Original Death amoca-3

by Eliot Pattison

  His assailant whistled and another figure emerged from the aisle of the barn to confer with him. As his head cleared, Duncan saw that the sinewy newcomer was dressed in the same green jerkin as his companion.

  “If you are truly rangers you have a chance of catching these killers,” Duncan interrupted. “My name is McCallum. I just arrived in search of someone who lived here. This happened only two or three hours ago. The raiders probably fled up the slope into the mountains.”

  The man with the scarred face turned with a sour expression. “I am not inclined to take advice from a murderer.” The cow bleated again, and the man kicked a pail to the second man. “Get someone to milk the damned beast, Corporal,” he spat, “then search every house and find me a witness.”

  “Sergeant Hawley,” the soldier acknowledged with a knuckle to his temple and disappeared.

  “Don’t waste your time,” Duncan said. “Everyone’s dead. The children must have-”

  “Sagatchie,” the sergeant muttered impatiently.

  Duncan only saw a quick motion out of the corner of his eye before something hard slammed into his skull. He collapsed unconscious to the floor.

  He awoke choking on dirt. A cruel laugh rose nearby, and more dirt landed on his face. Despite the throbbing pain at the back of his skull, Duncan shook the dirt off his head and struggled to rise. He was being buried. His legs and half his torso were under a foot of fresh earth. He tried to push himself up only to find his hands still tied. He spat a Gaelic curse, then leaned back on the ground and with great effort heaved his hips upward, pushing away enough soil to free his legs. Duncan rolled and began to stand, only to be pulled backward by a sudden strangling pressure on his neck. He was bound to a tree by one of the neck straps used by the tribes to restrain their captives.

  He turned toward the jeers, louder now, discovering three men leaning on shovels, staring at him in amusement. “Every hour you wait,” he growled, “makes it more likely these killers will not find justice.”

  The nearest man, the wiry corporal from the barn, swung his spade as if to spray more dirt at Duncan, then laughed at Duncan’s reaction and lowered it. “We don’t waste time, lad. We be giving these poor souls the Christian burial they deserve. And the king’s justice has already found the one who did this butcher’s work. Your hands were covered with their blood when we found you.”

  “I did nothing more than try to help a fellow Scot,” Duncan snapped. His voice trailed away as he surveyed his surroundings. They were behind the little church. Along the building’s rear was a row of bodies wrapped in blankets, makeshift shrouds no doubt taken from the beds of the houses. Crude plank crosses leaned on the wall above all but the last two bodies. Joshua Halftree read the first, then Rebecca Halftree, Martha Strong, Ezekial Strong, Barnabas Wolf, and Lizzie Oaks.

  “You knew them, Corporal?” he asked the ranger.

  The soldier gestured toward the south. “There’s a farm down the road. Sergeant Hawley sent for them. This was their church. They could at least put names to most of the dead.”

  “Most?” Duncan asked.

  “There be a nameless corporal of the 42nd of Foot,” the ranger declared. “The one you gloated over in the barn. His body was sent back with the dispatch rider for Fort Edward.”

  Duncan found he had no stomach for argument. Four open graves lay before him. “Let me help with the digging,” he said in a weary voice.

  The corporal studied him, then approached Duncan. He gestured to the guns leaning near the first cross. “We have ranger loads in those barrels. Know what that means?”

  “Swan shot on top of a full ball.”

  “Tends to take a man down permanently,” the ranger declared as he loosened the strap on Duncan’s neck. “If ye try to run we’ll all fire. Ye’ll be in pieces before ye reach thirty paces.”

  A cool determination settled in Duncan. “If I turn my back on these dead,” he vowed, “you are welcome to put a bullet in me.” Though he had not known any of the inhabitants of Bethel Church, he felt an unexpected affinity for them. They had given a home to Conawago’s kin. In their way they too were more last ones of their kind, and too many last ones were falling.

  They dug in silence, Duncan pausing every few minutes to look around, hoping for a sign of Conawago but not daring to ask about him for fear it could risk his friend’s arrest.

  They had finished another grave when a stranger wearing clothes of brown homespun cloth appeared, carrying another rough cross. Abraham Oaks, it read. They were all the names of Christian Indians, names assigned upon christening.

