Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“Do you feel that?” Duncan asked in a simmering voice, twisting the man’s arm. “The way the pain rises as I turn it? A little more-” the man gasped as Duncan turned it again, “-and you won’t use it for a day.”

“He gave the brute double rations,” the Welshman groaned. “He has no right.”

“Working until dusk, that is double duty,” Duncan suggested.

“You be the one! The McCallum fugitive that has the great lord so furious! Fifty pounds on your head!”

Duncan increased the pressure on the man’s arm. “If I twist some more you won’t use it for a week. And then how will you raise that musket when the savages come for you?”

“I can fix things for ye,” the Welshman groaned. “I’ll give ye to Ramsey when he comes. Then I’ll split the bounty with ye and let ye go. We can be rich!”

Duncan pressed harder, and the Welshman let Duncan pull the switch from his hand. Duncan released his hold and broke the switch on his knee. As he turned to toss the pieces into the darkness, he saw a bearded head watching from the shadows. Reverend Zettlemeyer, his body all but obscured by his black clothes, wore a sober, almost melancholy expression but offered not a word. As the Welshman followed Duncan’s gaze toward the missionary, he gave a defeated sigh. But he turned with a vindictive gleam before slipping away into the night.

“Ain’t just Ramsey who wants ye, boy. There’s a price on y’er hair. Ye be worth more to the Huron dead and scalped than presented intact to the great lord. In a few days ye’ll be begging to be turned over to Ramsey.”

Duncan stared into the darkness after the man, his heart racing. Ramsey and the French savages were competing for his head. It was impossible. Why would the French want him dead?

Duncan turned to the boy, who had taken the Welshman’s final blows like an old sailor, without breaking his embrace of the brindled beast. He lifted the boy’s tattered shirt only a few inches before Alex jerked it out of his grasp and slipped to the other side of the ox. But it was enough for Duncan to see the marks left by many such beatings in the past.

The boy’s eyes went wild as those of the ox as Duncan tried to approach him again. Duncan retreated, began stroking the opposite flank of the ox, rubbing him down with a rag that hung on a nearby peg. After a few strokes the boy pulled the rag from his hand and began using it himself.

Duncan offered greetings, offered apologies, offered to find Alex some extra food for himself, but nothing prompted so much as a glance from the former slave to the Indians. What had Reverend Zettlemeyer said? The boy had lost all the talents of society.

When Duncan finally abandoned his effort and stepped out of the shed, Reverend Zettlemeyer was still standing there, watching with the same melancholy expression.

“If this is what Moravians do for orphans,” Duncan spat, “then the New World can do without your settlers.”

Zettlemeyer seemed to accept the words like a well-deserved blow. “I wake in the middle of the night thinking of Alex,” he said. “I find myself stopping amidst prayer thinking of the boy, and the Ramsey girl. I know not how to reach them.”

Duncan’s head snapped up. “Sarah? You’ve seen her?”

“Ten days ago. But ever since she first visited last year, she is in my thoughts, sometimes my nightmares.”

Duncan stepped closer to the missionary. “Sarah was here ten days ago?”

“Just for a night. She rode away at dawn, in the direction of Edentown, right toward the raiding parties. She has powerful angels over her, that one.”

“She saw Alex?”

Zettlemeyer nodded. “It was like she needed to be certain he was still alive.”

Duncan turned, looking up to the night sky, his mind racing, and stepped toward the open fields.

The German kept speaking to his back. “My wife says you saved the life of our guest in the springhouse.” Duncan kept walking. “Just a word, McCallum.”

Duncan did not respond.

“Sarah Ramsey didn’t just speak to Alex, McCallum. She spoke to me about a dead man named Evering.”

Duncan halted, slowly turned. The old Moravian gestured him toward the moonlit field above the village and began walking. He had settled onto one of the stumps near the top when Duncan reached him. When he spoke again, he had none of the confidence of a man accustomed to the pulpit.

“She told me to protect the boy, to keep him safe, away from any visitors. But the boy will have none of it. I brought him into the house to sleep the night after she left, and he climbed out the window.”

“But what of Evering?” Duncan asked.

“She said a man named Evering had been given a vital message from Adam Munroe, who had known he was going to die. Evering was to have warned me, she said.”

“Warn you about what?”

“That was the source of her greatest agony. Adam Munroe had decided she could not know, that it was to be the job of the Ramsey tutor to carry the warning. She sat up here with me and wept as she watched Alex settling into the stable. She asked me strange things. She asked if I had ever met the English king. I would have thought it a jest but for her solemn expression. She asked me if I had had dreams since the massacre last year. She gave me something in a leather pouch I was to pass on as a message.”

“To whom?”

“She made me pledge not to reveal that.”

“Then what was the message?”

“I don’t know what it meant. There were no words, no writing.” Zettlemeyer sank his head into his hands a moment. “A pouch. Inside were a claw, a bear claw with little red feathers tied around it. At the bottom were a dozen purple beads.” He looked up, searched Duncan’s face. “You are the Ramsey tutor. Explain the catastrophe that comes.”

“Huron raiders. Lord Ramsey. Major Pike,” Duncan said. “We are rich in catastrophes about to break upon us.” He felt the Moravian’s gaze again. “I don’t know. Evering was murdered before he could speak with me.”

They sat in the cool stillness, gazing at the stars.

“My son leaves soon to bring back more settlers,” Zettlemeyer said at last. “He has a grand speech about property and land ownership. I told him I cannot go because of my health, but the truth is I cannot go because I don’t know what to tell them about this place, about how a good Christian goes about taming the wilderness.”

“Do you fear the wilderness?”

“We’d be fools not to. Most nights one of the children wakes up screaming from nightmares about Indian attacks. But that’s only a part of it.” The missionary went silent again. “You think you bring your old identity with you when you come as a settler,” he began at last, “your culture, your values, your knowledge of what it means to be human. But when you settle onto the new land, you soon learn that all that is gone. You are naked. You have nothing of the Old World to rely on. There is only what is in here-” Zettlemeyer tapped his chest, “and what is out there.” He gestured toward the forest. “When I first came, I met an old Indian named Conawago. I said, ‘this is Eden.’ In reply he said, ‘Yes, except it is the eighteenth century.’” The German fell silent again.

“This is God’s great experiment on earth,” he continued. “Here He reduces everyone to a common denominator, to see how they start over. And there are others who have pursued a spiritual life in the forest far longer than we have.” He ended with an unexpected motion, two fingers extended, spiraling upward. Duncan had seen it before.

“Is it something about the heavens, Reverend, that sign?”

“They use many names. The Great Spirit. The Guardian of the Forest. Most of the old ones just call it the Great Mystery.”