I had brought a copy of the Maine Gazetteer, and with Phineas’s help I marked the area in which Wolfe’s Folly lay. It was less than a day’s hike from Falls End.
‘Who do you think she is?’ I said.
‘Not ‘‘who’’,’ said Phineas, ‘but ‘‘what’’. I think she’s a remnant, a residue of anger and pain, all bound up in the form of a child. She might even have been a little girl once: they say there was a child in that fort, the daughter of the commanding officer. Her name was Charity Holcroft. That girl is long gone. Whatever’s left bears the same relation to her as smoke does to fire.’
And I knew that what he said was true, for I had seen anger take the form of a dead child, and heard similar stories from Sanctuary Island at the far edge of Casco Bay, and I thought that something of my own lost daughter still walked in the shadows, although she was not composed entirely of wrath.
‘I used to wonder if she was evil, and I came to the conclusion that she was not,’ said Phineas. ‘She’d have done me harm, but I don’t think she’d have meant it, not really. She may be angry, and dangerous, but she’s lonely too. You might as well call a winter storm evil, or a falling tree. Both will kill you, but they won’t consciously set out to do it. They’re forces of nature, and that thing in the shape of a little girl is kind of a storm of emotion, a little whirlwind of pain. Maybe there’s something so terrible about the death of children, so against the order of things, that this residue, if it sticks around, naturally finds form in a child.’
His cigar was almost done. He stamped it out beneath his foot, then tore apart the butt and scattered the tobacco on the breeze.
‘You can tell I’ve thought on this over the years,’ he said. ‘All I can say for sure is that’s her place, and if you’re going in there then you need to watch out for her. Now take me back to my room, please. I don’t want a chill to get into my bones.’
I wheeled him back to the center, and we said our goodbyes. His roommate was back in his bed, still reading the same newspaper.
‘You brought him back,’ he said. ‘I was hoping you’da drowned him.’
He sniffed the air. ‘Someone’s been smoking,’ he said. He shook his newspaper at Phineas. ‘You smell like Cuba.’
‘You’re an ignorant old man,’ said Phineas. ‘I smell like the Dominican Republic.’
He reached into a pocket of his coat, and waved a fresh Cohiba at his rival. ‘But if you’re good, and you let me nap in peace for an hour or two, maybe I’ll let you wheel me out to the lake before supper, and I’ll tell you a story . . .’
44
Shielded by looming pines, Wolfe’s Folly hid itself from the setting sun; less a fortress than the memory of one constructed by the forest, its lineaments blurred by shrubs and ivy, most of its buildings long collapsed in on themselves and only its log walls still standing intact.
Its proper name was Fort Mordant, after Sir Giles Mordant, an advisor to General Wolfe who had first suggested its construction. It had been intended as a supply depot and a place of refuge, a link in a proposed chain of such small forts stretching from the colonies on the east coast of the British claims to the St Lawrence River by the northwest of the French territories, part of a new front from which to harry Quebec. Unfortunately, the changing fortunes of war had left Fort Mordant unsuited to its purpose, and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 made the fort redundant. By then Wolfe himself was dead, killed at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham with his enemy Montcalm, and Sir Giles had been shipped home with a chest wound from which he never fully recovered, dying at the age of thirty-three.
In 1764, it was decided that the fort was to be abandoned, and its small garrison sent east. By then, the name Wolfe’s Folly had stuck: while the blame for the fort more properly lay with Mordant himself, it was Wolfe’s folly to have listened to him in the first place. It was said by some that Wolfe owed a substantial debt of money to Mordant, and was obliged to support his scheme; others took the view that Mordant was a fool, and Wolfe preferred to have him concentrating on his fort than interfering in more important matters of war. Whatever the reason for its construction, it brought no luck to either man, and had no impact on the outcome of the conflict.
The man entrusted with bringing word of the decision to close the fort and supervising its evacuation was a Lieutenant Buckingham, who traveled northwest in April 1764 accompanied by a platoon of infantrymen. They were still three days’ march from the fort when the first rumors began to reach them. They encountered a Quaker missionary named Benjamin Woolman, a distant relative of James Woolman of New Jersey, a leading figure in the burgeoning abolition movement. Benjamin Woolman had taken it upon himself to preach Christianity to the natives, and he was known to act as a conduit between the tribes and the British forces.
Woolman informed Buckingham that the garrison at Fort Mordant had carried out a punitive expedition against a small Abenaki village a week or so earlier, killing more than twenty natives, including, it was said, women and children. When Buckingham requested information about the reason for the slaughter, Woolman replied that he had no knowledge of why it was carried out. Such a small native group, scarcely more than a single extended family, could have posed little threat to the fort or its inhabitants, and, as far as Woolman was aware, there had been no particular tension between the soldiers and the natives. The Abenaki considered the fort’s construction to be an exercise in foolishness. More importantly, they tended to avoid the area of the forest in which it was located, terming it majigek, which Woolman translated as ‘wicked’. In fact, that was one of the reasons why Mordant had chosen that location for the fort’s construction. One of his sole redeeming qualities was his interest in the traditions of the native population, and he left behind him dozens of notebooks filled with jottings, essays, and sketches on the subject. The French were dependent upon their native guides, and if those guides were reluctant to enter certain areas of the woods, then a fort situated in such a place would enjoy relative immunity from attack. Thus it was that there could be no logical reason why the Abenaki should have been attacked by the British.
