Follow the River (49 page)

Nay, she thought, with a sudden violent shudder of disgust. Never that. I sh’ll never be brought so low. I’d lie down an’ decoy buzzards first.

But yet, she thought in queasy amazement, I did get to th’ point where I gave it a thought. God forgi’ me.

“AAAAAYYY!”

Ghetel’s bawling voice spilled down the valley so loudly that Mary started. It sounded as if she were only a few feet away. Mary scanned the curving opposite shore and, despite the filmy vagueness of her vision, spotted her almost at once, directly across the river but perhaps a hundred feet up the slope of a scrabbly knoll. She was as gray as the slate itself, but easy to locate by her vigorous waving and raucous yells. She was a heartening sight after this latest night of solitude. Mary returned her wave, and tried to answer her calls but found herself still voiceless.

Now Ghetel was shouting something else, which Mary couldn’t make out at once. She cupped her hand behind her ear. Ghetel shouted between her hands:

“Can’t go! Can’t go!” Then she pointed down the slope to her right with emphatic jabs of her finger. Mary followed the slope down with her eyes and saw what she meant: at the base of the knoll there was the mouth of a creek, pouring its waters into that side of the river. It was not a wide creek—little more than fifty feet, Mary estimated—but steep-sided and likely quite deep, really a formidable obstacle to Ghetel’s progress, the sort of obstacle that had added countless miles already to their odyssey.

Mary simply shook her head. “Walk around,” she whispered, and to try to convey those words to the distant Ghetel, she pointed up the creek’s ravine and then brought her hand back toward her. “Walk around,” she whispered again, and thought: Lord-a-God, she must know
walk around
by now.

Ghetel understood it, all right. She turned and looked down at the offending creek, crouched, made fists and slammed them down against her thighs, having a tantrum, her unintelligible Dutch curses rolling in the hollows of the canyon. That apparently being insufficient, she squatted on the slope and picked up slabs of rock and hurled them down the hillside at the creek.

Save thy strength, Mary thought to her. Y’re sure not scarin’ the creek much at all.

Then Ghetel, as if reading that thought, stopped throwing stones, and jammed her chin down into her fists and squatted there in this disconsolate pose, rocking herself and looking
down into the ravine. Mary waved at her, but could not get her attention now. Ghetel obviously was locked into a battle of resentment with indifferent Nature, and had forgotten Mary again.

Well, nothin’ I can do for ’er, Mary thought. Just pray she don’t sit there whupped till it’s too late t’ move on. As for me, I
got
to move on.

She hobbled along the narrow bank as it curved left around the mountain. As the newest view up the river unrolled itself before her, her heart sank.

Both walls of the river canyon, running straight eastward for at least two miles before bending again, were almost sheer cliff. It was a steep cut straight through a mountain. A colder wind was picking up, beginning to moan in the leafless trees high on the mountainsides. And it was a wind now unmistakably sharp with the feel of snow.

Give me strength, she prayed, teetering along a crumbly ledge inches above the slate-gray river; give me strength, for once again I’m a spider on a wall.

All the way along this cliff, Mary was in view of the knoll on which she had last seen Ghetel. She would look back and see the knoll there beside the creek mouth on the other side of the river. The first three or four times she looked back, she could still see Ghetel slumped, a tiny speck in the stupendous landscape. The next time she looked back, having come perhaps half a mile, she could still see the place but could not tell certainly whether Ghetel was there or not. If she was, she had become just another atom of gray in this great, ageless river-sculpture. Mary blinked constantly against the smarting and tearing of her swollen eyes, to combat the blur and distortion.

If I can’t see, I’ll die for sure on this selfsame wall, she thought. She squeezed her eyelids shut and felt the warm tears grow cold on her nose, and felt the mucus from her nose cold on her lip, then opened her eyes and ran her right hand out along the rock until it found a crevice. Then she looked down and found a little lip of stone, within reach of her right foot, moved her weight onto it, then hung there, thigh quaking maddeningly, brought her left foot alongside the right and,
having added another eighteen inches to her eight hundred miles, reached out with her right hand for another fingerhold to anchor on.

