Follow the River (15 page)

But you had a baby on the trail, she told herself. You knew then that any other sufferin’ would be less.

But she was not so certain now.

If the old woman gets through it, I promise I will get through it, she told herself. I promise.

The old woman stood waiting, her back to the prisoners. Than, as if remembering something, she stiffened her spine and turned her head to look back. Her glance fell on Mary. She smiled her best jackass smile, gave a funny shrug, then turned her face again toward her tormentors. Most of them were grinning now, as if there were something less serious about the business of whipping women prisoners. It was as if this part of the rite would be more of an entertainment than a vengeance.

The drum sounded. The old woman started down the line in a strange, straight-backed, jiggling trot, elbows bent, fists up. The switches began whistling. The old woman seemed to be moving scarcely faster than a walk, raising one or another shoulder as if to shrug off the blows. The men were laughing and hooting, bent over with hilarity as the quivering mass of flesh jogged by.

But jolly or not, the whippers were not being gentle. The Indian women and children were, if anything, laying on their switches with even greater ferocity. If the object had been to pound the male victims senseless and keep them from reaching the lodge, now it seemed to be that the female victims should get there with the utmost suffering.

The old woman lumbered on, it seemed for an eternity. Then, halfway down the line, a stout Indian woman stepped out of the line with a thick staff cocked over her shoulder and brought it around in a sweeping horizontal blow aimed at the side of the old woman’s head.

But the victim got an arm up, slightly deflecting the blow, which instead glanced off the top of her skull. And with a bellow of outrage, she stopped, turned on the astonished squaw, snatched the heavy stick out of her hands and rammed the end of it into her abdomen. Nearby squaws and children,
who had tried to converge on her when she stopped, suddenly surged back. She was laying to, left and right, left and right, as if the staff were a scythe and her tormentors were blades of grass. Thus armed, she literally fought her way along the next twenty yards of the gauntlet, giving as many blows as she received. It was an uproarious amusement for the men. The little knot of howling combat moved slowly toward the distant lodge until the old woman’s arms grew weary and her blows flagged. Soon she was disarmed, and Mary watched with pride and amazement as she resumed her slow trot to the end of the line under a renewed torrent of switches. The whole assemblage gave her a goodhearted cheer when she walked up and touched the wall of the lodge. “Quelle femme!” cried one of the Frenchmen. “Formidable!”

She was paraded back along the line in triumph, stumbling now and then, as the Indians laughed and whooped. Even the old chief was smiling when she returned to the head of the line, and she, despite her profusion of stinging welts and a stream of blood clotting her hair and running down her left temple, grinned back at him. One of the chiefs uttered some sort of command, and when the old woman had been brought back to her stake, panting and triumphant, a young squaw quickly appeared at her side with a clay pot and began working over her wounds with a greasy-looking gray-green unguent. “Gut. Gut,” the old woman kept saying, wincing and sighing. “Gut. Gut.” She looked up at Mary’s admiring eyes and winked. “Vas not bad,” she said. “You can do.”

They came and took Bettie next. She stood with her eyes shut and groaned as they untied her. They had to rip open the right shoulder of her dress because of the bulky splint on her arm, then they peeled the garment down off of her body. Mary ached with mortification for her sister-in-law, and she thought of Johnny so far away, hot-tempered brother Johnny and how enraged he would be to know she was being exposed like this. Mary was shocked, too, by the gauntness of Bettie’s once shapely body. Through the ordeal of their month on the trail, the perfect young curves and hollows of her flesh had melted away and now her ribs and shoulder blades, her hipbones and even vertebrae, jutted under her skin, accentuated by the hard midmorning sunlight. Mary was so crushed with
pity for her that she could just manage to speak when Bettie’s pain-haunted, fear-distended eyes looked back beseechingly over her shoulder.

“Faith, dear,” was all Mary could call to her. “
Faith!
”

Bettie stood slim as a reed, beautiful as a spirit, at the head of the gauntlet, looking down the long brown lines of people and their now bloodstained switches. She looked too frail to run. And Mary suspected she had been too dazed to learn anything from watching the others run. Tommy and Georgie were watching intently, wordlessly, trembling from head to foot at their aunt’s peril.