Woolman also said that, when he tried to seek further information about what had occurred, he was denied entry to Fort Mordant by its commander, Captain Holcroft, and he was now concerned for the officer’s mental state. He was also worried for the safety of Holcroft’s wife and daughter. Contrary to advice from all sources, Holcroft had insisted that his family join him when he took command of the fort. Woolman had been traveling east in the hope of communicating his worries to the appropriate authorities, and thus he agreed to accompany Lieutenant Buckingham and his men back to Fort Mordant.
They could see the buzzards hovering while they were still some distance away. When they reached the fort they found its gates open, and everyone inside dead. There were no signs of an Indian attack. Rather, it appeared that some dispute had arisen within the garrison, and the soldiers had fallen to fighting among themselves. Their uniforms were no longer regulation attire but had been accessorized with pieces of bone, both human and animal, and their faces were painted to resemble ferocious masks. Most had died from gunshot wounds, the rest at the point of a sword or a knife. Captain Holcroft’s wife was found in their quarters with her heart cut out. Of her husband and her daughter, there was no sign. A subsequent search of the surrounding forest revealed the remains of Captain Holcroft himself, and here, for the first time, there was found some indication of an Abenaki presence: Holcroft had been scalped, and his body mutilated and hanged from a tree.
While Buckingham’s men buried the dead, Buckingham and Woolman went in search of the Abenaki. Buckingham was reluctant to meet them without his men to protect him, for the Abenaki had fought on the side of the French, and the memory of their atrocities was still fresh in the minds of the British. Following the siege and subsequent massacre at Fort William Henry in 1757, the ranger commander Major Robert Rogers had found six hundred mostly British, scalps, decorating the Abenaki village of St Francis, and had destroyed it entirely in revenge. Relations with the Abenaki remained uneasy. Woolman assured Buckingham that, with him as a go-between, and with no demonstration of hostile intent, they would be safe. Buckingham grumbled that Holcroft’s violated remains gave him little comfort, and he considered the murder of the officer, for whatever reason, an act of war by the natives.
After riding for three hours, during which time Buckingham believed they were always under the eyes, and potentially the knives, of the Abenaki, they were met by a heavily armed party of natives, who quickly surrounded the two men. The leader gave his name as Tomah, or Thomas. He wore a cross at his neck, and had been baptized into the Catholic faith by French missionaries, accepting Thomas as his baptismal name. Buckingham was not sure what troubled him more: that he was surrounded by Abenaki, or surrounded by Catholics. Nevertheless, he and Tomah sat down together, and, with Woolman acting as translator, the Abenaki told them of what had transpired at the fort.
Most of what was said did not pass into the official record. Buckingham’s report on what came to be termed ‘the incident at Fort Mordant’ stated only that a dispute of unknown origin arose there, possibly fueled by alcohol, which led to the deaths of the entire garrison, including its commander, Captain Holcroft, and his wife. The role played by the Abenaki in Holcroft’s murder became clear only when Woolman’s private diary was discovered after his death, but Woolman also glossed over much of what was disclosed by Tomah, apparently by mutual agreement with Buckingham. Neverthelesss, the contents of Woolman’s diary went some way toward explaining why Buckingham allowed the killing of a fellow officer by the Abenaki to go both unreported and unpunished. Buckingham was a professional soldier, and he understood that, sometimes, a lie was preferable to a truth that might tarnish the reputation of his beloved army.
Woolman’s diary revealed a few pertinent details. The first was that Holcroft had been discovered by the Abenaki while apparently hunting his own daughter, but despite the Abenaki’s own efforts, and a further search by Buckingham and his men, the girl was never found. Second, the Catholic Abenaki told Woolman they had set out to kill the inhabitants of the fort in reprisal for the earlier slaughter. The small band of warriors who had been willing to overcome their fear of the territory were all Catholic converts, although they were additionally armed with totems of their tribe. They arrived at the fort to find that the soldiers had done the job for them, and had to be content with taking their revenge on Holcroft alone, whom Tomah described by using the same word that Woolman had used when Buckingham first met him: majigek.
Finally, according to Woolman, the Abenaki claimed that, before he died, Holcroft came to his senses, and begged his tormentors for forgiveness for what he had done. Woolman admitted that he had trouble understanding Tomah’s description of Holcroft’s final words, and was forced to clarify them in halting French, to little avail. Holcroft, it seemed, had railed in English, of which Tomah knew little; in French, of which Tomah knew slightly more; and in some mishmash of Passamaquoddy and Abenaki that Holcroft had picked up during his postings in the region, for like Mordant himself he was known to be a scholar of languages, and a civilized man.
As Woolman understood it, Holcroft claimed to have committed the slaughter of the Abenaki on the orders of the tsesuna, the Raven God who pecked at his window. He also termed him the apockoli, the Upsidedown God who spoke to him from behind his shaving mirror, and who sometimes called to him from the depths of the forest, his voice bubbling up from deep beneath the earth. It was this same entity, this demon, who had infected his men with madness, and turned them upon one another.
Holcroft had used another word too in connection with him before the Abenaki set to torturing him: it was ktahkomikey, a word that referred to wasps, particularly a certain species that nested in the ground.
Holcroft had died screaming of the God of Wasps.