Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

The words lingered in the silence. A spark of light shot across the sky and died. The owl called but had no answer.

  This was the world the two old men lived in, a world in which their bloodlines and their rich, centuries-old tribal cultures were being extinguished. What made it acutely painful for Conawago and Totokanay, Duncan realized, was that they now understood that, having been taken away by Europeans for education and conversion, they had become unintended agents of the forces that crushed their people. They had thought to help their tribes with their knowledge, becoming bridges between cultures, but all their training had done was make them more aware of the slow, grinding annihilation of all they held dear. For decades they had borne witness to the inexorable destruction of all they and their forebears had been, knowing they could not change it.

  Duncan felt small, inadequate, like an intruder at the death of someone else’s loved one. “They will be desperate there,” he said at last.

  “You understand nothing,” came Conawago’s voice, surprisingly impatient. “You do not understand your part, Duncan, because, like so many others, you do not grasp the stage you perform on.” For a moment, apology lingered in the old man’s eyes. It wasn’t like him to speak so harshly to Duncan. He dropped more of his fragrant tobacco onto the smoldering mound. “Jiyathontek,” he whispered to the heavens before turning back to Duncan. “We are lost if we don’t recognize that everyone in this drama is in their ending times. All of us here. You try to convince yourself that you are different from us, but you are not. The life of your Highland tribe is gone, as is that of the Nipmuc and the Abenaki, and soon the Iroquois. But it doesn’t stop there. The Jesuits have glimpsed their ending. They may be desperate, but they have more power than people think.”

  “Only the kings survive,” Duncan said after listening to the owl again.

  “No. You are wrong,” his old friend replied. “There is an ending time for them too. King George has America. King Louis thinks he can get much of it back. But they don’t know the people who have taken root here. Those people are beginning to grasp the truth that the tribes have always known. Nothing important in life has ever been granted by a king.”

  Conawago shifted his gaze back over the silver-gilded mountains. Minutes passed before he spoke again, in a slow, reverent voice. “There is no land like this land,” declared the old Nipmuc, who had seen more of the world than anyone Duncan knew. “There is no freedom like this freedom.”

  17

  THEY DROVE HARD THE NEXT day, ranger style, running for an hour, then stopping for a few minutes’ rest, taking turns with the heavier loads. Munro cleverly rigged a pack for Molly out of belts and pouches, and the big Newfoundland carried twenty pounds at Will’s side without ever breaking stride.

  Duncan found himself drifting to the back of the line, and more than once, Brandt, running on a flanking path as rangers were taught to do in enemy territory, had to throw a pebble at him to force his attention back to the trail. He found himself revisiting his time with the old tribesmen the night before, which had strangely disturbed him. There is no freedom like this freedom, Conawago had said. Duncan had not understood, protesting that he could not escape the bounty hunters and magistrates forever.

  “Not you. Everyone,” Noah had said, as if to correct him.

  Were they suggesting that the entire world was adrift? They seemed to think men were drifting away from kings, but surely that wasn’t possible. Duncan may have hated what the government did, but the king was the king, the head of the nation. The Jacobites hadn’t rebelled against kings, they had rebelled for their own Scottish king. He recalled the words of Josiah Chisholm, who said he could not get his mind around the notion of not having a king. There was no such thing as a country without a king. It was the old men’s tribal blood talking, the part of them that walked the forest in freedom. But the forest was not a country. No civilized nation had ever not had a king.

  He slowed, looking at the native rangers who ran with Woolford. The Iroquois had a civilization, and they had no king, only a council of wise chieftains and the matriarchs who counseled them. There were those who called the Iroquois the Romans of the New World, and he recalled too that for a time, ancient Romans, and Greeks, had lived without kings. What had Conawago said? Nothing important in life has ever been granted by a king.

  A pebble hit his shoulder again, followed quickly by the whistle of a warbler. He looked up from his musing to see Munro, silently pointing him up the trail. Duncan had fallen behind again. He had to stop worrying about freedom and honor and focus on murderers and traitors.

