Dorothy Garlock - [Wabash River] (18 page)

Liberty took a deep breath to steady the tremor that ran through her and walked slowly along a path that followed the river. It climbed steadily until it reached a small clearing almost ten feet above the water. She stopped to look once again at the rolling, restless river. The evening was serene and beautiful. In the near twilight the woods were alive with pleasant cheeps and chirps. A whippoorwill swooped overhead, trailing his melodious repeated cry, and distant colonies of ducks quacked companionably. She was not afraid to be alone there. Farr had told her to listen to the familiar sounds of the forest creatures. If something unknown to them moved among them their cadence would be interrupted.

With a deep sigh Liberty turned to retrace her steps. It was then she saw the headboard marking a grave. Behind it were wild rose bushes, their long stems laden with blooms. Along each side were forest ferns and in front of these, yellow buttercups. In a large half circle surrounding the glade were white blooming dogwood trees and red blooming judas. The small garden had been carefully planned and laid out. It was well-tended and lovely beyond words.

Feeling as if she were an intruder, Liberty moved closer to the marker at the head of the grave and knelt down. She had never seen a lovelier headboard to mark a final resting place. It was made from a slab of oak about six inches thick, and perched on the rounded top was the carved image of a dove. The headboard had weathered, but amid the carved vines and flowers, the letters, outlined with dabs of stain, were as easy to read as the day they were put there.

FAWNELLA QUILL

beloved of

Farrway Quill

1787–Oct. 22, 1803

My love for you through life will last.

Liberty felt a tightness in her throat. Farr’s wife had been only sixteen years old when she died. He would have been only a little older than the boy, Rain. He must have loved her very much to tend this place all these years. Liberty’s eyes blurred with tears.
My love for you through life will last.
A shudder of longing worked its way down her body. Fawnella Quill had had a wealth of love in her short lifetime, more than Liberty hoped to have if she lived a million years.

She was stroking the head of the dove with her fingertips when she saw Farr. She looked up and he was there.

“Colby and Rain are coming with your wagon.”

Liberty stood quickly, her heart beating, a mad tattoo against her ribs. In her haste to get to her feet she lost her balance and a foot went dangerously close to stepping on the grave. She stepped back hastily.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a breathless whisper. She expected him to say something, but instead he simply stood as still as stone and looked at her steadily. “It’s a beautiful place,” she murmured.

When he still didn’t speak, she turned her face away from him and looked around. There was something like panic running just below the controlled surface she presented. She closed her eyes tightly for an instant. Even with her eyes closed she could still picture his face. It was not the smooth beauty of youth as Fawnella had known it; the age lines around his mouth and eyes showed evidence of his grief. She turned to look at him again and through her tears could barely discern his profile.

“I’m glad they found the wagon,” she said when she found her voice. “I’d better go.”

“It’ll be a while before they get here. They’re crossing over on the ferry now.”

“How do you know that?”

“We’ve worked out a system with Mr. Washington. Three blasts on the horn says he’s going over to bring someone across. A short, a long and another short says things are all right.”

When Liberty moved away from the grave she passed close to where Farr was standing. She could feel every nerve in her body respond to his lean hardness. She wanted to press close to his broad chest, and have his powerful arms hold her. She wanted to comfort him, tell him that if Fawnella loved him as he had loved her she would want him to be happy. But she only glanced at his face as she passed.

“I’d better go,” she said again and walked quickly down the path.

Farr watched her leave. This was the first time he’d seen her when she was unsure of herself. In every other encounter he’d had with her she had faced things squarely, standing up to them, sober, truthful, and earnest. Now she seemed apprehensive. What astonished him was that her disquiet about being found here troubled him.

Farr didn’t understand himself at all. And then the truth hit him like a blow between the shoulders. Here he was in the place he had made for Fawnella and he was lusting for another woman.

