Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“He’s the last,” Duncan vowed, an unexpected vehemence in his voice. “No more are going to die. Not by hammers, not by axes, not by nooses.”

“We done fair by each other, you and me. Ye let me be me own man again, after pretending for too many years. No regrets.” Lister shifted his chains and crawled to the far side of the crib. “Now I need ye to make that journey and start our cabin in Carolina. By the time the trial’s done, I’ll be fit to join ye. I’ve been thinkin’ on it. I’ll get a Percheron, a big gray plow horse like me father had. I’ll buy one in Charleston and trot up to meet ye, grand as a prince.”

“We’ll need a cow,” Duncan heard himself say in a dry, cracking voice.

“Aye, and some sheep. But ye’ll be the one for the milking in the dawn.”

Duncan jammed his hand through the slats, futilely trying to reach the old man. He had not felt the black thing that now grew inside him since the day of the storm when he had climbed the mast and decided to die. We done fair by each other. Since Lister had pledged himself to Duncan, the old man had been whipped, arrested, beaten, reviled, arrested again, and now, despite their banter, they both knew he was going to hang.

Lister began a sailor’s song in a subdued, doleful voice. Duncan sat still, not sure he could summon the strength to move. “Good moon tonight,” Lister observed when he finished his song.

“What do you mean?”

“Crispin and I spoke. When the great lord settles into his library for tea, Crispin will appear on the kitchen step and leave a broom leaning by the door.”

“A broom?”

“My signal. Five minutes later I will start shouting that I see savages on the far bank. That’s when ye break away. A few miles to the east and quick as Jack Puddin’ y’er a free man. May God and Mary protect ye.”

Duncan seemed to watch himself from a distance as he stepped to the schoolhouse, then rolled his papers into his spare shirt. Minutes later he was at the little cemetery, uncovering the pack and inserting the pipes. He had moved away ten paces when he paused and turned back to Sarah’s gravestone. It took but a few moments to locate and clean the stone bear, which he pushed down beside his pipes. He slipped on the pack and made his way into the shadows. Ten minutes later he reached the Edge of the Woods place, where he sat staring grimly at the stone pedestal, as Woolford had done days earlier.

Images swirled in his mind again, the strange dreams that sometimes boiled out of despair. He would go to Carolina and send for Sarah. He saw her laughing and dancing with Crispin over the news that Duncan was in the southern mountains. Jamie and he were building a cabin as Lister plowed fields with a big grey mare. At a Highlands festival, Lister told old tales to freckled, kilted children. But then, like a frigid wave, reality broke over him and he found the words that had been squeezing against his heart. Sarah was a slave again, probably lying beaten and bloody that very moment in some squalid camp. He could only save her by breaking the solemn vow he had given her. And Lister could only be saved if Duncan preserved Hawkins, the man who was going to kill his brother.

He glanced at the map she had given him, and the name of the farmer who would act as go-between. William Wells. No one had told Sarah that the settler had been hacked to death the week before. The savages were close. The savages were everywhere. But slowly the realization had been building that there was another way to save Lister, as impossible as using Hawkins. There had been a witness to Frasier’s murder, lingering in the shadows by the alder bushes, laying another message on the riverbank. Somewhere in the vast wilderness was a savage who had seen Frasier’s killing.

When he finally rose, he lifted the stone cover of the lichen-covered cairn and draped the wampum belt over his forearm, the belt over which one could only speak the truth. He extracted his list of clan chiefs and held it before him, reciting the names without looking at the paper. He added a new name this time, in a firm, level voice aimed at the shadows before him. Duncan McCallum. Finished, he cupped in his hand the dried thistle he had carried since the day Lister had brought it to his cell and raised it toward the trees. He returned the belt, neatly folded, draped his list of clan chiefs around the thistle and set it on the belt before replacing the stone cover. As he did so men began shouting alarms from the town, and he saw figures running desperately toward the barn and great house. With a trembling hand he tore up the map to Carolina, then stepped toward the river and the black western forest. He wasn’t going to throw his life away as Ramsey’s puppet. But he was ready to die as the last chief of the McCallum clan.

Never in his life had Duncan felt so alone, so helpless. He ran at a crouch as he climbed out of the river, ran until his lungs ached, until he stumbled on a root and fell, gasping for air. Without conscious thought he crawled into a gap between two boulders, leaning against one, his heart thundering.

Through the trees he glimpsed a low ridge, with a rock ledge jutting from its spine. Moments later he was in a small clearing at the highest point, surveying the top of the endless forest, where he laid out his few possessions on a flat rock. His pipes, his spare shirt, a blanket, a tomahawk, flints and a striker, the food left by Crispin. The papers he had grabbed from his schoolroom table. Finally, unexpectedly, a muslin pouch containing nearly a quarter pound of black pepper, a small treasure that must have been purloined by Crispin from Ramsey’s kitchen, though Duncan could not fathom why.

A twig snapped nearby. Duncan recoiled in alarm, then he looked up into two moist black eyes. Twenty feet away a large stag stared at him. As he returned its gaze the majestic creature inched forward, tilting its head, and he realized he had seen its expression before, in the eyes of the Indians at the army headquarters, an intense, guileless curiosity, a countenance that seemed incapable of expressing fear. Duncan stayed motionless as the stag approached him, sniffing the articles he had strewn on the rock before him, cocking its head again as if expecting an explanation for Duncan’s intrusion. He slowly uncurled his fingers, opening his palm for the animal to see what it held, the last object in his pack. The deer stared at the stone bear as if it recognized something in the stone, then stepped backward, pausing to investigate a blood-red mushroom before slipping back into the mottled shadows, following the rock ledge toward the north and west.

Duncan stared for a long time in the direction the stag had disappeared, then at the stone bear in his hand. Once, a lifetime ago, Adam Munroe had written that the bear would take Duncan where she needed to go. He gathered his meager belongings into his pack, took a step in the direction of the stag, and froze. There was a new sound in the distance, though approaching fast. The baying of large hounds. Against all odds, he had already been missed. The bear dogs were kept hungry, in case there was work to do.

He would never outrun them. With sudden realization he lowered the pack and retrieved the pepper. Crispin had foreseen the danger. He quickly spread some of the pepper on the rock, ran ten feet from the rock in three different directions, sprinkling more pepper behind him, then took off at a sprint down the bare rock of the ledge, leaving no prints and the barest of scents, which, Crispin had reckoned, would be of little interest to dogs whose senses were numbed by the pepper.

By the time he paused again, an hour later, the barking of the dogs had faded, then stopped, and he had begun to recognize the patterns of the forest. Though it held no roads, it had its own unique thoroughfares. Narrow trails of animals, some heavily worn, led to small watering holes along the streams, which themselves flowed down from the ridges to the northwest. Birds he could not recognize sang over his head, and he saw flashes of red and yellow and chestnut as they fluttered among the trees. Here and there golden leaves, harbingers of autumn, floated in the air. Squirrels and chipmunks stood on their haunches, some scolding him, others gazing at him before racing away as if to report his presence.