Follow the River (51 page)

Her face and the skin on the front of her body were scraped and bleeding, splinters and dirt-grains embedded in the wounds, when she reached the bottom of the chasm and started climbing up the eroded gap between two of the taller stone columns.

She had seen a chimney sweep go up the dark hearth-flue of her parents’ house in Philadelphia, when she was a little girl, and she had had nightmares about it for years afterward: of human legs disappearing up a dark stone shaft. And now this was terribly like a chimney, a dark passage up through stained and crumbly stone to a mouth of light at the top. She braced her arms and elbows out against the sides and strained toward that distant top. There was only the noise of her harsh breathing, and, now and then, coughing spasms and the sifting and dribbling of dislodged dirt and rock down through the passage.

After about thirty feet, the passage widened, and with a deep sigh of relief she found herself above the oppressive tunnel; now it was more like a steep trench between the two pillars, whose tops were still more than a hundred feet above.

She had to rest here. Her arms were trembling uncontrollably from tension and fatigue, and all her innards were queasy and quivering. The bits of moss and bark and buds she had eaten the day before—was it a mere day? she wondered—had been digested long since, and any nutrition from them had been burned away by a night of shivering naked in the snow, and she was as empty as if she had not had a bite for a month. Her body was still consuming its own fiber and there was little left. And there was nothing here on this crag she could even put in her mouth and pretend was food. There was not even any moss on the rocks.

She clung to the stony wall of the trench with her feet on a jutting slab of rock and looked down past her bloody, mangled toes through the crevice, then out and down onto the tops of the pillars she had surmounted earlier, and then up at the anvil-shaped tops of the columns above.

There was blood oozing and drying on the pads of her fingers. She put one finger at a time into her mouth and sucked to ease the throbbing and stinging, and she salivated
as she tasted her own blood and she wondered if it could nourish her. Nay, it’s prob’ly thin as sassafras tea, she thought.

Then she was thinking of sassafras tea, and remembering how she and her mother would go up to the sassafras clump above the settlement with the little boys after the spring thaw had softened the ground, and pull and grub up the aromatic roots—ague tree, her mother called it— and shave them into the tea kettle to boil for a spring tonic to thin winter blood, and flavor it with maple or cane syrup … O she could smell it now, the steam off it …

Oh! Hold, now! No more o’ that barmy-headness or y’ll fall off the mountain …

Go now, she thought.

She looked at a rock lip just above her head. Then she looked at her right hand, and willed it to reach up and grip the rock. Then she looked up at a little crack in the pillar at her left side, then looked at her left hand and willed it to stretch up and take hold. She hauled herself up half a yard with trembling arms and dug in her toes and looked above for another handhold, and forced herself to reach up and get it. Then another. Then she had to rest again, and then she had to force herself again to continue.

She went on, three or four feet with each renewal of effort, for two hours that seemed like a lifetime. The sun had moved across and now was behind the pillar at her left and there was no more of its feeble warmth. She inched upward through a chute of frozen dirt and rock between gray monoliths flecked with snow in blue shadow.

The pain was good for her now. It had become so severe and total that it would not allow her to drift off in woolgathering. She could not daydream now, nor think of anything but bloody fingers and feet and sharp fragments of stone, of ice against skin, of the shock of cold inhalations against her bad teeth, of the fetid smell of her breath and the sores in her mouth, of the sounds of rock shards clicking and rustling down behind her, of the brilliant jabs of pain in her bone sockets, of the spells of white dizziness that would sweep like blizzards through her head. The whole world was this steep
and flinty gouge in a cliffside and the salvo of agonies she was expending against it. She was more intimate with this jagged square yard of earth and stone within reach of her tortured senses than she had ever been with Will; this climbing was a process as immediate and personal and critical as giving birth. It
was
like giving birth: If she could survive it there would be life beyond this cliff; if she could not, there would be nothing.