  “There were children,” Duncan said.

  The corporal gestured toward two shrouds lying together. “Brought from the smithy with the rest.”

  “There were more. Young ones taken from the schoolhouse,” Duncan said.

  The ranger shrugged and kept digging.

  As they finished another grave, a sturdy blond woman in her thirties wearing a bloodstained apron appeared with the last cross, for Rachel Wolf.

  Duncan looked at it in surprise. “But there was another in the smithy,” he called out to the woman.

  She shook her head but said nothing, just pointed to the cross above the church. The man in brown homespun appeared beside her. “My wife means that although the wheelmaker discussed the one God with great interest, he had not been touched by holy water.”

  Hickory John would not be buried in the churchyard.

  “But surely-” Duncan’s protest faded as the tall Mohawk from the barn walked around the corner of the building, leading a horse. Draped over the back of the animal was another shrouded body.

  “Sergeant Hawley says Sagatchie knows a place,” the farmer declared. As he spoke, the sour man who had arrested Duncan appeared behind the horse.

  A place. The Mohawk meant a ground sacred for the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois, where the dead were laid on platforms with offerings to take on the long journey to the spirit world. The tribal ranger stared at Duncan without expression. His war paint was gone in preparation for his solemn duty.

  “He’ll need help,” Duncan suggested to the sergeant. “He will have to build a platform as high as his head and lift the body onto it. Not a job for one man alone.”

  Hawley frowned. “My men are plenty experienced in handling the dead. One of my corporals will go,” Hawley spat, then he turned to the wiry man with the spade, who muttered under his breath.

  “Something to say, corporal?” Hawley growled.

  “Only how it seems a lot of trouble for a dead savage. Any fool can throw a body into a boneyard.” The rough men of the frontier became rangers for many reasons. Some did so for the money, which was greater than that paid to garrison soldiers. Others signed on to keep their homes safe from raiders. Some did so just to kill Indians.

  “There’re words that must be spoken,” Duncan pressed. “Hickory John was one of the last of a great tribe. He must be honored.” The Mohawk ranger cocked his head toward Duncan, surprise now in his deep black eyes. “The spirits must be made aware of his coming,” Duncan added, addressing the Mohawk now.

  The man with the spade gave another jeer. “I know the Psalms, boy,” the corporal growled. “The Lord maketh me lie down in green pastures.”

  Duncan shook his head. “Do you know the names of the spirits that must be called to admit Towantha to the next world? Can you speak the condolence of the tribes? Will you find a snake to carry the news of his journey to the other side?”

  When Duncan turned to the sergeant, Hawley’s gaze was locked on Sagatchie, who stared contemptuously at the corporal. The tribal rangers were critical to the success of the irregular units, and they had to be respected. The sergeant stepped to the Mohawk’s side and quietly conferred. Sagatchie hesitantly handed him the treacherous war ax slung over his back. The sergeant turned to Duncan, lifting the curved club that ended with a hard ball on one side and an iron spike on the other. “Do you have any notion how many this ax has killed, McCallum? Near a
dozen I know of, and no doubt there’s more. Sagatchie can split your brainpan at fifty feet if he has to.” Duncan offered a quick bow of his head toward the Mohawk. “Corporal!” The sullen ranger looked up at Hawley. “You’ll go too.” The corporal cursed.

  “If the prisoner offends the spirits, Sagatchie, you can teach him proper respect,” Hawley added. “Just bring him back mostly alive.”

  Duncan eyed the Mohawk uneasily. Sagatchie’s face seemed chiseled in stone, its expression somber, but in his eyes Duncan recognized the anger that smoldered in such warriors, never totally dying away. He looked over the Indian’s shoulder, increasingly concerned that he had not seen Conawago. Surely his friend would want to be present for the death rites of his kin.

  Sagatchie stepped forward and extended the lead rope of the horse toward Duncan. Hawley refastened the strap around Duncan’s neck then untied it from the tree, handing the end to the Mohawk. Duncan cast one more worried glance toward the settlement before yielding to Sagatchie’s tug on the prisoner strap and following him up the trail into the forest.

