She lifted her chin and looked coldly at Wildcat’s eyes. He stood between Tommy and Georgie. He held each by one hand. His chiseled face gleamed in the white light from above and the look in his eyes was hidden in shadow. For just an instant they held each other’s gaze, hers indignant, his inscrutable, and she reached slowly toward her sons. “Come,” she said to them, still staring at Wildcat’s face.
“No,” Wildcat said quietly.
She squinted up at him. “What?”
“No,” he repeated.
She looked down, confused, her hands still reaching for her sons’. Wildcat turned his head and spoke three syllables over his shoulder. A brave appeared behind him and took the boys by their arms and hauled them back out of the circle. Mary’s eyes went rapidly from them to Wildcat’s impassive face, then back to them, then returned to his face, confused and beseeching.
“Will be Kispokotha Shawnees,” Wildcat said. “I take.”
LaPlante and Goulart were standing behind Mary. They saw her begin to shake and crouch. She was either going to scream or get sick or attack Wildcat. They understood that she would do no good for herself, or them, with an outburst in the great council lodge. So LaPlante nodded to Goulart, and Goulart nodded to LaPlante, and each grabbed her under an arm. LaPlante clapped his hand over her mouth. They carried her swiftly, her toes just brushing the dirt floor, out of the lodge and into the misty rain.
They did not have to fight her.
She had fainted.
They rushed down the street toward their trading post with her limp body between them. From the rig on her back came the thin, purling wail of her baby, Bettie Elenor, whom Wildcat had not wanted. The baby had been jostled awake and was hungry. They gave her to Otter Girl when they got to the trading hut. Otter Girl stuck a ruddy nipple in her mouth and smiled down at her, and the two Frenchmen sat on the floor flanking their unconscious partner, the shirtmaker, ready to do whatever they might have to do to deal with her when she revived.
CHAPTER
9
The salt of tears had finally scoured her vision. She saw everything in clear, hard outline now, no longer through a mist of hope, trust or sentiment. Her heart was as small and cold and heavy as a bullet. When Wildcat had taken her children away from her to Kispoko town, he at last had made her invulnerable.
Two days after the council in the great lodge, the Indians took the two black-painted prisoners to a clearing north of the town and tied them standing to posts. The men were naked and had been scrubbed by squaws with sand and gravel in a creek until their hides were pink. They had been purified for the ritual of dying.
Their wrists had been bound behind them, then attached by five-foot tethers which allowed them to walk around the posts. Around each post the town squaws had built perimeters of kindling wood, stacked waist high. They had also sharpened thirty or forty slender fifteen-foot poles, then laid them on the ground, radiating out like wheel spokes, their pointed ends in the kindling. This was the arrangement when Mary was brought into the clearing, along with townspeople, to witness the executions.
The sun had come out. It drew at the moisture left by two days of rain and the air was thick and humid. Mary’s dress was sweat-soaked and stuck to her skin. Sweat ran in tiny courses down the dark and gleaming back of a brave who stood in front of Mary. She was determined not to watch what was to happen at the stakes. Although they would not let her leave, she intended to look at the back of the Indian, not at the condemned prisoners. They could not make her look. She had seen enough, in the massacre, at the gauntlet and at the prisoner market, to convince her that she had descended into hell. Somehow, without dying, she had come to hell. These Shawnee Indians were demons, and she had been fooled several times by their few little gestures of patience and good humor. But she could not understand what sins she was suffering for; she had never harmed anyone in her life, nor broken a commandment. She had never been proud nor gluttonous nor envious beyond those little degrees an ordinary person falls to day by day.
Squaws were carrying torches out to ignite the circles of firewood now. The crowd was silent, waiting.
No. Those two are truly in hell, she thought. I must be instead in purgatory. She had heard purgatory mentioned in preachments and had never understood it, but now she seemed to understand it. And she had never thought hell and purgatory could be in the same place, but it seemed they were here.
