Follow the River (54 page)

His hands were on the counterpane near her hand but neither yet could seem to reach and touch the other. Will and Mary just kept staring at each other’s faces and seeing only blurred shapes and shades.

“Well,” she said, almost strangling, “I did come to y’, Will …” and let out a long, trembling sigh.

Will was remembering, suddenly, something he had not let himself think of for days: his last sight of her. He remembered running away down through the meadows from that sight with the Indians in pursuit of him and he was wondering how he could ever tell her about that moment.

She slid her left hand down to cover the back of his left hand and they both watched their hands touch and saw their wedding bands glimmering through their tears. He thumbed the tears out of his eyes with his right hand and then he really saw her hands, the swollen knuckles, the scrapes and scars and scabs and mangled blue fingernails, and his chin began trembling and his nose started running.

And then Mary saw somebody else move near the foot of the bed and looked up and saw vaguely the form of her brother Johnny standing there and she knew he was going to ask about Bettie, and she didn’t know whether she could handle the answer.

All the things that needed to be said loomed as steep and high before her as the palisade cliff.

“Well, Johnny,” she murmured, “how d’ye?”

Old Adam Harmon had made a quick passage down the west side of the river, and by early afternoon was within a league of the hunting camp that his son had abandoned five days before. Adam had run across much Indian sign, most of it several days old: moccasin tracks, in that pigeon-toed pattern
left by the Indian stride; grooved impressions left in the snow at water’s edge by canoe-bottoms; and, here and there, human waste staining the melted snow. At one place not far above his own outcamp he found the cold, soaked ashes of a campfire in a trampled hollow, and beds of boughs indicating that as many as eight or ten braves might have camped here. Most of the traces led upstream, generally toward the settlements. This meant to him that the feeling in his little finger had not been wrong; there had indeed been considerable numbers of warriors in the vicinity at the time of Mrs. Ingles’ rescue and in the days she had lain in his outpost recuperating from the margins of death.

Of course, there was no sign of this crazy old witch of a cannibal Mrs. Ingles had sent him a-seeking; he expected to find none. As close to perishing as young Mrs. Ingles had been, surely an old woman would have died sooner. Or would be lying scalpless in the woods somewhere, her gray hair hanging from some young savage’s belt. Or the wolves or buzzards would have picked her bones by now.

Eh, then, he thought. The easier for me to carry ’em back.

Mr. Harmon had made this trip down mostly to humor Mrs. Ingles, but he was a practical man above all, and would not waste his time or effort on bootless errands. Whether he should find the old Dutch woman’s carcass or not, he might at least salvage what his son had left behind at the hunting camp; the kettle, the leather butchering-breeches, and, if he could round her up, the old hobbled pack mare.

He rode through the stark woods, rifle primed and laid across the pommel, and squinted against the whiteness of the snow, on constant watch for hints of ambush. He reined in the horse now and then to listen. A mile ahead, through and above the trees, loomed the curved blue-gray riverbend cliff he and his sons called the Big Horse Shoe.

Ahead and to his left was a saddle of land he could ride through to shortcut the long peninsula that jutted into the horseshoe. He halted and listened, and stood up slightly in the stirrups, his eyes darting more keenly now. There was something unusual in the air. He tuned his ears in and out through the soft noises of the wilds—gurgle of the river, hush
of space, chink and twitter of winter birds—and then his ear homed in on it, a faint noise not of the wilderness: a dull, metallic sound, just on the threshold of audibility. It repeated, faded, repeated.

And then something else; the back of his neck crawled when he heard it: a short, quavering wail, like a fragment of a wolf’s howl. Then the metallic
clunk, clunk
, still so faint; and then again the wail, louder.

It was broad daylight, but Adam Harmon felt the same kind of eerie, half-believing fright he had used to feel at night by a campfire when, with his sons, he had listened to an old half-Indian hunter tell haunt tales about the spirits of this valley—tales about the ghosts of an ancient tribe of Indians that had built mounds and rock walls all through the river valleys. Mr. Harmon was not a particularly superstitious man, but certain moods of landscape and light could make gooseflesh raise under his jaw-whiskers, and in such times he would think very intensely of God’s name, and check the powder in the flashpan of his gun, both of which he did now.

