Bone Rattler amoca-1

by Eliot Pattison

  “Surely you understand I have had no opportunity for inquiries.”

  “What possible need is there for further inquiries?” the vicar pointed out. “The evidence has all been assembled, the killer apprehended. All that is needed is the proper organization of your thoughts and the lifting of a quill.”

  “My logic and science have not pointed to Mr. Lister,” Duncan said, swallowing hard. “As you say, the record must be complete. There are questions I might ask the army,” Duncan suggested, trying not to look conspicuous as he watched for Ramsey’s reaction. “There was a general who asked about the death of Evering. He seemed to think that his death had some connection to military matters.”

  Ramsey withdrew into himself a moment, then helped himself to snuff from a silver box on the side table and paced in front of the window facing the river. “You told General Calder it was none of his concern,” he said without breaking stride. Duncan thought it was an invitation, but Ramsey continued in his imperious tone. “You told him the Company is an enterprise of Edentown. You reminded him Edentown is mine, by royal charter. You vowed to yourself that the Company would emerge victorious.”

  Duncan could see an ox team working the field closest to the barn. He had an overwhelming desire to be among the prisoners, plowing the earth, hauling stones, cleaning stalls ankle-deep in manure, anywhere but playing the rag puppet to such a man. “The killer is still at large among us,” Duncan said. “I think he or an accomplice killed an old Indian at the ferry inn.”

  “Impossible,” Ramsey said. “As I told Captain Woolford when he mentioned it, Indians are always dying. It is a sign of our victorious God. Do not be distracted from your duties.”

  “General Calder,” Duncan said, “believed I should be interested in a battle where many of our Indian allies died. At Stony Run.”

  It was not exactly alarm Duncan saw in the look that passed from Ramsey to Arnold, but something like a wary resentment, as if Calder had just stolen a point in some game between them. And Calder had used Duncan to make the score.

  “The Indian who died at the inn had the name of our ship,” Duncan continued. “He was trying to pass a secret to someone in the Company. Or someone he expected to be with the Company. A man who would kill Evering over a secret would have little hesitation in killing an old Indian. It could not have been Mr. Lister, for he was in chains.” Ramsey and Arnold grew very quiet, Arnold staring out the window, Ramsey at his map. “You say you will repay me for saving your daughter, sir. I ask that you release him on his parole.”

  “Impossible.”

  “On my own covenant then. He is an old man who will not stray far.”

  “And what recompense will you offer when he kills again?” Arnold inquired.

  “I pledge my indenture. If you find me mistaken, then put me in chains mucking out the horse stalls for seven years.”

  Ramsey replied with a silent frown, then stepped closer to his map. “In England,” he offered with a gesture toward the drawing, “towns and their populations have become such random, disheveled things. Here we have the opportunity to correct all mistakes.” He fixed Duncan with a sober gaze. “Our century stands at the culmination of civilization. We are its ambassadors.”

  The lord’s library, Duncan decided, was the most treacherous terrain he had yet encountered in the New World. He noticed small numbers in the lower right corner of each building sketch, the house bearing the numeral 3. Examining the numbers of each sketch and the status of the new construction, he recognized the sequence. “The very last structure to be built in your utopia is the courthouse,” he observed.

  Reverend Arnold seemed to welcome the comment. “Next is the house of God. What need hath man for the courts and legislation when he has a church and the Decalogue?” he asked, using the High Church reference for the Ten Commandments.

  “I am writing a commentary on Plato,” Ramsey announced, abruptly changing the subject. “Where else but in the New World do we have an opportunity to shape an entire society according to his esteemed principles?” The patron fixed Duncan with a level gaze. “Each of us is born to a destined duty. The ancient sage teaches that the highest reward is the fulfillment of that duty.” Ramsey had not changed the subject after all.

  Duncan dared to return Ramsey’s stare for a moment, then lowered his gaze. Lister was right. He was going to have to master the skills of retreat. “I shall tirelessly strive toward my just rewards,” Duncan said in a taut voice. He placed his cup on the tray and offered a slight bow as he maneuvered toward the door.

