Follow the River (27 page)

Mary soon felt a rising queasiness replacing her terrible emptiness. She swallowed a mouthful of the moist, starchy mass, then warned: “Mustn’t eat too much at once, Ghetel.
Might be we’ll have a late supper too, eh?” They went down to the river and drank water out of cupped hands, then back to the fence where they had left their blankets. They sat there in the weeds with their blankets draped over their shoulders, the night air chilling their ears and scalps, listening to the burbling and stitching of frantic digestion in their distended stomachs. Occasionally they rocked to and fro, for warmth and to help the food work down. After a while Mary realized it would be hours before she would be able to eat again, but the old woman was still thinking of food as she had been for days, and she could not bear to ignore the cornfield before bedtime. She went among the stalks and gnawed the kernels off of two more ears before she would admit to herself that she was satiated.

“Da’st we slepp ’neath a roof?” Mary ventured. She was growing drowsy over her full stomach. “I think there be frost a-comin’ on my head.”

“O for a roof, yah. Why not, eh?”

They went in the hut and spread their blankets on the Indians’ old bed-square, and rolled up in them, each with her spear lying at hand, after Mary had worked a bark shingle of the back wall loose to provide an escape-hole should anyone enter by the front door. It was fearsome to be sleeping in the home of savages who might or might not return, and the possibilities bothered her for an hour even as she grew cozy and less and less inclined to move. She decided to leave that chance in God’s hands, and prayed so. Ghetel was not snoring yet, either, and late in the night Mary heard her chuckle.

“What?”

A sigh from the old woman. Then: “Vas I mad w’en you missed the fish! But vaz I happy this night you don’t spear good!”

They laughed softly, and then they were able to sleep.

Mary woke with a gasp, the tense grip of a strong hand on her arm. Ghetel was clutching her, sitting up in her blanket and staring toward the grainy silver predawn light in the doorway. Somewhere out there, dry leaves were rustling
loudly, as if many people were walking without concern for stealth.

The two women freed themselves from their warm blankets and snatched up their spears. In her waking panic, Mary recollected details of their situation; she remembered the escape door she had made in the back wall. On hands and knees she turned and lifted down the slab of bark and looked out into the nearby cornfield.

The noise was coming from there. She could see cornstalks jerking and moving. They dared not try to escape from this side. She watched, frozen, for Indians to emerge from the corn.

The first face poked out among the leathery stalks. But it was at knee-height. Then there was another. Mary suddenly went almost silly with mirth. She reached back and grabbed Ghetel’s arm and pulled her down to the opening to show her the intruders.

The faces were looking toward the hut. They had comical black masks over their eyes, and busy little black noses. Then one of the raccoons rose on its hind legs, reached up with little hands and grasped an ear of corn. It shucked it skillfully and then started eating the tender kernels from the middle of the ear.

“Eh!” Ghetel cried. “It’s
our
corn! GET!” She scrambled to her feet and ran toward the front door with her hickory lance, abandoning all caution. By the time she had plunged into the corn patch, flailing with her stick, the furry little bandits had vanished and Mary was almost helpless with laughter. It seemed the misery of ages dissolved and sloughed off with this release. She was wiping her eyes when Ghetel returned stooping, grumbling, through the door.

“Ah, Ghetel! You and your raccoons!”

In the pink light of dawn they picked as much corn as they could tie up in the blankets, breakfasting on plump ears as they worked. They watched over their shoulders toward the woods and thickets, and kept an eye on the river for canoes. Their laughter might have been heard across the river in this morning stillness. Sounds from the Shawnee town were drifting
over clearly enough: snatches of voice; the faraway thump of some tool; the very distant gunshot of some hunter on the other side of the O-y-o. Mary was anxious to be well out of the vicinity of the town and this camp before broad daylight. They harvested rapidly the ears that the raccoons had not sampled. The little animals had done an amazing amount of sampling …

“Hush!” Mary whispered, listening.

It was the clunking of the horse’s bell. Mary moved to the corral and saw the roan standing inside, looking at her. The animal appeared quite tame, evidently over its fright of the previous evening. Mary, her heart high with hope, quietly replaced the fallen rails of the corral and then went into the hut and returned with the hide strap. “How’d y’ like us t’ have a horse?” she said to Ghetel, who was knotting the corners of a blanket full of corn.

