Bone Rattler amoca-1

by Eliot Pattison

  When out of earshot of the children, Fitch spoke of the native peoples and taught Duncan the meaning of Indian words like tomahawk, canoe, and succotash, describing how, as with nations in Europe, tribes rose and fell from dominance in their regions, how the Mahican, then the Lenni Lenape-called the Delaware by Europeans-had once been the powerful masters of the eastern lands, and in time were overshadowed by the Iroquois. The Iroquois themselves, whom Fitch often referred to as the Six, for the six nations that comprised them, were held together in a confederation that was doomed to failure, the sergeant insisted, since they foolishly acted like ancient Greeks, giving a vote to every warrior, even allowing women to choose their chieftains.

  “You make it sound as though they have a civilization,” Duncan observed.

  The grizzled ranger gave an amused grunt. “Last time I wasted time trying to figure who was civilized in this world and who weren’t, I had only fuzz on my cheeks,” Fitch said, and spat a dollop of tobacco juice between his feet.

  On the fourth day, as they had lunched at the edge of a high, open ledge, Duncan had stood alone, surveying the blue-hazed ridges that rolled toward the west. “She’s there by now,” a voice had suddenly observed. Fitch knelt at his side, looking at the ranges.

  “You mean she’s safe?”

  “I mean she’s at her father’s town.” The sergeant extracted a musket flint from his pouch and began freshening it with a stone, a habit that had begun to worry Duncan, for it meant Fitch wanted to be ready to use his weapon at any moment. Just as he had learned about the plants and animals of the new land, so, too, had Duncan learned more about the odd ways people spoke about Sarah. More than once when they had stopped at settlements and farms, he had heard the inhabitants ask Jonathan or Virginia if their older sister traveled with them and had seen the relief in their faces when the children replied. The prior night, at a huge trestle table populated with a family of twelve, a girl had completed Arnold’s blessing by adding, “and keep their witch from our door.” Jonathan had responded by rising and taking his meal outdoors, then sleeping in the coach.

  “Where did you go that night at the inn?” Duncan asked the soldier, who was showing signs of a grudging friendship after Duncan repeatedly rescued him from the evangelical ardor of Reverend Arnold. “Did you see what became of Old Jacob’s body?”

  Fitch paused and rubbed the gray stubble on his jaw. “He took his own skin and kept it all those years. Sorry few can claim that, red or white.”

  For a moment Duncan’s spine crawled. He had heard the words before, on the ship, spoken by the murderess Flora. Take the skin you are, she had said. “His own skin?”

  “It’s an Indian way of speaking. He did only true things. His true things.” Fitch shrugged. “I don’t know the words, McCallum. I’m just an old soldier. He was totally his own man, knew who he was and never let anyone change that, even as his clan died around him. He knew things about the workings of the earth that you and I couldn’t even guess at.”

  Duncan stared at the man, unable to fathom how Flora could have acquired such words, but wanting more desperately than ever to understand. “What are the true things, Sergeant?”

  Fitch considered the question a long time as he kept working the flints. “I s’pose if you could speak them, they wouldn’t be true,” he said at last. “It was like when Jacob would call a trout, and the fish would come and kiss his hand, never afraid. Ain’t no words to describe the watching of that, or the way that fish and Jacob would look each other square in the eye and know what the other was thinking.”

  Duncan gazed back over the mountains. “Are you saying you and the captain buried Old Jacob?”

  “We did the right thing,” he said. Fitch looked up and searched Duncan’s face, then reached into the pouch at his belt.

  “You mean you-” Duncan began, but the words choked away as he saw what lay in Fitch’s outstretched palm. It was a length of cloth, a tartan plaid, a brown field with stripes of dark green and red.

  “An odd thing, lad,” Fitch offered with a meaningful gaze. “We lifted this from the belt of a dead man at Stony Run.”

  Duncan squatted and took the cloth from the sergeant, stretching it between his fingers. It was a sash, a belt cloth of the kind a Gaidheil, a Highlander, would wear. “There were Scots at that battle, with the Indians?”

