Follow the River (43 page)

She was feeling very expansive toward the Lord now; she was thanking him for every little thing. It had become easier to believe in him after her discovery that they were on the right river after all. He did not seem quite so cruel and devious a God now; it was possible to forgive him for the forty days and forty nights of obstructions and sufferings he had put them through.

But if he had had them on the wrong river all that time, he likely would have lost a believer.

Poor Ghetel, she thought. If there was but a way to make her understand we truly
are
close to the end of it.

She had told Ghetel, had tried to explain, three or four times, that this river was within a few days’ walk of their destination. But it had been as futile as trying to cheer up a costive mule. Ghetel was either not hearing her words or was just refusing to believe them anymore.

Eh well, Mary thought. I could drag ’er the rest of the way by ’er heels, kicking and squalling, if I had to. I could stand anything these next few days, now’t I know.

I’ll be with ’ee soon now, Will, she thought, trying to remember what he looked like.

She couldn’t remember. She just couldn’t. When she tried to remember how her man looked, standing close to her, she could remember only the look of another man standing close to her: Captain Wildcat with his smooth, oiled skin and the silver bands around his arms; Captain Wildcat, the man who had brought her down this river into these months of purgatory.

All she could remember of Will was warmth.

Remembering Will now was like remembering not a person but a time. It was like remembering a summer.

By twilight they had come perhaps two leagues up this river, and reached a place where white riffles indicated a shallows that seemed to extend all the way across the stream.

Mary wanted to cross immediately, to gain the other side so they could start their return down the other bank at first light the next day. The sky was clear and cold and there was a nearly full moon sighting down the valley. They could cross now, perhaps even walk a few miles down the other side by moonlight. Every mile now is a mile less tomorrow, she thought.

But Ghetel had come as far as she was going to come this day, as Mary realized after a long spell of cajoling and scolding. The old woman was absorbed in her suffering, sitting on the ground rocking back and forth with her forearms folded across her abdomen, shaking her head and crying, but she was not too flummoxed to see that she was being urged to wade into cold water again, this time in near darkness. Mary would have had to beat her unconscious and carry her bodily
to get her across this river tonight. So she gave in on the point, and raked leaves into a niche under the cliff to make a place where they could roll into the blanket and sleep.

Probably best thisaway, she admitted to herself. The night air was snapping cold. Exhausted and empty as they were, getting wet tonight and then crawling out into this air might well bring on the finish of them.

Even though she had gotten her way, Ghetel kept up her woeful carryings-on. She let herself be led into the shelter and stretched out in the leaves, but kept whining and sobbing, curling up and hugging her waist, like a child having a bedtime bellyache tantrum.

Goin’ to have to smack ’er again if she don’t pipe down soon, Mary thought. She didn’t want to do that. She had done it today in her desperate rage, but she did not like to remember that she had so lost control of herself as to strike a poor dying wretch.

And it is true we are a-dyin’, Mary thought. She could feel it going on inside herself, could feel her body eating itself, burning its little remaining flesh as logs on a hearth are consumed by their own embers. She knew that Ghetel was genuinely suffering, as badly as she herself was suffering, and that they had been dying bit by bit for weeks, and surely would never be the same again even if they did manage to rescue themselves. They
were
dying; they had come within a breath of it many times in these weeks in the mountains.

But I won’t finish dyin’ while there’s still a mile to go, she vowed. If I got a week o’dyin’ left to do, then I got six days left to travel.

When she was at last warm enough to feel drowsy, she prayed, looking at the moon above the trees as if it were God’s face, thanking him still another time for showing her the sycamore in the rock and the blue-stone cliff; and then she thought of Will Ingles, looking at the now fuzzy, warm moon as if it were Will’s face, and promised herself that she would be lying next to him, instead of next to this writhing old woman, before the week was out.

Suddenly her eyes started open and the moon was sharp and cold and clear again because she had had a thought that
she had never allowed to enter her mind during this journey: She really did not know whether her husband was still alive. She hadn’t seen a sign of him after the massacre. Likely he and Johnny had been killed down in the fields that long-ago Sunday.

But that thought was too dreadful to keep in her mind for more than a few minutes.

O’ course he’s still alive, she thought.

