Follow the River (14 page)

The old woman had come as close to Mary as her neck tether would allow—about five feet—and made a summoning motion with her head, grinning. Mary went toward her until the rope at her own neck stopped her, and then they both sat down in the dusty grass. The old woman apparently wanted to talk.

“Ya, nah,” she said. Her voice was gurgly but loud. “You ben ’ahngry?”

“Angry?” Mary replied. “Well, more afeared than angry, but, yes, I …”

“Nah, I say ’ahngry!” The old woman opened her maw and pretended to chew and smack her lips. Then she raised her face and shut her eyes and sniffed the fragrant air with a blissful expression. “Gott, I ’ev altso! Dey vohn
feed!
” Mary had to listen carefully to sort out any comprehensible words from this thick accent, which was unlike anything she had ever heard. “Vair from, you?” the old woman said then.

“By the Blue Ridge,” Mary said. “D’ye know of it?”

“Nah.”

“And you?” Mary said.

“Fort Duquesne. You know dot?” Mary nodded. She had heard of it; Colonel Washington had spoken of it when he came through Draper’s Meadows. It was a new fort, at the place where two rivers came together to make the O-y-o. It had been started by the British and captured by the French even before it was completed. “Indians, Francemens, kill whole English army by there. Las’ mont’. One mont’ ago. General Braddock. Not shmahrt enough. Whole army!
Blitzen!
” The old woman shook her head as if in wonderment at the recollection. Mary gathered that the old woman had been at or near a disastrous battle and had been captured then, perhaps brought here afterward by just such a band of warriors as had destroyed Draper’s Meadows. So there really
was
a war with the French and Indians, as Colonel Washington
had told Mr. Patton. She tried to imagine that. A war. Whole armies and little settlements.

The old woman was talking again. “What?” Mary asked.

“You nem?”

“I … I am Mary Ingles.” It was odd to speak her own name in this strange world. “You?”

“Ghetel,” the old woman seemed to say, “Ghetel. I ben vidow from Herr Stumf.” Mary could not follow this very well, but made an effort to remember the strange name.
Ghetel
, she thought.

“So, Ghetel,” Mary said. “Here we meet, then. And what d’ye s’pose will come of us next, eh?”

“I hope zupper,” the old woman said.

They were fed, around sunset time, on a delicious hot starchy porridge, tasting faintly of hickory smoke and corn, and laced with nuts and strips of meat. Their hands were untied and they were allowed to dip into bowls of the rich food with their fingers and eat until they could hold no more. The Indian women who had brought the food squatted on the ground nearby and talked and watched them eat, then carried away the empty bowls. The old woman named Ghetel wolfed down great quantities of the stuff, evidently being as famished as she had said she was. The younger woman and the little girl tied to the post with her had eaten little. Those two did not seem to be related in any way to the old woman. They did not speak English at all, but wept softly and occasionally talked in a croaking, throaty sort of language to the three men tied at the next stake.

Through the twilight the captives were visited by Indians, sometimes families of them, who came to squat on the ground a few away and look at them. They watched Mary feed the baby at her breast. At dark the last people went away and the village grew still. There was the smell of tobacco smoke in the air, and in the vicinity of a big lodgelike building several hundred feet away, a fire kept burning and a drum bumped monotonously. Mary went to sleep to that monotonous throbbing. She awoke once when a slice of moon was almost
straight overhead. The drum had stopped and the fire was out. Crickets and katydids unwound their screechy songs in the silver-edged darkness. Georgie was mumbling in his sleep. Mary turned over to take her weight off the aching shoulder and hip of her right side, moved the baby gently to place it near her head, then went back to sleep vaguely thinking about the tether around her neck.

The baby crying for food woke Mary. Morning sunlight was touching the treetops. Nearby, the old woman was looking at the infant and saying, “Shoosh! Shoosh!” Mary sat up to attend to her child and saw that the other prisoners were already awake, gazing fearfully around the village.

Mary took the baby out of its carrier and unwrapped it from its swaddling cloth. She shook the bowel waste out of the cloth onto the ground and used an unsoiled corner of the cloth to wipe the little girl clean. But the cloth was too wet with urine to reuse. And the other cloth, which she had had available on the trail, had been lost somewhere. So she held the baby naked to her breast. It suckled, making the strange sweet pain around her nipple. After a moment Mary no longer noticed the sour smell of the stale urine. She listened to the
ngn, ngn, ngn
sounds in the baby’s throat and looked around the village.