  “I’d nay say a battle. More like murder on a grand scale. Half a dozen Iroquois were dead in the brush, including the one with this sash. Sixteen more were lined up and shot. Major Pike and the captain arrived not long after, from different directions, and exchanged harsh words. Pike wanted to burn the bodies and be gone. The captain posted rangers around the bodies to keep them from Pike and sent me to the towns for men to carry the dead back.”

  “Towns?”

  “The Six have settlements same as white folk. They have ways about their dead, too. They wash ’em and dress ’em and say words over ’em.”

  “And place cedar boughs on them,” Duncan asserted.

  Fitch nodded. “Some of the old tribes, like the Mahicans, they would place ’em on a scaffold in a likely spot, overlooking a valley or close to where two rivers join. Seven, eight feet in the air, with food and fixings for travel. Takes a year, the Indians say, for a spirit to find its way to heaven.”

  Sergeant Fitch, Duncan realized, had finally told him what they had done with Jacob the Fish. He looked back at the plaid in his hand. “Were there fair-skinned men among the dead?”

  “No, but if a man were to shave his head as some warriors do, and dye his skin with walnut juice, might be difficult to say.”

  “Did you know my brother?”

  “He ran with us a spell.”

  “Ran?”

  “Run the woods. That’s what rangers do. You have to be like a deer. Quiet. Fast. Always watchful. Forget that for a minute, and be ye deer or soldier ye can die. Officers from the regular army get assigned to run with us, sometimes to punish them, sometimes so they can understand the enemy. Most don’t last. They die. They get sick with nerves. One shot himself in the foot so he would be sent home. But some understand.”

  “You mean,” Duncan said in an inquiring tone, “some change.”

  When Fitch looked up, there was a glint of surprise in his eyes.

  “Because,” Duncan continued, not certain where the words came from, “they glimpse true things.”

  Fitch said nothing but stopped his work and followed Duncan’s gaze over the rolling, forested hills below them.

  “Why didn’t my brother join you and Captain Woolford then?”

  “The Forty-second wouldn’t have it. He was too valuable.” Fitch eyed Duncan again. “He had a quick hand and a good heart, y’er brother, but he would not suffer mule-headed officers.”

  Duncan offered a nod of gratitude. He had been ashamed of his brother for joining the army, but now, his brother a target of public condemnation, he felt no shame at all. “And Adam Munroe, did he run with you as well?” he asked.

  Fitch needed a long time to compose his answer. “Munroe was a Pennsylvania man,” he said at last. “Our work be in New York territory.”

  “But you knew him. And Adam knew Old Jacob, who died not long after he did.”

  The observation seemed to worry Fitch. He busied himself with his stone again. “Not everyone who runs in the woods is a ranger,” he said in a nervous, low voice.

  Duncan gazed out over the hills, watched one of the great white-hooded eagles that sailed the currents above the ridges. After a moment Duncan squatted beside the grizzled soldier. “Did Jacob speak with bears as he did with fish?”

  Fitch’s chipping stone lost its direction, slicing into the back of his hand. He gazed at the oozing blood a moment, then returned the flint and stone to his pouch. When he rose, a look of wonder had entered his eyes. “There was a settler who took a huge bear a few years ago. He boasted about it, told how he would make a fine bear blanket and mittens from its paws. But that bearskin disappeared from his
barn, along with the skull and paws and claws he had cut out. His maize crop failed that year. Since then I’ve heard of three or four other bears shot in these parts. Each time the skin disappeared. Folks say those skins got up and walked away to some bear paradise deep in the woods.”

  “Do you believe that, Sergeant?” Duncan asked, sensing in his empty hand the cold touch of the bear stone.

  “There’s old ones among the Six who won’t speak openly about bears, because they are the most sacred of all creatures, like gods walking on earth, the spirits that anchor people to this world. There’s a great shaman who can take the shape of a bear whenever he wishes.”

  “Do you believe it?” Duncan asked again.

  “What I believe is that I won’t be shooting any bears,” the soldier had replied, and had walked back to the coach.