What he’d had with Fawnella had been rare and beautiful. A man couldn’t ask for a greater love than the one she had given to him, he told himself sternly. Yet as much as he had loved her, he still wanted Liberty. It wasn’t a question of love, it was purely physical attraction, he reasoned. He wanted to bed with her! He wanted to bury himself in her softness, watch her face when she went wild beneath him, wanted her to cry out his name while in the throes of passion as the whore had done in New Orleans. But no, not like that! He wanted her to mean it!

F
arr squatted down and pulled the grass from around the marker that had taken him an entire winter to make. He gazed at the likeness of the dove, saw the crudeness of the sculpture, and wished that he’d had the skill then that he had now. But in that first winter of his grief he had not tried his hand at carving; he had simply known what he wanted and had set about carving it. Later, he was to think the labor had saved his sanity.

Memories flooded his mind, taking him back to his youth, to the summer of 1803. . . .

*  *  *

Eighteen-year-old Farrway Quill, in black oiled buckskins and moccasins, inched his way along the shelf above the Wabash River and peered over the edge. Coming from the salt spring he and Juicy had discovered, he had been drawn by the sound of jubilant laughter to this place. Two boats were beached below on the sandy bar that jutted out into the swiftly moving water. One, a light Indian canoe, had the body of a dead Indian in it. Another Indian floated facedown in the shallows, his legs caught in a sawyer at the end of the bar.

The other boat, flat-bottomed and laden with bales of fur, was drawn up onto the shore. Farr knew at a glance that the boatmen had overtaken the canoe, killed the Indians and taken their captive.

The guttural laughter came from two bearded, fur-clad trappers. They were stalking a nearly naked, fair-skinned girl. She made no sound but shook her head, waved her arms and frantically darted back and forth. Although small, not much larger than a child, she was not a child. Her light brown hair hung in a tangle over her shoulders and small, rounded, naked breasts. A dirty rag that had once been a woman’s dress hung in tatters from her waist to her knees. The trappers frolicked like two cub bears in the spring. They danced in a semi-circle on widespread, bent legs, their arms outstretched, keeping the terrified girl pinned between them and the river.

“Whoopsy! Whappsy!” The gleeful shouts echoed through the thick forest that lined the river.

“White! White! Ain’t no nigger, ain’t no squaw. White, white woman.” The grizzly hear of a man sang the words and waved his arms up and down in a frenzied, berserk manner.

“Hi-bye, diddly di-do.” The voice of the other man was a shrill imitation of a woman’s. “Thar’s bells a tollin’, ’n chains a clinkin’, mad howlin’ ’n screamin’. I is dippin’ my pecker, says I, say I. I is dippin’ my pecker, says I—”

It was the strangest sight Farr had ever seen. His mind ground to a halt for a mere instant. The men were mad! They had been too long in the wilds and were more beasts than men.
What
to do was the question. It never entered his mind that he would not try to help the girl. Farr checked the load in his rifle, touched the shaft of the knife in his belt. Wait, he told himself. Wait, plan, and act—in that order, Juicy had told him time and again.

What occurred next was so obscene, the thought to wait and plan left his mind, and a red rage filled it, rage at the indignity the young girl was suffering.

The trappers, worked into a lustful frenzy, dropped their britches down around their knees and were flaunting their swollen shafts. They continued their grotesque dance, their male organs bobbing up and down, stopping every other step to jerk their pelvises so that the young girl had no doubt of their intentions. They laughed uproariously at the horrified look on her face. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, but not a sound came from her throat. In desperation she dashed toward the river. A rough hand caught the loose hair flying out behind her and jerked her back. She fell hard, and one of the men fell on top of her.

Farr stood, aimed at the center of the back of the man standing over the couple on the ground, and fired. The blast resounded down the river and a flock of birds rose and fanned out against the sky. Before the man on top of the girl could shove his dead companion off him, Farr had leaped to the beach, raced across the bar, and plunged his knife in his back time and again. Never before had he killed a man who was not trying to kill him. Now, in the space of ten seconds he had killed two, and he thought no more about it than if he had killed a rattlesnake and a copperhead.

In a frenzy to see if the girl had been injured, he pulled the dead men off her. She lay there unmoving, pressed into the sand by the heavy bodies. Blood from the man he had shot covered her upper torso, and a splotch of wet, red blood smeared her chin. She was as still as death, her eyes wide and staring at the sky above her.

