“So, Ghetel,” Mary said. “Here we meet, then. And what d’ye s’pose will come of us next, eh?”
“I hope zupper,” the old woman said.
They were fed, around sunset time, on a delicious hot starchy porridge, tasting faintly of hickory smoke and corn, and laced with nuts and strips of meat. Their hands were untied and they were allowed to dip into bowls of the rich food with their fingers and eat until they could hold no more. The Indian women who had brought the food squatted on the ground nearby and talked and watched them eat, then carried away the empty bowls. The old woman named Ghetel wolfed down great quantities of the stuff, evidently being as famished as she had said she was. The younger woman and the little girl tied to the post with her had eaten little. Those two did not seem to be related in any way to the old woman. They did not speak English at all, but wept softly and occasionally talked in a croaking, throaty sort of language to the three men tied at the next stake.
Through the twilight the captives were visited by Indians, sometimes families of them, who came to squat on the ground a few away and look at them. They watched Mary feed the baby at her breast. At dark the last people went away and the village grew still. There was the smell of tobacco smoke in the air, and in the vicinity of a big lodgelike building several hundred feet away, a fire kept burning and a drum bumped monotonously. Mary went to sleep to that monotonous throbbing. She awoke once when a slice of moon was almost straight overhead. The drum had stopped and the fire was out. Crickets and katydids unwound their screechy songs in the silver-edged darkness. Georgie was mumbling in his sleep. Mary turned over to take her weight off the aching shoulder and hip of her right side, moved the baby gently to place it near her head, then went back to sleep vaguely thinking about the tether around her neck.
The baby crying for food woke Mary. Morning sunlight was touching the treetops. Nearby, the old woman was looking at the infant and saying, “Shoosh! Shoosh!” Mary sat up to attend to her child and saw that the other prisoners were already awake, gazing fearfully around the village.
Mary took the baby out of its carrier and unwrapped it from its swaddling cloth. She shook the bowel waste out of the cloth onto the ground and used an unsoiled corner of the cloth to wipe the little girl clean. But the cloth was too wet with urine to reuse. And the other cloth, which she had had available on the trail, had been lost somewhere. So she held the baby naked to her breast. It suckled, making the strange sweet pain around her nipple. After a moment Mary no longer noticed the sour smell of the stale urine. She listened to the ngn, ngn, ngn sounds in the baby’s throat and looked around the village.
A few Indians were up and moving among the huts. The old woman was standing up now, her feet wide apart, pissing a sibilant stream onto the ground. She smiled at Mary, quietly said something that sounded like Morgan, then went to dry ground a few feet away, sat down, stretched and yawned noisily.
Bettie was relieving herself, too, but trying to be more discreet about it. She was squatting with her skirts spread on the ground about her and looking around insouciantly as if to give the impression that she was doing anything but what she was doing. Mary smiled to herself. Of all the awful things we have, she thought, this lack of privacy is one of the worst.
She turned to speak to her sons, but suddenly her attention was diverted by a commotion of voices and drumbeats from the vicinity of the lodge. The prisoners all turned to look. Mary’s heart seemed to jump into her mouth.
Scores—then it seemed hundreds—of Indians were pouring into the long open space between the lodge and the place where the prisoners were staked. Young and old, male and female, what seemed to be the whole population of the village came running, howling and laughing, from every direction. All of them were carrying sticks and switches. They milled around and then began forming into two parallel lines along both sides of the streetlike clearing, and began slapping the earth with their sticks.
Then, from the lodge at the far end of the street, between the long lines of people, came the chiefs she had seen the evening before, as well as several warriors and the chieftain she knew. With them were two white men, one lean, one stocky, wearing faded cloth hunting shirts, with bright red caps on their heads. As they came closer, these white men could be seen smiling brightly through their black beards. They did not seem to be prisoners. One had a pistol in his belt and one wore a sheath knife. Mary was confused by a rush of speculations. Were they envoys perhaps sent from civilization to barter for the release of the prisoners? Were they former captives now living as Shawnees? Or were they some of the Frenchmen Mary had heard of, the French who were said to be involved in the war?
