“What did he want, Mother?” Duncan asked.
“Brumbach. I am Mother Brumbach. To take poor Peter’s things. I told him I would not trust them to a stranger. I am sending them to his family in Bethlehem. The Reverend said we should have sent the body but I said I would ne’er let them glimpse the horror. He was a fine, handsome lad and best they remember him as such.”
Duncan hesitated, holding the questions that leapt to his tongue, then stooped to clear away dried leaves that had blown on the graves. He paused, considering the snakeskin, then extended the two spotted feathers from Red Jacob’s pouch and inserted one into the earth at the base of each cross. In the tribal world it was snakes and birds who took news of the dead to the other side.
When he straightened she nodded her approval, and he realized that while someone else had surely brought the snakeskin and fur, she had not removed them. The Moravians understood the deep spirituality of the tribes and their own faith was strong enough not to be offended by a blending of traditions.
“I had the honor of worshipping at the great sanctuary in Bethlehem,” Duncan said, speaking of the Moravians’ mother church in America. “They are not unfamiliar with the horrors of the wilderness.”
The big woman’s face drew tight. “Not like this, junge. Never like this.”
“You mean it wasn’t just another raid on a cabin.”
“I have led people to believe so, for everyone’s sake.”
It was time for frank talk. “My name is Duncan McCallum, from the north. Some days ago I cleaned the body of an Oneida. His arm had been severed. His hand had been planted inside his stomach. His killer was moving south. Yesterday we found another man dead in the river, his face peeled away.”
A deep groan escaped Mother Brumbach’s throat. Her eyes filled with moisture, and she motioned Duncan inside the little church. They sat in a front pew, and she contemplated the flickering of the eternal light on the altar for several long breaths before speaking. “Sometimes when I bake bread I like to take a couple loaves to them. It’s only three miles down along the river and I enjoy the walk along the bank. They were working hard to prepare for the baby that was due next month. Peter had built a wonderful cradle of poplar wood and was carving an angel on the headboard last time I was there. Last time I saw him alive, I mean.” She sighed and wrung her hands in her lap. “I called out when I arrived yesterday afternoon but no one answered. I found them in the cowshed, the blood still wet on the ground. Rachel was tied to a post with a little linen blanket over her head. When I pulled it off I felt the breath of Satan on my back. Her beautiful hair was sliced off to the bone, her cheeks slashed, the side of her head flattened with the blow of a club. The blessed baby had died within her. God help us.”
Duncan recalled that there had been two strips of delicate ermine fur on her cross. One was for Rachel, the other for the unborn infant.
A tear rolled down the woman’s cheek and fell onto her folded hands. “Poor Peter was in pieces. His fingers had been cut away and jammed into holes pierced in his neck so they were like some hideous necklace.”
“The Blooddancer.” Duncan did not realize he had said the word aloud until he saw the woman shudder.
“An old Iroquois myth, boy. Speak not of such things in the House of our God.”
“There was no sign of a struggle?”
“Only footprints in the blood. Made by shoes with heels.”
“And have there been strangers in town?”
“What, apart from you and the twenty traders today, and more coming and going every day? The town may be crumbling but it is still at the intersection of many paths, on water and land.”
A tall native wearing a black waistcoat over his torso but only buckskin leggings and loincloth below entered the chapel and tended to the flickering lamp. He paused when he saw Duncan, then pulled up a stool and sat before them. He studied Duncan in silence before speaking in slow, carefully measured English. “It is the hand of God, Mother, that this man comes to us today.”
“This man?”
“You sit with the Death Speaker.”
The woman paled and inched away from Duncan, but the Christian Indian continued. Duncan realized he had met the man once, among missionaries along the Finger Lakes. “This is McCallum, brother to Sagatchie, comrade of Chief Custaloga, and the one who guided the great Chief Skanawati along his final path.”
It was Duncan’s turn to shudder as the native spoke of great men he had known, all Iroquois, all dead.
“Companion to Conawago,” the man continued, “and to the daughter of the shaman Tashgua.”