A few Indians were up and moving among the huts. The old woman was standing up now, her feet wide apart, pissing a sibilant stream onto the ground. She smiled at Mary, quietly said something that sounded like
Morgan
, then went to dry ground a few feet away, sat down, stretched and yawned noisily.

Bettie was relieving herself, too, but trying to be more discreet about it. She was squatting with her skirts spread on the ground about her and looking around insouciantly as if to give the impression that she was doing anything but what she was doing. Mary smiled to herself. Of all the awful things we have, she thought, this lack of privacy is one of the worst.

She turned to speak to her sons, but suddenly her attention was diverted by a commotion of voices and drumbeats from
the vicinity of the lodge. The prisoners all turned to look. Mary’s heart seemed to jump into her mouth.

Scores—then it seemed hundreds—of Indians were pouring into the long open space between the lodge and the place where the prisoners were staked. Young and old, male and female, what seemed to be the whole population of the village came running, howling and laughing, from every direction. All of them were carrying sticks and switches. They milled around and then began forming into two parallel lines along both sides of the streetlike clearing, and began slapping the earth with their sticks.

Then, from the lodge at the far end of the street, between the long lines of people, came the chiefs she had seen the evening before, as well as several warriors and the chieftain she knew. With them were two white men, one lean, one stocky, wearing faded cloth hunting shirts, with bright red caps on their heads. As they came closer, these white men could be seen smiling brightly through their black beards. They did not seem to be prisoners. One had a pistol in his belt and one wore a sheath knife. Mary was confused by a rush of speculations. Were they envoys perhaps sent from civilization to barter for the release of the prisoners? Were they former captives now living as Shawnees? Or were they some of the Frenchmen Mary had heard of, the French who were said to be involved in the war?

They were speaking cheerfully with the chiefs as they approached. They seemed to be speaking in the Indian tongue.

The white men came into the clearing and moved among the captives, looking them over carefully. Their eyes were quick and merry. They were talking between themselves now in a different-sounding language, nasal and sonorous. Then they stepped back among the chiefs and talked and nodded briefly with them. Mary glanced at Tommy and Georgie, who were looking, transfixed, at the white men.

The main chief then said something in a quick, sharp voice, and a cheer ran along the two waiting lines of Indians.

Three warriors stepped up to Henry Lenard and hauled him to his feet. They untied the bonds at his hands and ankles
and detached the tether from his neck. The chieftain then said loudly to Henry:

“Be naked.”

Henry looked at him, confused. The chieftain struck him a resounding blow on the ear and repeated, “Be naked.”

Henry hesitantly reached for his shirt collar and drew his shirt off over his head. Then he stood there holding it, and apparently he stood too long. The chieftain said something and two of the braves, brandishing knives, grabbed Henry, and in seconds had cut his breeches off and wrenched the moccasins off his feet. He stood there white as a fish, looking pitifully vulnerable, trembling. His panic-widened eyes flickered among his fellow prisoners as if appealing for forgiveness of his shame. Mary dropped her eyes.

“Lord in heaven,” Bettie murmured, and she too looked at the ground.

The chieftain turned to one of the bearded white men and told him:

“Say English to him. What he do.”

“M’sieu,” said the man. “I regret thees. Mais … you ’ave to
run
—run, comprenez?—to that.” He pointed toward the big building, which stood some two hundred yards away, at the end of the parallel lines of Indians. “When drum ah, ah, go, you run. Savvy thees?” Henry nodded. “You, ah, fall, you ’ave to run again. From here, comprenez?” Henry shifted his feet, tensed his legs and looked back. Mary was watching him again and saw that his usually weather-darkened face was almost as white as his scrawny backside.

A rumble of drumbeats rolled from the lodge. “Go! Vite!” the Frenchman yelled. At that moment the chieftain swung a swishing blow with a limber four-foot stick. It whacked so loudly on Henry’s pale buttocks that Mary winced.