Watching the sweat stream down the Indian’s back, she heard the kindling begin to crackle. Here and there in the crowd, voices whooped, male and female. The big soldier’s voice burst forth with a powerful string of oaths, against bloody heathens, against greasy squaws; then the oaths stopped and were followed by a quavering bellow of agony. Mary smelled woodsmoke and felt the heat from the flames even here. The Indians around her fell back a pace or two. It was a hot day for such a hot spectacle. The Indian’s back was not blocking Mary’s view now, and for an instant she saw the soldier writhing against the pole, trying to press back against it to get as far as possible away from the perimeter of fire. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut; his teeth were bared in a grimace. The flames were scarcely visible in the bright sunlight; the firewood was turning black, and the naked man’s figure was distorted by the updraft of heated air. Gray smoke piled into bright sky.
Mary shut her eyes and shrank backward into the crowd. Then she had to open them again because of waves of vertigo that made her fear she would fall.
The kindling had already fallen to gray and pink coals, still sending up a shimmering curtain of hot air. The soldier was on his hands and knees now, making a wet, grunting noise as he tried to cough out his scorched lungs. His hair was gone. Huge, glistening blisters had raised all over his body. The Indians were all yelling now, and squaws were stooping to pick up the long poles. Holding them by the outer ends, they began jabbing at the man’s blisters with the smouldering points of the poles. Mary turned and wove among the spectators to get out of the circle, closing her throat to keep from gushing vomit. The Indians were now too absorbed to heed her.
She found her way back to the trading post. There was no one in the town. Off in the distance the blended voices of the crowd made a low hum, and now and then a high shriek would come to her. Probably they were at work on the second man by now.
Mary put Bettie Elenor to her breast now and sat rocking to and fro on her haunches, scarcely conscious of what she was doing. Flies buzzed. The baby sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed. Mary ran the thoughts of hell and purgatory through her mind again and again.
Finally she decided that those were vague and fuzzy thoughts, like hope and trust. The reality was that she was here on this earth and her husband was on this same earth, four or five hundred miles away across a mountain range, at the far end of a wilderness river, and that the only thing to be done if she were to continue her life as a real human being was to go there, where her husband was, to get there somehow or perish in the attempt.
Wildcat was gone out her life now, and she did not have to worry any more about pleasing him or displeasing him. She did not have to worry any more about whether she was going to be his squaw. She did not have to bother her head any more with the delicate and unspeakable doubt about whether she would have liked being his squaw. He had given her but one chance to accept him and had been too proud to claim her after she had refused. He had simply taken her sons from her, getting in that way the precious Ingles blood he had come to covet so, and had cast her away like a bean-pod.
She had been such a fool to care what he wanted or did, she thought now, such a fool, and in a way it seemed to her that she had been unfaithful to Will by even considering Wildcat’s desires.
She had really never needed Wildcat anyway; she had only thought she had, she rationalized now. Through her own industry and her own character, she could have become important enough here in Shawnee Town to be her own protector.
I could do that yet, she thought. But I’m not going to. I’m no Shawnee, nor ever will
be. I’m Mrs. William Ingles.
I turned aside from ’ee in my heart, William Ingles, just a wee mite aside—not so’s y’d ever known it anyways, but a wee mite—but I’ll make it up to ye, William, I swear I’ll do that. I’ll come home. I’ll come home, and you and I somehow we’ll get our sons back, or have new ones, and we’ll make a new house like our old one, but with two doors ’stead o’ one, and I’ll work ’longside o’ ye in the grain, as I always did, and someday we’ll buy us some good checked flannel and I’ll make ’ee a fine shirt to wear. I’ll come home, Will. I’m no Shawnee squaw nor French merchant. I’m Mrs. William Ingles.
She began reviewing landmarks in her memory, trying to fix them again, as one tries to remember a waking dream before it fades.
I must think of them every day, she advised herself. If they jumble together in my head I’ll have no chance at all.
Her heartbeat began to accelerate.
I could walk away from here now, she thought. She looked around the trading hut. There were tomahawks and blankets here. There was corn and dried meat. There were moccasins and hides.