  “THE CHURCH IS HERE,” BRANDT explained in the last light of day, making the sign of a cross in the wet sand by the riverbank, “facing the square that adjoins the river on its western side.” He was drawing a map of St. Francis, which lay only three miles downriver now. “Rows of houses here and here,” the old ranger said, drawing lines radiating north and south from both sides of the square, where the Christian Indians lived.

  “We must split at the river’s edge,” Woolford advised. “One party around to the south, the other straight in from the north.”

  “Sounds like a military operation,” Conawago observed. “We are not trying to relive the St. Francis massacre.”

  “At least not the bloody parts,” Duncan rejoined. “Something else happened during that raid, and we must discover what it was.”

  Noah frowned. “Conawago and I will just walk into town. No one will suspect two old wanderers.”

  In the end, they agreed that Woolford and his rangers would flank the town and enter from the south while Duncan would lead his party along the bank to the riverfront landing. Hayes had announced that he would speak with the town leaders about European captives once Duncan had completed his business. The tinker, however, refused to stay in their camp with Will, Molly, and Sadie, insisting that he would carry his weight. “Jehovah has not brought me this far to have me linger behind,” Hayes stated, his face set in fierce determination.

  It did indeed feel like a wartime raid as they used hand signals to finally advance into St. Francis. It was an hour after dawn, and the town was still rising. If they met no resistance, they would meet at the church and seek the Jesuit priests.

  Duncan’s heart pounded as they cleared a little spit of land and the town came into view. Smoke rose skyward from more than four dozen buildings, some crude timber cabins but others substantial clapboard houses, beyond which were five or six more traditional bark longhouses. The big white planked church at the center of the town was flanked by a cemetery on the far side of the square, just as depicted on Daniel Oliver’s powder horn. Three or four women were already at the wide landing place below the town square, where canoes and dugouts were pulled up on the pebble beach.

  They stayed in cover, stealthily advancing, hands on the weapons they prayed they would not have to use. Munro softly whistled, indicating two men who emerged from a log house fifty yards away, one of whom pushed aside a loincloth to urinate on a tree. They kept up their approach.

  A woman in a long, dark dress dumped a basket of laundry on the pebbles, then took a shirt into calf-deep water and bent to soak it. She had her back to them, and as the sun emerged from a cloud, it lit the auburn hues in her carefully combed and ribboned hair.

  A choked cry rose from behind Duncan, and Hayes suddenly stood up from the alder he had knelt behind and took a staggering step forward. “Blessed God!” he murmured as he splashed into the water. “Rebecca!”

  The woman turned in surprise. Her European features lost all color as Hayes rushed to her. “It’s you!” Hayes cried. “My darling wife at last!” he called, sobbing as he wrapped his arms around her. She did not speak. She did not return his embrace. “It’s me! It’s Solomon!” Hayes cried as he tightened his embrace.

  “Va t’en!” a child shouted. Two small Indian boys, perhaps three and five years of age, burst from the shadow of a tree, shouting as they ran into the water. The oldest leapt onto Hayes’s back and violent
ly pounded his head. “Arrêtez! Arrêtez!” the younger cried as he grabbed a leg and desperately tried to separate the woman from Hayes.

  Duncan and his companions stared transfixed at Hayes and his long-lost wife. As Duncan stirred from his trance to help the tinker, Munro grabbed his arm. “No!” the Scot warned. Duncan followed his gaze toward the bank. An Abenaki warrior wearing a bandage around his thigh stood grinning at them. With one hand he gripped Conawago, whose arm was covered with blood. With the other he pressed a bloody blade to the Nipmuc’s throat.

  The boy on Hayes’s back scratched at an ear, drawing blood. “Leave my mother alone!” he screamed.

  CONAWAGO WINCED AS DUNCAN PUSHED a needle into the skin of his arm. Mog had stabbed deep into his bicep when he ambushed the old man, leaping out of the shadows with a blow aimed between the shoulder blades. Noah had shoved Conawago an instant before the blade struck, saving him from the fatal blow the warrior had intended. Mog, hearing the shouts from the riverfront, had changed his mind and quickly dragged his victim toward the water.

