Follow the River (17 page)

“Then tell me this,” she said after a while. “What
am
I to be paid for the shirts I make?”

LaPlante and Goulart glanced at each other. Though they did not look alike—Goulart being stocky with a large and lumpy nose, LaPlante thin and ferret-faced—Mary thought they seemed to be twins in their avaricious souls.

“We have talk on thees,” said Goulart. “We assure you, you will be pay well.”

“But yes,” exclaimed LaPlante.

“I sh’ld think so,” said Mary. “Otherwise, I sh’ld have no reason to sew shirts, should I?” They nodded, a little abashed. “Then what,” she said, “is my wage?”

“With each ten shirts you do,” said Goulart, “we pay you one fine wool blanket.”

Mary’s mouth dropped open, then she set her jaw. “Nay,” she said. “I’ll not sew for that!”

“It is late in summer,” Goulart said in a tone less friendly. “When the cold wind comes and the trees are naked, you and your children will count a blanket good pay.”

“Silvair not keeps one warm,” LaPlante said.

Mary saw the sense of it. “But not ten shirts,” she said. “Four.”

“Four! Sacre! Non! Eight, then.”

“Six.”

They looked at each other. They looked at the Indians who were gathering outside the hut to gaze at the cloth. Just then the chief’s son trotted by with a big smile on his face, his new shirt fluttering like a flag from the pole over his shoulder. They shrugged.

“Eh bien. Six.”

Goulart wanted to see the gold wedding band on Mary’s finger. It was only a narrow little band.

“I am remarkable that the Indians did not take this from you,” Goulart said.

“I’m glad they didn’t try,” she said. “It won’t come over the knuckle any more.”

“Sometime if that ees so, they will cut off the finger.”

She shivered. “Well, then I’m glad Cap’n Wildcat got no such an idee.”

“I would give you a blanket for that,” Goulart said.

“Nay. ’Twon’t come off.”

“We could get it off with bear fat.”

“Nay,” she said, more stern-voiced now. “I mean ’twon’t come off because I won’t
let
it come off.”

Goulart drew the corner of his mouth back and glanced at the ground. “Eh bien,” he said.

She began to wonder then whether Goulart was a man who might cut off a woman’s ring finger. She decided he could bear watching. He was a merchant, and therefore gold would mean more to him, she decided, than to an Indian.

Each new purchaser of a Mary Ingles checked shirt would parade proudly through the village exhibiting it. Mary became very industrious in the shirt-making business, working usually from dawn to dusk through the long August days, stopping only to commune several times a day with her children, talking to them about their father to keep them thinking of him. By the end of a week she had earned two blankets, one for herself and Bettie Elenor, and one to be shared by Tommy and Georgie. Then she started on a third half-dozen of the garments, with which she would secure a blanket for Bettie Draper. The Frenchmen were delighted with the arrangement. They were disposing of their cloth at a wonderful profit in silver and hides and war booty.

Bettie became less sullen when she saw the practical yield of Mary’s activity. Already there had been two unseasonably cool nights, one of them dank and rainy, to impress on her the providence of Mary’s business.

One afternoon when she was sewing in the shade, Captain Wildcat’s voice came through the murmur of town sounds. He was nearby, and she looked up quickly for him.

He was standing in the street outside the trading post, talking to Goulart. He had come to buy a shirt, and with him was one of his warriors who also wanted one of the prestigious garments.

While Wildcat talked with Goulart about the price of shirts, he glanced frequently into the shadows toward her. It was strange how he looked at her now. She had never seen fear in his face and never had expected to, but now what was in his face looked a little like fear, or timidity at least.

No one else had ever looked at her quite that way—except Will. She had gone to the mountains very young, and she had never been courted by anyone but Will because there had been no one else at Draper’s Meadows to court her. Will had looked at her with just such timidity during the days when he was getting ready to ask for her hand. She had realized then that he had looked fearful because he had been afraid she might refuse him. It had been the only time she had ever realized that a woman could have any kind of power over a man. Timidity, she remembered, had looked odd on Will Ingles because he was a fearless man.

