Follow the River (42 page)

There’s just nought to do but go on up this one and find a ford, she thought. It’s just another o’ these eternal walk-arounds, and from the looks o’ this river it could well be a hundred-mile walk-around.

The night’s sickness had left them so weak and cold and shaky that they had to support each other when they finally arose with the dawn and started on up the river bank. They trudged awkwardly along, the blanket drawn over their shoulders, leaning on each other, their legs limber and wobbly, hands palsied, and sometimes when one started to cave in, the other could hold her up, but as often as they held each other up, they brought each other down.

The toil of moving eventually worked out the shaky hollowness left by the poison and replaced it with the old familiar aches. About midmorning Mary’s bowels got out of control and she squatted moaning by the wayside every few minutes, groaning and spewing out the scouring fluid, while wave after wave of shivers ran down from her temples to her thighs.

As if following Mary’s leadership even in this, Ghetel was soon having to stop every hundred yards to suffer the same miserable scouring. Each such stop left them feeling colder and more exhausted. There was an eerie kind of lightheadedness
now, and a distortion of time, as if the roots had drugged them. Mary would look at an object, a tree or a chunk of rock, a few hundred feet ahead; then she would walk, her mind full of thoughts as light and formless as clouds, for what seemed an hour, and then when she became aware of the object again it would seem to be no closer. Thus when afternoon found them too exhausted to go another step, Mary had no notion of how far they had come. They sat down in leaves with their backs against the sunny side of a rock that sheltered them from the cold breeze. In minutes they were warm and lethargic, and slumped into a dazed sleep. When Mary awoke, the sun had slid low into the valley downriver. Most of the queasiness and disequilibrium was gone now and Mary saw every detail of the landscape with knife-keen clarity. Her heart had ceased its dreadful racing and tolled slowly, solemnly in her breast now like a muffled bell.

When she stood up it was not as if she were stronger—she was too empty to feel stronger—but was as if her body had become as light as a summer garment. The pain in her feet and her joints was still there, but it seemed to be coming from a greater distance and thus, like a faraway sound, diminished.

“I’d say this. That partic’lar root’s one delicacy I can do without, from this day on.” Her voice sounded strange after all the silence, a clear, thin wisp of a voice that was absorbed by the vast outdoor hush. She looked over at Ghetel, who was beginning to stir, awakened perhaps by Mary’s voice. Ghetel looked at her, blinking rapidly in the light, smiled weakly, raised her eyebrows and shut her eyes again and lowered her chin onto her chest. “Nay,” Mary said. “Y’re awake now; it’s up we go.” Ghetel grumbled. Mary took her hand and coaxed her to her feet and they continued up the shore, two women under one blanket, looking rather like a misshapen gray little four-legged creature almost invisibly tiny between the high canyon wall and the turbid river, its little dull bell faintly chiming.

But if they had by now become as one suffering creature, it was a two-headed creature, one head thinking they were going up the wrong river, the other presuming that the first knew the way.

Two days had passed since their sickness, and they had found neither food nor a place to cross the river and go back down the other side. They had found fallen logs along the shore, and each of these Mary had contemplated as a possible raft to float them over, but each time the thought of the rapids and riverbed boulders below convinced her that it would be suicide to put themselves into the grasp of that fast current.

In these two days they had passed under or over or around half a dozen towering cliffs that reared themselves up from the water’s edge, some of them perpendicular, some actually jutting out over the water. They had crossed the screes of two more avalanches, and their legs and arms were marked with abrasions suffered in those passages.

Ghetel had become gradually more sullen and troublesome. She had not spoken more than ten words to Mary in English for these two days, even to answer Mary’s questions; she had grown more balky at every rest stop, needing to be threatened to get up and move or needing to be left behind for a few minutes until fear of loneliness moved her to follow along; and she had been watching Mary with that cunning hostility in her eyes again, as if waiting to catch her off her guard.

The eternal
clink-clank
of Ghetel’s bell had become almost unbearable. Mary turned on Ghetel with gritting teeth once and grabbed it. “Lord ’a’ mercy!” she cried. “Why couldn’t y’a lost this cussed jingle jangle, ’stead o’ tommyhocks an’ blankets?”

