbled his greetings to the other women working, tending the skillets and kettles, chopping vegetables, washing cups.

“Cold today,” Sarah said. “Winter’s early.” She looked fit to bust. “A good day for special matters. For a special man.”

Cow Tom nodded, mute, and followed his mother down the narrow passageway toward the front of the house. She deposited him there and, with an encouraging nod, retreated from the room. He felt like a little boy, brought up before the tribal elders for an offense. Chief Yargee sat on a straight-back chair in the center of the room, flanked by two of his wives. One wove strips of flat reed into a basket, and the other pushed cut pieces of deerskin into what looked like leggings. Both of the sisters peered openly at Cow Tom, and Chief Yargee waved him in. A black-and-white patchwork mutt with begging eyes and a long jaw lay at the chief’s feet, and neither growled nor barked. Cow Tom’s presence in the house was not new.

“Any trouble with the sale?” the chief asked in Mvskoke.

“No, sir,” said Cow Tom. “They hit the right cattle price. I have the gold here.”

He pulled out the small sack from his jacket.

“Bring it to me,” the chief said.

Cow Tom paid watchful attention to the dog, careful not to threaten territory too quickly, and placed the sack into Yargee’s hands. The chief put it carelessly on the table by his pipe. “Good,” he said.

Cow Tom cleared his throat, suddenly very thirsty. “My part for sale and translation comes to seventeen dollars.”

Yargee grunted. “I’ll put it aside,” he said. “Like always.” He tapped his pipe on the table to settle the tobacco, and lit the con
tents, drawing in great drafts of air.

“That makes $396,” said Cow Tom.

“Yes. I believe it does.”

“And I sold my scrub steer to them for another four dollars.” He dug into a different pocket of his jacket and offered several coins. Chief Yargee placed them alongside the sack.

Cow Tom waited for further acknowledgment, but Yargee turned his attention to the dog. Cow Tom knew the story, as did everyone else in the tribe. Yargee had found him when he was a motherless pup, a scrappy survivor. He’d nursed him back to health and kept him close ever since. Yargee scratched the animal behind first one ear and then the other.

“That comes to $400,” Cow Tom pressed.

Yargee grunted again.

“The time has come,” Cow Tom said. He searched for how to proceed and came up empty. After a lifetime of waiting, he had lost the words he’d intended.

“What time?” asked Yargee. He barely made eye contact with Cow Tom as he talked, his stocky body loose and entitled, his attention more pulled toward the dog than either Cow Tom or the money. His movements were slow and sure, only enough to draw the short, smoking pipe to his lips and let out several curling puffs before returning the pipe to the table. The youngest wife let a tiny giggle escape before she composed herself, under the stern gaze of her older sister and fellow wife, her small mouth hidden behind her chapped, blunt-fingered hand. Yargee motioned the older wife, and she put down her basket weaving, picked up the sack and loose bills, and disappeared into a back room. Yargee tapped the bowl of the pipe against the table and waited.

Chief Yargee was playing with him. The old chief was a gregarious man, as fond of pranks as he was of stretching out a tall tale to make it last for hours, but Cow Tom didn’t have his usual patience today. Today wasn’t for tomfoolery. Today was only for seriousness.

“Time for free papers,” Cow Tom said.

“Whose free papers?” asked Yargee.

“I come to buy myself,” said Cow Tom, remembering his words at last. “I come to carry my own papers from now forward.”

“I see,” said Yargee. He exchanged a look with the young wife, and she dropped her gaze, concentrating on punching another small threading hole in the deerskin. “And the money?”

Cow Tom and Yargee had talked this through already, before they came to Indian Territory from Alabama, before he married Amy and had children, before he spent the hellish year in Florida. Yargee’s stated price for a black man’s freedom was $400, cash, and to the chief’s credit, he hadn’t once wavered on the agreed amount despite the passage of time.

“There is enough, with money kept back,” said Cow Tom. “With what you hold, and the sale last week of the sick steer I nursed through, and today’s add. There is enough.”

“Enough?” asked Yargee. “Did we say $450?”

“No, sir,” said Cow Tom. “Four hundred dollars. You hold $400, all together.” Cow Tom felt the sweat running down the sides of his face. Even his hands were damp and clammy, despite the chill.

Chief Yargee looked thoughtful, as if trying to decide between
sofki
with venison or ghost bread, each choice appealing and with merit, either decision possible and dictated entirely by his mood.

Cow Tom prided himself on reading people, one of the greatest survival skills a black man could possess. The chief could be playful, even at the expense of others, but as masters went, Chief Yargee was a reasonable man, not cruel, not intent on demeaning those belonging to him, nor overly harsh, even with warranted punishment. His attraction to money applied only to those things he could buy with it, like grain or seed or ponies or tools or cows. Chief Yargee was content to sit by the fire smoking his pipe all day while the tribe’s lands were worked by his Negroes, retelling stories to younger braves, or attending daylong Council meetings and settling petty squabbles as final decision maker. He basked within the attentions of his three wives, watched his grandchildren play
anejodi
stickball or
chunkey
in the distance, their voices floating over the prairie as they slapped at the deer-hide ball with their hickory sticks and took aim at the wooden fish atop the twenty-five-foot pole. But Cow Tom also knew Yargee considered himself better than all his slaves, without exception, superior by birth, as Indian, as Creek, as full-blood, as member of the Muskogee Nation, as chief, as elder, as husband in possession of three wives and a dozen Negroes to work the land.

“Yes. Now I remember. Four hundred,” Chief Yargee repeated, clearly sorry the game was over. “You will stay with the tribe?”

“Yes,” said Cow Tom. “The tribe has been good to me.”

