Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  With an audible sob a sturdy-looking woman stepped from the crowd and wrapped her arms around Luke.

  “Praise the Lord,” Occom declared. The assembly quickly echoed his words. “And tomorrow,” he added, looking directly at Duncan now, “when Reverend Wheelock arrives with the detachment of redcoats, they will gape in amazement at the prodigious size of Charlestown’s heart.”

  Some of the assembly began clapping. One man raised an arm and shouted “Huzzah!” Occom kept looking at Duncan. He had recognized him and inserted a warning into his words to the crowd. Duncan backed away. He returned the hat to the log, stepping aside for a goat pulling a cart with two young girls in it, then decided to look for the tavern.

  He was sitting against a big maple across from the tavern, sharpening his knife with slow, contemplative sweeps over his whetstone, when Conawago found him.

  “Troops are coming,” the old Nipmuc announced as he sat beside Duncan. “Regulars, from Boston they say.”

  “Who told you this?” Duncan asked.

  In answer Conawago pointed to Noah, who approached now from between two heavy farm wagons. “The reverend warned me,” Duncan said to the elder. “He must have spoken to the fort’s commander.”

  “There is no commander, just that drunken old soldier who hasn’t left Fort Four in nearly two years,” Noah explained. “He is obsessed with the raid on St. Francis, according to a town councilman. We delivered a dispatch to the council, ordering them to make ready accommodation and fodder for a dozen dragoons.”

  “Dragoons would need a flatboat for their horses. There weren’t any in Agawam when we left. That means they are a day or two behind us at least.”

  “The message said to expect Reverend Wheelock,” Noah continued, “as if the soldiers were escorting him. But his followers tend to exaggerate things, to make him sound like some kind of royalty. Just a coincidence that they are coming together, I suspect.”

  His followers, Noah had said, as if he no longer counted himself among them. “Reverend Occom says that Wheelock’s college will be an oasis in the wilderness,” Duncan observed, to gauge Noah’s reaction.

  The tribal elder betrayed no emotion, only silently returned Duncan’s stare. “The tinker leaves in the morning. He knows this land. Go with him.”

  “I do not trust the tinker,” Duncan said. “He keeps too many secrets.”

  “Secrets of life, secrets of death, secrets of gods. Is that not why all of us go north?” Noah asked. “His secrets are only of his heart.”

  Duncan wiped his blade on the grass, returned it to his sheath, and looked up, not certain how to take the words.

  “When I was a boy,” Noah said, gazing at a distant mountain, “my grandfather would disappear for weeks at a time. Once, I asked him where he went. He said to the mountains because that’s where men are free, where he could run with the stags. I grew up thinking there was some paradise in the wilds of the north where all creatures loved one another. Later I realized it was just a wide land where few people lived, white or red. But then the men from the north taught the world better,” he said, gesturing at a boulder a few feet from where Duncan sat.

  Duncan looked in confusion, back and forth from the big rock to the elder. Then he saw that the flat face of the boulder had letters carved in it. He rose and knelt at the stone, chipping away some of the encrusted lichen. “P-h-” he read, then peeled off more of the crust. “Phineas Stevens.”

  “This is where it began,” Noah said. “Under this very tree.”

  Duncan looked up at the broad limbs as if he might find an answer there. “I don’t follow,” he confessed.

  “When the distrust started, when the despair and hatred started. In 1746.”

  Duncan glanced at Conawago. It was the blood-soaked year of the Battle of Culloden, in the faraway Highlands, the year Duncan’s family had been slaughtered by the English.

  “Phineas was escorting some women who had been milking cows. Some French and Abenaki leapt out of cover and killed him in cold blood. A few months later, hundreds came from the north and besieged the fort. I met them on their way back after they had given up the siege. I asked one of the French officers why they had to kill all the time. He said because God and their king said so.” Noah shrugged. “The war was long. Braddock’s massacre. Lake George. Niagara. The Fort William Henry massacre. Ticonderoga. Quebec. St. Francis. I still don’t understand it.”

  “The war?”

  “Not war as such. The treachery men commit on behalf of gods and kings.”

  Duncan had no answer. He finished cleaning away the debris to make the name on the rock legible again.

  “Is it true,” asked the sachem in Christian clothes, “that all those men who died in Boston did so for a secret paper?”

