Follow the River (33 page)

And then these things, or some of these things, would cure themselves, and the women would be lucid and even-tempered again for a while, and would try to determine which of the roots or berries or buds had poisoned them, so that they could avoid them next time. But of course they had no way of knowing, as they had tried anything they could chew and swallow, so they were doomed to be overcome every few days by the same afflictions.

Despite all these miseries, Ghetel seemed to be having a resurgence of that brave good humor that had first incited Mary’s admiration on the day of the running of the gauntlet.

Mary studied her from time to time and marveled. It’s almost more than I can bear at my age, she thought. And she’s two times my years at least.

Once the old woman must have been quite fat. Mary had noticed, when first seeing her at the Shawnee town, that her frame was massive and her flesh was loose as if she had lost perhaps thirty or forty pounds of fat between the time of her capture and the time of her arrival at the Indian village. Now there was nothing massive about her any more. She was burning her flesh up from inside. She was a framework of heavy bones draped with a hide that once had been full and now was empty. Wrinkled folds of flesh hung from her arms like thrums on the sleeve of a hunting coat. Her breasts drooped like empty wallets and the skin of her legs bagged and wrinkled at the knees and ankles like hose ten sizes too big. Her shanks were covered with running sores. Her nails were split and broken and caked with black dirt. Her unruly white hair was matted with twigs and leaves and filth, and much of it was coming out. There were sores around her ears and scalp where she had scratched constantly at lice, and from the end of her nose there perpetually hung a string of snot. Her eyes were sunk in wrinkled red pouches and her face was cadaverous. Somewhere once quite long ago, Mary had seen a face that looked like this, and she had been trying to remember where, and now suddenly with an awful jolt she remembered: In Philadelphia when she was a little girl, in the cellar of a house nearby, neighbors had discovered the body of a derelict woman who had crawled in there and died as much as a month before. Mary, with other children of the neighborhood, had had a horrified glimpse of the corpse as it was brought out to the dead wagon. It could have passed for Ghetel’s twin.

Yet here was this wretch, looking fully like a cadaver that would not lie down; here in this roaring huge wilderness, in this valley where surely no white human had ever been before, except Mary and her fellow captives last summer, here
was Ghetel, refusing to die yet, sitting here at this moment on a boulder tearing strips of cloth from the rags of her dress to wrap around her feet, still trying to take care of herself. The old muffled horse-bell still hung useless from her neck like a pendant.

“Ah,” the old woman said, looking at her new footgear and then turning to smile at Mary. “Now I make a pair for you, eh?”

Mary choked back a sudden swollen ache in her throat, and the old hag-face shimmered beyond a film of tears. “Thankee, yes, Ghetel. Yes, God lov’ee!”

Mary stopped, aghast. She stood there leaning on her spear, an awful panic of confusion building up in her.

In their way lay a river mouth. It came out from between two mountains swift and deep, and swirled into the river they had been following. It was not just another river course to be detoured; worse, it was a river that did not exist among the succession of landmarks in her memory.

For days she had been watching the opposite bank for that whitish beach that would be the salt lick where she and Bettie and Henry had camped and worked on the way down. That salt lick was supposed to be her next landmark. She had not noted a river here.

“Vat?” asked Ghetel, who had stopped beside her.

I can’t tell ’er. I mustn’t tell ’er I think I’ve got us lost. She’d kill me sure.

“Vat?” Ghetel repeated.

“Oh, m’dear. Just another tiresome walk-around, is all.” She forced herself to smile. “But we sh’ll make quick work of it, shan’t we? Shan’t we, old friend? By now we sure know what t’ do aboot rivers in our way, don’t we?”

And so they turned south and west, though the compass in her head said south and east. And as they climbed over cold mossy boulders and snarls of driftwood, she ransacked her memory; she tried to remember where they might have taken a wrong turn; she tried to keep from lying down and giving up.

The dark swift water rushed by, almost beneath their feet. Mary looked down into it with a dreadful longing.

She was thinking how simple and quiet it would be, how easy it would be to terminate this infinity of miseries, to find eternal rest from this struggle, to take one step sideways off this rock, into this nameless river.

