Follow the River (3 page)

“In a boat.”

“…  in a boat, and then
ten times that far
 …”

He held his hands up with his ten berry-stained fingers spread.

“…  Aye, an’ then suppose ten times even farther than
that
 …”

And little Georgie, two years old, trying to match his brother’s concentration and understanding, held up his hands in imitation at the word
ten
.

“…  An’ then still ten times
more
 …”

Tommy nodded with satisfaction now, knowing those were the numbers of tens in her recitation.

“And beyond all that water, ten times ten times ten, with neither tree nor hill to be seen, y’d find a wee land called …”

“Ireland!” he cried.

“Ireland. And up in Ireland ye’d find a place called …”

“County Donegal!”

“County Donegal. And that is where y’r grandfather George Draper an’ me come from on a boat, twenty-six years ago …”

“George! Me!” interjected Georgie, his namesake.

“Aye. When I were a young lass an’ pritty just like y’r mama be now …”

“An’ sh’ll I ever go over the ocean to County Donegal?” That was the question Tommy liked to ask each time at this point in their reverie.

“Ye might; aye, ye might. But rather, I see ye goin’ still farther th’
other
way. Ten times ten times ten,” she said,
pointing westward, “right over that mountain there, and on, Tommy, as we ha’ been a-comin’ bit by bit by bit since y’r grandfather an’ m’self was young like y’r own mother an’ father …”

She stopped talking suddenly.

Screams, wordless, terrified screams, were coming up from the cabins. Elenor Draper’s face turned nearly as white as her hair. It was the voice of her daughter-in-law.

“What’s wrong with Auntie Bettie?” asked Tommy. Little Georgie ran into his grandmother’s skirt and hugged her leg. The awful tone of the screaming voice had scared him speechless.

“Come,” Elenor Draper urged. She put down the pail of berries and grabbed the children’s hands, hurrying them out of the brambles onto the path down to the cabins. Bettie must have hurt herself somehow, she thought.

Elenor and the boys emerged from the thicket onto the meadow by the cabins just as the Indian yells and gunfire broke out. She stopped suddenly, a shiver of terror pouring through her, and turned to drag the boys back into concealment.

But it was too late. Three Indians running with guns had seen them and now came bounding up the path with quavering mad howls.

Elenor Draper thrust the children ahead of her into the path among the berry bushes. “Go hide!” she hissed, then turned to face the pursuers.

She had nothing to fight with but her fingernails. Not even teeth.

The first Indian was upon her at once. His dark eyes glittered with the hunter’s thrill. Old Elenor Draper struck into them with fingers hooked like claws. The Indian bellowed and, blinded, dropped his gun and tomahawk to capture her wrists. Then another Indian came close and she felt a blade go into her side, under her ribs. She heard her own gurgling animal growl as she sank.

She felt fingers pulling at her hair, pulling hard, felt herself hanging above the ground with all her weight depending from the roots of her hair. Naked, greasy brown limbs—legs and
arms—moved around her, struggled with her. A knee smashed into her face and her nose caved in. Then she felt another blade slice into her scalp. Blood ran down over her eyes. She felt her scalp separate from the skull with a
pop
and then she was lying on the bloody green grass, a distance of ten times ten times ten from the green grass of County Donegal, all her life running hot and wet out of her.

Footsteps ran away through the brambles, faint and more faint until she could hear nothing but the rushing of an ocean.

Mary Ingles stood in the blood-spattered yard in front of her house. Her wrists were bound tight behind her with leather thongs and an Indian still held her erect by his grip in her hair. Her scalp anticipated the slash of the knife. She was praying silently, moving her lips.

Dear Heavenly God I do not want to die. But if Thou’ll spare William and our sons and my mum I am ready to go in their place
.

The shooting had stopped and the Indians had ceased their yipping. They were coming into the yard a few at a time from various places in the settlement. They were grinning, thrusting their weapons at the sky, laughing, some smeared with blood. Four warriors came down the slope from the little cabin of Henry Lenard, dragging him along on the ground by a noose. His hands were bound behind him. He struggled silently, in spasms of effort. Henry was an unmarried man, more hunter than farmer by nature, who had come to this valley with the Draper and Ingles families. He was a short and slight man, and the Indians dragged him with ease despite his kicking. He was not bloody, apparently having been caught unwounded.

