Follow the River (16 page)

“You, Madame,” he said, “you are, ah, you are
deja preuve
… how does one say … 
worth-ee
. M’sieu Wildcat say thees.”

Mary glanced into the hut. Bettie sat there, in profile. She had slept on her stomach or remained sitting ever since the running of the gauntlet. She could not bear to rest on her back, even though the squaw came in and refreshed the ointment on her back several times a day. The squaw had also taken over the care of Bettie’s arm, which was healing very slowly.

Bettie had not met Mary’s eyes since the day of the gauntlet, and had said nothing to her.

“I sh’ld rather been whipped by these people, than accused by my own,” Mary murmured, talking more to herself than to the Frenchman.

“Eh bien,” LaPlante said, then leaned close with an earnest look on his face. He was watching as she put the finishing touches on Bettie’s dress. “Madame, I will say now, I propose to do commerce with you.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t get your drift a-tall, sir.”

“We will do, how you say, partners. Ecoutez, Madame: Goulart and I, we ’ave, ah, ah … 
bolts
… oui, bolts … of good cloth, with a … a …” He squinted with his effort to find the word. “Un moment,” he said, raising a forefinger and getting to his feet. He disappeared. Mary shook her head and continued sewing. She stole a glance at Bettie, catching her glowering in her direction. What the devil d’ye suppose is in her mind now? she thought. Likely condemning me now for traffiking with enemies …

Far up the street, she heard Tommy yelp in delight. He and Georgie had been taken into the company of a group of little Indian boys of the village, six of them about their own age who belonged to three tribal families, and had been playing for hours with them. To the delight of the village bucks, Tommy and Georgie were holding their own in the running and throwing games they had learned on the trail. They could be distinguished at a distance by their whiteness. Like the
Indian boys, they were naked. Their rags of clothing lay beside Mary, along with the dress of old Ghetel, waiting to be repaired.

Mary was not sure now that the old woman’s name was Ghetel. Each time she would address her as Ghetel, the old woman would raise her hand and say, “Nah, nah! Not Ghetel,
Ghetel!
” She would display her front teeth and press her tongue tip against her palate as she said it, and would point at her mouth with a gnarled forefinger.

“Ghetel,” Mary would say.

“Ghetel!”

“Ghetel.”

“Ach. Ghetel,” the old woman would shrug, and then Mary would shrug and return to her sewing.

Now a shadow fell over Mary and when she looked up LaPlante and the other Frenchman, Goulart, stood before her. They each held one end of a bolt of checked cloth. “Thees,” said LaPlante.

Behind the two traders stood a dozen or more Indians, men and women and girls who were admiring the material. The traders set the bolt on end and LaPlante turned down a corner of the fabric for Mary to rub between her fingers. It was a soft and strong flannel, very luxurious to the touch. The checks were bright blue and a clean, clear white.

“But what’s this t’do with me?” Mary asked.

“Would sew shirt, eh? Make shirt. We would sell shirt to them.” He inclined his head toward the gathering Indians, whose desire for the bright cloth was evident. “Very good, ah, price. For you, for us.” Mary continued to look from LaPlante to Goulart and back, saying nothing. She had been too long and too recently involved in the survival of herself and her family to think yet about business.

“They say you are fine squaw,” said Goulart, who was easier to understand than LaPlante. “A squaw is very useful. If useful, she is important. Alors, to have importance is to be treated well. It can be the, the
difference
.” It was as if he had read her mind about the matter of surviving and had connected it for her to the matter of business. The future of the captives was still an unknown.

“Very well, then,” she said in a low voice, that Bettie might not hear. “We are in business.”

When Mary worked with needle and thread and shears, her thoughts would flow through her like a song that changed but never ended. She thought much about Draper’s Meadows, because most of the sewing she had ever done she had done there. And she thought much about Will, because most of her sewing had been for Will. She wondered often what William would say about this business she was in, and what he would say about her partnership with the Frenchmen.

They are only traders, she thought. They’re not the kind of Frenchmen who bring Indians to kill us. Will’s a most practical man, she thought. He does what’s best for everybody and doesn’t waste his mind on thoughts of enemies. He’s not ever made an enemy as I know of. Even when he was constable at Roanoke.

