I tried yelling down to let them know I just seemed to be taking a vacation from my corpus delicti, but Ed snapped a sharp command. Ochskahrt ran off. Things went misty at that point. I was surprised: When you’re a free spirit, you’re the one supposed to get transparent. It wasn’t that way at all. Everything else, rocks, bushes, people, became more insubstantial. You could see right through them. Including my oaken perch, which made me nervous—if the damned thing dematerialized, I might fall and break my ectoplasm.
A ghostly Ochskahrt came back with reins in his hand. On the other end was a horse, Oliver Miller’s. Well, he wouldn’t be needing it. I felt a tug, as if I were being drawn by a magnet. If I’d been religious, it would have been a good sign. As it was, I floated off my branch, toward the overcast. Last I saw of my friends, they had my mortal remains flopped over the saddle, leading it and the horse beneath, in the same direction the rebels had gone.
Meanwhile, I continued rising through the mashed potatoes: a thousand feet, ten thousand... by the time I estimated my altitude at a hundred miles, the sky had gone velvet, my velocity somewhere in the thousands of miles per hour. All around the stars were at their fullest-colored, planets circling some, against distant clouds of black-lit dust, faraway spiral galaxies. Whatever else was happening, the special effects were terrific. The voice of Bullwinkle the Moose kept saying “billions and billions and billions...”
The stars drew into spindles, one behind me a rich red, another in front, a deep blue. Blackness congealed into a tunnel I seemed to rush down at increasing speed toward actinic brilliance that resolved into a human form, radiating glory. A bandy-legged guy with a short haircut, heavy eyebrows, a two-button suit.
“Meet Edward William Bear—” The figure intoned as I sailed by. I’d heard that voice, but couldn’t place it. “—who, at the ripe age of a hundred eighty, figured he hadn’t lived long enough, and planned to tamper with Time itself. But, as he’s about to learn, he hasn’t traveled back to the eighteenth century at all. Instead, he has entered the Twilight—”
Floating past, I never got to hear the rest.
I began slowing, found myself in a harsh-lit room, filled with mist, surrounded by the faces of Lucy, Ed, Ochskahrt—my wife, my daughters, even Mom and the father I’d never known. Clarissa, dressed in a floaty gown (white was never her best color), stepped forward. “Go back, Win,” she pleaded. “I need you, darling. Your work is not yet complete.”
She hadn’t complained about that for a long time.
I extended a hand but couldn’t reach her. “Honey, I’m dead. I don’t know what you and Ed and Lucy are doing here, but I’m going fishing with my pop—ask Mom where she put that pair of socks I never found after her funeral. Hi, Mom!”
Mother folded her arms, shaking her head.
Clarissa begged, “But, Win—”
“All right, so I shouldn’t wear lavender socks. But you can come fishing, too, if you want.”
They all started frowning. “Okay, Winnie,” Lucy growled. “If that’s the way it’s gonna be, don’t say I didn’t warn you!” The acceleration started again, in reverse, out of the light, toward the ominous red end of the tunnel.
“Warn me about what?” I squirmed around to see where I was going. Ahead, a ragged mountain range was lit by flames. Waiting, green cape flapping, arms wide open, a hideous leer on the face as I bulleted forward, was another figure I recognized.
It was Edna Janof’s portrait in the center of a U.S. ten-dollar bill.
9
Free Man’s Burden
THURSDAY, JULY 17, 1794
From the day he was horn, he was trouble.
John Baldwin never bothered to carry a rifle. When he wanted somebody shot, he just shoved the bullet in with his hairy thumb. Right now, he was thinking
about it...
“But do you not understand, friends,” argued a husky voice just managing to stay out of the hysteria-range, “that upon our leave-taking, our kindly neighborhood Inspector of the Revenue dispatched a servant to Pittsburgh, requesting—”
Another voice broke in. “Demanding, you mean!” “Have it your own way, sir,” the first voice growled. “Demanding that Major Thomas Butler send a file of bluecoats for the purpose of defending Bower Hill against further complaint from General Neville’s dissatisfied custom.”
