Eliot Pattison - Blood of the Oak

“Duncan,” he heard Sarah say in a raised voice. “Crispin was asking about the iron ore mine being built at Brannock’s ford.”

He rose from his chair. “Still clearing the ox road,” he said in a distracted voice, then stepped to the map, quickening his pace as he neared it. “The northern branch of the Susquehanna!” he exclaimed as he pulled out his sketch of the lines from the dead Oneida’s upper arm. He laid his paper under the river on the map. “See how the line turns out of Lake Otsego!”

“And here where the streams join to the west of here!” came Conawago’s excited voice. The Nipmuc was pointing over his shoulder to the spidery lines that joined the main river.

Duncan folded over the paper so that only its bottom portion showed, where he had sketched the lines from Red Jacob’s hand. He rotated the paper to the left, then the right, sliding it over the map below the Susquehanna forks.

“There!” he cried, and pointed to two rivers that lined up in the same pattern as the sketch. “There!” he repeated, more emphatically, then his voice lowered in surprise. “Virginia. It leads to Virginia. The Rappahannock and the Potomac.”

Duncan spun about to face Analie. “Nineteen men to be saved. What does that mean?”

The French girl shrank back, her eyes shifting from Duncan to Conawago. “They put me in a chair to look at a book while the captain and Red Jacob talked with Sir William. I was at Johnstown, because they said maybe I should join the school there.” Duncan choose not to interrupt to remind the girl she had previously told them Red Jacob was taking her to relatives in the south. “They were comparing notes, making a tally. They didn’t know I listened. Twelve men had disappeared, all rangers, some of them Oneida and Mohawk. Later I asked Red Jacob why he was studying a map and he said they were going south to bring them back. Like they weren’t just lost, like they were captured in a war. Twelve,” she repeated. “I remember, like the apostles.”

Duncan sagged. Twelve, not nineteen. For a moment he thought it was possible Woolford had not been unhinged, that his friend had not been raving but speaking an urgent truth.

A nervous voice inserted itself into the silence. “Pennsylvania rangers started disappearing months ago, and some farmers who had been in our militia.” Jess Ross fixed the French girl with an inquiring gaze, as if assessing the truth of her words.

Sarah stepped forward to put her hand on the woman’s shoulder as if to quiet her. “Jess, surely you would not know that.”

“Rangers stop at our farm.” She cast a nervous glance in Conawago’s direction. “They get letters from other rangers they served with,” she said to Duncan. “There’s a bond, you know, between the men who run the woods.”

Duncan pushed past Sarah. “How many, Jessica? How many disappeared?”

“Seven, last I heard. If the killers are going south I must send a message.”

“Twelve from the north and seven from Pennsylvania,” Duncan said. “Nineteen! Nineteen men to die.” He needed to believe what he had heard from his delirious friend after all. “Woolford and Red Jacob were going to Virginia to save them and they were stopped. Why? The war is over.” He searched the faces of his friends for answers. Conawago lowered his head. Crispin looked at Sarah, whose face was coloring. Duncan had expected fear or sorrow on her face, not the smoldering expression she fixed him with before hurrying out of the room.

The meal was over. When the table was cleared Duncan sat and faced Conawago, who lingered at the hearth, smoking his pipe.

“What do you know?” Duncan demanded. “What is it you are not telling me?”

“I know it is not the way of Edentown. Not Sarah’s way of the willow.” Conawago’s expression turned to one of pleading. “She struggles so when you are not here, Duncan. But sometimes I think she struggles more when you are here.”

Sarah had declared that the population of Edentown and its dependencies had to let the strife and violence of the outside world pass over it, that it had to bend like the willow, keeping strong, surviving by being flexible. It was a speech he had also heard at the fire of the Great Council of the Iroquois.

“I accept that she won’t take sides in the affairs of governments,” Duncan argued. “But surely she understands this is different. We aren’t talking about government, but of brutal murder. If we alone know and don’t save those men we are complicit in their deaths.”

“She asked for my vow, Duncan, when I asked if there might be a place for me at Edentown. It was very simple. Above all else, keep this place protected from the world. And I told you. When you made your own vow to Adanahoe you bound me too. It is the Iroquois we must help. Not nineteen strangers who only inhabit Woolford’s ravings. There is a lost relic to find, that is all we know for certain. And one of us must stay.” There was pain on his friend’s weathered face but also a grim determination. What was the secret the old Nipmuc refused to share with him? Duncan turned away.

He found Sarah in the little log schoolhouse, where he had helped her learn about the ways of the Europeans after her years with the tribes. She had been wild and skittish, with an insatiable curiosity about what the books called “civilization.” She sat now on the very school bench she had occupied during those first days, facing the large slate on the wall where, as then, chalk-drawn images were centered over their English words.

She did not turn when he approached. “You shall not go, Duncan,” she declared in a tight voice, speaking toward the slate. “You are bonded to me.”

He spoke to her back. “I shall not go. I am your servant.”

His words clearly saddened her. Her hand moved to her face to push aside a lock of auburn hair but he did not miss the way she also wiped at an eye.

“I used to go among the villages with my father, my one father,” she said, adding the phrase that she always reserved for the beloved old chieftain who had adopted her, killed by the aristocrat who was her biological father. “Some of the villages had already lost most of their men. In many there were more captives adopted into the clans than warriors of Iroquois blood. I asked him why we must have so much war and he said because our enemies make war and our gods wanted to keep the Iroquois free. If we are not free we are nobody,” she added.

He hesitated, confused at her shift in tense, as if she were speaking now of recent events. “I’m not talking about war,” he said. “I’m talking about Woolford and Red Jacob and nineteen more like them. Would you have Red Jacob die for nothing? Would you ignore justice? Would you not have me try to save more men from these murderers?”

“I would have you live, Duncan McCallum. I would have you keep the troubles of the world out of Edentown. We will not become part of this trail of death you seek to follow.”

“Are you so certain it is something you can decide?”

“What I am certain of is that spring planting must be done and new fields cleared. Crispin and Conawago have laid out plans for a water wheel and a new mill. We owe it to our people.”

“This is not just a random killing. Nineteen men. It has the sound of a conspiracy, of a plot. I still wake at night from nightmares of my mother and sisters being bayoneted, my father and uncles swinging from gibbets. They just wanted to be left alone too. But then a few men in the English government started plotting.”

Sarah clenched her fists.

“It started out with little things,” Duncan continued, speaking toward the teacher’s desk that had once been his. “A few bands of drovers disappearing along mountain tracks, never to be seen again. Tavern fights between English and Scots that had always ended with only a broken bone or two suddenly ending with Scots impaled on swords. A solitary traveler wearing a kilt shot from afar. Everyone wanted not to see. No one wanted to look behind the killings. Wars had come and gone in the outside world for centuries without affecting the Highlands. By the time anyone recognized the beast that had been unleashed on the clans it was too late. Villages bigger than this became inhabited only by ghosts.”