Bone Rattler (46 page)

“How is he named? Where does he sleep?”

“He sleeps with the ox, if that’s what you mean. You be a Ramsey, too,” the Welshman concluded, chagrin in his tone.

“He does not sleep here.” The ox, Duncan knew, was the most valuable asset of the mill. At the end of the day it would not be left to shift for itself at the forest edge.

“Up at the Flats,” the frightened man explained. “Come nightfall every sane Christian is at the Flats, with the mission folk. His name is Alex, just Alex. He was too young to have remembered his family name, or from where he was taken, though most likely his kin all died the day he was enslaved, those many years ago.”

For a moment Duncan had a vision of savages closing in on them from every direction, and he had a compulsion to take up the old musket and join the man’s worried vigil. The man’s fear was contagious. “Who are those men outside?

“Hands from the farms. Came with two loads of bark last week, went back to find the families they worked for dead and scalped.”

“Sarah Ramsey. Have you seen her?”

“’Course not. And the Reverend’s party got a good head start if you be seeking the bounty on her.”

“Reverend Arnold is at the mission?”

The hollow-faced man studied him with a sour expression. “Gone north. I told him he best be charging for burials, ’cause he’d be a rich man by winter. It’s the way of Ramsey business. Where it
goes you need lots of prayers and lots of rum,” he said with a twisted grin. He inserted his gun back through the window and resumed his vigil.

Duncan paced along the dirt floor of the little cabin. A pile of molding pine needles in one corner might have been a pallet. An iron cooking kettle hanging on a peg looked like it had been used for years without a cleaning. A pile of squalid rags might have been spare clothes. He paused at the jugs, all but four of which were turned on their sides, empty. Behind the four was something hollow and shiny. He bent and pulled it into the light, its metal gleaming now. It was the ornate breastplate Arnold had worn into the woods. Except now it had two large bullet holes, dark stains along their jagged edges.

He carried the plate to the Welshman, who glanced at it and winced. “Like I said, got to keep your prayers up around those Ramsey captains.”

Duncan considered the words. “You mean it wasn’t Reverend Arnold wearing this.”

“They spent a night with us, the Ramsey men. One of them was so scared he just sat in the corner of the stable shaking, clutching an iron nail in his hand. That Hawkins had come in with another group, telling what the Indians would do to any man who tried to flee when they moved north. That wretch kept shaking, wouldn’t even join in Arnold’s prayer service outside. He was useless. In the morning Arnold said he needed a man to deliver a message to Lord Ramsey. The poor lug would have none of it, then Arnold said he could wear the breast plate. He took the message, put on the plate, grabbed his gun and was gone. A few hours later those two outside come in carrying the plate and the gun, asking if they could trade for a jug. They found his body less than two miles from here. The fool didn’t know the plate was made to stop arrows, not bullets.” The Welshman tightened his grip on the gun.

“And the message?”

“That be the business of the Ramsey captains.”

Duncan stepped outside, studying the little hollow, noticing for the first time a faint scent of smoke in the air, coming, judging from the wind, from over the next ridge. He stroked the horse’s back, considering the scene, then approached the rumbling millstone.

He spoke greetings to the boy, offered to get him some water, even complimented the brindled ox. The boy did not acknowledge his presence. The ox stared at Duncan with its huge black eyes.

Duncan stepped directly in front of the mill axle. “Alex,” he said, naming the boy for the first time. “I have been called a ghostwalker, too,” he ventured. “I am a friend of Sarah Ramsey,” he tried, still without result.

He paused frequently as he walked down the rough, rutted track that led out of the hollow, looking over his shoulder, unsettled by the Welshman’s expectation of imminent attack, watching the northern horizon with deep foreboding. Suddenly he stumbled over a freshly plowed furrow. He was at the edge of a cleared field, with a team raising dust on the far side, dragging a stump.

A broad-shouldered man with long blond hair, not much older than Duncan, stood with his back to him, making a speech on a low rise a hundred feet away, his black britches unbuckled at the knees, a wide-brimmed black hat on the stump beside him. Duncan hurried forward, anxious to find someone in the man’s audience to speak with, then halted as he reached the top of the little hill. There was no audience. The man was energetically addressing a field of stumps, in German. Duncan paused, not certain how to extract himself, then lowered his pack and settled onto the nearest stump as the stranger greeted him with a wave and kept speaking.

