Citizens Creek Read Online Free PDF Page A

have removed them. CowTom put them on slowly, and set off to the pasture to relieve his wife’s brother in the tending of the herd. He was bone tired, and he was hungry, but comforted that Amy would bring his breakfast out to the field to him soon enough, surely before the sun rose too far in the sky.

    Within one week of Old Turtle’s passing, Cow Tom became a father. The tiny, dark baby emerged with a full head of hair, wailing. A girl.
    They named her Malinda.

Chapter 5
    THE GROUND WAS still sodden from the sudden afternoon squall, but the sun was doing its best to dry the pasture, the fields, and the gardens. It was a less busy time of year, neither breeding nor calving season, and after leaving Amy’s brother and another hand to tend the herd, Cow Tom came from the meadow a little early, splashing through puddles. He had business with Chief Yargee in the main house, but delayed in order to pass through the Quarter on his way. The jagged crisscross of paths between the small logged cabins was second nature, and he practiced his arguments in his head to present to the chief before he came to his own house.
    His daughters played together on the damp ground, Malinda and Maggie, the older three and her sister one. Maggie mimicked Malinda’s every move, patting gooey mud into a flat shape, as if making bread for supper. Sons would have pleased him more, but he was well satisfied with his daughters, and there was time enough for the boys who would surely come. Not far away, Amy toiled in the garden, hoe in hand. Cow Tom congratulated himself. He was aware of his good fortune, a wife who still excited him each time he caught sight of her. His detour to the Quarter, he knew, stemmed from the knot of guilt tugging at him, though he intended to hold steady to his course. Cow Tom was a man at war with himself, fighting the need to do right by his family and the deep hunger to be free, to explore.
    She looked up, her face betraying both the carryover of their unfinished business from last night as well as concern.
    “You’re early. So you’ll talk to him today then?” she said.
    “It is Chief Yargee’s choice,” Cow Tom said, as if no time at all had passed since this line of reasoning failed in their argument of the night before.
    Amy stared at him, her eyes tunneling into his until he was forced to turn his head, fixing his gaze on a neat row of green-topped onions in their patch of garden.
    “I do what’s best for us,” he said. “All of us.”
    “You want to go,” she accused. “You steered Chief Yargee into sending you.”
    He started to protest, but stopped himself. He couldn’t deny the merit in her words. She knew him too well.
    “Three hundred and fifty dollars, Amy,” he said instead. “Freedom comes much faster this way.”
    “And if they Remove us while you’re gone? What then? What of us, me and the girls? If you don’t come back, what then?”
    “The military man said the war nears its end. Just a few months to round up the last of the Seminoles in Florida. All Creek warriors and translators will be back to Alabama long before our Removal, February at the latest, in time to make the trip with you to Indian Territory, in time for first planting there with Chief Yargee.”
    “How can you know how long war lasts? Seminoles are stubborn. And cagey. We would do well to keep out of all their doings, Seminoles, government, and Creek.”
    “We are Creek,” Cow Tom insisted, and though she held her tongue, he could see that Amy’s lack of argument did not imply an equal conviction on her part. “Our good is bound up with theirs.”
    Amy set her jaw. “You’ll do what you want,” she said.
    “There’s no changing course now. The bargain with the army is struck. I leave with the others next week.”
    She picked up her hoe and began to stab at the clusters of weeds sprouting near the squash.
    He almost told her then, and shared his desperate plan, but feared jinxing if he said the words aloud.