Citizens Creek

by Lalita Tademy

  “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.

  “He’s gone,” said Maggie. Her voice was flat. “He couldn’t hold to life.”

  The idea had barely taken hold that there were two babies, before there was only one. Cow Tom closed his eyes, his dreams evaporating and carried off by the wind. Still, they’d look to him to set the mood.

  “We bury him on Thursday,” he said. “Four days hence.”

  He took up the ax and headed to the forest, where he cut firewood until his arms and back ached and he could no longer swing the weight of the ax above his shoulders. Death was a part of life, a transition, but if a departed spirit needed four days to visit old, familiar places and people before moving on, what would a baby do with all that time?

  Cow Tom didn’t move back to the house. He stayed by the river alone, two days, and then three, and Maggie brought him food and daily reports. Faithful was missing, not the first time, last seen senseless drunk in the north pasture trying to mend a fence. Amy stayed in the woman’s space tending Malinda and the baby girl.

  On the fourth day when Maggie visited, one glance at her face and he knew something had gone wrong.

  Maggie paused, some consequential words unspoken, words he would need to coax from her. Edmound gone filled his mind to capacity, and Cow Tom considered not pushing further, not giving chase to further news to disappoint.

  “What more?” he finally asked.

  His daughter stared out over the churning waters of the Canadian, gathering her thoughts, and Cow Tom regretted the ask. What could be worse than his grandson gone before he ever had the chance to take him buffalo hunting on the plain? To teach him to tell healthy cow from sick, or to lasso a steer?

  “Is it the girl?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Faithful?”

  “We found him this morning, passed out in the corncrib,” said Maggie, so matter-of-fact Cow Tom knew this had nothing to do with whatever Maggie came to say.

  “Better just to tell it,” Cow Tom said.

  “Something’s not right with Ma,” she said.

  This last took him unawares, and for a moment, he couldn’t reassemble his thoughts.

  “Has she fallen sick?” Cow Tom reached out and took his daughter’s arm, squeezing too hard, he knew, but bringing her to focus. “Speak quick, girl!”

  Maggie blinked rapidly, though the morning had only begun and the day wasn’t bright. “Not sick,” she said. Her voice quavered, and Cow Tom saw her distress broaden to include him. “But she isn’t Ma.”

  Cow Tom left his daughter where she stood, by the riverbank, first in a determined walk, and then almost at a run, turning in the direction of the women’s tepee. The theft of Edmound was a cruel sting, hope thwarted, an affront that such injustice be allowed. But the concept that something had gone wrong with Amy went beyond, unthinkable. The world was a harsh place, guaranteed of quicksilver change and backhand slaps. But the constant throughout was Amy, calm and unflappable. Amy, the mainstay for them all regarding household or family concerns. He couldn’t consider a circumstance without her. He was Cow Tom because she was Amy, like the flow of the river or the set of the sun, so ever present sometimes he forgot she was there.

  “You can’t go in the women’s . . .” Maggie called after him, but her voice trailed, and he paid her no mind, hurrying toward the tepee with no real plan as to what he might do once there.

  Chapter 27

  THE TEPEE CAME into view, set off to the side from the rest of the compound, the cowhide flap open. Cow Tom slowed as he got closer, the import of his intrusion into the woman’s space breaking through at last, but he forced himself forward. He didn’t announce himself, but stood in the opening and peered into the darkened space. There were two of them there in a frozen tableau. Amy stood with a wrapped bundle in her arms, and his daughter Malinda lay asleep and unmoving, only her head visible, a sheen of damp on her dark face and hair loosed from her kerchief in wild and tangled clumps, her form obscured beneath a sweat-soaked blanket. The smell from the tepee was heavy, earthy, of damp and doom.

  “Maggie says the boy is gone,” he said, from outside. His voice seemed to echo in the small, stuffy space, too loud.

  Amy stared back at him, unresponsive, and Cow Tom welcomed both the dimness and distance between them, giving him time to adjust to Amy’s flatness.

