Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Yah. Coal, is all.”

  “Oh, aye! But it is, ain’t it?” She had seen coal in Philadelphia, but only in wagons, on the way to hearths. She had never thought of it making up mountains.

  “But you cannot eat coal,” Ghetel said.

  “Ghetel, leave me be awhile. I have t’ think. Go look f’r victuals. Something. But leave me be.”

  Mary sat for a long time on the rock, pondering. She shut her eyes and made herself concentrate. She had never thought this hard. She would concentrate on landmarks and their sequence as she remembered them, and tried to separate from them all the disorientation she had been suffering since entering this valley of coal. She put her mind far back to the day of the massacre at Draper’s Meadows and came day by day through her memory down the New River, the fording places the Indians had used, the burning spring, the salt lick, to the O-y-o, past its tributaries to the Shawnee town, on down to the salt lick of the big bones, and then started back up. She studied on each landmark until her head ached, trying to imagine where she could have made a mistake that would have lost the New River. She would think until she was dizzy, then would breathe deep and think some more.

  And finally, after more than an hour, she opened her eyes. There was only one explanation, and it calmed her and made her peaceful inside:

  There was no way they could be lost. The river they had been following was the New River. It could not be anything else. This coal river was just another tributary. The only reason she could not remember it was that somehow she had not seen it as the Indians were bringing her down. Somehow she had failed to notice it, and that was why it had appeared so shockingly, so unexpectedly, today, and thrown her into such a whirl of confusion. It was just another tributary that, like the others, they must cross when they could and then descend on the other side to regain the New River.

  She saw Ghetel sitting on a log nearby, rocking back and forth with her arms folded over her belly, looking at her.

  “You prayed?”

  “Aye, after a fashion,” said Mary.

  “I too prayed.”

  “Good. Now let’s us cross this river.”

  They went in gasping with the shock of the cold, there at the riffle. It was the only shallow place they had seen, and although the water was alarmingly fast, the day was growing old and Mary was very impatient to get across it and back down to what she was now sure was the New River. She was beginning to feel that if she slept a night up in this black valley she would never get her sense of direction straightened out thereafter.

  The spear-poles helped. With them, they sounded the rocky bottom that they could not see, and they leaned on them when the current pushed hard against their bodies.

  They prayed all the way across.

  They got back down to the river mouth before dark. Mary guessed they had walked some eight miles up and eight miles down that gloomy gorge. Those miles, and the strain and effort of wading the cold river, had so weakened them that they were forced to sit and rest every ten minutes or so by the day’s end.

  There was no light left by which to search for food. Their blankets were still damp from the crossing and from two or three brief rain showers that had fallen during their descent through the canyon. The rags on their feet had been worn or torn through by the stony passage of the day. Both women were further weakened by the scouring bowels that had been draining their vigor for days. And now with dusk came a slow, steady rain that promised to continue much of the night. Mary hurt in every joint, and her heart seemed to be fluttering more than beating.

  A few feet above the river mouth they found the hulk of a great beech tree that had long since fallen. Its center was rotted out, leaving a cavity some three feet wide, floored with the soft punk of decay and drifted leaves. Mary jabbed into the cavity several times with her spear, both fearing and hoping that it might be serving as some animal’s lair. Then they dragged themselves in, rolled into each other’s arms for warmth with the blankets wound around them and passed out to the hiss of rain.

  In the night a pair of gray foxes, one carrying a dead partridge, trotted to the log, smelled the intruders, bristled, skulked a few minutes, put their quivering noses into the musty opening, then turned and left to find other quarters, their damp bushy tails low over the ground, taking their partridge with them.

  Oh, heavenly God, she’s dead.

  “Ghetel. Ghetel!”

  She shook the old bony shoulder violently. The old woman did not respond. In the snug worm-eaten hollow of the log, enveloped by the smell of decay, it was too much like being in a coffin. Then Ghetel rolled onto her back and groaned, and exhaled a rank breath into Mary’s face. She began to stir, then sank back into torpor. Mary hugged her. She’s not dead. But she’s ready to lie here and die.

