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  The Fiddler’s Gun

  Fin’s Revolution: Book One

  A. S. Peterson

  The Fiddler’s Gun

  © 2009 by A. S. Peterson

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, eaten, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, telepathic, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews, historical textbooks, constitutions of small oligarchies, or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher and at least three of the author’s teenaged brainchildren.

  Published by long-eared carrot-eaters in

  Nashville, Tennessee at Rabbit Room Press

  940 Davidson Drive

  Nashville, Tennessee 37205

  Cover artwork by Evie Coates

  Edited by Kate Etue

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2009911581

  ISBN 978-0-615-32542-2

  ISBN 0-615-32542-4

  09 10 11 12 13 — 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my family—

  without whom I’d be unfashionably sane.

  “...the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.”

  —Frederick Buechner

  The Sacred Journey

  THE BEGINNING

  The trouble with Phineas Michael Button began the moment she was born. She had the expected two ears, two eyes, one nose, and dimpled cheeks, but in her father’s mind there was a problem. He had twelve children, daughters all, and was convinced that number thirteen would be his long-awaited son. So on the twenty-fifth of September, 1755, when he drew another baby girl from the womb of his long-suffering wife, he declared the discovery of an unacceptable mistake. He held up the little squirmer by a leg and inspected it with great suspicion, turning it first one way and then another as if peering at the child from differing angles might produce a change in its gender.

  After a long and uncomfortable spell of dangling the child by a leg and harrumphing in displeasure, he handed it over to his wife and asked, “What’s that, then?”

  “What is it? What is it?” Matilda-Mae Button screamed at him.

  “Twelve of them you had already and still not got it right. We ain’t keeping this one.” He nodded, walked away, and scarcely gave the child another thought for more than twenty years.

  To her meager credit, Matilda-Mae Button didn’t give up quite so easily as her husband. She named the child after its father, hoping she could trick him into thinking she’d fixed it. And then she went so far as to whisper in the child’s ear tales of what a good boy she was and lies of what a fine man she’d grow to be. It was a conspiracy of conviction she visited upon her daughter in hopes of talking her newborn child out of the way she’d been made in the womb. Raising twelve other daughters was trouble enough, though, and trying to fool number thirteen into a son eventually grew tiresome.

  Upon the morning of the seventh day of her life, Phineas Michael Button crossed the Savannah River into the Georgia colony. She was swaddled tightly and tucked deep into the arms of one of her twelve sisters, who were, in turn, tucked into the back of a covered wagon. In the front seat, her parents argued in whispers and hushed exclamations. They’d arrived in the town of Ebenezer and the discovery of an orphanage had generated a decisive mood in their father and a quarrelsome one in their mother. Many words flew in both directions between the two, but it will suffice to say that when the wagon clattered its way out of Ebenezer that morning, the orphanage had gained a child and the wagon had lost one. The Buttons left behind a bundle of red curls and unwanted promise, and Matilda-Mae uttered a silent prayer that her thirteenth baby girl would somehow know a full life in spite of her unkind beginnings.

  The Baab sisters of the Ebenezer orphanage were ready and willing to answer that prayer and see it through, but time has a way of leading a person along a crooked path. Sometimes the path is hard to hold to and people fall off along the way. They curse the road for its steep grades and muddy ruts and settle themselves in hinterlands of thorn and sorrow, never knowing or dreaming that the road meant all along to lead them home. Some call that road a tragedy and lose themselves along it. Others, those that see it home, call it an adventure.

  Part I

  Foundations

  CHAPTER I

  “Give him a whop on the head!”

  Danny Shoeman and John Cooper were up to no good. Again. Nine-year-old Owen Sheffield was cornered behind the stable, out of breath, and whimpering in the path of the beating he seemed certain to catch in the form of a “whop on the head.” To a boy like Owen—frail, timid, and endlessly awkward—a confrontation with two menacing sixteen-year-olds was nothing less than a sign of the apocalypse, the end of the world, the coming of a reign of tyrant gods bent on his destruction.

  Luckily for Owen, Fin Button was within earshot and this was just the sort of trouble she hoped for when she crawled out of bed each morning. She peeked around the corner of the stable and her lip curled into a grin. Seventeen years at an orphanage will teach a person either to get along very well with all manner of people or to fight like a heathen. Fin had never been one to get along, so boys like Danny and John had taught her how to fight. Even as a small child, Fin was more likely to run with the boys than play dolls with the girls, and she learned all manner of indecent behavior in their company—cussing, for instance, and climbing and spitting and how to throw her fists and make her punches count. It was just horseplay at first, but eventually there were real fights, usually over disrespect shown to one’s mother. For orphans, the esteem of one’s mother was elevated to something approaching sainthood and the hope of a parent’s good intentions was the holiest thing a child could possess. As such, the tainting of it caused all manner of boyish violence.

  In her younger days, Fin lost her share of fights and slunk around the orphanage with plenty of black eyes, fat lips, and bloodied noses, but she didn’t take well to losing. Once it was apparent to her that the boys had weight and power as their advantages, she claimed speed and surprise as hers. In time she learned that whoever threw the first punch usually won the fight, and she hadn’t lost one since. The boys learned that getting cross with Fin Button was a sure way to invite a fist in the eye, and by the time she was sixteen most people avoided her like they would an angry hornet’s nest.