He listened awkwardly, casting about to confirm that he was the only human in the audience, then strained, able to make out a few German words.
God,
Duncan heard repeatedly, and
beggar,
and
bread.
As the dust began to clear, he saw a collection of buildings beyond the field. Beside a few struggling apple trees lay a pile of black material he took to be charcoal, beyond which was the roof of a building dug into the hillside with a tall stone chimney out
of which a line of smoke curled. A girl in a black dress milked a cow. Children worked at a fence woven of twigs and branches that enclosed a vegetable garden. Dogs played along the bank of the meandering river.

Duncan found his hand absently rubbing his neck. If Reverend Arnold or Hawkins were at the mission, he could be in an iron collar by dusk. He became aware that someone was speaking to him. “Did you?” the stranger in the white shirt was asking, switching between German and English. “Did you think it too long?”

“I could find no fault with it,” Duncan offered.

The German worked his tongue in his cheek as he weighed Duncan’s words. “In a month I will depart for Saxony to recruit new settlers to join us. My father, the Reverend Zettlemeyer, says they will expect me to offer a sermon about faith in the New World. If we are to pay for their passage, then we must be certain they are committed to our missions.”

“This is Reverend Zettlemeyer’s mission? The Moravian mission?”

The German confirmed with a nod.

“I came about the boy.”

“We have four boys.”

“The boy with the ox.”

“Ah. He’s not a—” It almost seemed the German was going to say Alex was not a boy. He pushed the long blond hair from his brow and settled his hat on his head. “That one’s not right in the brain. I am afraid that’s all you
can
do, is see him.”

“He lived with the Iroquois.”

“And something of him died with them. His soul. My mother says an old Indian named Tashgua ate his soul.”

“If I cannot speak with him, I will be satisfied to have him listen.”

“We’ve tried things, for months we have tried things. There are secret ways, from the old country,” the Moravian continued. “Last month my mother read the Book of Job to him, backwards,” he added in a meaningful tone. The young Zettlemeyer surveyed his audience of stumps, offered them a mock bow, and gestured back
toward the buildings. “My sisters bake bread today,” he said, and then extended his hand. “I was christened Martin.”

Duncan, shouldering his pack, reached out and took the hand that was offered, introducing himself by his Christian name only. He studied the little community as they walked toward it. “An impressive enterprise, for you to be able to pay for new settlers,” he ventured. Moravians were known for their missionary zeal, not their wealth.

Martin laughed softly. “Never a profit from our hard-scratched fields, nor even the furnace. Father has arrangements,” he said, then waved and called out to the milkmaid.

Ten minutes later Duncan sat in the shadow of the cowshed, drinking from a ladle of fresh milk as the freckled adolescent girl who had been tending the cow, one of Zettlemeyer’s younger sisters, blushed at his side. The Moravian village, consisting of ten buildings other than the furnace, seemed a world away from the bark mill. All the inhabitants he encountered as he wandered along its paths—a soot-stained man on the bank above the furnace who fed charcoal down its chimney, two woman doing laundry in a wooden tub, the children in the garden—seemed peaceful, even contented. But the graveyard by the little chapel held over three dozen graves, a third of which appeared to have been dug in recent weeks.

He walked among the graves, most of which were marked with crosses of hewn wooden slabs, whitewashed and lettered in an ornate hand, many only in German. As he straightened a leaning cross, anchoring it with a stone, he saw half a dozen markers set apart from the others, not new but perhaps only months old.
Private Albert Simpson,
he read, then
Corporal Robert Griffin,
and
Ensign Bernard Atwood.
Soldiers. There were some old moccasins at the base of one of the six identical crosses, a faded green cap on another. Not exactly soldiers. He had found the rangers who had been murdered the year before. As he paced along the graves, he trod upon a long, unyielding object obscured by a clump of wildflowers. A narrow slab of precious iron. He paced the graves and found four more, all embedded in the ground. Someone, a
Highland Scot, had protected the graves with iron pigs, straight from the furnace.

