The Rabbit Stick 1
A Novella 1/?
The Rabbit Stick
Prologue
June, 1729
Gigi
The trick was to quiet the dogs. For weeks Gigi had been playing her little flute near the edge of the woods, letting the dogs bark. With patience the dogs would be ignored even if they barked, which they wouldn't do. Gigi kept little balls of congealed deer fat, which after a little while had endeared her to the dogs of the sprawling amalgamation of homesteads. Soon the dogs were coming to see her every evening, trusting and sweet and quiet. Finally, she was able to get a closer look.
The first cabin she entered had a copy of the Bible. She greedily stuffed it in her bag. The next one had a Bible too, but she limited herself to one Bible per trip because they took up so much space. Her eyes lit up again when she saw the dark brown bottle. She smelled it and the laudanum was unmistakable. Her father would be pleased.
She went methodically from one cabin to the next, at first finding little of value, but then in the third cabin, the largest, where a man, who seemed to Gigi as large as a bear, lay face down, occasionally jerking as if frightened by a dream. In this cabin she found: some whiskey, a sharp knife in a well made sheath, and finally, some paper, with an ink well and a quill. She smiled and placed the items very carefully into her sack. Satisfied, she ignored the last two cabins and made her way cheerfully through the dark to her father, who called her with a click of his tongue. Examining her bag, Utano smiled with approval. Reaching into his own bag he retrieved a little cluster of pecans which were coated in honey. He gave it to the little girl and they made their way back to camp.
***
Rahab and Kofi
Rahab and Kofi sat together by the light of the fire. She read the heavy black book with caution:
“How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people… how is she become as a widow… she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary…”
She looked at Kofi.
“Tributary?”
“Subject”, he said.
She read on,
“She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.”
She looked at the book with curiosity.
“I like the English version”, she said.
Kofi didn't answer.
She continued,
“The ways of Zion do mourn, because none come to the solemn (she shook her head at this word) feasts: all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted, and she is in bitterness.”
She paused again. Kofi waited for a question but it never came. She continued, faster,
“Her adversaries are the chief, her enemies prosper; for the Lord hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions: her children are gone into captivity before the enemy.
Let all their wickedness come before thee; and do unto them, as thou hast done unto me for all my transgressions: for my sighs are many, and my heart is faint.”
“Faint?”
“Weak”, Kofi answered.
She nodded her head.
The two of them continued reading into the night.
***
Jonah Swallowed Up
June, 1730
Two log cabins sat on a low hill above a creek and a wooded mountain rose behind them. Through the trees Utano could hear the sound of axes. He smelled fire and honeysuckle and somewhere a baby was crying.
At the base of the pecan tree a boy was collecting nuts into his hat. He was fifteen, long-limbed and slow in his movements, with a guileless face and a scar above his left eye where he had fallen from a wagon on the road west of Philadelphia. He crouched and gathered and did not look up. His name was Jonah.
Utano crept along the tree line. He did not come straight up the hill but moved in a long arc through the brush, keeping out of the sightline of the men at their work. He came up behind the boy without sound. Jonah felt a sharp pinch in his thigh just when the Indian grabbed him. The boy for a long time remembered the image of the pecans scattered in the dirt.
The sound of the axes continued for a while and when the men stopped to rest, the baby stopped crying as well and a silence landed briefly on the place.
Jonah's father came around the side of the cabin and found Johah’s hat on the ground and the pecans around it in the dirt. He stood looking at them. He called toward the cabin. He called again.
A woman's scream crossed the field and went out into the trees and did not come back.
Utano carried Jonah through the woods over his shoulder, the boy's body limp. He moved through the underbrush without sound, not breathing heavily, moving barefoot with uncanny speed. The canopy closed green overhead. The whole world seemed to glow. The path wound on and on and Jonah had a sense of tremendous space and was too frightened to move or show he was conscious.
Utano carried him high up the mountain to his camp and dropped him unceremoniously on the ground. Jonah lay still. Utano ducked into his tent and came out again, approaching the boy with such intensity that the boy covered his head with his hands and cried out, only to feel a heavy but harmless thump against the back of his head. Jonah shouted and scrambled away.
