Follow the River (19 page)

This business continued for more than an hour, and the dwindling knot of captives stood mournfully in the middle of the lodge, awaiting fates they could not understand. No more were tied up and painted black, and the two who had been remained lashed to the posts. The soldier glared defiantly around, watching everything, his pale eyes stark and ferocious in contrast to the blackened face. The other kept his eyes closed and muttered constantly to himself.

At last Wildcat got up, and by this time the ony prisoners left standing in the arena were those from Draper’s Meadows: Mary, with her baby on her back, Bettie, Tommy and Georgie, and Henry Lenard.

Mary looked down at Georgie. The boy was gazing at Wildcat with the kind of wide-eyed admiration and trust he had always beamed upon his own father. She glanced back and down at Tommy, who was gazing likewise. She heard Henry clear his throat nearby.

Wildcat went to Henry first. He pointed at him and began to speak. Today Captain Wildcat was the finest sort of Indian. There was nothing human about him today, nothing hesitant or shy or warm or humorous; he was a war chief of tomorrow, standing straight as a plank, glowing in a beautiful new blue and white shirt, slicked raven hair gleaming in the skylight
from the smokehole above, filling the air with thundering words, with well-timed pauses, with graceful sweeps and powerful thrusts of his hands. Mary wondered what there could be about the culling of a slaveherd that would require such epic eloquence.

And the worst of it was that, for the first time, his oratory seemed never to refer to her. Not once had he glanced her way. Two warriors came to the center of the room and accompanied Henry away. He did not look back.

Then Wildcat stood by Bettie. He talked for a minute about her, then pointed to a round-faced Indian man of about fifty. The chief nodded and said, “Oui-sah.” That, Mary remembered, meant “good.” It was the only word she had understood through this whole transaction.

Wildcat grasped Bettie’s left arm and disengaged Tommy’s hand from hers. He pointed to the round-faced man.

“Go. Him.”

Bettie’s eyes widened, faltered, searched Mary’s face. They glittered with sudden tears while her mouth seemed to try to form a question. Mary suddenly had the awful notion that she and Bettie would never see each other again. And Bettie’s stricken expression seemed to say that she understood that too. At once they lurched toward each other and embraced. Neither was able to get a word out past the little strangling noises in the top of her throat. Then Bettie was pulled away. She went away into the gloom, an indistinct shape veiled by a sudden flow of hot tears. Tommy and Georgie were both piping questions Mary was too stunned to hear.

Mary raised her arm and put her face against the upper sleeve of her dress to dry the tears and mucus that had so suddenly poured from her eyes and nose. Above her own snuffling she could hear Wildcat talking.

When she had gotten herself under control, LaPlante was standing beside her. “Pas de rien,” he was saying. “Pas de rien, Madame. You will be, ah, with
us
. In the store. Our, ah, partner. We ’ave,
arranged
so.”

Anger and disgust brought her voice back to her. “
Bought
me,” she snapped.

“Ehhhh …” LaPlante shrugged. But his eyes fell. Then he
looked at her again with a blazing smile. “So come, eh? We make shirts, eh?” He grasped her upper arm and, with a bow to Wildcat and the chiefs, started to lead her out of the square.

She understood, rationally, that once again she had been exceedingly lucky, that she had survived this latest perilous reckoning probably better than anybody. She was not to be put to death; she was not to be taken away to still another unknown place; she had not been given in concubinage to some savage stranger. But even this kind of fortune was not enough to outweigh her deep sense of insult: she had been
sold
, sold like a slave.

And a part of the insult, it shocked her to realize—she rushed to put it out of her mind—was that it was Wildcat, her protector and advocate in this alien world, this man who had spared her the running of the gauntlet, this man who had looked at her one sun-gilded evening on the O-y-o River with some deep personal thoughtfulness, this man who once had looked at her with admiration, even tenderness, and had said she was
oui-sah
, good; this man who once had held her arm and offered her a proposal; it was this man who had now simply
sold her off
, as if she were of no importance to him. He did not want her if she did not want him. And she was immediately ashamed of herself for having felt hurt by it.

