Bone Rattler (32 page)

“The king himself,” Ramsey declared with a conspiratorial air, lifting a map from the desktop and laying it on the arm of his desk chair. A massive tract was outlined in red. “Ten thousand square miles. Much of the colony to the west, all the way to the great inland seas that feed the Saint Lawrence. The king wants it to be ours.”

Duncan’s heart seemed to wither as he watched the thin smile form on Ramsey’s face.

“I am impressed with your usages of death,” the English lord declared to him, then stepped back to the tray and poured another cup. “Would you prefer sugar in your tea, Professor McCallum?”

 

 

“Carolina.” It was the first word Lister spoke when Duncan found him working at one of the new cabins. “It is our answer,” the old
sailor said, gesturing Duncan out of earshot of his companions. “Hundreds of Scots are there, in the mountains. I hear there are even towns where they speak only the old tongue. Sometimes the smith talks as he works. Last year some Scots in thrall to Ramsey fled south and made it, out of the reach of his dogs. Scots go there to be free, far from the law. Cameron’s been collecting canoes on the river above town. We can take one, get to the Delaware, and follow it to Philadelphia, work a ship to Charleston.”

“You mean us to flee?”

“I mean for us to live. Yesterday a wagon arrived at the carpenter’s shed. I watched them unload fifty muskets. Bars of lead, powder horns, bullet molds, all stowed and locked in the shed. Lord Ramsey, he is taking us into the war somehow.”

Duncan studied the great house. There was movement in an upstairs window. The woman using Sarah Ramsey’s name was staring into the forest again. He had begun to feel somehow victimized by her. He had saved an impostor. “Woolford’s pack is on a bench in the barn,” he said. The ranger had disappeared two days earlier. “I must speak with him.”

“He ate by the south well with Fitch, then walked into the woods near there.”

Duncan followed the perimeter of the fields below the house, pausing frequently to peer uneasily into the forest. This was not the western bank, he kept telling himself, this was a thinned, tamed forest. Lifting a heavy stick for a weapon, he ventured slowly under the trees, turning frequently to assure he kept the huge barn in sight. It took nearly an hour of nervous forays into the shadows for him to discover the clearing, three hundred yards beyond the fields. Under the boughs of several huge beech trees, four logs had been arranged in a square, in the center of which was not a fire pit, as Duncan expected, but a three-foot-high platform made of long, flat stones stacked on top of one another. The scene had been set many years earlier. The benches showed signs of rot; the stones of the cairn were covered with lichen. Seedlings sprouted in the square around the cairn.

A solitary figure in green sat on one of the logs, his rifle beside him, staring at the stacked stones as if waiting for something to climb out of them. Woolford, looking exhausted, did not glance up until Duncan was a few feet away, then reacted with a small frown and gazed back at the cairn.

“They say that in the last century, the tribes and early settlers made places like this near every settlement.” The ranger’s voice seemed drained of emotion. “They say old Penn and the Quakers visited them often, to speak with the chiefs. Few could speak both English and the tongues of the tribes, but there was far less blood-shed. Now that we can speak with one another, all we want to do is kill one another.”

“It is a meeting place, then?” Duncan asked as he sat beside Woolford.

“The Edge of the Woods place is what the tribes call it. Old Jacob and Hendrick used to tell of such ceremonies they joined as young warriors. It is where those who came out of the woods met those not of the woods. Those who came from afar would talk about the difficulties of their journey, to show the sacrifice made for the sake of discourse among peoples, speaking loudly so the messengers in the trees would hear.

“Each chief would hold a wampum belt to underscore the importance, to show the truth of his words. It was also done between tribes, before Europeans came. The host would symbolically wipe the sweat from the traveler’s limbs and pretend to pull thorns from his feet, then clean the eyes and ears and mouth, to be certain all would be clearly understood. Sometimes evil spirits would follow from deep in the woods, and words had to be said to drive them away.”

Duncan looked about again. He had arrived at the edge of the woods, Sarah had said when Duncan had arrived, and earned the unspoken censure of her father for using the words. “A wampum belt?” he asked, not sure why he was whispering. He gazed upward, into the dense, glittering canopy supported by the broad grey columns of the beeches. It was as if they were in a cathedral.