Utano made no move to follow. He held in his hand a large black family Bible. He held it out to the boy like feeding an animal through bars. The boy took it. Utano backed away.
Jonah was shaking. The Bible felt strangely heavy. His own body felt light and insubstantial, like one meant for flight. The Bible was too heavy and he let it fall.
Utano watched him intently.
"You want me to read it?"
The man pointed at the book, his face twisted into a stern and demanding scowl. The boy picked it up. The opening pages where the family names would be were ripped out and there was blood smeared on the first page of Genesis. Jonah began to read.
"In the beginning—"
Utano jumped up, snatched the book and covered the boy's mouth very forcefully. He held the book admiringly. He looked down at the boy. His face settled into a kind of rest.
Jonah woke up bound to a tree. The bindings were tight but not painful. There was a bit in his mouth tied around the back of his head. Across the clearing Utano was crouched at the fire, cutting and grinding, measuring and mixing, his hands held far from his body as he worked. He sat in a deep squat and pivoted, putting one knee down and then the other, covering a large area, laboring in this way for a long time. Strange smells moved through the air. Not of food.
The camp sat just off an old animal trail. A stream ran down the mountain and in moments of stillness it was just audible over the rattling of the leaves. Fallen branches had been woven between the camp and the trail, latticed with smaller branches and leaves, and Utano's tent was likewise camouflaged. The clearing sloped gently down to where the boy was tied, where it fell away into a steep ravine.
The afternoon passed and then the evening. Jonah looked up at the canopy and saw a shimmering blanket of green and gold through which could be seen at times the fluttering shadow of a giant skeletal bat.
I'm dreaming, he thought.
The fire seemed to anticipate the wind and at times Utano seemed to direct it. Then the canopy went dark and the trees began to dance, slowly and then more and more emphatically, until the boy was sick and Utano brought him water from a skin. It tasted strange. Jonah drifted back to sleep.
He woke in the early dawn with the fire out and his head untied. Utano crouched beside him offering the skin. The boy drank.
He woke again in the light and could hear his family calling from somewhere on the mountain. His limbs were heavy and numb. He could hear his uncle's voice nearby, close enough that the boy felt he could almost speak, and then could not. Utano stood behind a large tree some distance away. Jonah found the Indian's eyes and neither of them moved until the uncle's voice receded further up the mountain and was gone.
The sky was red in the morning. The air on the mountain was thick and the wind whipped furiously overhead while on the ground where the boy sat the atmosphere performed a kind of rocking tidal motion, more like a body of water than air.
Jonah was hungry. Utano saw he was awake and gave him the skin, a different one this time, and the water tasted clean and fresh. He gave the boy a piece of dried meat which Jonah chewed slowly, savoring it.
Utano began to make signs. He bowed to the ground and placed his hands together in the manner of Christian prayer, then uttered something that sounded like a question and pointed to the boy. He repeated this several times.
“You want me to pray?”
“Pray”, the man said. His hands together.
“Alright”, the boy said. He put his hands together and looked at the man, who watched him blankly.
“Lord, if you see to it, Lord, protect us from the storm. Let me get away from this Indian.”
Utano seemed satisfied. He spent some time in prayer himself. Then they sat quietly as the storm began to build. There were loud cracks of thunder but the lightning flickered dimly from deep inside a giant whirling mass of black clouds overhead.
The wind grew louder, more powerful. All around them on the mountain the limbs began to snap until there was a clattering bone sound mixed with the groaning of the trees. Dead branches fell all around them, some so heavy and so near the boy felt the vibrations in his feet.
The rain came down so hard there was standing water on the mountain. The stream near camp had disappeared under sheets of water rushing over the mountain and down through the ravines to meet the river, which overflowed its banks and flooded the farms in the valley below and washed some away. In the quiet between the gusts you could hear a chorus of wailing from down in the valley.