I couldn’t have come all this way if he wa’n’t.

Then even with the coming of morning, Ghetel was not ready to wade into the water. She stood hunched in the cold, looking at the purling shallows, hugging herself and shuddering and making a low, undulating moan in her throat and shaking her head in refusal. It was not hard to understand. Just looking at the crinkling, ice-blue water, while standing barefooted on the frosty bank as a moon-cold winter sun rose between the upstream mountains, made Mary herself quake in anticipation of the chilly shock.

“Well, then, Ghetel, I’m sorry, but I canno’ leave you a choice in the matter.” She lowered the tip of her hickory spear and jabbed it hard against the baggy flesh of Ghetel’s buttock. Ghetel yelped and spun on her, her face wide open in pained astonishment. Mary was now crouched, pointing the stick at her face. “Git,” she snapped. “GIT!” She thrust the stick, this reputed spear, toward her face two or three times, then motioned toward the water. “GO ON, DAMN ’EE! YOU’VE SLOWN ME DOWN ENOUGH, BY HEAVEN!”

Ghetel backstepped toward the river’s edge, glancing up and down between the spear-point and Mary’s demonic expression, and, with a high sob, squatted and wrapped her arms around her head. Another fierce jab with the stick brought her to her feet more quickly than one would have thought she could move, and she stepped knee-deep into the stream with a terrible gasp. Mary stepped in right at her heels, still poking her in the rump with the stick-point, and they floundered toward the opposite bank, sucking air in deep, involuntary gasps.

The water reached halfway up their thighs at midstream,
and seemed to have frozen the marrow of their bones, but they stepped streaming onto the other bank within two minutes. It had been their coldest but their easiest crossing.

They were back down to the New River by midday, and turned southeastward along its right bank. There was a narrow fringe of bottomland here between the river and the mountainside. It was brushy and cluttered with fallen rock, but at least it was relatively flat.

“Level feels good, don’t it, hon?” she said to Ghetel, still trying to break through that black curtain of suffering and resentment that Ghetel had drawn between them. Mary tried to joke. “I bet my one leg’s shorter’n t’ other, I been a-walkin’ on right-handed mountainsides so long. You too, eh, Ghetel?” The old woman did not answer. She hulked along ahead, with the filthy, tattered blanket over her hunched shoulders, and did not turn or even shrug to acknowledge Mary’s words. She just kept stumbling and mincing along, muttering in her private tongue, howling when rocks hurt her feet. “Hi, what say’ee to that?” Mary called, still trying to arouse a response. Now Ghetel turned her head just far enough to show Mary one baleful eye, looking not at Mary but at the spear-point, and then turned forward again, and shambled on.

“By th’ Eternal!” Mary exclaimed, now joyously indignant. “If’ee don’t make me feel like a red savage m’self, and you my white captive woman …”

Shouldn’t ’ve said that, she thought. Might be terrible close to what
she
feels; too close to seem a joke.

But hey. I don’ think she hears
anything
I say anymore.

By dusk they had made many miles, and were now so fatigued and weak with hunger that they were sitting down to rest more than they were moving. The place looked vaguely familiar; it seemed to have been somewhere hereabouts that she had been ferried across the New River in a bark canoe.

Must find something to gnaw on, Mary thought, or we’ll not make it even another day.

The good spirits she had been using as fuel the last full day were no longer enough. Another frigid night was falling and Mary could feel her soul flickering weakly like the wick in a used-up candle.

She got to her knees and tried to turn over a rock. It was embedded in the frozen soil. She crawled to a smaller one and strained until she managed to dislodge it and tumble it over.

There were no worms under it. The ground was black and frozen. Ice crystals delicate as snowflakes lay in tiny patterns on the iron-hard earth.

She turned over another rock and it was the same. The small effort had left her winded.

Ghetel, a few feet away, had noticed this activity, and she began turning over stones, panting, cursing in Dutch each time she found nothing.

They now began trying to pull up shrubs to look for roots. Neither of them, alone, had enough strength to budge even the smallest bush. Ghetel’s voice grew more desperate with each failure, keening up and down a wavering scale so pitiful that Mary forgot all her annoying and stubborn behavior and felt a tug of pity toward her, and warm tears started from her eyes and ran down her nose in cold trickles.