“Nonsense!” That from an authoritative skeptic, the kind that’s always wrong. “Butler is a friend, for all he commands the garrison at Fort Fayette. I my self fought at his side against Complanter and his savages. He would never stoop to defense of the Neville Connection against his—”
Nearby, soft, mysterious music issued from an empty grain bin. Ochskahrt had been instructed to avoid any composition written after 1794, but I don’t think the message got through. He was playing “Stardust.” None of the contending voices was Baldwin’s. A plainspoken man of the soil, he knew enough to recognize confusion when he saw it. And stay the hell out of it. Somebody else spoke, one of the McFarlane brothers, James or Andrew. I hadn’t learned which was which, yet. “Inspector Neville will also have quilled a missive directing General Gibson and Brigadier Wilkins of Pittsburgh to call out their militia in aid of suppressing ours.”
That observation earned assenting mutters, even ironic laughter.
“They in turn,” Ed volunteered, “will pass the buck to the sheriff, asking him to raise a posse.”
Scary silence. It would have been nice if he hadn’t chipped in. I’d worried about this moment. We were strangers here—in far more than the geographical sense. None of these people were trusting each other, right now, let alone foreigners. Then the older of the McFarlanes, James, I guess, laughed. “‘Pass the buck’? A clever turn of phrase, friend Edward, I must remember it!” General laughter.
McFarlane, a major in the Revolution, had been elected leader of the expedition the night before—after a deal of enthusiastic buck-passing, whether they had a name for it or not. Individuals better qualified appeared less willing to have their names associated with rebellion. He’d ridden from Pittsburgh with news about the sheriff having been alerted and that seventeen GIs had gone from the Fayette garrison to Bower Hill. One of the buck-passers had been the local sheriff, John Hamilton. No relation.
A toothless ancient, wearing a faded black many-buttoned coat, cranked himself to his feet, raising his hands above his wispy scalp in supplication. “Gentlemen, I abjure you in the bowels of—”
“Bowels?” Ed was getting into the swing, and it made me nervous. “Oliver Miller lies gut-shot, and you speak of bowels? Who might you be, old man?” “Why, he’s old John Clark, pastor of the Bethel Presbyterian Church, yonder,” replied McFarlane. The rebel leader pointed across the clearing, giving the geriatric case a nod of encouragement. “Speak up, pastor. What would you have of us?”
The old man pointed a shaky finger at McFarlane. “I would dissuade you from the enterprise before further bloodshed.”
“Pastor, it’s difficult,” said another man, who looked enough like the Major to be his brother—and in fact was, “to comprehend the position of your church, its having supported the Revolution to the extent that Tyrant George was wont to refer to it as ‘the Presbyterian Rebellion.’ Has the clergy lost its love of liberty where whiskey is involved?”
The preacher, no stranger to whiskey himself to judge by the veins in his nose, opened his mouth, said nothing, and closed it. At the moment, in the glare of yet another kind of morning after, the Bower Hill minibattalion, augmented by an astounding force of five or six hundred men—“an expedition of over three hundred guns,” history books said—called up during the night, were just realizing that they had the makings of a revolution on their hands. John Holcroft and his party were certain to be prosecuted unless they were supported by the surrounding community sufficiently to force events in some other direction. There was considerable debate. Some called, like Pastor Clark, for meek submission, others for compromise. The hulking Baldwin sat quiet in the background, propped agains
t a wall, stropping a huge, crude-forged fighting blade on his boot-sole.
It had stopped raining twenty-four hours earlier. Still this place dripped. I lay a yard away from Baldwin, at the rough stone footing of a palisade of rotting logs, my breathing not quite so painful now. The unexpected aftereffects of forty-four years in stasis had left me weak and helpless through the night.
And perhaps envious. Holcroft and his men could cherish the satisfaction of having been in a battle, although Tom the Tinker’s pullback to Mingo Creek Church hadn’t been a bit less ignominious than our own to Couch’s Fort, a moldering defense against the Indians about four miles southeast of Neville’s place. I seemed to be no more than a casualty of lying in wet grass too long.