  Mary raised herself painfully onto an elbow. Daylight outside the end of the log showed only a stretch of ground covered with wet dead leaves. But she could hear, in the hiss of rain and the drumming of the rivers, all that hopeless wild inhospitable space out there. And within the fastness of this log it was soft and warm. They had not slept so profound a sleep before. It would be so nice just to lie here and not wake up, ever, she thought. One could die quite nice here. She closed her eyes and listened to the hush.

  But then she opened her eyes. She needed to make water.

  And besides, she couldn’t just up and die. Will was waiting for her to come home.

  She couldn’t make Ghetel move. So she strained and pulled and dragged her own blanket free and wriggled out into the dank, rainy air, drew her blanket over her head, and stood shivering, legs apart, pissing, looking around. The dark river was high and fast. It had risen to a level within a few feet of the log.

  We might well ’a’ been swept into th’ river, she thought with a strange, bemused indifference, an’ back down to th’ O-y-o. An’ lost all that ground we’ve gained so hard. But o’ course we’d not ’a’ knowed. Or cared.

  She staggered listlessly down to the bank of the New River, her feet chilled by the wet leaves, the filthy rags of her footcloths dragging, and stood there looking upriver for landmarks. The river was gray-green, more than half a mile wide, sizzling with rainspatters, rushing down the V-shaped valley. The iron-gray mountainsides slanted up, their summits out of sight in the rainclouds. The whole valley looked as forbidding and hellish as the coal valley had seemed yesterday. And what nagged her was that it looked no more familiar.

  Surely we’d have come to the salt lick by now, she thought, if we was really on the right river.

  No, damn ’ee! Don’t admit them doubts again.

  She closed her eyes and swayed. She heard the horse bell. Ghetel was up and moving, then.

  God, I’m empty. She reached inside the blanket and ran her hand over her belly. For the first few weeks of this hungry trek it had been flat, even hollow. Now it was so full of emptiness that it was bloated.

  What is that smell?

  It grew stronger as she went toward the river’s edge.

  “May-ry.” Ghetel came alongside, waddling and staggering, clutching her filthy blanket about her and carrying her spear.

  And then Mary saw it. The river had cast it up amid the shore drift: a doe’s head, considerably decomposed, its eyes milky, tongue gray. It had been neatly cut off just behind the skull, cast away, perhaps, by Indian hunters upstream. Shuddering, Mary bent and picked it up by grasping one of its cold, wet ears, and carried it up toward the beech log. Ghetel walked beside her, staring at it. Mary put it on top of the log, as if setting a table, and drew the tomahawk out of her belt.

  “It’s putrid,” she said.

  “Yah.”

  “Hope it don’t sicken us.”

  “Just cut. Hurry!”

  The skin slid off the slimy meat easily. There was flesh on the jaw muscles. It was pasty white, a little blue, even, and they almost gagged as they chewed it.

  There wasn’t much else but the tongue. Mary got it loose and threw away the rest of the head so she
wouldn’t have to see the eyes. She split the stinking tongue lengthwise and gave half of it to Ghetel. They sat down on opposite sides of the log to eat, as neither could stand to watch the other eating offal.

  The stench of the rotten head was still in their nostrils and hands and clothing that afternoon when they passed opposite the mouth of another large river that flowed into the New from the east. It looked familiar, though Mary was beginning to suspect that winter had changed the aspect of everything so completely that she might never recognize another landmark against the ones she had engraved in her memory.

  And if so, she thought, then we sh’ll just have to travel largely on faith alone.

  Ghetel coughed loudly several times behind her, and Mary felt a rush of sympathy for her.

  On faith alone, she thought. That’s all poor Ghetel’s been a-travelin’ on this whole way.

  “Dem deers,” Ghetel said at twilight as they were inching their way over rain-slick rock slabs at the river’s edge. “Oh, all dem deers! I want ’em!”

