Follow the River (46 page)

She trembled as the last of her warmth seemed to die down inside her, and crumpled from her position on hands and knees into a curled, trembling ball, her knees under her and her arms hugging her chest and her forehead on the ground, the cold moonlight seeming to penetrate deeper and deeper into her back.

But really shouldn’t leave without praying, she thought. What if Mother and Tommy and Georgie was a-waiting for me over there and I went across and couldn’t reach them because I’d left here without a prayer …

She raised her head from the ground and looked at the wavering silvery lights and shadows. Her eyes fastened on something a few yards up the slope, something that looked like a house. It would be, she thought without wonder, just a mirage. I’m through with silly hoping, she thought. It’s just something I think I see and I can blink it away …

But it was still there.

Well, I need to know, she thought, and she started crawling toward it over the frozen ground, expecting it to retreat or fade before her like the mirage it was.

And eventually she was there. She had crawled to it through what she realized was a patch of corn-stubble, and she reached out and touched a wall. It really was a wall, a wall of bark. She found a door.

It was some sort of a hut, whether made by Indians or by white people from the settlements above she could not tell. There was not much of it. It was dilapidated and the moon showed through cracks in the walls and there was nothing on the dirt floor but drifted leaves. But it was a roof to protect her from the stabbing cold of moonlight. It was the first building she had been in since … since that hut where they had stayed on the O-y-o and had found the belled horse and the corn. A
building
, she thought. I’m in a
building
.

She raked leaves into a pile along the base of the back wall and burrowed in among them, covered herself with more of them, and now that her bare skin was no longer in the light of the piercing moon-bright sky, even dead leaves seemed like a blanket. She shivered for a while, her mind wandering back and forth between nothingness and the awareness of shelter, and then she was dreaming of turning over on her own rustling corn-shuck mattress to roll closer to Will. She opened her eyes in the dream and there was some sort of a great cat standing in the doorway, in the morning sunlight looking at her, a cat as big as a person, and when it saw her eyes it turned and darted away from the doorway.

When morning truly came, she sat outside against the sunwarmed east wall of the hut for a few minutes until her skin was dry and almost warm, and her heartbeat strengthened from flutters to a weak rhythm, and she was able to think and remember things and even anticipate that she might yet live another day.

She did not remember having seen this place on the way down. Perhaps it had not been built yet then—though it seemed old, abandoned. No, she realized then. We’d have been on the other side of the river when we passed it. That was the explanation.

She got to her feet and stood, weaving, spots drifting across her vision, and had to lean against the wall until she could see again; then she went down into the corn-patch and searched
it for dry ears or stray grains that might have fallen to the ground.

But there was little left of the corn-patch, other than trampled stubble and the prints of wild animals, and they seemed to have gleaned it thoroughly, leaving her not a grain.

Alongside the corn-patch there was another small plot of cultivated ground, once a vegetable garden, with some withered stalks of something lying along it, mostly eaten. Mary found a stick and poked and grubbed in the hard ground. She saw something violet and white just below the surface. “Oh, my,” she said aloud, dropping to her knees and clawing at the frozen earth.

A half an hour spent digging up the whole garden yielded two small turnips which the animals had failed to find. Trembling with anticipation, Mary took them down to the river’s edge, knelt with sunlight glancing up from the water into her face and carefully washed them, taking her time as if she were in the luxury of her own kitchen, prolonging the anticipation, enjoying the knowledge that here was food, real domestic food, not worms or buds or buzzard-leavings, but turnips, real turnips, and furthermore that she would not have to wolf down her share of them before Ghetel got them.

Careful now, she thought. Slow; must no’ sicken yourself.