Mother Brumbach let out a breath. “The Death Speaker,” she repeated in a steadier voice, then rose and gestured Duncan into a small chamber at the rear corner that served as something of a rectory office. Against the wall was a small table, spotted with ink stains, which held dog-eared song sheets, quills, and several liturgical books. Above it were shelves bearing bundles of candles, little wooden crosses, and a battered wooden box.
Mother Brumbach set the box on the table, opened it, and lowered herself into the chamber’s only chair. “The cabin had been ransacked so God alone knows what was taken. But this”—she lifted out a muslin pouch—“was stuffed under the roof in the loft. His valuables.” She anticipated the question in Duncan’s eyes. “It’s where the Mission Society teaches us to hide our few valuables.”
Inside was another cryptogram, if it could be called such, written in the style of the message at Peter Rohrbach’s grave. A clever, artful hand had drawn first a rendering of a deer, a pea pod, a toe, and single syllables interspersed with a saw, a star with a tail, and what looked like several human eyes, closing with an oval from which several vertical lines extended, one with a fat cap at the top. At the bottom was a hasty postscript in plain text. Colonel Barre has offered encouraging words from London.
Below the odd missive was a child’s Bible bearing the dead man’s name in crude block letters; two feathers, one red and one white, bound together with a thin strip of fur; a quillwork bracelet with the names Peter and Rachel skillfully rendered with dyed quills. Duncan upended the pouch and a small black stone tumbled out. As he gazed at its coils and seams, he at first thought it was a stone expertly carved into the shape of a snail-like creature, then he suddenly realized he had seen such a stone before, in an Edinburgh display of natural curiosities. The luminaries had not all agreed on what to call it. A mortified beast, one had said. An alchemist stone. An Aristotle rock, some insisted, because the ancient Greek had been the first to describe them. But Duncan had settled on the term used by one of his more modern professors. A fossil.
“Was Peter a natural philosopher?” he asked.
Mother Brumbach was clearly uncomfortable with the little stone. “He always had an active mind.”
“Enemies?”
“Seldom would you meet a kinder soul this side of heaven. I never heard him raise his voice. Except once,” she added a moment later, “when a man from Philadelphia came through a few months ago. He had a starched collar and a ledger book. He said when the new counties were organized there would be land taxes owed and he was taking note of homesteaders. Asked to see Peter’s deed. I would not have credited it if I had not been there to witness it. Our gentle Peter raised an ax handle and declared that no far-off official had the right to tell him where to raise his family or take his hard-won earnings when giving nothing in return. ‘But I represent the governor,’ the man protested, and Peter said he never signed on to be the governor’s slave. Rachel came out with the dog, half wolf he was, and when he showed his teeth that fool from Philadelphia turned pale as a ghost. He must have run all the way back to town.”
He looked up to see Mother Brumbach holding a cross in her hand now. “Should I call in all our flock to stay in town?” she asked in a tight voice. “I am not ready to dig more graves.”
“This didn’t happen because he was a Moravian. Was he perhaps a friend of rangers? Of some Iroquois?”
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br /> She shook her head. “His darling wife was a Delaware, with a face like a spring flower.” The words, soft and delicate, seemed out of place on the tongue of the big-boned woman. She wiped a tear and turned away.
Duncan returned the items to the pouch, holding the black stone for a moment. It looked like a small stone nautilus. Mother Brumbach reached out and closed his fingers around it. “Take it. The thing unsettles me. There is something dark about it, something that has no business in a church. An old Dutchman said there were once ancient monsters whose breath turned every living thing to stone. One of the Senecas said he has seen a place in the mountains, a clearing where nothing grows, where the ground is littered with such stones. He said his old sachem told him it was the place where gods go to die.” She looked up forlornly. “Why would my Peter have such a thing?”
HE WANDERED INTO THE THREE TAVERNS LEFT IN THE TOWN, ALL of them unclean, decaying places that stank of stale ale and unwashed men. There was no sign of rangers, or men who might once have been rangers. As he stood by the corner bar cage in the third, a man called out for a cup of dice. As the tavernkeeper reached for one of five shaped leather cups on a shelf above him, Duncan saw that five small printed rectangles had been pinned to the shelf below the cups.