She lifted her chin and looked coldly at Wildcat’s eyes. He stood between Tommy and Georgie. He held each by one hand. His chiseled face gleamed in the white light from above and the look in his eyes was hidden in shadow. For just an instant they held each other’s gaze, hers indignant, his inscrutable, and she reached slowly toward her sons. “Come,” she said to them, still staring at Wildcat’s face.

“No,” Wildcat said quietly.

She squinted up at him. “What?”

“No,” he repeated.

She looked down, confused, her hands still reaching for her sons’. Wildcat turned his head and spoke three syllables over his shoulder. A brave appeared behind him and took the boys by their arms and hauled them back out of the circle. Mary’s eyes went rapidly from them to Wildcat’s impassive face, then
back to them, then returned to his face, confused and beseeching.

“Will be Kispokotha Shawnees,” Wildcat said. “I take.”

LaPlante and Goulart were standing behind Mary. They saw her begin to shake and crouch. She was either going to scream or get sick or attack Wildcat. They understood that she would do no good for herself, or them, with an outburst in the great council lodge. So LaPlante nodded to Goulart, and Goulart nodded to LaPlante, and each grabbed her under an arm. LaPlante clapped his hand over her mouth. They carried her swiftly, her toes just brushing the dirt floor, out of the lodge and into the misty rain.

They did not have to fight her.

She had fainted.

They rushed down the street toward their trading post with her limp body between them. From the rig on her back came the thin, purling wail of her baby, Bettie Elenor, whom Wildcat had not wanted. The baby had been jostled awake and was hungry. They gave her to Otter Girl when they got to the trading hut. Otter Girl stuck a ruddy nipple in her mouth and smiled down at her, and the two Frenchmen sat on the floor flanking their unconscious partner, the shirtmaker, ready to do whatever they might have to do to deal with her when she revived.

The salt of tears had finally scoured her vision. She saw everything in clear, hard outline now, no longer through a mist of hope, trust or sentiment. Her heart was as small and cold and heavy as a bullet. When Wildcat had taken her children away from her to Kispoko town, he at last had made her invulnerable.

Two days after the council in the great lodge, the Indians took the two black-painted prisoners to a clearing north of the town and tied them standing to posts. The men were naked and had been scrubbed by squaws with sand and gravel in a creek until their hides were pink. They had been purified for the ritual of dying.

Their wrists had been bound behind them, then attached by five-foot tethers which allowed them to walk around the posts. Around each post the town squaws had built perimeters of kindling wood, stacked waist high. They had also sharpened thirty or forty slender fifteen-foot poles, then laid them on the ground, radiating out like wheel spokes, their pointed ends in the kindling. This was the arrangement when Mary was brought into the clearing, along with townspeople, to witness the executions.

The sun had come out. It drew at the moisture left by two days of rain and the air was thick and humid. Mary’s dress was sweat-soaked and stuck to her skin. Sweat ran in tiny courses down the dark and gleaming back of a brave who stood in front of Mary. She was determined not to watch what was to happen at the stakes. Although they would not let her leave, she intended to look at the back of the Indian, not at the condemned prisoners. They could not make her look. She had seen enough, in the massacre, at the gauntlet and at the prisoner market, to convince her that she had descended into hell. Somehow, without dying, she had come to hell. These Shawnee Indians were demons, and she had been fooled several times by their few little gestures of patience and good humor. But she could not understand what sins she was suffering for; she had never harmed anyone in her life, nor broken a commandment. She had never been proud nor gluttonous nor envious beyond those little degrees an ordinary person falls to day by day.

Squaws were carrying torches out to ignite the circles of firewood now. The crowd was silent, waiting.

No. Those two are truly in hell, she thought. I must be instead in purgatory. She had heard purgatory mentioned in preachments and had never understood it, but now she seemed to understand it. And she had never thought hell and
purgatory could be in the same place, but it seemed they were here.