As soon as the storm passed Utano began to break camp, hastily, and before setting off he stopped and held the ax before Jonah, his eyes fixed on him, and brought it down through the air in an expert pantomime of the ax being lodged in an imaginary skull.
The boy nodded.
They walked down the mountain in silence. Many trees had been knocked across the path and where the soil thinned and the rocks showed through the footing was slick and sharp. They made their way down and through the low area, but avoiding the farms, and walked until there were no more.
The whole valley was littered with debris. Several farms had been washed away completely. In the darkness the boy heard a child crying out and then the wild high vocalizations of horses, and a pair of black horses came very close, very loud, very fast. Utano did not seem to notice. The child cried out again.
“Can we help him?”, the boy asked, his voice a soft whisper.
Utano turned toward the sound. He looked at the boy sternly and held out the ax.
“No”, Jonah said, and they walked on.
They walked through marsh and swamp and forest. The swamp smelled of dead fish and the water was black and sometimes waist high. Big things moved in the water, seeming to flee lazily out of Utano's path, and Jonah trudged through the stinking sucking black mud as quickly as he could to stay in the Indian's wake.
At morning light the swamp gave way to open water and they swam. The boy had always loved to swim but he felt afraid of the water and saw the Indian as his only safety. When Utano gained ground the boy swam furiously to catch him. The river took them both a long way until Utano got his footing and dragged the boy a short distance through marsh and up a hill and into the woods. The trees were taller here and swayed continually and the soil was sandy and soft underfoot. Utano stopped abruptly at a clear patch of ground and fell promptly asleep.
Jonah stayed awake a long time listening to the fluttering sound of the small birds in the bushes and the high lonely call of some far off bird of prey. It didn't occur to him to try to escape.
Utano woke after a few hours and found the boy asleep. He walked in a slow deliberate manner through the brush around the clearing picking blackberries and watching for rabbits. When he saw evidence of them he went and got the boy.
Utano woke Jonah with a nudge of his foot and the boy startled as if he had found himself suddenly falling. His head hurt and he was hungry and cold without his clothes, which he had hung on a branch to dry.
They spent the afternoon in the clearing. Utano made a little mock rabbit from sticks and moss and found a half dozen sticks for the boy to throw, as uniform in size and weight as he could manage in a hurry. He made a series of notches on a tree with his ax, then walked back to where the boy stood and asked for one of the sticks. He seemed to mull over its weight for a moment, then slowly demonstrated the arc of his arm. He looked at the boy and the boy nodded. Utano threw the stick with power and accuracy, leaving a deep gash in the tree where it knocked away his notches.
At first the target seemed impossibly far to Jonah but he soon struck it, again and again, and from further away. Then Utano took him to where the rabbits were and they didn't wait long before Jonah saw one and took his shot. The stick missed by a few inches and the rabbit, along with several others, scampered from their little grass maze and disappeared into the woods.
The sandhills stretched for what seemed like a thousand miles, a barren pine forest with brown and red undergrowth loud underfoot. Utano was intent on teaching the boy to walk without making so much noise. The first time Jonah walked carelessly into a patch of dry grass Utano slapped him playfully on the back of the head. The next day when the boy made the same mistake the Indian slapped him so hard the boy sprawled forward onto his hands and knees.
It was here Jonah noticed that the soil had turned completely to sand. Deep white sand. The morning was overcast and the sun shot frosted smoky beams of gray light through the trees. He looked up at the strange man who stared down at him without pity and gestured for him to get up.
They walked on, the boy stepping carefully around the grass, and where this was not possible he followed the Indian's example, which had been exaggerated for pedagogical effect, lifting his knee and putting his toe down first and only then his heel, so that his steps were almost inaudible. After an hour of walking this way Jonah felt a sense of satisfaction as his footsteps grew softer and softer.