Woolford replied by standing and stepping to the stone platform. With both hands he pushed back the heavy stone on top, and Duncan joined to help lean it against the stack. The long, narrow stones underneath had been crisscrossed to form a hollow in the center. From the compartment Woolford lifted a bundle of leather, unfolded it, and extracted a four-inch-wide belt of small beads, strung in intricate patterns. As he unfolded it to its full three-foot length, Duncan saw that the background of one half was made of white beads, its many figures depicted in purple, and the other half was of purple background, with white figures. Between the two squares at either end were the shapes of men and women, houses, deer, and axes, with a tree at the center.

“It is their way of saying important things, of sending important messages,” the ranger explained. “When they hold such a belt, they can only speak the truth.”

“What does this one say?” Duncan realized he had seen such beads before, or one such bead, in the empty sack on Old Jacob’s belt, and recalled the alarmed way Woolford had stared at the single purple bead.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen one like it.” Woolford seemed shaken, more worried than Duncan had seen him yet.

In the silence that followed, Duncan recalled the reason he had sought Woolford. “Hawkins took several of the men. Where did they go?”

For once, the ranger offered a direct answer. “We followed their tracks ten miles upriver. They joined others, with three canoes. Not far north, one man climbed out on the opposite bank. Fitch started to follow him, but then two more bodies came floating down the river. Settlers, dead several days. We dug graves instead.”

Duncan found himself looking toward the river. It was like wilderness kept coughing up the dead. “They call Hawkins a trapper.”

“He started making his living by taking fur pelts, years ago. Mink, otter, beaver, marten. He would boast about how he devised traps that did not kill right away, that would only pin them, sometimes for days, until he had the time to personally cut their throats. Now he sells his finely honed skills to the highest bidder.”

“Including the army?”

“The highest bidder,” Woolford repeated.

“Is he going to Stony Run?”

Woolford offered no reply.

“If you seek the murderers from Stony Run, Captain, tell me why you keep coming back to Edentown?”

“This belt,” Woolford replied in a voice gone melancholy, “may be the closest I’ve come to an answer. The tribes are very wary of words, and whom they give them to. They believe in showing, not telling,” he added as he studied the belt again.

“Last night in my classroom I made two lists on my slateboard,” Duncan revealed after a long silence. “On the one side it said
salt, evil eye, bee, iron, Scottish cross, deiseal circuit.”

Duncan paused to explain the meaning of each in Highland tradition. “Beside that list I wrote another:
bird skulls, wolf clan arrow, beaver, crooked man, crooked tree, painted feather, bear.
I could add
wampum beads.
” He explained what Jonathan had shown him that morning.

Woolford grew very quiet.

“Since the day Evering died, a dialogue has been under way, using mystical signs of the Highlands and the Iroquois. It isn’t so much the pattern of violence that holds the key, it is the pattern of that conversation.”

Woolford had closed his eyes. “A bear,” he said. “Why did you list a bear?”

Duncan was not ready to speak about the stone bear that had been rescued by Adam from Woolford’s trunk, or the nightmare he had suffered the night before, of Adam tossing the stone bear between blood-soaked hands. “On the road past the inn,” he said instead, “a baby bear was executed on a rope, the day Jacob died.”

Woolford looked as if he had been struck. “Why did you not tell me this?”

“Why,” Duncan rejoined, “would I think you needed to know?
What is it about a bear that frightens those who have fought in the wilderness?”

Duncan watched with unsettling confusion as the ranger closed his hand into a fist, tapped his heart, then, with two fingers pointed up, made a spiraling motion toward the sky. “What it is about a bear,” Woolford whispered, “can never be spoken.”

Duncan pulled out the brass cylinder he had taken from Ramsey’s safe room and dangled it before Woolford. “Then speak about this.”

