Follow the River (13 page)

The canoe men deftly beached the vessels at a place that seemed to be the end of a long, wide street or commons of the town. The crowd of Indians, a moving, easygoing, laughing mass of ruddy naked skin and pale deerhide garments, pressed close to the canoes to gawk, then fell back a little way on each side to make way as the painted chieftain sprang ashore with a panther’s agility. They cheered and clapped their hands and parted to make way as he strode grinning toward the center of the town, holding a musket aloft with one sinewy arm and waving a scalp with his other hand. It was a scalp with gray hair, but, Mary knew, not her mother’s. No doubt it was that of Colonel Patton. Mary trembled and felt sick, sickened by the villagers’ gleeful response to this grisly trophy.

Each of the next three braves who leaped ashore was waving a scalp; each brought another outburst of cheers. Mary did not want to look at the scalps, but found herself watching, fascinated and horror-struck, as if identifying ghosts: that small patch of graying brown hair would be what was left of bald-headed Casper Barrier; those short white wisps, Phil Barger. The little dark nest of curls, Bettie’s baby boy. Mary glanced back at Bettie, grateful to see that she was not watching this. Then she turned in time to see the long gray hair of her mother’s scalp being waved over the heads of the crowd.
And though she should have been expecting it, the shock of it went through her heart like a lance; for a moment her vision swam and she had to brace herself against a faint.

It was Tommy and Georgie who helped keep her from swooning. Intimidated by the mob—they had never seen more than ten people at a time—they pressed back against Mary with such voiceless, urgent need that they brought her out of her shock determined to protect them in any way she could.

Her mind was whirling with the confusion of the moment. Brown hands were clutching at the gunwale of the canoe; others seemed to be reaching for her and her children. The musky, earthy smell of the Indians was close and she had never heard such an uproar of so many voices, not even in Philadelphia town. The babble of the voices seemed to roll over her with waves of the Indian smell. It was not the sour, rankling smell of white people who have been too long in their clothes; it was not unpleasant in that way. It was simply the heat and the closeness of so many; it was their rude staring and their reaching, their incomprehensible tongue being uttered at once by so many voices, shrill and deep, masculine and feminine; it was their delight at the hostages’ misery; it was that eerie
other-worldness
Bettie had spoken of on the other side of the river, but now amplified by hundreds. Mary and her three small children, like a knot of life, clung to each other in the belly of the canoe and cringed against the gunwale away from the people as hands reached. In the distance above the babble, she could hear the strong voice of the chieftain going away into the village, in a chant of boastful tone. He at least had favored her, on the trail; now he was deserting her to swagger away boasting, no doubt, about the scalping of old men and women and babies.

Mary grew angry then, and her anger gave her the strength and courage to face the mob and control her fears.
Dignity
, she remembered.
Be dignified
. It’s worked thus far. “Up, laddies,” she said as calmed as she could. “Up now. They want us to get out of the boat.” With her hands gripping their upper arms, she urged them up and away from her and toward the reaching hands. And she, gathering her legs under her,
rose with the weight of the baby on her back and stepped gingerly after them as they were lifted out, silent in fright, onto the trampled grass and packed dirt of the shore. “Come, Bet,” she said, reaching back for her with one hand. Bettie shook her head and cringed in the canoe, face in a grimace, hugging herself with her left arm. “Up, Bettie, sweet. Be dignified, now. Show them what a Draper is made of.”

On the bank they soon were being pressed toward the center of the town by the crowd, and it seemed that all the hundreds of women and girls and boys had their hands on her, abusing her or exploring her as a curiosity. Brown hands snatched at her hair and pulled it, slapped her face, grabbed and pinched her arms, ripped at her dress, raised her skirts, tugged at the baby carrier on her back, felt her breasts, intruded on her person in every rude way. Faces kept looming in front of her, laughing, hissing, baring their teeth, some spitting at her face. There were old women with snow-white hair and faces creased and cracked like boot leather; there were pretty young women with saucy and derisive black eyes; there were great broad women with moon-round faces and hooded eyelids and gaps in their teeth, blowing their stinking breath in her face or screaming shrill as whistles in her ears; there were naked little children striking with their fists at her hips and her groin. Ahead she could hear Tommy and Georgie screaming, but they were invisible among the milling Indians. On her back, her baby daughter was squalling. Somewhere beyond the din of voices Mary could hear—or rather, feel—the pulsation of drumbeats. Dust of the street roiled upward, charged with afternoon sunlight, rankling in her nose, dry and gritty in her mouth. Above the heads of the crowd she could see the tops of village lodges and cone-shaped huts of hide and bark, and leafy treetops shivering in the hot breeze, and beyond that, a dazzling pearly blue sky. She yearned to keep her eyes above the intimidating faces and pray to that sky, but had instead to look down to fend off blows and try to keep from being tripped.

