Follow the River (20 page)

But how does one cross such a river? she wondered.

Sure there’d be a canoe unguarded somewhere.

But what about food?

What one can carry, long’s it lasts. Then, why, it’ll be fall soon: Nuts and berries, persimmons and paw paws, and game, if I could steal a gun, and then, well, we’d just have to see …

But
 …

She looked down on Bettie Elenor’s head, at the whorl of dark silky hair on the soft skull, and felt the hungry pull at her nipple. She thought of the countless miles of stony river banks and creekbeds, and of the coming cold of autumn.

A babe would starve as I starved, and freeze as I froze, she thought.

She realized that of all the obstacles she could anticipate in the path of her escape, this delicate and helpless life was the greatest. Surely it would die on the trail.

Even more surely than I would die on the trail, she thought.

Her vision was clear, free of hope. Her heart was like a bullet. She erased the name
Bettie Elenor
. The baby at her breast had to become an object to her. Just an object. Her soul was still a huge gaping wound where her sons had been, as if a keen-edged knife had cut away a living part of her. She must see to it now that this infant, this tiny stranger who had joined her in the forest and ridden ever since on her back facing away from her, should not become such a part of her in this hazardous episode that its loss could break her spirit.

She returned to her contemplation of the tomahawks and blankets and provisions. Her body was feeling the pull of the long homeward river valleys. She was ready to rise, fill her arms and simply walk southward out of the Shawnee town, whether to home and freedom, or to death.

“Eh! La voila!”

It was LaPlante. He and Goulart had returned, with the Otter Girl following them.

There would be no walking away from the Shawnee town today. She had sat too long pondering it.

Mary reckoned by her calendar of knots that it was mid-September when Goulart announced the salt-making expedition. She would be in the party, he said.

Her heart began thudding. A salt-making expedition might well provide the opportunity to escape. But she hid her eagerness and said nothing.

“You. Me. LaPlante and his squaw. The old woman. And men from this town, twelve or twenty I would say, for the canoes and to escort us,” Goulart said, stroking his beard and squinting into the treetops with the effort of speaking English. He was squatting on the earth beside her on his thick haunches as she sewed a final shirt from the exhausted supply of blue and white checked cloth.

Mary was beginning to be leery of Goulart. He showed signs of becoming familiar and proprietary toward her, as if he were beginning to consider her his squaw now that Wildcat was gone. He had not touched her, nor said anything ungentlemanly, but she had caught him contemplating her with a certain confident satisfaction showing in his face, and he
would refer often, as he had just now, to
you
and
me
, as if they belonged together. After the division of the prisoners Mary had been moved from the hut she had shared with Bettie to the trading post, where she and Otter Girl and the two Frenchmen slept under the same roof. Goulart continued to call her Madame, and she had suggested several times that he should address her as Mrs. Ingles. Goulart was a virile man of big appetites, for whom it obviously was not easy to be patient, and sometimes she imagined she could smell his desire even through the sourness of his heavy, unwashed body and the leggings and loincloth he never changed, or that she could feel it emanating like heat. She did not know how long it would be until he would make some sort of advance. If he did, she had sworn to herself, she would kill him. He wore a sheath knife between his shoulder blades on a thong that passed under his left arm and over his right shoulder. She had seen him practice drawing it in idle moments. Acting as if he were merely scratching his scalp or tugging his earlobe, he would, quick as a striking snake, whip his right hand forward; the long knife would be in it. If he ever tries to embrace me, she had vowed, I will get that knife off his back and stick it between his ribs.

She had never contemplated killing before, except in that long-ago moment when the Indians killed Bettie’s baby, but the abrupt and brutal events of the last two months had built up in her a readiness to strike back quickly at the next person who should try to encroach on her life. They had left her nothing but her own body and soul. She would brook no more insults on those.

“The old woman?” she asked, returning to what he had said.

“Oui. Madam Stumf. The great horse.” He snickered.

“She is still in this town?”

“Oui. She works like two men. Who would give away such a one?”