  Ramsey raised his cup toward Duncan as if in salute.

  Duncan wandered about the compound, admiring the huge barn, more English than the house itself-its mortised beams joined like those of a mighty ship, with thirty stalls and central grain storage chambers and tool rooms under a cavernous hayloft-but soon found himself back in the classroom, staring at the blank slate on the wall. Checking that the door was latched, he extracted tattered pieces of paper from his pocket and arrayed them in front of him on the teacher’s table. His list of the McCallum clan chiefs. Evering’s poetry. The two messages from Jacob’s lean-to. He found a sheet of paper and began writing, one line for each event in the mystery that lay before him, then tore the list of events into slips, one line per slip, and arranged them in a row, top to bottom. Evering breaks vial of laudanum. Compass ritual, said the next. Then Evering murdered and Sarah awakens. He studied them for several minutes, then shifted the last paper to the top. Sarah awakens, Compass ritual, Evering murdered. After a moment he wrote and tore more slips. Frasier and Cameron loot Woolford’s chest. Adam barters with McGregor for the bear stone from Woolford’s chest. Woolford flees the ship with Sarah to be in port a day before the others. Adam commits suicide. Jacob the Fish receives message about ship from Socrates Moon. Old Jacob murdered. Duncan attacked in New York harbor. Woolford secretly writes Moon. Moon leaves message for Jacob. He arranged the papers in an arc before him, as he once had done with the names of the bones when memorizing the sequence of the human skeleton. As he stared at the slips, convinced that if he could only place them in the right sequence he would glimpse the truth, a terrible weight seemed to close around his shoulders. The skeleton before him was that of the monster responsible for the violence and mystery that simmered below the surface of the Ramsey Company. Here before him, in his hands, hung the life of Lister. He wrote a last slip and put it in front of all the others. Massacre at Stony Run.

  He turned to his list of clan chieftains and recited each name out loud, then retrieved and unwrapped the bear stone, placing it before him, facing the paper slips, as if it might help him translate the events and the dialogue in his patron’s library. It had not been Ramsey’s words about Lister that had made Duncan’s skin crawl. There had been something else, when he had described the death of Old Jacob. Indians are always dying, Ramsey had said. It is a sign of our victorious God. In his youth, Duncan had been forced to listen to the same words spoken from English pulpits, about the destruction of the Highland Scots. He stared at the clan names again, then pushed the slips aside, unfolded the message Jacob had made in his own blood, and stared at it. It was meant for a man who understood more than Duncan did, meant for a man more conversant with the violent truths of the New World. He buried his head in his hands.

  Flora is alone, with no hand to hold. The thought pounced upon him from nowhere. The guilt he felt for leaving the mad, faceless murderess on the ship would not be shaken. She was gone, condemned to slow death in the tropics, and for the rest of his life he would feel the helplessness, the pain of not being able to help her, the doubt over whether she had, like him, been unfairly convicted. He was a clan chief and was supposed to help Scots in peril. But he had failed her. Her strange words, the soft, desperate touch of her hand during the long, dark hours, had moved him more than he cared to admit. Flora, too, had been touched by the New World, he knew now, for her words had been echoed on the river and the frontier road, had been the seed of a str
ange, unnamable awareness that seemed to be building inside him. At night, at the edge of sleep, he sometimes sensed a warmth in his fingers, as if she were still there. She had become an invisible member of his clan, more real in a way than Sarah, who had proven an imposter. The night before, he had dreamt he had stayed with Flora, gone to Jamaica and escaped with her in a small, swift sloop on a warm, dark sea.

  He became aware of a small, round face peering through the window at him and hurried to the door. “I am in need of a guide, Master Jonathan,” he declared, “Will you show me your town?”

  They moved along the perimeter of the little community, past the dog kennels and pens where rotund sows suckled piglets. Some of the workers, men not of the Company, called out greetings to the boy, who answered with awkward waves. Others, familiar from the Anna Rose, glanced nervously at Duncan and looked away without speaking.