Ed sat beside me, the other half of the “Bear twins,” new volunteers in the struggle against taxatious tyranny, fighting mad and fresh from the wilderness “west of here.” Somewhere around Cleveland, we left it vague. Back in Ochskahrt’s lab, we’d discussed using the name “Baer,” Pennsylvania being crowded with immigrated Germans. The likelihood of running into someone who could handle a language neither of us spoke canceled the idea. “Bear” is an English name, and in a pinch could hint at our Red Indian ancestry. Nobody we were dealing with—excepting Albert Gallatin—had ever bothered learning to tell a Ute from a French horn.
It helped that we’d been at the ruins of Couch’s Fort, where we knew they’d turn up the next morning. Excise-related encounters of the tar-and-feather kind had been accumulating since 1791. We gave them a story about having heard of the exploits of Tom the Tinker even out in the hinterlands of Ohio. It also helped that we’d brought our own guns, that sort of plumbing being in short supply.
For several hours after Bower Hill, I couldn’t move a muscle. The condition was progressive: when I’d regained consciousness, even speaking was too much. I swam in a red fog thick enough to keep me from feeling much. Now and again, the fog would thin. I’d perceive that Ed and Lucy and Ochskahrt were carrying me, or later that I was belly-down over a saddle. Four miles through rough, almost roadless country should have been uncomfortable that way, but it wasn’t. I didn’t wonder until later whether Oliver Miller’s horse would be missed by its inheritors, and by then there was too much company around to ask about it.
We’d passed my illness off as a minor bullet wound acquired at Bower Hill during the moment of greatest chaos. Lucy—presented to the rebels as our cantankerous mother—had adjusted my suit, underneath the buckskins, to simulate a bruised crease in my side. It even seeped pink-tinged plasma, extracted from body fluids, into the linen bandage she’d wrapped over it.
The bullet wound had also solved the problem of credentials. These people were neighbors, in many cases related by blood or marriage, engaged in activities conducive to the sale of a lot of rope to the government. Individuals were trying to decide which side to take and whom to trust. But where there were wounded, no one from the otherwise tight-knit Washington County communities asked who they were or where they came from. Their injuries were proof of their sentiments.
That time came, as it does in any room full of people, when nobody could think of anything further to say. The strains of “You Light Up My Life” wafted from the horse-feed department, across the compound.
Baldwin stood, lithe as a cougar despite his size, the huge blade swinging close to one knee. “Will no one say ‘enough’ to this palaver?” He panned his glare for everybody to enjoy, declaring between gritted teeth: “I be but an ignorant farmer, no fine speechmaker like some here. But the law of conviction has taken place in my one breast to guide me to do right. Neville must be made to hear his name called in a public court, to undergo the ridicule of a lawyer, to be an object of contempt for the public to gaze upon—else be put out of the way like a maddened dog—are we to live free of his annoyances.”
His arm became a blur. Thump! Twelve feet away, his knife had buried half its blade in the wall. Decayed flakes drifted to the dirt floor. “There, boys, I’ve cast my vote!” He set his mouth and folded his arms in defiance. It was the last he spoke all morning.
Major McFarlane was in no such speechless frame of mind. “Er, upon reflection, I have become aware of the rashness of this venture.” Then he looked straight at Baldwin, who was busy trying to wiggle his toad-sticker out of a log—another terrific reason never to throw a knife. “But we have gone too far now to retreat. The militia will march in force to Bower Hill and demand Neville’s resignation as Inspector of the Revenue—” There were murmurs, growls, some laughter. “Hear me! Upon which resignation, the General will be received as a good citizen and restored to the confidence of the people!”
Boos and catcalls. Someone moved to replace McFarlane with Baldwin. The Major laughed, allowing that would suit him as well as any other course. Baldwin blushed and hid his face in his hands. Democracy raised its ugly head: voting proceeded, and seemed to go on and on for hours, for these people a recreation as much as anything.
I huddled in a blanket, nodding in and out of blessedly dreamless sleep. That last nightmare had filled my quota for the next century. Somewhere between naps, Baldwin’s “plan” to ambush and assassinate Neville was voted down, McFarlane’s milder proposal adopted. That’s when they committed their second mistake: to handle arrangements for the march, they appointed— a committee.
I shivered, turned over, and, to the lilting melody of “Over at the Frankenstein Place,” went back to sleep.
I think Lucy put him up to that one.
10
Liar’s Flag
“How you feeling, boy?”