The barman followed his gaze. “All the way from Philadelphia they come,” he groused, “just to reach into my purse to exchange my hard-won coin for little slips of paper.”
Duncan recalled seeing such rectangles fixed to the back of news journals. “I thought the stamp tax was only on gazettes and legal documents.”
“And playing cards. And dice, damned their eyes. The innkeeper next door refused to pay and they burned his cards and crushed his dice with a pestle.”
Duncan fingered the broken cube in his pocket as he left the tavern. Both Woolford and Red Jacob had carried broken dice, though he was certain neither was a gambling man.
He sat on a ledge overlooking the river and watched a dozen native women hanging splayed shad to dry on racks, some singing to babies on their backs. He tried to piece together the sequence of the deaths. The man on the river had died no more than two days earlier. The Moravian and his wife had died less than twenty-four hours earlier. The demon killers were still working their way south.
A shadow moved across him and Tanaqua silently lowered himself onto the rock.
“The Blooddancer was here,” Duncan said, and explained what he learned of the murder of Peter Rohrbach and his Delaware wife.
“I had an old uncle who would fill the winter nights with tales of the trickster Blooddancer,” Tanaqua recounted. “As a young boy I buried myself in furs against the wall of the lodge and laid awake half the night in fear. Later when we fought in the wars together I asked why he did such a thing. He said there were many things to learn along the path to being a warrior but the most important thing was fear. He said a man without fear is a danger to all those around him, that I had to learn there were indeed many things to fear in this world and the next.”
The Trickster. The strange symbol messages, Duncan realized, were the work of a trickster. “The killers move downstream ahead of us,” he said. “Is that what Woolford feared, that nineteen men would be torn apart by an Iroquois demon?” He answered his own question. “It can’t be. He came from Johnson Hall, running south. He would not have known about the missing mask.”
“Colonel Johnson sent for Red Jacob. I was with Red Jacob when he read the message. Life or death. Come now, it said. That was the day after the mask was stolen. Sir William knew. Messages run between Onondaga and Johnson Hall almost every day.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“It had nothing to do with the Blooddancer. You look for missing men. I look for a missing god.”
“Then why did the Blooddancer kill Red Jacob? First Red Jacob, then the man on the river. Now two Moravians here at Shamokin. The Blooddancer is going south.”
Tanaqua frowned, as if Duncan had insulted the god. “The Trickster does not even know Europeans exist. He is an Iroquois god.”
“He knows enough to kill them. You said before, he infects those around him with his bloodlust.”
Tanaqua did not reply. After a long silence he lifted a handful of the sandy soil by the rock and sprinkled it on the ledge, then made the image of a stick man with the head of a fish on his neck. “He knew how to tame angry spirits. The half king.”
“The half king was half a man?”
“All the leaders at the edge of the League’s territory are called half kings. But this is his particular sign. When he traveled he would cut that shape in trees or scratch it in rocks along his path. When I was a boy my uncle took me to see some, the fish men carved on trees. We found old shrines near every one of the signs.” Tanaqua somehow seemed angry with himself.
Finally he turned to Duncan. “The dead man on the river. The arm with the string. He had ripped away his shirt and scratched letters on his flesh.”
“You mean the killer did.”
“No. Under the fingernails of his other hand there were still pieces of his own skin and flesh.”
Duncan now recalled how the Mohawk had hesitated over the body and lifted the second hand for a moment. “What did it say?” Duncan asked, then saw by the flash of embarrassment on Tanaqua’s face he had asked the wrong question. “I am sorry. What were the shapes of the letters?”
The Mohawk leaned over to claw up a handful of sandy soil, dropped it between them, and spread it flat. With a twig he made the letters he had seen.
A chill crept down Duncan’s spine as he read them. Fi Fo Fum.
He shuddered at the thought of the man’s last moments, probably left for dead, an eye hanging out, the shrieking agony of the mutilations wracking his body. Yet he had ripped his shirt, tied the old family heirloom to himself to protect it, then clawed at his own flesh to send a message. The urgent message left by the Philadelphia gentleman, his last desperate words, were the same unlikely words carried by the dead Oneida.