He tidied the graves of Woolford’s men, then sat in the shade of an old maple at the edge of the cow shed, watching the track from the bark mill for signs of the ox and his keeper.

“They have a wagon to fill by the morrow,” a voice suddenly said, stirring him from a half sleep. “So they will work until the light fails. Come eat with us. You failed to mention you knew my father from Edentown.” Martin Zettlemeyer helped him to his feet, and Duncan hesitantly followed him to dine at a table of planks set on barrels under a tall tulip poplar tree. He had deliberately not mentioned it, had hoped to avoid the elder missionary, the only person in the village who could put a full name to his face, who could name him as a fugitive.

The Moravians engaged in polite conversation at their hearty meal of sausage, boiled potatoes, maize pudding, and fresh bread, carefully avoiding personal questions. But clearly they had been informed about Duncan’s intentions at the mission.

“He has lost all the talents of society, the young one,” declared the solemn, gray-bearded senior Zettlemeyer. “He faithfully performs his duties and sits through all our worship services. That has to suffice, and perhaps that is the way it will always be. When Herr Weiser comes next month, we will send the boy back with him.”

“Mr. Weiser?” Duncan asked.

“Conrad Weiser, of Berks County, in the Pennsylvania colony. He comes on errands for the government, to speak with the tribes. Conrad will know a farm safe from the war that needs an honest hand. The boy is no trouble.”

“He is nothing but a beast of burden,” Duncan said.

“In the eyes of the Almighty,” Reverend Zettlemeyer opined, “we are all beasts of burden. If we can each find the particular burden we are destined to carry, then it is a blessing.”

“Find our true skins you mean.”

Duncan’s words stopped all conversation at the table. Everyone
looked toward the old reverend, who worked his tongue against his cheek, as Duncan had seen his son do. The Reverend cast an oddly pained glance at Duncan, then, too loudly, asked for the potatoes.

Duncan insisted on helping to clear the meal, carrying the empty dishes to one of the tubs where the Zettlemeyer daughters worked with scouring rushes and hot water, singing a spirited hymn in German. Still the ox stall was empty. As he carried his last load to the washtub, one of the women appeared with another bucket of hot water. But when he turned from his task, she was gone—and the bucket hadn’t been emptied over the dishes. He found no sign of her as he circled behind the buildings, but discovered behind the woodshed a makeshift laundry line of white linen strips, pieces of old bedding torn into bandages.

From the shadows he studied the buildings with new interest, rubbing the head of one of the mission dogs that had followed him. The furnace and charcoal shed. The neat cabins that housed the inhabitants of the mission village. The cow shed, a wagon shed, the summer kitchen. A large springhouse with the door slightly ajar. Why would the woman take hot water into the building used for cold storage?

Duncan broke off a small piece of the sausage he had saved from dinner, wrapped in a leaf, coaxed the dog to follow him, and tossed the morsel into the open door. He slipped in behind the dog, hugging the inside wall. From behind a blanket hung on a rope at the rear, the woman gave a half-hearted reprimand to the dog, but did not rise from her work. As the dog nosed the blanket open, a sturdy hand reached out and patted its head. But the woman did not look away from her patient.

The man lying on the straw pallet was a few years older than Duncan, with long reddish hair clubbed at the rear. His face was puffy, his jaw clenched against pain as the woman lifted a poultice and began washing an ugly, oozing wound on his right calf. On the wall behind the man hung a black leather cartridge box, beside a knife sheathed in deerskin.

As the man flinched and twisted, Duncan saw the ugly color of the leg in the sunlight. Without conscious thought, he stepped forward around the edge of the blanket.

“Gangrene.” The terrible word leapt out uncontrolled, as if he were suddenly in his Edinburgh classroom again. “It will be rotten soon.”

The woman gasped. The man stretched for his knife but recoiled in agony, his only resistance a curse as Duncan knelt beside him to examine the wound, then sniff it. It was an old bullet wound, poorly healed over, which had broken open and festered. “How long ago were you shot?” He sniffed the poultice, then nodded with approval. Oatmeal and linseed.