They followed a stream until it dissipated into a thick layer of black mud that seemed to suddenly dominate the forest. There were fewer pines here and the whole atmosphere took on a ghostly quality. They came to a large knotted gray tree and Utano seemed satisfied. He reached out and tapped it with his knuckle and the boy did the same. The wood felt like stone. Utano pointed to a sapling of the same color nearby and took two swings of his ax to cut through it. They followed the edge where the sand met the swamp and when Utano encountered another of the gray saplings he would examine its shape carefully. One or two he left alone. The others he cut down and gave to the boy, who soon carried a bundle of six. Utano looked at Jonah with his arms full and nodded wearily, like a carpenter deep in his work.
As they crested a sandhill the underbrush wore away revealing a large patch of white sand. Utano paused and pointed. The boy looked and saw a pattern he recognized, having seen the movement of snakes and the marks they leave in dirt before, but the impression in the sand before him was of a snake of an impossible size. The Indian held up two fingers imitating fangs. Jonah nodded.
That same day Utano pointed out tracks of deer, rabbit, and wolf, and after each seemed disappointed. Then another break in the tall grass exposed a bare stretch of sand and the man stopped with great seriousness and pointed to the ground. There in the sand the boy saw the footprint of a very large cat.
They slept that night without a fire. Even by the light of the full moon the boy could not see the man clearly where he sat across the clearing, but every now and then he heard the gentle knocking of sticks and the barely audible whisper of a blade shaving wood.
Utano woke the boy before sunrise. The moonlight illuminated long columns of pines. He handed Jonah a heavy leather bundle tied with fiber string and gestured to one end. The boy reached in and pulled out a heavy wooden stick, gently curved and carved smooth as riverstone. There were four in the bundle, much finer than the sticks the man had first taught him to throw, which were merely broken pieces of fallen branches.
As the sun began to rise they walked again. Where the sandhills met the edge of the swamp the landscape changed suddenly, thick dark green bushes scattered along the water's edge among tall blonde grass. The Indian cautioned Jonah to walk slowly and softly and they approached the vegetation in near silence. With a hand motion Utano told the boy to stay. He crept toward the bush and reached out and shook it, making a hissing sound, and in what seemed like a miracle two fat gray rabbits leapt from the bush and funneled by the landscape barreled straight toward the boy. Jonah threw the stick hard when the rabbit was ten paces off, though it occurred to him he might simply have clubbed it as it ran past. The stick was heavy and its edge was almost sharp. It hit the rabbit. There was a sound of cracking bone followed by a nightmarish scream.
They traveled several more days through the sandhills, eating rabbit and wild turkey. The trees seemed to amplify the color of the sky, which turned a soft yellow gold and then a vibrant swirl of lavender and pink in the slow imperceptible hypnosis of the lonely field of high columns. Jonah walked softer and softer, and the quieter his footsteps became the more he could hear, and the more he heard the more he could see. The wind made a strange dry hiss and rattle as it shook the longleaf pine needles.
A woodpecker worked diligently somewhere, and the cicadas hummed without ceasing like monks at prayer. A bird of prey circled overhead, penetrating the forest with its call.
Somewhere along the path it occurred to the boy that they had turned south. The sand gave way to firmer soil and suddenly everything was green, then darker and darker to grey.
The trees were mostly still pine but more hardwood now, sweet gum and red maple. The air was cool in pockets where Jonah would find an excuse to linger and Utano never protested. In these cool shaded moments he would look at the boy and wait patiently, sipping water from his skin.
Suddenly, the boy saw a great writhing oak draped in Spanish moss. They both stopped in awe. The forest seemed to open up for it.
The forest was choked in a web of vines which clung to the hardwood trees and were thick enough to hold the weight of a man. After a few hours they began to walk along a narrow shallow channel of water the color of sand and dirt, its low irregular banks exposing the roots of the hardwood trees, the whole place scattered with fallen branches and low shallow lakes spilling lazily over beaver dams. The stream continued its route, and they followed along its banks until it was a small river. At a particular bend Utano began following an animal trail through the woods. Jonah hadn't noticed it. A few moments later Utano was pulling branches and debris away, revealing a small wooden canoe.
It was past midnight when they put the canoe in the water. Utano cautioned the boy several times to be quiet, though they had traveled in silence for a week.
