Bone Rattler (47 page)

“Nigh a year,” the man grunted, clenching his jaw again in obvious pain. “It was wedged into the bone. It’s been no problem until now.”

“It has become dislodged and is moving about,” Duncan declared, “mortifying the flesh. If we do not cut, the gangrene will take hold.”

“Cut?” the woman asked in a stunned tone.

“I studied with surgeons. We need more water, scalding hot. Your best knife, freshened on a stone. Rum. Lots of rum. Have you knitting needles?”

The woman nervously nodded. “But my uncle allows no spirits here, none closer than the bark mill.”

“Then he must be carried outside to the table, with men to hold him down and a strap in his mouth. And cover his eyes. He must not watch the blade.”

The man’s eyes had gone wild and round. “Like hell you’ll cut me.” His words were few but enough for Duncan to recognize the Scottish burr.

“Then you will die,” Duncan declared, the firmness in his voice surprising even him. “As certain as daybreak you will die a terrible and slow death if we do not remove the offending metal and clean the wound inside. This time next week you’ll be in the ground.”

The words took all the fight out of the man on the pallet.

In a quarter hour all was ready, and in another quarter hour Duncan was done, sewing up his incision with the mission’s finest thread. He looked up at last to find an audience of eight wary faces. “Now,” he said, finding his confidence rapidly leaving him, “all we can do is pray.”

“That,” solemnly replied Martin Zettlemeyer, “is what we do best.”

A great wave of fatigue surged through Duncan as he watched them carry the man back to the springhouse, then gazed at his hands, which had begun to tremble. It was the first time he had ever cut into a living human being.

As he lowered himself onto the bench by the table, the cowmaid appeared with a jug of cold milk, then with a nervous glance toward the house produced from her apron a piece of bread dipped in precious sugar. As he reached for it, the girl stopped his hand and wiped the blood from it before he ate.

“Do you speak English words?” he asked when he finished.

“Oh, yes. Papa says if his Indians can speak three or four tongues, then we can try two at least.”

On the table Duncan absently rolled the round bullet he had excised in the surgery. “His Indians?”

“It’s why we are here, to christen the Indians.” She cast a worried glance at Duncan. “But you mustn’t think we condone . . . .” Her mouth twisted in confusion. “You’re a Ramsey,” she added, as if it were the cause of her sudden discomfort.

“I have an Indian friend as well,” Duncan assured her. Only after the declaration left his tongue did he realize how strange it sounded, though it was perhaps the hundredth time that day he had thought of Conawago, left with the dead at the Chimney Rocks, preparing himself to become one of them.

“I was wondering about the iron on the graves,” Duncan said. “It reminds me of my old country. Is he the one who does it?” he asked, nodding toward the springhouse.

“Different ones come,” the girl said, gazing now at the cemetery. “They usually appear at dawn, smoke a pipe or two with my father, and are gone.”

They spoke of small things. Duncan pointed out a hawk soaring over the field. “Were you here last year when the ghostwalkers arrived?”

The girl shuddered, then silently nodded. “That was the second day, after all the killing. Brought in like captives, with the red-coated soldiers.”

“Major Pike?”

“Oh, yes,” the girl said dreamily. “On his fine white horse. He made sure Miss Ramsey got a bed, and a real dress. One of mine. I was happy to offer it.”

“And Adam Munroe?”

The girl nodded again. “When he arrived he had his hair in braids and animals painted on his skin. I thought he was playacting, like my brothers and I do sometimes among the stumps. Some play the Indians, some play our fine brave soldiers in their red tapestry.”

“Did you ever hear the boy speak?”

“Twice he spoke.”

“Only two times?”

“I mean his tongue was open, then closed, then opened once more before it went numb forever. At first, when he arrived, he wanted to tell everyone about the tribes. Then Miss Ramsey spoke to him after they beat Mr. Munroe, and he was silent.”

Duncan looked up in surprise.