And there were no two sons or sister-in-law here now to stay for, no attachments. The only things to detain her were the hazards of getting away from the Shawnee town undetected, and getting across the O-y-o, and then those hundreds of unmarked miles to go …
But how does one cross such a river? she wondered.
Sure there’d be a canoe unguarded somewhere.
But what about food?
What one can carry, long’s it lasts. Then, why, it’ll be fall soon: Nuts and berries, persimmons and paw paws, and game, if I could steal a gun, and then, well, we’d just have to see …
But …
She looked down on Bettie Elenor’s head, at the whorl of dark silky hair on the soft skull, and felt the hungry pull at her nipple. She thought of the countless miles of stony river banks and creekbeds, and of the coming cold of autumn.
A babe would starve as I starved, and freeze as I froze, she thought.
She realized that of all the obstacles she could anticipate in the path of her escape, this delicate and helpless life was the greatest. Surely it would die on the trail.
Even more surely than I would die on the trail, she thought.
Her vision was clear, free of hope. Her heart was like a bullet. She erased the name Bettie Elenor. The baby at her breast had to become an object to her. Just an object. Her soul was still a huge gaping wound where her sons had been, as if a keen-edged knife had cut away a living part of her. She must see to it now that this infant, this tiny stranger who had joined her in the forest and ridden ever since on her back facing away from her, should not become such a part of her in this hazardous episode that its loss could break her spirit.
She returned to her contemplation of the tomahawks and blankets and provisions. Her body was feeling the pull of the long homeward river valleys. She was ready to rise, fill her arms and simply walk southward out of the Shawnee town, whether to home and freedom, or to death.
“Eh! La voila!”
It was LaPlante. He and Goulart had returned, with the Otter Girl following them.
There would be no walking away from the Shawnee town today. She had sat too long pondering it.
Mary reckoned by her calendar of knots that it was mid-September when Goulart announced the salt-making expedition. She would be in the party, he said.
Her heart began thudding. A salt-making expedition might well provide the opportunity to escape. But she hid her eagerness and said nothing.
“You. Me. LaPlante and his squaw. The old woman. And men from this town, twelve or twenty I would say, for the canoes and to escort us,” Goulart said, stroking his beard and squinting into the treetops with the effort of speaking English. He was squatting on the earth beside her on his thick haunches as she sewed a final shirt from the exhausted supply of blue and white checked cloth.
Mary was beginning to be leery of Goulart. He showed signs of becoming familiar and proprietary toward her, as if he were beginning to consider her his squaw now that Wildcat was gone. He had not touched her, nor said anything ungentlemanly, but she had caught him contemplating her with a certain confident satisfaction showing in his face, and he would refer often, as he had just now, to you and me, as if they belonged together. After the division of the prisoners Mary had been moved from the hut she had shared with Bettie to the trading post, where she and Otter Girl and the two Frenchmen slept under the same roof. Goulart continued to call her Madame, and she had suggested several times that he should address her as Mrs. Ingles. Goulart was a virile man of big appetites, for whom it obviously was not easy to be patient, and sometimes she imagined she could smell his desire even through the sourness of his heavy, unwashed body and the leggings and loincloth he never changed, or that she could feel it emanating like heat. She did not know how long it would be until he would make some sort of advance. If he did, she had sworn to herself, she would kill him. He wore a sheath knife between his shoulder blades on a thong that passed under his left arm and over his right shoulder. She had seen him practice drawing it in idle moments. Acting as if he were merely scratching his scalp or tugging his earlobe, he would, quick as a striking snake, whip his right hand forward; the long knife would be in it. If he ever tries to embrace me, she had vowed, I will get that knife off his back and stick it between his ribs.
She had never contemplated killing before, except in that long-ago moment when the Indians killed Bettie’s baby, but the abrupt and brutal events of the last two months had built up in her a readiness to strike back quickly at the next person who should try to encroach on her life. They had left her nothing but her own body and soul. She would brook no more insults on those.
