Follow the River (12 page)

It might well be, of course, she thought, that he’s just never seen anyone with my coloration. Like as not, every woman he’s ever seen has had the same raven hair and dark eyes as his. Even lovely Bettie has black hair, brown eyes … Surely I’m just a curiosity.

She had worked that explanation out reasonably enough. But in her breast she remained unsettled. She did not want to think too hard on the matter. Somehow, she feared, when this savage looked at her he was making decisions that might affect her future in a very personal way.

He might be, she thought, putting the thought directly into words, planning that I should be his.

This was an annoying thought. It made blood rush to her face and her skin prickle. By the Lord God, she thought, my Will would snap your spine if he caught ye bold-eye-looking at me thisaway, ye murtherin’ snake.

She had a daydream then. Her eyes were seeing the glare of sunlight on the great river, but in her mind she saw Will Ingles, her Will with his great, thick knotted arm and shoulder muscles bulging with strain, squeezing the life out of this
slender brown man, his arms around his middle, his skull pressed up under the Indian’s chin, bending him backward, backward, straining the way he could strain for minutes at a time, levering out a stump or a boulder from a plowfield, until his skin grew pink and his veins stood out; she saw Will’s arms like oak limbs tightening, saw the Shawnee’s tongue protrude and his eyeballs bulge white until, with a muffled
crack
, the Indian’s backbone broke; and then she saw Will fling the savage down like a broken twig and stand over him, flushed, sweat-drops glinting in his reddish chest hairs … Sometimes, she remembered, when Will would put himself upon her on summer days, taking pleasure with her in a sunny field or in the airless heat of their cabin while the boys napped, with that sudden great plunging desire of his, he would drench her with his sweat, and it would trickle tickling down her flanks and thighs, and when he would rise off her there would be sweat-drops glimmering in his body-hair like dewdrops on a spiderwed …

Her mind came back and she saw the river there before her, and her heart was pounding and she felt weak, weak in the way she felt weak after Will had lain upon her, or weak in the way she felt weak after she had watched him slaughter a pig.

It was strange that she felt this way now after those fantasies of love and killing: weak, spent, satisfied, avenged.

But she had come back to the present moment and was standing here, flooded with the sunglare off the river. And when she looked out of the corner of her eye again at the Shawnee chieftain, he was still standing there tall and hairless and slick as a snake, gleaming with bear grease, his black eyes still on her. His straight back was not broken after all, not even bent, and for some reason she was relieved to see him still standing there erect and perfect and, in his heathen way, beauteous …

Beauteous?

She could hardly believe that she had thought that:
beauteous
.

She was confused now by her thoughts, and she hated the Indian even more for having confused her so strangely, for having disturbed her so deeply.

She tried to put the daydream out of her mind. But her thoughts kept returning to it as camp was made overlooking that long river vista, as she nursed the baby, as she watched her sons throw spears at the rolling hoop, as she dressed Bettie’s arm. Sometimes she would think of it in personal terms: about the chieftain and his drilling scrutiny of herself, about this matter of his beauty. Other times she would think of it in general.

They have the power to decide what is to be done with us
.

She had never had such a thought before. It was not a way in which anybody should ever have to think.

“How far d’ye reckon they’ve brought us?” Bettie asked that evening as Mary worked with needle and thread in the remaining light to rejoin a sleeve to Tommy’s shirt.

“Ten times ten times ten,” said Tommy.

Mary laughed, and Tommy laughed. Georgie laughed after his brother. Then even Bettie laughed.

But then Mary thought of her mother, whose saying that had been. And then apparently all the others remembered, and they did not laugh any more. In her mind Mary saw the bloody scalp of her mother’s gray hair.

“How far?” Bettie had to ask again after a while.

Mary pondered. She thought of the knots in her belt and tried to calculate how far they had come on a typical day. “We’ve been a-comin’ three weeks now,” Mary said. “Twists and turns, ups and downs an’ all, surely we’ve done five or six leagues a day. Th’ number that come t’my mind is two hundred miles or thereabouts.”

