Bone Rattler (48 page)

A low, throaty rumble disturbed the still evening air. The sound of an angry ox. Duncan was on his feet before he heard the second sound, the hissing rhythm of a switch being jerked through the air. He did not pause as he reached the shed, did not hesitate as he launched himself at the Welshman, seizing his uplifted arm as it was about to slam the stick onto the boy’s back again. He thrust his foot against the man’s knee, spinning him violently backward against a post.

Quickly turning to examine Alex’s injuries, he lifted the boy’s torn
shirt and froze. The ox’s tether was stretched tight, its nostrils were flared, its eyes bulging. With another ounce of effort the massive creature could snap the line and, in its current temper, could destroy anything in its path.

But Alex, without even a glance at Duncan, darted to the ox and began stroking its neck. Instantly the tether went slack and the animal’s angry breathing quieted, replaced by the gasping of the Welshman, whose breath had been knocked out of him.

Duncan ventured a step closer. The boy spread his arms and the ox buried its mighty head in them. As Duncan paused, unwilling to disturb the embrace, a slab of firewood struck a painful, glancing blow on his shoulder. A second blow knocked Duncan to the ground, and the Welshman charged forward, switch in hand. He landed another two strikes on the boy’s back before the ox hurled him aside with a thrust of its horn, then Duncan reached him, seizing his free arm, pulling it behind him, bending it until the man cried out in pain. Learning the treatment of injuries at the pugilist matches in Yorkshire also meant he had learned their causes.

“Do you feel that?” Duncan asked in a simmering voice, twisting the man’s arm. “The way the pain rises as I turn it? A little more—” the man gasped as Duncan turned it again, “—and you won’t use it for a day.”

“He gave the brute double rations,” the Welshman groaned. “He has no right.”

“Working until dusk, that is double duty,” Duncan suggested.

“You be the one! The McCallum fugitive that has the great lord so furious! Fifty pounds on your head!”

Duncan increased the pressure on the man’s arm. “If I twist some more you won’t use it for a week. And then how will you raise that musket when the savages come for you?”

“I can fix things for ye,” the Welshman groaned. “I’ll give ye to Ramsey when he comes. Then I’ll split the bounty with ye and let ye go. We can be rich!”

Duncan pressed harder, and the Welshman let Duncan pull the
switch from his hand. Duncan released his hold and broke the switch on his knee. As he turned to toss the pieces into the darkness, he saw a bearded head watching from the shadows. Reverend Zettlemeyer, his body all but obscured by his black clothes, wore a sober, almost melancholy expression but offered not a word. As the Welshman followed Duncan’s gaze toward the missionary, he gave a defeated sigh. But he turned with a vindictive gleam before slipping away into the night.

“Ain’t just Ramsey who wants ye, boy. There’s a price on y’er hair. Ye be worth more to the Huron dead and scalped than presented intact to the great lord. In a few days ye’ll be begging to be turned over to Ramsey.”

Duncan stared into the darkness after the man, his heart racing. Ramsey and the French savages were competing for his head. It was impossible. Why would the French want him dead?

Duncan turned to the boy, who had taken the Welshman’s final blows like an old sailor, without breaking his embrace of the brindled beast. He lifted the boy’s tattered shirt only a few inches before Alex jerked it out of his grasp and slipped to the other side of the ox. But it was enough for Duncan to see the marks left by many such beatings in the past.

The boy’s eyes went wild as those of the ox as Duncan tried to approach him again. Duncan retreated, began stroking the opposite flank of the ox, rubbing him down with a rag that hung on a nearby peg. After a few strokes the boy pulled the rag from his hand and began using it himself.

Duncan offered greetings, offered apologies, offered to find Alex some extra food for himself, but nothing prompted so much as a glance from the former slave to the Indians. What had Reverend Zettlemeyer said? The boy had lost all the talents of society.

When Duncan finally abandoned his effort and stepped out of the shed, Reverend Zettlemeyer was still standing there, watching with the same melancholy expression.

“If this is what Moravians do for orphans,” Duncan spat, “then the New World can do without your settlers.”

Zettlemeyer seemed to accept the words like a well-deserved blow. “I wake in the middle of the night thinking of Alex,” he said. “I find myself stopping amidst prayer thinking of the boy, and the Ramsey girl. I know not how to reach them.”