As she did so, she saw a snowflake touch her arm, felt its tiny cold kiss. And then more, spitting cold against her shoulders, her back, her thighs, her face.

And more.

And then, after a measureless age of such tedious going, her skinned fingers and feet leaving crimson spots in the snow dust on the rocks, Mary ran out of cliff and found herself on a gentle slope beside a spectacular loop in the river.

Dazed, she walked away from the steep blue cliff with its thin white etchings of snow, and looked back along it and realized that she had actually done it; she had come those two miles along that vertical wall, inch by inch, almost in a trance of concentration, and it was behind her now.

She was dizzy, and staggered, barefoot and naked, along the wide, curving beach, going southward now. The beach seemed to have been deposited by two small creeks, each about ten feet wide, which emptied into the river about three hundred feet apart, one coming down from either side of a cone-shaped crag. These creeks were but knee-deep and she waded through them as if they were not there, and followed the easy shore. This appeared to be another great horseshoe bend, perhaps two miles around, but she was on the inside shore, where ages of silting had created a wide fringe of gentle, wooded bottomland. The other shore was a curving stone bluff four or five hundred feet straight up, undercut by the river, and so obviously impassable at its base that Mary, despite her torpor, knew she was fortunate to be on this side rather than that. Thanks be to God, she thought.

And pray there’s no such a cliff ahead on my side o’ th’ river, she added.

Within an hour it looked as if there would be.

She had gone down the west arc of the bend and was proceeding up the east when she saw through the veil of falling snow ahead that the river made another sharp loop. The wide bottomland she was walking on seemed to narrow
abruptly to nothing a few hundred feet ahead, and there was another one of those curved stone parapets dropping straight to the water’s edge.

She was too numb and lethargic now to think of any approach to the obstacle. The notion of going two miles back around the horseshoe and finding a gentle slope to climb over was simply more than her mind could handle. There could be no such thing as retracing steps, after all these hundreds of leagues; it was as if she had been allotted some predestined quota of footsteps and heartbeats, exactly enough to carry her to Draper’s Meadows and no more, and to backtrack a thousand steps or a thousand heartbeats would subtract them from the end of the odyssey and leave her to die a thousand steps, a thousand heartbeats short of home.

And she had too little strength left to climb hills anyway. There was nothing to do but plod straight for the base of the cliff and, as she had done so often already, traverse it like a spider or try to wade under it.

And if she could do neither, there was nothing but to perish in the attempt.

The cliff had been polished smooth by the river. There was no footledge to be found.

Fatalistically, numbly, hair and skin now totally wet and clammy from the snow, Mary waded into the river at the base of the cliff. Blood from her feet stained the water as she went in. The bottom was a jumble of small rock shards and pebbles, sand and silt. She hugged herself against the cold stone of the cliff and pressed against the river’s current. The cliff leaned out over her, seeming to topple against the drab sky. Snowflakes whirled down to the gray water and vanished. The water rose to her waist, to her ribs, to her breasts, to her shoulders.

She clawed at the cliff with her fingernails as the current tried to lift her feet from under her and pull her down into its cold, gentle, final embrace. She tried to grip the bottom with her toes, but they were as rigid and numb as wood. She stood there for an immeasurable time, afraid to move, the cold again penetrating inward toward the feeble lamp of her heart.

Then she thought of will.

She moved her right foot a few inches forward, and stayed upright. She brought her left foot up after it. Then moved the right foot forward again.

The bottom was sloping upward slightly now. Her shoulders were out of the water. She moved three more steps. The water was under her breasts now. A little further and she was only waist-deep. Her upper body was covered with gooseflesh and the snowflakes were dissolving against her skin with icy little kisses. But now she could see a little lip of beach under the cliff. A few more steps and she would be out of the river.