At each pause for rest she would look down at the treetops and the river below them, and each time she looked down, the more enchanting she would find that world below. She seemed to belong to the riverbed. It was familiar; she had been down there looking up for so long that it seemed terrible and wrong to be up here looking down. She would look down almost with longing. All one would have to do, she thought, without thinking it in words, would be to let go—open these cramped and bloody hands—and fall away to eternal rest.

For a long time she looked up at her hands and played with the notion. At last she smiled a little smile and willed them to loosen their grip.

But they would not do it.

It was deep in the afternoon when she ran out of cliff. She clutched at the trunk of a small cedar and drew herself up onto a level table of stone and dirt and snow and realized that she was now on the summit.

There was a forest here on top of the cliff. There were the tables of snow-covered rock that were the tops of the stone pinnacles.

She had no spirit left to rejoice. But in her mind she knew she had done it. She lay with her face against the frozen dirt and had her say with God.

Lord, I’ll thank’ee never to give me another day like this if I grow to be eighty.

No one deserves a day like this.

This is the most terrible day I’ve had in a hell of terrible days and I’m no’ grateful for it.

Now give me the strength to make my way across and down
this devil’s scarp. Do that and then maybe I can make peace with’ee.

She was too weak and shaky to walk. She went on all fours or crawled along the brink. There were places where erosion had cut far back into the summit, and she had to detour around these crumbling clefts. She stopped at one place and leaned against a tree and looked out at a narrow precipice that was covered with leafless scrub and she became certain that this was the one on which they had spent that fearful night under the eye of a Shawnee sentry. Aye, there was the very rock he’d sat on with his musket across his knees …

She really had not intended to crawl out on that eagle’s nest of a place now; it was too near the edge; it was out of her way.

And yet it was, in a way, a kind of sacred place, where Bettie had bled from her wound, and where they had labored together in the darkness to help each other. And to recross this cliff now on her return, without going out on that precipice to touch that place, would be a sacrilege, somehow. So she crept out on it.

It was different now. There were no leaves on the shrubs; the ground was covered with snow and ice. Far below there was that hard earth in the bend of the river, snowy ground etched with black bare trees, range after range of naked white hills stretching away to the southeast and finally the Blue Ridge as the last horizon. Aye, here were the fragments of rock that had tortured their sleep. There was no trace of Bettie’s blood now.

I was so full of child then, and so full of fear.

Now I am empty of everything. I am even empty of fear, finally.

She looked down over the brink. The river was three hundred feet straight down. To her right there stood pillars that were entirely independent, detached from the cliff itself; they stood like gigantic stone tree trunks on the edge of the river. And to her left was the way down, the way home. She could see from here the gunpowder spring. And somewhere above it there should be the Harmons’ camp hut …

She could not quite see it, and strained far forward on the ledge to look for it.

A shower of pebbles tore loose under her hand and dropped silently through space for many seconds, then plipped into the cold river far below with tiny white splashes.

Aye, there it is, she thought. The little hut. It was a tiny dark rectangle among the etched trees, at the mouth of a ravine above the spring. There was a sere cornpatch below it.

My, she thought. It looks cozy. That’s the place to lodge tonight when I get down off this accursed scarp. Swear I can see smoke comin’ off that …

No, she thought. Y’re daydreamin’ again.

No. It was no mirage. She knew chimney smoke when she saw it. And there was chimney smoke above that little hut down there. No more than a half a mile away. Her heart tripped.

It could be Indians, she thought.

Or it could be Adam Harmon.

It didn’t make much difference. She would have gone to Indians now. Even an Indian would have fed and warmed someone in her condition. Maybe he would kill her later but he would feed her first.

She opened her mouth and tried to call out. But she was still without voice.

While there’s still daylight, she thought, get down off here to that lovely cabin.

She felt giddy, wonderfully giddy.

I could spread my arms, she thought, and just sail down there like any old buzzard.

Adam Harmon laid in the poles to close the cow pen behind the hut. Two brown cows and a calf moved close together for warmth and stood looking at him, their breath clouding in the twilight.

