Eliot Pattison - Original Death

Simon looked up at the sound of more footsteps on the path. Hetty, Conawago, and Ishmael appeared. As if in warning Simon gestured to the Mingoes who had been with him, who had retreated into the field of boulders but held their axes ready, then to the plain below. Half a dozen warriors were indeed erecting new slave posts. He glanced at his mother uneasily before replying to Duncan. “What I did was teach school. All my students were from the tribes,” Simon added.

“Regis handled the Mingoes and Hurons,” Duncan continued. “Brother Xavier took care of the French and the traffic in secret messages, and old Lord Graham handled the Scots. But none had a connection to Bethel Church. You were the connection. You were Regis’s particular friend as a boy. You learned about Shakespeare with him, and about killing. And you devised the scheme to make a duplicate wagon and steal the payroll.” Duncan produced one of the pieces of paper from the wall of the schoolhouse and extended its drawing of the wagon.

Simon frowned. He wasn’t shamed, he was just impatient. “You must have the coins! It’s the only explanation!”

“Regis was about to say you were the one who swung the killing hammer at Bethel Church. It’s why you shot him. He wasn’t reaching out for help as he died, he was pointing to you. As terrible as the acts of the others might be, they were acts of war. But the deaths at Bethel Church, they were cold-blooded murder. You swung the hammer to crush the skulls of those who had befriended you, even students you taught.”

The schoolmaster leveled the gun with a peevish sigh. “One keg of coins is all I ask. There is a French settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi. I can make a new life.”

“You killed them all, Simon,” came a tight, high voice. “They gave you a home, and you killed them.”

Simon turned to look at Hetty. For an instant he was just a regretful son. “I learned to play war the European way. Come with us, Mother. I will build you a grand house in the Louisiana country.”

Sadness filled Hetty’s eyes. “All these years I spent sewing lace to pay for your lawyer, and you were guilty. You were just planning more murders. I sent you the last valuable keepsake I had from Wales, and you used the silver links for rum and women.”

Simon seemed about to argue when a stone hit his cheek. “You killed my grandfather!” Ishmael shouted, and he threw another stone, then another.

The schoolmaster leapt to the boy, violently slapping him on the face. “Ever the disobedient cub, Ishmael!”

With a shudder Duncan saw the warriors from below ascending the ridge, the ones in the rocks slowly advancing with weapons raised. The hell dog appeared on a nearby boulder, its eyes fixed on Simon. The schoolmaster glanced at the dog and hesitated for a moment. He too would have heard how the creature was inhabited by the spirit of the noble warrior who had been his father.

He turned back to Ishmael. When he struck the boy again, knocking him to the ground, Conawago moved quickly but Hetty was faster, darting forward and covering the boy with her body. Simon grabbed the back of her shirt and heaved her aside like a sack of flour.

“You shame your father and me!” she cried from the ground, but her son was beyond hearing.

Simon grabbed Ishmael and lifted him upright. “Your grandfather’s head sounded like a ripe melon when I hit it! He just kept singing like the others, the old fool.”

“His was a warrior’s song!” Ishmael shouted back. “I heard him! He died with more honor and bravery than you’ll ever have!”

The fury with which Simon pummeled the boy was frightening to behold. He pounded the boy, knocking him to the ground. Suddenly his pistol was aimed at Ishmael.

“No!” Conawago shouted, and he charged at the schoolteacher, who shifted the gun towards the old Nipmuc.

As Duncan leapt forward, a brown shape hurdled past his shoulder.

The pistol fired, hitting the hell dog in the chest, but the great creature still clamped its jaw around Simon’s throat, sending him reeling backwards. Simon dropped the pistol to beat the dog with his fists, staggering backward, struggling to get the furious animal off him. Then they were gone.

Man and dog disappeared over the high cliff. By the time Duncan reached the edge, there was nothing but a ring of ripples where they had vanished into the water.

The Mingoes roared into action, lifting war axes to strike as Duncan threw himself against Ishmael and rolled away with the boy in his arms. Conawago stood over Hetty and was raising his own club to defend her when their attackers abruptly stopped.

Impossibly, Duncan heard a bagpipe. He followed the confused gaze of the warriors toward the head of the trail from the boat landing.

William Johnson stood there, leaning on a walking stick, beside Woolford and a solitary piper of the Black Watch. Emerging at a fast trot from the trail behind them was a seemingly endless line of Iroquois and Highland warriors.

By midmorning of the second day, Johnson and his army were gone, his flotilla of sloops, bateaux, and canoes stretching out for a mile down the river, joined by more and more Caughnawags pushing off from the bank. The Irish colonel had wisely chosen not to press Duncan for a detailed account of his travels since they last met. Indeed, the head of the tribal and militia troops had seemed to lose all interest in reports from the field of war when he discovered who lay on the scaffolds on the high point over the river. He was visibly shaken by the death of his friends. Immediately he had turned to Tushcona and Adanahoe.

“You are blinded by tears of grief. I would wipe them away with my words,” he said, the opening lines of the Iroquois condolence ceremony. He had gestured to Kass to join them as they settled in a small circle to continue the ritual.

Nearly an hour had passed before one of his men interrupted to report that the half-king was among the dead at the old abbey. Johnson rose, promising to return to Onondaga Castle to conduct a weeklong mourning ceremony, then he hurried to the barnyard to look at the bodies. His eyes grew round. “I hope the Iroquois understand the miracle you have worked for them,” he said to Duncan and Conawago, pumping their hands.

He had given them free rein to dispose of the bodies, and after consulting with the elders, a mass grave had been dug at the far end of the old slave-trading field. The terrifying Revelator, shaper of tribal nations, was just another renegade corpse tossed into the hole. When the grave had been filled, they had used the posts the Mingoes had raised to light a bonfire over it. The heat and ashes would bind them in the earth for many years, Adanahoe declared. The elders wanted such men kept out of the spirit world for as long as possible.

Much more care had been taken for another of the dead. After Johnson’s men had recovered the bodies of the two who had fallen off the cliff, Hetty had insisted on burial in the ground for her son, but over the grave, alongside the scaffolds of the two fallen Iroquois, she had directed the building of a third scaffold. On it she had arranged the body of the courageous brown dog. If any had doubted her claims that a warrior, her husband, had lived inside the beast, none did now. Hetty had dutifully cleaned her son’s body but had shed no tears and offered no words over it. Over the warrior with the four legs she had wept, then cleansed it with great care while chanting the mourning songs. Before they had raised him onto the platform, she had woven small, bright feathers into the long hair of his legs, as though to help him fly to the other side.

“He was the best of companions,” Duncan offered as she worked, trying to break through her grief. He watched as she cut away a lock of the brown hair and carefully folded it into her amulet pouch. “I am sorry, Hetty,” he said. “I should not have done it, but. .”