  “What you think, John? Should we beat him, whip him, or pound him?” said Danny.

  Owen Sheffield opened his mouth to protest his doom but was so alarmed that he failed to form even a comprehensible word and only managed to gurgle. Then he tried to faint his way out of the predicament. He’d heard playing dead was a sure way to escape bear attacks, so he rolled up his eyes, shuddered, and went limp.

  Danny and John broke into a fit of laughter. It was this laughter that disguised the sound of Fin Button walking up behind them; it was also this laughter that turned Fin’s face red with anger and wound her arms tight, ready to throw. The laughter stopped abruptly when she spoke.

  “I got a whop for the both of you,” she said. Before Danny Shoeman could turn around to see who was speaking, he had an earful of knuckle and a gut full of Fin’s dirty, skinned knee. Surprise and speed. She left him lying in the dirt, sucking for wind, and turned on John Cooper, who quickly appraised the situation and decided that running was his best option. Fin didn’t allow it. She shot out her hand and jerked him by the ear so hard she nearly snatched it clean off.

  “Ow, ow, ow, ow . . .” said John as he bent around and followed his ear back toward Fin, and then, “Oof!” as she kicked his legs out from under him and he flopped to the ground next to Danny.

  After that the three of them went to yelping, scratching, and biting like dogs in a
pit. Owen Sheffield cowered out of the way. At first he was too afraid to do anything but keep clear and be thankful Fin had come to his rescue, but soon he gave up his cowering and began to cheer for her. “Stick him again, Fin!” he shouted and, “Look out behind!” And when he saw that Fin was in danger of letting the boys get the best of her, he jumped in among them and latched himself fast to John Cooper’s left leg until Fin knocked him cold in the dust and could turn her full attention to putting Danny down.

  To the smaller children, Fin was a legendary figure. She was their caretaker, their guardian, their savior. When the young men her age, her friends at play in earlier years, began to speak in deeper voices and fuss about their sprouting beards, they saw she wasn’t really one of them and shunned her. The girls wanted little to do with Fin either, so stuck between the children and being alone, Fin took the younger generation on as her flock. She would tolerate no mistreatment of the younger orphans by the likes of Danny Shoeman and John Cooper.

  It didn’t take long for Sister Hilde to follow her nose to the commotion. Once Hilde detected the outbreak of a fight within her realm, she descended on it like bird of prey. She flew across the courtyard and seized hold of Danny Shoeman’s arm as it travelled through the air toward Fin’s head.

  “Cease! Cease this very moment!” Sister Hilde ordered. There was a brief moment of silence in which all the involved parties did, in fact, cease all movement and stood perfectly still in contemplation of each other. But then, as if upon some unseen cue, each of them burst into shouts of accusation and denial. Sister Hilde’s nose quivered in anger. “Silence! Explain this madness, Danny Shoeman!”

  “It wasn’t my fault, Sister Hilde. She started it!” said Danny, pointing at Fin.

  Fin feigned shock.

  “They was picking on Owen and was going to knot him up. I wasn’t going to stand and just watch,” explained Fin.

  Sister Hilde had scarcely even noticed John lying on the ground. When he groaned and wiped his bloodied nose with the back of his hand, she snapped her fingers and ordered him up. “John Cooper, get up from there this instant,” she said as if the discovery of a boy awakening in the dirt at her feet were a perfectly natural, although unsatisfactory, occurrence. She rounded back on Danny, “Do you expect me to believe that Phinea started this fight, Danny Shoeman?” Fin smiled like an imp. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Go get cleaned up, it’s nearly time for dinner.”

  “But—” he protested, still pointing at Fin.

  “Enough!” Sister Hilde aimed a bony finger at the dorm and Danny sulked off.

  “You, Miss Button,” she considered Fin for a moment, “are a shameful and continual disappointment. Is this how a young woman behaves? You’re seventeen years old and look at you! You’re a monster, you filthy child.”

  Fin bristled and clenched her fists. Sister Hilde knew very well that Fin was no child. She used the word like a weapon. Hilde scowled down her nose and shooed Fin away in disgust. “Get yourself ready for dinner.” She turned to appraise Owen Sheffield. “Are you hurt, child?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Then what are you waiting for? Go!”

  Sister Hilde Baab was the slight old crone who held the day-to-day run of the orphanage firmly in her grip and sent orphans running for cover when she’d flick her gaze their way. Years before, when Sister Hilde first came upon the newborn Phineas Michael Button, she made up her mind that a girl with a man’s name wasn’t proper and lopped off the s, leaving naught but Phinea behind (she was similarly dismayed when the children shortened “Phinea” to “Fin”). Despite an unfriendly demeanor and shrewd tongue, Sister Hilde’s nose was her deadliest weapon. Same as the rest of her, it was long, pointed, and gnarled like an old tree, striking out first in one direction, then shifting midstride to head in quite another, then finally changing its mind again and heading back the way it had gone to begin with. When she was irritated, it twitched back and forth and turned red. When she was mad, it dove down and depressed her nostrils, making them flare out like crab apples. Children claimed she could even point with it, and the last thing a child wanted was to look up and find Sister Hilde’s nose pointing at him. Wherever Hilde was, somewhere else was always a better place to be.