As if reflecting her somber doubt, this canyon blackened as they climbed, crawled and hobbled up its twisting course among the mountains. Much of the rock debris underfood was black, and there were wide strata of gleaming black rock along the cliff faces. A heavy overcast had ended the spell of bright cold weather, deepening the gloom of the valley, dulling the details of the forests. The water looked like ink. Ghetel’s brief period of good humor seemed to be guttering out like a candle under the influence of this hellish gorge and Mary’s own dark preoccupation. They went along in grim, laborious silence, hearing only their rasping breath, the sliding and grinding of shale and rock underfoot, the ominous, hollow rushing of the dark river and the moan of the wind in the trees high on the hillsides. The leaves had fallen out of Ghetel’s beloved bell, and now it clunked dismally as they struggled along.

I just don’t remember this black valley, Mary told herself time after time. If I’d come by it once I’d not have forgot it. I remember a valley farther up where the stone was blue. But I don’t remember this black valley. I’m sure I’ve never been by this black valley!

She kept watching the opposite shore for sight of the salt spring.

Surely we’d ha’ come to th’ salt spring by now. Surely. If’n we were on the proper river.

Once her heart leaped when she saw a line of white at the shoreline in a riverbend ahead. There, she thought, wanting to shout it, there’s the salt spring!

But when they drew abreast of it, she saw that it was not a white beach, but the swift white water of a riffle. The shores were relentless black and gray. She sank to the ground and retied on her feet the strips of cloth, which had grown pitch black. “What a bleedin’ dirty place,” she muttered, looking up at the crumbling black cliff at their backs. “Have y’ ever seen th’ like?”

“Yah. Coal, is all.”

“Oh, aye! But it is, ain’t it?” She had seen coal in Philadelphia, but only in wagons, on the way to hearths. She had never thought of it making up mountains.

“But you cannot eat coal,” Ghetel said.

“Ghetel, leave me be awhile. I have t’ think. Go look f’r victuals. Something. But leave me be.”

Mary sat for a long time on the rock, pondering. She shut her eyes and made herself concentrate. She had never thought this hard. She would concentrate on landmarks and their sequence as she remembered them, and tried to separate from them all the disorientation she had been suffering since entering this valley of coal. She put her mind far back to the day of the massacre at Draper’s Meadows and came day by day through her memory down the New River, the fording places the Indians had used, the burning spring, the salt lick, to the O-y-o, past its tributaries to the Shawnee town, on down to the salt lick of the big bones, and then started back up. She studied on each landmark until her head ached, trying to imagine where she could have made a mistake that would have lost the New River. She would think until she was dizzy, then would breathe deep and think some more.

And finally, after more than an hour, she opened her eyes. There was only one explanation, and it calmed her and made her peaceful inside:

There was no way they could be lost. The river they had been following
was
the New River. It could not be anything
else. This coal river was just another tributary. The only reason she could not remember it was that somehow she had not seen it as the Indians were bringing her down. Somehow she had failed to notice it, and that was why it had appeared so shockingly, so unexpectedly, today, and thrown her into such a whirl of confusion. It was just another tributary that, like the others, they must cross when they could and then descend on the other side to regain the New River.

She saw Ghetel sitting on a log nearby, rocking back and forth with her arms folded over her belly, looking at her.

“You prayed?”

“Aye, after a fashion,” said Mary.

“I too prayed.”

“Good. Now let’s us cross this river.”

They went in gasping with the shock of the cold, there at the riffle. It was the only shallow place they had seen, and although the water was alarmingly fast, the day was growing old and Mary was very impatient to get across it and back down to what she was now sure was the New River. She was beginning to feel that if she slept a night up in this black valley she would never get her sense of direction straightened out thereafter.

The spear-poles helped. With them, they sounded the rocky bottom that they could not see, and they leaned on them when the current pushed hard against their bodies.

They prayed all the way across.

They got back down to the river mouth before dark. Mary guessed they had walked some eight miles up and eight miles down that gloomy gorge. Those miles, and the strain and effort of wading the cold river, had so weakened them that they were forced to sit and rest every ten minutes or so by the day’s end.

