The Constable's Tale (7 page)

Blinn reached for his pistol, but Harry gestured for him to leave it alone. The man looked too old to cause trouble. He was squatting in front of a blackened tin pot containing a freshly cut-up chicken in some water. The man was naked except for a greasy loincloth and turned partly away so Harry could not see his face. Slabs of withered skin flapped and quivered as he struck a fire steel against a piece of flint underneath the pot. The effort had little effect in terms of making sparks. The sparse heap of tinder looked too damp to ignite anyhow.

Either the old man was as hard of hearing as Scroggins or he was ignoring the trio. Harry stepped closer, deliberately snapping twigs under his boots. The man slowly turned his head, acknowledged their presence with a disinterested glance, and said in unaccented English, “Do you have any fresh flint?”

“Comet Elijah?” Harry ventured.

He gave the flint one more weak blow, then threw it and the fire steel to the ground. Comet Elijah had never been known for his patience.

“Do you know this man?” asked Blinn.

Certain now of his identity, Harry nodded. He wondered if his astonishment registered on his face.

“Is that chicken you’re getting ready to cook?” Blinn again. Though he could see plainly that it was.

“Well, it will keep a man alive. Even though it’s not as good as the roast beef of old England.”

Harry, Blinn, and Noah looked at each other. They were miles from New Bern. There was no possibility the fife-and-drum corps music could have traveled that far. Or that what Cogdell had served for supper in his tavern the night before would have been reported to this location on Trace Creek.

“Why did you say that?” asked Harry.

“What did I say?”

“The roast beef of old England. Why did you use those words?”

Comet Elijah frowned, as if feeling accused of something. “I just had roast beef on my mind when you were coming up, that’s all. I don’t know why. I was looking at my little chicken, and roast beef came into my head.”

Harry felt he needed to be on guard. He wondered what other reverberations Comet Elijah might have picked up, assuming this apparent act of mind invasion was not some colossal coincidence. It was the kind of thing that seemed a regular occurrence with him.

“Don’t worry,” he said, as if determining Harry’s thoughts perfectly. “I can’t hear anything you want to keep to yourself. Don’t you remember me telling you that?”

He used his arms to help himself to his feet in the painfully slow way of old people. “Do any of you buckoes know anything of medicine? I have noticed that most white men have some doctor training.”

“Not much besides what you taught me,” said Harry. “You showed me there is something in the forest to cure most anything that bothers you.”

Comet Elijah’s features rearranged themselves into a grin. Pleased by the flattery.

“I fear that something ails my
ótkwareh
,” he said, mournful again. “It seems to be slowly disappearing. It has retreated noticeably just since the end of winter. I think it is being absorbed into my body.”

“What is an
ótk
. . . ?’” whispered Noah, stumbling on the word.

“It’s Tuscarora for the male member.” Then, to Comet Elijah, “I don’t think we need to see . . .” But he was too late. With a swift motion, the loincloth slipped away from the slender waist.

“This has happened to many of my people since the arrival of the whites,” he said, gesturing toward the evidence. “So far I have escaped, but now I think it is my time. My body is eating my
ótkwareh
, and I will soon die.”

“There is nothing wrong with your
ótkwareh
,” Harry said. In fact, it looked very healthy for a man of his age. “Now, please put that back on.”

Comet Elijah obeyed, complaining as he stooped to pick up the cloth that they had not looked close enough to make an informed ruling.

“Well, I am dying, that is definite. Last night I was visited by some of the stonish clan. They asked if I had seen the Giant Head. He has been gone for a long time, but now he is in the forest again, looking for humans to eat. I know it was only a dream, but such visions come to those who are nearing the entrance to the Sky Land.”

He scratched his rump, giving it a good deep dig.

“How is my old friend Natty doing these days?” he said. “And his son—what’s his name? Hendry. Has Hendry returned from the war yet?”

“Natty is fine. My father is still missing. Lying in an unmarked grave on the Spanish Main, most likely.”

“I am sorry to hear that. I didn’t think anything good would come of him going off. He never dropped by to see me, so I didn’t know if he was dead or not.”

