Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  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.

  “Pray, Mister Harmon, send y’r lads down th’ river a ways to look for her. Surely she’s within a day’s ride. If she lives yet, y’ might save ’er.”

  “By God, I’d not go a-lookin’ for a cannibal,” Hank snarled, “save maybe t’ see ’er dead!”

  “Nor me,” growled Junior Harmon.

  “Then t’ bring ’er poor bones back, or t’ bury ’em,” Mary pleaded. Mister Harmon was equally outraged. He set his broad face in resolution. “They don’t want to. And I’m o’ their mind, about such a witch as that, so I’ll sure not make ’em.”

  Her pleadings could not change their minds. She sighed. They just couldn’t understand how it had been with her and Ghetel.

  She sighed and thought back over it all.

  Of course not, she thought. How on earth could they know?

  Mary told them what she had heard of General Braddock’s defeat in July. They nodded and told her that the news of it had rolled down through the English colonies in August like a dark cloud.

  She told them of the account given by the warrior Red Hawk at the Shawnee town. “It was Colonel Washington he couldn’t kill, I’d wager,” she exclaimed.

  Old Harmon nodded. “ ’Tis told two horses was kilt under him that day. And several musketballs went through his clothes, but he wa’n’t nicked. It was our Lord God watched over ’im that day, as He watched over y’se’f, Missus Ingles.” The two sons murmured. They were hovering almost worshipfully around her. They seemed to be connecting her somehow with the imagined drama at Fort Duquesne, as if by surviving her ordeal she brought hope that English colonists might yet triumph over the military disaster whose pall had hung over them for so long.

  Mary knew her arrival and recuperation had delayed the Harmons’ return to the settlement. She could see, by the preoccupation with sentinel duties, that they were anxious about Indian expeditions. And she, so recently a victim of Indian captivity, had even more reason than they for fearing an Indian surprise here in this remote outpost. They were sturdy and brave men, and acted as if they would die to protect her from further harm and suffering, but she well knew that three men in a pole-and-bark hut, burdened with cattle and corn, beef, venison, hides and a sick woman, would have little hope of surviving a raid.

  And so, on waking the next morning, she declared that she felt fit to travel whenever they wanted to leave, and the earlier the better. “I just sense it,” she said, “that Will and Johnny have got back. And it’s too long since I’ve seen them two.”

  The Harmons protested a little about her weakness and fatigue, but when she reassured them that she felt up to it, they were glad to saddle up. It took them but a few minutes to strike camp, load the pack horses with everything portable and start leading their fat cows up the valley of the sinking creek toward Draper’s Meadows, the sun rising in their eyes.

  Mary had been dressed in old Adam Harmon’s spare linsey-woolsey hunting shirt, which was big enough to wrap thrice around her gaunt frame and hung below her knees. They had given her a pair of Henry’s woolen stockings, wrapped her in a blanket that was draped over her head like a monk’s hood and lifted her onto the saddle of Junior’s bay horse. The young man was riding on a pack horse, behind its load. They passed up the valley between the snowy mountains, this valley that had been full of mosquitoes and dense green foliage when she had come down it. The men kept an anxious eye upon the little woman on the bay, watching her wobble and lurch as the horse picked its way over the rough ground, but she was sitting well. Hank rode up beside her, his horse snorting steam. “How d’y?” he asked. She turned and smiled at him from under the blanket, looking pathetically like a frail grandmother in a wimple. “A nice ride,” she said, and then he saw a tear drop off her nose.

  Mary was thinking about the last horse she had ridden.

  There was nobody at Draper’s Meadows. The partially rebuilt cabins stood open and deserted. Mary sat on the horse and clenched her jaws and looked over the snowy meadow in front of her scorched cabin, the massacre passing behind her eyes, faint screams and gunshots echoing in her memory, and when she could not look any more, she turned and gazed westward over the Alleghenies whence she had come.

  Ten times ten times ten, she heard her mother saying. Ten times ten times ten, she heard Tommy’s voice reply.

  Hank Harmon walked down through the snow from one of the cabins and swung up onto his saddle. He pointed to tracks in the snow leading up off the meadow. “Looks like folks left quick. ’Bout yesterday. Indian scare, ’d reckon. These tracks head f’r Dunkard’s Fort.”

  “So do we, then,” said old Adam Harmon.

  And as they rode, Mary looked
down at the traces in the snow, and wondered if they had been left by the horses of Johnny and Will.

