Follow the River (2 page)

Still, Mary would think now and then with dread about Indians. Her mother, Elenor Draper, was a widow because George Draper had failed to return from a hunting expedition ten years ago and was presumed to have fallen victim to Indians. And though Mary had never seen any Indian exhibit a hostile look or gesture in her life, their existence out there beyond the western mountains did nonetheless hang like a dark cloud on the horizon of her mind, the only thing that seemed likely ever to trouble this Eden folded between the mountain ranges.

But now Mary was here on a peaceful summer Sunday, cooking for her beloved William, as on any day; in a moment she would take the family’s soiled clothes over to the spring under the big willow and wash them there in that delightful cool place where the water purled and gurgled and refreshed one’s soul as well as one’s heated body. Her sister-in-law was over there already—Mary could hear her slapping her family’s wet clothes against the rocks—and they would talk while they worked.

Thanks be to heaven that Johnny found himself such a cheerful and pretty wife, Mary thought. Mary had come to love and admire Bettie Robertson Draper, in the year since Johnny had gone over the mountain and brought her back as his bride. Mary had been midwife for Johnny and Bettie’s firstborn, and that did make a bond between women.

Aye, Mary thought, the dread now beginning to drift off of her soul as she tied the soiled clothes and a cake of tallow soap into a bundle, there’s nought to fear in this good place. Through a window she could hear the voices of her sons laughing and murmuring as they gathered berries in a nearby thicket with their grandmother. Aye, Mary felt, surely all’s well here.

And so, swinging the bundle of clothes over her shoulder as
easily as a man might, Mary went out the door of the cabin, preceded by her swollen belly into the sunny fresh air.

The moment her gaze fell over the settlement, she realized that what she had been dreading was about to happen:

Indians were running crouched and swift toward every cabin in the settlement.

Shwop! Shwop! Shwop!

Bettie Draper, kneeling on a flat rock beside the spring near her cabin, slapped her husband’s soapy shirt several times against the rock, then dipped it into the pool of cool water, held it there a moment, pulled it up and twisted it to wring the water out. She was in the shade of a big willow whose gnarled roots bulged out right over the spring. The constant shade and the delicate green ferns growing around the spring kept the place pleasant on the hottest days. Nearby, spread to dry over sunbaked rocks beyond the shade, more of her family’s laundry lay, creamy-white linen and faded gray homespun. She hummed as she worked, pausing now and then with an ear toward the house for sounds of her baby’s awakening. Her husband, Johnny, had built both a front door and a back door in their cabin, and when both doors were open, as now, the breeze up from the valley could flow through the house and the baby could nap comfortably in his hollowed-log cradle, not waking fitful and flushed and sweat-damp as he often did in the night when the doors were kept shut. It was so cool in the Draper cabin, in fact, that sometimes on the hot days Mary would bring her two-year-old boy Georgie over to nap there instead of in his own bed. “By heaven, Bettie,” Mary had said with a conspiratorial smile only yesterday, “one day after the harvest, you and I sh’ll take my Will from both sides at once, and ’suade that old hardhead t’ saw me oot a back-way just like’t.”

Shwop! Shwop! Shwop!
John’s spare pair of britches now. As usual with a button off one knee and a tear in the seat, she noticed. A hard-working and a hard-playing man he was, strong as a bull and just as heedless, and there was something to mend every week when he changed his clothes. But Bettie
smiled. She rejoiced in any chance to do some little thing for him. Johnny was a prize of a man indeed.

Now wringing out the britches, Bettie looked up and saw Casper Barrier, a neighbor, coming up toward the spring with two empty oaken pails dangling by ropes from a yoke across his shoulders. Casper was a widower, bald and lonely, and Bettie had observed that he would always drop whatever he was doing to come fetch his water when there was someone doing laundry at the spring. And he would strike up a chat, all innocent enough, and stay there wistful-eyed for as long as the hapless laundress would listen, talking about how good his wife had been to everyone, and about how he would never find as good a one to marry, so why even leave the valley to seek? Well, I won’t have much time t’ hear out Mr. Barrier’s woes today, Bettie thought, inspecting the tear in the britches. With mending to do and all … the Sabbath’s no day of rest when ye’ve a man to care for …

When she looked up again, Casper Barrier was no longer walking toward the spring. He was lying face down on the footpath. A naked Indian, painted and shining in the sunlight, crouched over him, chopping into the back of his head. Casper’s bald scalp was bright with new blood. There were other Indians running down the slope from the path.

