Follow the River (47 page)

“Good! I found two turnips!” She held up her hand with the turnip in it.

Ghetel was silent for a minute. “Turnips! O, I vant!”

“Sorry!” But Mary yearned, for an instant, for the strength to throw this turnip across the river to Ghetel. She wondered at herself for having that impulse, after all that had happened the night before.

She wished she could go across to Ghetel and give her the turnip and put her arms around her and make things be the way they had been before Ghetel had lost control of herself. Because they had had each other close, those had been good days, despite everything. She now remembered their easy passage along the beautiful O-y-o in the warm autumn sunshine as if recalling a balmy holiday with a dear friend.

Now the valley was in shadow and the air was becoming bitter cold again and it was time to move or freeze. She started up the bank.

“Pleeeeease!”
Ghetel was wailing now. She got down on
one knee and wrung her hands, far over there. “I vant us together!”

“I can’t come over anyway!” Mary called back. “Now, come on! We’ll walk now, shan’t we?” In a way it would be like being together, she thought, if they could keep each other in sight. They would still be together. There would just be a nice safe river’s breadth between them. It would be just fine. She was a long way from the blanket, of course, and from the warmth of a fellow body to sleep alongside in the cold of night. But she was an equally long way from that murderous craziness that came over Ghetel when her belly was truly, truly empty.

“Come along,” she called again, waving her arm. “We’re still together, dear!”

And at last, slumping, chin on her chest and head wobbling from side to side in dejection, Ghetel clutched the bedraggled blanket around her and began trudging up the other side of the river.

So they were together again, in this new and necessary manner of being together, with a river between them, and they resumed their upriver journey which had been interrupted by that hour of utter terror the night before.

Mary lay shuddering with cold in a deep drift of leaves and waited for dawn to lighten the way enough so that she could rise and go on. Because of the cold, she had not slept at all during the night. The leaves had not kept her warm, as she had been when sharing the blanket with Ghetel; they only slowed her heat loss enough to keep her from freezing to death as she lay still during the interminable night.

The sky gradually grayed. She rustled the leaves around her head and raised herself far enough to peer around. It was perhaps light enough now to make her way along the cluttered shore. It was easy enough to see the path and the obstacles now; they were outlined with a heavy frost.

When she rose, the cold pressed on her naked skin like steel. She was painfully hungry. The two turnips had fed her momentarily yesterday, but they had also taught her stomach again to have expectations.

She shivered and peered across the steaming river to its dim frosted shore and tried to see where Ghetel lay. She would have slept well, doubtless, with the blanket, and probably was still asleep. Mary called her name, her breath making a frosty cloud, then called it again and again. She did not want to lose sight of the old woman, but knew she could not wait here in this frigid air while Ghetel slept late.

“Yaaaah!” Ghetel’s voice answered across the river, a grouchy wail that made Mary smile in fond amusement.

Mary trembled and rubbed her forearms up and down over the gooseflesh of her bosom, and bawled back in high spirits: “Roust the old bones, slug-a-bed!” There was no answer for more than a minute. “Up, dearie,” she called again, “if y’re a-goin’ t’ walk with me!” She tried to press her thighs together to warm each other but they were so wasted that only her knees touched. While she waited for a sign of life from the other shore she remembered to tie another knot in the yarn rope that was now not only her only garment but her only possession. And her history. She was wracked with a painful spasm of coughing and her nose was running like a spring. She could scarcely move her swollen fingers or control their trembling to knot the yarn.

She had reckoned it all out during the sleepless night; according to her count of days and her perception of terrain, she was sure they were not much more than thirty miles from home. She was not in the least inclined to waste a minute of daylight waiting for Ghetel to get her sleep out. But, on the other hand, she had dragged and prodded and coerced the old crab more than seven hundred miles and was determined not to lose her this close to salvation.

They were able to keep each other in sight most of the day as they climbed and stumbled and crawled up the dark, wild valley with the seething gray river between them. The sight of Ghetel over there, looking as insignificant as an insect at the base of an enormous, mist-shrouded mountain, made Mary aware of how small and weak she herself was in this immense, indifferent wilderness.

