Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“As it happened to you,” Conawago said in a tight voice.

It was Duncan’s turn to settle onto the bank. Conawago was right. What had happened to Jacob had also happened to him. A drop of blood fell from his bent head onto his hand. He stared at it for a moment, then began explaining what he knew about Jacob’s death.

When he finished, the old Indian was silent a long time, withdrawn into himself.

“The wolf,” Duncan ventured. “You were of the same clan?”

“Not exactly,” Conawago said absently and looked up at Duncan. “He was Mahican. I am Nipmuc. He knew no one else left alive from his tribe. I know no one else of mine. But we always believed we would find them. He thought if he just stayed on his ancestral lands, someday they would come back. My tribe’s land, in what you call Massachusetts, was taken so long ago, I look elsewhere. The last time I saw Jacob, he said he had had a dream in which we discovered that our peoples had been living together on an island in a lake that I had overlooked. He thought it was very funny. But,” the old Indian sighed, “like all of his dreams, he thought there was truth in it. He made me promise to find the island, then come for him so we could go live there together.”

Conawago fell silent again, looked at the old tree. “You should go back,” he declared. “You, too, will die from your wounds if you push too hard.”

Duncan looked over his shoulder toward the east. “There is no back for me. I am a fugitive, an escapee from the Ramsey prison company. I can only go forward. I am looking for a place called Stony Run, somewhere in the north.”

Conawago winced, then tossed a pebble into the water and watched its ripples until they had disappeared. “If you knew what lay north, you would beg me to finish the job those fools started.” The old Indian rose and put on his shirt. “You will not make it there. Return to the settlements. Stay here. Go north and die if that is your wish. You will snap like a twig in the hands of a Huron raider.”

“You saved me. I thought Indians believed that when they saved someone they are responsible for them thereafter.”

“I know not what you mean when you say Indians,” Conawago replied in a weary tone as he lifted the shoulder strap of his pouch around his neck. “There are Lenni Lenape, Mohawk, Seneca, Susquehannocks, Nanticokes, Oneidas, Onandagos, Tuscaroras, Cayugas, Huron, Abenaki, a handful of Wappingers left, and fifty other tribes I have known personally, the nations living here before the Europeans. Just as across the ocean there are tribes called English, Scottish, Irish, French, Dutch, Hessian, Catalan, Danish, Welsh, Italian, and, if you credit the tales in taverns, Hungarian.” The old man glanced at Duncan and seemed to relent. “I was schooled by Jesuits at an early age,” he declared with a shrug. “They cured me of many of my early notions.”

“I don’t recollect many Jesuits making offerings to streams.”

“Jesuits,” Conawago said with a sigh, “don’t know everything.”

Duncan gazed at the darkening forest. He could not recall ever feeling so weary, so lost. He needed Conawago, just for the night. “An innocent man is being held for murder at Edentown. I can find answers at Stony Run that will save him.”

Conawago frowned again, then picked up another pebble, little more than a grain of sand, and tossed it into the pool. It barely made a ripple as it sank. “That is how much I care about the guilt or innocence of Europeans out in the broken land.”

“Jacob the Fish was an innocent man.”

“Lightning reaches down and takes you. If the spirits intend it, you will step around a tree into a swarm of hornets. It has nothing to do with innocence.”

“Some of us fight the spirits when we have to. Jacob did. He didn’t die because they wanted his scalp. He died because he had to deliver a message.”

When Conawago reached for the paper Duncan extended, Jacob’s blood-inked message, the old man’s hand trembled. After a moment his eyes took on a distant expression as if looking through the paper at something far away. “I will light a fire and make tea for you,” the old Indian said. “Then you will tell me everything.”

Conawago spoke no more for nearly an hour, except to say they would need shelter from the storm, though Duncan saw not a cloud in the sky. Quickly, with an economy of motion that astounded Duncan, Conawago assembled a lean-to of limbs against a large, flat-faced boulder, covering it with pine boughs and a piece of tattered sailcloth from his bag. Then he tossed Duncan a flint and steel to begin a fire as he collected moss for a bed, laying Duncan’s pack on it, and enough firewood to last for hours.

“I was in the Ramsey Company,” Duncan began as the last rays of the sun hit them and the wood began to crackle in the flames.

“That is nothing, just what some other men did to you,” Conawago said. “I am asking about you. Where was your mother on the day you were born, near water or mountain? What animals did you play with as a child? Were you scared of the ocean at first, or did your parents perhaps set you in it before you could walk?”

“How did you know I lived by the ocean?” Duncan asked.

“You can take no truth from a man without knowing the truth of his life,” was Conawago’s only reply. From the forest floor he picked up a flat stone, twice the size of his palm, set it at Duncan’s side, then with two twigs lifted an ember from the fire and dropped it on the center of the stone. From his bag he produced a brown leaf and laid it on the ember. As the tobacco smoke rose in a small, slow spiral, he dispersed it with his hand around Duncan’s head. He dug further into his bag and produced a folded piece of deerskin, which he reverently opened, exposing an inch-wide belt of white wampum. “Now the spirits are listening,” the Indian declared somberly, as he laid the belt on Duncan’s wrist, nodding, “now we shall see about you.”

Thus began the most extraordinary conversation of Duncan’s life. The old Indian would not have him speak of Jacob or Ramsey or any event of the past year, but spent an hour asking about the Highlands, asking the Gaelic words for rainbow and oak tree, trying to understand how Duncan had been raised. He became quite excited to hear that Highland cattle resembled bears and that they roamed freely around the hills like the guardians of the ancient clans.

“What do these creatures do at first snow?” Conawago inquired as he composed a soup of roots and leaf buds in a small copper pot. He seemed skeptical that such animals could truly be called cattle, and asked whether Duncan had ever caught any listening at doors and windows, as American bears were known to do.

“If as a boy you cupped a butterfly in your hand, did you notice the wind change direction? In living by the ocean, did you ever see giant fish circle about and make one of the great whirlpools that draw stars into the ocean?”

“I knew an old woman who said she had seen children change into seals,” Duncan offered. The news brought an appreciative nod from his companion.

It seemed hours before Duncan reached the voyage of the Anna Rose and its prisoners, long after he had consumed Conawago’s fragrant concoction and let the old man help settle him onto the moss bed against the face of the rock, which had absorbed the heat of their fire.

Did the great leviathans follow their ship, the Indian asked, and after a man had been lashed at sea did Duncan see the water around the ship glow the following night, as Conawago had himself witnessed? Thunder rose in the north, and lightning from over the horizon reflected on clouds above.

When Duncan came to the deaths on board, the questions came obliquely, about aspects he had not previously considered, as though Conawago’s process of comprehending how men died was different than Duncan’s. When they spoke of Evering, the Indian passed quickly by the circumstances of his murder and wanted to know if there were specks of color in the professor’s dead eyes, whether he sang songs on his last day, and how he behaved at night on deck when the stars shined. He was intensely interested when Duncan related how Evering had predicted the coming of a comet.