“Two hundred,” Bettie breathed. She was still for a minute, then sighed. “That’s just about what I’d thought. My feet told me a thousand, but I known they’d be a-stretchin’ the truth summat.”

Mary smiled in the dimming light. Thank God, Bettie’s humor was returning. Mary had had to worry a great deal about Bettie while it was lacking.

They followed the O-y-o westward the next day, perhaps fifteen miles. They were slowed by the fording of several creeks and small tributary rivers. They waded the shallower
creeks, the Shawnees carrying the children over. At the rivers they brought forth hidden canoes. At each stop, Mary lifted the baby out of its carrier, rinsed out its swaddling cloth in the stream, wrapped it in a dry one and put it to her breast. The baby slept most of the time, perhaps lulled by the motion of Mary’s walking.

Th’ are such a good babe, Mary would think as she walked along the river bank behind warriors and horses, such a good, still and calm babe. She would think this as if talking silently to the little weight on her back, and a rich sadness would squeeze her heart. Keep looking back, little ’un; that’s where y’r rightful home is … that I fear y’ll never never see.

She could not let herself hope that the baby would ever see their homeplace or her father. It was better not to try to envision Will Ingles with this babe in his arms ever. Better to imagine it, in some vague way of imagining, as an Indian baby. An Indian baby, an Indian child. A white Indian woman.

Mary tried to foresee such a life, in her imagination, to prepare herself for that awful possibility. She envisioned a little girl huddled among animal skins on a dirt floor; than a naked woman shiny with animal grease, painted and tattooed, adorned only in bracelets and tufts of feathers, dancing obscenely with a savage leer on her stained face, being passed from hand to hand among warriors and chiefs, bearing half-white children, then growing haglike and white-haired, praying to pagan gods in some corner of the wilderness and someday dying unaware that she was to have been Bettie Elenor Ingles, daughter of William …

The baby girl’s whole live thus passed in vague and wretched images through the dismal fancies of her mother, who plodded westward along the river bank toward an unknown destiny.

They traveled two more days along the shore of the great river, going generally in a northwesterly course. On the thirtieth day of their captivity, with a noonday sun beating down, Mary noticed that air of anticipation among the Indians again. When they stopped to rest, the braves got out their
bags of pigments and mixed war paints, and decorated their faces and bodies. Mary looked at Bettie and saw in her eyes that old dark terror of the first days. Even Tommy and Georgie, who had grown familiar with several of the warriors, came to Mary’s side and hung there watching. Their memories of old terrors were being stirred as they again saw the savages as they had seen them on that first day of blood and shock a month ago. Mary was chilled with dread, and hugged the boys close to her, feeling anew their awful vulnerability. “God save us,” Bettie breathed beside her, “what d’ye reckon, Mary? It’s no huntin’ party now, for certain.”

“Faith, Bet. Faith, now. But I don’t know, I’ll confess.” They watched the braves work on Henry Lenard’s bonds nearby, retying his hands behind his back and once again slipping a noose over his head. Mary tried to catch the eye of the chieftain, to see if she could somehow gauge their peril from the expression on his face. But when he paused to look at her, his face was as distant and unreadable behind its paint as if he were masked. Once again he was not a human.

The sight of a cornfield was so unexpected that they were halfway past it before Mary realized what she was seeing. It was the regularity, the orderly spacing, that caught her eye, which had grown conditioned to the random profusion of woods and thickets and cane. The sight of cultivation was such a shock perhaps, she realized, because she had never expected to see such a thing again. Bettie seemed to notice it at the same time, and turned to look back at Mary with wonderment in her eyes.

“If Will and Johnny could see this corn,” Mary exclaimed. “It’s every bit o’ ten feet tall!”

And she realized now that she was looking too for buildings—that without having thought of it she was expecting buildings to be where there was cultivated grain. With an ache in her breast she realized that she had not seen a human dwelling in a month, other than caves.