She could not have eaten them fast if she had wanted to. Her teeth were so loose that she could gnaw through the tough skin and firm flesh only with care and difficulty, wincing and squinting. As she chewed, a molar came out into the mass of turnip pulp. It was the first tooth she had ever lost. She worked it forward in her mouth as one does a fishbone, took it out and looked wistfully as it as she chewed and savored the mouthful of turnip. She chewed and chewed that first bite, almost in a state of bliss, and it softened in her mouth and tasted heavenly, and her stomach clamored for it. What I like about a turnip, she thought, the longer y’ chew it, the bigger it gets. And y’ want it big, don’t ’ee, my belly? She smiled at the thought of talking with her belly. Then she swallowed and shut her eyes and smiled and felt it go down. “There, how’ee like ’at, my belly?” she said aloud. Her stomach clutched up and hurt for a moment at first, but she did not
get nauseated, and she got up and went back to the hut and sat against its sunny side again and carefully began working her teeth through the second bite, and carefully chewed it, her gums itching and aching with the pressure of chewing, and she ruminated on this mouthful, dreamily, ecstatically, soaking in the weak dry sunlight, shivering now and then when a cold breeze would touch her, and she believed she had never, never been quite so happy.

She used up about an hour, eating the first turnip, which had provided four bites, and when it was gone she sat and gazed at the other one. She was full now, and she wished Ghetel could be here to eat the second turnip. O but wouldn’t she be in heaven, the poor thing, her and her appetites, Mary thought.

She lay there in the sunshine for perhaps another hour, her mind drifting like fog, blank and light, looking at but not really seeing the river, while her innards burbled and grumbled over the unaccustomed task of digestion. She was too blissful and lethargic to move.

When she woke up, the sun had moved around to the south side of the hut; it was about midday; she felt drugged. The whole bright gray-yellow landscape pulsated with each heartbeat.

Must get on, she thought. Now’t I got the wherewithal.

She yawned and groaned and hoisted herself to her feet. “G’bye,” she said, looking back at the hut and garden. “It’s been a nice visit. I sh’ll surely come back sometime.” I shall, she thought. Sometime I’ll come back down here with Will and have another look at a place where I ought to’ve died but didn’t, thank the Lord.

She carried the remaining turnip in her left hand and hobbled along the narrow bottomland. With her immediate agonies of starvation allayed a bit, she was more aware of her other discomforts: the feet and legs with their hundred aches and stabs, the silent grinding of her swollen joints, the various twinges around her kidneys, the gurgle of phlegm in her chest and the wintery air on her nakedness. But now at least she felt she could bear these things and keep going. Having a little strength was everything; having pain was nothing.

She had lost a few hundred yards during the canoe crossing and she had walked for half an hour before she saw on the opposite bank the thicket where she had fought Ghetel and later found the canoe. A little farther on she saw the low bank under which she had crouched and waited for Ghetel to pass.

The New River here continued its twisting course among mountains of awesome height and mass, mountains that seemed to be the backbone of the world, but for some miles now there had been flat bottomland to walk on, though occasionally it was necessary to clamber through windfalls and tangled drift. These obstacles tired her and demanded all her attention while she was in them, but during most of her progress she would look up every few minutes from her footing and search the opposite shore for a sign of Ghetel. O it’s strange after all that’s happened, she thought, but ’twould be a lovely thing to see her over yonder.

It was midafternoon and the sun was already dipping behind the high ridges, whose shadows crept up the mountainsides opposite, when Mary noticed something she had been seeing for several minutes without heeding: Circling in the wedge of blue sky in the valley ahead, silently and gracefully winding a course downward toward the riverbank, there were buzzards.

Something dead, she thought, remembering the muskrat remnants she had pirated from a flock of buzzards back at the waterfall. Pray it’s on this side of the river …

And then she thought:

Ghetel
.

O, pray not
 …

Heavy brush impeded her way as she went with dread curiosity toward the place upon which the buzzards were descending. She plunged and wove through it in the greatest haste she could manage, ignoring the scratches and the stinging slaps of the branches on her cold skin.

At last she broke out of the thicket and found herself looking almost directly across the river at the sight she had dreaded to see.

There on a flat rock shelf next to the river bank, out in the
open, lay a gray and white shape, which was Ghetel half-draped in the old blanket. She lay sprawled, inert, on her side, one arm extended stiffly beyond her head, the other lying limp over her waist, as if she had died while trying to claw her way one last inch forward across the rock surface.