“
Yaaaa!
” Henry gasped, then yelled what he must have thought the Frenchman had said: “Go, feet!” And he dropped into a crouch and sprinted away. The Indians were howling now, and the air was full of the swishing and whistling of their sticks and switches as he raced past them. Mary could hear the lashing of the wood on his skin, and she cringed. She saw him raise his hands to shield his face and ears. This slowed
him, and he was no more than thirty yards down the gauntlet when a well-aimed staff swung by a grown man smashed him to the ground. The Indians converged on him and slashed and whipped at him repeatedly for several awful seconds.

They let him up then and dragged him staggering back to the starting place and aimed him again toward the lodge. Blood was running from his right ear. His back and buttocks and legs were laced with bloody welts.

But now Henry Lenard’s face was red with fury and he no longer looked scared. He crouched for the signal and stared with bugging eyes and bitten lips at the chieftain. “Let’s go, great Injin,” he hissed. “I’m set.” Mary’s heart was hammering in her neck and she could hear her sons whining.

The drum sounded. Henry, his eyes on the chieftain, shot out like a rabbit before the chieftain could raise his stick. And now he ran with his arms pumping, not bothing to protect his head any more. Mary prayed for him and watched him get halfway to the lodge before he was tripped and clubbed to the ground and again obscured from view by the milling Indians.

When he was brought back to the head of the line again there was scarcely an inch of his skin that was not crisscrossed with red marks, and his face was covered with blood. Again he stood defiant, looking with hatred at the chieftain, heaving now for breath.

“I’m set,” he said again. The drum thudded and he lunged forward. Halfway down the line he was again knocked out of his course, but this time, after dropping to one knee, regained his footing and shot forward again. A man with a raised club stepped into his way, but was bowled to the ground by Henry’s momentum before he could strike. Mary’s heart leaped with joy when she saw the distant naked figure stagger to the lodge and heard the Indians give him a cheer.

“He made it!” she yelled to the boys. “He made it!”

The three men prisoners were next. Neither of the first two made it. The first fell to the ground within ten yards and drew himself up into a whimpering ball and took their blows until he passed out. He was dragged back to the stake and lay there face down, his skin entirely red with stripes and blotches and oozing blood. The second man made three tries, finally being
felled and beaten senseless a mere twenty yards from the lodge. Then the man in the British army coat was stripped. He was big and beefy. He stuck out his pugnacious jaw and scowled at the Frenchmen until the drum sounded. Then, instead of starting down the gauntlet, he roared, “God damn y’r eyes!” and lunged at the thin Frenchman, catching his throat in his big hands and nearly strangling him before he could be pounded into insensibility with a war club and hauled back to lie beside the other unconscious men.

The Frenchman sat on the ground, coughing and wheezing and spitting, his face draining from red to white, then finally stood up, leaning against his companion. Neither of them was smiling now. The chiefs watched them patiently, exhibiting no concern. Then the main chief spoke, and the Frenchmen nodded. They turned now toward the remaining prisoners, who were all women and children. The chief shouted something down the line, and all the men with their clubs and staffs stepped back out of the lines.

Dear God, Mary thought. It’s us next. Oh, not the younguns, please God. And not Bettie. She’s hurt.

One of the young chieftains came into the clearing and looked at the foreign woman, thoughtfully, and pointed finally at the big old widow. She stood up slowly, glaring at them with hard-edge eyes. Braves untied her tether from the stake, then cut the hide belt from her waist and ripped away what was left of her tattered dress. She stood naked, a great, gray-white ruin of womanhood, breasts and buttocks hanging flat, her skin drooping in folds like a loose garment on her sturdy frame. Her thighs were massive with muscle. As she was led toward the head of the gauntlet, muttering an incomprehensible something that might have been a prayer, she kept her back straight and was dignified despite the ugly, ill-fitting suit of flesh that quivered with each step she took. Mary felt a sudden, surprising welling-up of admiration for her. Her own flesh felt the awful nakedness and anticipated the shock and cutting of the switches. She doubted that she herself would be able to bear it, and even though the Indian men with their stout sticks and clubs had withdrawn from the ranks to leave this sport to the women and children, she
foresaw herself falling and curling up to faint under the pain, just as the one male prisoner had done.