Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Conawago said nothing. Now he, too, was watching his blood mix with the river water, desolation in his eyes.

“We reburied our uncle. My mother wanted to try to determine which pieces of which ancestors went into the other graves. My father said it didn’t matter, so long as we showed proper respect. So we just put a few of the bones in each of the old graves and covered them up. We were almost done when my father looked past me and groaned. My mother had cut off her beautiful red hair, had shorn herself like a spring ewe, and was dropping a lock of her hair tied around a sprig of heather into each grave.

“My grandfather disappeared when the sun went down, and we found him playing pibroch in the graveyard, under the moon. Every night for a month he did that, and every night more of our people came to listen, until at the end of the month there was a great gathering and a bonfire with the clans swearing blood oaths to support each other. My grandfather declared it enough that the old ones in the graves were peaceful again.”

Conawago, still staring at the blood as it slowly swirled downstream, gave no sign of hearing his words. Duncan fought an unexpected torrent of emotion as he relived the pain of that long-ago day when his family had found their own ancestors scattered across the slope.

“Pibroch?” the old Indian suddenly asked.

“It means the Great Music, the old music. .,” Duncan began. “I don’t know how. . ” He stood, slowly surveyed the cemetery again, and stepped to his haversack. Conawago gave no notice as he extracted his precious pipes, inflated the bag, and began to play at the base of the tallest chimney. But as he played, his companion’s head slowly rose, until he was solemnly staring into the sky.

Minutes later Conawago rose and slowly began collecting the remnants from the ground and arranging them on the surviving platforms. Duncan played for nearly an hour, then set down the pipes and helped Conawago. They worked until dusk, when at a distance from the cemetery Duncan made a small fire and a bed of moss for his companion.

“Hawkins,” he said, breaking a long silence. “You asked who would do such a thing. It was Hawkins. He left Edentown last week with Ramsey men who were familiar with handling the dead.”

“But why?”

Duncan had no answer.

“I had a dream last night,” Conawago said after another silence. “I was at Stony Run. Men flew through the air like birds. As I was speaking with an old woman, rocks began pouring from the sky. There was great lamentation, though the okewa had not even begun.”

“I, too, had a dream,” Duncan rejoined, his heart racing now. “I was with Sarah Ramsey. She sat in the shadow of a great bear, and Hawkins was sneaking up on her with a knife between his teeth.”

Conawago nodded slowly. “It is the way of things for her,” he said in a weary voice. “She becomes only bone and starts over.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She is dead again. The last time, I believe.” Conawago gestured him around the outermost of the tall pillars, which towered over a bend in the river. A new scaffold had been raised, the only one left standing. On it lay a dead woman in a familiar green dress, with crows sitting at her head.

With a mournful sob Duncan leapt forward and in an instant was on the cross support of the scaffold, hoarsely yelling at the birds, with blind horror lashing out at them. Then he began to see the thing. It was Sarah’s dress, he was certain, as was the small gold chain around the neck. But inside the dress were old bones, including a skull from which long hair still clung, with skeleton arms, even skeleton hands clasped together. He fell away, dropping from the scaffold, and gazed at the thing in horror. He wanted to weep.

After a long moment he steeled himself enough to examine the thing on the scaffold. Around the scaffold were the recent prints of moccasins, many overlain with boot marks. Indians had been there after the destruction of the burial ground and erected the scaffold. And the men who come after, probably Arnold and his party, had been too frightened to touch it.

A terrible despair tore at Duncan’s heart. He gazed out onto the ruined dead. He felt so weak, he dared not ask the Indian to explain.

Conawago pulled him away, back toward the fire. “You still mean to go north?”

It took Duncan a long time to answer. “I have begun to understand the truth of dreams.” he said. “An innocent man is going to hang. The truth of the murder he is charged with lies in the north. I know of no other way to go.”

Conawago gestured to the broken bodies. “This is what Hawkins and the others will do to you,” he said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice.

Duncan stared into the fire, fighting images of Sarah and Lister being chased by skeletons. He had also begun to grasp why Woolford had warned about speaking of dreams with the Indians. “I shall boil some tea,” he declared at last.

“No tea,” the Indian said in a dry, creaking voice. “The pipes. I never knew of these, but your grandfather understood. The dead can hear those pipes.” He gestured out toward the desolation. “Call them home, like before.”

Naked trees. “Look for naked trees,” Conawago had said when Duncan had left him at dawn that morning. “Follow the naked trees to Bark Hollow by the mission at German Flats.” After Duncan had spoken of his dream, the old Indian had spoken no more of Duncan fleeing south, but he had also denied any interest in traveling north himself now.

“Here is where I am needed,” Conawago had said with a deathbed air. “I should go across, I should explain and apologize.” He was, Duncan had realized with a chill, speaking of dying.

Duncan had felt as if he were bidding good-bye to another of his great-uncles, never to see him or his ways again. He had lit another small fire for Conawago and left him staring at the flames. “Mourning must be done,” Duncan had said as he stood to leave, “but mourning is not standing up to the enemy.”

Conawago had given no sign of hearing him.

Ten miles from the Chimney Rocks he reached the first of the naked trees, a huge hemlock, over five feet in breadth, stripped of its living bark for ten feet above the earth. Soon there were others, all oaks and hemlocks, all huge, all stripped to a uniform height. The swath became broader as he approached a rumbling sound that rose from behind a low ridge. He paused just before he reached the crest of the ridge, and looked back at the dozens of debarked trees he had passed. They were all going to die.

Bark Hollow had been aptly named by Conawago. Except for a small log house at the far end, the small valley was piled with bark. In the center, a heavy log had been mounted on a central hub fixed to a stump. Two-thirds of the way along the length of the log was fastened a huge roller stone, like a thick mill wheel with heavy striations along its rim. Harnessed to the end of the log was a great brindled ox, pulling the wheel along the circle, crushing the bark under the wheel. Leading the ox was a boy of perhaps twelve years. Duncan settled onto a rock and watched, his interest suddenly intense. Another riddle was answered. Evering had written that the third ghostwalker would be found at an ox wheel.

As Duncan took a step down the hill, still in the shadows of the trees, the boy’s head snapped up, not at him, but at the forest, as if sensing something had changed. The ox slowed and bent its heavy head toward the cabin. Duncan paused, then squatted in the shadows, studying the cabin. It was a rough, squalid place. Two men lay stretched out on benches beside the cabin, jugs beside them. A thin horse tied to a tree gazed longingly at the stream that ran by the cabin. A small, fur-covered creature lay dead on a stump, a crow pecking at its head. Beyond the cabin stood a decrepit wagon at the end of a cleared track that wound behind the ridge. On it sat three bales of the crushed bark, bound for a tannery, where it would be steeped in water for its tannic acid.