Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“There is no shame in the lamb who stumbles at first step.”

The hint of a smile flickered on Sarah’s face, and she dared to meet Duncan’s own gaze for a moment. “Could I learn the songs your mother would sing to us orphan lambs?”

“They were in Gorse, the old Gaelic,” Duncan said, not daring to ask why she referred to herself as an orphan. “You have to have an ear for it, like the pipes.”

“ Ceol Gaidhlig ,” she said. Gaelic music, in the old tongue.

He stared at her. A question is as good as a bludgeon to her, he reminded himself. She had, after all, spent months with Adam, himself a Gaidheal, a Highlander. “You are a never-ending source of mystery, Miss Ramsey. It reminds me of another word. Haudenosaunee.”

Sarah noticeably relaxed. “It means people of the longhouse. The Iroquois. The Six, the sergeant calls them.”

“Longhouse?”

She picked up the chalk and drew a long structure with a curved roof, explaining how saplings were tied together for the ridge poles and covered with elm bark to make a house, with several hearths inside, one for each family.

“It would be a rare bargain,” Duncan proposed, “if for each English word I taught you, you would give me one in Iroquois.”

She offered a nervous nod, and he wrote the word maple . “The Haudenosaunee do not draw their words,” she said, “but I can give you the saying of them.” She drew a turtle. “ Anonwara ,” she pronounced, a hint of excitement in her voice.

They worked for another two hours, without lunch, and Sarah’s table became covered with papers filled with the words she asked Duncan to spell. Oak, hemlock, cedar, and a dozen other trees. Deer, beaver, eagle, owl, wolf, beside drawings with his own makeshift spellings of the Indian words she gave him. Erhar, dog. Anokie, muskrat. Kenreks, lion. Ohskenonton, deer. As a learner, she was as fleet as a creature of the forest, and for the first time Duncan saw on her countenance something that, if not contentment, was at least satisfaction.

“And bear?” Duncan asked.

Sarah hesitated only a moment. “Ohkwari.”

It was what she had cried out that first night, in the cells, then again in the barn. Haudenosaunee, she had said, then ohkwari.

“Your father will have missed you at lunch, Miss Ramsey,” he reminded her.

Sarah gave a sour smile. “He takes his lunch privately, at his desk.” She looked up. “I am not practiced in the ways of etiquette. But we are not so many years apart. When we are together like this, are we allowed to use our Christian names? Duncan.”

“I remember telling you stories of my childhood, Sarah,” he ventured.

She stood, and he was sure he had frightened her away, but she stepped to the window. The view of the river and the deep woods seemed to quiet her. “When I left the spar that day, it seemed I was falling forever. I don’t remember being in the water. I just awoke in the cell and thought I was in one of the places spirits go to. It was only later in New York that Captain Woolford told me you were the one who saved me.” She searched his face as if for an explanation. “You cleaned my grave,” she added in hollow whisper, as if it had been another way of saving her life. She leaned into the glow of the window and touched the glass with her fingertips. “I remember so little of my time on the ship. I was always sleeping, or felt as asleep even when awake.”

“They dosed you with strong medicine.”

“They gave me tea, always bitter teas. My stomach would turn over from it, but they would just give me more. Reverend Arnold explained I was going through a spiritual crisis, and I knew he was right from all the terrible visions I had. He said that it was the hand of Providence at work in me, that going across the ocean in my strange hibernation allowed me to be made anew. They said after you fished me from the water, that the captain insisted I be put in the cell. The vicar was very apologetic. Lord Ramsey said it was the right thing to do, to keep me safe.” She stepped back to the desk and began sounding out each of Duncan’s written words. “Beaver. . deer. . wolf.”

She did not seem disturbed in the least by her strange confession, or her time in the ship’s cell. She had already been a prisoner for twelve years, Duncan reminded himself. A dozen questions leapt to his tongue. When he approached, she glanced up, suddenly wary. He could sense her muscles tensing.

“I regret not getting to know the professor better,” he offered. “A learned man of great natural curiosity, especially about the New World.”

Sarah ran her fingers through her auburn hair, which at some point had lost its ribbon. In their time together, Duncan realized, a wild, almost ragged look had settled upon her. She had begun to make small twisting movements as if her tight-necked dress had become a straitjacket. “I would wake in my bed and he would be sitting there. There was always someone in the cabin with me, but he was the only one who kept to a chair beside the bed. The others always stayed away, at a table, reading to themselves. He was the only one to realize that in the small hours of the morning I was closest to wakefulness, and he arranged it so he was there in the middle of the night. He diminished my dose, so I would wake and we would talk, in whispers, and he never told the others. He had a daughter who had died of a fever years ago. She would have been my age. He said that God had smiled on him, to allow him the chance to be with me the next few years as I came of age.”

Duncan began to get a measure of the fragile balance of their conversation and spoke of his own conversations with the professor, of his respect for the gentle ways of the scholar as much as for his intellect, of Evering’s fascination with the night sky and his hoped-for comet. “The storm that day,” he said at last, “it was unlike any I had ever seen. I was in the mast when it struck. I heard my grandfather’s voice, though he’s dead these twenty years.”

Sarah gave one of her sad, wise nods, as if not at all surprised. “He brought me tea the night before. Real tea, not medicine tea, for the first time. He said I was well enough to stay up all night with him, that the day was his daughter’s birthday and his way of celebrating would be to hear more secrets about my life.”

“He had decided you had had enough medicine.”

She shrugged. “I can’t resent them for dosing me during the voyage.”

“I thought it was because they brought you against your will.”

“Young deer, unused to people, can take such a fright they run for miles.”

“But you bolted across an entire ocean. What frightened you so much, Sarah?”

He had done it, had broken the balance. She grabbed the papers on her desk and slipped away, watching him like a cornered animal. But she paused at the door to answer. “The world,” she whispered. “So many people without true skins.” She took a step across the threshold, then halted so abruptly it seemed she had been struck, her eyes fixed on something beyond the entryway.

Duncan darted to her side. Jonathan was throwing stones at old pots again, this time not only hitting the old crockery but stomping the pieces into the dirt after he had broken them. Sarah’s hand clutched her breast and she seemed to sag. She stepped backward as if to hide, seemed to sense Duncan’s presence, and put a hand in his, not fully enclosed, but intertwining the fingertips the way they had from their cells. It was not a touch of affection, but of fear. After a moment came the sound of shattered crockery, and she turned, her eyes awash with tears. Without a word she fell against him, clutching his neck, and wept like a little girl.