In the center of the village the crowd suddenly opened, and she was thrust forward, almost falling, into a cleared and trampled space some thirty feet across. In it stood four up-right
posts, and at the foot of each post there were people sitting and lying. Their faces were turned toward her: they were white people.

They were in rags. Their hands were bound behind them and there were ropes and thongs around their necks, tethering them to two of the posts. There were six of them. Two women and a little girl were strung to one post, and three men to another. One man’s face was covered with dried blood. He wore the tattered red coat of a soldier. Another’s clothing was brown with old bloodstains but there were no injuries on his face.

Strong hands forced Mary’s arms behind her and she felt thongs being wound and tied around her wrists, mercilessly tight. Tommy and Georgie were being bound by nooses to the third post, their hands free, still crying at the top of their lungs. Henry Lenard was already tied to that post, and at the moment Mary’s eyes fell on him he was struck to the ground by one of the braves of the war party.

In a moment Mary and Bettie were secured by nooses to the fourth post. The mob drew back a few feet and stood in a circle surrounding them, and a change in the thumping of the drums suddenly depressed their shrilling cries to a murmur. Tommy and Georgie and the baby girl were still crying, and their voices rose above everything else now, wailing up and down in the stillness. Their wails were the center of everything now. Mary was both torn with pity and mortified. The Indians had begun laughing at them.

“Thomas!”
she snapped suddenly, in that voice she seldom had to use. “THOMAS!” His cries stopped and she stared at him. Dust and tears streaked his face. “Thomas, hush Georgie up, or I sh’ll cane thy hide!” Tommy swallowed and grimaced, his nose running, almost starting to cry again, but then rubbed his fists in his eyesockets and turned on Georgie. With threats and hugs and cajolery, broken with hiccups of strangled sobbing, he soon calmed the two-year-old. The circles of Indians had observed this interchange of authority, and began laughing softly, exclaiming in what seemed to be tones of approbation. Mary stood with her head erect and tried to look as dignified as she could with that last screaming voice still issuing from the baby carrier on her back. “Bettie,”
she murmured, “please, can y’ try to quieten this babe, in the name o’ God?” Bettie stood behind her and whispered and crooned. That, or the cessation of the hubbub, worked. The baby’s squalling descended and trailed off and soon she was gurgling and cooing. Again the Indians in the encircling mob laughed appreciatively. Mary stood, flushing, aware of the hundreds of dark eyes on her. “Thank’ee, Bet. Oh, thank’ee, Thomas, and Georgie, dear. We must no’ shame ourselves in any way, now. Good, good …”

She glanced at the post nearest by, where the strange women and the girl were tied. The older of the two women had risen to her feet and stood there looking at Mary and nodding. She was saying something. Mary sorted her voice out from the surrounding drone of voices. “Gut,” the old woman seemed to be saying. “Gut. Gut.”

She was a startling sight, this old woman. Taller and broader than most men, she stood with a proud stance and peered with pale hazel eyes out through a lank, tangled mob of white and iron-gray hair. Her cheeks were concave with toothlessness and her mouth was puckered and furrowed. She was grinning, displaying large, yellow, horsy upper and lower front teeth, which gave her the appearance, Mary thought, of a braying ass. A great wen sprouted black hairs on the right side of her nose. What had been a dress of linsey-woolsey hung here and there on her big-boned frame in strips and tatters, belted with a strip of deerhide, almost black with dirt and ashes. Her muscular legs, scratched, insect-riddled, wrinkled at the knobby knees, were visible through great rents which ran from the waist to the hem of the dress, and the left side of the bodice had been ripped open to expose a great, veined, brown-nippled dug that hung to her waist. Despite her remarkable ugliness and her devastated condition—she looked as if she might have been raked out from under a bonfire—there was something formidable and even noble about her. She was standing there, apparently unbeaten by the ordeals she must have survived, grinning happily straight at Mary and repeating, “Gut. Gut.” Mary smiled at her. Here was dignity, and it was reassuring to see it among these helpless hostages.

