Duncan helped Winters untie the body and set it in a sitting position against a tree, then the overseer lifted the spade and stepped out onto the flat grassy clearing above the cliff. To Duncan’s surprise he loosened a handful of soil then sprinkled it in each of the cardinal directions before dropping a few particles over his head and rubbing the remainder between his palms. It was a native purification gesture.
Winters gazed at the corpse. “I was only six when he first brought me here,” he said. “My father was the pastor for the little settlement old Mr. Dawson started here. Mr. Dawson, he was a man of the Christian God, not a man of the forest, but he trusted Jahoska like a brother. Jaho had always been here, like the Chuga dog. Once I joked that maybe there had always been a man named Jaho here too, like Chuga. My father didn’t laugh, just said because we worshipped the Old World God didn’t mean we should make light of New World gods. My father sometimes called him Saint Francis of the tribes. I think now my father envied him, for his closeness to his gods and the effortless way he had with nature.”
Winters turned to look out over the sweeping landscape. “In the autumn we would watch huge flights of ducks and geese flying along the edge of the bay. The passenger pigeons would fly overhead in flocks stretching from one horizon to the next. He would call out to them in his old tongue and they would fly lower as if they understood him, so low we could not hear ourselves speak for the sound of their wings. I was spellbound. I thought he was some kind of gentle wizard, for the way he understood nature and could coax wild animals to approach us. He always knew what nights to climb up here to show me meteor storms.” Winters looked up at Duncan. “I will never forget those nights, and I will never fathom how he could know what nights the stars would fly like that. It was as if the pulse in his body came from the earth itself.” As he spoke a huge owl swooped out of the darkness and landed on a limb above the dead Susquehannock. The bird cocked its head at Winters. Winters cocked his head at the bird. “He left special instructions for the burial hole,” he explained, then started digging.
An hour later they had finished the peculiar grave that Jahoska had asked Winters to dig years earlier, a slanted hole that put his feet three feet deeper than his head, which itself was to be only a forearm’s depth from the surface.
“He knew he would be here,” Winters said.
“It’s where he could see his land the best,” Duncan ventured, then watched in surprise as Winters reverently unwrapped the cloth around the old man’s head.
Tears streamed down the young overseer’s cheeks. “I could have stopped it,” he declared in a choked voice. “I let the gentlest, wisest man I have ever known be flayed alive by the cruelest man I have ever known.”
“No,” Duncan said. “You would have just gotten yourself killed. And that would have ruined the reverence of his death.”
“Reverence? I saw only butchery. Gabriel will surely burn in hell.”
Duncan turned back to the old man again, his body in ruin but his face so calm in death it seemed he was only sleeping, then after a moment gestured Winters toward a log near the grave. “Sit,” he said, and lowered himself onto a flat boulder. “Tell me more, Jamie. Tell me more about your time with Jahoska as a boy.”
Winters drew a long breath and nodded, as if welcoming the invitation. “He was always here, on the banks of the great river, here when there was nothing but forest and the ruins of some old lodges, here when my grandfather built the first cabin near the bank, long before the elder Mr. Dawson came and Miss Alice’s family built their farm upriver. He never objected, never complained about Europeans taking his land. My grandfather said that, back then, old Jaho had a wife and two children but they were all carried off by smallpox decades ago, before I was born.
“My father remembered how in those early days Indians from the northern tribes would come visit, greeting him like he was some kind of royalty. They would speak with him of problems among the tribes of the confederation and he would offer advice. Sometimes he would disappear for weeks at a time, but he always came back. He was always alone but never lonely. There was often an animal of some kind at his side. Never did I know any creatures but other men to shy away from him. He knew all the herbs and medicines from plants, could cure any disease known to his people. But smallpox was a European disease.” Winters’s words cut off with a sharp intake of breath at a sudden movement on the trail. Chuga emerged from the shadows, glanced at them, then probed the body with his nose.
The overseer nodded, then explained how, when his grandfather had sold the struggling farm, the elder Mr. Dawson had promised to always give them gainful employment on his new debtors’ work estate, and had even encouraged Winters’s father to join the clergy and build a church for the workers. “Even as his precious forest had been leveled for sotweed fields old Jaho had stayed. My ma would say he was not so much a normal human as a land spirit in human form.”
Chuga emitted a low, mournful cry, then sat beside the corpse, on guard.
“He wasn’t just the wisest man in my life,” Winters continued, “he was the strongest, and the best spoken. He always knew just what to say, and could say it with fewer words than any man I’ve ever known. Like a poet. Always so deliberate, so observant. It broke my heart to see him raving like some drunken fool out in the field.”
The pantomime still haunted Duncan. He did not believe Jaho had lost his mind but his actions had indeed seemed deranged.
“Before he was the wise man of the river, he was a warrior,” Duncan said, and spoke of Jaho’s legendary prowess and the tales told of him at Iroquois fires. “If he had stayed in the north,” Duncan concluded, “he would have become chieftain of all the tribes.”
The last of the clouds blew away, leaving the world below glowing in the light of the moon.
“There were some little cedars down the trail,” Duncan said. “We should burn fragrant wood. You can bring some while I spark a fire. Then we will lower him into the earth.”
He cleared a circle of bare soil, grabbed some twigs, and extracted his flint, soon coaxing small flames to life. He looked back at Jahoska, keeper of the ancient secrets, then rose and extracted the fossil he had brought from Shamokin and dropped it into the old man’s pocket.
Winters returned and they lit the cedar, waiting for the scent to fill the air before lifting the body.
“This was the day he was going to die,” Duncan said after they had settled the body in the grave. “The day he intended to die.”
Winters looked up from his grief as Chuga settled beside the grave. “He couldn’t have known that Kincaid would drag him to that post.”
“Of course he did. He taunted them, and knew they would take vengeance for Hobart’s death once he taunted them with the medallion, knew he was not one of those who had to be preserved for the hangings. His body was failing him, so he chose his day. It is the way of the true warriors, the ones following the old ways, to make their deaths mean something, to fill their last acts with honor.”
Winters gazed into Jahoska’s face. The old man seemed to be listening. “I understand nothing.” From somewhere below, a whippoorwill called, its lonely cry echoing down the slope. The overseer’s voice cracked as he spoke. “How can you find honor in this?”
Duncan pushed down another tide of emotion. The words were painful. He had known others like Jahoska. Most were now dead, but Conawago was still among the living. “Remember how he would say he knew of no man left like him, a man of no mixed blood, a pure Susquehannock?”
The young overseer slowly nodded. “I found him up here once, at night. He had made a little fire of cedar, just like this one, and was talking with his ancestors about it, about what becomes of a tribe when there is only one left. I couldn’t understand much, for he mostly spoke in his old tongue, but he explained that I was welcome as long as I stayed silent. Afterwards he said we had a duty to those who came before.”