  “Eh?” Mary stopped and looked back. Ghetel was pointing toward the opposite shore. There at the river’s edge a quarter of a mile away there were three white-tail bucks and two does, their heads down as if grazing. Mary felt her hand tighten instinctively on the shaft of her spear-stick and wished she could be on that side of the river. I’d get one, she thought. I swear I’d get one and we’d make a fire an’ roast it so nice …

  And then she noticed something.

  The deer were all licking at the beach. And the beach was pale, a strip of gray-white, as if snow had fallen there.

  “Ghetel!” she whispered intensely. “It’s th’ salt lick!” Her heart frolicked inside her ribs.

  “Vat’s?”

  “The salt lick! Ghetel! I know just where we be!”

  “I t’ought you alvays know dat.”

  “Aye, but …”

  Two of the bucks had raised their heads and were looking across the river. They had heard the voices. They were alert, beautiful, tiny at this distance, the enormous dark mountainside rising a thousand feet into the clouds behind them.

  Ghetel raised her spear over her head and shouted:

  “You! I could eat you raw!”

  “You raw! You raw!” the mountainside echoed.

  They found shelter under a shelf of rock stratum twenty feet above the river that night. It was not quite a cave; it was perhaps three feet from floor to ceiling at its entrance and six feet deep into the cliff. The dry floor was littered with sticks and leaves, and animal and bird droppings, and there was a fragment of a clay pot near the back. A charred flat stone on the floor and soot on the ceiling showed that somebody, however long ago, had enjoyed a fire. At one end, Mary found a scattering of cracked turkey or duck bones and some flakes of flint, including two sharp but broken arrowheads. Dast we try a fire? Oh, she thought, how I should love t’ look in a fire after all this lonesome cold an’ gray!

  She shaved a fistful of tinder from a stick with the edge of the tomahawk, stacked twigs near at hand, and knelt, shivering, over it with the tomahawk in her left hand and a piece of flint in her right. She struck several sharp, glancing blows against the steel with the flint. But the flint was so small and light that she could produce only a spark or two. She exchanged it for another scrap of flint but it was even smaller. The sparks flew like little stars in the darkening cave, but were too feeble to ignite the tinger. After a while, breathing hard, cursing, knuckle and thumb smarting and bleeding, she gave up and sat back on her haunches, all but crying with frustration. “Well, I reckon we’re just not meant …”

  “Hssssst!” Ghetel was peering out into the twilight, listening.

  And then Mary heard it: a syllable in human voice from across the river through the hush of rain, and shortly after, another and another, and the clatter of hooves. Words were indistinguishable, but the inflections of the voices left no doubt that Indians were passing on the opposite shore. Maybe her imagination was tricking her, but in the murky gloom over there she thought she saw figures moving downstream among the tree trunks. After a while the sounds were swallowed up by the rain and the river but the two women huddled motionless for some time longer.

  And when they rolled into their blankets, she gave a prayer of thanks to the same Providence she had been cursing a moment before for the same reason: her failure to ignite a fire.

  They left the cave early the next morning, too cold and hungry to sleep past dawn. They went flinching along the stony river bank for five minutes, their aching-cold feet punished unbearably by each step, their stiff toes seeming to stub on every rock. Finally Ghetel stopped and sat on a log, saying, “No, no, no. Gif me de ax.” Mary hesitated. “Come, come. Gif,” Ghetel insisted, putting her palm up and waggling her fingers for it.

  She took it and bent down to a leatherwood shrub and deftly scored a branch and stripped off several strands of bark.

  Then she tore four large rectangles of cloth from the remains of her skirt. Mary sat and looked on, curious. The old woman worked, talking to herself, her breath condensing in the bitter air. Every few minutes she had to stop and put her stiffened fingers between her thighs to warm them. Mary sat with her hands between her own legs. With the constant hunger, her blood seemed more and more sluggish, her heartbeats more feeble and uneven, and her extremities seemed to be getting no blood at all to warm them. It was, she thought, as if her heart were trying to pump cold sorghum instead of blood.