“Hunk?" I woke with a start, seizing Lucy by the arm. “Shhh! You’re not supposed to be here when there’s...” I trailed off because there wasn’t anybody else around. I’d laid my hand over the old lady’s mouth. The eyes above it glared dangerously. The eighteenth-century man’s-world business was the dumbest thing I’d ever had to deal with. I’d have given anything to have Clarissa with me. “Uh, sorry, Lucy.”
I released her, propped myself on my elbows, took a deep breath. She hunkered beside me, a mischievous twinkle replacing the glare. I rolled over, stretched my arms, then stood up and began stretching everything else in astonished pleasure. I felt fine. I felt more than fine. “What’s going on?” I asked. “What did you do to me? I could whip my weight in revenuers with one hand shoved up my—”
Pulling an earlobe, she said, “We didn’t do a thing,
Winnie, not a blamed thing.” Footsteps forced me to bite off a reply. Ed, poking his head around a corner, followed it into the compound. Behind him, Ochskahrt tripped on the gate-sill, ended up facedown in the dirt. Adjusting the big flintlock in his belt, Ed scuffed a moccasin and looked me up and down.
“You’re in the pink, Win, according to your instruments. We’ve sent word upstairs to Ooloorie, just in case. She’ll find out more if she can. Meantime, the weather’s good, how do you feel about a four-mile ride?”
I shook my head and grinned. “Back to Bower Hill?” He nodded. I rearranged the big knife in my waistband, bent without the usual grunt, and grabbed the rifle where it leaned against a wall. I opened my mouth to tell them what a piece of cake it would be—
“C’mon, boys, we’re burnin’ daylight, an’ there’s federates t’put outa our misery!”
“Er, Lucy...” Ed stepped forward to whisper there still must be company outside. “Only one soldier was killed at the second battle of Bower Hill, and everyone who—”
She wrinkled her already-wrinkled face. “Spoilsport!” Then she said to Ochskahrt and me, “Let’s get our carcasses outa here, ’fore he ruins all the fun!” She stopped me in the doorway as the others exited. “Glad t’see you up an’ around again, Winnie. Had us worried for a while, there.”
“I had me worried, too!” I stepped out into the noonday sunlight, and a ragged cheer went up. I looked around behind me to see what the fuss was all about, then realized it was for me. Five hundred men were seeing to their horses and equi
pment. Some “company.” I grinned and waved, then started looking for my own horse.
Funny thing: It wasn’t until this moment I realized that these were dead people, cheering me because I’d damned near joined their number a couple hundred years before I’d even been bom. I’m certain they all felt alive, as unsure of their personal destinies—to me, the stale news of history—as I felt about my own. I’d been acquainted with a traveler from the distant future once, that flying-saucer jock I’d reminisced with Ooloorie about. Had he counted me among the already-dead? I climbed on my purloined cayuse and did the human thing: tried not to think about it.
My companions had acquired transportation. The march from Couch’s Fort to Bower Hill, a pleasurable excursion now that I had the use of myself again, was completed by five o’clock that afternoon. The horses were left with some of the wounded or unarmed. They’d tried including me in that detail, but I refused to surrender my rifle to anybody. There was something special we’d come to see, and it seemed every yard along the way had brought me closer to full health. The whole world was celebrating with me, the sun shining, the birds singing, the crickets cricketing. The militiamen decided on a formal occasion, drawing up around Neville’s bullet-riddled manor with drums clattering, fifes squittering, feet stomping in the closest thing Washington County could offer to military pomp and parade.
McFarlane and his officers took places on an eminence near the house to direct the “siege,” but had agreed to try peaceable methods first. The forty-three-year-old combat veteran had been third-string choice to boss operations. When Sheriff Hamilton, the regular militia colonel, had refused, command was offered to young Benjamin Parkinson of Mingo Creek. He’d passed on grounds of insufficient military experience. David Bradford and James Marshall of Washington Town had been urged to take part, but declined, Bradford on account of conflict of interest—he was the local state’s attorney. This was nothing if not a respectable insurrection. The laurel (or hemlock) was passed to McFarlane.
L Neil Smith - [North American Confederacy 06] Page 6