Harry’s mind went back to the day everyone decided Hendry was not coming back. He had refused his family’s pleadings and gone off to fight for the king at a place called Cartagena. The Spanish proved not as willing to leave their outpost on the South American continent as the British were eager to see them go. People later called it the navy’s worst defeat in history. Hendry’s mates in the New Bern militia said the last time they saw him, he was walking at a crouch toward the walls of Fort San Lazaro under showers of musket-and cannonballs.
The only one of them who had not thrown down his scaling ladder that fearful night and fallen back. Hardheaded to the end, they said.

Fifteen months later, at the approach of Harry’s tenth birthday, Natty told Talitha he wanted to take the boy on a winter hunting trip in the mountains. It was something Natty and Hendry, along with Comet Elijah and several of their planter friends, did every year during the season when there were no crops to plant or harvest. A weeks-long excursion into the West. Talitha protested that such a trip would be too much for a ten-year-old boy. But Natty said it was time Harry began learning the things Hendry would have been teaching him were Hendry still around. In the end they left it up to Harry. Talitha said later she knew she had lost when Natty turned to Harry and said, “So, son, would you rather spend your time with the men, or stay back here with the women?”

The trip was moderately successful. More often than not they killed enough to keep themselves alive, and the times when food did run out they were welcomed into villages whose people Comet Elijah knew. But as they began making their way back, they ran into an awful storm. People would talk about it for years to come, how it was the worst outbreak of snow, wind, and freezing cold those mountains had seen in more than a hundred years.

The men had started setting up their camp earlier than usual that afternoon, knowing from how fast and hard the temperature was dropping, and from a certain uneasy feeling in the air, that they might have to stay there for a while. Harry remembered how he went walking off to investigate a sound he had heard in the forest as the first flakes came down. Before he knew it, the camp, along with the men, were gone. Lost in a grainy gray haze of wind-driven snow.

He later pieced together what had happened next. As soon as somebody noticed him missing, they fanned out to search. Each man went in a different direction. All Harry remembered was night falling around him and the snow getting thicker on the ground, the snow whipping around him so hard that he could not see beyond the closest
trees. He finally lay down beside a rotted-out log for a nap and woke up an unknown time later feeling warm and safe and well under a makeshift shelter of tree branches and slabs of bark. At the entrance a small fire burned cheerily despite the wind gusts. Encircling him were the strong arms of Comet Elijah.

“I have you to thank for teaching me to be a man, Comet Elijah. You and Natty.”

“You were a good learner.”

“We guessed you’d gone on another of your long hunting trips, or maybe to visit your people, the ones who went to Canada. But you never said good-bye and you never came back.”

“It was time to go. I had nothing more to teach my people. Or you.”

Noah and Blinn had been following this exchange with looks of surprise and curiosity. Harry said to them, “I think what he means is I wasn’t listening to him anymore. Or to Natty or anybody else, for that matter.”

“I also wanted to see my relatives the Haudenosaunee, the ones the French call Iroquois. The Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga, and my own Tuscarora cousins who survived the uprising and went up to live with them.”

“Comet Elijah was an important man,” Harry said, directing himself to Blinn, who had arrived in New Bern from England only four years earlier and had shown scant interest in the town’s history. Harry realized he himself knew little more than Blinn, tales from the old days just not striking him as information he needed to have. But he did know Comet Elijah’s story. He had heard it over and over again from Natty.

“He was the young king of a Tuscarora band that lived north of New Bern. When the southern group attacked the Swissers, he kept his people out of the fight, and by doing so saved many lives. King George himself rewarded them with unquestioned ownership of their land. Some—the ones who didn’t move away to Canada—still live on it to this day.”

“The king gave them their own land?” asked Noah.

“Well, yes. It sounds strange now, but that’s what happened.”

“I decided I would go up to Canada for a visit,” Comet Elijah said. “See if they were still angry with me for not helping them kill the whites. By the time I got up there nobody seemed to care anymore, so I was safe. I stayed for a good long time and even took a wife, but she died one winter. Then after a while I got tired of it. It’s too cold up there. I wanted to come back home, see the old places again. See how you came out. Has the young warrior gained wisdom to go along with his knowledge of the tomahawk?”