Nought but a couple o’ bugs, she thought. O how mighty
stupendous this world is, and how feeble we, and O how far we’ve creeped over it! Ten times ten times ten. Aye, it’s no surprise if the Lord overlooks us entirely, as I fear He has done.

They called to each other often across the water, to keep in touch and to keep their spirits up. Mary sang, and Ghetel would sing
da da, da, da, da, da
… They were past worrying whether Indians might hear them. Anyways, if Ghetel met a Shawnee now, Mary thought with a grim smile, she’d doubtless kill and devour ’im.

At every resting place, Ghetel would come to squat at the water’s edge, huddle there with the blanket drawn cowl-like over her head and plead with Mary for one chance to rejoin her. She professed penitence, and made elaborate and contrite promises, which Mary could barely hear over the rush of the water and the rising wind in the forest, and implored forgiveness, and begged to resume their old companionship. Mary could not seem to make her understand that she could not have recrossed the river if she had wanted to. Mary yelled to her about the canoe, about its sinking, but Ghetel seemed not to understand a word of that. Maybe she did not recognize the word
canoe
, or maybe she could not hear Mary’s words. Or perhaps she was still, or again, in that condition of mind she had so frequently been in, when she simply
would not
hear anything but her own plaints.

Rain started, then turned to sleet, stinging their skin, driving them onward and increasing their lamentations.

Withal, our witchy wailin’ ought to haunt this Devil’s valley, Mary thought, f’r many a generation t’ come.

Will Ingles, Johnny Draper and Gander Jack rode slouching in the cold rain. Water dribbled off the drooping edges of their hat brims. Each had his rifle lying across his loins, protected by their deerskin capes. The skins were sodden and clammy but the men were warm inside the pungent wool clothes they wore under the hides.

They were not in good spirits. Their trek down among the Cherokees in the Tennessee and Georgia country seemed to have been a waste of weeks and expense. Snake Stick had given them no sense of confidence. He had not only remained reluctant to carry their ransom offer to the Shawnees, he had also, as his parting words, told them that he might not even go up to the O-y-o country until next spring, instead of this fall. That pronouncement had been almost the last straw for Johnny, who had been simmering under Snake Stick’s insolence, and Johnny had boiled over. Eyes flashing, he had demanded that Snake Stick return the ransom goods. “I’m damned if we give you all this if y’re just a-gonna sit here in your hutch an’ count it all winter!” But Will had managed to cool Johnny down before he could make a real scene, which might have been fatal. In the end, the chief had shrugged and said only, “Snake Stick might go now and he might not go now. Snake Stick does not live to please English.”

Their return from the Cherokee lands had been uneasy. Gander Jack had sworn a hundred times on the way back that he saw Indians in the corners of his eyes, though he had never managed to get a fixed glimpse of any.

And so autumn had muted into winter gray on their disconsolate trip back toward Virginia. They had ridden up an
endless series of rocky creeks between somber, hazy mountains, joined the Tennessee River and followed it past the Nolichucky and then the Watauga, finally crossing a high range to reach the headwaters of the New River, which flowed in exactly the opposite direction, here running north and east toward Draper’s Meadows and Ingles’ Ferry. Now they would stay generally in this valley for the next few days, following the New River downstream, to reach the settlements. Their journey was nearly over. That it might have been futile was uppermost in all their minds, but they had never said so to each other.

Gander Jack was in advance about twenty feet; he slumped so low in his saddle that he might have been thought asleep, but Will knew from their long weeks of travel with him that his downcast eyes were scanning every inch of ground for signs of Indian passage. Johnny was bringing up the rear, leading the now lightly burdened pack animal. The horses’ coats were dark and shiny with rain.

Will and Johnny had acquired scout’s eyes, too, and from under their half-closed eyelids they scanned the trails and mountainsides before, alongside and behind them constantly for that little displaced something, that half-hidden motion, that unnatural shadow, that unlikely sound, that skittish behavior of animals and birds, which might indicate the proximity of Indians.