  A monster and a filthy child. Not a suitable description as far as Fin was concerned and yet more accurate than she wanted to admit. The older she got the clearer it became that she wasn’t what people expected of a young woman. Whenever Sister Hilde accused her of not acting her age, she knew exactly what she meant, yet she refused to surrender her own ways to Hilde’s all-encompassing authority. In the seventeen years since she was abandoned at the orphan house, Fin had grown into a freckled mess of red hair, spindly limbs, and boyish features. Although Sister Carmaline often whispered that a pretty face might lurk beneath the smudges of dirt and tangled hair, Fin didn’t care to find out. She was one of the boys, and the sisters’ insistence that she was nearly a grown woman wasn’t about to change that.

  In defiance of her orders to wash up, Fin snuck through the front door of the chapel and climbed the ladder to the tower. Bells for calling the Lord’s worship were too costly for the small town, and the tower was empty save nesting birds, cobwebs, and deep shadowy corners in which to sulk, pout, or hide. Fin considered it her domain.

  She settled into the cleft of the bell tower and considered swatting the dirt off her clothes. She decided against it, solely for Sister Hilde’s sake, and looked out over the walls. The vast pine and oak forests of southern Georgia spread out around her, broken only by the meandering line of the Savannah River. Somewhere to the east, she imagined, it met the Atlantic, but she’d never been to the sea and the imagining was all she had. The smell of dinner was on the air and the sun was setting behind her. The long shadow of the bell tower stretched out across the walls and reached beyond the boundaries of the orphanage. Fin closed her eyes and let part of herself go with it.

  CHAPTER II

  “Fin!” called a voice from below.

  She ignored it.

  The voice called again and a shadowed figure stepped into the courtyard. Fin raised two fingers to her mouth and whistled. Peter LaMee looked up and followed the sound. Like his form crossing the courtyard, Peter was vague and difficult to define. He held his words close and was content with his silence in a way uncommon to a boy of seventeen. While Fin always had an opinion and a need to voice it, Peter was a quiet companion, a good listener. They were two sides of a coin—one a stark profile and the other an obscure symbol of the minter’s affiliation. She gave another short whistle and Peter LaMee clambered up the ladder into the tower.

  “Sister Hilde is going to skin you,” he said.

  “I’ve had it with her and her waggling nose.” Fin didn’t move. She maintained her solemn consideration of the countryside. “I’m not hungry.”

  “She won’t let us eat till we’re all at the table. You know that.” Fin knew. That was precisely the point. Fin’s lips lifted into the slightest grin as she pictured Sister Hilde sitting at the table fuming over her whereabouts. But it wasn’t fair to the rest of those waiting to eat, and she knew that too.

  “Fine.” Fin sighed with irritation. “Let’s go.”

  Inside the dining hall the sisters, Brother Bartimaeus, and twenty-four orphans stared hungrily at two platters piled high with roasted pork and a kettle of stewed carrots. When Fin moseyed in and made her way to her seat, she was pleasantly satisfied by the distinct twitch of irritation in Sister Hilde’s nose.

  “Miss Button, thank you for joining us,” said Hilde. “You will see me after the meal. Let us pray.”

  For the next twenty minutes the room was full of the smack-smack and the mm-hmm of well-enjoyed food. Brother Bartimaeus ate quietly with a grin on his face while Sister Hilde paid more attention to the orphans’ table etiquette than to her own plate. Sister Carmaline, on the other hand, ate every bite as if she feared it might be her last.

  Carmaline Baab, Hilde’s elder si
ster and the official headmistress of the Ebenezer Orphan House, was a terrifically fat woman who somehow managed to stay plump even during lean years when others starved. She didn’t glutton the food (that anyone ever saw); people just figured the Lord himself had set her ample dimensions and all the failed harvests and dysentery in the colony wouldn’t lighten her. Her cheeks were as rosy as new-picked apples, and the chubbiness of her face made them bunch up against her eyes so that she looked to be forever squinting out at a world that was too bright. Everywhere she went she bobbled along humming hymns while orphans scurried here and there trying not to ogle at the vastness of her.

  When the sounds of dinner died down, Sister Carmaline stood (a state confirmed by the slight vertical elongation of her orb-like physique) and waited for the room to quiet. Fin jabbed Peter with her elbow and rolled her eyes. Carmaline always had a speech.

  “Thank you for your attention, children. And thank you, Brother Bartimaeus, for another heavenly dinner.” Nodding heads and smiling faces concurred. “Before we adjourn to our beds for the evening, I wish to discuss a few matters.”

  Several orphans rolled their eyes and were each dutifully ignored by Carmaline.

  “I’m sure you took note of the elderly gentleman about the yard earlier today with Sister Hilde and myself. He was, as some of you may know, Brother Bolzius, the mayor of Ebenezer, and he was most impressed with the level of order and cleanliness we demand. In fact, he was impressed enough to make a small proposition on the behalf of the town.”