“Yah! For dinner, you say?”

“Nay, for ridin’!”

“Ah, ’at vould be acceptable also. My feets say so. Ha!”

Having won the horse’s allegiance with a handful of corn and few syllables of sweet talk, Mary easily got the leather strap tied to the thong that supported its bell. The horse was a mare, docile, long in the tooth, and so complacent and easily led that Mary presumed she was accustomed to white people. Probably stolen from whites, she thought. With quick and surprising ingenuity and some strips of leatherwood bark, Ghetel retied the blankets in such a way that they could be slung over the horse’s back with a bulging load of corn hanging at either flank, and by sunup they were ready to continue upriver. They were more cheerful than they had ever seen each other. They were strengthened by a supper and a breakfast of corn. They had enough food to last for several days, and a horse to carry it and themselves. They had already proven themselves by their first hundred and fifty miles, and with this food and this wonderful heaven-sent mare, the next three or four hundred miles loomed comparatively easy.

“You ride first, Mary,” the old woman offered magnanimously. “I lead.”

Mary suspected Ghetel was afraid to go first on an untried
horse, but of course did not venture that appraisal. “No,” she said. “Till we’re out o’ this vicinity, let’s us stay low. We’ll both walk.”

“Ah, yah.”

They tried to keep themselves far enough inland that they could not be seen from across the river, but soon found that the cane and undergrowth were impenetrable everywhere but on the Indian trail along the river bank. So all they could do was stay along the trail most of the time and hope they would not meet any parties of Indians coming down.

It was a pleasant morning. Though they were in rags now, the walking and the food in them kept them warm, and the sun was pleasant on their faces when they were out of the shadows. The horse’s hooves thudded softly, a reminder of this gift of Providence, and the little bell on its neck clanked, a sound musical and civilized to their ears after the rushings and roars and deep silences of the wilderness they had heard for so long, after the gunfire and tortured screams and sobbings of grief that had begun their wanderings in this savage purgatory. The bell was a dull bronze, old, and Mary wondered where it had come from. Civilized hands had made it, she was sure; bells were civilized things. Maybe it was part of the booty brought here by raiding Indians. The kind of thing LaPlante and Goulart traded for skins. Aye, it very well might have been through that very trading post sometime, she thought. The blue and white checked pattern of shirt cloth moved in her mind behind her eyes. It seemed ages since she had been engaged in that business. Even that, in a way, seemed like civilization compared with the elemental subsistence of these last weeks. But she smiled to herself. It was good not to be the bounden partner of those Frenchmen any more. She was free. With corn to eat and a companion who, though erratic and difficult, was a companion nonetheless, and with a good horse with a civilized bell.

But that bell, she thought suddenly. P’raps for safety it ought to be thrown away. She stopped the horse and reached to untie it.

“Vat you do here, eh?”

“Get rid o’ this. Kind o’ noisy f’r sneakin’ by Indians …”

The old women grabbed her hands and jerked them down. Mary looked at her in astonishment.

“No,” Ghetel said, shaking her head severely. “This bell is good luck. Haf to keep. I had dream, the bell is good luck for us.”

“Nonsense. It could be the death of us …” She reached again; again Ghetel shoved her hands away, with real roughness. Then the old woman’s face softened and brightened. She held a finger to her temple, indicating the source of an idea. She stooped and gathered a handful of leaves and stuffed them inside the bell, around the clapper. Then she tore off one of the rag tatters that had once been her dress, and bound up the bell to keep the leaves from falling out. “There,” she said. “So ve keep the bell. Is luck.”

Mary shrugged. The little conflict of the moment was gone.

And, in truth, she would have hated to throw the civilized little bell away into the wilderness anyway. Ghetel had done well, with her fond little superstition.

The horse was proving a great comfort to them. Late in the morning, Mary climbed onto a ledge of limestone and slipped a leg over the animal’s broad back, tentatively, in case the mare was not accustomed to a rider. Gone are the days, she thought, when I could just spring on. The horse turned her ears and quivered her mane and tried to look back, but Ghetel held her firmly by the lead. Mary slid the rest of her weight onto the horse’s back in the space in front of the bundles of corn. The mare blew softly but stood steady.

