Follow the River (41 page)

Then they moved across the lip of the cliff, scooting and sliding rather than walking, afraid to stand up above the yawning chasm, afraid they would faint and fall off through space.

There were evergreen trees up here, dark green, carpeting the scrabbly soil with their fallen needles. The women sat for a while on this carpet, warmed by the sun, and seemed to be able to breathe more deeply up here than down in the confining, shadowy valley with its dank air. Up here the noise of the river was a whisper instead of a roar, and the sky was like new blue steel and seemed almost close enough to reach up and touch. Mary felt a strange lightness, almost an elation, and pressed herself tighter to earth against the feeling that she might simply float off in the wind. Strands of her hair blew across her face. She was startled by a voice.

It was Ghetel. It was the first thing Ghetel had said in days without first being spoken to. She said:

“I vant to be an iggle.”

Mary was pleased. Ghetel’s mind seemed somehow to have surfaced. “An eagle, eh?” she said, turning to her with a smile. “Aye. Likewise.”

Ghetel was grinning a strange, wild grin. “I vould fly down,” she said, in a crackling voice, holding her hands curved like talons; then she added, clamping the talons suddenly, very hard, on Mary’s upper arm: “and GET YOU!”
She grinned crazily and clutched and shook Mary’s arm, tugging and shoving at it with those bony, unbelievably strong fingers. The bell clanked with her motions. Mary was alarmed. The grip hurt, but Mary was afraid to struggle, on this high place, with a grinning, fierce-eyed woman who possibly believed herself to be an eagle. Mary forced a smile.

“And why would you
get
me?”

“Because … I am
hungry!
” She nodded violently, still wide-eyed, still clutching the arm.

“But I’m your friend.”

Ghetel shook the arm to and fro a moment, then said:

“You are bad.”

That surprised Mary. “Why am I bad?”

“Bad voman,” Ghetel said, squeezing the arm harder, “you ate your baby.”

Mary’s mouth fell agape. “What say you?”

Ghetel stuck her jaw forward so that her lower teeth were in front of the upper, and seesawed her jaw from side to side, wrinkling her nose. “You ate your baby. You had a baby. I know. Now it is all gone.”

Mary jerked her arm out of the clutch. “I did NOT!”

The hands grabbed her again. Mary pulled, shouting:

“I did no such a thing, madwoman!”

“Den
I
ate your baby.” She let go of Mary’s arm suddenly and looked sad. Mary tightened her other hand on the hickory stick to be ready, but hoped to talk Ghetel out of this spell. “Why’d you do that?” she asked.

“Hungry.”

“Eh, well.” Mary was frightened, but she was hurt and angry. She made her own left hand hard like an eagle’s claws and grabbed Ghetel’s arm and squeezed as tightly as she could, digging her broken, jagged fingernails in hard. “I am hungry, too,” she said in a harsh voice. “Remember that!”

Ghetel’s eyes suddenly went shrewd. She looked at Mary’s eyes until stared down, then looked down at Mary’s hand on her arm. “It hurts,” she said.

“Well I know.”

Ghetel winced, then put her hand on Mary’s hand and tried
to remove it. After a moment, Mary let go, and sat looking at Ghetel, alert.

The old woman seemed to have been subdued. She would not look in Mary’s eyes.

“So now,” Mary said. “Let’s get off this mountain and go on.”

And they did. But Mary could not shake the old woman’s crazed and awful words out of her mind.

Yesterday Mary had inquired why God had sent her, a decent woman, into hell.

And today Ghetel, speaking in unearthly tones on a mountaintop, had said Mary was a bad woman.

Because of the baby, she had said.

The old woman was tetched, of course.

But it is said that the tetched know God.

For a mile or so after coming down from the mountain that afternoon, they had comparatively easy going. They were in the inside of a bend in the river now, and the river had deposited a few hundred yards of silt and gravel along the base of a mountain. The other side of the river was another undercut cliff.