But the outburst threw Ghetel into such a slump that Mary let go of the bell and decided not to mention it again—unless it became insufferable.

* * *

This morning Mary had been awakened by Ghetel’s movements, in a tiny, hard-floored cave they had found for shelter, and had found the old woman trying to reach the hickory spear, which Mary always kept under one arm as she slept. Mary had grabbed it and sat up quickly, her heart pounding in alarm, and had pushed Ghetel back with it and demanded an explanation.

“I need stick to help valk,” Ghetel had complained then. “You alvays use it.”

“I could make you one,” Mary snapped back, “if’n you hadn’t flang away our tommyhock back yonder like a perfect fool.”

Ghetel hadn’t answered, only scowled in the dawn light, and that was how they had started this day.

As for the spear, it would have been of little use as a weapon now anyway. It had been thrown in vain at so many animals, and its point bumped inadvertently against so many boulders and cliffs during its use as a sounding-pole, that it had become as blunt as a finger, and without the tomahawk to sharpen it, it was in truth now little more than a walking staff. Ghetel could have armed herself just as well as Mary by picking up any straight limb or sapling from the ground, but she kept a covetous eye on Mary’s lance instead of thinking to do so, and Mary was not about to suggest it to her. As long as Mary was the only one carrying a stick that had the reputation of a spear, she had a semblance of command. She was strangely amused by this, by the absurdity of it, and when she considered it she smiled for the first time in many days.

At one point this afternoon, when Ghetel had sat on a log, three-quarters naked in the cold, stupidly refusing to come along, Mary had a devilish idea. She stood beside a cliff, glowering back at Ghetel, and whetted the blunt point of the staff against the stone, as if sharpening the spear. It worked. Ghetel rose and came following.

And Mary was pleasantly surprised to see that this whetting actually had sharpened the point somewhat. She stayed there for another minute and rubbed it against the stone until it was almost as sharp as it had been when she had manufactured it with the tomahawk.

* * *

Mary was thinking that they would die before reaching a fording place; she was almost crushed with the weary frustration of this long detour, when they straggled around a cliff that led to the right, and her heart fell so heavily in her that she dropped to her knees with a groan.

They had come to the mouth of another river.

It flowed straight across their path, deep and wide, the kind of river she knew would twist for miles back among the mountains before growing narrow and shallow enough to permit them to cross. Another walk-around just to get back onto this walk-around they had been ascending so painfully for a week! Oh, cruel God, she prayed in angry despair, who would fling two poor sufferers down in this maze of rivers and canyons! Why?
“WHY?”

Ghetel, who had stopped and stood dumbly behind her, was alarmed by this wailed question. She scurried to Mary’s side and bent down, exclaiming, “Vat? Vat?” Then she seemed to notice the river before them, and through her torpor finally seemed to recognize it as still another obstacle, and she fell to her knees and began to howl, letting the blanket drop from her shoulders and clutching Mary’s arm in that same hard, two-handed grip she had used on the cliff, her eagle’s grip.

After a minute, the pain of that grip on Mary’s bony arm became worse then the anguish in her soul, and she transferred her anger from God to the hysterical hag beside her. She wrenched her arm free with a violent jerk and then swung it back hard and hit Ghetel across the mouth with the back of her hand.

The howl stopped with the blow. Ghetel blinked repeatedly, eyes streaming tears, mouth gaping and closing, gaping and closing, a trickle of blood tracing from her lip-corner. She raised her hand slowly, as if waking to some strange reality, touched her mouth, looked at the blood on her fingers and said in quiet disbelief: “Why you hit me for, May-ry?”

Mary shook her head and gritted her teeth and said something she would never have thought she could say:

“ ’Cause God’s out o’ reach, I reckon.”

And so they turned reluctant steps up another nameless river.

It was going to be a hard one. There was little room for a path among the fallen rocks; the blue stone cliffs seemed to close in closer with each turn in the river.