Give away, she thought. Selling and trading us like cattle.

But a salt-making party! Not only a better chance to escape, she thought, but the salt lick is much closer to home! She reviewed her memory of the trek down, and recalled that
they had reached the salt lick after less than two weeks’ travel from Draper’s Meadows.

Dear Lord, she thought, her heart beginning to fill up with hope again, they’ll be taking us halfway home! If I can escape from them there, why, I can make it home, I know I can!

Mary watched the little whirlpools the paddles made alongside the canoe as the four vessels moved gracefully down the limpid green Scioto toward the O-y-o. The baby slept in its carrier on her lap, shadows of overhanging sycamore and willow leaves gliding silently over her eyelids. Mary felt as if the quick high pounding of her own heart might awaken the baby. She was going home! The Indians and the Frenchmen did not know it but they were helping her start her journey home! She had to lower her face from time to time to hide her sly smile. If they saw her eagerness, surely they would become suspicious of her intent.

It was a beautiful day: dry air, deep blue sky, profound green shadows under the great trees along the river banks. Patches of foliage were already yellowing or reddening in some places and their reflections mottled the blue-green surface of the river. Tassels of Indian maise and leaves of tobacco glowed yellow-green in the clearings. The paddles dipped and dribbled. Clouds of birds rose and settled along the shores as the canoes bore down on them. The birds seemed as free and cautious as Mary’s own soul now. From time to time old Irish songs would rise in her mind, in her mother’s sweet remembered voice. She thought of her mother talking as she always had with Tommy and Georgie, the buzz and lilt of their voices on a summer’s day. And soon she found herself singing, voicelessly, with her lips only, to the tune of an old favorite ballad of her mother’s:

“Ahhh,” Goulart’s voice growled behind her, where he sat wielding a paddle. “La Belle Riviere!”

Mary looked up. There it was now, a broad blue expanse across their way, the O-y-o. Her heart leaped again. She saw it as the highway to her freedom. She suppressed a smile, then looked back at him. “What did you say?”

“La Belle Riviere,” he breathed, his voice almost an amorous croon. “All Indian names for thees mean ‘The Beautiful River.’ Iroquois say ‘Oligen-Sipen.’ Delawares say ‘Kitonocepe.’ Wyandottes say ‘O-hee-zuh.’ All mean ‘The Beautiful River.’ ” He looked at her, after the poetic outburst, with such a strange expression, a sort of cow-eyed leer, that she realized he was feeling romantic, and she had to look forward again to keep him from seeing her mirth.

But he was right. It was a beautiful river. Its splendor had impressed her even through her terror on the way to the Shawnee town. And now that her heart was full of the promise of escape, this grand stream looked still more benevolent.

The shimmering vista widened slowly as the canoes moved down the mouth of the Scioto. Beyond the broad O-y-o, the dark bluffs of the south bank mounted up to loaf-shaped hills of lilac blue. A mere dot on the far shore she made out as the Indian hut where they had stopped to await the canoes.

Now the prows of the canoes sliced into the current of the great stream. The sense of spaciousness was thrilling. A strong, fresh breeze, sweeping up the river from the unknown lands in the west, nudged them as they emerged from the sheltering bluff at the Scioto’s mouth. It whipped her hair about her face. She shifted herself slightly and bent forward to shade the baby’s face from the sun and protect her from the wind, and looked upstream toward the east.

Now, ye bloodsoaked heathens, she thought in crafty, silent exultation, just turn left here and head me f’r home! I sh’ll leave you at th’ salt lick and make my own way thence, thank ’ee kindly …

The shoreline swung as the canoes began their slow turn.

And suddenly the smile froze on Mary’s face, and then melted, and her blood drained out of her head.

No. No, wait, now … Not that way … NOT THAT WAY!

She turned a stricken face backward. Goulart was stroking over the canoe’s left side with his paddle, looking quizzically at her bewildered expression.

“Q’est-que c’est?”