  When, an hour after their capture, Duncan and his friends had been marched at gunpoint into their makeshift prison chamber, the old Nipmuc was already there, being tended by a young priest. The Jesuit had been alarmed, if not outright frightened, by the arrival of the new prisoners and had fled without responding to any of Duncan’s urgent questions. The basket he left on the bench, however, contained additional bandages and even a needle and silken thread, which Duncan was using to close up the wound.

  “His name is Father Tremblay,” Conawago explained with another grunt as the needle pierced his skin again. “Arrived here a few months ago, he says.”

  “More talkative with you than with us,” Munro observed.

  “Because Mog told everyone you were rangers who had come back to finish the job they started nine years ago. Tremblay says the old ones tell him they spent days digging graves the last time rangers came to St. Francis.”

  The long, narrow chamber they had been locked in seemed to have once been a sacristy, where priests stored vestments and changed into them before services, though apparently for a larger church than the one they had been led to. The narrow loophole windows illuminated a long row of pegs and, bolted to the wall, an old armoire that had been scorched in a fire, in which discarded moth-eaten cassock robes hung. More recently, the room seemed to have been used as a small classroom. Four benches were pushed against the inner wall, with half a dozen small writing slates stacked on one. On the plaster walls were drawings in pencil lead or chalk, some crude renderings of animals and trees but others expertly drawn images of religious symbols and events in the town.

  Munro seemed unshaken by their captivity and spent his time studying the drawings, pointing out what he recognized, including christenings, weddings, meetings with visitors, harvest festivals, and even an Easter crucifixion scene. Corporal Brandt’s eyes had lighted with a disturbing gleam, and he claimed one of the narrow windows, staring out onto the St. Francis square and the river beyond, muttering to himself as he pointed at the poles along the perimeter of the square that were mounted with human scalps. Sometimes he pretended to shoot passersby, emitting one of his roosterlike laughs each time he pulled his make-believe trigger.

  Hayes sat in the darkest corner of the room, his hollow, unfocused expression resembling that of a soldier who had been rendered senseless by the explosions of battlefield artillery. Duncan repeatedly tried to speak with him, but the tinker showed no sign of hearing. His despair was a horrid black serpent that was slowly strangling his soul. Duncan would never forget the forlorn confusion, then the desolation on his face as a mob of furious Abenaki women had dragged him away from the woman he had sought for so many years. He had committed his fortune, his hopes, his entire life to finding Rebecca. But she had just stood in the water and stared at him, her only acknowledgment the tears that welled in her eyes.

  It was midday when the heavy door opened. Two Abenaki guards armed with muskets stepped aside to let in Father Tremblay and another Jesuit, a compact middle-aged man whose round face was lined with worry and marked with deep bruises along one side. Behind them came a native woman with a massively wrinkled face, carrying a basket of food.

  “Maria has water, bread, and dried fish,” the older Jesuit explained. “And two bottles of disappointing wine. Not our usual hospitality, I fear.”

  “Very generous,” Duncan said as Ishmael enthusiastically helped the woman distribute the food. “Father—”

  “LaBrosse. I am trying to convince the elders to release you. But our war chief Mog is most insistent.” He seemed not to notice the intense way Duncan stared at him. Here at last was Jean-Baptiste de LaBrosse, who sent purple-inked letters and gold coins to rangers. “Seeing armed English stealing into our town revives old anguish. It’s a bad business, trying to recover a captive. The Rebecca you seek exists no longer. She is married to one of our chieftains.”

  Without waiting for a reply, LaBrosse bent to examine Conawago’s bandage with an approving eye, then experimented with the Nipmuc’s hand, asking him to squeeze and extend his fingers. When he finished, he walked among the prisoners as they ate, asking if any were injured, shaking his head over the unresponsive Hayes, who showed no evidence of even being aware of the Jesuit. The priest’s gaze shifted, and he cocked his head at the wall, then quickly produced a writing lead from inside the folds of his robe to finish the sketch of a tree on the wall. The old woman watched for a moment, then shook her head as if in frustration over his absentmindedness and left the chamber.

  “We are not here for Rebecca,” Duncan said to the priest’s back. “We came because of men who were murdered in Massachusetts.”