Dusk had descended while she was in the river. She was at the very elbow of the bend now. She stood on the narrow shore leaning back against the cliff and looked down both sides of the bend. The river had virtually doubled upon itself. It had come around a long craggy neck of land scarcely a hundred yards across. Now she started down the strip of bottomland along its eastern side. She was gasping, shaking so hard it seemed as if her brittle frame would break apart. She went faintish. The mountain at her left seemed to reel in the sky and a sizzling flood of white light poured through her head.

She was lying on the snowy ground. The dusk was deeper. She gathered her limbs under her and stood up slowly. The white light rushed through her head again and more time passed before she gathered enough strength to stand up again. This time she stayed up.

She was moving automatically now. There was still a little light. She walked on and on through the swirling, sifting haze of snowflakes, feeling nothing but the ache of bone sockets and the agonizing reduction of distance. It was beyond her mental powers now to try to calculate how far she had come today or how much distance remained. It was even beyond her mental powers to think of finding a place to stop. It was simply easier to keep dragging one bloody, frigid lump of a foot ahead of the other, and suck in one icy, rasping breath after another, and watch the landscape twitch with every new heartbeat.

The canyon veered gradually to the left as she staggered along in this fashion. Again the beach narrowed and grew
steeper, and here brush and saplings grew down almost to the river’s edge, and she wove her way through these. She tripped over a root and lay in the snow. When she got up she remembered to gnaw some leaf buds off and try to grind them between her teeth. A back tooth came out of the gum and she swallowed it with the woody pulp of the buds, and stumbled on through the thickets. She almost blundered into a massive, gray pillar at the water’s edge, which at first she took to be the trunk of an immense beech tree. But she put her hands against it and it was rock. A pillar of crumbly rock, standing directly in her way. She stood against it, panting, and tried to think what this could mean. It seemed like some trick of nature, to put such an unlikely thing in her way, after she had learned to know and surmount every other kind of obstacle Nature had ever invented.

No, really, now, she thought, as if explaining her plight to God; no, really, now. I can’t have anything else put in my way. I’m almost home. I’ve almost run out of everything I am. There’s not much time. I mustn’t have any more stops. No.
Please
. No more stops.

She tried to go around it to the left, but found an almost vertical slope of snow and rock and roots. She turned and tried to go around it to the right, slipped in snow and mud, fell slamming among tree trunks and brush and floundered into the edge of the river, thigh-deep, holding herself upright with one arm hooked over a rough-barked branch.

She hung there for a moment, gasping for breath, the current swirling very strong around her legs.

And being now in the edge of the river, out of the thicket, she could see what this obstacle was.

The river flowed by, wide and dark. Just in front of her, rising straight up from the river’s edge, stood what first appeared to be a row of gray stone pillars, rough-edged, towering perhaps three hundred feet above her, their tops actually overhanging the river, so high they were vague in the snow-swirl. It was a cliff, a gigantic, fluted cliff of eroding stone shafts.

Her mind worked at this. She struggled to gather her scattered faculties and concentrate on what such an obstacle
could mean, and whether it could be circumvented somehow. What could this be, she thought. It was familiar, in a strange, disturbing sort of way …

And then she recognized it.

It came back to her in a rush: that terrible first night after their capture, when she and Bettie and Tommy and Georgie and Henry Lenard had been carried to the top of a cliff by the Shawnees and then herded out onto the precipitous cap of a stone pillar to spend their first night.

O God, she thought in awe, looking up and up and up to the top of the cliff: up there is where we were! Up there is where we made a splint for poor Bet’s arm in the dark! Up there’s where we slept clinging together, afraid of falling off into this river here below …

Her soul, so benumbed for so long that she had nearly forgotten what it was to experience an emotion, became a turmoil of memories, joys, regrets, fears, a bittersweet flood of gratitude and despair.

She was at the end of the river journey. Beyond this cliff was the gunpowder spring that marked the overland trail up to Draper’s Meadows by way of Sinking Creek. Here was where they had joined the New River and started this incredible lifetime river journey down to the O-y-o and back, this journey that had cost her her three children, her sister-in-law, and every last shred of her comfort and security …

And that now threatened to close it all by costing her her very life.