“Watch the woman on the left,” Tanaqua said. Duncan followed his gaze to a middle-aged woman who stood apart from the others. “At the end of each of her racks she lays down half a fish, for the river spirits. Only her racks.” Duncan glanced at the others and saw his companion was right. The Mohawk turned to him with an expectant look and when Duncan did not react he raised his brows. “She is Lenni Lenape. The only one I have seen today,” he said, then pushed off with his hands, gracefully dropping from the low ledge onto the flat where the woman worked.
Lenni Lenape. A Delaware. By the time Duncan reached them she was in earnest conversation with Tanaqua. The woman not only knew Rachel, she was her aunt. “I promised to look after her while her mother went to the Ohio country in search of her husband, who never came back from the war.” As she raised her hand with another fish, Duncan saw a fresh cut on the back of her hand, and remembered the blood at Rachel’s grave. It was an old, nearly extinct, part of tribal burials, slicing one’s flesh to express grief.
“Had you seen your niece this week?” Duncan asked.
The woman kept working as they spoke, and Tanaqua began lifting the gutted fish from her basket and stretching the rich layers of flesh before handing them to her for the rack. She nodded. “Three days ago I took a rabbit stew to them. Rachel was sewing a little quilt for the baby. Peter was talking to those Philadelphia men, so I sat with her and helped for an hour.”
“Philadelphia men? Do you know their names?”
“No names. Friends of Peter’s from Philadelphia.”
“What did they talk about? Did they argue?”
“Not argue. Hushed, very serious. Something important. Like when men go on a warrior’s path, though those two men were no warriors. When they left, Peter had to call out to tell them they were going in the wrong direction to reach town.”
“Did they say anything to you? Have you seen them here in town?”
“Nothing to me. Not like Peter’s other friend who cam
e with him from Philadelphia. Very kind man. He could speak Iroquois like he had been born in a lodge. But they argued that time. Peter said the Bible, the captain he say Shake-a-speare,” she said, adding a syllable that lent it a tribal whimsy.
Duncan looked at her with a dumbfounded expression. He knew only one captain who would speak of Shakespeare on the frontier. “Woolford. Patrick Woolford.”
The woman shrugged, and swung a horsehair whisk at the gathering flies. Later there would be smoky fires lit along the rows of racks that would keep away the insects. “He made Rachel laugh. Graves in the rain. Worms in the dust. He made Peter recite it again and again. No write, no write, the captain say. A book would come. No write. But later Peter write, and he made the show for Rachel.” Tears trickled down the sturdy woman’s cheeks. “What do I tell her mother? There is no one to make babies in our family ever again.”
Duncan had no answer to her question. As Tanaqua took the woman’s hand and began speaking in low comforting tones, Duncan backed away. He climbed the path to the town, once more aiming for the church. He walked slowly, trying to piece together what he had heard. He realized he should not have been surprised that Woolford had been at Shamokin. Over the years he had learned that the process of solving the puzzles of deaths was like painting on a blank canvas, filling in a tree, a cloud, a house, a flower, a road, then eventually vague human forms who, with the final strokes, at last assumed faces. But here all he had before him was a fog. Of course Woolford might have had business in Shamokin, which had become a common shore onto which the flotsam of war and lost causes drifted. But what business could the captain have had with a reclusive Moravian and his wife? For that matter, what was Woolford’s business? Conawago had spoken of secretive missions in the wilderness. But Woolford had disappeared for months the year before. Duncan had not known his whereabouts until a parcel had arrived from London, enclosing a newly published work on medicine, with a letter that spoke of family and weather, its only hint of his purpose there being references to too many trips to Whitehall and Greenwich, where high officials and military leaders met behind closed doors. Woolford had a mission, one that included nineteen men, one that was taking him to Virginia. But why would the captain have not sent Duncan to the military in Albany for help? It was as if he no longer trusted the military. Duncan still could not see through the murk on his canvas. But he knew that Woolford had trusted Peter Rohrbach with a deadly secret and, disobeying Woolford, Rohrbach had written it down.
Blood of the Oak: A Mystery Page 8