Bad Men (2003) (13 page)

SFW: So Fucking What?

As soon as the direction of the prosecutor’s questions had become apparent, Moloch had begun to speak like a handicapped man, talking through his nose, the words barely intelligible.

“Is there something wrong with him?” the judge had asked, but it had been Moloch who provided the answer.

“Sorry, Your Honor,” he’d said, modifying his speech sufficiently for his words to be understood. “But I was kissing your wife good night, and the bitch closed her legs.”

That had been the end of the proceedings.

“You hear me?” repeated Torres. “You’re an asshole.”

“Why am I an asshole?” said Moloch. He didn’t look at the men at either side of him. Neither did he look at the chains on his hands or his feet, so used was he to the shuffling gait their presence necessitated. He would not fall. The investigators would not allow him to fall, not with people watching, but still they kept him moving quickly, depriving him of even the small dignity of walking like a man.

“You know why.”

“Maybe I just felt the urge to jerk that old judge’s chain some.”

“You sure jerked it,” said Torres. “You surely did. And don’t you think it won’t come back on you, because it will. You mark my words. They’ll take your books away, leave you nothing to do but shit, sleep, and jerk off.”

“Then I’ll be thinking of you, except maybe not when I sleep.”

“You fucking asshole, you’re a dead man. You’ll get the juice for this, doesn’t matter how much you mouth off to the judge.”

“Sticks and stones, Mr. Torres, sticks and stones.”

They reached the car, Moloch smiling at last for the cameras, then he was put in back and his chains locked once again to the D ring.

“It’s been fun spending time with you both,” Moloch said. “I appreciated the company.”

“Well,” said Torres, “I can’t say I’m looking forward to the pleasure again.”

“And you, Mr. Misters?” said Moloch, but Misters didn’t respond. “Mr. Misters,” repeated Moloch, savoring the words on his tongue, extending the “s” sounds into long washes of sibilance like water evaporating from the surface of a hot stove. “Wasn’t that kind of the name of some suck-ass, white-bread band in the eighties? ‘Broken Wings,’ that was them, right?”

Misters remained silent.

“Your partner doesn’t say very much, does he?” said Moloch to Torres.

“He’s kind of fussy about who he talks to.”

“Well, maybe he’ll find it in him to say a few words before the journey’s end.”

“You think so?”

“I’m certain. I can be a very interesting conversationalist.”

“I doubt that.”

“We’ll see,” said Moloch. “We’ll see.”

And for the next five miles he hummed the chorus of ‘“Broken Wings,” over and over and over, until Torres broke down and threatened to gag him. Only then, when the young investigator was sufficiently rattled, did Moloch stop.

The surroundings of the library had faded around Macy. She was no longer conscious of the old librarian, the other researchers, or the occasional rattle as the main door opened, the cold air accompanying it. Instead, she was lost in the history of Dutch Island, the history of Sanctuary.

The Native Americans had fought hard to maintain their hold on the islands of Casco Bay. Like modern-day tourists, they summered on the islands, fishing and hunting porpoises and seals, even the occasional whale. Chebeague was their main base, but they used others too, and were resentful of the gradual encroachments of white settlers. The islands were the centers of population in the new colonies: they were easy to defend, safer than the mainland, and offered an abundant source of food from the ocean. Macy noticed that a lot of them, like Dutch Island, had multiple names: Great Chebeague was once Merry Island, then Recompense; Peaks Island was formerly Munjoy’s, Milton’s, and Michael’s, the name changing as the owners changed.

Despite their relative safety, the islands were still frequently attacked in the late seventeenth century. Settlers who were fleeing the atrocities on Harpswell Neck and other islands nearer the coast built a fort on Jewell, on the Outer Ring. In September 1676, a bloody year with attacks on whites at Casco Neck and Back Cove, the families on Jewell were attacked by eight canoes of warriors and were so disturbed by the experience that they retreated to Richmond Island. For the remainder of the year, the natives rampaged along the coast, annihilating every settlement between the Piscataqua and Kennebec Rivers. The settlers dug in, although some gave up and found safer places to live inland. In 1689, the natives raided Peaks Island, the most accessible island from the mainland, and slaughtered many of its inhabitants. One year later, they returned and forced the remaining settlers from the island.