  They climbed up steep switchbacks for over an hour, Sagatchie chanting in his own tongue the entire time, until they reached a small valley dominated by hemlocks, interspersed with maples. When they reached a flat where all the foliage was blood red, Sagatchie tossed down the end of the prisoner strap. The surly corporal lowered himself against a massive sugar tree and cut a piece of tobacco.

  “Careful, Corporal,” Duncan said in a casual tone. “Some in the tribes say the spirits of such trees can reach out and pull in humans who show no respect for the place.”

  “What kind of fool talk is that?” the corporal spat.

  “My friend Conawago and I found a skeleton once. The tree was growing over the bones. I said the man must have died many years before. Conawago insisted it had happened only days earlier, because the man had not shown the proper reverence. Of course such a powerful tree would have to have the mark of the spirits on it.”

  The corporal seemed about to curse again, but as he turned he saw Sagatchie untying the horse’s burden, then nervously studied the landscape beyond the tree. A casual glance may have dismissed the regularly spaced, thin timbers in the shadows as a grove of saplings, but now the corporal saw them for what they were, the posts of more than two score platforms, each topped with a decomposing body.

  The soldier shot up and looked uneasily at the massive trunk he had been leaning against. “Jesus weeps!” he gasped and quickly backed away from the tree. Above his head were carved symbols, worked in the wood by many different hands over many years. A human skull had been carved into it, and also a bear’s paw with long curving claws, a leaping deer, and at least a dozen snakes, creatures understood by the woodland tribes to be particularly important messengers to the gods.

  “A sentinel tree,” Duncan explained. “It protects the other side.”

  The corporal frowned but warily looked around the back of the tree as if taking Duncan’s words literally.

  “Some of the ghosts may still linger,” Duncan suggested, “trying to find their way across.”

  He picked up the ranger’s musket, which the corporal had abandoned in his hasty retreat. “Perhaps you’d best keep watch from the creek,” he suggested to the ranger, and extended the weapon to him. “But I would like the loan of your belt ax, Corporal.”

  The corporal grabbed the gun with a sour look, then cocked it, aiming it in Duncan’s direction before tossing his ax to Duncan’s feet and marching to a log by the nearby stream. Duncan gathered his neck strap into a coil, pulled the loop over his head and tucked it into his belt, then paused for a silent prayer with his palm on the venerable tree before moving toward some sturdy saplings.

  As Duncan worked at cutting poles, Sagatchie consulted the sky, the wind, the surrounding trees, and finally a hawk circling high above before selecting a sunlit patch above a short waterfall. The Mohawk made a round of each of the scaffolds, murmuring quiet words, as Duncan worked the posts into the earth.

  There should be other rites, Duncan knew, daylong rites spoken by wise old sachems and tribal matrons, with loved ones joining in, but for Hickory John there was no sachem but Conawago, no matrons, no clan members to gather and recall the heroic deeds of his long life. Like Conawago he was of a disappearing breed, not just because he was Nipmuc but because he was a woodland Indian. Perhaps his greatest achievement of all was that he had survived from the time of the endless forest, from a world that had not known the boundless ambition of Europeans.

  Duncan again choked away his questions about Conawago, determined not to break the reverence of the place. At last they were ready to raise the dead man onto the platform. As they pulled the shroud from the body, Sagatchie seemed to grow more troubled. He looked to the sky and spoke something that sounded like an apology.

  “Your friend,” he suddenly said to Duncan. “The Nipmuc with the kind eyes.”

  “Conawago.”

  “Conawago,” Sagatchie repeated with a nod. He spoke in a low voice, nearly a whisper. “He told me you were trusted by the dead. That you could read them. Why did he say that? What did he mean?”

  “Sometimes the dead can leave behind questions they need to be answered. There were many questions left at Bethel Church.”

  “But you did not even know him.”

  Duncan recognized the invitation in the warrior’s voice and saw the nervous way Sagatchie looked at the other dead, as if unsure they would approve. Duncan knelt beside Hickory John. “Did you?”