The curving beach was overgrown with shrubs and there was a low place where the mouth of a backwater had silted up; in this stale pool they found a stand of reeds, and hobbled over to pull them up and muck about for their roots. The yield, after they had all but turned the slough upside down, was a dozen black-skinned, finger-sized tubers which, when snapped in two, revealed white centers. They scraped off as much of the repulsive dark covering as they could, and then, teeth aching, they masticated the crunchy, tasteless flesh as if it were the finest delicacy. Two more of Ghetel’s front teeth came out in the mass, and she picked them out and put them on the ground. The longer they chewed the pulp, the bigger it became. Soon their shrunken stomachs were turgid with the mass they had swallowed; a few minutes of near-nausea followed, and they kept swallowing it back until it subsided. Mary had been unable to eat the last one of the tubers, and she secreted it in her hand for later as they left, smeared with
cold mud but almost happy, and continued up the bank toward the next bend in the river. Mary was singing, but just above a whisper.

Over the hush of wind and water they began detecting a low rumble.

It was a familiar sound, a dreaded sound. Ghetel looked terrified, and stopped where she stood on the narrow spit of land, shaking her head.

“Aye, another waterfall,” Mary said. “No fear. Likely we can climb right past this’n.” She was not going to make the mistake of getting wedged in as she had at the other falls, even if she had to climb a mile-high mountain to get around it.

As they worked their way into the bend of the river, they saw an enormous black bird swoop low over the shore a few yards ahead and disappear on the other side of a huge rock.

Eagle, Mary thought at first.

But then a shadow flickered over their path. Looking up, she saw another great dark bird, descending on graceful outstretched wings turned up at the tips. A buzzard.

It was a moment before she remembered the meaning of buzzards: there would be something dead up there.

“Hurry,” she said.

There were three buzzards there, hunched over something small, working on it, now and then pushing one another aside, beating each other with their wings, hobbling awkwardly on the flat rock. Beyond them, silhouetting them, was a vast, seething, churning pool of water and the right edge of a waterfall visible around the bend. Sunlight striking the rising mist made a fragment of rainbow at the river’s edge.

Mary plucked up her courage and hobbled over the rock shouting, “Hey, hey!” at the buzzards and swinging her stick. The birds arched their wings and stumbled about, then beat the air and rose off, one at a time.

The object of their attention lay near the edge of a slanting table of rock where it had been washed up: a little mass of dark fur, torn open to show tattered pale flesh and white bone. It appeared to have been a muskrat or some such thing, probably killed by a plunge over the waterfall. It was not
fresh, and the buzzards had been at it for a while, leaving little. It was tainted with the contents of its own shredded bowels. Mary squatted at the water’s edge and washed the little wreck of a carcass, and then with the sharp edge of a broken rock, extracted the little flesh the buzzards had left. This amounted to two or three ounces of flesh and organs for Ghetel and a like amount for herself.

There are some things I shan’t want to tell back home when I get there, Mary thought. Leaving my babe with a squaw, for one. And eating after buzzards.

But truly I’m not a bad woman, Heavenly Lord. Or thou’d not have give me meat.

Thank’ee, O Lord, she thought, remembering to give grace only after she had eaten.

This waterfall was as beautiful as the other had been fearsome. Perhaps it was the sunny day, the shaft of rainbow leaning above it. Perhaps it was that they were looking at it with a little something in their stomachs.

The river was wide here, came flowing broad and smooth down from a curve between gently sloping hills and then spilled twenty or thirty feet over the great crooked stone sill of the falls, foaming and misting and thundering onto the huge chunks of stone that had broken away and fallen in the pool at its base.

And this cascade would be easier to bypass. A heap of boulders lay where the falls swept past the shore, and these could be climbed to put the women on the upper level of the river. They lifted and pulled themselves up these and in ten minutes were above the falls.

The mountainside they were traversing now was steep but not precipitous, and they were able to walk upright most of the time, not having to hang on with their hands. They were passing through a magnificent forest of beech, hickory, oak and ash now, on a floor of dead leaves, now and then veering to skirt some massive outcropping of solid rock, green with moss and splotched with blue-green lichen.