Dutch Island, named for a Dutch sailor named Chris Herschdorfer, who was briefly shipwrecked there toward the end of the seventeenth century, was a different matter. It was farther from the mainland, and the distance made the crossing difficult for the Indians, who had only birch-bark canoes in which to travel. Furthermore, they regarded the island with suspicion, and seemed content to leave it unexplored.

Shortly after the Indian raid on Peaks, Major Benjamin Church, whose soldiers had been present on Peaks during the course of the main attack, led an expedition to the island and found it to be heavily forested, with only a handful of suitable landings for boats. Yet it was to Dutch that a man named Thomas Lunt led a group of settlers in 1691, weary of the running battles he was forced to fight with the natives. In total, thirty settlers joined him in the first two weeks on the island that he renamed Sanctuary, among them survivors of the attacks on Jewell and Peaks, and their numbers continued to increase over the following months. They opted to settle away from the shore, hoping that the higher ground might make them less vulnerable to a surprise attack.

At this point, Amerling’s history of the island became less detailed and more speculative, but it seemed that the behavior of one of the settlers, a man named Buer, grew increasingly unpredictable. He became estranged from his family, spending more and more time alone in the thick forest at the center of the island. He was accused of attempted rape by the wife of one of his fellow settlers, and when her husband and three other men attempted to hunt him down as he tried to flee, he killed one of them with a musket shot and then sought shelter with his wife, begging her to hide him, claiming that he had done nothing wrong. But she, fearful for her own life (for she was as disturbed as anyone by the change in her husband), betrayed him to his accusers. He was chained to a post in a barn, but somehow he escaped from the island, stealing a boat and disappearing to the mainland.

He returned some months later, in the winter of 1693, at the head of a party of armed men and renegade Indians, and led the slaughter of the settlers on Sanctuary, including his own wife. One of the settlers, a woman, survived her wounds long enough to tell of what had occurred. Even now, three hundred years later, Macy found herself wincing at the details. There was rape and torture. Many of the women were assaulted, then bound and thrown alive into a patch of bog, where they drowned. No distinction was made between adults and children.

The search for the killers was led by three hunters from the island who had traveled to the mainland to trade on behalf of the settlement and were therefore absent when the massacre occurred. It was said that they tracked down a number of those involved in the attack and dispensed swift justice upon them. Years later, the son of one of those hunters would be among those who resettled Sanctuary. His name was Jerome Dupree.

Crow had stolen away from the group almost as soon as the canoes touched land, grateful only that he had survived the voyage. He had positioned himself behind the White Leader in the second canoe, his hand upon his knife throughout the journey, hidden beneath a rough, woven cloak. If they tried to take him, he would place his knife upon the throat of the White Leader and hold him hostage until they reached the mainland. He suspected that the White Leader knew what he was planning, for he could see the knowledge in his eyes, and his lieutenant, the man named Barone, remained seated in the bow of the boat with his back to the coast, a musket on his lap as he watched Crow.

From the safety of the woods, Crow saw the White Leader kill the Mi’kmaqs in their sleep. In truth, Crow had been planning to kill them himself. There had long been tension between his people and their own, and it was only the hand of the White Leader, and the protection offered by his guns, that had kept him from slitting their throats before now. Crow would like to have killed the White Leader, and considered remaining close to the camp in the hope of disposing of him, but English soldiers had come, alerted to the presence of the men whom they sought, and a skirmish had commenced. Crow escaped from the woods in the confusion, and when he returned, three of the White Leader’s killers were dead and one was a captive.