They were speaking cheerfully with the chiefs as they approached. They seemed to be speaking in the Indian tongue.
The white men came into the clearing and moved among the captives, looking them over carefully. Their eyes were quick and merry. They were talking between themselves now in a different-sounding language, nasal and sonorous. Then they stepped back among the chiefs and talked and nodded briefly with them. Mary glanced at Tommy and Georgie, who were looking, transfixed, at the white men.
The main chief then said something in a quick, sharp voice, and a cheer ran along the two waiting lines of Indians.
Three warriors stepped up to Henry Lenard and hauled him to his feet. They untied the bonds at his hands and ankles and detached the tether from his neck. The chieftain then said loudly to Henry:
“Be naked.”
Henry looked at him, confused. The chieftain struck him a resounding blow on the ear and repeated, “Be naked.”
Henry hesitantly reached for his shirt collar and drew his shirt off over his head. Then he stood there holding it, and apparently he stood too long. The chieftain said something and two of the braves, brandishing knives, grabbed Henry, and in seconds had cut his breeches off and wrenched the moccasins off his feet. He stood there white as a fish, looking pitifully vulnerable, trembling. His panic-widened eyes flickered among his fellow prisoners as if appealing for forgiveness of his shame. Mary dropped her eyes.
“Lord in heaven,” Bettie murmured, and she too looked at the ground.
The chieftain turned to one of the bearded white men and told him:
“Say English to him. What he do.”
“M’sieu,” said the man. “I regret thees. Mais … you ’ave to run—run, comprenez?—to that.” He pointed toward the big building, which stood some two hundred yards away, at the end of the parallel lines of Indians. “When drum ah, ah, go, you run. Savvy thees?” Henry nodded. “You, ah, fall, you ’ave to run again. From here, comprenez?” Henry shifted his feet, tensed his legs and looked back. Mary was watching him again and saw that his usually weather-darkened face was almost as white as his scrawny backside.
A rumble of drumbeats rolled from the lodge. “Go! Vite!” the Frenchman yelled. At that moment the chieftain swung a swishing blow with a limber four-foot stick. It whacked so loudly on Henry’s pale buttocks that Mary winced.
“Yaaaa!” Henry gasped, then yelled what he must have thought the Frenchman had said: “Go, feet!” And he dropped into a crouch and sprinted away. The Indians were howling now, and the air was full of the swishing and whistling of their sticks and switches as he raced past them. Mary could hear the lashing of the wood on his skin, and she cringed. She saw him raise his hands to shield his face and ears. This slowed him, and he was no more than thirty yards down the gauntlet when a well-aimed staff swung by a grown man smashed him to the ground. The Indians converged on him and slashed and whipped at him repeatedly for several awful seconds.
They let him up then and dragged him staggering back to the starting place and aimed him again toward the lodge. Blood was running from his right ear. His back and buttocks and legs were laced with bloody welts.
But now Henry Lenard’s face was red with fury and he no longer looked scared. He crouched for the signal and stared with bugging eyes and bitten lips at the chieftain. “Let’s go, great Injin,” he hisse
d. “I’m set.” Mary’s heart was hammering in her neck and she could hear her sons whining.
The drum sounded. Henry, his eyes on the chieftain, shot out like a rabbit before the chieftain could raise his stick. And now he ran with his arms pumping, not bothing to protect his head any more. Mary prayed for him and watched him get halfway to the lodge before he was tripped and clubbed to the ground and again obscured from view by the milling Indians.
When he was brought back to the head of the line again there was scarcely an inch of his skin that was not crisscrossed with red marks, and his face was covered with blood. Again he stood defiant, looking with hatred at the chieftain, heaving now for breath.
“I’m set,” he said again. The drum thudded and he lunged forward. Halfway down the line he was again knocked out of his course, but this time, after dropping to one knee, regained his footing and shot forward again. A man with a raised club stepped into his way, but was bowled to the ground by Henry’s momentum before he could strike. Mary’s heart leaped with joy when she saw the distant naked figure stagger to the lodge and heard the Indians give him a cheer.
