Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Duncan’s gaze drifted back to the boy, who was facing the ox, standing idly now, stroking its snout. Something was fastened to the boy’s waist at the rear. A rope, he saw as the boy turned and began walking again. The ox was tied to the axle of the great wheel. And the boy was tied to the ox.

Duncan stepped back over the ridge, circled the valley, and walked up the track toward the cabin. The two men on the benches, reeking of rum, did not move as he untied the horse and led it to the stream, then knelt and washed the grime from his own face.

After a moment the hairs began rising on the back of his neck. He looked up to see a musket barrel extended from one of the windows, aimed directly at him.

“I only mean to water him,” he explained in a loud voice.

“Git inside or git dead,” came a high, nervous voice. “Put him back where he was.” More gunbarrels had appeared, two others extending from rectangular holes recently chopped into the log wall.

Duncan rose slowly, tied the horse to a sapling, then moved toward the building, hands opened at his side.

“I tie him like that so when they come for him I have a clean shot,” the gaunt man inside explained as soon as Duncan entered the musty cabin. There was an accent in the man’s voice Duncan could not place.

“Wolves?” Duncan asked.

The man gestured toward Duncan’s scalp. “Man with a wound like that shouldn’t have to ask.” Welsh. It was a Welsh accent.

“Indians want to steal your horse?”

“Steal everything but the air you breathe. ’Tis a raw, cruel season. Every farm for fifty miles along the river up in smoke.”

As Duncan’s eyes drifted around the dim chamber, he saw tools tossed in one corner, several clay jugs like those outside in another. One of the guns stuck into a loophole was heavily crusted with rust, its stock split. The weapon the man carried, though appearing too heavy for him, was of much sturdier quality. Burned into its stock was a familiar R.

“You have a Ramsey gun.”

“Been through many hands, I daresay. The great laird won’t complain if I kill a few red bucks with it.”

“I came to speak with the boy,” Duncan ventured.

The announcement seemed to disturb the Welshman. “I don’t reckon so,” he said, cradling the gun in his arm now, the barrel a short swing from Duncan’s face, “since everyone knows he don’t speak. Who the devil are you?”

“How is he named? Where does he sleep?”

“He sleeps with the ox, if that’s what you mean. You be a Ramsey, too,” the Welshman concluded, chagrin in his tone.

“He does not sleep here.” The ox, Duncan knew, was the most valuable asset of the mill. At the end of the day it would not be left to shift for itself at the forest edge.

“Up at the Flats,” the frightened man explained. “Come nightfall every sane Christian is at the Flats, with the mission folk. His name is Alex, just Alex. He was too young to have remembered his family name, or from where he was taken, though most likely his kin all died the day he was enslaved, those many years ago.”

For a moment Duncan had a vision of savages closing in on them from every direction, and he had a compulsion to take up the old musket and join the man’s worried vigil. The man’s fear was contagious. “Who are those men outside?

“Hands from the farms. Came with two loads of bark last week, went back to find the families they worked for dead and scalped.”

“Sarah Ramsey. Have you seen her?”

“’Course not. And the Reverend’s party got a good head start if you be seeking the bounty on her.”

“Reverend Arnold is at the mission?”

The hollow-faced man studied him with a sour expression. “Gone north. I told him he best be charging for burials, ’cause he’d be a rich man by winter. It’s the way of Ramsey business. Where it goes you need lots of prayers and lots of rum,” he said with a twisted grin. He inserted his gun back through the window and resumed his vigil.

Duncan paced along the dirt floor of the little cabin. A pile of molding pine needles in one corner might have been a pallet. An iron cooking kettle hanging on a peg looked like it had been used for years without a cleaning. A pile of squalid rags might have been spare clothes. He paused at the jugs, all but four of which were turned on their sides, empty. Behind the four was something hollow and shiny. He bent and pulled it into the light, its metal gleaming now. It was the ornate breastplate Arnold had worn into the woods. Except now it had two large bullet holes, dark stains along their jagged edges.

He carried the plate to the Welshman, who glanced at it and winced. “Like I said, got to keep your prayers up around those Ramsey captains.”

Duncan considered the words. “You mean it wasn’t Reverend Arnold wearing this.”

“They spent a night with us, the Ramsey men. One of them was so scared he just sat in the corner of the stable shaking, clutching an iron nail in his hand. That Hawkins had come in with another group, telling what the Indians would do to any man who tried to flee when they moved north. That wretch kept shaking, wouldn’t even join in Arnold’s prayer service outside. He was useless. In the morning Arnold said he needed a man to deliver a message to Lord Ramsey. The poor lug would have none of it, then Arnold said he could wear the breast plate. He took the message, put on the plate, grabbed his gun and was gone. A few hours later those two outside come in carrying the plate and the gun, asking if they could trade for a jug. They found his body less than two miles from here. The fool didn’t know the plate was made to stop arrows, not bullets.” The Welshman tightened his grip on the gun.

“And the message?”

“That be the business of the Ramsey captains.”

Duncan stepped outside, studying the little hollow, noticing for the first time a faint scent of smoke in the air, coming, judging from the wind, from over the next ridge. He stroked the horse’s back, considering the scene, then approached the rumbling millstone.

He spoke greetings to the boy, offered to get him some water, even complimented the brindled ox. The boy did not acknowledge his presence. The ox stared at Duncan with its huge black eyes.

Duncan stepped directly in front of the mill axle. “Alex,” he said, naming the boy for the first time. “I have been called a ghostwalker, too,” he ventured. “I am a friend of Sarah Ramsey,” he tried, still without result.

He paused frequently as he walked down the rough, rutted track that led out of the hollow, looking over his shoulder, unsettled by the Welshman’s expectation of imminent attack, watching the northern horizon with deep foreboding. Suddenly he stumbled over a freshly plowed furrow. He was at the edge of a cleared field, with a team raising dust on the far side, dragging a stump.

A broad-shouldered man with long blond hair, not much older than Duncan, stood with his back to him, making a speech on a low rise a hundred feet away, his black britches unbuckled at the knees, a wide-brimmed black hat on the stump beside him. Duncan hurried forward, anxious to find someone in the man’s audience to speak with, then halted as he reached the top of the little hill. There was no audience. The man was energetically addressing a field of stumps, in German. Duncan paused, not certain how to extract himself, then lowered his pack and settled onto the nearest stump as the stranger greeted him with a wave and kept speaking.

He listened awkwardly, casting about to confirm that he was the only human in the audience, then strained, able to make out a few German words. God, Duncan heard repeatedly, and beggar, and bread. As the dust began to clear, he saw a collection of buildings beyond the field. Beside a few struggling apple trees lay a pile of black material he took to be charcoal, beyond which was the roof of a building dug into the hillside with a tall stone chimney out of which a line of smoke curled. A girl in a black dress milked a cow. Children worked at a fence woven of twigs and branches that enclosed a vegetable garden. Dogs played along the bank of the meandering river.