  “Thirty-seven. Most as they slept.”

  Noah gave a heavy sigh. “In the tribes we are taught that when a man dies in his sleep, his soul will be unprepared and confused. When my grandfather lay dying, he insisted that we hit him with switches to keep him awake until the end came.” He seemed to consider Duncan’s words. “And my friend Jonathan Pine?”

  Duncan realized he shouldn’t be surprised. Many of the Christian Indians in New England knew each other. “He died,” Duncan said. “He wasn’t asleep.”

  Noah held Duncan’s gaze for several moments. “I don’t know if I should resent you or thank you for saying no more than that.”

  “Thank him,” Conawago inserted. “Just know that Pine died well, saving that boy’s life,” he added, extending a hand toward Will, who was now skipping along the street with Molly at his side.

  “How do you know that big brute of a man?” Duncan asked after a moment, nodding toward the bearded figure who had greeted Noah earlier, now on the steps of the general store, laughing with his companions.

  “A friend of the tribes. He brings food sometimes to the old ones in the winter, though I wonder if it may be just so they will sign his papers.”

  “Papers?”

  “Papers for land.”

  “Deeds?”

  Noah nodded. “Deeds. He collects deeds for land that no one has ever owned, then trades them in the settlements like animal skins. I said to him once that I do not comprehend how land can be reduced to a piece of paper, that the land belongs to the gods. He laughed and said no need for me to understand, only necessary that a proper English magistrate understands.” He shrugged. “If not him, it would be another. He has a big heart.” Noah glanced at the bearded frontiersman then fixed Duncan with an amused gaze. “Later I suspect he will take off his shirt, set a shilling on a stump, and invite all comers to wrestle him,” he added, as if in invitation, then produced three apples from a belt pouch. He distributed two to his companions, then bit into the third. “In the mountains to the north there are places no man could track you,” he said to Duncan in a pointed tone. “Mountains of bare earth and heather. Rather like Scotland, I fancy.”

  “I am not fleeing,” Duncan replied.

  “We are all fleeing something. Sinners flee their priests. Saints flee their temptations. That’s what the Christians would say.”

  Duncan silently studied the elder, who had lived so many years as a Christian, had even joined the devout Apostles of Reverend Wheelock. Was he having a crisis of faith? Or had he worn the Christian clothes as a shelter, as a mask to flee something himself? His gaze drifted back to the boulder, and he realized that while those who carved the name meant to honor the dead man, there would be others, from the wilderness, who might see it as a monument to rebellion.

  Conawago spoke in a near whisper. “We both had teachers before the Christians.”

  “Yes,” Noah replied in a cracking voice. “The biggest mistake Christians make is to think only Christians can speak with gods.” He looked toward Reverend Occom, and for a moment it seemed as though he would weep.

  HIS GAZE ON THE TAVERN entrance, Duncan lingered with Munro on one of the benches set up for an evening Scripture service, half l
istening to a pair of adolescent sisters sing old hymns. Will and Sadie tossed a hard-boiled egg back and forth on the torch-lit street, to the delight of a dozen boys. Hayes seemed to have disappeared again.

  As the sisters concluded with an off-pitch rendition of the Doxology, one of the lay leaders rose and solemnly announced that he would lead a prayer for the brave.

  “Pray keep courage and faith resolute in one who has given us so much,” the man in dark homespun intoned. “In this hour of greatest need, may he who has given us so much know our faith in him remains steadfast.”

  It was not a prayer for the brave in general, Duncan realized, but for a specific brave man. “Beg pardon,” he said to the young farmer beside him. “Who is it we are praying for?”

  “The great hero, of course. May he be freed soon so those Worcester raiders can feel the same righteous fist that saved us from the devils of St. Francis.”

  “Major Rogers?” Duncan asked. “Freed from where?”

  “Freed from his torment, freed from false accusation.”

  “Accusation?”

  The man fixed Duncan with a reproving gaze. “Ain’t ye heard? Major Robert Rogers, the great liberator of the frontier, is being held in Canada, kept in chains on charges of treason!”