They were shuffling through dry leaves on that forest floor, alongside just such a subtly colored bluff, when the strange sweating started. Mary felt her skin prickling all over. Her
vision blurred as sweat ran into her eyes. When she wiped her hand across her brow it came away wet. Cold drops were coursing down her flanks. Her face felt hot just under the skin but icy on the surface. And the hues of the mottled rocks faded suddenly, everything going white and shadowless. Her heartbeat was racing. Suddenly her knees went limber and she sat down abruptly. Her stomach hurt—no more than it had been hurting for weeks, but differently. It was as if someone were inside it stabbing outward with a sharp object. Her stomach contracted hard with each pain, making her bend forward. Ghetel had stopped beside her, and was looking down at her, but her face was not clear; it was as if in silhouette.

“Ghetel! I … I think we shouldn’t’ve et those roots. Ah! Ah! Share me th’ blanket, would y’ please? Oh! oh, dear heaven. You feel it too? Oh! OH!” She doubled over and her forehead touched her knees. Ghetel knelt by Mary and saw that she was shivering visibly. Her skin was white but splotched red, and covered with gooseflesh and a sheen of perspiration.

Ghetel knelt beside her, confused, and drew her inside the blanket with her. She held her there and looked around her at the trackless woods, the ranks of dark mountains stretching away up the rivercourse. When Mary was not moving ahead, Ghetel had no notion of where to go or what to do.

She knelt there and hugged the convulsing young woman to her, while the sun descended behind a ridge and left them in chilly blue shadows. The other shore of the river was bathed in a creamy, rosy glow of winter sunlight, and that glow dimished upward as the sun descended. It was during this time that Ghetel too began to wince with stomach pains and feel dizzy and wet. She slowly keeled over, drawing Mary to the ground with her, and they lay there on the leafy slope for a measureless time as the valley darkened. After a while they began feeling a powerful backing-up of pressure in their chests. Mary began heaving first, then Ghetel. Nothing was coming up, but their bodies were trying to get rid of the alien matter in their stomachs.

They retched dryly for a long time, retched and moaned,
shivering and drooling uncontrollably. Night came, unnoticed. There were blank spaces in time, then moments of feverish, shuddering wakefulness, then more cold blank spaces. Sometimes Mary would come to and be aware of Ghetel writhing beside her, of her own tripping heartbeat and stomach spasms, of the profuse watering from her mouth and nose, of the darkness and the cold, the sound of the river, the tilt of her body as she lay on the slope. Once she saw, or imagined she saw, the face of a wolf in the starlight a few feet away. Then she would dream of falling—soaring, rather—from high, bright places.

Her head ached. The stars were brilliant. There was a hard, heavy knot in her stomach, as if she had swallowed a stone, but she was no longer heaving. Her throat was raw and there was a dryness in her mouth, feeling like wool and tasting like soap. She had never in her life felt so weak and shaky. Her lower body felt as if it were full of hot water.

The poison of the roots, whatever they were, seemed to have spent itself, and she presumed that she would be all right now—though the bowels had yet to be heard from before she could say it was all over. Ghetel was sleeping, breathing heavily beside her, sometimes murmuring incoherent words. The blanket was in disarray. The ground was sparkling with frost and Mary’s legs were uncovered, stinging with cold. She tugged at the blanket until she and Ghetel both were covered as well as they could be, and the next awareness she had was of pale pink light over the mountain on the other side of the river. She could feel the damp cold coming up from the ground, permeating her flesh, making her bones ache. She lay there shivering, waiting for sufficient daylight to move by, and thought, trying to gather her understanding back to the place where it had been before the poisoning had dispersed her senses.

This, she remembered, was to have been the day when, if she had not yet seen a familiar landmark, she was going to try to cross this river and go back down the other bank to that other river that had beckoned so strongly to her premonitions, the river just above the first falls.

But how am I to do that when I’m doubtful I can even get me up off the ground? she thought. How can I cross the river here? It’s still wide and wild and I’ve not the strength to ride a log across. And we’re too close to the falls. We’d be dashed in the falls afore we’d get halfway across.

Maybe we could go back below the falls and put in a log and hang on it, she thought.

Nay, she argued. We’d be beat to death on the rapids. We might even get carried all the way down to the lower falls and over them. Put a log in this river and y’d have to go where the river takes it. It was some days to get from that falls to this one but I reckon if you were floatin’ a log y’d be swept back down to ’em in a few hours.

She felt the worst wave of helpless frustration she had experienced at any step along this endless, aching, soul-crushing journey.