Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“Where are the other children?” Duncan inquired as they watched three men hew beams to use as roof rafters, beside others spudding bark from chestnut logs.

“Virginia is at the butcher’s with Reverend Arnold, where he goes to plan the week’s meals. There are no others.”

Duncan’s gaze settled on two of the workers, not of the Company, laboring at a stump. They wore iron collars around their necks. “What sin,” he inquired in a taut voice, “did those men commit?”

Jonathan followed his gaze. “Escaped. Father sometimes goes to Philadelphia and brings back bondsmen from those arriving on the ships. They sign papers to stay. When they flee, Mr. Hawkins brings them back. He uses father’s bear dogs,” the boy declared, nodding toward the kennels. “Father says we must always keep them a little hungry in case there’s work to be done. Such men must be reminded of their sin,” he added in a flat tone. “God wills it so.” Duncan did not need to ask the origin of that particular script.

Duncan clenched his jaw and kept moving. It wasn’t so much a Greek utopia Ramsey was building as a Roman circus. “Some of these men must have families,” he said. He tried to steer toward the thicket that jutted into the fields, but Jonathan pulled him in the opposite direction, carefully avoiding looking at the thicket.

“Not here,” the boy replied. “Not yet. Father will tell them when they may bring their families from the settlements.”

“When did they start building the palisade wall?” Duncan asked after a few silent paces. He spotted another group of workers, a dozen men in two columns, walking with Cameron at the lead, holding barrel staves like muskets.

“Last autumn. Eventually it will protect the entire town.”

Last autumn, Duncan reminded himself, would have been after the incident at Stony Run, after Sarah Ramsey had fled.

They paused at a stone-walled well and sat on its side to drink from the wooden ladle hung on its timbers, speaking of the geese migrating overhead. Duncan showed the boy how to turn a blade of grass into a whistle between his thumbs, and to Jonathan’s delight, a jay answered from the forest.

“Jonathan, why did your sister go to England?” Duncan abruptly asked.

The boy looked at the earth at his feet, his muscles visibly tensing.

“Father says she was sick. She needed doctors there.”

“But where was she before that?”

Jonathan clamped his hands together and began wringing his fingers. “If mother had not gone away, it would have been different. We said prayers for Sarah’s tortured soul, for all those years. Mother said when we met Sarah, it would be in heaven. But then mother went to heaven. And Sarah. . When at last she could see us, we were not allowed to speak with her. Not allowed to touch her.” Tears welled in his eyes. As Duncan put a hand on his shoulder, the boy recoiled as if he had been struck, then sprang up. Duncan was certain he would run to the house, but instead the boy took five quick steps and turned, waiting. Duncan rose and followed the boy back toward the riverbank, where he stopped at a clump of alder bushes only a hundred feet beyond the house.

At Jonathan’s feet were pebbles, scores of pebbles arranged in a shape from Duncan’s boyhood. It was a Scottish cross-a cross of equal arms, each a foot long, overlaying a circle. It was a symbol discouraged by the modern church, for the shape harkened back to the sacred circles of the blue-painted Picts and the Druids. Men like Arnold were loathe to admit how much Christianity had borrowed from the pagans. In the remote lands of Duncan’s youth, such a device had often been used as a charm, a powerful device for banishing demons.

Two inches from the bottom and top of the cross were straps of iron, probably the most precious commodity in the town. The bottom iron appeared to be the handle of a long kitchen spoon, bent and rebent until it had snapped away. At the top was a narrow, six-inch piece of strap iron. Duncan lifted each in turn. As a charm against demons, many Highlanders considered iron even more potent than a cross.

Duncan studied the position of the cross. “Are there more?” he asked the boy.

Jonathan seemed troubled by the question. “They break the eggshells, too,” he blurted out.

“Eggshells?”

“Every morning on the pile where the cook leaves the pot scrapings, the eggshells are all lined up, each with a hole cut in the bottom.”

Duncan nodded somberly. “Show me the other crosses.”

Jonathan led him along the bank to two more crosses made of pebbles, with iron arranged as at the first, one of the pieces the bowl from the broken spoon. But when the boy paused a third time, he did not gesture toward the ground. Duncan followed the boy’s shifting gaze toward the far bank, the barn, the fields, then realized the boy was simply looking everywhere but the one place he could not bear to see.

Duncan saw the ants first, a line of them leading under the shadows of a clump of alders, then stepped closer and froze. The ants were devouring a dead fish beside another cross. The fish was in the middle of a vertical row of objects and signs. The first set was the skull of a small bird with lines drawn in the earth beside it. The skull and lines had been stomped on with a heavy boot, crushing the bone and nearly obliterating the lines. Next came two sets of curving lines side by side, then the fish, then a yellow feather, then two stick figures that caused Duncan’s breath to catch-a beaver and the curving lines of the snake. Then came another feather and another skull, this one with a piece of iron jammed into its eye socket, pinning it to the ground. Finally there was a small cloth pouch, no more than two inches long, drawn with a string at the top. Beyond the signs in an arc around the top were handprints in the moist soil, of two different sizes. Past the hands, encircling the cross and objects, were lines of bootprints, all walking in the same direction around the cross and the adjacent objects. Someone had walked three times around, a deiseal or sunwise circuit, used for admonishing demons.

Duncan’s gaze drifted back to the fish. Its mouth had been forced open with a small twig. The fish had been speaking and was now dead.

The boy, still not looking at the objects, was trembling. Duncan put a hand on his arm. “When did you discover this?”

“This morning,” Jonathan replied in a quivering voice as he dared a glance toward the ground. “I was gathering stones. I thought maybe I should cover it all with dirt. Should I tell Reverend Arnold? I don’t know what he would do.” The boy leapt back, the color leaving his face. “It’s coming to life!” he gasped.

Duncan followed his stricken gaze to the little sack. It was moving.

“I think,” Duncan said, working hard to keep foreboding out of his voice, “we should just leave this the way it is.”

“Because it is a curse to keep them on the other side?”

Duncan weighed the boy’s words, gauging the position of the design, on the upside of a small swale, facing the house. The cross was not aimed at the western forest, or the island. “Because it is a curse,” he repeated. But he knew the row beside the cross was no curse, nor a ritual. They were looking at a dialogue. The cross had been made first, by a Highlander. Then the first skull of a messenger had been added, with lines of a message. Someone had then answered with the curving lines, four facing right, four left, like parentheses. They could have been claws, the number of claws on a wolf’s front paws. Then the feather, the stick men, the beaver and snake signs, the fish, the signs of Adam and Jacob, then a feather as if in acknowledgment. Finally the skull and the small, moving pouch. Duncan picked up the little bag and opened it. A large bee crawled out onto his thumb, gazed at him, then flew straight up into the sky. He stared after it a long time. Birds might be messengers to the spirits in the Iroquois world. But in the world of the Highlands, it was the bee who carried messages to the dead.