The moon was an imperceptible sliver and the sky was host to a glimmering swarm of stars, clouds of them, trapped in a sublime ocean of wobbling blackness.
The canoe moved softly through the muddy water and the rotting leaves, and the gentleness of it struck him as an absence. Like a far off groan which had long hovered just near the surface of perception, which had just now gone silent.
Huge clouds of mosquitoes were illuminated against the blackness of the sky and the water, which for a long time was thick with rotting black leaves, and snaked through the high swamp grass and little islands alive with turtles. The river grew wider and deeper as they floated like ghosts through the haze of the night. Alligators, which had surprised and frightened him at first, had now become commonplace. They paddled wide around the big ones.
Utano continually mouthed the words of a silent dialogue, his eyes constantly shifting from the shoreline to the water, ahead and behind.
Slowly the boy began to smell something on the wind as the narrow black river grew wider and wider, and the smell of decay gave way to the smell of salt and the wind picked up and whipped at their clothes, cold and clean.
Then suddenly a ribbon of smoke and a glow on the horizon, and they approached an island in a large harbor. The island had once been well fortified, though the works of man had largely given way to nature. There still stood a large artificial hill which ran along the shoreline.
As their oars hit sand Utano cried out and a group of men of various races speaking several languages came scrambling over the hill and before the boy could make sense of it they surrounded the little canoe.
The question of why he had been taken had barely occurred to Jonah in the shock of the last two weeks, and when it had it done so with an insubstantial dreamlike quality, the silence of his captor, and the hypnotizing repetition of the pine forest and the ghostly sublimity of the black water hardwood swamp numbing him to the question of his ultimate fate. He had come silently and involuntarily to trust Utano, and now in the tumult on the shore he looked to him for comfort, but the Indian did not meet his gaze.
Utano, seemingly immune to the chaos around him, had his eyes fixed in the distance where standing with a torch under the old Spanish arch there stood a frail white man in a hooded black cloak. The man in black turned and walked into the darkness and the men prodded the Indian and the boy after him. The boy tried again and again to meet the Indian's gaze. Utano stubbornly refused.
Walking through the arch Jonah could see by the flickering torchlight that along with the mysterious hooded figure some thirty or forty men, mostly Indians but also some African and some white Spanish and French, armed with a motley assortment of weapons, were occupying the site of an abandoned Spanish fort. It was clear from the general atmosphere of squalor and the various ad hoc structures that these men were squatters and not true permanent occupants.
A few of them were drunk, though they all appeared possessed of a kind of unnatural energy, a manic determination. In this spirit the whole group marched swiftly down the center street of the old Spanish town, sometimes ankle deep in mud, starving dogs and rats darting here and there among the old broken houses. At the end of the avenue was a modest wooden church which the island's ever surging vines had already half reclaimed.
The hooded figure entered the church and the boy and the Indian and all the men followed. Torches illuminated the darkened interior. At the far end at the altar a small space was lit with crude candles. There was some argument between Utano and those among the bodyguards who understood him. They exchanged stern words.
Utano looked almost afraid. He looked sharply at the man in the hood and spoke a few words in a low and solemn voice. The hooded figure nodded and a few of the men disappeared into a back room behind the altar. They emerged moments later holding a girl, bound and bloody, nearly starved, her clothes in rags. Only Gigi's soft persistent whimpers betrayed the life in her body.
Upon seeing the girl, Utano rushed toward her. The men dropped her at his feet. She let out an involuntary cry. Utano stooped quickly to pick her up and held her close to his chest and tears welled in his eyes. He turned to the hooded figure to speak but whatever he wanted to say in the end he was unable.
He cradled the little girl in his arms and began to whisper to her, murmuring against her cheek. He said something to the man in black, who nodded again. The crowd parted. The Indian took the girl and with a doomed look cast one glance back at Jonah, turned, and walked out of the church and into the dark.
The boy wanted to run after him but was frozen in place.
The man in black approached him. He pulled back his hood. He smiled.
“Hello”, he said.