The shout of a strong male voice drew the attention of the village Indians, and one side of the circle opened.

Five Indians walked slowly through the gap into the arena, led by a white-haired man wearing a red headband, which held at his right temple a silver disk with two eagle feathers hanging from it. A wide chest ornament made of rows of red beads and white quills hung from his neck, and his breechclout also was decorated with rows of red beads. He was of medium height, and stately, with eyes so deep-set and shadowed that he appeared to be blind. His mouth was wide and thin, drawn down at the corners in an expression of severity. Mary presumed that this man was the chief. Walking beside him—almost strutting—was the slender chieftain whose party had brought her here, and it was apparent that he had led the chief here to see what he had brought back from his expedition. Behind the two came two other finely dressed Indians of middle age whose air of gravity and self-importance suggested that they too might be chiefs of some rank.

The four stopped within the cleared circle, a few feet from where Mary and Bettie stood, and studied the captives while the young chieftain began a long discourse in rapid syllables and grunts, moving his hands in ways that, Mary imagined, were meant to illustrate brave fighting, risings and settings of the sun, high mountains and long distances. Now and then he would point toward one or another of the hostages, and he and the chiefs would look at that one as the narrative continued.

The chieftain talked a long time while looking at Mary. He made that baby-scooping motion, and she knew he was talking about the birth of Bettie Elenor. He looked proud, and Mary remembered what she had been thinking about this chieftain’s special interest in her. He was not beauteous now and she wondered how she had ever thought he was beauteous, because he was in truth a murderous, painted braggart, ugly as Satan.

Mary saw the chiefs nod several times while they were looking at her. And they actually smiled and chuckled when the chieftain led them closer to Tommy and Georgie and talked about them. She saw him make motions that reminded
her of the spear-throwing game his warriors had taught the boys. The people in the crowd, meanwhile, listened rapt to all this oratory, sometimes muttering, sometimes exclaiming, sometimes laughing, sometimes patting their palms lightly together as if applauding. Now and then Mary would turn to look at Bettie or the other captives. Bettie stood as if frozen, scarcely blinking, not looking at the chiefs, her lips white. Tommy and Georgie had calmed down and were mostly watching the chieftain. Mary wondered what they could be thinking of him. He had become familiar, even, perhaps, a friend, on the trail, and she wondered how much they still associated him with the violence and hurt of that bloody and flaming day a month ago at Draper’s Meadows. Henry Lenard, now with a dark red abrasion on the left side of his face where he had been struck a few minutes before, sat on the ground and glared at the chiefs. It had been weeks since he had been allowed close enough to her to talk at any length, and she wondered what he was thinking of their plight by now.

The formidable old woman at the next post still stood, looking defiant and amused, sometimes staring at the chiefs, sometimes sweeping her gaze over the surrounding mob with hauteur or, for no apparent reason, flashing her yellow-toothed ass’s grin at them. Several times, too, she brought her gaze to bear on Mary, and smiled each time she did so.

The chieftain seemed to run out of words suddenly after about ten minutes, and the old chief with the red headband then spoke in a deep, growling voice for less than a minute. When he finished, the crowd broke out in cheerful chatter, and parted again to make way for the departure of the chiefs. Part of the crowd began drifting away. Others stayed on, studying the captives with rude fascination, but now no longer venturing close to torment them. The sun was almost down into the treetops now, washing the scene with a glowing cross-light, heightening the purples and reds and blues and vermillions decorating the scanty clothing of the villagers. Scrawny dogs, yellowish and wolflike, wandered among the legs of the people, came and sniffed cautiously at the strange scents of the white people and went away, their tongues hanging
pink in the hot evening air. Through the dust now came the distant shouting and laughing and crying of children, the drone of voices, whiffs of woodsmoke and the enticing fragrances of cooking meat and baking corn.