  Ghetel raked a pile of dry leaves onto each of the pieces of cloth. Then she placed her right foot on one of the piles, drew the edges of the cloth up around her ankle, and tied a strip of bark around the ankle. She did the same then with the other foot, so that she now had, in effect, a bag of leaves bound around each foot. “Now you,” she said.

  Mary was touched; her eyes brimmed as she watched the miserable old creature kneel at her feet and struggle with her gnarled and benumbed fingers to knot the stubborn bark. She helped her rise, and smiled at her. The old woman grinned broadly, quite pleased with herself. And they set off again up the river bank. They had to walk carefully to keep from snagging or loosening the makeshift shoes, and had to stoop and retie them often, and replace the crushed leaves, but the warmth and cushioning were luxurious, and Mary turned often to Ghetel with smiles and sighs and happy headshakes to express how much she appreciated them. This in turn kept the old woman much more genial than she might have been otherwise.

  Mary saw the flames first. For a moment she was baffled by the sight of yellow-orange fire billowing out of the riverbed a mile ahead. Then she remembered. She stopped and pointed at it. Ghetel looked up from her careful negotiation of the rocky shore and her eyes bugged. Delight and then fear passed rapidly over her features, then she hung onto Mary’s arm and looked to her for explanation. Mary told her about the odorous air that bubbled from the mud, and how the Indians had ignited it. “Must be them Indians we heard last night thrown a brand into it,” she speculated. “What sport, eh?”

  They found a rock ledge directly across the river from the burning spring, and brushed up a thick pile of leaves under it. Then they foraged up and down a nearby ravine for two hours. They were uncommonly lucky, and brought in half a pound of acorns, eight walnuts and a handful of wildflower bulbs that looked something like wild onion. Almost gleeful, they huddled in their blankets against the biting cold, gazed across the broad river at the cavorting pillar of flame and its reflection on the water and ate their variety of victuals as a purple dusk gathered. “Odd. We wanted a fire so last night. Now here we jus’ wait a day an’, I be blessed, we got one. Hum?”

  It was too far away for them to feel any of its heat, of course. But as the nourishment of their repast stole out into their limbs and owls hooted and wolves wailed among the mountains, they gazed at the flames long into the night and thought of their respective hearths, and their souls at least were warmed by the sight of the distant fire.

  CHAPTER

  19

 
Sometime in the long, cold hours after midnight, the wind strengthened and backed into the northwest. It began moaning up the valley, rattling the millions of bare branches. Then it gusted suddenly to a gale strength, shrieking along the steep mountainsides, sweeping leaves off the ground, flinging a hail of broken twigs through the forest and blowing down shallow-rooted trees. Mary and Ghetel were jolted awake by the ripping and snapping and thudding of great limbs and tree trunks, and in terror clutched at their blankets, which the icy wind threatened to tear from their bodies as it scoured all the leaves of their bedding out of their alcove and pelted them with flying debris. They huddled together, squinting. Across the river, their friendly pillar of flame from the burning spring leaped and ducked and fluttered horizontally over the water before the force of the wind, then with a pouf was blown out.

  They sat clinging to each other in the howling darkness the rest of the night, their backs to the rock, trying to keep their blankets tight around their shoulders and anchored under their feet. There was no such thing as sleep now, just shivering and waiting, clutching each other when some huge splintering, slamming weight would thump to earth above or below them. The wind sang through a range of demon voices, now harsh as a wildcat’s yowl, now lowing, now shrill as a man whistling through his teeth, sometimes all those at once. Toward dawn a fierce hissing joined in and the women lowered their faces to their knees to protect them from the needle-stings of sleet.

  It was maddening. It seemed to Mary that this pitiless cold lashing had gone on for a year. She clenched her jaws to keep from screaming because to scream would be to become a part of the wild-devil’s soul of the storm itself and she knew there would be no coming back from that. Mary had some confidence that she could anchor her own soul against the storm until daybreak, but she feared for Ghetel’s soul, which, since that morning she had tried to go back for the horse, Mary had suspected was unstable and at times on the very brink.

  A woman in her state c’d easy go stark mad this night, Mary thought.