“He made it!” she yelled to the boys. “He made it!”
The three men prisoners were next. Neither of the first two made it. The first fell to the ground within ten yards and drew himself up into a whimpering ball and took their blows until he passed out. He was dragged back to the stake and lay there face down, his skin entirely red with stripes and blotches and oozing blood. The second man made three tries, finally being felled and beaten senseless a mere twenty yards from the lodge. Then the man in the British army coat was stripped. He was big and beefy. He stuck out his pugnacious jaw and scowled at the Frenchmen until the drum sounded. Then, instead of starting down the gauntlet, he roared, “God damn y’r eyes!” and lunged at the thin Frenchman, catching his throat in his big hands and nearly strangling him before he could be pounded into insensibility with a war club and hauled back to lie beside the other unconscious men.
The Frenchman sat on the ground, coughing and wheezing and spitting, his face draining from red to white, then finally stood up, leaning against his companion. Neither of them was smiling now. The chiefs watched them patiently, exhibiting no concern. Then the main chief spoke, and the Frenchmen nodded. They turned now toward the remaining prisoners, who were all women and children. The chief shouted something down the line, and all the men with their clubs and staffs stepped back out of the lines.
Dear God, Mary thought. It’s us next. Oh, not the younguns, please God. And not Bettie. She’s hurt.
One of the young chieftains came into the clearing and looked at the foreign woman, thoughtfully, and pointed finally at the big old widow. She stood up slowly, glaring at them with hard-edge eyes. Braves untied her tether from the stake, then cut the hide belt from her waist and ripped away what was left of her tattered dress. She stood naked, a great, gray-white ruin of womanhood, breasts and buttocks hanging flat, her skin drooping in folds like a loose garment on her sturdy frame. Her thighs were massive with muscle. As she was led toward the head of the gauntlet, muttering an incomprehensible something that might have been a prayer, she kept her back straight and was dignified despite the ugly, ill-fitting suit of flesh that quivered with each step she took. Mary felt a sudden, surprising welling-up of admiration for her. Her own flesh felt the awful nakedness and anticipated the shock and cutting of the switches. She doubted that she herself would be able to bear it, and even though the Indian men with their stout sticks and clubs had withdrawn from the ranks to leave this sport to the women and children, she foresaw herself falling and curling up to faint under the pain, just as the one male prisoner had done.
But you had a baby on the trail, she told herself. You knew then that any other sufferin’ would be less.
But she was not so certain now.
If the old woman gets through it, I promise I will get through it, she told herself. I promise.
The old woman stood waiting, her back to the prisoners. Than, as if remembering something, she stiffened her spine and turned her head to look back. Her glance fell on Mary. She smiled her best jackass smile, gave a funny shrug, then turned her face again toward her tormentors. Most of them were grinning now, as if there were something less serious about the business of whipping women prisoners. It was as if this part of the rite would be more of an entertainment than a vengeance.
The drum sounded. The old woman started down the line in a strange, straight-backed, jiggling trot, elbows bent, fists up. The switches began whistling. The old woman seemed to be moving scarcely faster than a walk, raising one or another shoulder as if to shrug off the blows. The men were laughing and hooting, bent over with hilarity as the quivering mass of flesh jogged by.
But jolly or not, the whippers were not being gentle. The Indian women and children were, if anything, laying on their switches with even greater ferocity. If the object had been to pound the male victims senseless and keep them from reaching the lodge, now it seemed to be that the female victims should get there with the utmost suffering.
The old woman lumbered on, it seemed for an eternity. Then, halfway down the line, a stout Indian woman stepped out of the line with a thick staff cocked over her shoulder and brought it around in a sweeping horizontal blow aimed at the side of the old woman’s head.
