“I remember how your mother watched me as I did so. She had been listening to my conversation with Agili and Turtle and knew what was happening. There was a resigned look on her face. She did not ask me to stay or encourage me to go. She just said nothing. In truth, I think she was just as glad to see me go. I had not been a good husband. My drinking and strange ways had been hard on her. Although your mother told me that our marriage was over after I returned, I think she had already made that decision on the day I left for the war.

“I remember, too, how you behaved that day I left. You did not cry, but you held on to me so hard that it was difficult to make you let go.”

My father reaches out his left hand, the one closest to his heart, and rests his palm for a moment on my chest. I feel a lump in my throat and swallow hard.

“Maybe you have heard stories about war, about bravery and great deeds. Those tales do not tell you what war is really like. They do not talk about the smell of battle, what it is like to see a man you know trying to keep his intestines from coming out of a great wound in his belly. Those stories do not tell you how terrible it is to cause the death of an enemy, a person who is just as much a human being as you are.

“My friends and I agreed to serve in that army for only three months. That may not seem long. It is only a little more than the time it takes to plant your corn and bring in the crop from the fields. But those three months were long and hard. And the harvest we brought in was death and destruction.

“The Red Stick Creeks were brave fighters. In battle they would never surrender but fight to the last man. They were so fearless in battle that they frightened the white men. Many of Jackson’s white soldiers ran away. In one battle his whole Tennessee Militia ran all the way back to the Coosa River as we Indians fought to cover the retreat. If it had not been for our regiment, the Mounted and Foot Cherokees, Sharp Knife would have lost his own life. By the end of that year, nearly all of Sharp Knife Jackson’s white soldiers had deserted or served out their terms and gone home.

“When our own term of enlistment ended, we, too, could have gone home. But we did as almost every other Indian did. We re-enlisted. Sharp Knife brought in new white recruits. Our army grew in size. Soon, counting our five hundred Cherokees, it numbered more than two thousand.

“And that was our strength in March of 1814 when we came to Tohopeka, the place the white men call Horseshoe Bend.”

CHAPTER 16