Follow the River (52 page)

“Help me, help, help me,”
Mary was trying to cry out.
“Help me, Mister Harmon!”
But the words only came as a raspy whisper.

She stopped and listened. She could not hear the men’s voices now, and was afraid they had left the cornfield.

She had seen Mister Harmon and his sons as she crawled down the slope from the palisade cliff. She had seen the one youth working in the cornpatch and then she had seen old Adam Harmon and the other son start down from the hut. She had tried to walk down to the cornpatch where they were but her legs finally had failed her entirely, and she had dragged herself through the thicket toward the edge of the corn, trying to yell for their attention through her ghostly husk of a voice.

She tried to rise to her feet again but her legs were simply gone. She crawled into the snowy stubble of the cornfield now.

She saw dim shapes ahead of her through the cornstalks.

There they are, she thought.

She shouldered past a stand of cornstalks and suddenly she was face to face with them. Her heart plunged.

They were all aiming rifles at her face.

“NO!”
she whispered.

Powder flashed orange in the flashpan of Junior Harmon’s rifle when he squeezed the trigger. But at that instant his father’s hand came up under the rifle and knocked it off target. The ball whickered off through the foliage and Mr. Harmon’s voice roared:

“It’s a woman!”

He and Hank kept their rifles cocked. They were still not sure of this situation. They knew only that there was a gaunt white face of a woman there in the corn a few feet in front of them. But the thought of Indians had not left their minds and Mister Harmon wondered for a moment whether this emaciated creature crawling toward them might be a decoy, backed by Indians.

Mary raised herself onto her knees and reached toward the three Harmons with her hand. She could not understand why they had shot at her and did not come to her. Then she heard Mister Harmon say:

“Damnation! Can that be Missus Ingles?”

And at the sound of her name, everything wheeled and there was another one of those blizzards of dizziness, and this time she could not fight it and her mind blew away.

They stood over her, speechless, for minutes. They had never seen a human being in this condition. She was a skeleton covered with bruised and lacerated skin. Her hands and feet were bloody and swollen to a grotesque hugeness. Her knees were worn through to bone.

Her hair, though matted and dirty, was white as snow.

“Take this,” Mister Harmon said in a choked voice, handing his rifle to his son. He knelt beside the unconscious bundle of bones. He turned her onto her back and slipped one hand under her knees and one under her back and stood up.

When he felt how light she was his throat closed up, and he
carried her toward the hut blinded by tears. His sons were crying too.

“Go kill th’ calf,” Mr. Harmon said to Adam Junior. The youth looked at his father, at the broad, bewhiskered face, the old, strong face so sad in the light of the hearth fire and a tallow wick.

“Why that, Pa?”

“Your Ma always said beef tea’s the best thing f’r a gone body. Butcher th’ calf an’ bring me a chunk o’ loin.”

“We got three hundred pound o’ venison and bear already, Pa,” said Hank. “Wouldn’t that do?”

“Beef tea,” Mr. Harmon repeated, looking down at the unconscious skeleton lying under a bearskin blanket on a pallet in the corner. “An’ be quick about it, boy. You, Hank: Stoke up that fire an’ boil water.”

They didn’t argue. That pitful hag in the corner was for them, as well as for their father, the center of the world now. They were thinking of Will Ingles, who was about the finest man they knew. If he came back from the Cherokee country and found out they’d let her die, that would be a disgrace on them.

The fire roared.

There was some grievous commotion outside in the night as Junior caught the calf and strung it up by its hocks and slaughtered it. He came in with blood up to his elbows and put a fat piece of meat in one of the kettles. In the other kettle, Mr. Harmon was boiling rags. He would lift them out steaming on sticks and apply them to the little woman’s swollen feet and hands.

Late in the night the beef tea was ready, and Mr. Harmon dipped some up in a gourd and knelt by the pallet and put his hand under the pitiful knob of a skull and raised her head and put the gourd to her lips. She mumbled something and reached out from under the bear robe with her misshapen paws and held onto the gourd and sipped over its edge. Mr. Harmon had the sense to limit her to a few sips at a time.

After a few hours, she slipped off into a slumber so deep that he had to put his ear to her mouth to determine that she was asleep rather than dead.