  Duncan had to admire the planning that had gone into the construction of Ramsey’s town. The nucleus he was creating would have sustained a much larger community. They passed saw pits where logs were being cut into planks, a mason’s yard where large stones dragged in on ox sledges were being shaped for lintels and sills. He studied the men with the oxen, remembering Evering’s cryptic words on the sheet torn from his journal. The ghostwalker at the ox wheel, his tongue is in his heart. But Duncan saw no ox cart, no wheel of any kind among the great beasts.

  Jonathan pointed out a lime kiln built into the knoll beside the northernmost pasture, even a potter’s shed where rust-colored bowls were lined up on a bench to dry in the sun. Ramsey’s fields were laid in careful squares, divided by walls of stone collected in the clearing of the fields, except for a flat acre of thicket and small trees that extended like a tongue into the fields from the south, disrupting the neat sequence.

  “Where are the other children?” Duncan inquired as they watched three men hew beams to use as roof rafters, beside others spudding bark from chestnut logs.

  “Virginia is at the butcher’s with Reverend Arnold, where he goes to plan the week’s meals. There are no others.”

  Duncan’s gaze settled on two of the workers, not of the Company, laboring at a stump. They wore iron collars around their necks. “What sin,” he inquired in a taut voice, “did those men commit?”

  Jonathan followed his gaze. “Escaped. Father sometimes goes to Philadelphia and brings back bondsmen from those arriving on the ships. They sign papers to stay. When they flee, Mr. Hawkins brings them back. He uses father’s bear dogs,” the boy declared, nodding toward the kennels. “Father says we must always keep them a little hungry in case there’s work to be done. Such men must be reminded of their sin,” he added in a flat tone. “God wills it so.” Duncan did not need to ask the origin of that particular script.

  Duncan clenched his jaw and kept moving. It wasn’t so much a Greek utopia Ramsey was building as a Roman circus. “Some of these men must have families,” he said. He tried to steer toward the thicket that jutted into the fields, but Jonathan pulled him in the opposite direction, carefully avoiding looking at the thicket.

  “Not here,” the boy replied. “Not yet. Father will tell them when they may bring their families from the settlements.”

  “When did they start building the palisade wall?” Duncan asked after a few silent paces. He spotted another group of workers, a dozen men in two columns, walking with Cameron at the lead, holding barrel staves like muskets.

  “Last autumn. Eventually it will protect the entire town.”

  Last autumn, Duncan reminded himself, would have been after the incident at Stony Run, after Sarah Ramsey had fled.

  They paused at a stone-walled well and sat on its side to drink from the wooden ladle hung on its timbers, speaking of the geese migrating overhead. Duncan showed the boy how to turn a blade of grass into a whistle between his thumbs, and to Jonathan’s delight, a jay answered from the forest.

  “Jonathan, why did your sister go to England?” Duncan abruptly asked.

  The boy looked at the earth at his feet, his muscles visibly tensing.

  “Father says she was sick. She needed doctors there.”

  “But where was she before that?”

  Jonathan clamped his hands together and began wringing his fingers. “If mother had not gone away, it would have been different. We said prayers for Sarah’s tortured soul, for all those years. Mother said when we met Sarah, it would be in heaven. But then mother went to heaven. And Sarah. . When at last she could see us, we were not allowed to speak with her. Not allowed to touch her.” Tears welled in his eyes. As Duncan put a hand on his shoulder, the boy recoiled as if he had been struck, then sprang up. Duncan was certain he would run to the house, but instead the boy took five quick steps and turned, waiting. Duncan rose and followed the boy back toward the riverbank, where he stopped at a clump of alder bushes only a hundred feet beyond the house.

  At Jonathan’s feet were pebbles, scores of pebbles arranged in a shape from Duncan’s boyhood. It was a Scottish cross-a cross of equal arms, each a foot long, overlaying a circle. It was a symbol discouraged by the modern church, for the shape harkened back to the sacred circles of the blue-painted Picts and the Druids. Men like Arnold were loathe to admit how much Christianity had borrowed from the pagans. In the remote lands of Duncan’s youth, such a device had often been used as a charm, a powerful device for banishing demons.