  Sagatchie looked into the dead man’s face as he spoke. “Towantha wandered through the towns of the Haudenosaunee when I was young, never staying more than a few weeks in one place, though my mother once asked him to live with us in our longhouse, with our clan. You could see he was lonely, but he always embraced life’s joys. He would carve things, beautiful things. Bowls with stags leaping along their sides. Pipes for the old men, war clubs for the young ones. He was always looking for something. At first it was for a sign of his people, who had been forced long ago from their homes along the Hudson. Later it was sacred places. He knew about places no one else did. When I stood no higher than a yearling deer, he took me to a cave with paintings of bison and huge bears and told me it showed the lives of people from before time, from tribes who only live in the spirit world now.”

  Sagatchie walked slowly around the body. “They will take long to paint his life on the other side,” he added, then gestured Duncan toward the dead Nipmuc and stepped away to gather cedar wood from the stream.

  Duncan clenched his jaw and lifted the dead man’s hands, both of which had been crushed, studying their ruin of broken bones and cuts. He lifted away the shirt, noticing that someone had tried to wipe away the bloodstains. A cloth, which Duncan recognized as one of Conawago’s precious linen handkerchiefs, had been placed over the hole in his chest. Duncan lifted the linen to probe the wound, then moved to the bruises and cuts that covered the dead man’s face and shoulders. When he finished he gazed silently at the dead man, recollecting how he had been killed differently than the others, and separately. The others had died in a row, with Hickory John facing them. He had been forced to watch them die. Duncan looked up to find that Sagatchie had lit a small fire and was extending a piece of smoldering cedar wood around and under the scaffold. The fragrant smoke would attract the spirits.

  “First he was bludgeoned,” he explained when the Mohawk paused at his side.

  “I know not this word.”

  “Beaten with something. I saw a bloody wheel spoke in his shop. They beat him, and then they broke his fingers, probably with the hammer that killed the others. The breaks don’t line up, which means his killers broke his fingers one by one, probably laying each one on his anvil. They knew who he was, knew they were destroying his ability to work, to carve those animals and make his wheels.”

  Sagatchie considered Duncan’s words for several heartbeats. He clenched his jaw. “You are saying they made sure he took l
ong to die.”

  “He suffered long,” Duncan agreed.

  Sagatchie spoke to the dead man now. “Like a captured warrior who frightened his enemies.”

  The words caused Duncan to hesitate. The Nipmuc had indeed died a warrior’s death. “I think he was tortured for some knowledge,” Duncan continued, “some secret, and when he would not talk they lined up the others in front of him. I think the raiders meant to leave no witnesses in any event, but they made sure to kill the others in front of him, slowly, one at a time, meaning to break him. When they finished with the others and he still did not speak, they found another way to threaten him.” Duncan touched the strange medallion he had found in front of the Nipmic’s body, still in his pocket. “He finally spoke, and they finished him with a blade to his chest.”

  Sagatchie frowned, as if not certain he could accept Duncan’s words. “You speak as though you were there with the killers, like Sergeant Hawley said.”

  “I was trained as a healer, to understand the many ways of the human body. I came with Conawago to celebrate with Hickory John, not to bury him.”

  Duncan returned Sagatchie’s intense stare. It was the way Conawago had studied him when they had first met. It was as if certain members of the tribes could see into another human in ways unknown to others. Sagatchie took a beep breath and raised a hand to the sky. Duncan was not certain what had just happened, but the distrust was gone from Sagatchie’s voice when he spoke.

  “Your friend would not let go of this one when we found him,” the Mohawk said. “He was wild in the eyes and frail in the body. I took him to a bed in one of the houses.”

  Relief washed over Duncan. Conawago was safe.

  Sagatchie made one more solemn circuit around the body, holding the smoldering wood near it. “You are finished?”

  When Duncan nodded, Sagatchie gestured for Duncan to help remove the dead Nipmuc’s shirt. “They must see the greatness of the man who is coming to their door,” the Mohawk declared, and he pointed to the intricate designs tattooed over much of Hickory John’s upper torso. Each of the tattoos told a story, Duncan knew, stories of great achievements and spiritual victories, some no doubt lost in the fog of time. Some might well be from rituals no longer known by the tribes. Duncan found himself looking back at the trail. Conawago should be here, Conawago would recognize the stories.