  11

  DUNCAN SPENT ANOTHER AGONIZING HOUR waiting for Brandt to appear, his heart heavy with the news of Robert Rogers. Patrick Woolford had written to Edentown months earlier with the welcome report that Rogers, hero of the frontier, had won command of the garrison at Michilimackinac, the British fort in the far northwest. Duncan and Woolford had both assumed that Rogers would be there for years, for it was the ideal location for the major to pursue his dream of discovering the elusive Northwest Passage to the Pacific. But now someone in the government had decided that Rogers, like Duncan, should hang. Duncan had only briefly met Rogers in an Albany tavern years earlier. Horatio Beck, who had gone to Ticonderoga to examine records of the St. Francis raid, had surely known of the charges against Rogers. Did Beck think Duncan and Rogers were connected in some conspiracy?

  His eyes kept drifting toward Hayes, who had resumed trading with the various strangers who wandered over to his outstretched blanket of goods. He was selling ribbons and writing lead and the odd spoon or fork, and from the snippets of conversation Duncan caught he seemed as interested in learning about conditions in the north as in selling his wares. He heard a solitary tribesman deny any interest in trading, but Hayes called him closer and spoke in low tones with the man, then gave him a slip of paper and a tin mug, which the man accepted with a nod, carefully stowing the note in a pouch at his belt.

  When Brandt finally appeared, stiffly marching with a weapon on his shoulder, as if on a parade ground, Duncan was instantly on his feet. Munro put a hand on his arm. “Let him work on his thirst for a while. I gave him a half shilling as a token of our friendship, and he’ll be eager to spend it. After three or four pints our conversation will go a mite easier.”

  Thirty minutes later they found the wiry corporal sitting at a table by the hearth, staring at his powder horn, which now lay on the table before him. From above came an unexpected cooing. Duncan recalled that the proprietor’s wife kept pet doves.

  “Sorry to hear of yer predicament,” the corporal said as Duncan pulled up a chair.

  Duncan cast an uneasy glance at Munro. The Scot, who had cannily worked his way into conversations with the townspeople, had told Duncan that Brandt, who had lost his family early in the last war, had long ago ceased being paid by the government. He had become a self-appointed sentinel at the fort, living on the generosity of the settlers, who would never let a St. Francis ranger starve. Recently, however, he’d been unexpectedly paying off all his old debts. Dismissed by many as a harmless fool, he was fastidious in his care of the modest arsenal, as if always expecting an attack. But what had Munro told Brandt of Duncan?

  “I conveyed to the corporal how yer betrothed got dragged away by her unhappy father to his farm in the Champlain country,” Munro explained as Conawago settled beside Duncan. “It’s why ye need to hasten to Ticonderoga and find a boat to the north end of the lake,” he added, and turning from Duncan’s withering glance, he called for the barmaid.

  Brandt drained his tankard and ordered another. “Must be a beautiful thing,” he observed with a dip of his head.

  The man’s high, scratchy voice and his mannerisms so reminded Duncan of a rooster that he had to clamp his jaw to stifle a grin. “I’m sorry?” Duncan asked.

  Brandt lifted his tankard to Duncan. “True love, son, true love.”

  Munro was able to turn the laugh that rose in his throat into a polite cough.

  “I am eager indeed to reach Ticonderoga,” Duncan said. “How is the trail?”

  “Trail, you say? Nay, t’is a military road. Didn’t the good major and I work to finish it, all the way to Crown Point. Good to have our hands busy after the return. Heavy hearts need busy hands, my ma used to say. Bless her soul.” The corporal dabbed at an eye.

  “Heavy hearts—after St. Francis, you mean,” Duncan suggested.

  “The ’Nakis had scalped and burned and butchered all across the frontier, from Maine to Champlain and down into Massachusetts. We stopped ’em good, didn’t we? Never the same after that October dawn. ‘Take ’em down,’ the major says, ‘take ’em all down. Too many of us have buried children and women. Let ’em choke on their medicine.’ That was the speech he gave when we gathered in the dark. ‘Let ’em feel the fist of good King George,’ the major says. May God rest that royal gentleman,” the corporal added with a dip of his tankard. That king, the second George, had died a year later.