But the victim got an arm up, slightly deflecting the blow, which instead glanced off the top of her skull. And with a bellow of outrage, she stopped, turned on the astonished squaw, snatched the heavy stick out of her hands and rammed the end of it into her abdomen. Nearby squaws and children, who had tried to converge on her when she stopped, suddenly surged back. She was laying to, left and right, left and right, as if the staff were a scythe and her tormentors were blades of grass. Thus armed, she literally fought her way along the next twenty yards of the gauntlet, giving as many blows as she received. It was an uproarious amusement for the men. The little knot of howling combat moved slowly toward the distant lodge until the old woman’s arms grew weary and her blows flagged. Soon she was disarmed, and Mary watched with pride and amazement as she resumed her slow trot to the end of the line under a renewed torrent of switches. The whole assemblage gave her a goodhearted cheer when she walked up and touched the wall of the lodge. “Quelle femme!” cried one of the Frenchmen. “Formidable!”
She was paraded back along the line in triumph, stumbling now and then, as the Indians laughed and whooped. Even the old chief was smiling when she returned to the head of the line, and she, despite her profusion of stinging welts and a stream of blood clotting her hair and running down her left temple, grinned back at him. One of the chiefs uttered some sort of command, and when the old woman had been brought back to her stake, panting and triumphant, a young squaw quickly appeared at her side with a clay pot and began working over her wounds with a greasy-looking gray-green unguent. “Gut. Gut,” the old woman kept saying, wincing and sighing. “Gut. Gut.” She looked up at Mary’s admiring eyes and winked. “Vas not bad,” she said. “You can do.”
They came and took Bettie next. She stood with her eyes shut and groaned as they untied her. They had to rip open the right shoulder of her dress because of the bulky splint on her arm, then they peeled the garment down off of her body. Mary ached with mortification for her sister-in-law, and she thought of Johnny so far away, hot-tempered brother Johnny and how enraged he would be to know she was being exposed like this. Mary was shocked, too, by the gauntness of Bettie’s once shapely body. Through the ordeal of their month on the trail, the perfect young curves and hollows of her flesh had melted away and now her ribs and shoulder blades, her hipbones and even vertebrae, jutted under her skin, accentuated by the hard midmorning sunlight. Mary was so crushed with pity for her that she could just manage to speak when Bettie’s pain-haunted, fear-distended eyes looked back beseechingly over her shoulder.
“Faith, dear,” was all Mary could call to her. “Faith!”
Bettie stood slim as a reed, beautiful as a spi
rit, at the head of the gauntlet, looking down the long brown lines of people and their now bloodstained switches. She looked too frail to run. And Mary suspected she had been too dazed to learn anything from watching the others run. Tommy and Georgie were watching intently, wordlessly, trembling from head to foot at their aunt’s peril.
They can’t kill her with switches, Mary kept reassuring herself. The worst to fear is falling and breaking that poor arm again.
Bettie was not as lethargic as Mary had feared. At the first thump of the drum she was away like a startled deer, and got by the first twenty or thirty Indians before they found their reflexes and began hitting her. The rest of the way down the line she continued so swiftly that only a fraction of them managed to lay their switches on her. There was a general murmur of admiration when she stopped at the lodge and was led back. She returned as if the eyes on her nakedness were as painful as the switches had been; she looked at the ground, and tried to cover her little pointed breasts with her splinted right arm and her groin with her left hand. When she was seated at the stake, the young squaw went to her at once with the bowl of ointment. Bettie’s back and legs were striped with perhaps two dozen livid welts. There was one cruel red slash across her nose and cheekbone, and Mary realized with a shudder how close Bettie had come to being blinded by that blow.
“Bettie, I’m proud. And O so grateful.”
Bettie was wincing as the squaw palpated her wounds and worked in the ointment. She nodded, and looked at Mary. Her mouth was drawn down in a grimace and her chin was trembling. Her eyes bulged with a hurt fury. She worked her mouth, but no words came out; instead, bloody spit drooled out of her underlip. She had been biting her tongue, Mary realized, in order not to scream.
I’m next, surely, Mary thought. Quickly she thought back over what the others had taught her: Go your swiftest. Guard your eyes. Fight if you’re blocked; the Indians admire that. Never mind the pain; it’s getting stopped that’ll ruin you.
Follow the River Page 11