A scream tore out of Bettie Draper’s throat. She jumped to her feet. By instinct she sprinted toward the cabin, to get to her sleeping baby. She screamed again and again as she ran, screams that were not coherent words because there were no words for this.

In the corner of her eye she saw figures running as if to flank her, heard the slumping of their breath. She leaped with flying skirts upon the front-door threshold and into the cabin’s shadowy interior. She snatched her baby boy out of the cradle and ran straight out the back door.
“PLEASE GOD!”
she was screaming now.
“HELP! MARY! ELLIE! INDIANS! THEY KILT CAS … OH GOD HELP!…”

Colonel James Patton was sitting at a table inside the door of his cabin, writing a report to Colonel Washington—a report of nothing. The region, which he knew well because of
his huge landholdings and his responsibility as militia chief, had lain in utter peace since Colonel Washington’s visit; there had not been a tremor of disturbance anywhere on this western side of the Blue Ridge. Colonel Patton was in fact just now trying to organize the early harvest rather than any sort of military readiness. He had just sent his nephew Bill Preston down Sinking Creek to Philip Lybrook’s house to ask him to come up and help with the barley cutting.

James Patton leaned back in his chair and looked at the page upon which he had been writing. He put the quill in the ink bottle and twirled it there, resting his other hand on his thigh. White chin-whiskers hid his broad chest. His chair creaked under the weight of his powerful frame as he extended a leg straight out under the table. Sitting cramped him, and he hated anything—ledgers and letters—that took him off his horse or out of the fields or woods and made him have to fold himself up to fit furniture.

On the table by his right hand lay a great antique weapon that he had kept with him ever since he had grown big enough to carry it. It was a claymore—a straight broadsword, as long as an ordinary man stood tall, and it weighed as much as an axe. It had been passed down through his family along with a legend that it had belonged to some ancestor who had been a Scottish Highland chieftain. Its hilt was made to be held by two hands, and an ordinary man needed two hands to wield it. But old James Patton, who was four inches over six feet tall, had always been able to swing it, with equal facility, by either hand, and could do so even now as a sixty-three-year-old widower. Though it was too precious to use as an everyday tool, James Patton had found occasion in camp or in the fields to lop down thick hardwood saplings or branches with this great weapon, usually in a single stroke.

The dazzling doorway suddenly was darkened. At the same moment, a woman’s voice screamed outdoors. Colonel Patton looked up from his word gathering, and his heart leaped. Two painted Indians had entered, each with a raised tomahawk, and as James Patton grabbed the handle of his great sword, he saw others at the door.

The colonel wasted no time getting free of the furniture.
Rather, he exploded into a standing position, hurling the heavy table at the Indians with an upsweep of his left arm while the chair fell backward with a clatter behind him. The flying table slammed one of the braves back against the doorway. The second warrior had nimbly sidestepped, and with a gurgling yell he aimed a tomahawk blow at the old man’s forehead. But the broadsword swished, glittering, and the warrior felt a strange tug in his shoulder and saw his forearm fall to the floor, spurting dark blood. It was the last thing the warrior saw; the great sword whiffed again and his head rolled on the cabin floor.

Another warrior was in the doorway. He saw the terrible old man advancing on him holding the long, bloody sword by both hands and roaring with fury. As the brave raised his tomahawk to strike, the old man grunted and swung and the sword came around and passed through the Indian’s waist, parting everything but his spine. The Indian sagged, his bloody intestines spilling out.

Colonel Patton tried to ready his sword for the next Indian in the doorway, but at the end of his last great upward swipe, the point of the blade had jabbed two inches deep into one of the low ceiling beams. Blood ran down the blade to the hilt and reddened Colonel Patton’s hands. And as he strained to free the weapon from the wood, the Shawnee on the threshold took aim and pulled the trigger of his musket. There was a roaring orange flash, and a musketball smashed through Colonel Patton’s temple into his brain.

The Indians crouched in the doorway speechless for a moment in the blue powder-smoke and watched the white-haired giant begin to fall. One bloody hand slipped off the sword hilt, and then the other, and his huge body bumped to the floor.

