Follow the River (6 page)

“Thankee, Mary,” Henry Lenard called to her softly.

“Welcome, Mr. Lenard.”

There. They had dared to talk, and the Indians seemed not to mind now. The warrior brought the pan of water back to
Mary and she drank the rest of it, and it was good; it was almost as refreshing as having been able to speak. The Indian nodded and smiled as he took the vessel from her. It was unbelievable that they who had wrought a massacre and burned a settlement in their savage passion a few hours ago could smile and behave like humans now. That seemed like years since; this seemed like a myth-story now.

“Bettie,” she cried. “Bettie, ca y’ hear me, hon?”

“Aye,” came her reply after a moment.

“How d’y do, sweet?”

“Oh, Mary. I want to die.”

“Nah, nah nah nah, Bettie! Won’t have that. We’re goin’ to be all right yet, dear, I do believe so.”

“No. I’m going to die.”

“Thomas!”

“Hey, Mama?”

“Y’ don’t let y’r auntie die now, or I’ll give y’ a sound hidin’, d’y hear?”

After a moment of hestitation, the child replied, “Ay, Mama.”

Mary smiled. Good Tommy, she thought. He’s best off with a chore at hand.

It was odd how Mary felt now, with this unexplainable hope and good humor rising up in her, above all her pain and fatigue. I’m going giddy, she thought. But I’ll vow, if these savages don’t get murderous again, I’ll get us out o’ this somehow.

“Oh, I will die,” Bettie moaned again.

“Y’do, Bettie, and it’s
you
I’ll whip,” Mary said, feeling a bubble of outrageous hilarity in her breast. I mustn’t go crazy, she thought.

Or maybe best I should.

The tall chieftain now was walking toward her, apparently attracted by the talk among the captives. He was not smiling, but he did not seem annoyed, either. He stopped and looked up at Mary with curiosity, then started to say something, but didn’t. It was as if he were searching for English words he might not have. Mary was astonished that she felt no fear of him now. He was simply a person, a man standing here.
Though he held all their lives in his hands, for the moment at least, Mary was not afraid of him. But Georgie was. Mary felt the child stiffening his back against her in terror as the warrior stood by the horse. She stroked the little boy’s hair and spoke to the Indian.

“Will we stay here, Mister? We
must
get down.”

He pondered her words, then pointed to the north, up toward the high, jagged escarpment. “No. There. Mo-ther be still.”

“Oh, please, not up th …”

“Mo-ther be still,” he repeated, more loudly. Then he turned his head and studied the slope which led up onto the cliff. Mary watched his profile and studied his demeanor to determine how close she might be to the limits of his goodwill. My Georgie’s all beshit, she thought.

“I need to clean …”

“Be still!” the Indian spat at her. He looked straight at her and his eyelids narrowed. It was obvious that this was all his indulgence for now. He turned and called a command, and the group of warriors dispersed and took up their places along the pack train. Mary watched the chieftain as he strode forward to the head of the column. His back was straight as a wall, and she noticed that the back of his head was flat also; a leather band around his head held three dark feathers and they stuck straight up in back. His thick black hair, parted in the middle, was held neatly in place by the headband and flowed to his shoulders. He carried himself with that same erect confidence Mary had noticed in Colonel Washington and so Mary presumed that this warrior was perhaps the equivalent of a colonel.

We shan’t have to mollycoddle them all, at any rate, she guessed. If we can keep this gent calm, I don’t reckon he’d let the others do us harm.

And then she got an arm around Georgie, and cooed to him as the horses moved off again. She tightened her stomach muscles as well as she could and gritted her teeth and the column turned northward away from the river’s elbow bend, climbing a steeply sloping ridge that led to the palisade’s crest. The path was closer to vertical than anything Mary had
ever ridden; the horse lunged and stumbled and scrabbled for footholds, and Mary had to squeeze her legs with all her remaining strength and grab handfuls of mane to keep herself and Georgie from sliding back over the beast’s rump. Pray Bettie’s still got strength to hang on, she thought. “Tommy,” she called back, “hold tight, dear!” She couldn’t hear his reply over the clatter of hooves and sliding rock debris. Below, almost straight below, the river gleamed like dull pewter through the black foliage. The Indians were almost invisible now in the gathering darkness, but nevertheless swarmed sure-footed as panthers up the steep ridge.