Now Johnny, he’s a different sort. A hotspur, and will let a grudge color his judgment.

I’m more like Will, she thought. That’s a reason we’re married good.

Married
, she thought.

The sun-flecked white and blue of the flannel she was working on filled her vision.

I wonder how Will Ingles would look in a blue and white checked shirt, she thought. Pretty fancy! She smiled down at the cloth.

She remembered him as he looked when he would raise his arms to pull on a gray homespun shirt. She remembered his powerful thick trunk, thin white skin over hard muscle, and the reddish-brown hair all down the front of him. She remembered how his belly button would look, winking out through that belly-hair for a moment before the shirt would come down and hide it.

She remembered how his hairy belly felt against the skin of her belly: like a thousand little caresses just before his whole weight would settle on her and the bigger caress would start inside her.

Her loins remembered William and suddenly she was desolate
and empty and bittersweet inside, and the blue and white pattern of the cloth shimmered and blurred.

She had to stop sewing for a minute.

After a few days the Frenchmen began taking Mary each morning to their trading post, near the center of the village. The post was another open-sided shelter, facing the street. In corners of the building there were several barrels and kegs, some metal cooking pots and kettles, boxes of knives and steel tomahawks and axes, a few muskets, a stack of gray woolen blankets and assortments of buttons, colorful glass beads and mirrors. There was also a great musky pile of pliant, well-cured deerskins and buffalo hides.

The Frenchmen had built a long puncheon table and placed it across the open front of the hut, to conduct their trade over, and Mary could lay the cloth down on this table to cut it without getting it dusty. That was why they had begun bringing her to the trading post. She would come over with the baby on her back, and while she was not sewing shirts she would nurse the baby. LaPlante had an Indian squaw, a girl of perhaps eighteen years, plump and pretty and easily incited to fits of strange, tearful giggling. Her name was An-Otter-Swimming-On-Its-Back, but she was called simply the Otter Girl. She had had LaPlante’s baby a few weeks ago but the little half-breed had been feeble and had died. She was morose. She was a Chahlagawtha Shawnee whom LaPlante had married in a bigger Shawnee town many miles north where the Chahlagawtha sept lived. The Otter Girl at once fell in love with the baby white girl and wanted to know her name. Soon she was taking care of the little girl, fulfilling her own frustrated motherly instincts, cooing to her and fondling her while Mary worked, and calling her Bay-tee Ali-no.

Mary listened while she worked, and learned everything she could learn about where she was and what might happen in the future. The chieftain named Captain Wildcat, she learned, was from the Kispokothas, who were in charge of things pertaining to war in the Shawnee nation. This village in which they were now sojourning was called Lower Shawnee Town, and the river on whose bank it stood was called Scioto-cepe, the Scioto River.
Because of its location near the O-y-o River and its importance as a trading center, Lower Shawnee Town was inhabited by Shawnees of all the five septs, but it was predominantly a Maykujay Shawnee town; the old white-haired chief was a Maykujay. The Maykujays, Mary learned, were healers and seers and makers of magic.

Mary learned that the Shawnees as a nation were newcomers to the valley of the O-y-o. Years before, she learned, they had been driven from their ancestral lands in Virginia and Carolina by the Cherokee and Choctaw nations. They had gone northward then into lands on the upper O-y-o. They had lived there a few years until Englishmen came in and settled and drove out the game and called that land Pennsylvania. And now the Shawnees were here. They had become allied with the Frenchmen against the Englishmen, they said, because they were tired of being pushed back from one place to another and did not intend to give up these lands of the O-y-o valley.

Mary did her best to learn these strange names and facts, because she sensed that she and her family were not through being moved around and imperiled, and that anything she might learn about places and about the feelings of the Indians might be useful in keeping them alive. She sewed and listened to the Otter Girl chortling to the baby and repeated the names over and over in her mind.

She was surprised at the variety and complexity of the Indians’ civilization. The people seemed generally happy, always busy. In reality, Mary had to admit, their life seemed easier and more diverse than the hard, spare life in the white settlements.

