Bone Rattler amoca-1

by Eliot Pattison

  “We’ve seen these pagan rites before,” Arnold said, his voice gathering strength now, “the first time a murder stained the Company.”

  “Before, you agreed it was not Mr. Lister.”

  Arnold turned his pale, hard face toward Duncan. “Before, I agreed it was better for the Ramsey Company to blame the army.”

  Arnold, Duncan recalled, had once said they were going to provide the answers to human nature. But he had never mentioned what the questions were. “The last time, they seemed to be calling on the devil. This time, they seem to be calling on God.”

  “They are mocking our God,” Arnold said. He had not moved from the doorway. “There was a Bible. Who would steal a Bible?”

  Duncan warily lifted the cross, surprised by the thought that there was a simple, natural beauty to it.

  “I’d say ’twas more like they wanted two gods to get acquainted,” a dry, raspy voice observed.

  Duncan turned. In the corner, in the shadow behind the door, sat Sergeant Fitch. The grizzle-faced ranger looked bone tired, but his eyes were lit with a strange excitement.

  “Who would do this?” Duncan asked as Fitch rose and approached.

  “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” the ranger said. “If two spirits were coming from different worlds to meet,” he added in a contemplative tone, “I reckon this would be their Edge of the Woods place. Sometimes they seek to exchange hostages. They be offering to exchange gods as hostages.”

  The words seemed to stun Arnold as much as Duncan. The vicar, his face pale as a sheet, backed out of the building.

  Fitch, a look of wonder on his face, seemed not to hear when Duncan asked him if he had seen Indians in the barnyard. He left the sergeant staring at the altar and returned to the forge.

  Come on me brave seamen that plows on the main, Give ear to me story I’m true to maintain. .

  The dimly lit figure inside the coal crib kept singing until Duncan tapped a post.

  “Edentown be paradise indeed,” the old Scot said, leaning toward Duncan with the clink of chains. “I lay about all day out of the hot sun.”

  “You said Frasier and Hawkins argued. Could you hear about what?”

  “The boy spoke softly, too low for me to hear. He was excited, seemed to want to tell Hawkins urgent news. But Hawkins cursed him, said the boy needed some rum. Frasier spoke again, something about treason. Hawkins slapped him like a misbehaving child, then left the lad staring at the ground. Later, when no one was about, the boy walked around the barn three times, sunwise.” A deiseal circuit. Frasier was seeing demons everywhere. But Hawkins was the wrong demon to cross.

  “I’ll tell you a secret, Clan McCallum,” Lister whispered after a moment’s silence. “I got sent to the Company for a scrape with an army officer. But ten years ago I was ashore, back home visiting what was left of me family, when a lieutenant of the Royal Navy came to press me last two young cousins for service. When we argued, he drew his sword and slashed one of the boys on his arm, saying we were not permitted to decline the king’s desire. I knocked the blade from his hand, but the fool pulled a pistol. I jumped him, the gun went off, and the ball pierced his heart. We threw his body in the sea. It were a noose for me for certain, but the boat his party came in capsized on the return with all hands lost. Everyone just assumed he was lost at sea. So I’ve been cheating the rope ever since. My account is overdue.”

  “You didn’t kill Evering or Frasier. You didn’t murder anyone.”

  “I see their faces in dreams, me father and those who died on Culloden moor. I never should have lied about me name, never turned me back on who I was,” Lister said in a hollow voice. “Used to be once a month, but now the dreams come every night. I was meant to die by English hands at Culloden. I cheated them all by lying and running away to sea, and that be the plain way of it.”

  They had reached the truth of it, Duncan realized. It was why Lister had so readily revealed his secret Highland roots to Duncan, why he was ready to accept the noose, not for killing an English officer years earlier but for abandoning his clan and the Highland ways.

  They sat in silence. Doves cooed in the barn next door.

  “There’s autumn flowers sprouting along the edge of the fields,” Duncan said. “I saw thistles.” Through the slats of the crib Duncan saw a sad grin form on Lister’s lips. “One day we’re going to build a cabin on the side of a mountain in Carolina, you and me and any Scot who wants to join us. We’ll plant thistles for the joy of it and speak the old tongue all day, dance a jig all night.”