  Brandt quieted, and seemed to lose himself in the dancing flames of the hearth. He spoke abruptly, in a distant voice now. “The babies are screaming, but nothing like their mothers when they see them covered in blood. One threw her infant from her breast into the river rather than see it killed in front of her. I wake in the night hearing them screams. But we had to do it, don’t ye see? ‘They have to choke on their own medicine,’ the major says. ‘Have they not slaughtered the babies of settlers for decades?’ ” Brandt made a stabbing motion, as if with an imaginary knife. Conawago and Duncan exchanged a worried glance. Brandt did not seem entirely tethered to reality.

  “ ‘Just a little boy, he has a bad foot,’ one cries. A woman holds up a papist cross over her breast. ‘But yer Bible says an eye for an eye,’ my lieutenant shouts to her.”

  “What did you find there?” Conawago asked. “In the battle, did you discover something surprising?”

  Brandt hesitated. “They was dead, and then not dead.” The corporal still spoke to the fire. “They ran into the Jesuit church for safety, but as the fire spread through the town, the blaze reached it, too. I saw several, a ’Naki grandmother with a gray streak on top of her head like a polecat, with a little girl clutching a cornhusk doll, and a Jesuit priest. But except for the back chamber of stone, the church was all wood. It went up like an inferno. God, the screams.” Brandt went quiet and gulped down more ale. “We never wanted that, not for the church to burn, not for all those Christian women and children to die like that. But an hour later, as we formed up to retreat, there they were, on the slope above us, at the edge of the forest with their town burning below them. Alive again. That grandmother and the little ’Naki girl with her doll, and that priest with a bunch of children, all just watching him.”

  Duncan recalled what Chisholm had said when asked about Brandt. Not all who seem crazy are insane. “Him?”

  “The major. I told him. Dead and risen again.”

  “They must have gone out a window,” Munro pointed out.

  “Nary a chance. We had posted men to be sure no one else escaped from the church. Several warriors had run in there at the beginning of the fighting.”

  They sipped at their ales. “Did the major acknowledge them?” Duncan asked. “As if he knew them?”

  Brandt slowly nodded. “At least the
priest. He seemed to be waiting. It was as if they knew each other.” Brandt shrugged. “Know the land before ye attack, the ranger rules say.”

  Duncan chewed on a piece of sausage left by the barmaid, gauging the nervous corporal who had survived the St. Francis expedition. “You mean he had a secret informer.”

  “Wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t.”

  “You said the priest and the others waited, as if they had to confirm something?”

  The old ranger frowned and sipped at his ale before replying. “When they saw him, they didn’t run. That’s why I remembered. Major Rogers, he was like a demon to most ’Naki. They were superstitious about him, truly scared of him. But not these, not that old woman and the papist. The major held something up above his head. A white doeskin pouch with those flowers that ’Naki women like to embroider with threads and quills. The priest held a hand above his own head and made a motion. Funny, I thought, it was like a ranger sign, made a fist, then spread his fingers as he waved in a spiral motion. For a ranger it would mean disperse and hide in the forest. But how would a priest know that?”

  “Had Rogers gone into the church before the raid?” Duncan asked.

  “Not that morning. But he made a reconnaissance the night before.”

  Duncan remembered the romantic stories that had been published about Rogers’s grand St. Francis adventure. While they varied considerably, they all agreed on one thing, based on Rogers’s own official report—Rogers had gone into St. Francis the night before the raid. He was fluent in Canadian French and passed himself off as a casual traveler. He had done so, he said, to assess the strength of the enemy, but what if he also met an ally inside the town and perhaps told him to ready a parcel for him to retrieve during the raid?

  “Did the church burn to the ground?” Munro asked.

  Brandt, staring intensely into his ale now, seemed not to hear. “People hide up in their rafters and lofts, thinking they’ll escape notice. They’ll have no chance when the flames engulf them.” His face hardened. “There’s trophy poles everywhere, even in front of the church. At least a score of scalps on every pole. Hundreds of scalps. The ’Nakis even ripped the hair off little girls. There’s a special pole of nothing but scalps of long, straw-colored hair, some still with ribbons in them. God’s blood, but they scream. The air is full of smoke and the stench of blood and burning flesh. A dog runs by me, all on fire. We gotta keep order, dammit, like good English soldiers. Ain’t gonna be coming for us for a day or two, the major says, so we’ll get a good start toward Number Four. Safe Number Four. Blessed Number Four.”