Follow the River (50 page)

Between her and her Will Ingles stood this sheer cold stone wall.

It would be too incredibly awful a joke, to be stopped here, a mere day’s walk from home, after six weeks’ toil through an untracked wilderness. Surely, she felt, God would not mean it to end this way, not God in whom she and her people had always believed.

She hauled herself out of the edge of the river. She was angry now. Her resolve was returning, and it once again rekindled energy where she had thought there was none left.

I’ve waded under many a cliff, she thought. This is nothing I haven’t done before.

She found a dead sapling on the ground, a section about eight or nine feet long. She carried it back to the river. She clung to shrubbery and waded back down in the river at the cliff’s edge and probed for depth with the pole. It did not touch bottom. Suddenly the pole was gone.

It was as if some great unseen fish had snatched the pole out of her hand and taken it under. It was simply gone. She clung to her handhold, mystified.

Then, a few feet out and downstream, the stick popped through the surface like a leaping fish and floated away.

Mary understood. There was some sort of powerful whirlpool under the base of this cliff, caused apparently by a great depth and by the doubling back of the river under this precipice.

There was this dangerous undercurrent. There were no ledges or shelves by which to traverse the face of the palisade. She was thwarted.

And now it was dark. Only the snow kept the scene from being obscured in pitch blackness. She was wet, and colder than she had ever been. She had come some eight or ten miles up the canyon this day, much of the distance under the effort and tension of creeping along cliffs or wading in strong, cold river currents. Now there was nothing left to sustain her. Even the inspiration she had drawn all day from knowing she was close to the end of the trail had deserted her now, in the face of this impassable wall of craggy rock.

As if her spine had crumbled, she quit resisting the great desire to give up. She slid to the ground. She sat in the snow for a minute, gazing dumbly at the dark lines of the trees against the snow, her mouth hanging open, too defeated even to scold at God. After a few minutes she keeled over onto her left side and rolled into a ball with her hands between her scrawny thighs. As the snow sifted down on her and her heartbeats weakened, she dreamed of voices—a low, dolorous babble of incoherent voices seeming to come down the corridors of time, now and then a man’s voice, familiar, almost
recognizable, rising above the mutter, and then subsiding back into it.

After midnight the snow stopped falling and the clouds scudded out from under the moon, and the palisade towered silent and dark among the silvery mountains.

She knew she should have died during that long night, but there in the east the sky was pale and she was looking at it and seeing it. The snow was pale blue and the last of the stars had winked out, and low in the west over the far shore of the river, looking thin and translucent against the fading sky, was a shaving of moon. Steam was rising off the river. Mary was shaking continuously now. Her arms and legs felt paralyzed.

The eastern sky warmed to the hues of a peach. Mary heard a tiny buffeting sound and opened her eyes to see a tiny black bird with a white breast swaying on a slender twig a few inches above her face, looking at her. Mary tried to grab it but could not raise her arm. The bird darted away and snow dust fell off the disturbed twig.

How do they stay alive? Mary wondered.

She had been seeing without thinking. But now she was thinking. She had wondered how birds stay alive in the winter, and she had noticed that she herself was still alive when she should not have been.

She remembered something her mother had said once, once at the breakfast table on a Sunday morning, when they would all try to talk a little like preachers because real preachers had seldom come over the Blue Ridge to Draper’s Meadows. Her
mother had said, in her brogue, with a cheerful glow in her face:

“Any marnin’ th’ good Lord lets’ee open your eyes, that’s a day he’s got somethin’ f’r ye t’ do.”

Do what? Mary wondered. There was that cold river; at the base of the cliff its surface was dimpled with turbulence, and she remembered the force with which it had tugged the sounding-pole out of her hand last night. Even in morning light the cliff above looked as ominous and insuperable as it had in the night; it looked now, silhouetted against the chilling dawn, like the walls and crenels and battlements of a storybook castle. What, she wondered, has th’ Lord for me t’ do?