“I’ve changed, Comet Elijah. Mostly for the better, I hope.”

Blinn made an impatient noise in his throat. Curiosity satisfied, Harry guessed. “I am sure we all got a lot to talk about,” Blinn said. “First, though, we need to ask you some questions.”

Harry told Comet Elijah about the murders, including the peculiar poses of the bodies.

Blinn said, “It looks like it happened during the storm that came through here three nights ago. Where were you, exactly?”

“I went into my longhouse when the storm came up.” He pointed in the direction of his ragged home. “It was right around dark.”

“Did you see anyone?” said Harry. “Any travelers coming through here?”

“Now that I recollect, I heard hoof beats later in the night. Somebody riding by fast. The rain had stopped, but the wind was still blowing. Yes, I am sure I heard a horse. It went by too fast for me to hear what they were thinking.”

“They?” said Blinn.

“The man and the horse.”

Harry said, “Do you remember the direction the sound was coming from? Where they might have been headed?”

Comet Elijah made a pass through the air with a withered hand, signaling no. “I was under my blanket, trying to keep the rain off. But I may as well not have bothered. I was getting soaked. That night was not a nice time for me. We can talk more about it later on, if you’d like.”

Harry looked back toward the ruined camp, then at the pot of uncooked chicken.

“This is no way to live. You need to come and stay at my place. You and Noah here would make fine barn mates.” He introduced Noah and briefly told his story, how he had been left homeless by the murder of the Campbells.

“There’s plenty room in the barn,” Noah agreed. “It’s better even than a tavern. You can have your own pile of hay.”

“That’s a fine offer, but I want to spend a few more days in the woods.” He looked around. “Every one of these trees is an old friend. I see many have wounds from people draining off their life’s blood.”

“What about the Giant Head?” Blinn asked in a mocking tone. “Aren’t you afeared of getting gobbled up?”

“I may need to battle a monster tonight,” Comet Elijah said, nodding. “My ancestors would expect me to put up a good fight.” Giving it another moment of thought, he added with a sly grin, “Might do my
ótkwareh
some good, too.”

CHAPTER 7

57: In walking up and Down in a House, only with One in Company if he be Greater than yourself, at ye first give him ye Right hand and Stop not till he does and be not ye first that turns, and when you do turn let it be with your face towards him, if he be a Man of Great Quality, walk not with him Cheek by Joul but Somewhat behind him; but yet in Such a Manner that he may easily Speak to you.

—R
ULES OF
C
IVILITY

VAPORS FROM A SIMMERING POT GREETED HARRY AND NOAH AT
Natty’s house. It was well past midday. Blinn had started back to town to report to the sheriff the discovery of the old Indian. Natty was not
at home, but judging from the stew’s rich and nearly done appearance, Harry reckoned he was not far away.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Noah, his eyes wandering around the dark interior. “It looks like something that grew out of the ground.”

The way Harry had it figured, Natty so missed his former life in the Albemarle, where the dividing line between outdoors and indoors was sometimes vague, that he tried to remake it here. Over time the house had taken on a wild, shaggy look, more like a dwelling in the man’s swampy homeland to the north. Thick garlands of hanging moss covered the walls inside and out. Their curling, dried-out tendrils gave the place a feeling of year-round autumn in another world. Worked into the moss were animal parts: snakeskins, antlers, turtle shells, bear and panther bones, and some other smaller, less easily identified objects, including one about the size of an apple that looked eerily like a jawless human skull.

Harry said, “Natty wanted his own place away from the main house, away from Mother, who can be a thorn in the side at times. My house is even farther away, near the edge of our family’s property.”

As Harry was explaining this, Natty stepped through the doorway, bending his neck to the side to clear the top. He had the rangy look of a runner. A narrow face with sharp features, pale blue eyes, and neck-length hair going raggedly gray, tied in back with a ribbon. He had on an open-throated deerskin hunting shirt and leggings. A necklace of blackened shark’s teeth gleamed with moisture against his sweaty chest.