Adam bent his stocky old body and gathered the last armload of the pea-vine fodder from under the eave of the hut and dumped it over the fence to them. Then he brushed chaff off the front of his shaggy bearhide weskit with his huge hands, while scanning the valley with quick, keen brown eyes. The squint-lines showed them to be merry eyes, but they were serious and suspicious now. He ran his tongue back and forth between his lower teeth and lower lip as he searched the valley shadows, and smoothed down his grizzled beard with the palm of his right hand. “Hank Boy, come ’round ’ere.”

Adam Harmon’s elder son, even taller and thicker than his father, came around the corner of the hut with a greasy, bloody knife in his hand. His sleeves were turned up and his hands were slick with animal fat. He had been flensing an elk hide that was stretched over poles at the front of the hut. “Aye, Pa?”

“Quit that f’r now. We’d best go down, he’p Junior with th’ corn while there’s still light. I got me a spookish sense we oughter light out f’r Dunkard’s Bottom come mornin’.”

“Gettin’ t’ you too now, eh?”

“Mhm,” Adam Harmon admitted.

Hank threw the knife at the hut and it stuck in a corner log and quivered. He wiped his hands on the thighs of his breeches and turned down his sleeves. They picked up their
rifles, which had been leaning against the side of the hut, and went down toward the corn patch. Passing Indian bands evidently had taken much of it; wild animals had destroyed some, and the rest was dry and hard. They had been late getting down to this New River camp of theirs from the settlement because of Indian alarms. They had come down only three weeks before, and had spent much of the time hunting in the hills across the river. Only yesterday, Adam Junior had hastily abandoned a little hunting camp about two leagues down, spooked out by Indian signs. He had fled in such a hurry that he had left a kettle of stewing meat over a fire, a pair of leather breeches, and a hobbled old pack mare that had wandered out of sight of the camp. He had been a little ashamed of himself since, and had not said much, and had worked by himself, sullen, away from his father and brother. A couple of times he had said he might go back down there and retrieve the horse. “No, forget ’er,” Adam Senior had said. “She’s no’ worth th’ risk o’ goin’ back there alone. If they was savages there, they got ’er by now anyhoo.”

Adam Junior looked up from his picking when they walked into the cornpatch, then back down. “ ’Bout t’ quit,” he said. “Light’s gone.” He picked up the bag of corn he had gathered and moved a few feet away, set it down and twisted an ear of corn off its dead stalk with a quick rustle.

“Let’s get all we can find,” the old man said. “We’re a-gonna pack out o’ here t’morra, first light.”

Junior looked up, surprised. “Why, Pa?”

Mr. Harmon grunted, shrugged. “I just feel it in m’ little finger.”

Junior nodded. He felt better now; he was not alone in his uneasiness about Indians. Old Mr. Harmon was a bold man, as only a bold man would have built an outback camp this far from neighbors and right along a main Indian trace. And when Harmon said he felt something in his little finger, it usually meant something real was in the air. “Me too,” Junior said. “Never felt it so strong as I done yester …”

“Husht!”
young Hank cautioned suddenly, laying a hand on Junior’s arm, crouching, and raising his rifle.

The other two turned, holding their breath and listening,
and brought their rifles up and around, to point at the thicket at the far edge of the cornpatch.

They all heard it now: a rustling; something either in the thicket or among the dry stalks of the corn. In the dusk they could see nothing yet. But they understood that it was not any wild animal. Wild animals simply did not approach talking men they could smell and hear. Therefore, they all understood, it could be only one or another of two things: a domestic animal, or Indians. The only domestic animals hereabouts were their own: the cows and calf in the pen, and their horses in the corral.

Mister Harmon and his two sons stood now with all their senses focused on a place at the edge of the field where brush was being moved and a strange, hoarse, intense whisper was being repeated: human whisperings, they were certain; Indians passing information to each other, most likely. The three men knelt now, each on one knee, to lower their visibility and steady themselves for shooting, checked the powder in the flashpans of their guns and slowly pulled back the flintlock hammers. They aimed the long weapons at the sounds of approach and waited for their target to appear.