Otter Girl was beginning to absorb little Bettie Elenor into her own existence the same way the bucks had absorbed Tommy and Georgie into theirs. While Mary was sewing, swimming in the river of her dreams and fears, she would become aware now and then of Otter Girl’s melodious voice softly murmuring endearments and lullabys to the baby, and she would look up from her needlework and see the baby’s ivory-white skin against the flushed-umber skin of Otter
Girl’s torso, held close and lovingly against the squaw’s swollen, dark-nippled breasts. Mary was both comforted and disturbed by this bond she saw developing before her own eyes. That the infant was being showered with caresses and gentle voice-music that she herself could not give it during the work hours was a very good thing; she could tell that the baby would grow secure and quiet under such care. It was a far cry from the harsh and miserable circumstance of its birth in the woods. But sometimes Mary’s own breast would ache for the baby Otter Girl was holding.

And then late one somnolent afternoon, when sunlight through the trees was dappling that tender scene, making trembling blue shadows on their velvet skin, Mary looked up and saw one slight, natural motion that made her heart plummet to the pit of her stomach:

Little Bettie Elenor was puckering and rounding her miniature red mouth; Otter Girl shifted the infant slightly on her arm and with her other hand cupped her breast and pressed its turgid nipple against the seeking mouth.

The baby attached itself instantly to this offering, drawing and smacking with relish, and Otter Girl’s eyes glittered and her face melted into blissful repose.

The white face and the brown breast. And yet, Mary knew, they were now one. The Shawnee milk nourishing the English child.

Something between sadness and outrage told her to jump up and seize the baby from the squaw’s embrace.

But stronger than that was the realization that she could not bear to separate them at such a moment.

For a while she tried to sew through a blue and white shimmer of tears. But gradually it became easier to bear.

Y’ve known this would come to happen, she told herself. It’ll be best f’r us all, finally, I just know it.

But God help me if Bet ever saw it.

The first shirt Mary finished was for a buck who was the son of the village chief. He bartered for it with narrow bracelets that looked like pewter. Mary watched the transaction. The Indian wanted to give the Frenchmen one bracelet for the
shirt. Goulart insisted on three bracelets. After a great deal of arm-waving by Goulart and solemn head-shaking by the Indian, Goulart took two bracelets and gave the Indian his shirt. The Indian broke into a broad smile then, slipped a long, slim pole in one sleeve of the shirt and out the other and then, yipping with delight, trotted down the street waving the shirt like a banner, showing off his rare new possession.

“Tres bien,” Goulart said, grinning to LaPlante. He bent to show the bracelets to Mary, then gave one of them to LaPlante. “Argent,” he said.

“What?” Mary asked.

“Argent,” said LaPlante. “Ah, silvair.”

“Silver?”

“Oui. Somewhere the Shawnee find silvair in the earth,” Goulart said. “Only their chiefs know the place.”

Mary thought about that. “Then you trade for silver, do ye?”

“Pas beaucoup. A little. Most they pay in furs. But not thees, ahm, season.”

Mary thought some more. “Is a checked shirt really worth two silver bracelets?” she said.

The Frenchmen looked at each other and grinned. They began chuckling, low in their throats. “A shirt,” said Goulart then, “is worth what one will pay for a shirt. That, Madame, ees commerce.”

She thought some more. “Would the Shawnee pay two bracelets for just the cloth?”

Goulart shrugged. “Peut-etre … Non. No. Maybe one.”

“Then,” she said, “I reckon y’ll be a-payin’ me one of those bracelets for
making
the shirt?”

“Heu!” LaPlante exclaimed, then laughed. “Madame, that ees no’ commerce!”

Mary looked at them through hard-edged eyelids. “And why’s it not, pray?”

Goulart thought awhile. “Because, Madame, because you have no use for silvair here. And you will be here. Toujours.”

“What is that, ‘too-zhoo?’ ”

“That, Madame, is ‘always.’ ”

Dogs barked somewhere. A whiff of roasting meat drifted
in. A fly came and walked on Mary’s arm. She could hear the voices of Indian children at play. For a few moments she had been wondering if she might make enough as a shirtmaker to buy freedom for herself and her family. The possibility had gleamed like a thin beam of sunlight through a chink in a wall.