He reined his horse to the left and kneed it to a walk and rode into a cleft in a limestone bluff, where he would be hidden on two sides and have a clear view down over the peninsula. He turned and halted there and sat his horse, the butt of his long rifle now resting on his thigh, ready for instant action, his left hand soothing the withers of his horse, which had heard the strange noises and was flicking its ears and puffing steam nervously.

He waited and listened. The noises were coming closer now, and were no longer ghostly. The metallic sound evidently was from a livestock bell of some kind. And the voice was crying:

“Hallooooo! Hal-LOOOOOOOO!”

His horse nickered, and another answered nearby.

He could hear the hoofsteps soon, and the bell, and guessed they were going to pass within fifty yards of him. He cocked his flintlock.

And then around the corner of the bluff the rider appeared, and Adam Harmon’s hair stood up at the sight, which was a
stranger apparition than any of the old haunt stories in his imagination had ever produced:

The afternoon sun glowed in a frizzy halo of white hair, crowning the oldest, ugliest, most cadaverous face Adam Harmon had ever seen on a living body. The wearer of this hollow-cheeked, cave-eyed, wattle-skinned horror-mask was draped in a filthy, tattered gray blanket, and was riding astride a rackabones nag which Harmon instantly recognized as his own strayed pack horse. A bell hanging from its neck clanked at every step.

The horses were already responding to each other before the astonished Adam Harmon realized that this wailing spectre was a woman, and therefore, surely, the old Dutch woman he had come to find. Somehow, apparently she had stumbled onto Junior’s abandoned hunting camp down below and caught the mare.

He kneed his horse and rode down toward her. “Ay, there!” he said loudly. The old horse had stopped, and the old woman turned a blank, dulled stare at him, her gnawed, sunken, sore-covered mouth hanging open.

“Could y’ be Missus Stump?” he asked, looking at her without friendliness.

She sat gaping wordlessly at him for so long, swaying on the horse’s back and seeming to try to focus her eyes, that he thought she was perhaps about to faint. But she closed and opened her mouth several times, like a fish, and then said:

“Ah … ah … Missus Stumf, yes …” She looked fearfully now at the upraised rifle, slowly raised a scraggy hand toward him. “I vould not hurt ’er,” she mumbled. “Please don’ shoot me, Mister Inkles.”

The womenfolk had shooed all the men out and then had brought Mary Ingles close to the hearth, stripped her, bathed her thoroughly, salved her many wounds and chapped skin, dressed her in one of Diane McCorkle’s softest, warmest nightshirts, brushed her hair and fed her fresh milk and soup and hoecake. When the men came back in, she was sitting on
a chair looking at the fire and there was a tinge of color on her cheekbones.

Will sat beside her as dusk fell outside, and he held her hand and sipped whiskey and gazed into the firelight with her, now and then turning to look at that strange, skull-like head, the deeply recessed eyes.

They had had difficulty talking to each other about things close to their souls. She had told him the whole story of her captivity and escape, but had left out certain things, and he was not going to pry them out until she seemed ready to say them. He had in turn told her everything about his trip down among the Cherokees. Will looked at her shyly for long moments when her profile was to him, and he thought: with care she’ll be a young woman again, I think. But a young woman with snow-white hair, always to remind us.

When he thought this, such a bittersweet pang squeezed his chest that he thought he was going to cry again.

Johnny Draper had sat with them for a while. He had gazed into the fire, as if seeing a thousand miles beyond it, and had tried to act hopeful and cheerful. But Mary had watched the expression in his face and had watched him raise his hand up and gnaw the skin around his thumbnail. She had put her hand, that frail, scarred, raw framework of bird-bones that was her hand, on Johnny’s wrist and had gently pushed down, saying:

“ ’Member, Ma always said a gent don’t put his hands about ’is face lest he’s a-prayin’.”

After a while, Johnny had replied, “Well, then, likely I was a-prayin’, eh?”

“Do, Johnny. Have faith. She’ll get back someday, somehow. I did.”

“Aye. But she wasn’t brought up a Draper. She was more … delicate, like.”

Mary thought for a while. “No. A body’s delicate only if she’s let t’be.”