Young Adam and Hank took turns standing sentry under the stars. When Hank came out to relieve his brother, they stood for a while together. Junior said:

“I been wonderin’. Where d’y reckon she been, five months?”

“Lost out yonder, I guess,” Hank said, waving a hand up toward the palisade cliff and Butte Mountain beyond it. “Not far, d’ reckon. Y’ know a woman. Git lost twenty yards off th’ doorstoop.”

“Yeah,” said Adam Junior. “Poor thang. Five month! Jesus God!”

She was warm. For the first time in many weeks, she was not shivering. All her body felt hot and sweaty. A jumble of bad dreams was dissolving like smoke as she remembered where she was. She heard a fire crackling and someone snoring. She could smell the musky bearskin robe under which she had slept, and the smell of meat stewing. Her mouth was full of saliva and kept filling with saliva as fast as she could swallow it.

She opened her eyes as far as their swelling would allow. They were gummy and everything she saw was blurry-edged. There was firelight flickering on the pole-and-bark ceiling, but she could also see a thin, fuzzy-edged angle of gray light and knew it was daylight outlining a chink of door-crack.

She had a very important question to ask.
“Mister Harmon?”
Still no voice. Her whisper gurgled with saliva and phlegm. The snoring nearby stopped and she saw dark bulks moving above her.

“ ’Mornin’, ma’am,” rumbled Mr. Harmon’s deep, soft voice, a music so profound and comforting that her eyes unexpectedly washed with tears. Oh, my, she thought. Her miraculous deliverance had left her on the edge of such a deep, wide sea of sentiment that, she realized, anything and everything—from food to voices to fireglow—likely would drown her in weepiness.

“Mister Harmon,”
she whispered, then swallowed, then whispered:
“what d’y know o’ Will an’ Johnny?”
The saying of their names nearly strangled her with bittersweetness.

He cleared his throat. “Ah, well. They be fine, I reckon.”

“Can ’ee take me to ’m?”

“You eat an’ sleep a day ’r two. Then we’ll talk about movin’.” Mr. Harmon and his son whispered something to each other that she could not hear. She hissed:

“Then maybe fetch ’em here?”
They could ride down here from Draper’s Meadows in half a day, she thought.
“O, sir, I must see Will this very day!”
Again the tears poured.

“Hank, dip ’er up some o’ that bear chowder,” Mister Harmon said. He wanted to get some more nourishment in her
before
telling her about Will and Johnny. “Now, sip this, Missus Ingles, an’ we’ll talk about what we’re going to do.”

He spooned the savory broth to her lips. There was very tender meat in it, in tiny bits, and corn. It was the best food she had ever eaten and she appreciated it so much that she had to stop eating for a while to cry. The food churned and burbled in her shrunken stomach and made her burp with almost every breath. It was so rich that it made her drowsy and she slipped away again. When she awoke the Harmons were sitting in a circle, working on their rifles and talking low. “…  an’ till we can leave,” Mr. Harmon was saying, “we’ll one at a time stand picket outside.”

“Aye,” one of the boys said. Then it was quiet for a while, until the same voice said: “I saw ’er prints. She come down off the cliff.”

“Th’ deuce y’ say!”

“Yup.”

“Sh-sh! She’s awake, boys.”

Mister Harmon moved close to her and squatted by the
pallet. He put his big rough but gentle hand on her forehead and smoothed back her hair. “Hullo. How goes’t?” She burped, nodded, then whispered:

“Please send f’r Will.”

He inhaled a long breath through his nostrils. “Well, mum, y’see, y’r husband ain’t hereabouts, nor ’s y’r brother John …” He saw the look of sheer dismay strike through her wasted visage, and realized that she was believing the worse, so he hurried to explain: “They rid down southways to confabulate with Cherokees about gettin’ you ransomed, mum. Uh, might be they’re back now, even … It’s three weeks since we was at the settlement. Yup, could be they’re home by now. Soon’s y’r strong enough to ride, we’ll all go up an’ see.” He cleared his throat again. “How’s ’em feet? Hank, sop up them rags an’ lets tend to these poor feet again …”

While these ministrations were being done, old Harmon tried to reassure her of the likelihood that Will was safe. He was not really that confident—it seemed to him that Mister Ingles’ sojourn was very long on risk—but he did not want her recovery to be complicated by worry and low spirits.