Duncan’s head snapped up. “Sarah? You’ve seen her?”

“Ten days ago. But ever since she first visited last year, she is in my thoughts, sometimes my nightmares.”

Duncan stepped closer to the missionary. “Sarah was here ten days ago?”

“Just for a night. She rode away at dawn, in the direction of Edentown, right toward the raiding parties. She has powerful angels over her, that one.”

“She saw Alex?”

Zettlemeyer nodded. “It was like she needed to be certain he was still alive.”

Duncan turned, looking up to the night sky, his mind racing, and stepped toward the open fields.

The German kept speaking to his back. “My wife says you saved the life of our guest in the springhouse.” Duncan kept walking. “Just a word, McCallum.”

Duncan did not respond.

“Sarah Ramsey didn’t just speak to Alex, McCallum. She spoke to me about a dead man named Evering.”

Duncan halted, slowly turned. The old Moravian gestured him toward the moonlit field above the village and began walking. He had settled onto one of the stumps near the top when Duncan reached him. When he spoke again, he had none of the confidence of a man accustomed to the pulpit.

“She told me to protect the boy, to keep him safe, away from any visitors. But the boy will have none of it. I brought him into the house to sleep the night after she left, and he climbed out the window.”

“But what of Evering?” Duncan asked.

“She said a man named Evering had been given a vital message
from Adam Munroe, who had known he was going to die. Evering was to have warned me, she said.”

“Warn you about what?”

“That was the source of her greatest agony. Adam Munroe had decided she could not know, that it was to be the job of the Ramsey tutor to carry the warning. She sat up here with me and wept as she watched Alex settling into the stable. She asked me strange things. She asked if I had ever met the English king. I would have thought it a jest but for her solemn expression. She asked me if I had had dreams since the massacre last year. She gave me something in a leather pouch I was to pass on as a message.”

“To whom?”

“She made me pledge not to reveal that.”

“Then what was the message?”

“I don’t know what it meant. There were no words, no writing.” Zettlemeyer sank his head into his hands a moment. “A pouch. Inside were a claw, a bear claw with little red feathers tied around it. At the bottom were a dozen purple beads.” He looked up, searched Duncan’s face. “You are the Ramsey tutor. Explain the catastrophe that comes.”

“Huron raiders. Lord Ramsey. Major Pike,” Duncan said. “We are rich in catastrophes about to break upon us.” He felt the Moravian’s gaze again. “I don’t know. Evering was murdered before he could speak with me.”

They sat in the cool stillness, gazing at the stars.

“My son leaves soon to bring back more settlers,” Zettlemeyer said at last. “He has a grand speech about property and land ownership. I told him I cannot go because of my health, but the truth is I cannot go because I don’t know what to tell them about this place, about how a good Christian goes about taming the wilderness.”

“Do you fear the wilderness?”

“We’d be fools not to. Most nights one of the children wakes up screaming from nightmares about Indian attacks. But that’s only a part of it.” The missionary went silent again. “You think you bring
your old identity with you when you come as a settler,” he began at last, “your culture, your values, your knowledge of what it means to be human. But when you settle onto the new land, you soon learn that all that is gone. You are naked. You have nothing of the Old World to rely on. There is only what is in here—” Zettlemeyer tapped his chest, “and what is out there.” He gestured toward the forest. “When I first came, I met an old Indian named Conawago. I said, ‘this is Eden.’ In reply he said, ‘Yes, except it is the eighteenth century.’” The German fell silent again.

“This is God’s great experiment on earth,” he continued. “Here He reduces everyone to a common denominator, to see how they start over. And there are others who have pursued a spiritual life in the forest far longer than we have.” He ended with an unexpected motion, two fingers extended, spiraling upward. Duncan had seen it before.

“Is it something about the heavens, Reverend, that sign?”

“They use many names. The Great Spirit. The Guardian of the Forest. Most of the old ones just call it the Great Mystery.”

Duncan considered the Moravian’s words as they gazed at the stars. “Are you saying, Reverend, you have lost your appetite for converting the Indians?”

Zettlemeyer seemed to struggle to get his response out. “I am only asking the question. What if our spirits are blinded by what we bring from across the ocean?”

A shiver ran down Duncan’s spine. “Why do you say these things to me?” Something small in the forest began screeching in terror, its cries gradually subsiding as it died.

