the stand within had fired along the walk on either side, keeping the Indians at
a distance.
Pushing gently on the door, I found a timber wedged against it, but managed to
get a hand through and moved it enough to open the door.
John Quill sat facing the doorway, his head on his chest, his musket across his
knees. There were eight other muskets within the room, all placed in position
near loopholes or the door.
Kneeling beside him I touched his hand. Turning sharply I said, “Get Sakim up
here! He’s alive!”
29
We buried Matt Slater on the land he loved, and buried him deep in the earth. We
planted a tree close by his head that its fruit might fall where he lay. His
years had been given to raising crops, and seeing the yellow grain bright in the
sun, so we put him down where the seasons pass, where his blood could feed the
soil. We left him there with a marker, simple and plain.
HERE LIES MATTHEW SLATER, A FARMER
A FAITHFUL MAN WHO LOVED THE EARTH
1570-1602
John Quill recovered, though wounded sorely, and told us a little of what had
transpired.
They had come suddenly in the dawn, killing a Catawba who had brought meat to
the fort, and the gate had been closed against them before they could take his
scalp.
Then began a desperate fight, two men against thirty, and they ran from wall to
wall, firing here, firing there. The Catawba warriors were far from the village
on a hunt, but the old men fought and the women fought, and John Quill and Matt
Slater defended the fort.
It was after sundown before they came over the wall and Slater went down
fighting four men, and John Quill retreated into the blockhouse where they had
gathered food and powder for a stand. Alone, he fought them all through the
night and another day. They tried to fire the blockhouse but the timbers were
damp from recent rains and would not bum.
“Six men I know I killed,” John Quill said, “and mayhap another went, and
finally they gave up and one shouted at me in English and told me to come to
them, that the tribe would welcome me. They told me I was a great warrior—” John
Quill looked at me. “Captain, I am only a farmer. It was all I ever wished to
be, like poor Matt, who had his land only to lose it.”
“He will never lose it,” I said. “He had it when he died, and he had the memory
of it in his soul. Nothing can take that from him.”
“He was a brave, fine man,” Abby said gently, “as you are, John. Our country
needs such men to build it and make it grow. God help us always to have them,
men who believe in what they are doing, and who will fight for what they
believe.”
“Aye,” I said, “no man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a
man without faith.”
So we came back to the fort after our journeying, and with my own hands I
carried on the farming of Slater’s crops. He’d planted them well and cultivated
them a mite before passing on, and it was no trouble to keep up the work he’d
begun.
We were all of us growing into the land, finding our living from it, and
learning where the berries grew thick upon the bushes and where the nuts fell
and the pools where the trout loafed in the shadows.
Man is not long from the wilderness, and it takes him but a short time to go
back to living with it, and we had the Catawbas to guide us. Peter Fitch took an
Indian girl to wife, a tall well-made girl with four warrior brothers.
We went often to the far hills that spring, wandering deep into the mountains
and living off the country, for there was always fresh meat for a man good with
a gun, and there was no need to be belly-empty if you could shoot.
One day Kane O’Hara asked leave to be gone awhile. He took his musket and went
over the mountains, and some said that would be the last of him, but I thought
it would not and said so, but the womenfolk worried.
It was many weeks later when he came back, and when we saw him coming down the
mountain, straight and tall as always, we saw he wasn’t alone. Somebody walked
beside him, and when he came closer we saw she was a Spanish girl from a Florida
settlement.
“Kane,” I asked, “did she come willing?”
“She did,” he said, ‘”That you can ask her yourself. I took meat to her town,
and I speak her tongue from a time when I was a prisoner there, and I broke some
wild horses for them—”
“Horses?”
“Aye, they’ve horses; I made to fetch some, but hadn’t nothing to trade for them
and they are wary of letting them go. Toward the end they got suspicious of me
and did not believe what I said. Only Margarita believed me and said so, and
when I left she came with me.”
He looked at Abby and smiled. “It is all right, Mistress Abby. We stopped at an
Indian village where there was a priest, an Irish priest from the Spanish lands
who was teaching the Indians the ways of God, and he married us, all fitting and
proper.”
“What of her folks?”
“We sent them word by the priest. He was stiff about a marriage without her
father saying it was proper, him knowing the family and all, but a nudge with a
pistol and a reminder that if he did not marry us we’d be wedded Indian fashion,
and he came through shining with a proper ceremony.”
When the year ended we went down the river again, all of us going this time,
with Kin doing his own walking and Abby having her hands full with Brian …
named for her father … whom she carried when Lila could bear to let go of him.
Kin walked along with us, and bawled when he was picked up to be carried and
insisted he carry his own pack, so we made a small one for him.
One of our boats was gone when we came to them, but we took the other two and
went down the river after a few repairs. There were more of us now but we knew
the country better and knew woodland travel.
We built a raft to tow our load of furs, for it was large, and we’d more pearls,
mostly gotten by trade with the Indians, and some by capture. There’d been
fights with the Cherokees, the Creeks, and the Tuscarora, and one day a captured
Shawnee told us there had long ago been a great bunch of white men who lived on
a river across the mountains, but they had fought often with the Shawnee and the
Cherokee, too, before the Cherokee came so far south. Finally, the white men had
been killed, but some of their women had been kept by Indian men, and a few of
the survivors had come to live with the Shawnee.
It was a long story, but there were many such, and from time to time we heard
stories of white men who had been in the country before us.
We had come down all the way to the Outer Banks again when we saw a canoe coming
toward us. It was Potaka again. He had a strange-looking creature with him, a
long, thin man with a beard who kept saying over and over, “Barnabas, Barnabas.”
And it was Jago, who had sailed with us on the fluyt.
The Indians had found him, months before, roaming in the woods, and had cared
for him as they did all mad men, for so they thought him to be. And truly, he
was wandering in his mind.
“Jago,” I said, “I am Barnabas.”
“You said to ask for you,” he said simply, and was content.
That he had been through some terrible ordeal was obvious, and his body bore the
scars of torture, most likely by Indians. And from where he had been found and
what he could recall it must have been the Tuscarora … but there was no
certainty of this.
After he had rested with us, he slowly began to recover. Always a hard worker,
he was no different now. Bit by bit we learned a little. He had been on a ship
that somehow had been attacked by Indians when laying off shore. Some of the
crew, including himself, had escaped. Some of the Indians had been carried out
to sea on the ship, and when his own party ashore had somehow been separated, he
had wandered in the forest, subsisting on nuts and roots until captured by the