Timidity now looked odd on Captain Wildcat, and for the same reason. He looked like a shy boy now, not like a strong, bold savage who dealt in lives and deaths and would be chief. Mary almost smiled at this, but it was too serious in its consequences. She was in no position to make light of his yearnings.

Wildcat was naked except for his breechclout and moccasins and jewelry. Even his sinewy, shapely muscled legs were hairless. They were oiled against insects and they gleamed with reflected sunlight, as hard and smooth as cast iron.

Even I got hairier legs than that man, she thought.

Wildcat and his warrior had brought familiar things to barter for the shirts, and the sight of these made her jaw clench.

The warrior had brought her own pewter tea kettle, one of her wedding gifts from her mother. A tea kettle was not enough for a fine and prestigious shirt, in Goulart’s estimation,
and so the Indian also produced a bullet-mold, which she recognized as Will’s.

Damn you, she thought, looking at the warrior’s face. This was the Indian who had held the point of his knife on her belly the day of the massacre. Mary had a notion that she might barter separately and directly with the Frenchman to get the tea kettle back in her own possession but decided she would not, because the need for blankets was more urgent.

Wildcat had brought Colonel Patton’s huge broadsword to exchange for a blue and white shirt. Its blade was brown with rust now and tarnished with the blood it had spilled on that day. The beheading of Phil Barger flashed in Mary’s mind, and she turned away and would not look at the weapon again.

A shadow came across her sewing.

“Coat must … hold Wildcat good,” she heard the chieftain say. He had completed the purchase arrangements and now stood inside the hut, towering over her, feet wide apart in that stance men take to make themselves look brave, looking down at her, expressionless. He was standing under the highest part of the roof, at its front edge, but his head was almost touching it.

“I beg your pardon?” Mary said.

He did not understand this. “What you do?” he responded. Neither was understanding the other’s words, and the resolution in Wildcat’s face was beginning to crumble into confusion.

“What did you say about a coat?” she asked him.

“This,” he said, pointing to the flannel, “you make …” He then drew the fingertips of both his hands from his shoulders down to his hips “…  be like Wildcat.”

“Fit,” interjected Goulart from one side, “he mean it have to
fit
him
tres bien
.”

“Oh, he’s a dandy, is ’e now? Eh, well.” She put off her lap the garment she had been sewing, gathered her legs under her and stood up. Under the low, slanting roof she had to stand very close to him, and, as if afraid of her nearness, he stepped backward, bumping the table. It was an unusually clumsy move for him, and she smiled, enjoying his embarrassment. She picked up a piece of ribbon she had been using
as a measuring tape. She advanced on him and he leaned backward against the table.

Goulart had gone out into the street and was showing the long sword to bystanders. Otter Girl sat back in the shadows, nursing the white baby and covertly admiring Wildcat.

“Hold y’rself still,” Mary told him, and raised the ribbon to his left shoulder with one hand. He shied from it. “Be still,” she said. She knew he understood that; he had said it to her so often. Then she stretched the ribbon down along his arm to his wrist, and at that point pinched the ribbon and then marked it with a bit of chalk from her sewing basket. She saw that gooseflesh had risen on his brawny brown arm where she had touched him. He had a good, clean, musky smell. “Now be still again,” she said. She stretched the tape across his chest from shoulder to shoulder. He was all gooseflesh now, and his little dark brown nipples stood hard as if he were cold. “Gettin’ stirred, are ye, chief?” she muttered with a nasty little half-smile, and he responded:

“What you said?”

“Never mind, chief.” She wanted to laugh; the urge was for a laughter of bitterness and mockery.

He could see that she was about to laugh at him, and the look that flashed through his dark eyes at the moment she glanced up was a desperate, angry, insulted look. He was not a man to be mocked. She knew that, and she knew that she had fared so well in captivity because she had never annoyed him. The way he felt about her—whatever strange way that might be—could still determine her fate; she knew that quite well. And so, thankful that Bettie was not here to see this, she suddenly stared into Wildcat’s eyes with a serious intensity, which she meant only to show him that she did not mean to mock him.

It transformed him. The timidity, the hurt, vanished from his countenance and now his face was hawkishly earnest; his irises suddenly went deep and limpid, as if a reptile had opened the protective veil over its eyes.