She peered up at the craggy rampart against the sky and once again remembered the night the captives had spent up there, almost five months ago, that miserable and terrifying night which since had been eclipsed by a hundred nights more miserable and terrible. She remembered how the land below had looked from that high brink: the land dark with summer foliage, the depths below shrouded in river fog; the mountain range dwindling away eastward toward Draper’s Meadows …

That, of course, was the only recourse. The Indians had brought them
over
the cliff because there was no other way to pass it.

The only possible way to get home to Will, then, was to climb around and over this gigantic obstacle.

O that’s mad, she thought; I’ve not th’ strength to lift an arm.

But any day th’ good Lord lets’ee open your eyes, that’s a day he’s got somethin’ f’r ye t’ do
.

“All right, then; so be it,” she whispered, as if replying to her mother. She tried to straighten her limbs, to rise out of the snow. They were swollen huge, and as cold and stiff as the limbs of a corpse. She looked at her right hand as she tried to open it. The fingers felt as if they were breaking rather than bending. The fingertips were brown with dried blood and the hand was swollen to twice its normal size. When she tried to
lift her head from the ground it felt as if her neck would snap. Snow fell from her cheek and from her hair.

It was half an hour before she could uncurl her body. Her hips and knees were the most agonizing.

I’m like a whole set o’ rusted hinges, she thought. She imagined her joints squealing as she moved them, and the thought was nearly funny.

It’ll be funny someday when I can tell it t’ folks, she thought.

To folks!

O what a lovely idee! she thought. To
talk
to folks! It had dawned on her then, for the first time in months, that there were
folks
in the world, people who spoke her language and knew her name, people of her own kind, with whom one could sit by a fire or in the sungold of a summer eve, just … just talkin’ ordinary … just
palaverin
’ about the twaddle and the piffle of the day …

Because for most people, for most of their lives, she thought, there’s lesser things on mind day by day than stark survivance.

Oh, dear heaven, yes, I’d nigh forgot th’ happy time ordinary folk pass in trifles and flummadiddle …

O,
get home!
she thought.
Get home!
Y’been too long on th’ bare edge o’ livin’ …

And after a while she was up, standing unsteady, leaning on a rock to keep from falling. Her feet were huge and blue and puffy, and as her blood flowed down into them they felt full of sparks, almost unbearable sparks.

She forced herself to move. She went back a few painful paces, looking up the palisades for a place to begin her climb.

In the daylight now she could study the strange formation of the cliff. The stone of the cliff was rotten and crumbling. Between the columns of stone there were eroded gaps, full of dirt and rock debris, scrub and roots, saplings and gnarled black grapevines. It appeared that the only way to the top of the cliff would be up through these gaps. While steep, they were not quite vertical, as were the rock columns themselves.

Raising her arm to reach the first handhold caused such a stab of pain in her shoulder that she almost swooned. She shut
her eyes and took a deep breath and reached up again and hooked her stiff fingers over a root. Sharp twinges and prickles went down the arm. She winced against the grind of her hip socket and got her left foot up onto a lichen-spotted chunk of rock jutting from the slope. With this handhold and foothold she drew herself a few inches up the slope. She was on her way. She hung there for a moment, saw a little leafless dogwood sapling two feet above her head. She got her numb left hand up to it and around it, forced the fingers to close, and pulled herself, panting and squinting, a little further up, her naked abdomen and thighs scraping over snow and rock and frozen soil, her cold-petrified toes trying awkwardly to gain traction.

The next handhold was another root. Then a snarl of rough, black grapevines. Then a chunk of rock, slick with ice and snow. Then the rotting stump of a broken-off sapling. Then a dead branch wedged between two rocks.

Every four or five feet she had to stop and press against the slope to recover breath, coughing up gobs of phlegm.

The effort of climbing was gradually thawing her cold-stiffened body, but it was all at the cost of renewed sorenesses and stabbing pains. Gasping the cold morning air was searing her throat; her eyes watered constantly and her nose drained.

