The Constable's Tale (35 page)

It seemed like Harry could see it unfolding.

*

It was an hour or so after the rider had passed by. Still well before dawn, the murky part of night when spirits are about. The storm had tapered off to almost nothing. Sleep ruined anyway, he thought to go into the town, see if he could find some dry, safe place to recollect himself. Someplace where he would not draw attention until returning to the forest at first light.

He was moving at a good pace down the new-cut road when he saw a light ahead. A farmhouse. He sprang onto the porch like a cat and peeked into one of the windows. Inside was a woman, young and good-looking, with red hair. She was staring straight at him. He ducked back down and got ready to run, then realized she must have been looking at her own reflection in the glass. He stole another glimpse. She was touching up her hair with her hand and messing with her
blouse, all in a sly way, like she did not want anyone to notice. The way women sometimes do when they are around men who are not their husbands.

He lowered his head, waited a minute or two, then looked again. Now her back was turned and she was facing a table where two men were sitting. One was wearing dirty breeches and a loose-fitting hunting shirt made of coarse material. The other was better dressed, but everything was damp, including the man’s matted yellow hair. A fancy robin’s-egg blue jacket was drying out on a chair next to the fireplace. A baby’s crib in a corner. The only other person he could see was a little boy standing near the chair. He was looking at the jacket.

The yellow-haired man was eating and taking draughts from a metal cup and talking between mouthfuls, going back and forth in conversation with the other man. Comet Elijah could not see what was on his plate, but watching his jaws work made him hungry. He had a thought to knock at the door and ask for something for himself. He had not eaten in three days. But before he could act on the idea, he noticed the little boy reach inside one of the jacket pockets. The adults were tangled up in their conversation and not paying attention.

As he watched, the boy drew something from the pocket. Comet Elijah caught a glimpse of gold. Then the boy reached back in and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper. He looked back at the table where the adults were. Seeing he had not been seen, he squatted and put both objects, the gold piece and the paper, underneath the crib. Maybe thinking to look at them more closely later on.

By and by, the men got out of their chairs and shook hands. The yellow-haired one pulled on his jacket, shaking his head no. Likely turning down an offer to stay the rest of the night.

Comet Elijah crept to the side of the porch and jumped down onto the ground and stayed there until he was sure the man had gone. Then he circled back around to the steps, walked boldly up, knocked on the door, and asked if he could have some food.

The man and woman looked surprised but got over it. In a short time he was at the table having a meal of roasted corn, red beans, and collards flavored with pork bits.

That is when the monster showed up.

Comet Elijah had seen such things among his own people. A child will be going along just fine, acting normally, like children do, when all of a sudden something will get into it. It will start yelling and screaming for no reason or twitching or talking in some unknown language. Just like a demon had got hold of it. And that is exactly the case. The child acts like whichever type of devil has come inside of it. It can be a dangerous proposition if the child is older or big for its age or if the parents just let it go on without doing anything. Like these parents were. Either they were afraid or just being too lenient, letting the little boy get away with whatever came into its little monster head to do.

The parents seemed like good people. Comet Elijah could see they would appreciate having somebody step in and show them how to handle the situation. He got out of his chair and walked over and picked the child up and threw it nearly all the way across the room.

The man was upon Comet Elijah in an instant. Clearly he had misjudged him. Suddenly aware he might lose a combat with a younger, stronger person, he had no choice but to finish it quickly with his knife. The woman started in on him next. He figured he might be able to fight her off without hurting her too badly, but in the uproar he accidently stuck her in the side. She fell back to the floor bleeding like a pig in a chute, then started dragging herself off into the next room.

While that was happening, the little boy demon recovered enough from its injuries to run out the front door. Comet Elijah pulled the man’s rifle down from over the fireplace—he already had noticed it was primed and ready—and shot him in the back.

The baby was awake and squalling now but offered no threat.