They can’t kill her with switches, Mary kept reassuring herself. The worst to fear is falling and breaking that poor arm again.

Bettie was not as lethargic as Mary had feared. At the first thump of the drum she was away like a startled deer, and got by the first twenty or thirty Indians before they found their reflexes and began hitting her. The rest of the way down the line she continued so swiftly that only a fraction of them managed to lay their switches on her. There was a general murmur of admiration when she stopped at the lodge and was led back. She returned as if the eyes on her nakedness were as painful as the switches had been; she looked at the ground, and tried to cover her little pointed breasts with her splinted right arm and her groin with her left hand. When she was seated at the stake, the young squaw went to her at once with the bowl of ointment. Bettie’s back and legs were striped with perhaps two dozen livid welts. There was one cruel red slash across her nose and cheekbone, and Mary realized with a shudder how close Bettie had come to being blinded by that blow.

“Bettie, I’m proud. And O so grateful.”

Bettie was wincing as the squaw palpated her wounds and worked in the ointment. She nodded, and looked at Mary. Her mouth was drawn down in a grimace and her chin was trembling. Her eyes bulged with a hurt fury. She worked her mouth, but no words came out; instead, bloody spit drooled out of her underlip. She had been biting her tongue, Mary realized, in order not to scream.

I’m next, surely, Mary thought. Quickly she thought back
over what the others had taught her: Go your swiftest. Guard your eyes. Fight if you’re blocked; the Indians admire that. Never mind the pain; it’s getting stopped that’ll ruin you.

But Mary was not next. The Indians now were untying and stripping the young foreign woman at the next stake. Her face and figure were comely; she was hardly more than a girl. Mary had presumed she was the mother of the little girl, but, seeing her naked now, guessed she was no more than fifteen or sixteen, perhaps a sister, or maybe not even related. They scatter and mix families as a whirlwind does the leaves of fall, she thought.

The nude girl was dragged sobbing and whining to the head of the gauntlet. She was abject, beyond any semblance of dignity or courage. At once she fell prostrate before the chief, trying to wrap her arms around his legs. But his face darkened with scorn and he kicked her in the face. A pair of bucks grabbed her arms and set her upon her feet. Blood burbled from her nose as she snorted between sobs. She was aimed down the line and the distant drum sounded. Instead of running, she screamed and cringed back against one of the bucks. He shoved her, and she pitched forward to the ground. The squaws at the head of the line converged on her with their whistling switches, and went at her as if to flay all the skin off her buttocks. She shrieked and rolled on the ground and flailed with arms and legs to deflect the lashes.
In the name of God, girl, get up and run!
Mary was thinking, and then she heard her own voice above the hubbub and knew she had been shouting it.

The girl did not get up. She had gone limp. After several minutes of the sickening swish and smack, the squaws were called off. The girl was dragged by her feet back to the stake. The squaw did not come to her with medicine. Apparently medicine was only for the courageous.

Now me
, Mary thought.
I’m ready, dear Lord
. At that thought, she felt a deep calm. She held her baby at her breast and waited for them to come for her.

The chieftain came toward her. He stood over her and began orating. The chiefs came closer and listened. He talked for several minutes, once more making the scooping motion to signify her delivery of the baby.

My, how that seems to’ve impressed him, she thought.

The chieftain went on and on in his great, deep voice, accompanying himself with sweeping and pointing hands, posturing like a lord. He was some fine talker; she could tell that, even though she could not understand a word. The crowd was enjoying his performance immensely; they seemed to lean and sway like puppets beyond the ends of his moving fingers, looking rapt at him until he would direct them to look at her.

And
he
looked at her. When he talked with his eyes on her, he talked as a man does who is proud of something that he has.

He believes I’m his, she thought. He wants the people to know this.

Well, ye heathen, I’m not. I’m Will’s, that’s whose I am.

And yet in a way, she realized, this chieftain was an important person to her. She knew that she and hers might have been dead by now if he had not taken this proprietary interest in her.