  A few miles further up the New River, they stopped on a low shore. Mister Harmon startled Mary out of her torpor with a sudden loud whoop. She looked up and noticed a thick rope, running through a pulley lashed to a sycamore tree and running to the other shore of the river. At that moment the rope began moving through the pulley, and then from the far shore a wide log raft with pole handrails came forth, a man on it turning a windlass.

  “ ’Ey, now,” she said. “This new?”

  Old Adam grinned at her. “It’s Ingles’ Ferry,” he said. “Will built it ’fore he went down t’ Cherokee land. Best way over t’ Dunkard’s Bottom.”

  “Might he be …”

  “We’ll see.” Harmon patted her shoulder.

  But the youth operating the ferry said that Will Ingles and Johnny Draper had not come across with the people from Draper’s Meadows. They hadn’t yet been heard from, he said. He was a tall, bony youth Mary had never seen, and had his musket alongside him on the raft. He seemed quite nervous as he cranked them across. After he had gone back and brought the cattle over, he asked if he might go with them to Dunkard’s Fort.

  “Might’s well,” Adam Harmon said. “If I was you, I wouldn’t stay out here alone these days.”

  Mary looked back at the ingenious contraption as they rode off, and was proud of Will. “Imagine,” she said, almost to herself, “gettin’ acrost that dadblame river so easy as that.”

  They reached the fort about dark. It was only the McCorkle family compound, with a new stockade of upright logs around it—not much of a fortification, but well situated for a watchful defense. There were about twenty people crowded within: the McCorkles; two small families of Dunkard German Baptists; James Cull, who had survived the July massacre at Draper’s Meadows by hiding wounded in the brush nearby; and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Lybrook from Sinking Creek, who had come here by way of Draper’s Meadows after an Indian alarm. These latter people, Mary’s old neighbors, first fell back in shock at the sight of her, then practically smothered her with their amazed and joyous greeting. She was finally laid out on a real bedstead and the last thing she remembered seeing, through a new curtain of tears, before slipping off in a swoon, was the halo of a candle held by Alice Lybrook beside the bed.

  No one here had heard from Will Ingles or Johnny Draper.

  Will Ingles stood naked at the head of two parallel ranks of armed Indians. The chief struck him across the back with a staff and Will started running down the line, being slashed and bruised by many of the Indians’ switches and clubs. He was tripped by a stick thrust between his legs and when he fell, a silent yell on his lips, the Indians closed around him, yelling and flailing …

  Mary Ingles woke up sweating and whimpering, and the people who were sleeping in blankets on the floor around her bed were getting up to soothe her. The gray of early daylight showed through chinks in the log walls.

  “It’s no wonder,” murmured Mrs. Lybrook to Mrs. McCorkle as they stoked up the cooking fire, “that th’ poor thing has nightmares. O heaven, what she’s suffered!”

  “Reckon what become o’ th’ baby she was a-carryin’?” Diane McCorkle wondered in a low voice.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Lybrook, in a near-whisper, “Mister Harmon say he ask’er just that, an’ she didn’t give no answer.” She shook her head. “Poor thang, poor thang. Reckon there’s matters she won’t never tell about.”

  “Such as what?” whispered Mrs. McCorkle, pausing with the iron poker in her hand, still looking into the rising flames.

  “Well, you know. Like what outrages them naked heathens might afflict on a he’pless woman …” She left it hanging there, and Mrs. McCorkle stole a look over her shoulder at the little white head on the pillow, as if something might show. Mrs. Lybrook’s musings had given her some deliciously ghastly scenes to nurture in her imagination. Her heart beat rapidly all the rest of the morning and she stole many more glances at the remarkable little white-headed young-old skeleton of a woman over there in Diane McCorkle’s own bed.

  “Mister Harmon?”

  “Aye, Missus Ingles?”

  “Stoop down close here.”

  “Mhm?”

  “Y’ve not told anybody here what I said, have y’, aboot poor old Ghetel a-trying t’hurt me?”

  “Nup, I ain’t.”

  “Have y’r boys?”

  “Not that I’ve heerd.”

  “Well, good. ’Cause I don’t want ’em to think ill of ’er.”

  “I think ill of ’er.”

  “Well, y’ can just stop that, Mister Harmon, if’ee please, ’cause I’m askin’ y’ once again, as a good Christian man—y’re a good Christian man, an’ no savage, ain’t that so?—t’ ride back down where I told ’ee, an’ try to find ’er …”

  “Now, mum …”

  “Mister Harmon, if I don’t begrudge ’er, I surely don’ see how you nor anyone else can do!”

  He cast his eyes down. “Aye, there’s summat in that, I’ll allow.”

  “Do it then, I beg ’ee, Mister Harmon.”