The Indian’s plan was to make for the area around the Chandiere River. It was inhospitable territory, but there he believed he would be safe for a time from his own people, and from the English who had placed a price upon his head. Crow longed to regain his place among his tribe, which now dwelt by St.-Castin’s settlement on the Bagaduce River. There, the Frenchman, who had reestablished French control over southwestern Acadia after its occupation by the English, had built a habitation that broke with the traditional model typically adopted by the Europeans. There were no defensive walls around the main dwelling and the storehouse. Instead, protection came from the thirty-two wigwams surrounding the settlement, housing 160 Wabanaki, whom the French termed Etchemin. St.-Castin had even married into the tribe, taking for his bride Pidiwamiska, the daughter of the sachem Madockawando, and sister to Crow. It was his objection to the union, and subsequent revolt against his father’s rule, that had led to Crow’s banishment.

Crow despised the Europeans. He knew that more would come, and St.-Castin’s marriage to his sister represented the beginning of the dilution of the old ways. Already, there was less game to hunt, and great numbers of his people were dying in strange, unfamiliar ways, taken by invisible ailments that had never existed before the coming of the whites. Gluskap, the great creator of the Maine natives, had fled when he sensed the coming of the Europeans, abandoning them to their fate. Crow believed that Gluskap would never return as long as Wabanaki dwelt with the Europeans, giving to them their women and protecting them from their enemies. Through the White Leader, Crow was able to strike back at the hated French and English, but by the time of the raid on Sanctuary, he knew that the uneasy alliance was drawing to an end, and that the hour would come when the White Leader’s musket would be used upon his guide.

So Crow turned his back to the sea, and headed for the wilderness to the west, not knowing that three new names had been added to the list of those who hunted him.

The three hunters, the last living remnants of the settlement on Sanctuary, searched for their prey without rest, and, once found, disposed of them without mercy.

It took them four years.

The names and descriptions of the men whom they sought had been obtained from the English in Portland, who had tortured their captive, a man named Mundy, until he informed on his companions. They were aided in their aims by the reluctance of the perpetrators to leave for long the northeastern territories familiar to them, and in which they had families and allies who might give them succor.

The first they killed in Wells, as he tried to make his way south to establish contact with his brother, who lived near Fort William & Mary. Two died at Winter Harbor, fleeing the Indian raid on the settlement and falling instead to the knives of the hunters. As Queen Anne’s War raged around them, they hanged one at Norridgewock, taken as he and two fellow cutthroats shadowed the Hilton expedition in the hope of stealing supplies. They tracked another north through Acadia, eventually confronting him by the shores of the Northumberland Strait, and as he pleaded for mercy they drowned him in the icy waters.

Of Barone and the man the natives termed the White Leader, they found no trace. At the end of their long hunt, they were weary of bloodshed and revenge, and had made the decision to travel back to the islands when they encountered a small French patrol escorting parties of natives to the Saint Lawrence River, where they hoped to find shelter from the English under French protection. Aiding the French was a guide, his tribal tattoos defaced with hot irons, a man who always stayed apart from the families he was guiding.

It was the Wabanaki killer known as Crow.

The hunters tracked the party beyond the Dead River, where the natives were handed over to the care of more soldiers. After resting for three days, the French soldiers, ten of them in total, prepared to make the journey east once more in order to winter in Acadia, with Crow as their guide.

By now, the hunters were more accomplished killers than the soldiers, and they had no love for the French. One day into their journey, when the soldiers stopped to make camp for the night, they were attacked as they sat around their campfire. Tired, and unprepared for fighting, the first five died in the glow of the flames. Three more were taken in the woods, and two escaped to tell of what had occurred.

The hunters trapped Crow by the banks of the river. He held a knife in one hand, and an ax in the other. His musket, its shot wasted in the confusion of the initial attack, lay at his feet. He watched silently as the three men emerged from the trees, their faces hooded, their bodies draped in furs. They stopped when they were some twenty feet from him, and their leader raised his hands and dropped the hood that hid his features.

“Do you know who I am?” he said.

Crow merely shook his head.

“My name is Dupree. You killed my wife.”