The woman finally finished breathing. Regretting what had happened, though none of it had been his fault, as a gesture of respect
he arranged the family in dignified positions. Even plucked a sprig of rosemary from the garden and put it at the boy’s nose to emphasize his sorrow over the outcome of his fight with the monster. An apology to the dead people’s souls.

Comet Elijah stopped talking. Finished with his story. He stared at the ground in silence. Harry also stayed quiet, trying to take in the enormity of what he had heard. He looked into Comet Elijah’s thickly lined face, wondered what was going on inside that dark, all-but-bald head. Maybe now that he had relived it fully, maybe for the first time, the experience weighed him down as it had not before.

“You may be right,” Comet Elijah said finally, once again correctly reading Harry’s thoughts. “Maybe I acted too quick. Some of my own people used to criticize me for that kind of thing. But a lot of it was just jealousy of my bold leadership style.”

He struggled to regain his footing as old men do when they have been sitting for a while. He came onto all fours, straightened his legs, tried to push off with his arms. That did not work. Finally, he accepted Harry’s offer of a hand. Then there was the chore of recovering his kit again. Several pieces of flatware, and who knows what else, had spilled out of it.

Harry’s mind raced as he helped restore order. Was the story believable? It seemed too detailed and too close to what Harry knew to be true to have been made up. Unlike riddles, whose answers were arbitrary and depended on wordplay, solving puzzles demanded the use of logic. In this case logic ruled out every possibility except that Comet Elijah had just confessed to killing the Campbells. Albeit with the occasional embellishment. Harry did not believe the business about jumping around like a cat, for example. But he could not have been describing just some elaborate dream, some vision he’d had, with himself inserted into it. Comet Elijah killed the Campbell family. And Harry could not rule out the possibility that he might do something similar again if allowed to go free.

As he sifted through pine needles, pretending to look for lost objects, Harry sorted out the ramifications. It would seem that duty demanded he
bring Comet Elijah back with him into New Bern to stand trial. He tried to imagine just getting him there. A struggle was possible. Harry weighed the odds of being overpowered by some Tuscarora conjuring, the kind that had allowed Comet Elijah to escape prison. But logic again intervened. It seemed more likely he had stolen away through some dereliction on the part of his guards, not by climbing up a wall like a fly and melting through a bullet-glass window. For all the posturing about strength and agility, given equal combat without the advantage of surprise, Harry was sure he could whip Comet Elijah. At least he was passably sure.

He pictured in his mind the trial and its certain outcome: hanging from the gibbet in front of the old courthouse. The man who, with Natty, had raised Harry. Taught him everything he needed to know about life and survival in the world outside the genteel haunts of colonels and judges and young cadets and all their rules of civility. Sheltered him from the cold.

He wondered what Natty would do.

Although absorbed by these thoughts, he had not failed to notice that Comet Elijah had begun to wander away. There was less and less of him to see, as the trees and patches of underbrush were breaking up the picture. Harry realized that by not acting, he was making a choice. Maybe he already had.

He walked toward the place he had last caught a glimpse of dirty pink. When he got there all he could see was more forest. Something moved off to his right, and he started in that direction. He had not gotten many steps along when he saw another pink patch, this one even dimmer, still farther to the right. He turned that way. Then realized that if he continued on like this he would be going in circles.

He looked back at what he took to be his original position. There was no sign of Annie. The pine forest seemed to have closed in behind him. It was quiet except for a woodpecker hammering at a tree, short bursts of stutterings so close together they sounded like the swinging of a rusty hinge. That, and a low babbling that somewhat resembled human laughter, but was probably coming from the creek.

Suddenly, there was Comet Elijah. Or at least his face. It was nestled among some fully leafed pine limbs thirty feet off the ground. Smiling down at him.