It was some time before she could speak. By then the canoes were clearly riding the current downstream toward the west. “I … I thought we were going to the salt lick … I thought …”

“Oui.”

“But …” she moved her lips and found no words. She pointed back upstream. “Salt …”

He rested his paddle and pointed downstream. “La bas,” he said. “
Much
salt. The Lick of the Giant Bones. You will see.
Incroyable!
”

The statement was nonsense to her. It did not matter. She had been foolish enough to hope again. And now they were not taking her closer to home after all. They were taking her father away.

She sat in the belly of the canoe feeling herself again grow small and hard inside as the paddles dipped and the water purled along the thin bark hull that supported her on the surface of the deep eternal water of the great river. After a while she turned halfway to Goulart and asked: “How far?”

He shrugged, looked skyward, translating distances into English in his mind. “Maybe,” he said, “one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred miles.”

He heard her groan.

“Have no worry, Madame,” he said. “You are in the care of Goulart.”

They went swiftly with the current for four days, and every hour of the passage only tormented Mary, because each league they skimmed over with such ease was a league farther from home. She watched the magnificent wooded bluffs and cane-covered bottomlands glide by and estimated that the canoes were traveling down the river at least three or four times as swiftly as she would be able to walk up its banks. She did not even pretend to join in with the high holiday spirit of
the expedition, with Goulart’s clumsy, bearish attempts to be jolly and charming, with the Indians’ peaceful good humor. They all seemed to be exhilarated by this effortless float down the beautiful river in the finest weather. But Mary was wrestling with her notions of the possible and the impossible. The summer was drawing to a close. Even if she could somehow manage to escape from this party, and keep herself alive in this steep and tangled wilderness, and find her way back by way of dubious landmarks along these rivers, surely such a trek would take as much as two months—into the raw and icy weeks of early winter. Her reason told her such a walk would be utterly impossible, even for a strong man, certainly for an unarmed woman. Reason told her that she must stay with the salt party, return with them when they were done, stay in the Shawnee town through the winter, and hope for a chance to escape the next spring.

But something as strong as her reason told her that she could not stay with the cruel Shawnees, could not become Goulart’s squaw, could not forsake her existence as a Draper, as the wife of William Ingles. Their family had been devastated and scattered, and unless she and Will could find each other and rebuild the family, there was really no reason to go on living.

On the fourth day in the canoes, having traveled generally in a westerly direction, they passed the mouths of three rivers, one pouring into the O-y-o from the north, the next from the south, and the third from the north.

“This they call ‘Pio-quo-nee,’ ” Goulart said, pointing to the first. “It mean, ah, river of high banks.”

Mary made a note of its name and its appearance. She was studying landmarks again. He called the river mouth on the left bank the P-thu-thoi, which Mary remembered was the word for buffalo.

And the third river, which they passed in the afternoon, he called La Roque, or stony river. The Indians, he said, called it the Miami-zuh.

Mary saw these rivers as landmarks to remember, but also as further obstacles to any attempt she might make to escape.
They were obviously too wide and deep at their mouths to wade. If I was to follow the O-y-o shore, she thought, I sh’d have to turn up one side of these river mouths and go up that side till I found a shallow place to cross, then come back down t’ other side.

That, she realized, would add an inestimable number of miles to a march already impossibly long, and her mind shrank from it.

Afternoon shadows were long when the canoes swung close to the left bank and curved into the narrow mouth of a creek. The O-y-o had turned southward during the afternoon, and now the ascent up this creek, whose waters had a strange tangy odor, was leading them eastward. The sinking sun at their backs laid a yellow pallor over a strange, desolate landscape before them as they moved up the stream.

It was a shallow, swampy valley, the ground on both sides of the creek treeless and bristling with yellow-gray reeds and clumps of thick scrub. The ground was mucky and full of stagnant puddles. In the shadows, rustlings and splashings told of the flight of many animals. The air grew acrid as the canoes slipped up the sluggish creek. Limbless tree trunks stood rotting at the fringes of the marsh. It looked, Mary thought, like a valley that had sickened and died.