She was perhaps forty feet up, clinging for life to an ice-coated chunk of rock, when the first ray from the rising sun burnished the top of a great, tooth-shaped stone pillar a hundred feet above her. It struck her as being so beautiful, so enchantingly God-given beautiful, that she went all weepy inside with sentiment and could scarcely gather the strength to go on.

Half an hour later she was only ten feet further up. She realized that she was expending more of her waning energy in shivering and clinging desperately than in climbing. That same sun-gilded pinnacle seemed as distant as it had been.

If only that sun would touch
me
, she thought. It’d do me good! She remembered long-ago times when she had sat on the cabin stoop at Draper’s Meadows, leaning back against the sun-warmed log wall while the sun had eased the aching
weariness of field work out of her muscles. And she remembered that recent morning when, having escaped across the river by canoe and slept in the hunter’s hut, she had leaned against the hut wall in the wintry sunlight breakfasting on a turnip. O, she thought, but that was a happy time! A little sunlight now would double my strength, she thought.

She was not likely to get any sun here on this palisade, though, not for a while. She was in the cold shadows between two enormous shafts of stone and at this rate it would be hours before she could attain the summit and rest in the sunlight.

She pulled herself up five feet more and lay gasping against the slope with a quaking arm hooked around a sapling. And then she went away somewhere in her head. She returned with a shock to find herself sliding down the slope toward the river below, pulling a small avalanche of dirt and snow and shale fragments with her, rocks and roots scraping and lacerating her skin. She jolted to a stop against a small shrub, her heart slamming, and hung there, gasping and shaking and hurting, listening to the dislodged debris scrabble on down the cliff-face into the river.

She had lost about thirty feet of ground—an hour or two of climbing—and for a while was too shaken to move. She courted the notion of climbing back down to the shore and quitting. Or just letting go. She looked down longingly through the trees to the glassy river, that river now reflecting the blue of the sky.

Rivers. She had come so far along rivers. And so often she had looked deep into them, seeing permanent peace under their waters. It would be over in moments, and surely would not hurt much—not as much as to continue living.

But then she thought of Will, waiting for her to come home; she thought again of sitting on a stoop in the sunlight with people of her own kind, just
folks talking
.

And with a sob she started climbing again.

This time she rested every five feet or so and concentrated on the next five and did not let her mind slip away to yearning or daydreaming.

It was midday when she hauled herself the last few inches
up the slope and onto a saddle of earth that ran like a bridge between two pinnacles. She lay heaving for breath with her fingers entwined in the prickly dry foliage of a cedar shrub to keep from falling.

I made it, she thought. I made it to the top o’ this devil cliff. Her nose leaked onto the ground and coughing wracked her body. After a while she opened her eyes and looked down and she was looking down onto treetops with blue-shadowed snow under them, and the river going under. Now, she thought. Now I can go across the top of this devil cliff and down the other side.

She looked over the saddle of ground and her heart sank. She was
not
at the top of the cliff.

The pinnacles she had reached were separated from the rest of the cliff by a deep, eroded chasm.

And the pinnacles she had reached were not the tallest ones of the cliff; they had weathered far down. She was a little more than a hundred feet above the river.

The other palisades stood nearly two hundred feet higher.

She would have to go over the saddle and down into the chasm and then up through another eroded crevice to get to the top of that higher rampart.

“O God I know thee now as a one for mean tricks,” she whispered through clenched teeth and tears.

She stayed there for a few minutes feeling the weak sun and trying to believe it was strengthening her. Then she started down the other side.

Going down into the chasm was more frightening than climbing up. She could not see where she was going. Her toes, bleeding, brittle as ice, groped for projections that might support her weight. The only way to know a projection would not support her was to feel it crumble underfoot and hear it rattle and crash down below, leaving her to hang by her hands until her foot could find another surface to test. And the ones that were strong enough to hold her were icy. Countless terrifying times a hand or a foot would slip off and she would be hanging by a single pain-wracked hand, trying by the sheer friction of skin against hillside to keep from losing her purchase and slithering down the steep chute toward the river.