  Two inches from the bottom and top of the cross were straps of iron, probably the most precious commodity in the town. The bottom iron appeared to be the handle of a long kitchen spoon, bent and rebent until it had snapped away. At the top was a narrow, six-inch piece of strap iron. Duncan lifted each in turn. As a charm against demons, many Highlanders considered iron even more potent than a cross.

  Duncan studied the position of the cross. “Are there more?” he asked the boy.

  Jonathan seemed troubled by the question. “They break the eggshells, too,” he blurted out.

  “Eggshells?”

  “Every morning on the pile where the cook leaves the pot scrapings, the eggshells are all lined up, each with a hole cut in the bottom.”

  Duncan nodded somberly. “Show me the other crosses.”

  Jonathan led him along the bank to two more crosses made of pebbles, with iron arranged as at the first, one of the pieces the bowl from the broken spoon. But when the boy paused a third time, he did not gesture toward the ground. Duncan followed the boy’s shifting gaze toward the far bank, the barn, the fields, then realized the boy was simply looking everywhere but the one place he could not bear to see.

  Duncan saw the ants first, a line of them leading under the shadows of a clump of alders, then stepped closer and froze. The ants were devouring a dead fish beside another cross. The fish was in the middle of a vertical row of objects and signs. The first set was the skull of a small bird with lines drawn in the earth beside it. The skull and lines had been stomped on with a heavy boot, crushing the bone and nearly obliterating the lines. Next came two sets of curving lines side by side, then the fish, then a yellow feather, then two stick figures that caused Duncan’s breath to catch-a beaver and the curving lines of the snake. Then came another feather and another skull, this one with a piece of iron jammed into its eye socket, pinning it to the ground. Finally there was a small cloth pouch, no more than two inches long, drawn with a string at the top. Beyond the signs in an arc around the top were handprints in the moist soil, of two different sizes. Past the hands, encircling the cross and objects, were lines of bootprints, all walking in the same direction around the cross and the adjacent objects. Someone had walked three times around, a deiseal or sunwise circuit, used for admonishing demons.

  Duncan’s gaze drifted back to the fish. Its mouth had been forced open with a small twig. The fish had been speaking and was now dead.

  The boy, still not looking at the objects, was trembling. Duncan put a hand on his arm. “When did you discover this?”

  “This morning,” Jonathan replied in a quivering voi
ce as he dared a glance toward the ground. “I was gathering stones. I thought maybe I should cover it all with dirt. Should I tell Reverend Arnold? I don’t know what he would do.” The boy leapt back, the color leaving his face. “It’s coming to life!” he gasped.

  Duncan followed his stricken gaze to the little sack. It was moving.

  “I think,” Duncan said, working hard to keep foreboding out of his voice, “we should just leave this the way it is.”

  “Because it is a curse to keep them on the other side?”

  Duncan weighed the boy’s words, gauging the position of the design, on the upside of a small swale, facing the house. The cross was not aimed at the western forest, or the island. “Because it is a curse,” he repeated. But he knew the row beside the cross was no curse, nor a ritual. They were looking at a dialogue. The cross had been made first, by a Highlander. Then the first skull of a messenger had been added, with lines of a message. Someone had then answered with the curving lines, four facing right, four left, like parentheses. They could have been claws, the number of claws on a wolf’s front paws. Then the feather, the stick men, the beaver and snake signs, the fish, the signs of Adam and Jacob, then a feather as if in acknowledgment. Finally the skull and the small, moving pouch. Duncan picked up the little bag and opened it. A large bee crawled out onto his thumb, gazed at him, then flew straight up into the sky. He stared after it a long time. Birds might be messengers to the spirits in the Iroquois world. But in the world of the Highlands, it was the bee who carried messages to the dead.

  He stepped backward, taking in the entire scene. There had been a dialogue between two parties who could not, or would not, meet face to face. But a third had also participated, coming back, interrupting with a boot, a strap of iron in the skull of a messenger, and a deiseal circuit. And Duncan knew who at least one of the three was. He looked up at the boy, who stared in silent fear at the river, then with his pencil lead on a flat white stone added one more sign to the row, where the bee had been. A drawing of Adam’s she-bear.