  Again Lister took a long time to answer. “It’s the New World, lad,” the old sailor said in a flat voice. “Find yourself a new kind of dream.”

  “I already have a dream,” Duncan said. “You gave it to me. And now it’s burnt too deep to walk away from. I vow you will not hang, Mr. Lister. You gave me my life that day on the mast. A sad wretch I would be if I did not return the favor.” What was it Adam had told Frasier? There are promises made which, if broken, will end all good things forever.

  From the shadows on the far side of the schoolhouse came the laugh of a young girl. Duncan rose. “What happened to them, your two cousins?” he asked before stepping away.

  “Bonny lads, both of them. The only joy of their mother’s vexed heart. A different press gang caught up with them a month later. They both died when their frigate was sunk by the French off Brest.”

  Duncan found Virginia sitting on a stump beyond the schoolhouse, watching her brother throw pebbles at pieces of broken crockery lined up on a bench. Jonathan wore a sober air as he aimed his missiles, his younger sister calling out in amusement whenever he hit one of the targets. Duncan settled beside the girl, watching her brother. It wasn’t just solemnity on the boy’s countenance. There was fear, even anguish. He did not respond with glee when he hit the crockery, but with a flash of something that might have been called hatred.

  After several minutes Duncan invited them to see their new classroom. Asking which of the small tables they would choose for their own, they each took a side table, leaving the center of the three empty, each glancing at it nervously.

  “Where is Sarah today?” Duncan asked.

  “Father and the vicar,” Virginia offered in a grown-up voice. “They fret so about her. Reverend Arnold reads the Bible to her for an hour each day.”

  As she spoke, one of the housemaids called the children’s names from the porch of the great house. “Father’s giving us music lessons,” the girl announced brightly, then gathered her skirt and skipped away, with Jonathan a few steps behind, marching like a soldier.

  Duncan quickly stuffed a piece of paper and a stick of writing lead in his shirt, slipped into the barn to retrieve one of the spare ax handles leaning against the wall, and found his way to the ceremonial ground, the Edge of the Woods place. He lowered himself onto one of the log benches, his heart racing, and clutched his makeshift weapon. Never in his life had he been frightened of the wild, until now.

  A twig snapped and he fought an urge to dart back to the fields, then saw it was one of the small, brown, spotted creatures Crispin called a chipmunk. He stared into the canopy, calming himself, then stepped to the stones in the center of the clearing. The Indians were savages, but those same savages, at least some of them, held ceremonies like those of the church and seemed to have reverence for the truth, had something about them that stirred a battle-hardened man like Sergeant Fitch.

  He paced about the stone platform and then, feeling like a violator in a temple, slid the stone from the top. He stared inside the compartment, then studied the forest, his heart thumping again. The wampum belt was there, but beside it someone had lain a bundle of feathers and fur tied with a single string of beads. His heart rose up in his throat as he surveyed the forest around him again. An Indian had been there, half a mile from his own bed, in the past twenty-four hours, and now he was intruding into that Indian’s secrets.

  Extracting the paper, Duncan began to carefully replicate o
n it the shapes on the belt he had first examined with Woolford. A square at either end; figures of men holding axes; a large tree topped by a man in the center; several small X shapes with the top of each X connected, alternating with animal shapes. The figures were meaningless to him. But they meant something to someone at the settlement. When he finished, he extracted from his waistcoat the pages he had taken from Evering’s journal and read every line again, attempting to decipher even the many lines that been crossed out. The pages were mostly filled with Evering’s maudlin verses, some further describing Sarah as she slept, others reflecting what seemed to be Evering’s growing unease about landing in America. Duncan kept returning to several lines that seemed to be premises for poems never written. If dreams transport you to the other world and you dream two months without waking, would you not try to stay on the other side forever? the professor had asked. Then, under a series of X’s meant to obliterate the words, Evering’s chilling version of an old children’s rhyme. There was a crooked man who climbed a crooked tree. He found a crooked promise and kissed the crooked sea.

  The thought of Evering caused him to lift his head toward the river. He returned the belt to the cairn, then stepped toward the water. Duncan kept learning from Evering, long after his death, as if the scholar were speaking to him from the spirit world. He found himself on the riverbank, gripping his fear, and stepped into the water.