Harry stood there for a while trying to ignore it. Tired of tricks. Or maybe it was just the apple brandy. He took deep breaths to help resettle his mind. Remembered a snatch of what Toby had put down in her diary, something about pieces of time forever flowing by. His own life had taken a sharp turn over the past four months. He had not been aware of it while it was happening, but now he could see it as plainly as a hawk can make out a twist in a river from high in the air. Another marked change of course had occurred ten years earlier, when old man Rollins had caught him and Maddie in a hayfield. He could bring back neither of those times, make them turn in a different direction. And it would do him no good to wonder if he and Maddie somehow ever might have had a future together. Those moments were locked in the past.

What he saw ahead was life with a woman he knew he loved, Toby, and fatherhood. And years of working in the tobacco fields and pine orchards of what might be an ever expanding Woodyard plantation. He looked into a future of being a good friend to his neighbors, the people of Craven County, in whatever ways he could. Lending food and livestock and tools and hours of his time when needed to help them through hard stretches. Certain these favors would be returned when needed. And keeping up his volunteer service as a constable. Maintaining order at public meetings. Serving writs on people who needed to answer for skipping Sabbath services or missing militia musters or making drunken fusses in public. Arresting those who would do more serious harm to his countrymen or the Crown.

These waters looked somewhat familiar and yet fresh and new, full of unforeseen moments. As for Comet Elijah, Harry contented his mind. Florida seemed as good a place as any to die again.

THE END

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE GODS OF WRITING ARE KIND TO PRACTITIONERS OF HISTORICAL
fiction. They allow us to fill as many gaps as we wish in the written record of whatever bygone day, for whatever reason, catches our attention. The only limits are imagination and some measure of the laws of plausibility. Many of the characters in this book are based on real people, including a few historical figures like George Washington and a gangly teenaged Virginia fiddler named Thomas Jefferson. Several key characters with made-up names were suggested by real people, including the French spymaster, who readers may find the most remarkable of any they meet here. Such a person did exist, and after the war did retire to France to live out his life on his own terms. As for the constable himself, I had an ancestor in that part of North Carolina just around that time who served in the same kind of position, a volunteer constable, and later as a militia officer. The real Henry
(“Captain Harry”) Smith exists today as no more than the faintest of shadows formed by two brief lines in a 1930s family genealogy, and his birth and death records. Harry Woodyard’s story, with his family’s roots in the swampy back country around Albemarle Sound, and his efforts to fulfill his mother’s ambitions for him and her family name in the up-and-coming Pamlico region, is imaginary. But it is entirely plausible. All I did was fill in some gaps.

I’m indebted to the authors of more than one hundred histories, journals, and travel logs I’ve digested about old North Carolina and, more broadly, America, in this crucial but much under-appreciated period of our history, when foundations were being laid for the American Revolution twenty years later. Prominent among my history sources was Fred Anderson, University of Colorado professor and author of
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766
. (When I told him I was writing a novel about a constable in colonial North Carolina during the French and Indian War, he observed, “You are entering virgin fictional territory.”) I based much of my point-of-view depiction of the climactic Battle of the Plains of Abraham on his account, the most detailed and nicely written one I have seen. Also especially useful were Noeleen McIlvenna’s
A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660–1713
(University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Alan D. Watson’s
A History of New Bern and Craven County
(Tryon Palace Commission, 1987); Gertrude S. Carraway’s
Crown of Life: History of Christ Church, New Bern, N.C., 1715–1940
(Owen G. Dunn, 1940); Dwight C. McLemore’s
The Fighting Tomahawk: An Illustrated Guide to Using the Tomahawk and Long Knife as Weapons
(Paladin Press, 2004), and the marvelous four-volume series of North Carolina folklore collected by Duke University Prof. Frank C. Brown between 1912 and 1943, in collaboration with the state’s folklore society, which he founded. Many of the oral traditions he came across in his wanderings have unmistakable origins in the period of this book and earlier.

Of course, as with all historians whose works have formed my understanding of these times and events, I take responsibility for any inaccuracies—or, as I might prefer to call them, artistic licenses.