Citizens Creek by Lalita Tademy

senses.
    The brave set about shoving in another load, methodically, expertly, but the tight rifling of his superior gun meant a slower reload, and in the chaos and noise all around him, Cow Tom grabbed his own musket from the horse’s saddle, loaded and already primed,and pointed it toward the man. But the brave never let up his reloading rhythm, except to bark an order in Miccosukee.
    “Find Mother!” he said, and pushed the boys away from his body, out of this particular harm’s way, and they were off in a flash, bare feet slapping the mudded hammock, running toward the center of the burning village, away from him.
    “Don’t,” said Cow Tom to the brave, in Miccosukee.
    The brave’s hands started to shake, whether from fear or nerves or frustration, Cow Tom didn’t know.
    “We don’t have to do this,” Cow Tom shouted. “Give up. Remove.”
    The black brave paused this time, the muscles in his face rigid but the deep brown of his eyes bottomless and fierce, and what Cow Tom saw was a free man, on his own land, with no intention to Remove. Not for Cow Tom, not for the general, not for the government, not even for his sons.
    Buzzards circled overhead, and in the distance, a single flat pop of an American musket was answered with a sharp ring of an Indian rifle. The acrid smoke of burning gunpowder and the dense black smoke of palmetto aflame married and made it hard to breath. A turkey-bone whistle shrilled, drums beat, and human voices, both high-pitched and guttural, reached the two men at a standoff. A solitary keening chant that seemed of no beginning also had no end. The bugler began his play again.
    It was as if only the two of them inhabited the hammock, young black fathers caught up in the making of life in a hostile world. They could be brothers, one free, one slave. Suddenly the Seminole fumbled, his grip loosed, and his rifle slipped from his grasp onto the ground. He looked from Cow Tom to his rifle and back again to Cow Tom, but he didn’t stoop to pick up his weapon.
    Cow Tom wanted an end to all this. He brought his musket to his shoulder and fired, point-blank. The force of the blast sent the brave backward, and he went down, sitting in the mud, a stuttered pattern of expanding red exploded across his chest and belly. Evenas his life drained, he didn’t look surprised, only resolute until the last, when he crumpled to one side, dead.
    Cow Tom squatted in the mud next to the body, for how long he wasn’t sure, but all shooting had stopped, and the hiss and crackle of the fires seemed louder than all other sounds. Finally, he rose, straightened the brave and arranged him on his back. He left him there, and led his horse to the roundup.
    The smoke made it difficult to see and to breathe now, from thick, choking fires and gunpowder residue both, but most of the villagers huddled together waiting, corralled and defeated, watching the flames take the last of their homes, as always happened at the end of these raids. There were some injured, but only one dead, the black Seminole, lying where he’d fallen.
    Cow Tom scanned the listless crowd of captured Seminoles, guarded by several dragoons. Most of the military attention went to Micanopy, the fat chief, recaptured at last. But of the thirty or so Negroes gathered, none was his mother. He recognized the two small boys from earlier. They stood with a rail-thin black woman, on either side, with her hands on their backs pulling them near, claiming them. The boys stared at Cow Tom, and then whispered something to the woman, and she pressed them closer to her body as she squinted against the sun and the smoke as if to memorize his features. They each looked to him then, mother and sons, as if he was the devil incarnate, and Cow Tom couldn’t deny their judgment.
    “Linguister!” called the general.
    Cow Tom, mind a-churn, responded, his debrief chores at their beginning.
    He had done this. His own mother could have been in the captured camp. He had