Watching the sweat stream down the Indian’s back, she heard the kindling begin to crackle. Here and there in the crowd, voices whooped, male and female. The big soldier’s voice burst forth with a powerful string of oaths, against bloody heathens, against greasy squaws; then the oaths stopped and were followed by a quavering bellow of agony. Mary smelled woodsmoke and felt the heat from the flames even here. The Indians around her fell back a pace or two. It was a hot day for such a hot spectacle. The Indian’s back was not blocking Mary’s view now, and for an instant she saw the soldier writhing against the pole, trying to press back against it to get as far as possible away from the perimeter of fire. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut; his teeth were bared in a grimace. The flames were scarcely visible in the bright sunlight; the firewood was turning black, and the naked man’s figure was distorted by the updraft of heated air. Gray smoke piled into bright sky.

Mary shut her eyes and shrank backward into the crowd. Then she had to open them again because of waves of vertigo that made her fear she would fall.

The kindling had already fallen to gray and pink coals, still sending up a shimmering curtain of hot air. The soldier was on his hands and knees now, making a wet, grunting noise as he tried to cough out his scorched lungs. His hair was gone. Huge, glistening blisters had raised all over his body. The Indians were all yelling now, and squaws were stooping to pick up the long poles. Holding them by the outer ends, they began jabbing at the man’s blisters with the smouldering points of the poles. Mary turned and wove among the spectators to get out of the circle, closing her throat to keep from gushing vomit. The Indians were now too absorbed to heed her.

She found her way back to the trading post. There was no one in the town. Off in the distance the blended voices of the crowd made a low hum, and now and then a high shriek would come to her. Probably they were at work on the second man by now.

Mary put Bettie Elenor to her breast now and sat rocking to and fro on her haunches, scarcely conscious of what she was doing. Flies buzzed. The baby sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed. Mary ran the thoughts of hell and purgatory through her mind again and again.

Finally she decided that those were vague and fuzzy thoughts, like hope and trust. The reality was that she was here on this earth and her husband was on this same earth, four or five hundred miles away across a mountain range, at the far end of a wilderness river, and that the only thing to be done if she were to continue her life as a real human being was to go there, where her husband was, to get there somehow or perish in the attempt.

Wildcat was gone out her life now, and she did not have to worry any more about pleasing him or displeasing him. She did not have to worry any more about whether she was going to be his squaw. She did not have to bother her head any more with the delicate and unspeakable doubt about whether she would have liked being his squaw. He had given her but one chance to accept him and had been too proud to claim her after she had refused. He had simply taken her sons from her, getting in that way the precious Ingles blood he had come to covet so, and had cast her away like a bean-pod.

She had been such a fool to care what he wanted or did, she thought now, such a fool, and in a way it seemed to her that she had been unfaithful to Will by even considering Wildcat’s desires.

She had really never needed Wildcat anyway; she had only thought she had, she rationalized now. Through her own industry and her own character, she could have become important enough here in Shawnee Town to be her own protector.

I could do that yet, she thought. But I’m not going to. I’m no Shawnee, nor ever will be. I’m Mrs. William Ingles.

I turned aside from ’ee in my heart, William Ingles, just a wee mite aside—not so’s y’d ever known it anyways, but a wee mite—but I’ll make it up to ye, William, I swear I’ll do that. I’ll come home. I’ll come home, and you and I somehow we’ll get our sons back, or have new ones, and we’ll make a
new house like our old one, but with two doors ’stead o’ one, and I’ll work ’longside o’ ye in the grain, as I always did, and someday we’ll buy us some good checked flannel and I’ll make ’ee a fine shirt to wear. I’ll come home, Will. I’m no Shawnee squaw nor French merchant. I’m Mrs. William Ingles.

She began reviewing landmarks in her memory, trying to fix them again, as one tries to remember a waking dream before it fades.

I must think of them every day, she advised herself. If they jumble together in my head I’ll have no chance at all.

Her heartbeat began to accelerate.

I could walk away from here now, she thought. She looked around the trading hut. There were tomahawks and blankets here. There was corn and dried meat. There were moccasins and hides.

And there were no two sons or sister-in-law here now to stay for, no attachments. The only things to detain her were the hazards of getting away from the Shawnee town undetected, and getting across the O-y-o, and then those hundreds of unmarked miles to go …