There was no light left by which to search for food. Their blankets were still damp from the crossing and from two or three brief rain showers that had fallen during their descent through the canyon. The rags on their feet had been worn or torn through by the stony passage of the day. Both women were further weakened by the scouring bowels that had been
draining their vigor for days. And now with dusk came a slow, steady rain that promised to continue much of the night. Mary hurt in every joint, and her heart seemed to be fluttering more than beating.

A few feet above the river mouth they found the hulk of a great beech tree that had long since fallen. Its center was rotted out, leaving a cavity some three feet wide, floored with the soft punk of decay and drifted leaves. Mary jabbed into the cavity several times with her spear, both fearing and hoping that it might be serving as some animal’s lair. Then they dragged themselves in, rolled into each other’s arms for warmth with the blankets wound around them and passed out to the hiss of rain.

In the night a pair of gray foxes, one carrying a dead partridge, trotted to the log, smelled the intruders, bristled, skulked a few minutes, put their quivering noses into the musty opening, then turned and left to find other quarters, their damp bushy tails low over the ground, taking their partridge with them.

Oh, heavenly God, she’s dead
.

“Ghetel. Ghetel!”

She shook the old bony shoulder violently. The old woman did not respond. In the snug worm-eaten hollow of the log, enveloped by the smell of decay, it was too much like being in a coffin. Then Ghetel rolled onto her back and groaned, and exhaled a rank breath into Mary’s face. She began to stir, then sank back into torpor. Mary hugged her. She’s not dead. But she’s ready to lie here and die.

Mary raised herself painfully onto an elbow. Daylight outside the end of the log showed only a stretch of ground covered with wet dead leaves. But she could hear, in the hiss of rain and the drumming of the rivers, all that hopeless wild inhospitable space out there. And within the fastness of this log it was soft and warm. They had not slept so profound a sleep before. It would be so nice just to lie here and not wake up, ever, she thought. One could die quite nice here. She closed her eyes and listened to the hush.

But then she opened her eyes. She needed to make water.

And besides, she couldn’t just up and die. Will was waiting for her to come home.

She couldn’t make Ghetel move. So she strained and pulled and dragged her own blanket free and wriggled out into the dank, rainy air, drew her blanket over her head, and stood shivering, legs apart, pissing, looking around. The dark river was high and fast. It had risen to a level within a few feet of the log.

We might well ’a’ been swept into th’ river, she thought with a strange, bemused indifference, an’ back down to th’ O-y-o. An’ lost all that ground we’ve gained so hard. But o’ course we’d not ’a’ knowed. Or cared.

She staggered listlessly down to the bank of the New River, her feet chilled by the wet leaves, the filthy rags of her footcloths dragging, and stood there looking upriver for landmarks. The river was gray-green, more than half a mile wide, sizzling with rainspatters, rushing down the V-shaped valley. The iron-gray mountainsides slanted up, their summits out of sight in the rainclouds. The whole valley looked as forbidding and hellish as the coal valley had seemed yesterday. And what nagged her was that it looked no more familiar.

Surely we’d have come to the salt lick by now, she thought, if we was really on the right river.

No, damn ’ee! Don’t admit them doubts again.

She closed her eyes and swayed. She heard the horse bell. Ghetel was up and moving, then.

God, I’m empty. She reached inside the blanket and ran her hand over her belly. For the first few weeks of this hungry trek it had been flat, even hollow. Now it was so full of emptiness that it was bloated.

What is that smell?

It grew stronger as she went toward the river’s edge.

“May-ry.” Ghetel came alongside, waddling and staggering, clutching her filthy blanket about her and carrying her spear.

And then Mary saw it. The river had cast it up amid the shore drift: a doe’s head, considerably decomposed, its eyes milky, tongue gray. It had been neatly cut off just behind the skull, cast away, perhaps, by Indian hunters upstream. Shuddering, Mary bent and picked it up by grasping one of its cold,
wet ears, and carried it up toward the beech log. Ghetel walked beside her, staring at it. Mary put it on top of the log, as if setting a table, and drew the tomahawk out of her belt.