“Eh, now. Lead on, Ghetel, I think she’s no objection whatever.”

Mary was lulled by the motion of the horse’s progress, and realized how weary she was. Her legs tingled and throbbed in waves. Having no underclothing, and scarcely any outer garments, she was directly against the horse’s hide, could feel the friction against the insides of her thighs like a massage soothing away the stress, could feel the animal’s flesh giving slightly over its ribs, could smell the wonderful remembered musk of horse. She went into fits of dozing, or rather trances
of oblivion, as she did not close her eyes; and faces and scenes from Draper’s Meadows—the faces of her mother and the boys, Will sitting before the hearth luxuriating while she washed and kneaded his feet after a strenuous day; the ticking of the old grandfather clock as she lay awake looking at his sleeping profile after love while the pleasure of it in her loins ebbed into the deepest sort of ease—such dreams of their old hard but heavenly life drifted like smoke behind her eyes. Will had often said that the kindest thing people could do for each other was tend to each other’s feet at day’s end, and he had “done” her feet almost as often as she had done his; she could feel now Will’s strong, warm hands kneading her arches almost to the limit of bearability, sometimes making her legs twitch, and his loving fingers flexing her toes, pulling them until their joints popped softly but surprisingly, and then rotating her tense, resisting feet on their ankles until her calves would relax—oh what a sweet good man was her Will! Capable of the biggest and boldest efforts but kindly and attentive to the smallest need, always having time to give to anyone who needed him, however tired he was or how full of tomorrow his mind might be …

I’m a-comin’ back t’y, William Ingles; oh I vow I’ll reach ’ee
 …

Suddenly a bolt of dread snapped her out of this reverie. In her mind she had seen a looming of dark faces. She opened her eyes onto the bright innocent yellow and crimson of autumn foliage, seeing nothing ahead but the horse’s neck and ears and Ghetel’s wild iron-gray hair and the gauntlet-stripe scars on the sagging skin of her back. But the feeling would not leave; it was the feeling which on that July Sunday morning had made her glance repeatedly at the cabin door. She could not ignore it. “
Ghetel!
I’m a-gettin’ off,” she hissed. The old woman’s face turned to her, reflecting the alarm she had detected in Mary’s voice. She halted the mare and Mary slid off to the ground. The pain of the sudden weight on her half-rested feet and legs almost made her fall. “Listen,” she whispered, “something’s a-tellin’ me we ought to get off this trail …”

At that moment the mare’s ears pricked up and she gave a
low nicker, her head turned toward the shadows under a lofty wood.

From somewhere in those shadows came the muffled sound of a man’s voice. They listened. A moment later it came again, louder.

Mary jabbed with a finger toward a thicket of sycamores and locusts lying down the slope at their left, close to the river bank, and both the women hauled at the neck-halter to bring the animal along. They made a din of rustling and crackling on the leaf-and-twig carpeted floor of the thicket, and had just halted the mare behind a head-high clump of scrub when Mary saw the Indians, a mere fifty feet away.

They were afoot, all warriors or hunters, going westward along the trail, toward the Shawnee town. They wore no war paint but carried their muskets at their sides. Several of the braves, in pairs, carried poles across their shoulders and there were dead animals and fowl hanging from these poles by their feet or necks. Mary counted thirteen men passing, then a brindled pack horse with the whole carcasses of two small deer over its back, then another horse, a large bay, carrying a black bear strapped across it, the bear’s hanging head swaying and bobbing with the horse’s movements. Ghetel watched them and kept crouching lower and lower, as if wishing the earth would swallow and hide her big pink and gray body. Mary watched under the mare’s neck, stroking to keep her from starting or neighing.

The hunters took a long time in passing. They were casual and jovial, talking and sometimes grunting out short, coughlike bursts of laughter.

The two women remained still for a long time after the sounds of the hunters’ passage had faded. They stood letting their heartbeats and breathing return to normal, watching the trail for any sign that the group might have been only part of a larger body. At last a horsy smile spread over Ghetel’s face and she looked at Mary with some wonder. “I don’t know how you know,” she said, beginning to shake her head, “but I listen to you after now.”