“Poor Mr. Munroe, we pray for his soul. That first night Mr. Munroe and Alex escaped. But the pickets caught them because the boy fell and twisted his ankle. The soldiers dragged them both back and beat Mr. Munroe with sticks, cut off his braids, and scrubbed off his paint with rushes. Miss Ramsey, she spoke in the tribal tongue to the boy, like a mother chastising her son. But weeks later, when the great lord came, Alex talked a lot. They gave him sweets and paid my mother to make new clothes for him. He talked and talked as they made notes. Then one day while they were here, an old ranger came, asking about the men who had died, asking about the traders who come from the north, and Alex stopped again. His
tongue has not worked since. My brother says when he gets older you’ll be able to put a harness on him like another ox and he won’t say a word, just mind the gees and haws.”

“An old ranger named Fitch?”

The girl nodded and smiled. “A nice man. He carved a bird for me.”

A figure emerged from the biggest cabin, Reverend Zettlemeyer, holding a Bible. As Duncan rose to follow him toward the springhouse, he pocketed the musket ball and turned back to the freckled girl. “When you playact among the stumps,” he asked, “who wins?”

“Why, the soldiers, of course. Always the soldiers.”

 

 

For the second time in a month, he entered a room filled with a woman’s quiet German prayers. But this time the man on the pallet, though asleep, was still alive. He stepped past the Reverend’s wife reading the heavy Bible, and noted for the first time a long bow with a quiver of feathered arrows beside it. He turned over the cartridge belt hanging on the peg above the pallet and froze. The knife was out of the sheaf, the cold blade expertly pressed against the artery of Duncan’s thigh.

“I don’t recollect offering to pay my butcher,” came a dry, rough voice. The Scot was awake, and surprisingly nimble.

Duncan did not release the small leather box on the belt but slowly traced the two digits of its tarnished brass adornment. “The Forty-second saw rough service at Ticonderoga.”

The man did not reply, but did not press the knife when Duncan shifted away, kneeling to inspect his sutures. “You must drink twice as much as usual. One part water, one part milk. Keep a poultice on the incision.” He paused, glancing out the window for the milkmaid. There was another question he should have asked her. How could she know Adam Munroe was dead? He turned back to his patient. “Do not try to walk for a week; then use a crutch. If you open the wound, the flesh could mortify.”

“Right,” the man muttered. “Then ye’ll be back and announce
it’s time to saw it off anyway. I know doctors. I leave on the morrow, and I’ll slice anyone who tries to stop me.”

“Mrs. Zettlemeyer,” Duncan turned to address the woman in a level voice. She looked up from her Bible. “When the skin turns yellow because he has walked on it too soon, then you must take him to the woodshed and have one of the boys chop the leg off.” Duncan leaned over to the cool water in the stone trough at the head of the springhouse, moistened his fingers, and touched the moist earth. “Right here will do,” he said, and with faint marks of mud drew a broken line on the man’s skin above the knee.

His patient’s face turned white as he tried to squirm backward, out of Duncan’s reach. The woman’s hand closed around his good leg and he moved no more. “If you think that was painful,” Duncan said, “wait until the ax. By then you will scream in agony each time someone touches the skin of your leg. There will be unbearable pain for a couple hours, then you will likely die anyway.” He turned to the sturdy German woman. “Dig his grave by those of his friends the rangers.”

The Scot moved no more, just gazed abjectly at the line drawn on his skin.

“Were you at Ticonderoga?” Duncan asked.

The man accepted a drink of water from Mrs. Zettlemeyer. “All the regiment was at Ticonderoga,” he replied sullenly. “I was a sergeant. It’s sergeants who run the battle.”

“Who was on the ridge above?”

“Onondagas. Then we saw the Hurons on the ledge above them, where they could destroy the old man and the other Iroquois with five minutes of musketry.”

“Tashgua? Tashgua’s band was there?”

The Scot nodded.

“You mean the Hurons were preparing to attack Tashgua’s band?”

“That’s what we thought, that’s why we ran up there. But they weren’t attacking, they were waiting.”