  The fields of Edentown radiated outward from a compound of nearly twenty structures, including one large, two-story house of stone and a huge, elegant, English-style barn, four times the size of the house. The barn was made of stone, squared logs, and a shake roof, and stood on the eastern banks of a wide, shallow river. In the fields, teams of oxen with plows broke the earth for winter wheat. In one pasture, enclosed with a zigzag snake-rail fence, a dozen milk cows nibbled at high clover; in another, two score sheep grazed. In a field of golden hay, men labored with scythes. To the north, others were felling trees along the edge of the tall, dense forest that surrounded the estate to the north, south, and beyond the river to the west. Logs were being dragged by heavy horses toward new cabins, and a palisade wall was being erected along the north side.

  “The Lord be praised,” Crispin sighed. Duncan followed his gaze to a solitary figure in a green dress, waiting on the steps of the house. Sarah Ramsey had indeed found her father’s town.

  As they drew to a halt by the barn, Jonathan and Virginia Ramsey erupted from the coach with an exclamation of joy, running toward their older sister, who swept them up in a wide embrace. On the steps behind Sarah a solemn, bewigged figure appeared, dressed like a country squire. He waited for Jonathan to bow and Virginia to curtsy before kneeling and taking them both into his arms. Lord Ramsey had lost weight since the portrait in the New York house, but Duncan could not mistake the close-set, steely grey eyes that turned to him as Crispin led the children into the house.

  “Mr. McCallum,” Lord Ramsey said in greeting, “we have so anticipated your arrival.” Duncan recognized his careful, clipped tones as the product of England’s elite schools.

  Duncan’s uncertain nod of acknowledgement froze as he met the gaze of the older Ramsey daughter. Sarah looked like a thin porcelain statuette, but her countenance seemed free of the effects of opium. Although melancholy still ruled her features, there was also a fire in her eyes that he had not seen before. Her father, noting Duncan’s distraction, stepped in front of Sarah as she offered him a shy smile.

  “Mr. McCallum,” she announced, “has reached the edge of the woods.” The unexpected words seemed to mean more to her father than to Duncan. Ramsey’s eyes flared and he turned to his daughter with a censuring stare. Sarah retreated up the stairs.

  “Professor Evering was ready to move heaven and earth to reshape the Ramsey heirs,” Ramsey proclaimed, addressing Duncan again. “We have equally profound hopes for you,” he added, then pointed to a broad-shouldered man in a brown waistcoat waiting at the corner of the house, and marched back inside the house.

  “Consider yourself well and truly blessed,” the man in brown said as he approached. “We had to stand for an hour’s speech when we arrived.” It was Cameron, only changed in appearance: scrubbed, clipped, and neatly attired. “I’m to see you to your manor,” he said, pointing to a compact log structure across the stretch of drying mud that served as the main street of Ramsey’s town. Duncan pulled his bag from the wagon and followed the keeper, who explained that the Company had been divided into parties of wood clearers, builders, and farmworkers, joining a dozen craftsmen already employed at the town. Cameron recited the function of each of the buildings as they walked. A summer kitchen, a smokehouse and butcher’s works, a springhouse, a carpenter’s shop, a milking stable, a forge, a cooper’s shop being used temporarily as a chapel, a spinning shed, a kennel with huge hunting hounds, and finally several long log structures, the newest of the buildings, that served to house the men of the Company.

  “He will send for you when tea is ready,” Cameron announced as he opened the door to the schoolhouse.

  Duncan paused on the threshold, glancing back at the house as he wondered why Ramsey would consider his heirs in need of reshaping, then stepped into an austere room with a large fireplace, lit by a single window and furnished with one table in front of a piece of slate on the wall, facing three smaller tables. Through a narrow doorway he spied a bed and a chest of drawers in a smaller chamber. “What happened after you crossed on the ferry that first day?” Duncan asked abruptly. “Another man was murdered. An old man with a fish on his cheek.”