“Hear,” he said in a voice low and intense. “White mo-ther is good blood. Children good blood. Come with Wildcat to Kispoko Town.” He pointed northward, up the river.

To Mary, farther up the river meant farther from Draper’s Meadows. That alone was enough to make her shake her head.

Wildcat’s eyelids hardened; his nostrils flared. Then he softened his glare and grasped her upper right arm firmly. She looked down at his hand and kept looking at it. She did not like to be touched by this man. It unsettled her.

“Wildcat will be,” he said, and then his next words shocked her like a blow: “…  the father of your sons. They will be sons of a chief.”

Aye, she thought after the flash of indignation had cooled down inside her, leaving her weary and almost ready to agree to anything that would mean security for her children and herself. Aye, one could go along with such an offer, I reckon, as there’s no other choice to speak of but slavery or maybe death. There’d be no shame in it really, now would there?

Captives often became squaws; she’d heard of many. And this Captain Wildcat was no ordinary repulsive Indian to her; he was noble enough, for what he was, and he would be important in his tribe, and she and her children, she felt confident, would be well honored and cared for if she agreed to his desires.

Oh, not to worry about one’s fate day by day, she thought with a heavy longing. Just to give up. One could be comfortable. One could …

He was still holding her upper arm, firmly but not hurtingly; she was still looking down at his hand on her arm. She sensed Otter Girl’s attention behind her. But the girl could not understand their words.

Mary brought her left hand up slowly across her bosom now, the ribbon still pinched between thumb and forefinger, to put her hand on the hard, hairless brown wrist of the hand that held her. And as she brought her hand up, the sunlight reflecting from the bright outdoors glinted on the little gold band on her finger.

She took a deep breath. She put the heel of her hand on his wrist and shoved his hand away, still not looking at his face, just at her own hand now.

Bright yellow light flooded her eyes. His dark silhouette
had vanished from between her and the sunbeaten street. He was gone.

She stood looking at the ribbon for minutes. The sounds of the town, the voices, the barking dogs, which she had not been hearing for all those minutes, began filling her ears gradually as if she were approaching the village from a silent place out in the woods.

She took hold of the other end of the ribbon with her other hand and held the ribbon horizontally in front of her.

His shoulders are this wide, she thought.

During that week several war parties came in with white prisoners. Mary saw the wretches from a distance as they were led to the stakes. And each following day she would find herself alone in the trading post when the town’s whole population would gather on the far side of the council lodge for the formation of the gauntlet. She would sew diligently, concentrating on her work, sometimes humming songs aloud to shut out the excited murmuring and wailing of the distant crowd and, especially, the chilling screams of its victims. The people of the Shawnee Town seemed never to tire of this cruel entertainment; only the feeble and sick excused themselves from it. Captives who had come earlier and had already endured the gauntlet were kept away from it. The Shawnees were skillful, Mary noted, at keeping their white captives separated in small groups. Even though she now enjoyed a degree of freedom to pass through some parts of the town, she never came within speaking distance of any whites other than Bettie and the old widow and the children. On two separate days she saw Henry Lenard at the far end of the street with the other white men who had been in the same circle of captives a week before. They were carrying rails, burdened as heavily as slaves.

As the village population swelled with the influx of war parties and prisoners, there was a detectable stir of anticipation. Long councils were held almost every day in the central lodge. LaPlante and Goulart would come from those councils full of vivid war stories they had heard. Men, some red, a few white, and some who could have been either, rode into the
town on lathered horses and went directly to the lodge. Mary guessed they were couriers bringing war news. Parties of warriors would ride or strut up the streets, some of them with bound wounds, bringing no prisoners but displaying grisly scalps at the top of long poles—in virtually the same spirit, Mary thought, as the town bucks exhibiting her checked shirts.

“Bettie,” she exclaimed one evening. “That Otter Girl today went to stand in the line to whip prisoners. When she come back there was blood on her hands, even specks of it on her face an’ ’er dress … and sweet as y’ please she picked up Bettie Elenor an’ took ’er to ’er bosom as tender as ever I do. How can … how can the same person …”