The chief’s question was hollow. Yargee still owned Cow Tom’s wife and children and mother. Of course he would stay with him. The freedom calculation was exact, the order of purchase mattered. If Cow Tom could, he would have bought his entire family at the same time and been truly free, but of course, that was impossible. If anything happened to him, the rest of his family were lost in the thicket of servitude, but once he purchased his own freedom, his wages would be his own, and he would work, no matter how long it took, until he shook every member of his family loose from Yargee’s rolls. First himself, then Amy, so no future child of theirs would be born into bondage, and then their children before they came of age to have children of their own.

“You are free,” said Yargee.

How many dark times had Cow Tom doubted he would ever hear those words? A wash of emotions fought his resolve—triumph, gratitude, resentment, exhaustion, disbelief. He wanted to go immediately to Amy, tell her he’d done this thing they’d dreamed for so many years, that her time was coming too. But he refused sloppiness, refused to let emotion overcome practicality.

“White men come through next week,” said Cow Tom. “We can draw up new papers then.”

“No need for the white man’s paper,” said Yargee. “We agree.”

“The government is strong. Without the paper, they can make many claims,” Cow Tom said. “Papers must be signed as proof you
agree. For me to carry outside our village.”

Cow Tom knew how much Chief Yargee despised dealings with the white men, the scent of them, the ugliness of their language, the capriciousness of their character, and the foulness of their ideas, the fact that they didn’t properly respect the Upper Creek way.

“I will sign,” Yargee said, “but then I want them gone.”

Yargee turned his attention back to his dog, the mutt’s tail slapping the floor.

Something drained from Cow Tom, and he was outside his own body, watching the release of a wild animal caught in a trap. He didn’t move, unsure. He saw Sarah down the long hallway to the kitchen. She grinned openly.

Cow Tom turned back to Yargee.

“Thank you,” he said.

He had walked into his master’s house a slave, but he was going back to his patch of land, to his wife and to his children, a free man.

He left by way of the front door.

Ten Years Later

–1852–

Chapter 26

AMY JOINED COW
Tom by the river at his favorite spot, under an old scrub oak amid a cluster of cedars, where he most enjoyed a quiet smoke. The location always put him in mind of Old Turtle, and he cherished his stolen moments here, but his heart leaped at the sight of his wife.

“Is it time?” Cow Tom asked.

Amy laughed. “Soon enough,” she said, her mood as high as his. “Edmound makes us wait.”

Edmound. His daughter insisted on this. He hadn’t known where Malinda came by such a lofty-sounding name, but she seemed sure as she carried the child in the swell of her belly, wide and low, that this time it would be a boy, and that the boy child would become Edmound. And Cow Tom had approved the Wachena name, without basis for real objection, eager as both he and Amy were for this male extension of the bloodline, after five girls of their own already born. Girls ran in this family, but now a grandson, at long last. Someone to carry on.

Amy sat next to him, and for a long time, they said nothing, the noise of the cicadas controlling the river.

“What I could not give, our daughter will,” Amy finally said.

“Amy,” Cow Tom said in warning, but he couldn’t stop her.

“I promised you sons.”

“I am content.”

“You are a man born for sons, and for bigness. I know who you
are.”

Amy was attuned to the better man he’d worked so hard to become, but she could never comprehend who he’d been with the general, and for this, Cow Tom was thankful. Although all five of his daughters were precious to him, he’d had to resign himself to his inability to produce sons as his special punishment, retribution for that moment on the hammock in Florida when he robbed those two black Seminole boys of their father, and all the raids after. He could only hope the reckoning didn’t spill over to his daughters too.

“I am content,” he repeated.

“Malinda and Faithful will change the course,” Amy reassured him.

A part of Cow Tom wanted better for his eldest girl, a man more worthy than Faithful to father his grandchildren, a man of more fire, more ambition than sliding from day to day under the heavy haze of alcohol. But if Faithful could bring a boy child into their family, that would be enough.

“A child is a child,” Cow Tom said.

He was afraid for Amy should Malinda deliver a girl. Amy had invested too heavily in the idea of a boy child and, after so many disappointments, was no longer reasonable about the subject. Yes, he was eager for a grandson, but Amy made the idea of a boy baby too large for easy retreat.

“He comes any time now,” Amy said.

He hadn’t seen her this excited since he’d bought the last of their children from Chief Yargee. She ran her finger down the ridged nub of his bad ear, a sign of her playful state of mind. He swatted
her hand away, but she came back at him again, laughing, and he laughed too, happy at the sound.

The birth was difficult, off in a separate tepee removed some distance from the house, updates coming every few hours or so, from one woman or another or a messengering child sent by Amy, who midwifed. By the second day, the tone became increasingly worrisome. Malinda was losing vigor, and the child wouldn’t present.

Unable to sleep, Cow Tom walked the dark path and waited alone at the riverbank, where Maggie sought him out.

“There’s two,” she announced, “a boy and a girl.” But a steady twitching in her face and the hesitation in her tone let Cow Tom know it was too soon to let go his caution.

“The boy was first, but small. He wasn’t given enough breath,” she told him. “And then the girl, smaller still, she fought her way out.”

Cow Tom absorbed the news. He wanted to talk to Amy, for her to tell him all would be well, but he’d have to wait. Men were not allowed in the women’s space, and Amy was still needed there. He concentrated on the positive. The long-sought boy had come, and with a sister. Edmound had come.

“The girl’s name?” Cow Tom asked.

“No name yet,” Maggie said.

He stayed out by the river, his need to be in the open overwhelming, and Maggie came once more to him there the next morning.

“The girl grows stronger,” she told him. “She finds the breast.”

His daughter gave more detail than he wanted.

“And the boy?” Cow Tom asked.