  There was movement from the bundle Amy held. Clearly the girl, swaddled and live, but the baby didn’t cry or offer sound. Amy broke her gaze and looked down, made some adjustment to the piece of blanket, as if lost to him.

  “She all right?”

  Amy nodded, finally. The gloom over the space unnerved him. Cow Tom wanted to be finished with this.

  “Where is he?”

  At first, Amy didn’t answer. “We’re cursed,” she said at last.

  “Where is the boy?”

  Still no answer. Amy sat down on the ground cross-legged beside the figure of Malinda, the recovering mother’s breathing soft and barely audible, and she placed the baby in the hollow by Malinda’s side on the pallet. Cow Tom suddenly feared their daughter was also at risk.

  “Malinda all right?” he called into the tepee.

  “She’ll be fine,” said Amy. “She’ll rest awhile, to live another day.”

  “Amy, where’s the boy?”

  Amy fussed with the girl baby, picked her up and stood again, this time moving her from one side of Malinda to the other, so the child could feel the warmth of the mother, even in sleep. Again she sat, as if Cow Tom hadn’t spoken.

  “Amy.”

  She looked up. The flat black of her eyes revealed an Amy gone to a deep, dark place he dare not follow, even had he wanted. Though he understood how much she looked forward to this grandchild as boy, Cow Tom couldn’t imagine her dismay taking her to such a dangerous mood, but Amy had always been inextricably tied to her omens and superstitions in ways unknowable.

  The space inside the tepee was not large, and Cow Tom was loath to enter. Still outside, he sought a sighting of the boy, and sensed the stillness in the corner of the tepee. Another bit of blanket, a rounded form, but no movement beneath. From behind, his other daughter had come up from the river and now stood almost alongside with uncertainty, only a footfall away, unsure how to handle the unprecedented male presence contaminating their sacred ground. For one moment, it seemed she intended to pass him at the threshold and enter the tepee, but she stepped back again, her internal battle betrayed by the indecision on her face, a tug-of-war between bonds of womanhood and duty of filial piety.

  “We bury him before midday,” Cow Tom said. “He must go to ground.”

  Cow Tom thought then that Amy would rouse herself to prepare the boy, but instead, his wife pressed at Malinda’s forehead with a dampened rag. She cleaned and bundled the girl baby, but did not touch or acknowledge the body of the lifeless boy, nor did she speak.

  “I’ll see to him,” Maggie said. She took a few tentative steps toward the entrance, but Cow Tom didn’t give quarter, blocking her way. He shook his head,
stopping her.

  “It is Amy must do it,” he said, making his tone hard, “not you.” He put his body in between his wife and daughter. “I’ll be back within the hour for the boy. Gather family. We meet at the clearing by the twisted elm in the east pasture. Tell Faithful to bring a gun.”

  He lingered just long enough to assure that Maggie left them to attend her task.

  “Amy,” he commanded into the semidarkness, his voice barely above a whisper. He hoped he did the right thing, nudging her back to her responsibility. “Have the boy ready by my return.”

  Cow Tom lit out for a part of the pasture prone to wildflowers, an area Malinda fancied as a girl before her hours filled with being a woman. He stopped at the lean-to supply shed along the way to collect a shovel. It didn’t take long to dig the hole, so small as to be hardly more trouble than turning over the soil for a garden’s planting, and when satisfied with the location and the depth, he threw down the tool, wiped his hands on his tunic, and returned to the tepee. As he got closer, he listened for Amy’s voice, anything that could give him a clue as to what he would find. He made noise so they knew him coming and might prepare themselves, stopped once more at the threshold of the tepee, and peered in, feeling the fool all the while.

  Amy still sat on the ground, just as he’d left her, listless. But now Malinda was awake, albeit droop-lidded and somber, propped up on the pallet with the girl baby at her breast. She started when she caught sight of him there at the threshold of the tepee, and did not try to hide her distress. Cow Tom didn’t know the right thing to say.

  “Malinda.” He forced his voice to cheer. “The girl presents healthy.”

  Malinda looked down at the baby’s suckling, and covered herself as best she could.