“You’ll be all right now, ma’am. You’ll be all right. I killed them.” The girl continued to stare straight up, and Farr shook her gently. “Ma’am, are you hurt?”

There was no answer. His young mind groped for a reason and found one. She was in a stupor. The poor little thing had been scared almost to death. Farr picked her up in his arms and carried her to the water’s edge. He stripped her of the tattered dress and used it to wash the blood from her face and body. He had never seen a fully naked woman before, but that fact never occurred to him. This pitiful little creature needed his help. When he was finished, he wrapped her in a blanket he found in the Indian canoe. That done, he reloaded his rifle, something he had never failed to do immediately after firing, pulled his knife from the back of the mad trapper, and shoved the bodies out into the river until the current caught them and they were swept downstream.

By the time he was ready to leave for the camp he and Juicy had set up, the girl was thrashing her arms and trying to rid herself of the blanket. Not a sound came from her throat when Farr went to kneel down beside her, but her eyes, focused now, were wild with fright.

“They’re gone. I’ll not hurt you. You’ll be all right now, little girl.” Farr spoke softly and brushed the tangles of hair back from her face. “You don’t have to be afraid. I’ll take care of you—”

Something in his sincere young face must have reached into the depths of her understanding. She quieted, her face crumbled and she began to cry. Her mouth worked, but no sound came from it. The tears that filled her eyes ran down her cheeks. Her eyes clung to his face in mute appeal.

“Ah . . . don’t cry, little girl.” Farr lifted her onto his lap and cradled her to him, rocking her as if she were a baby. She curled her arm up about his neck, turned her face to his shoulder and silent sobs shook her thin body. “Don’t cry, little pet,” he crooned. “You’ve had a hard time, but it’s over now.”

Gradually she quieted, and when Farr tilted her head back to rest in the crook of his arm, he saw that she was asleep. Brown, gold-tipped lashes, the same color as her hair, fanned down onto her cheeks. She had a sprinkling of freckles on her nose, but otherwise the skin on her face was clear and smooth as velvet. Her mouth was wide, her lower lip somewhat fuller than the upper one. She was young, he thought, so very young to have had to endure what she had just been through.

A yearning to protect this small, helpless creature came over him with such a rush that his arms held her to him with fierce determination. As he held her, he studied her still features and gently brushed the hair back over her ear. In all his young life he’d never held a girl in his arms, never felt a soft arm about his neck, never had anyone turn so trustingly to him and depend so completely on him. In the space of that instant, young Farr lost his heart to the helpless young girl.

He carried her back to the camp he and Juicy were using while they built their cabin. And in the weeks and months that followed he devoted himself to her. She couldn’t speak, but she could purse her lips and whistle. When he asked her if she had ever spoken she shook her head. Farr asked her name and told her his. She shook her head again, sadly. He never knew where she had come from or how she happened to be on the river with the Indians.

Farr named her Fawn because she reminded him of one, and then added Ella, his mother’s name, to it. She accepted the name with a broad smile. At first she was afraid of Juicy and clung to Farr when he was near. Then gradually she began to trust the old mountain man. As the days went by, she became stronger, took over the cooking chores, laughed at Juicy’s antics, and hugged him when he presented her with a pair of moccasins. She had been wearing Farr’s shirts and the britches he had cut off for her, but his moccasins were so large she couldn’t keep them on her feet.

Fawnella and Farr spent every waking hour together. He talked and she listened. He told her about Carrolltown, his schooling in Virginia, about Cherish and Sloan Carroll. When he told her of the death of his parents, she buried her face against his shoulder and clung to him, showing her regret. Their love and devotion for each other grew until it was all-consuming, and the only world they wanted was in that clearing beside the Wabash.

By summer’s end the cabin was up and they moved in. Juicy began to prepare for his annual fall trip downriver to Cairo. He would trade the prime furs from the trappers’ boat and bags of salt from their salt spring for supplies to last the winter.