  He sat staring across the bed and through the far wall, his lips bitten. Then he seemed to ease down inside from a great tension. “Very well, I shall.”

  Mary was genuinely surprised. She had seldom known strong men of Adam Harmon’s ilk to acquiesce, against their better judgment, to the wishes of womenfolk. Mary was, she now realized, a much more influential person than she ever had been.

  “And one more favor,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tell your boys t’ keep th’ secret, too. If y’ should find poor Ghetel an’ bring ’er among these folk, I don’t want ’er t’ be hated out.”

  But it was too late for that. Junior Harmon had already related it to Jim Cull out by the stockade, and Cull had related it to Mr. McCorkle, and by the time old Adam Harmon had ridden down the west bank to search for the old Dutch woman or her remains, everyone in the fort knew and was aghast at that part of the ordeal of Mary Ingles.

  As Mr. Harmon trotted his horse down the west bank of the New River on his dubious favor for Mrs. Ingles, he was concentrating too hard on the frozen and snowy path ahead to notice three armed horsemen approaching the Dunkard’s Bottom Fort from the south. They came out of a ravine, leading a pack horse, and went at a walk down through the stark and leafless woods toward the little stockade which stood dark and square in the blue-shadowed snow beside the river.

  “Ol’ Adam’s off down th’ river again,” said Will Ingles, who had recognized him even at this distance. “That feller worries me; just won’t stay put, no matter how things be in the countryside.”

  “Just like a couple others I know of,” observed Gander Jack, with a half-smile and a sidelong glance at Will and Johnny.

  They had spent the night alongside the New River, about eight or ten miles upstream from Dunkard’s Bottom, and had got up at the first hint of daybreak this morning to make this last leg of their long journey back to the settlements. To Gander Jack the little fortification looked wonderful indeed; he had seen signs of Indian passage almost every day for the last week and felt they were getting in by the skin of their teeth.

  “Hayo!”

  The greeting came up the ravine to them from the fort. They saw a figure at the stockade, waving at them.

  Johnny Draper, who had the deepest lungs among them, called back, “Haaaa!”

  The little figure ran across the snow among the cattle and horses and swine that were impounded inside the stockade, and went hollering into the house. In an instant, a dozen people swarmed out of the house, whooping and cheering and waving joyously at them. Will raised his eyebrows. “Kind of an overmuch whoopee, say what? Reckon they’ve mistook us f’r Cunnel Wash’ton?” Johnny grinned at the joke, then went glum. All these people knew what they had ridden out to do so many weeks ago and were going to be let down by their dismal report.

  “Mebbe they’s
just celebratin’ the sight of us alive,” Gander Jack said, “an’ I’ll drink one t’ that.”

  “There,” said Mrs. McCorkle, putting another pillow behind Mary. “Now y’ just set back an’ smile.” She bustled around, smoothing back Mary’s white hair, which she had brushed for her a few minutes earlier. “Oh, y’ look pretty—f’r someone so peaked …”

  “What’s a-goin’ on?” Mary asked. Everybody was bustling around like a crowd of simpletons, it seemed to her, and there were excited voices outside every door and wall.

  “Someb’dy come t’ pay’ee a call, hon. Perk up, now.”

  And then there was Will Ingles stooping to come under the door lintel, his eyes passing curiously across the room until they stopped on her and went wide. His hand came up to his throat.

  O, he’s alive! was her first thought. And her second was: What’ll I tell him about th’ baby?

  The awful thought did enter his mind the moment he saw the face in the bed across the dim room and realized that it was Mary: Had she been spiled?

  He shuffled, clumsy as a bear, into the room, that one hand still at his throat, the other starting to raise as if to salute her. The doorway behind him was crowded with breathless people and he could feel them back there. Three steps and he was at the bedside and he had finally grown accustomed to the gloom and he saw her white hair and sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, and then she was distorted by a curtain of tears.

  “Well, William,” she said.

  “F-forgive me, Mary,” Will said, dropping to his knees beside the bed. He meant for the thought he had just had, but he disguised it quickly by adding: “… f’r not bein’ here when y’ come …”

  His hands were on the counterpane near her hand but neither yet could seem to reach and touch the other. Will and Mary just kept staring at each other’s faces and seeing only blurred shapes and shades.

  “Well,” she said, almost strangling, “I did come to y’, Will …” and let out a long, trembling sigh.

  Will was remembering, suddenly, something he had not let himself think of for days: his last sight of her. He remembered running away down through the meadows from that sight with the Indians in pursuit of him and he was wondering how he could ever tell her about that moment.