“If Tashgua wasn’t there to fight, why was he there?”

The Scot’s thin mouth twisted. “You wouldn’t understand. None of us really understood for months.”

“Try me.”

“Gods get new faces.”

“Do not speak in riddles of such important things. I must know!”

It was Reverend Zettlemeyer who answered, from the shadows where he had hovered. “It is what old Tashgua does,” he said in an already strained voice. “He stands between his people and their gods, to explain to his people the demands of their spirits. If he fails, the spirits will abandon them, and the people will die. But he knows that spirits can change, just as men can change.”

Duncan searched their faces. “I still don’t understand.”

“Everyone says the French won that day,” the deserter said in a bitter voice, “with nigh on two thousand British lying dead and wounded, and no more than one-tenth that on General Montcalm’s side. But not to old Tashgua, not to all the Iroquois chiefs who came with him. To them, the British and French gods were battling it out on that field, and they had never seen anything like the British one. What else could explain thousands of men willingly throwing themselves to the cannons? He had never imagined such a powerful god. He was so shaken, his daughter had to lead him away.”

“That’s when he began doubting himself,” Duncan said.

“That’s when—Mother of Christ!” the man gasped, raising his knife again. “Look at you!”

Duncan stared in confusion. Nothing had changed about him, except he had stepped closer to the full sunlight cast by the chamber’s small window. Outside, during the surgery, the man had been blindfolded. For the first time he was seeing Duncan’s countenance in direct light.

“Step further into the light!” the man demanded. “Do it, or I swear I’ll rip your stitches out of my leg.”

Duncan took an uncertain step forward, into the pool of light.

“He said he had a brother,” the Scot declared in a suddenly
wrathful voice, “an English doctor who sold out their clan, betrayed an old uncle to the gallows to please his lacy lairds.”

Duncan’s mouth went dry as tinder. “Where is he? Where is Jamie?”

The man seemed to have forgotten his pain. He studied Duncan with a cool, thin smile. “Many a night I’ve sat and listened to him recount the ways all traitors must be dealt with. Last time he said his brother the doctor would have a medical kit with cutting tools. He vowed to use each one on you before you breathed your last.”

Duncan felt the cold scalpel in his heart already. “It isn’t like that. They traced my uncle to me. I never—”

The man lurched upright and launched a hand at Duncan, hitting his chest before collapsing in pain.

Through his own agony, Duncan saw the man had ripped the tartan sash from inside his shirt.

“You’ll not use this for your lying and cheating of true Scots.”

“I am the eldest of the Highland McCallums, I—”

“There be no English boots to lick here. Save your song for when you’re tied to the post. He’s learnt a thing or two from the tribes, about making men sing.” The deserter stuffed the plaid inside his own shirt, then seemed to brighten. “My nurse this afternoon told me ye be a Ramsey slave. The river’s up, high enough for Ramsey canoes to journey here in a day or two, with Major Pike not far behind. Ye got nowhere to run but into the arms of y’er heathen brother.” Despite the obvious pain it caused him, the man burst into a harsh, wheezing laughter.

A hand was suddenly on Duncan’s shoulder. Reverend Zettlemeyer was at his side. Duncan let himself be led out of the springhouse like one of the living dead.

A
GOAT TIED TO A TREE. Woolford’s words from the night on the Hudson echoed in Duncan’s mind as he sat on the bench where Zettlemeyer had led him. He had thought he could escape that fate, even save Lister and Sarah in doing so. But now his brother wouldn’t come for him because the army dangled Duncan like bait; he would come because he hated Duncan as much as Duncan hated the English aristocrats. Either way his brother would die; either way Duncan would be powerless to save his friends. The deserter in the springhouse was right. He didn’t deserve the piece of tartan. He was an arrogant fool to even playact as a clan chief. The Ramseys and Pikes of the world were destined to win, would always win. He would wear an iron collar around his neck for years, and every time he touched it he would think of Lister and his brother rotting in their graves, because of him.