Hank, for all his burly appearance, was a gentle nurse, and his careful treatment of her feet was soothing, and sometimes he would wince and shake his head as if he were suffering the pain of her mauled and seeping extremities himself. There was a severe case of chilblains, and perhaps some frostbite damage, but no smell of mortification yet.

“Ma’am,” he said in awe, “looks t’me like these trailbeaters o’ your’n got a good hunnert mile on ’em.”

She smiled strangely down over the bear robe at him.
“Nay, friend,”
she whispered,
“more like a thousand.”

“Yup,” he agreed, looking back down at her feet with a shy smile, thinking she was joking. “More like a thousand. They do look it.”

“Reckon where you been?” old Harmon asked.

She looked at the ceiling for so long, eyes glistening wet, that he thought she’d drifted off and ignored or forgotten his question. But then she whispered:
“To th’ O-y-o, then way down it too.”

Mister Harmon’s eyebrows raised slightly and he gazed at
her thoughtfully, wondering whether she really had any idea what she was saying. Hank looked at his father and shook his head in pity. After a while, Mister Harmon leaned close to her and said: “It’s told that this river here,” he pointed, “goes plumb through the mountains to the O-hee-o. What say’ee to that, mum?”

She kept gazing through the roof with those wet glittering eyes.
“It does.”

“You, uhm, you
know
it does?”

“Aye,”
she whispered.
“It’s where I been.”

Adam and Hank Harmon looked at her for a long time, still not quite believing. If it were true, they were thinking, this little woman was the first white person ever to have gone through that uncharted vastness. Old Harmon didn’t want to wear her out just now with further questions about that, thought his mind was suddenly boiling with questions. So instead, he said after a while:

“Them as was with ’ee—your boys an’ all—what o’ them?”

It was not a good question to have asked. Mary Ingles dissolved into a fit of quaking, voiceless weeping that went on until she descended into sleep again at evening.

They heard her trying to say something in her sleep. Old Harmon leaned close over her and listened, but the sound made no sense. It was like a whispered chant:
“Ten times ten times ten a—way …”

On waking and asking the Harmon men for a moment’s privacy late that night, Mary realized that the soothing broths and soups had restored her voice. The men went out into the night, with their rifles, leaving her with a pail to use as chamberpot. Rising from the bed brought an onslaught of extreme pains, but these pains were not so soul-shaking; she felt stronger and these were the pains of knitting, not dying, flesh and sinew.

The unaccustomed richness of meat had flooded her bowels, but it was a miracle to be passing something more than seed-husks and beetle-wings and wood fiber; at least it was not the debilitating flux she had suffered so many recent times after eating poisonous roots. She crawled back under
the bearskin and looked at the rediscovered beauty of glowing wood-embers and wick-flame. She was utterly overwhelmed by amazement and gratitude for the miracle of fire. She thought back on the soul’s comfort she had derived from the distant burning spring one long-ago cold night, and knew that she would never again look at fire as merely another useful tool. Now flame was like a picture of the light of living; it was as if she had seen the bright flames of life burn down to embers, and then to a spark, and nearly down to ashes, in the hearth of her own bosom in these past six weeks in the cold wilderness, and she knew she would always understand this whenever she looked at fire, for the rest of her life.

The rest of my life!
she thought, with a leap of the heart.
There will be such a thing!

The men, two inside at a time while one prowled outside as sentry, stayed up most of the night coaxing Mary’s story out of her, and were dizzied by it as it wore on. They kept gasping at this, wincing at that. They uttered profanities when she told of the gauntlet and the burnings at the stake. They were aghast, trembling in fury, as she related Ghetel’s desperate attempt to kill and cannibalize her.

“I fear she be dead out yonder now,” Mary said softly, wistfully.

“I’d hope it,” growled Hank Harmon through clenched teeth. “Like t’ see th’ wolves in ’er guts and buzzards at ’er eyes!”

“Oh, no,” Mary exclaimed. “O, listen to this …” And then she told them the wonderful story about Ghetel lying down and playing dead to ambush buzzards. She smiled and waited for them to laugh, but they failed to laugh. And then she thought: No, I reckon y’ just couldn’t understand it lest y’d seen it, lest y’d knowed ’er.