But both were at the same time preoccupied with thoughts of their wives. They were trying to get themselves accustomed to the likelihood that they would never see them again. On the way out to the Cherokee country, they had dared to hope for Mary and Bettie. If ransom negotiations could have begun now before winter, there would have been a decent chance to trace the women and children and bring them back still physically and spiritually whole. But since their encounter with Snake Stick, they had come to believe that the trail would be too cold by next year, that life among the Indians would have ruined them. Will burned continuously inside with chagrin, heated by his imagination, in the knowledge that his young wife’s body, so sacred to him—his wife’s body that he considered
his
—was at the mercy of
savages who would have no respect for it or for his sacred conjugal right to it. True, he had heard that the Indians did not practice rape on their female victims, but he found that impossible to believe. Surely no man who lived the wild and sensuous and naked life of a heathen, who could so abandon himself as to dash out a baby’s brains and scalp an old woman, would have the discipline to honor the desirable temple of a young woman’s body.

Why, even a white man wouldn’t have the discipline to mind his morals in such an opportunity, Will thought over and over. Surely not a heathen.

Though he tried to keep it out of his imagination, a disgusting image would appear and reappear during these long periods when there was nothing to do but ride and think.

In his mind there would be his beautiful, lithe Mary, always in a council lodge like that of Snake Stick, and she would be staked down naked, spread-eagled on a buffalo hide, lit by flickering fireglow, biting her lips and tossing her head from side to side, her auburn hair spilling and tangled, her precious breasts red and bloody with bite-marks, while one naked, shining, slavering, drunken Indian after another—all looking like Snake Stick— would kneel between her lean white thighs and then throw his weight upon her and thrust his filthy dark stiff unimaginable profanity of a lewdness into that sacred secret place of hers, and pump his heathen seed into her, yipping with lust while she screamed Will’s name—or God’s—with no one to hear her but the other savages who had finished with her or were waiting their turns …

Or sometimes, even worse, he would see her face change from pain to pleasure and hear her screams turn to moans, and she would begin raising and moving her hips the way he remembered …

And when he saw these pictures in his mind in all their pitiful and revolting details, his heart would swell with rage and then shrink down cold and sick, and a pall of hatred and disgust would darken his emotions so that he would not want to see or converse with Gander Jack or even with his own brother-in-law. He would stay in this mood sometimes for hours, thinking and rethinking the repugnant but somehow
fascinating scene, until he could not bear the notion any longer and he would take a deep breath and squeeze the nightmare out of his mind.

Often Will would turn and see Johnny, hot-tempered Johnny, wrapped in just such black moods, his mouth drawn so thin the lips would look gray, and would presume that Johnny was thinking like thoughts about Bettie.

Will had even wondered—even while exhausting his every resource and risking his neck to repatriate her—whether this same lewd image would be his first thought upon seeing her again, and whether he would be charitable enough and tolerant enough in his soul ever to draw her close to him again if he did think it.

The three men had reached a place where they had to decide which of two paths they would take. One would lead them overland along the shadow of the Blue Ridge to their ruined settlement at Draper’s Meadows, where a little restoration had been started after the raid in July; the other would lead them across the New River to the little fort at Dunkard’s Bottom, where most of the neighbors in the region had congregated for protection earlier in the fall after getting their crops in.

“What say’ee, brother?” Johnny inquired, looking tiredly at Will from under the dribbling brim of his hat. They both felt so much let down after the apparent failure of their long mission that nothing seemed worth doing, and no choice worth more than the flip of a coin. “Want to ride up to th’ Meadows and put in a few days o’ work on th’ roofs?”

Will peered up at the rainy skies. “There’s y’r answer,” he said. “This is no roof-mendin’ weather. Partick’ly if this turns t’ snow.”

Johnny shrugged. “Dunkard’s it is then, Jack.”

“Yep,” Will said. “I would like t’ look in on th’ ferry, too.”