There was a faint shout outside, then a louder one. People left the room to see what was happening. “It’s Adam,” someone yelled. Will stood up, across the hearth from Mary, and waited, his face pale and hardened.

A few minutes later, everybody came spilling back into the
room from outside, all muttering and grumbling or arguing in high voices. They filled the candle-lit room, tracking mud and snow all over, the men’s hats almost touching the low ceiling-joists, and milled back toward both walls of the room, leaving a sort of an aisle between the front door and the hearth where Mary sat. Mary turned and looked toward the door. Mister Harmon stooped under the lintel and came in, mud-spattered to his thighs, then turned and reached out the door into the darkness and led Ghetel into the candlelight.

Ghetel stood tottering in the doorway, blinking. Her eyes were drawn at once toward the fire, and fell upon Mary Ingles. Her mouth dropped open and started working, as if saying voiceless words. The two women looked at each other down the length of the room. All the people in the room knew this was the foreigner-woman who had tried to kill and eat Mary Ingles, and they stared silently at her with a hostile fascination, watching every expression and tic of her hideous face. She had lost all but the two eyeteeth from the front of her mouth by now and they looked like fangs. However the people at Dunkard’s Fort had been imagining this cannibal, she surely was no disappointment.

Mary got up slowly from the chair. Even in woolen stockings and moccasins, her feet exploded with pains as she put her weight on them, and she steadied herself on the chair back. At the door at the far end of the room, between the lines of hating, hard-lipped faces, Ghetel looked as if she were about to start down another tribal gauntlet.

Mary and Ghetel started hobbling toward each other. Ghetel was wearing the blood-stained leather butchering-breeches she had found at the Harmon’s hunting camp, and rags of blanket-cloth trailed from her festering feet.

It was only the length of a small room, but it seemed an eternity passed as the two white-haired, limping survivors approached each other, looking straight at each other’s eyes, with expressions such as no one here had ever seen before.

They stopped two feet apart, eyes blazing from within their deep, shadowy sockets, and there was not a breath to be heard in the room, only the crackle of the fire on the hearth. Then the old woman said:

“You ought to stayed vit’ me, May-ry. I found a pot of meat.”

An indignant murmur swept up and down both sides of the room, then died down. Mary replied:

“It’s all th’ same, dear. I found my folks.”

They stood there for another moment, then leaned together as if to hold each other up, and put their arms around each other and patted each other on the back.

They were like this for a long time, while the people in the room stood blinking and swallowing and beginning to understand something they knew they would never forget.

Finally Mary raised her head with a long, unsteady sigh. She took Ghetel’s arm and turned to lead her to the hearth.

“Come sit,” she said. “Them feet need some tendin’ to.”

Will Ingles lay in the dark in the big bed with Mary beside him and listened to the snoring and the muttering of the people sleeping on pallets all over the floor of the room. There was no privacy for himself and Mary, and he was grateful for that.

He was afraid of being alone in a bed in a room with her.

She had snuggled up to him when they first got into bed together, and her body had felt like a bundle of broomsticks and hoe handles. She had put her head on his arm and her cold bony arms around his chest and had asked him to keep her warm, and at the feel of her he had got all screamy inside and covered with shivers and had wanted to leap out of bed and go sleep on the floor in a corner someplace.

Then she had touched around on his body and made little m’s in her throat while his eyes bugged in the darkness and he wanted to cringe away from her touch. Finally, to his relief, she had fallen asleep.

Will wasn’t sure whether she had wanted him to do the love thing with her. Surely not; surely she don’t feel fit for that, he thought, and wouldn’t in this crowded darkness. But just the question of it made his stomach churn and the sweat run down his temples.

He didn’t know why.

It wasn’t just because she was a stranger to him now, or that
she looked like a brittle old woman. It was that, but that wasn’t all of it.

It wasn’t just because of that fierce, awful wild-animal blaze in those hollow eyes, either. It was that, too, but that still wasn’t all of it.

It wasn’t just because of the way she had greeted that old Dutch hag, either, the way she had greeted her better than she had greeted him, as if she knew her better than she knew him, as if she loved her better than she loved him. It was that, too, because that had hurt him and scared him, but it was more than that, too.