Alex appeared, carrying water in a charred wooden bowl draped with a rag. Conawago knelt, pulling down the lids of the man’s unseeing eyes as he murmured strange words to the woman, who still not did not respond.
Ramsey’s painting. The image recoiled in Duncan’s mind as vividly as the hour he had seen it in the aristocrat’s library. The woman at the cabin at the edge of the woods, cradling a man’s head. Except this woman and this man were Indian.
“Moravians,” Woolford explained when Duncan stepped to his side. “Part of Reverend Zettlemeyer’s flock.”
“But the cabin. The field. The cow. . ”
“Go to any large Iroquois town and you’ll see acres of maize and pumpkins. They understand farming. This is the way of the peaceable kingdom, the Moravians tell them. These two would often travel to the mission on Saturday to be there for the Sabbath.” Woolford began lifting pieces of debris, bending over a footprint here, the mark of a heel there, studying the landscape as if to reconstruct the attack.
Duncan, too, surveyed the rolling field, the stream, the blue mountains in the distance. It was the kind of place where, in his own dreams, he might have started a farm for his clan. But in the world in which he was living, every dream ended in something smoldering and bloody. He gazed in confusion back toward the trees where the man in buckskins had died.
“It was quick, hot work here,” Woolford said, as if to answer the question in Duncan’s eyes. “They didn’t linger, didn’t even finish everything. Like they were in a rush to be elsewhere.” He knelt, studying the dark, moist earth, then the ranger rose and circuited the house, examining footprints and breaks in the plant stems that had been trampled by the raiders. Finally he motioned for Duncan to help lift a half-burnt roof beam that had fallen into the cabin ruins. He raised a charred blanket from the remains of a bed and stepped back to the woman, who had refused to leave her dead husband. Conawago gently coaxed the woman to her feet, then led her to a bench at the side of the cabin that had escaped the fire. As she walked, Duncan noticed the slight, low roundness that said she was with child.
Woolford laid the blanket beside the dead man and motioned Duncan to his side. They silently laid the body on the blanket and carried him to the stream. When they had finished washing the body, Duncan extracted the ranger badge from his pocket and handed it to Woolford. “You probably saved my life with this.”
“There are accounts to balance.” The ranger made no effort to accept the badge.
“Accounts?”
“You buried Fitch.”
“As any good Christian would have.” He searched Woolford’s face, which had gone cloudy. “Say what you mean, Captain. You are thinking of Adam and his wife.”
Woolford looked away. “I knew her. A lot like Sarah, only happy. Always a song in her eyes, yet wise about many things.”
“I saw her run with Alex that day at the mission, but I made the mistake of following them on the same trail. The infantrymen crossed the ridge and got there first. I arrived but a minute too late. They had already. . I stood over her body and ordered them away.”
Woolford washed the dead man’s arm for the third time.
“Already what?”
“Like Alex said. They had business.”
Duncan closed his eyes a moment as he finally understood. “They scalped her,” he whispered after a moment. “But the army is prohibited.”
“We’re a long way from headquarters. There’s always someone with money for scalps. Trappers move between here and Canada. I caught one last year with twenty-five scalps hidden between his beaver skins. More of it goes on than ever before. Fitch and I swore if we ever found the one who opened those purse strings, we’d fill his throat with coins until he could breathe no more. It was what Fitch had been doing while I was gone to Europe, trying to track those who paid for hair, back along the trails to Canada.” Woolford looked down at Duncan’s hand, which still clasped the badge. “Keep it.”
“I will not serve the king,” Duncan insisted.
“The ocean is wide, the king is far away.”
“The king is as close as Lord Ramsey.”
Woolford winced, then stared into the face of the dead man, as if consulting him. He glanced back at the cabin, reached to his belt, and produced his knife, extending it to Duncan hilt first. “Like you announced once, you are a wondrous doctor to the dead,” the ranger said as he lifted one side of the blanket, obscuring the view from the direction of Conawago and the woman.
“I don’t follow.”
“The wounds. I want to know what caused them. Do it,” he insisted as he saw the hesitation in Duncan’s eyes. “Then we’ll wrap him tight in the blanket and dig a hole. He would have wanted a Christian burial. We’ll have to make a marker.”
Duncan slowly closed his fingers around the hilt, then knelt at the stream, slapping the cool water over his face before beginning the grisly work. In ten minutes’ time he had produced two round musket balls. The other wounds had been stabs from short blades. Duncan washed the bullets off and handed them to Woolford, who gazed at them grimly before stashing them in his pocket.
They buried the man on a knoll under a tall sycamore. Duncan had begun a second grave when Woolford stopped him with a hand on his arm, gesturing toward the tree where the man with the arrow had died. The body was gone.
Duncan trotted to the tree in alarm. He could understand enough of the signs on the ground to see that the body had been dragged to the river by someone in moccasins coming from the homestead. Conawago. Conawago had dumped the body in the river while Duncan and Woolford had been digging the grave.
He asked no questions when they gathered at the grave. When no one offered words, Conawago spoke, first in a native tongue that Woolford did not seem to understand, then switching to English, solemnly reciting a Psalm. Duncan gazed at him in surprise, then remembered that the old Indian had long ago been educated by Jesuits. Alex stood beside the grief-stricken woman, holding her hand, showing no emotion as Duncan and Woolford began closing the grave, standing there with the Indian woman until they had finished. When she finally turned from the grave, she walked deliberately toward the ruined cabin. They followed and helped her pry up a charred floorboard, from under which she retrieved a long object wrapped in leather. She unrolled the wrapping to reveal a well-used hunting rifle, with a powder horn carved with deer. She spoke to Conawago, who shook his head, then she pressed, her insistent tone unmistakable, though Duncan knew not the words that were spoken.
When Conawago at last accepted the rifle, Woolford turned to Duncan. “She says the world is upside down. She says she could not bear for Conawago to be buried this season as well.”
Alex helped the woman gather her few surviving possessions into a blanket, which he slung onto his shoulder, and then the two began walking across the field. When Duncan grabbed his own pack, Conawago put a restraining hand on his arm.
“They have a different path to take,” he said.
Duncan looked in confusion from the old Indian to the boy. “But Alex. . all those years a prisoner. Surely we can’t just let him think he’s a slave again. We must. . ”
“God’s breath!” Woolford snapped. “After all this, you cannot see? His nightmares aren’t caused by all those years with the Indians. To his mind, he only became a prisoner when he was taken by Europeans.”
Duncan looked from the ranger to Conawago, both of whom gazed at him; perplexed, he looked down at the earth, at his feet, with unexpected shame. He was a fool to think he was progressing toward the truth. All he ever found was more confusion.
“Do you think he suffers from anything you and I do not?” Woolford asked in a forgiving tone.
“What are you saying?”
“His days spent with Arnold and Ramsey at the mission. You asked once when the Company was started. That’s when.”