“A case for slow match,” the ranger said absently, his gaze back on the wampum belt. “Grenadiers carry them, usually on their chest straps. Not many grenade bombs are used over here, but grenadiers still carry the cases. It’s part of their tradition, part of their official uniform.” Duncan’s inquiry finally seemed to register with him, and he looked up. “Where did you find it?”

“In the forest,” Duncan lied. “One of those soldiers must have dropped it.”

Woolford frowned, then took the metal case, staring at it. “They’re infantry sent from New York town, not grenadiers,” he said with a puzzled expression, then pocketed the case. He stood and carried the belt back to the stone pillar, pausing before setting it back inside.

“Is it a call to war?” Duncan asked.

“They send what they call a black belt for war. All purple.” The ranger seemed to reconsider. “I don’t know. Fitch says Iroquois camps are being systematically raided, small groups are being killed in secret. The raiders use canoes so we can’t track them. The tribes may be calling a war council, keeping it secret from the army. But this belt, it has the messages all mixed. War, death, women, prisoners, celebration. Fitch met some warriors north of here. They were excited, on edge. They used words he had never heard before. He says they seemed to be speaking about miracles, or signs from spirits that had been long sleeping. A miracle of the water, one of the earth, one of the sky. Nothing makes sense.”

Duncan pointed to the tree in the center of the belt. “It looks like it has a stick man at the top.”

“A man in a tree.” The tension in the ranger’s voice seemed to say it was the sign that worried him most of all. “Some in the Six use it to indicate a prophet. A man in a tree. A crown of antlers.”

“Antlers?”

“Deer antlers, tied in a circle with vines. A tribute paid to prophets.”

Duncan studied the belt, and Woolford’s troubled gaze. “It could have been here for years.”

“No,” the officer said. “I always check when I arrive here. I don’t really know why.” When he turned to Duncan, his face was clouded with worry. “The cairn was empty three days ago.” He set the belt inside and covered it. “Go back to town, McCallum. You’ll never understand this.”

“I’ve seen a crown of antlers,” Duncan confessed to the ranger’s back as Woolford lifted his rifle to leave. The officer turned, leaning on his gun, as Duncan began explaining about Evering the dead prophet.

 

 

Duncan stared at the blank slate in the schoolhouse for an hour, knowing he must plan lessons for the Ramsey children, unable to think of anything but his strange conversation with Woolford. Giving up, he found Frasier sitting on a shaving horse in the shade of the barn, working with a drawknife to make trunnels, wooden nails, while the men prepared for the evening meal. The sullen young keeper took no notice of Duncan as he finished rounding a trunnel out of a narrow split of ash, offered no thanks when Duncan handed him another splint to clamp and trim.

“Iron’s hard to come by in Edentown,” Duncan observed in an even voice. “At the rate you’re using it, you’ll be pulling up the floors of the great house for their nails.”

Frasier missed the placement of a stroke and sliced away a quarter of the split, ruining the trunnel. He still said nothing as he tossed it aside and accepted another from Duncan.

“My grandmother and I used to make the old crosses with pebbles when I was a boy,” Duncan offered. “And she always cut holes in her eggshells.”

“It’s all been a lie,” the youth declared suddenly. “All the evils of the old country were going to be left behind, they told us. But here is where the demons of the world all are born.”

“Who told you that?”

“One who knows. One who’s seen them roast men alive and eat their flesh.”

“Hawkins? When did you speak with him?” Duncan asked.

“I should have finished that hole on the ship,” Frasier declared in a chilling tone. “Here we just wait between the demons and the English.”

“Where is Hawkins?”

“Fighting the demons. He at least understands the job before us, Cameron says.”

“Cameron?”

“Aye. Mr. Cameron brought rum out for Hawkins and his men. They shared stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“About the responsibility of Christian men when they meet the heathen.”

A shiver ran down Duncan’s back. He had never asked Cameron what he had done after his family had been slain. A man like Cameron was not one to turn the other cheek.

“When you see Hawkins next, pose him some riddles,” Duncan suggested. “Ask when was the last time the army paid him money, Frasier. Ask him what he did with our body snatchers. Ask if bears ever follow him in the forest.”

Frasier’s face clouded, but he remained silent, working the drawknife.