The buzzards were almost upon her old carcass now; one had landed on a bare limb a few feet above her and was watching her; the shadows of the others drifted back and forth over the blanket as they rode the air down to her. Mary sank to the ground, her heart squeezing, her face crumpling up, and moaned. The whole pitiful scene blurred beyond her tears. She felt as crushed as when she had watched the Indians come down with the scalp of her mother.

O God, to have come this far together, Mary prayed. O dear God, if she’d only behaved, we’d still be together and I could’ve kept her alive, I know I could’ve; I did for weeks and weeks and weeks.

She wiped the tears away and looked at the dreary, final tableau of that brave old woman’s eventful life. She thought about throwing rocks across the river to drive the buzzards away. At least I could do that for ’er.

But that would be futile. She could hardly lift a rock. She could not possibly throw one even halfway across this river. And even if she could, how long could she stay here throwing rocks to keep hungry buzzards off that pitiful old carcass? One thing she knew about buzzards was that they had the patience that outlasts all other patience; theirs is the final hunger to be satisfied.

Eh well, then. The next best thing I can do for ’er, I guess, is not to watch ’em. When they do it to me I’d not want anyone t’ see it.

So … Ghetel, old dear … I’ll say bye now … an’ get along … leave ’ee in privacy …

She took one last look, rising to go on. Tears were trickling down her nose, and she saw that the buzzard on the limb had half-spread his wings and was dropping toward the carcass, and one of the flying ones was just settling on the blanket and folding his wings. From this distance she could just see the ugly red nakedness of their heads.

“HAH!”

The scene burst into a flurry of motion: black wings beating the air; Ghetel’s form suddenly lurching; Ghetel’s outcry and the clanking horsebell echoing faintly over the river. Mary had to blink to see it.

Ghetel was trying to scramble to her feet. She had a buzzard by the leg and it was beating frantically to escape, losing wing feathers. “I got you! I got you!” Ghetel was cackling. Mary stood with her mouth agape, shivers of awe running down her flanks, and then with a jolt of gleeful comprehension, she whooped.

The cunning old devil had finally got hungry enough to ambush buzzards!

Mary was doing an exuberant dance now, screaming with laughter, cheering Ghetel, having the time of her life. It was simply the most wonderful thing she had ever seen. Even though this was the same desperate visceral cunning that Ghetel had used to attack and hurt Mary, Mary cheered it and thought Ghetel was surely the most marvelous madwoman who had ever come round the mountain. Her heart leaped the wide river to her.

The ambush didn’t quite work. Ghetel’s feet got tangled in the blanket, and when she fell the buzzard tore itself free and blundered along the ground until it could gain the air, surely having learned never to approach a carcass in a blanket again. And Ghetel stood there in her scanty rags, a skeleton in wattles of loose skin, shaking her fist and hurling a screeching stream of Dutch profanity skyward after the climbing carrion birds.

But what heart it had given Mary!

Ghetel was stooping to gather up the blanket when she seemed to realize that she was not alone. She straightened up and looked quizzically about, simmering down from her rage and disappointment, until her gaze finally came across the river and she saw Mary rocking back and forth and waving to her.

Ghetel raised both hands and called Mary’s name. It came faintly across the river. It was very strange, hearing her name come from that distance and then echo along the hills.

Ghetel, white in the winter sunlight against the enormous gray and brown backdrop of the wintery landscape, pulled the blanket up around her shoulders. “I am sorry!” she called.

“So, then,” Mary called back. “I’m glad to see you!”

“Ya, ya, me also! May-ry, you come back now, heh?”

“I can’t!”

“Please! You come! Ve be friends like before!”

“No!”

“I like better to be with you! Please you, come back!”

Mary shook her head. “This is my side! That’s your side!”

Ghetel cupped her ear. “Vat you said?”

“Better we stay apart!”

It was impossible to see the old woman’s expression from this distance, but her postures and hesitations and gestures showed her to be very cast down and full of remorse. “I am sor-ry!” she called out in drawn-out syllables and pitiful tones. She paused for a long time, extending her arms toward Mary again and standing that way with her head tilted. Finally she called: “I vill not hurt you, I promise! I found a root to eat!”