And now as he stood here binding all his people with his eloquence, she had to admit to herself yet again that for all his savagery he was a splendid man, a man who, had he been born white, doubtless would have become with age a general or governor or some sort of leader in the civilized world. Cleaned of his warpaint, wearing soft, tan hide leggings and beaded breechclout, his coppery upper arms encircled by soft-gleaming metal bands, his long raven hair perfectly parted and combed, he was as trim and graceful a figure of a man as anyone she had ever seen. Being beardless and hairless as a woman, but hard and straight, he seemed keenedged, like a new, sharp knife—a contrast, somehow to Will, burly Will whose outlines were softened by thick body hair, by unruly brindled hair and whiskers so close to the color of his skin that in certain lights his whole being looked fuzzy, out of focus. Will was wonderful to be against, all warm and tickly. It would be like lying with a sword, she thought, to lie with this Indian who now stood …

She flushed suddenly at what she had been thinking, realizing that the chieftain’s eyes had been on hers while she was thinking it. God above, she thought, sweep such abominations
out of my poor bumfuzzled head! I’m starting to think like a conkybine.

The chiefs were listening to him with grave attention, nodding and grunting. It dawned on Mary at last: He was arguing that she should not have to run the gauntlet.

He was interrupted by a loud yowl from the old woman. She was kneeling over the girl, an incomprehensible stream of language pouring out of her. She had turned the girl onto her back.

The old woman paused for breath. She looked at Mary. “Det!” she cried. “She iss det!”

Dead?

The chieftain stepped astraddle the inert girl and bent down. He lifted her eyelids with his finger. Then he stood up and looked at the chief.

“Nepwa,” he said. He made a short, final horizontal sweep over her body with his hand.

The chief scowled at the naked corpse. Flies were walking on its wounds. Then he turned away and went to the head of the gauntlet. He made a short pronouncement. The two ranks of the gauntlet dispersed and came strolling up to crowd around and gape at the naked, bloody captives. Mary realized then that she was not going to have to run the gauntlet. Not now, anyway. Every fiber of her being suddenly seemed to melt. A tremendous shiver of relief passed from her scalp to her knees. Once again she had been delivered, and once again it was this proud and keen but murderous young chieftain who had caused her to be spared, for whatever his reasons.

She looked down at the dark hair of her baby girl, this child that was the only simple truth she could turn to: the daughter of Will Ingles. Mary placed her hand on the baby’s tiny arm, and its miniature hand closed around her thumb.

Mary looked up at the chieftain then. He was looking at the baby’s hand on Mary’s thumb.

Then he raised his eyes to Mary’s, and they stared at each other for several seconds, oblivious to the multitude of voices around them.

I wonder what his name is, she thought.

The thin Frenchman, whose name was LaPlante, in the next two days explained certain things that Mary had already partially deduced.

LaPlante was the one who had been throttled by the big British soldier. His windpipe was bruised and he was low in vigor and spirits, and so he stayed in the vicinity of the prisoners, talking with them as much as his tender voicebox and limited mastery of their language would allow. He was a trader, he said, not a military man, and one who is a trader values information as much as he values goods. Thus he explained his penchant for talking and listening.

As he understood it, Mary Ingles had been spared the gauntlet for one or both of two reasons: the death of the girl had satisfied the chief; and Mary was highly esteemed by the warrior chieftain who had brought her here. His name, LaPlante told her, was Captain Wildcat. He was a very much favored chieftain of the Shawnee warrior sept, likely to be a great chief someday.

The captive woman and children had been moved temporarily into a roomy open-sided hut near the center of the village. The men had been taken somewhere else. By pointing at the torn rags of clothing and making sewing notions, Mary had suggested to Captain Wildcat that her sewing basket should be returned to her, and she had assumed the duty of repairing the women’s clothes while their wounds were being nursed. While she sewed, LaPlante came by frequently to linger and attempt conversation. He watched her sew when he was not ogling Bettie’s nudity.

The gauntlet, he told her, was a manner of trial, an initiation,
for the prisoners, preliminary to their adoption by families of the tribe.