At last the slope became more gentle, then leveled, and they rode a few yards to the left into a deep wood that she reckoned must be on the very crest of the palisade.

And then, on this precipitous height, the column stopped, and the Indians began unloading horses. A warrior appeared beside Mary’s horse and reached up and grabbed Georgie, who reacted with a moan of terror. Don’t cry, Mary thought; don’t cry out or he’ll pitch ye over the cliff! The Indian set the little boy on the ground, and said something to Mary. With a wheeze of effort she leaned back and raised her aching right leg over the horse’s withers, sat sideways for a moment praying her legs would support her, then slid off. She staggered and stumbled and held her ponderous abdomen when her feet hit the ground, but found her balance and stayed upright. Nearby, Bettie cried out sharply in the gloom, doubtless having hurt her arm in dismounting. Tommy’s voice warned, “Don’t die, Auntie Bettie!”

Indians led the horses off somewhere, and herded the captives into a group on a jutting, scrub-covered promontory of the ledge, then stationed a single warrior to watch them. On three sides of the huddled hostages, sheer cliffs dropped away. On the fourth side the sentinel seated himself on a rock with his musket across his knees. As the last silvery-gray of the gloaming faded out over the horizon and stars appeared overhead, the rush of water over rocks could be heard from far below. Beyond this narrow place, there was nothing but night and space. The captives kept close together, intimidated by the nearness of the precipice, and whispered consolations
to each other. It was obvious that they were to be allowed no comfort but that of togetherness.

“A paradise down there by the spring, and they choose an eagle’s nest for a camp,” Mary explained.

“So ’tis,” murmured Henry Lenard. “A safe place from pursuit, that’s why.”

“D’y’ reckon anyone is followin’ us?”

“Not likely, I guess. Who’s to follow? Best as I could make out, they kilt Colonel Patton. I saw Jim Cull light out f’r the woods wounded, limpin’ bad,” said Henry. “That leaves but Will and Johnny and Casper to follow. An’ maybe Bill Preston an’ Phil Lybrook, who was down th’ creek som’ers, an’ maybe stayed safe.”

“Not Casper,” Bettie sniffled. “I saw ’em cut him up. I saw …”

“Let’s us have a look at y’r poor blighted arm, Bettie …” Mary said, scooting carefully across the rock and closer to her. “I been frettin’ about that all the livelong day …” She didn’t want Bettie to start recalling the massacre.

“It’s broke here. Ow! Oh! I can’t stand touchin’ …”

“Now, down at that spring, with water and a fire and a shred o’ daylight left, I could ha’ treated that up just sweet as c’d be,” Mary commented. “But here … well, got t’ splint it somehow, at least, darlin’. Mister Lenard, would y’be so kind as to feel around f’r a few sticks please, about a foot long, I guess. An’ I’ll get me some strips o’ cloth here. Must tear the sleeve off y’r pretty dress, Bet, hon, t’ get at you. Tommy, I must ask’ee to clean up Georgie a bit. He’s messed himself, poor tad … and, Tommy,” she added, “thankee for not letting your auntie die on us. That was a good lad …”

“I won’t die on y’ now,” Bettie murmured. “Forgive me such talk. I just …”

“Ssshhh, now. Nought to forgive.”

Mary ripped up the bloody sleeve of Bettie’s dress and tore strips from her own skirt, and with a few lengths of branch Henry had broken off a shrub, they prepared a makeshift splint. “This’ll hurt, now, Bettie. But just for a minute. Pull her hand there if y’d kindly do so, Mister Lenard, just a slow an’ steady pull …”

Bettie’s shriek split the night open and quavered out over the valley when Mary probed blindly into the swollen, bloody flesh of the broken upper arm as Henry stretched the arm. Mary steeled herself against the anguished wail and tried to guide the broken ends of the bone together, as she and Will had done once for Johnny after a log-toting accident had snapped his arm.

But there were no simple clean bone ends in Bettie’s break. The musketball had shattered the bone and Mary could feel pieces of it adrift in the tortured flesh. A pity, she thought; it’s going to heal up short. If it heals at all, she thought.

So, as Bettie went into a merciful faint, they braced the arm as well as they could in the splint, and Mary prayed that the festering might not get too well started before they could make a decent camp with a fire and hot water and maybe a poultice of some kind—what was that we used for Johnny’s? she tried to remember;
comfrey
, that’s what it was, comfrey—a poultice of comfrey leaves to draw the pus and poison out.