Bettie Draper knelt nearby on the grass over her slaughtered baby, her shoulders quaking with a voiceless weeping. Her broken arm hung bloody and unheeded, as if she could not even feel it through the pain in her heart. Mary wanted to go to her but could not move. She stood and scanned the thicket, beginning to have a hope that her mother and sons had slipped away undetected during the attack.

Then she saw a movement in the edge of the berry thicket, and her heart surged. “Mum!” she cried. “Go back! Run!”

But it was an Indian who emerged from the foliage. He raised his arm and waved something gray and red. Mary looked at it as the warrior came near, and with a feeling that her soul was being crushed, recognized it as her mother’s scalp. She lunged and wailed, only to be yanked back by her own hair so forcefully that she fell on her back to the ground, her bound wrists twisted under her back.

The Indian whom Mary had tried to shoot a few minutes before came and stood over her, grinning as if very amused. He bent and prodded the bulge of her belly with hard fingers. He said something, and the other Indian, who now had a foot on her neck to pin her down, answered with a short laugh.

The warrior quit prodding her belly and reached down for the hem of her skirt. He began drawing it up, until it was gathered under her breasts. The sun beat on her naked legs and loins and the turgid mound of her abdomen. She watched him with loathing and a rising panic as he reached for the waistband of his breechclout.

“Heavenly God!” she screamed. That they would rape a woman in full term of pregnancy, about to give the sacred gift of life, was to her an inhumanity even beyond murder. She shut her eyes and locked her legs together and prayed with all her soul for some miraculous strength, or death itself, to protect her from this final brutality.

She felt a pain at her navel: a sharp point of pain, pressing inward there. The Indians were laughing and talking. She was not being raped. Not yet. What …

She opened her eyes. The Indian was kneeling beside her and was watching her face is if he had been waiting for her to look at him. Her terror deepened when she saw what he was doing.

The savage was pressing the point of a knife hard against her abdomen, almost breaking the skin. He nodded at her, as if to say:
Now watch what I am going to do
. She had heard tales of pregnant women being slit open and their babies cooked and eaten by savages in blood lust.

She could not even pray now. She rolled her eyes back into
her head and tried to die. She felt the knife point moving from her navel downward toward her genitals. She felt the rough grass under her bare back. A warbler was singing nearby. And she heard Bettie Draper saying, barely above a whisper:

“Oh, no. Don’t do that to her.”

A rush of love swept through Mary. That Bettie in her grief could plead for me! she thought. The terrible moment suddenly took on a strange, desperate beauty. If Mary and her unborn baby were to die, it would not be in a truly loveless world, after all.

Several of the Indians were talking now, one in a great, deep voice. And through their voices Mary thought she heard Tommy’s voice. The pain went away from her stomach. The foot was lifted off her neck. She opened her eyes and looked at the Indian, who was rising and sheathing his knife. Whether he had only been terrorizing her or had decided not to rip out her womb she did not know. A tall warrior with the air of a chieftain stood nearby and his was that powerful deep voice; perhaps he had ordered this to cease. Mary felt a swollen and almost delirious sense of deliverance. Henry Lenard was on his feet a few yards away, still tethered by the neck, his face mottled red and averted from Mary’s sprawling nakedness.

And then there was Tommy’s voice again. He was uttering a low, terrified moan. Mary looked around and saw her two sons. A warrior stood between them, holding each by the hair. Their faces were contorted and flushed and wet with tears, blood and slobber, and they appeared to be out of their senses with fear. Mary turned onto her side and tried to rise but could not with her hands bound. She lay now with the side of her face on the ground and looked at them. “Tommy,” she said, surprised that she could produce a calm voice. “Georgie.” She had learned to anticipate the worst and expected that they had been brought here to be slaughtered before her eyes.

“Tommy. Georgie,” she repeated. They gave no sign of hearing.

The delicate, sweet voice of the warbler continued.

“Hold,” said William Ingles.