“Because I am the one who betrayed the ghostwalkers,” Zettlemeyer blurted out in an anguished tone. “The price for doing so has been far heavier than I expected.”

“But they were captured by soldiers.”

“The three asked me to release them. I refused, for the good of their souls. I kept Sarah Ramsey locked in a room until she could be safely conveyed to New York.”

There was more, Duncan sensed. The missionary still was not
telling him what weighed most heavy on his heart. “You visited Edentown last week,” he ventured.

Zettlemeyer sighed heavily. “We had nothing, hardly enough to feed ourselves, no hope of anything so costly as an iron furnace.”

Gradually Duncan fit the pieces together. “There was a reward paid by Lord Ramsey,” he concluded.

The Moravian’s head moved up and down in the moonlight. “A wagonload of food at the start of the winter. It was a great blessing. We gave thanks to Ramsey in our prayers. But I did not understand something about Ramsey.”

“A man like Ramsey,” Duncan suggested, “doesn’t pay rewards. He pays retainers.”

“Crates of Bibles. The equipment to build the furnace. More cases of Bibles, even copies of the Greek philosophers.”

“Money for transport of new settlers,” Duncan said.

“Even our bishop prays for Ramsey now. And I get letters from Edentown asking about things.”

“Things?”

“How many Indians have we baptized. How many Indian children in our school. Send the last known location of the shaman Tashgua. Make two maps of the location of all the settlers’ farms we know of. It doesn’t seem like much, does it? Ramsey sent me a passage from the Old Testament about how true believers must destroy the temples of the idolators. When he was here two days ago, Reverend Arnold announced that the hand of God soon will make a fist.”

The words left a smell in the air, like the smell after a lightning strike.

“Once every few days I see a huge bear at the edge of the fields, by the northern trail,” Zettlemeyer said in a thin, weary voice. “Sometimes it brings the body of something to eat there. It eats, then it sits and watches us. I couldn’t bear to tell Sarah about my dreams when she asked. I often wake in cold sweats, my heart pounding from a dream in which I find the bear sitting at our hearth in a chair, reading our Bible.

Duncan did not respond, in that moment did not believe himself capable of responding. The old Moravian began whispering a prayer, in German. Duncan studied the thousand stars overhead. When he looked back down, Zettlemeyer was gone.

He retrieved his pack from the shadows by the furnace and found his way to the cow shed, then located the small, slender form lying against the slumbering ox and settled onto the straw-covered earth beside the boy, pulling straw over them both. He listened for a long time to the strangely harmonized breathing of the two creatures.

“Alex,” he whispered at last, “I know not how to reach you when you are awake. But my grandfather taught me there are parts of us that listen while we sleep.” The breathing of the ox seemed to grow in volume, the great hairy back heaving up and down.

“My name is Duncan McCallum,” he began. “And I live between worlds, as you do.” After these first difficult words, the others came out with surprising ease. He explained how he had been arrested and transported, how he had met Adam Munroe, how Adam had died, then spoke of Reverend Arnold and Ramsey and Pike and Woolford. In a lower voice he spoke of Sarah’s kidnapping, and of Conawago and the ruined Indian graveyard where he had left him. “There are questions left by the dead, Alex, which will never be answered unless you and I help.”

When he finally fell silent, the ox turned its great head toward him, as if it had been listening and knew that Duncan had left something out. After a moment he whispered his final, brittle confession. “I built a dream around finding my brother, and all the while he has wanted me dead.” When he settled back onto the straw, he realized his hand had closed around the stone bear, his fingers rubbing the head. So often it had done so in the past weeks, it had become something of a reflex.

 

 

He rose before dawn, when he could still fix the North Star, and quietly slipped out of the shed, after piling added straw over the sleeping
boy, pausing to touch the crown of the ox, who watched him intently, and pausing again with a grateful grin when he found a pouch of food lying on top of his pack. Five minutes later, on the far side of the fields, he halted. Someone had lit a small fire at the head of the trail to the north. Looking about for a sign of the Moravians, he warily advanced and was almost upon the fire when he glanced down and froze. It was a small mound of tobacco leaves, carefully laid over burning coals. He gasped in alarm as a hand closed around his shoulder from the back. His assailant did not speak, and was already returning his war club to his belt as Duncan turned to face him.