  The lead froze in midair for a second, but then LaBrosse continued his drawing. “Massachusetts is a long way away. Another world. Not our world.”

  “I am afraid it has become your world, Father. St. Francis is involved in the crimes.”

  LaBrosse, still facing the wall, made a dismissive gesture. “That was always one of your sins, you English. Exaggeration is but the shadow of a lie.”

  “Thirty-seven men were lost on a ship. I saw the bodies. They were killed by two Frenchman allied with your war chief. Two more men were scalped and murdered by the same man who stabbed my friend Conawago. And don’t accuse me of being English. I am Scottish.”

  The writing lead in LaBrosse’s hand snapped against the wall. “You don’t know it was Mog,” he whispered, still facing the drawing.

  “We do. I saw him, twice, once in Boston and then when we wounded him in his thigh as he tried to kidnap a boy.”

  From his waistcoat pocket Duncan withdrew the swatches of cloth he had been carrying for weeks and dropped them on the bench beside Father LaBrosse. “I took these from the mouths of those two dead men. They were both rangers with Rogers. In October of ’59.”

  Brandt, listening, gave another of his unsettling laughs. The old ranger’s mind seemed to be unhinging again since arriving in St. Francis.

  The Jesuit picked up the swatches and lowered himself onto the bench. He stared at them with an anguished expression, then studied his prisoners as if seeing them for the first time. “Please, I beg you, just tell them you came for news of that man’s lost wife,” he said with a nod to Hayes.

  “Too late for that, Father,” Duncan replied.

  LaBrosse seemed to sag, fixing Duncan with a mournful, apologetic expression that Duncan tried to ignore.

  “Tell me, Father, how long have you been here?”

  LaBrosse sighed. “Long enough.” He looked down at the embroidered leaves and fish stained with blood. “Mogephra was a great war chief, famous among all our people. They would sing all night when Mog returned from raids, parading with long poles adorned with English and Iroquois scalps. When the children draw him”—the priest pointed to an image on the wall opposite him—“he is always bigger than the other figures.”

  Ishmael studied the scene, then glanced nervously at Duncan.
Duncan looked closer and saw women carrying torches. It wasn’t the crucifixion scene Munro had thought it to be. It was a scene of three men tied to T-shaped posts, about to be burned alive.

  “The Abenaki had always known war,” LaBrosse continued, “but it had always been far removed from here. Rogers changed that. The Abenaki coined a special term just for him. Wobomagonda. It means white devil. Our people still have nightmares about the raid of the Wobomagonda.” LaBrosse reached out and pulled Duncan away, as if he didn’t want him looking at the scene. “Mog’s family died in that October dawn,” the priest continued in a brittle voice. “His heart shriveled into a dark, black thing. If a cause allows him to keep killing English, whatever it may be, that cause will be his.”

  “You speak of him as if from a distance,” Duncan observed.

  “I am not one of those priests who put on war paint. They all left St. Francis after the war, thank God.”

  “There are Frenchmen who would start the last war all over if they could.”

  “I am not one of those,” the Jesuit said again.

  “Yet here we are, locked in your church. The Jesuit church that was the center for Abenaki war making. When was it used first? Nearly fifty years ago, St. Francis war parties were raiding the Maine coast. Twenty years ago it was Western Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Then there was the battle at Lake George. The massacre at Fort William Henry. How many scalps did your good Christian Indians bring back from that one? Fifty? A hundred?”

  LaBrosse stared into his folded hands. “That was a different church, not my church. Rangers burned it down in 1759.”

  “Most of it,” Duncan corrected.

  “Most of it.” LaBrosse sighed and looked up. “This sacristy survived. I used it as something of a cornerstone for our new one.”

  Conawago sat beside the priest. “Tell me something, Father. The Abenaki began to call Major Rogers the White Devil. But what do you call him today?”

  LaBrosse, Duncan had decided, was a complicated, even cunning man despite his simple appearance. But he was also an honest one. “Liberator,” the Jesuit said. “Proof that compassion and mercy can transform a savage enemy into a savage friend.”