And then alarm and confusion: They must be approaching a settlement! That would be the reason for the war paint. She had thought they would never again see a white settlement,
after this long trek northwestward. But there must be one hereabouts. And the Shawnees were evidently planning to attack it now, and once again she suffered that awful sense of helplessness, knowing that she could not warn the settlers, whoever they must be, of the massacre and mayhem that were about to fall upon them.

She smelled woodsmoke before she saw it. Then above the shaggy tassels of the corn she saw it drifting up, faint against the dark backdrop of the forested bluff.

Strangely, the Indians had not deployed themselves for a surprise attack. Instead, they continued marching straight toward the source of the smoke, and, instead of subsiding into stealth, suddenly began hooting like owls and laughing.

The dwelling came into view beyond the edge of the cornfield. It was unlike any building she had ever seen, either in Philadelphia or on the frontier. It was the size of a small cabin, but was domeshaped and covered with slabs of tree bark. An animal skin, hanging on its doorway, was being held open by a black-haired woman who was naked except for a small deerskin apron and moccasins. A sturdy Indian man of middle years, without war paint or other decorations, was coming forward from the house to greet the party, smiling, his right hand held raised in greeting. An array of crude mattock- and hoelike tools and pointed sticks, evidently agricultural implements, leaned against a pole fence beside the hut. The place was pleasantly shaded by cottonwood trees, and its yard sloped down to the edge of the wide river, where two naked boys, about twelve or fourteen years old, had paused in knee-deep water, one holding a slim spear, the other a large, open-mesh basket of woven cane. On the shore near them a bark canoe lay upside down; in its shade a large yellow dog stretched and yawned and watched their approach. Mary understood now. There was not a white settlement here. They were apparently arriving at the outskirts of the Shawnee civilization. The warriors had painted themselves for their victorious return.

And despite the apparent tranquility of the place, Mary trembled with apprehension. The frank, silent curiosity in the eyes of these riverside dwellers, this silent, expressionless
approach to inspect the captives, was ominous. She felt her vulnerability more keenly than she had since the day of the raid.

The Indian boys were sent across the big river in the canoe. The vessel angled downstream across the blue-green water, diminishing to a speck, then vanished between two low bluffs on the opposite shore, into what evidently was the mouth of a tributary. The warriors talked and smoked with the hutdweller, glancing often across the river. The Indian woman regarded the knot of white hostages from a few feet away with a dark, veiled look that was not shy, nor friendly, nor really even hostile. Mary smiled at her as one young woman to another, but there was no response except a momentary, apparently unconscious, raising of the black eyebrows. After a while Bettie murmured something that conveyed the strange meaning of it:

“We’re in their world, Mary.”

By the middle of the afternoon five long canoes had come across the river and had been loaded with the booty from Draper’s Meadows, the meat and salt from the salt spring and the warriors and their captives. There were five strong young paddlers in each canoe and the vessels surged swiftly in a single file across the sparkling river. For some time they were on the wide, smooth surface of water. Tommy asked: “Is this like an ocean?”

They entered the shade of the woods at the mouth of the tributary and went upstream. Along the bank there were more of the domeshaped huts, and many shaped like cones, covered with skins or bark. These stood close to the water, and their inhabitants, women and children and old men, came down to the river bank to look and then began moving in a crowd, apace with the canoes, talking excitedly and laughing and pointing.

The woods gave way then to cleared fields separated by pole fences. Some of the fields were in corn; others were full of pole frames leafed over with climbing pea and bean vines. Other fields were yellow-green with tobacco leaf, and some were covered with low, broad-leafed plants Mary did not
recognize. And as the canoes slid upstream, close to the shore, a huge village of the cone-shaped dwellings and some long, low lodges—bigger even than the houses Mary had seen as a girl in Philadelphia—came into view above the cultivated fields. She was dumbfounded by the sight of this unexpected civilization, by the extent of its agriculture. Her old imaginary notions of Indian life, of small, ragged bands of murderous nomads scattered through the forests and living unsheltered on the ground, were being forced out of her mind by this impressive scene, by this now murmuring mob of copper-skinned people moving en masse along the shore toward the town.

And they’re all coming to see what’s going to become of us, she thought. We’re the center of all this. She quailed at the thought.