  The crooked face of the effigy seemed to be staring directly at him when he arrived under the hemlock on the island. Almost nothing had changed since his first visit, except the crown of antlers was in front of Evering now, with several feathers leaning against it. In one of the professor’s twig hands was a little stick, four inches long, with a single strand of beads attached to one end. Several notches had been cut into the stick. With mounting fear Duncan lifted the stick and its beads away. With a shudder he discovered what it was that was frightening him even more than on his first visit. Evering’s watch was ticking.

  He backed up several steps and examined the beads on the stick. They were white and purple, arranged in a pattern of two purple and one white, the same as in the strand around the new bundle in the cairn; the same, he suddenly realized, as one of the oval lines drawn by Jacob the Fish in his dying message. The old Mahican had been sending a wampum message, without the beads.

  An hour later Duncan sat on the school steps, making notes in the late afternoon sun, when suddenly a figure erupted from behind the cooper’s shed, stumbling, steadied by an older man who was pushing him forward. They walked along the wall of the building, disappearing around its far side. When they reappeared, Duncan put down his papers and stood, stealing along the shadows for a better look.

  It was McGregor and the other Company prisoner who had been brought back, the man still wearing the same mindless, numb expression he had worn when he had appeared from the forest. On the third round, Duncan realized the two men were making a deiseal circuit around Arnold’s makeshift church.

  “What was his sin?” Duncan asked a Company man who watched the ritual uneasily.

  “Killed a snake with an ax,” the man replied in a perplexed tone. “Old Fitch had a fit. Broke off the ax head and tossed it in the forge to melt. McGregor said he knew a way to make things right.”

  Duncan waited for McGregor and his companion to finish their circuits, then reached the old Scot as the two men, finished, stepped to a drinking trough. “What happened out there with Hawkins?” he asked.

  The old Scot swallowed hard before answering. “We came upon a farm where everyone had been killed, days earlier. Blood everywhere, the bodies in pieces, picked by the crows. That night we stayed with a Welshman who sold us rum, who told us tales of the heathen, said if we kept going upriver the Huron would take us home and hang us up alive for meat, slicing off pieces for their stew pots.”

  “But that was where Hawkins was taking you? Upriver?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. They’re not coming back. Over there, in the forest, it’s like being thrown into the ocean not knowing how to swim. For four days, this one,” he said, indicating the younger convict with him, “never slept. ’Tain’t right, McCallum, ’tain’t for people like us to-” The Scot’s voice trailed off as the younger man wandered away into the makeshift chapel. “Hawkins, he left the boy on the trail, weeping like a babe, so weak he couldn’t walk. I told Hawkins the boy was Ramsey property, that he couldn’t be wasted like that without accounting to the great laird.” McGregor shook his head. “He sneaks into the chapel when e’re he can. I’ll have to drag him out again, a’fore Reverend Arnold hears.”

  “Hears what?”

  “His prayer, always the same prayer. May I die soon, he says, may I die quick.” With a sigh McGregor stepped toward the chapel.

  Duncan returned to the schoolhouse steps, keeping an eye on the men who walked along the muddy paths of the town until he spied a compact, sinewy figure in green. Fitch entered the barn and was sharpening his hand ax on a grindstone when Duncan approached and silently took over the turning of the handle. The sergeant nodded and continued working the blade with grim determination. A Company worker appeared with a spade to grind, and backed away as he saw Fitch. The men treated the sergeant like some kind of wild beast that sometimes prowled in their midst.

  “The Indians use codes in their beads,” Duncan said after a minute. He extended the strand of beads on the stick with his free hand. “Jacob used the same code.”

  Fitch paused, testing his blade with a callused thumb, glancing at the beads. “This used to be their land. Even if Ramsey offered to pay for it, which he didn’t, they wouldn’t understand. Their brains can’t fit around the idea that men can own land.”

  “Who exactly uses such codes?”

  “The Six,” the sergeant said toward the trees, then turned to Duncan. “Each of the Six Nations has its own bead pattern, to identify it in messages. Four strands, with two purple and one white, that be Onondaga. They are the central tribe, the keepers of tradition, the ones charged with watching over sacred things. The ones with the most powerful shaman.”

  “Tashgua, you mean.”