And at that moment a huge grab of pain in her own sore and strained pelvis reminded her of another urgent reason why they would need a decent camp any time now.

The captives awakened themselves and each other at times throughout the night with the mutterings of their nightmares and discomforts. But the marvel of it to Mary Ingles was that they had slept at all, on the bare, crumbling stone of the cliff-top, with the dew settling on them and chilling their skin. Mary had been tormented awake countless times by the pain of stone debris grinding into her shoulders or flanks or the side of her face, and especially under her weighted hipbones, and had turned over and lain there trying to drown thoughts of their desperate straits in the muzzy undercurrent of exhaustion. She had managed to doze now and then, and when she awoke in the indistinct predawn grayness, she realized that she had fallen at last into an utter oblivion of slumber, she knew not how long. She looked about and saw her children and Bettie and Henry lying like so many dew-damp corpses in the half-light, saw the vast, foggy abyss beyond the
edges of the cliff and saw the form of the Indian sentry still sitting, as if in a trance, a few feet away.

The Indians, she saw, had not even indulged themselves with a campfire. As the light grew, she saw the warriors rise one by one from their beds of concealment, with their weapons, and she knew that they had slept—if they had slept at all—ready to do instant battle, if necessary, on this fortresslike cliff-top. They had both hobbled and rope-corralled the horses, in a grassy glade near the edge of the woods, no doubt to keep them from straying over the brink of the cliff during the night.

The Indian camp stirred to life in silence. The river muttered and rushed below. A cricket nearby creaked its monotonous repetitions. Mary painfully detached herself from the ground, hauled herself upright and stepped among the sleeping captives to a small corner of space where she could relieve her bladder. Not wanting to squat and bare her haunches under the eyes of the Indian sentry, she simply spread her feet apart, bent her knees until her skirt hem touched the ground, gazed out over the valley and emptied herself of a long stream, concealed from his eyes. When she turned back from it, the Indian had not moved nor altered his impassive expression, but she imagined a smirk of amusement. The thought irritated her. It seemed very important somehow, though she knew she was presuming things about the Indian character, that she and the others should exhibit all the dignity their destitute circumstances would allow. Somehow, she felt, dignity might be all that could keep them alive. It was a notion she had arrived at largely by watching the straight-backed carriage of the tall chieftain.

The sky paled. The mist began to grow pearly, then yellow, then began to separate into wisps and dissolve. Mary got the children awake and tended to them, persuading them through her own whispers and soft tones that they must not whine or talk too much. She aroused Bettie and Henry, managing to whisper to them also the conclusions she had reached about stoical and dignified behavior. “I don’t care how ever much y’ hurt, Bettie—nay, I mean, I do care—but however much, just be still and bear it. Once we get out of this, we two might just
go out in the open somewhere and holler and caterwaul. But not so long as we’re in the hands of a band of nervous savages. What say y’ to that, Mister Lenard?”

“Right smart, Mrs. Ingles. Dignity it is.”

She mused on his apparent willingness to let her, a woman, assume the natural leadership among the hostages. Perhaps, she thought, it’s out of his respect for William.

William! she thought, with such a mighty compression of her heart that it nearly forced undignified tears from her own eyes.

A warrior brought a pan of food to the captives and took the place of the sentry. They ate while the Indians readied the pack train. Mary recognized some of her own hoecake, and also distributed a few sections of the rabbit she had been cooking yesterday—incredible that it was only yesterday! she thought—when the raid had so abruptly uprooted and scattered their lives.

The Indians bound Henry’s hands again, and were about to tether him by the neck once more, when Mary took a chance on his behalf and indicated that the rope might be attached to his wrists instead of his neck. The Indians, to her surprise, simply shrugged and complied.

Now, she thought, I reckon he can stay more dignified thataway.

They rode out northwestward that morning, following ridge trails and creekbeds, sometimes not glimpsing the river for hours. Then they would come around the brow of a mountain and there far below would be a stretch of river with an island in it, or a stunning horseshoe riverbend glinting in the
morning sun under the lowering mass of some great curving cliff-face. Then up another steep ridge and into the deep woods or across a high meadow with no river to be seen for still more hours.