Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Again Lister took a long time to answer. “It’s the New World, lad,” the old sailor said in a flat voice. “Find yourself a new kind of dream.”

“I already have a dream,” Duncan said. “You gave it to me. And now it’s burnt too deep to walk away from. I vow you will not hang, Mr. Lister. You gave me my life that day on the mast. A sad wretch I would be if I did not return the favor.” What was it Adam had told Frasier? There are promises made which, if broken, will end all good things forever.

From the shadows on the far side of the schoolhouse came the laugh of a young girl. Duncan rose. “What happened to them, your two cousins?” he asked before stepping away.

“Bonny lads, both of them. The only joy of their mother’s vexed heart. A different press gang caught up with them a month later. They both died when their frigate was sunk by the French off Brest.”

Duncan found Virginia sitting on a stump beyond the schoolhouse, watching her brother throw pebbles at pieces of broken crockery lined up on a bench. Jonathan wore a sober air as he aimed his missiles, his younger sister calling out in amusement whenever he hit one of the targets. Duncan settled beside the girl, watching her brother. It wasn’t just solemnity on the boy’s countenance. There was fear, even anguish. He did not respond with glee when he hit the crockery, but with a flash of something that might have been called hatred.

After several minutes Duncan invited them to see their new classroom. Asking which of the small tables they would choose for their own, they each took a side table, leaving the center of the three empty, each glancing at it nervously.

“Where is Sarah today?” Duncan asked.

“Father and the vicar,” Virginia offered in a grown-up voice. “They fret so about her. Reverend Arnold reads the Bible to her for an hour each day.”

As she spoke, one of the housemaids called the children’s names from the porch of the great house. “Father’s giving us music lessons,” the girl announced brightly, then gathered her skirt and skipped away, with Jonathan a few steps behind, marching like a soldier.

Duncan quickly stuffed a piece of paper and a stick of writing lead in his shirt, slipped into the barn to retrieve one of the spare ax handles leaning against the wall, and found his way to the ceremonial ground, the Edge of the Woods place. He lowered himself onto one of the log benches, his heart racing, and clutched his makeshift weapon. Never in his life had he been frightened of the wild, until now.

A twig snapped and he fought an urge to dart back to the fields, then saw it was one of the small, brown, spotted creatures Crispin called a chipmunk. He stared into the canopy, calming himself, then stepped to the stones in the center of the clearing. The Indians were savages, but those same savages, at least some of them, held ceremonies like those of the church and seemed to have reverence for the truth, had something about them that stirred a battle-hardened man like Sergeant Fitch.

He paced about the stone platform and then, feeling like a violator in a temple, slid the stone from the top. He stared inside the compartment, then studied the forest, his heart thumping again. The wampum belt was there, but beside it someone had lain a bundle of feathers and fur tied with a single string of beads. His heart rose up in his throat as he surveyed the forest around him again. An Indian had been there, half a mile from his own bed, in the past twenty-four hours, and now he was intruding into that Indian’s secrets.

Extracting the paper, Duncan began to carefully replicate on it the shapes on the belt he had first examined with Woolford. A square at either end; figures of men holding axes; a large tree topped by a man in the center; several small X shapes with the top of each X connected, alternating with animal shapes. The figures were meaningless to him. But they meant something to someone at the settlement. When he finished, he extracted from his waistcoat the pages he had taken from Evering’s journal and read every line again, attempting to decipher even the many lines that been crossed out. The pages were mostly filled with Evering’s maudlin verses, some further describing Sarah as she slept, others reflecting what seemed to be Evering’s growing unease about landing in America. Duncan kept returning to several lines that seemed to be premises for poems never written. If dreams transport you to the other world and you dream two months without waking, would you not try to stay on the other side forever? the professor had asked. Then, under a series of X ’s meant to obliterate the words, Evering’s chilling version of an old children’s rhyme. There was a crooked man who climbed a crooked tree. He found a crooked promise and kissed the crooked sea.

The thought of Evering caused him to lift his head toward the river. He returned the belt to the cairn, then stepped toward the water. Duncan kept learning from Evering, long after his death, as if the scholar were speaking to him from the spirit world. He found himself on the riverbank, gripping his fear, and stepped into the water.

The crooked face of the effigy seemed to be staring directly at him when he arrived under the hemlock on the island. Almost nothing had changed since his first visit, except the crown of antlers was in front of Evering now, with several feathers leaning against it. In one of the professor’s twig hands was a little stick, four inches long, with a single strand of beads attached to one end. Several notches had been cut into the stick. With mounting fear Duncan lifted the stick and its beads away. With a shudder he discovered what it was that was frightening him even more than on his first visit. Evering’s watch was ticking.

He backed up several steps and examined the beads on the stick. They were white and purple, arranged in a pattern of two purple and one white, the same as in the strand around the new bundle in the cairn; the same, he suddenly realized, as one of the oval lines drawn by Jacob the Fish in his dying message. The old Mahican had been sending a wampum message, without the beads.

An hour later Duncan sat on the school steps, making notes in the late afternoon sun, when suddenly a figure erupted from behind the cooper’s shed, stumbling, steadied by an older man who was pushing him forward. They walked along the wall of the building, disappearing around its far side. When they reappeared, Duncan put down his papers and stood, stealing along the shadows for a better look.

It was McGregor and the other Company prisoner who had been brought back, the man still wearing the same mindless, numb expression he had worn when he had appeared from the forest. On the third round, Duncan realized the two men were making a deiseal circuit around Arnold’s makeshift church.

“What was his sin?” Duncan asked a Company man who watched the ritual uneasily.

“Killed a snake with an ax,” the man replied in a perplexed tone. “Old Fitch had a fit. Broke off the ax head and tossed it in the forge to melt. McGregor said he knew a way to make things right.”

Duncan waited for McGregor and his companion to finish their circuits, then reached the old Scot as the two men, finished, stepped to a drinking trough. “What happened out there with Hawkins?” he asked.

The old Scot swallowed hard before answering. “We came upon a farm where everyone had been killed, days earlier. Blood everywhere, the bodies in pieces, picked by the crows. That night we stayed with a Welshman who sold us rum, who told us tales of the heathen, said if we kept going upriver the Huron would take us home and hang us up alive for meat, slicing off pieces for their stew pots.”

“But that was where Hawkins was taking you? Upriver?”