The Empty Chair

uneasily. “I always worry about the bridge. People looking for you.”
    Always?
    Garrett beached the boat and shut the motor off. He climbed out and unscrewed a turn-bolt securing the outboard, which he pulled off and hid in the grass, along with the gas tank.
    “What’re you doing?” she asked.
    “Can’t take a chance of getting spotted.”
    Garrett took the cooler and the water jugs out of the boat and lashed the oars to the seats with two pieces of greasy rope. He poured the water out of a half dozen of the jugs and recapped them, set them aside. He nodded toward the bottles. “Too bad about the water. Mary Beth doesn’t have any. She’ll need some. But I can get some for her from this pond near the cabin.” Then he waded into the river and gripped the boat by the side. “Help me,” he said. “We’ve got to capsize it.”
    “We’re going to sink it?”
    “No. Just turn her upside down. We’ll put the jugs underneath. She’ll float fine.”
    “Upside down?”
    “Sure.”
    Sachs realized what Garrett had in mind. They’d get up underneath the boat and float past the bridge. The darkhull, low in the water, would be almost impossible to see from the bridge. Once they were past they could right the boat and row the rest of the way to where Mary Beth was.
    He opened the cooler and found a plastic bag. “We can put our things in it that we don’t want to get wet.” He dropped his book, The Miniature World, inside it. Sachs added her wallet and the gun. She tucked her T-shirt into her jeans and slipped the bag down the front of her shirt.
    Garrett said, “Can you take my cuffs off?” He held his hands out.
    She hesitated.
    “I don’t want to drown,” he said, eyes imploring.
    I’m scared. Make him stop!
    “I won’t do anything bad. I promise.”
    Reluctantly Sachs fished the key from her pocket and undid the cuffs.

    The Weapemeoc Indians, native to what is now North Carolina, were, linguistically, part of the Algonquin nation and were related to the Powhatans, the Chowans and the Pamlico tribes in the Mid-Atlantic portion of the United States.
    They were excellent farmers and were envied among their fellow Native Americans for their fishing prowess. They were peaceful to an extreme and had little interest in arms. Three hundred years ago the British scientist Thomas Harriot wrote, “Those weapons that they have, are onlie bowes made of Witch hazle, and arrows of reeds; neither have they anything to defend themselves but targets made of barcks; and some armours made of sticks wickered together with thread.”
    It took British colonists to turn these people militant and they did so quite efficiently by, simultaneously, threatening them with God’s wrath if they didn’t convertimmediately to Christianity, decimating the population by importing influenza and smallpox, demanding food and shelter they were too lazy to provide for themselves and murdering one of the tribe’s favorite chiefs, Wingina, who, the colonists were convinced, erroneously, as it happened, was plotting an attack on the British settlements.
    To the colonists’ indignant surprise, rather than accepting the Lord Jesus Christ into their hearts, the Indians declared allegiance to their own deities—spirits called Manitous—and then war against the British, the opening action of which (according to history as writ by young Mary Beth McConnell) was the assault on the Lost Colonists at Roanoke Island.
    After the settlers fled, the tribe—anticipating British reinforcements—took a new look at weaponry and began to use copper, which had been used only for decoration, in making arms. Metal arrowheads were much sharper than flint and easier to make. However, unlike in the movies, an arrow fired by an unpulleyed bow usually won’t penetrate very far into the skin and is rarely fatal. To finish off his wounded adversary the Weapemeoc warrior would apply the coup de grâce—a blow to the head with a club called, appropriately, a “coup stick,” which the tribe became very talented in making.
    A coup stick is nothing more than a large, rounded rock bound into the split end of a stick and lashed into place with a leather thong. It’s a very efficient weapon, and the one that Mary Beth McConnell was now making, based on her knowledge of Native American archaeology, was surely as deadly as the ones that—in her theory—had crushed the skulls and snapped the spines of the Roanoke settlers as they fought their last battle on