“Come on now, hon,” she groaned through a tightening throat. “I bet th’ two of us together can pull an ol’ root.” She hauled herself to her feet with the aid of the hickory stick and hobbled to her. She laid the stick on the ground and with both hands grasped the shrub Ghetel was straining at, and put her whole aching body into it, wheezing and groaning, her hands and finger joints aching and popping, her shoulder pressing Ghetel’s.

Suddenly that pressure was gone. Ghetel had released the bush; at once Mary heard her emit a shriek of triumph and lunge behind her.

And even before she could turn to look, she knew that Ghetel had snatched up their weapon.

Mary turned slowly to face the most demented cackling she had ever heard.

The worst of it was, her tears of pity for the cunning hag were still wet and cold on her face.

The treacherous Ghetel now had everything: the blanket and the spear. Mary had nothing, nothing but a rope of knotted yarn around her waist and a few rags of what once had been her summer dress, these hanging from her shoulders and collar.

Mary stepped backward. Her heart was beating fast in her throat. She could not tell by looking at Ghetel’s crazed eyes whether she was going to stab her with the lance now or enjoy for awhile the power of having Mary at her mercy. Mary wanted, in either case, to get far enough from her that she would have to throw the spear if she chose to attack.

If she throws it, Mary thought, she could miss and then I’d have it again.

She kept stepping backward, feeling with her feet for rocks that might trip her. Ghetel came on, grinning, her laughter now voiceless, a kind of quaking whisper. Ghetel’s conception of the hickory stick as a true, fearful weapon, that conception Mary had tried so hard to nurture to keep the old coot under control, seemed to remain now that it was in her hands. Now Mary had to keep telling herself that it was only a stick after all. She had to keep telling herself that, to keep from growing panicky. Just a stick, she thought. Just an ol’
stick
.

Talk to her, she thought. Talk. Surely even a crack-brain can’t try to kill somebody who’s talking to her. “Well, now, hon,” her voice came out, strained, “looks like you got th’ old walkin’-stick you wanted so bad. Well, that’s good, hon … y’ should have it awhile; I know the walkin’s been hard, and
that’ll make it easier for you …” Ghetel came on, still with that hissing laugh.

“Well, now, hon, don’t know ’bout you, but I’m just tuckered,” Mary continued, “an’ I think we walked fur enough for one day, don’t you? We ought t’ find a nice holler place t’ roll in an’ go beddie bye-lo, eh? or maybe, uh, maybe … I ’spect there’s ’nough light yet we could … grub up some nice roots ’round here … I reckon we could pull up that shrub back yonder, if … we’s to tug on it together a mite more, eh? Why don’t we do …”

“I eat no roots anymore,” Ghetel said, then laughed that strange breath-laughter again and kept coming on.

“Aye. Well, y’know, I’m kind o’ tired o’ roots, too, now’t you mention it … ’specially after those a few days ago, made us so sick …” Her retreat was backing her up against the bluff, where she would be cornered, so she began veering up along the bank. “…  Maybe we could find some nice buds, then … or maybe there’s nuts th’ squirrels’ve not got yet …”

“Those too I dun eat.”

Mary had backed away from the cliff now and was retreating toward the open shingle along the river bank to keep from getting trapped in the shrubbery and driftwood she could glimpse out of the corner of her eyes. She was more afraid of Ghetel’s strange, sudden coherence and purpose than of her possession of the “weapon.” The old woman had been bothersome when she was whining, bawling and helpless, but now she was sinister. Had her capture of the spear transformed her so abruptly, or had she been feigning helplessness all this time with her eye on obtaining it? Mary had heard people speak of the cunning of the crazy, and now it was something she could comprehend. She sighed now and smiled and tried again to molify her with chatter. “Well, then, might be we could try our hand at, uh, spearin’ a fish with that thing … if’n it ain’t too dark … Been a long while since we tried to get us a nice big fish t’ eat …”

“Dun’ eat fish, too.”

Mary forced a gay little laugh. “Well, dearie, that’s about all th’ choices we got on our bill o’fare … Not a whole lot, as y’ well know by now …”