Mary was talking to herself as they limped along this river-course. It was the first time she had done this—as far as she knew. She was simply running out of dignity and control. This last diversion from the long way home had simply broken something down inside her. She was not sure she even cared anymore. She had a strange, resigned sense, a notion that she might just die on her feet and her body would keep going up rivers that divided into smaller rivers, and those into creeks, and those into smaller creeks, until she would come to a place in the heart of the wilderness where there were no more creeks reaching up, and there she would stand, dead, and rot, and her bones would stand there forever to mark the source of all rivers.

And someday Will might come along exploring, she thought, coming up rivers and creeks lookin’ for land and rememberin’ me, and he’d find m’ bones a-standin’ here, and he’d be startled at first, but then he’d get bold and come close and he’d recognize this marriage band—it would still be here on me on account of I can’t get it off over my knucklebone—Ah, Will, darlin’, old sturdy, furry Will, best man in Virginia, O believe me I tried to come back to you. O how I tried only God could tell you and only He could tell you I loved you so much I left my baby with the savages so’s I could come to you … I don’t know if you’d ever understand and forgive me that, Will darlin’, but the Lord could tell you why.

I just wanted to come back to you and start new, new sons, new daughters, start new and have again the kind o’ life we was havin’ before the heathens come down on that Sunday and ruined everything …

She stumbled and hurt her knee on a stone, a sharp bone-pain that made a sunflash behind her eyes. She grimaced and rose, dizzy with weakness and that shaft of pain, cursed under her breath and limped on.

The fall had jolted the reverie out of her head and the canyon was clear and specific before her eyes, and it seemed, for a moment, as if she had been in this very place before,
alongside this blue-stone cliff, going up along this limpid river; there where that sycamore grew with its roots in a split boulder—she had seen that before, hadn’t she, in some other time, or …

Yes. She had seen it before.

She stopped.

She looked at the sycamore, at the cliffs.

Blue stone.

O heavens.

O yes I know this place.

A hot shiver poured out of the top of her head and raced down over all the skin of her body.

“O Lord God thank ’ee!”

It was the tributary they had turned into on the way down. On the fifth day after the massacre, her memory told her.

We been on the New River all this time after all!

“Ghetel!” She turned and hugged the old woman. They sagged in each other’s arms, Ghetel’s face showing only confusion and a little fright at this outburst, as if she would be struck again. “Ghetel! We’re but five days from home!”

Ghetel’s mood darkened as Mary’s brightened. Whenever Mary would sing, Ghetel would howl at her to shut up. The old woman began stalling at every resting place, and she walked stooped, moaning and clutching her abdomen, as they moved up the river along the blue-stone cliff. She wailed at every little sort of hurt that she had long ago learned to absorb without complaint.

It was as if she were trying to destroy the first exuberance Mary had felt in weeks. But Mary understood it.

I been coaxin’ her on with promises and singin’ and false cheer so long, she like as not thinks this’s just another sham to keep ’er going, Mary thought.

Ghetel’s surliness and whining could not bring down Mary’s high heart now. Five days it had taken the Indians to bring her down this far from Draper’s Meadows in July; if she and Ghetel could keep going enough hours a day, they should be able to reach the Meadows on foot in that same amount of time, or a week at most.

We can keep going for a week more, she assured herself. I feel stronger now than I’ve felt in a month, just a-knowin’ where we are.

She could not recall just where the Indians had crossed this river. That particular day she had been so miserable and faintish from the childbearing that she had noticed little. Somewhere they had ridden across a river; she could remember its blessed coolness on that hot day; she could envision the blood washing from her thighs and reddening the water. But it seemed that that crossing had been on some other stream. She could not recollect the experience of crossing this one.

And there had been a crossing by canoe somewhere around here, too, she remembered. That was farther up, she thought. We crossed to this side of the New River by canoe, before we got to this river. I’m sure of that. Aye. O but I’m glad I started glancing back and memorizing the look of places. Lord in Heaven, thank’ee for givin’ me the sense to do that, even amidst my torments of that day.