  “You mean an Indian then. Beg pardon, sir. I think Indians just die. Never heard that one could be murdered. May as well call a farmer a murderer for turning a pig to bacon.”

  Duncan gripped his emotions and pressed on. “Did you see him?”

  “Heathens have their own strange ways,” was Cameron’s only reply.

  Duncan stepped to the window and gazed out.

  “There’s a crib in the forge for charcoal,” Cameron declared to his back. “The smith put a lock on the door.”

  “And who keeps the key to this dungeon?”

  “In the main house.” As Duncan turned to confront Cameron, a grimace creased the keeper’s face. “Lord Ramsey says if any man disobeys the law, he has the authority to punish. He says those who survive the full seven years will be given fifty acres of good bottomland.”

  “Those who survive?”

  “We’re in a war, His Honor reminded us that first day,” Cameron continued in a stiff tone, “and the way we win is by cutting down trees, building cabins, and obeying his commands.”

  “You had a letter of mine, Cameron,” Duncan said as the keeper withdrew. “Who did you give it to?”

  “Didn’t need it anymore. Murder’s been solved. We know who is going to hang.”

  “We had a bargain,” Duncan pressed. “You keep the letter, I steer suspicion away from you.”

  The keeper’s face darkened. “Like I said, the murder is solved.”

  “Not until the trial.”

  “There’s another piece of paper, my certificate about seeing your name on Evering’s body. I have that in a safe place, McCallum.”

  “Excellent. You understand my point. We still need each other. Is there a guard on his cell?”

  “I need you for nothing.”

  “You misunderstand. I know you gave the letter to the army. Captain Woolford knows. How do you think Reverend Arnold and Lord Ramsey will react when they learn you had contact with the army?”

  A silent snarl formed on Cameron’s face.

  “Is there a guard on the cell?”

  “Most times,” Cameron spat.

  “Then call him away, now.”

  Duncan watched as Cameron left the building, calling out to the men carrying rocks from the fields, retrieving a stick where it leaned on the side of the barn and twitching it on the backside of old McGregor for moving too slow.

  Five minutes later Duncan circled the barn until out of sight of the main house, quickly locating a smoke-stained stone structure beyond the milking shed. The furnace was cold, the bellows idle. Beyond the anvil was a sooty structure of heavy vertical slats spaced a few inches apart, filled waist-high with charcoal, its door kept shut with a length of chain connected with a padlock.

  “Mr. Lister,” Duncan said, pressing his face close to the planks. “Are you in pain? Can I get you something?” A scrap of cloth extended through a gap in the planks. It was stained with dried blood.

  “Just before dawn comes a great chorus of birds.�
�� The voice that came from the shadows was dry as sticks. “You’ve never heard such singing. A little taste of heaven.”

  “I beg you not to be contemplating heaven just yet.”

  “I’ve heard only gulls these past thirty years. ’Tis a sweet choir to awaken to.”

  On the ground Duncan noticed a piece of birch bark shaped into a cone, fastened with a splinter of wood. He filled it with water from the smith’s bucket and passed it through a gap in the slats.

  “The day you crossed the river,” Duncan said after Lister had drained the cup and passed it back, “a man was killed. Did you see anything?”

  Lister scooped away charcoal, making a hollow where he could sit close enough that Duncan could see the dim glow of his face. “Don’t know about a killing. But there was a phantom lurking about. He weren’t meeting the Company, he was just studying it, following close as a shadow, cool as a fox. We were an hour past that Dutch inn. Young Frasier had tended my wounds and left me with a crock of water. Most of the men were out of the wagons, walking, herded on by the keepers and those guards. I was inconvenienced in the wagon, nothing to do but enjoy the day. A bird sang then, too. I thought nothing of it at first, but it persisted, a short, questioning song that seemed to want an answer, but none ever came. The bird followed, then I saw a dark shape close by, a stone’s throw away. At first I thought it a stump, but then it moved, and the bird song moved. The shadow would disappear, then appear a quarter mile up the road as we passed. It went on for two or three miles, the song and the shadow, the song getting more and more lonely.”