“The old woman?” she asked, returning to what he had said.
“Oui. Madam Stumf. The great horse.” He snickered.
“She is still in this town?”
“Oui. She works like two men. Who would give away such a one?”
Give away, she thought. Selling and trading us like cattle.
But a salt-making party! Not only a better chance to escape, she thought, but the salt lick is much closer to home! She reviewed her memory of the trek down, and recalled that they had reached the salt lick after less than two weeks’ travel from Draper’s Meadows.
Dear Lord, she thought, her heart beginning to fill up with hope again, they’ll be taking us halfway home! If I can escape from them there, why, I can make it home, I know I can!
Mary watched the little whirlpools the paddles made alongside the canoe as the four vessels moved gracefully down the limpid green Scioto toward the O-y-o. The baby slept in its carrier on her lap, shadows of overhanging sycamore and willow leaves gliding silently over her eyelids. Mary felt as if the quick high pounding of her own heart might awaken the baby. She was going home! The Indians and the Frenchmen did not know it but they were helping her start her journey home! She had to lower her face from time to time to hide her sly smile. If they saw her eagerness, surely they would become suspicious of her intent.
It was a beautiful day: dry air, deep blue sky, profound green shadows under the great trees along the river banks. Patches of foliage were already yellowing or reddening in some places and their reflections mottled the blue-green surface of the river. Tassels of Indian maise and leaves of tobacco glowed yellow-green in the clearings. The paddles dipped and dribbled. Clouds of birds rose and settled along the shores as the canoes bore down on them. The birds seemed as free and cautious as Mary’s own soul now. From time to time old Irish songs would rise in her mind, in her mother’s sweet remembered voice. She thought of her mother talking as she always had with Tommy and Georgie, the buzz and lilt of their voices on a summer’s day. And soon she found herself singing, voicelessly, with her lips only, to the tune of an old favorite ballad of her mother’s:
O ten times t–en times ten a–way,
But I’ll be home a–gain.
O ten times t–en times
ten a–way,
I will O my Will, O my darrr–lin’ …
“Ahhh,” Goulart’s voice growled behind her, where he sat wielding a paddle. “La Belle Riviere!”
Mary looked up. There it was now, a broad blue expanse across their way, the O-y-o. Her heart leaped again. She saw it as the highway to her freedom. She suppressed a smile, then looked back at him. “What did you say?”
“La Belle Riviere,” he breathed, his voice almost an amorous croon. “All Indian names for thees mean ‘The Beautiful River.’ Iroquois say ‘Oligen-Sipen.’ Delawares say ‘Kitonocepe.’ Wyandottes say ‘O-hee-zuh.’ All mean ‘The Beautiful River.’ ” He looked at her, after the poetic outburst, with such a strange expression, a sort of cow-eyed leer, that she realized he was feeling romantic, and she had to look forward again to keep him from seeing her mirth.
But he was right. It was a beautiful river. Its splendor had impressed her even through her terror on the way to the Shawnee town. And now that her heart was full of the promise of escape, this grand stream looked still more benevolent.
The shimmering vista widened slowly as the canoes moved down the mouth of the Scioto. Beyond the broad O-y-o, the dark bluffs of the south bank mounted up to loaf-shaped hills of lilac blue. A mere dot on the far shore she made out as the Indian hut where they had stopped to await the canoes.
Now the prows of the canoes sliced into the current of the great stream. The sense of spaciousness was thrilling. A strong, fresh breeze, sweeping up the river from the unknown lands in the west, nudged them as they emerged from the sheltering bluff at the Scioto’s mouth. It whipped her hair about her face. She shifted herself slightly and bent forward to shade the baby’s face from the sun and protect her from the wind, and looked upstream toward the east.
Now, ye bloodsoaked heathens, she thought in crafty, silent exultation, just turn left here and head me f’r home! I sh’ll leave you at th’ salt lick and make my own way thence, thank ’ee kindly …
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