  “He was born Onondaga. But he lives apart now, away from the Iroquois towns, with his own band, has for years. Like a band of roaming warrior priests, protecting the old ways.”

  “But there are soldiers here. Surely hostiles won’t move about with the soldiers so close.”

  “Gone, with the last of the settlers, worn out by Ramsey hospitality. There was a farmer named William Wells, with a place not many miles north. Killed and scalped two days ago, but his place wasn’t burnt, so those settlers went there. And the troops were just a small patrol, due to go back soon.”

  Duncan examined the stick again. “It has ten notches. What does that mean?”

  “It’s a council stick, lad. A religious council. An Indian shaman wants to talk. Ten notches means in ten days.”

  “Are you saying it’s an invitation?”

  “If ’twere given to an Indian, that’s what it would be.”

  “Where? Where is this council?”

  “If you have to ask that,” Fitch replied, “then I reckon it ain’t intended for you.” He rose and pushed the tomahawk into his belt. “Given recent events, I reckon ’tis the last place any sane Christian wants to be.”

  Duncan put a hand on his arm as the sergeant took a step away. “Adam Munroe was supposed to be with the Company. He would have known how to read the beads.”

  Fitch looked away. “Aye,” he confirmed in a reluctant tone.

  “Because he was a ghostwalker,” Duncan ventured. “Because he was a prisoner of the Indians,” he added in a questioning tone.

  Fitch frowned. “Ghostwalker’s just a name for the pitiful souls who are brought back, not Indian but no longer exactly European either. Most of them move about without purpose, having lost the way of themselves.”

  “How long was he a prisoner?”

  “There was an expedition of Pennsylvania militia three ye
ars ago. He was one of those who did not come back,” Fitch added, then hurried away.

  Adam had trusted Duncan with the stone bear, he had said, because Duncan was becoming a ghostwalker. For a horrible instant he thought Adam meant he was to be captured by the savages, then he understood. Duncan was between worlds, too, able to see certain true things because his true people were lost. He looked down at the notched stick. It ain’t intended for you, Fitch had said. But maybe it was. The old Ramsey tutor had given it to a new one.

  It was dusk when Duncan returned to the schoolroom. Dropping the paper with the drawing of the belt onto the table with his other clues, he stared at them all, arms folded on the table, until his head dropped into his arms and he slept.

  When he awoke, a nearly full moon had risen. He unlatched the door and sat on the stone step, watching the sky, his thoughts constantly drawn toward the old Scot in the makeshift cell. Finally he rose and stepped inside to his bedchamber. Pulling out the sea bag he had brought from the ship, he extracted the clothing and reached into the bottom, removing the tattered, stained muslin bag that held his most precious possession. Holding the bag tightly to his chest, he stepped outside. He studied the forge a moment, then stepped away from it, walking hurriedly over the open ground, slowly finding his way through the laurel thicket until he reached the overgrown cemetery. As he reached into the sack, his heart gave a sudden lurch, and he stood unmoving, overwhelmed with emotion. The intricately crafted pipes had been handed down through his family for at least two hundred years, but they had been lovingly cared for, left to him by the old uncle who had sought refuge with Duncan, secretly kept for him by one of his Scottish professors who had visited him in prison and then appeared in the courtroom when he had been sentenced to transportation.

  Slowly, methodically, sitting on one of the ruined cabin walls, Duncan prepared the instrument, flooded with memories of his grandfather playing and teaching him with the same pipes. Finally, the bladder bulging with air, the reeds wetted and reset, the drones tuned as best he could manage, he clamped the blow-stick in his teeth and grasped the chanter. He was out of practice, but the fingering came back quickly. His grandfather had taught him many lonesome ballads of the Highlands and the seafaring island folk, and Duncan played all he could recall, each song releasing him further from the guilt and hopelessness he felt in the Ramsey compound. Long-dead scenes opened in his mind, of his mother dancing with him in the kitchen as his father played small music, of his grandfather offering a solemn pibroch to bless the fishermen each spring before they set out on the treacherous Hebrides waters. His heart thundered, and a new energy reached his piping. He was rowing with his grandfather on a calm sea as the old man piped to the whales and seals. He was at one of the joyful Highland weddings, where men who smelled of heather and peat piped all night by a bonfire and girls danced over swords.