The hilt of the embedded claymore thrummed up and down, spraying blood onto the corpse.

Bettie Draper was running hard now toward the Ingleses’ cabin, her crying baby clutched in her right arm. She saw Mary Ingles standing dumbstruck on the doorstoop in the sunlight with a bundle over her shoulder. And the Indians, their presence now revealed by Bettie’s alarm, broke their
silence with yelps and howls. They sounded like a hundred devils wailing in the valley.

One of the warriors pursuing Bettie stopped in his tracks, aimed his musket and fired.

Her scream broke off in a gasp of pain as the musketball broke her right arm. The infant fell to the ground and Bettie spun away, falling to her knees. Her face was chalky with shock. She saw her baby lying sprawled in the grass a few feet away; she saw lithe, yipping savages running toward him with their tomahawks and clubs.

Bettie lurched back to her feet, ran to where the baby lay, scooped him up from the ground with her good arm and continued running.

Bettie’s plight at last jolted Mary into action. She dropped her bundle of clothing and turned back inside the cabin. She grabbed Will’s loaded rifle off its wall pegs and waddled back to the door with it. In the front of her mind was the urgent need to save Bettie and the baby; in the back of her mind was an awful question: whether the savages had yet found her own little sons and her mother.

The scene outside the cabin door made Mary, for the first time in her life, furious enough to kill.

Several warriors were having sport with Bettie’s shrieking baby, tossing it back and forth between them, while another held Bettie by her dark hair and forced her to watch. She was on her knees, and her shrieks sounded as if they must be tearing out the membranes of her throat. One of the Indians was trying to hit the baby with his tomahawk as it hurtled through the air. The blade struck the baby and brought him to earth. Then the warriors scrambled for him as if they were playing some game of ball-scrimmage. They were laughing and howling; Bettie and the baby were screaming.

Mary’s head was roaring with outrage. She tried to cock the flintlock hammer. Twice it slipped under her sweating hand.

Now one of the Indians had the bleeding screaming baby by its ankle. Lurching away from the other two, he swung the baby in a wide arc and dashed his brains out against the corner logs of the cabin. The baby’s screams were punctuated
by that awful squishing thud. Bettie’s cries stopped also: she was beyond being able to scream.

In that awful silence the warrior, pirouetting triumphantly and holding the baby high overhead, its smashed skull dribbling blood on him, turned to find another white woman, this one big with child, standing on a doorstoop five feet from him with a cocked rifle aimed straight at his eyes. He froze. His mouth dropped open. Baby blood was spotting the ochre and blue paint on his face.

Mary pulled the trigger.

The hammer clicked. The gun did not fire.

She remembered then that Will always left the barrel loaded, but the firing pan uncharged, when he hung up the gun.

“No,” she groaned. She simply stood there, resigned, the useless gun still at her shoulder, her eyes now darting wildly toward the berry patch for a last sight of her mother and sons. She felt strong hands grab her hair from behind and her head was yanked back and all she could see was the clear blue sky and the eave of the cabin roof.

She felt the the gun being torn from her hands and heard the Indians laughing at her.

* * *

Elenor Draper loved to take her grandsons berry picking in the summer, and herb gathering and mushroom and wild-grape hunting in their season, mostly because little Thomas had such an inquisitive mind and imagination. Tommy had been born here in Draper’s Meadows and had never been anywhere else in his four years of life, but he was endlessly fascinated by the idea that his grandmother had once lived in a land far beyond a great ocean. They would reach carefully into the wild raspberry brambles and gently squeeze off the bright red berries, squeezing them ever so lightly so as not to crush them, reaching gingerly so as not to scratch their hands on the thorns, and as they did this with half their attention she would try to make him visualize what an ocean was. They had recited all this many times and surely would do it many times
more, because his curiosity about the Atlantic Ocean seemed insatiable.

“Now, look’ee then to th’ top o’ that mountain yonder, Tommy-lad …” He stood up straight and looked where she pointed, his dark eyes squinting, freckled nose crinkling, a breeze moving wisps of his thick red-brown hair across his forehead. “…  an’ suppose now that was water all the way to there.” He nodded in appreciation of that wonderful notion but waited to hear the rest. “And now suppose y’ come all that way on th’ water …”