“What is’t?” asked John Draper. They stopped and stood still, holding their scythes. Will squinted over the sun-bright field and listened. Nothing but the rush of the breeze and the rasping shrill of insects, and their own heavy breathing. John’s torso was streaming sweat. His shirt was off, its sleeves tied around his neck so that it hung like a short mantle to protect his shoulders from the sun. He mopped his face with a corner of it and turned his head this way and that. “Y’ heard somethin’?”

“A gun, I thought,” said William. “Might be just my head a-poppin’ in this heat, though. Y’ heard nought, eh, Johnny?”

John Draper shook his head. “But I hear my guts a-grumblin’ for victuals, an’ I’m as dry as last year’s gourd. Now’t we be stopt, what say y’ to a little grub and water?”

They grounded their scythes and went among their shocks of newly cut barley to the deep shade of a great elm in the middle of the field. They sat and leaned their backs against the trunk and drank water. Then they dug into their pouches for chunks of hoecake and began to eat. William’s brindled chinwhiskers rose and fell over his sweat-soaked shirtfront as he chewed. The breeze made the wet shirt almost shivery cool.

“What crossed my mind, ’twere a signal Mary’s started t’ labor,” he mused.

“More likely Hank a-shootin’ ’imself some beastie f’r the cookpot,” said John. “Mary’s no sort to fetch y’outer th’ field for a mere birthin’.”

“True. Lest she was a-havin’ trouble with it.” He remembered her strange confession of fear that morning.

“Not Mary,” said John around his bread. “Tougher’n either you nor me. Growed up ’longside me, just like a man. Y’know, how she c’d mount a horse in a leap. Jump over a chairback from a standstill. Naw. Like ’s not she’ll have th’ baby on ’er teat and be splittin’ cookwood with ’er free hand by th’ time we’re home.” He chuckled. He was proud of his sister, and thought Will coddled her too much.

Will grinned. There was truth in Johnny’s words. Mary at twenty-three was fit as green hickory, and a joy to behold. Wide enough in the hips to give birth easily, but slim and firm and smooth-skinned. William thought of her now with a longing and a tingling. It had been a long time since they had embraced that way, and Will Ingles was a vigorous and needful man by nature. When she was with child, Will would daydream a lot about their nakedness and her flat stomach that he remembered, and the surges of strength with which she would give herself to him.

And her eyes. In the firelight her eyes would blaze when they were doing that. Dauntless and willing and happy. Will and Mary had always rejoiced in each other and in the way they fit and in the way they loved. Folks often would remark that those two needed only each other and the rest of the world could go hang. But of course anybody who said that didn’t know how important their land and children were to them. Now, give me my Mary
and
my wee’uns and my land, Will thought, and the rest
can
go hang.

His heart swelled with these feelings now, with longings that came from way back and went far ahead, as if spanning mountains. This was like the feeling of prayer to Will Ingles, to think of what he had and what might yet be. And in the heart of this feeling there was always Mary’s face, those straightforward eyes, that golden down on her jaw, finer than peach fur, that stealthy smile that came at the oddest times and made three tiny dimples under each corner of her mouth. I wonder if most men pass as much time as I do with their heads full of their wives, he thought.

But again he remembered her anxious face this morning. She has a way of knowing things are going to happen, he admitted. When she had an instinct, he couldn’t ignore it,
even if he might try to laugh it off or say something to set her womanly qualms at ease. She just
knows
, somehow, like animals before storms.

“Johnny,” he said suddenly, “y’ might hop back to work or y’ might nap, but I’ve got it in me t’ walk up there an’ look in on Mary. I jus’ can’t seem t’ shrug it.”

“So be it. As y’ will, y’will, Will.” Johnny chuckled. He liked to say that. Ol’ Will. Always fussing over Mary as if she were frail and helpless. Still, better your sister’s married to a man who cares too much than one who cares too little.

A copse of timber, marking the head of a wooded gully, jutted into the grainfield between the settlement and the elm where Will Ingles now left his brother-in-law resting, and the tops of its trees hid their view of the distant cabins. Will waded through the sunny fields toward the end of that timber, to go around it and then up. His leggings whisked in the high grain, and butterflies tumbled away before him. At the edge of the wood he saw a flash of brown: a deer plunging down into the gully.