Follow the River (56 page)

Matthew ran straight toward one and, at point-blank range, discharged his rifle into his face. The warrior spun to the ground and Matthew leaped over him, but there was now another in his way. All of them seemed to have forgotten the fort now and were stopping and veering and coming toward him with fierce glee in their faces, as if now they were involved in a game of sport, their purpose being to keep this lone white man from reaching the wall of the fort. Matthew roared with an equally fierce exuberance; his muscles felt like steel springs, his feet felt winged. He held his rifle like a quarterstaff, by its barrel. A brown face painted with ochre and blue stripes rose before him and he swung the rifle stock around and felt it thud against flesh and bone, and that Indian was gone. He swung it at another face and with a loud snap the stock broke off. There were hands all over him now. He jabbed the splintered rifle stock into a buckskin-covered abdomen and then the broken gun was wrenched from his hand. He roared with joy and surged on toward the fort, now so near, feeling himself dragged down by the gripping hands. Something was striking his back and shoulders.

He was on the ground, disarmed, the weight of bodies
squirming on him. A few inches ahead of him on the ground there was a great long-handled fry pan. Why it was there he had no idea. But he got out from under the howling attackers somehow, grabbed the pan and scrambled to his feet. It had the weight and heft of an axe, and he killed two warriors with it before sharp things slamming into his back took his breath away and he saw the brown earth coming up to his face.

John Ingles, peering through a loophole in the stockade, wrapped a ball in a greased patch and rammed it down the barrel of his long rifle, tipped a pinch of powder into the flashpan and stuck the barrel out through the loophole. A man behind him yelped and dropped to the ground. There were two dead men and three wounded women on the ground inside the stockade, and John Ingles could not understand where the shots had come from that had hit them. The fort was on a small rise. Any shots that were coming inside the compound had to be coming from someplace higher. John squinted against the powder smoke smarting in his eyes and looked for a target.

“There ’e be!” someone yelled. “Up that poplar!”

John stooped to the loophole again and scanned the surrounding woods until he saw the sniper: the warrior was on a high limb of an immense poplar tree two hundred yards from the fort. Now it seemed that a number of the defenders in that fort had seen him and were sending shots off into that tree. John drew a bead on the tiny figure in the distant branches and fired. Missed. He drew the weapon in to reload, and this time he risked putting in an extra-heavy charge of powder. He rammed the ball down and charged the pan, heart racing, afraid someone else would hit the sniper before he could. He aimed into the high branches again. A puff of smoke floated out from the tree and a ball thwacked into a roof behind him. John Ingles aimed a half a degree high, braced the gun butt tight against his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The stock wrenched his shoulder back as the super-charge went off, but then through the veil of drifting smoke he saw the warrior pitch sideways and fall fifty feet to the ground. He grinned at the cheers he got.

John Ingles lay on the ground half an hour later, feeling the
blood gurgle in his lungs. He had done all he could. He had caught a ball in one of his lungs and was too weak to get up, and the stockade was on fire. The gate had been burned and then rammed open and there were Indians running through the stockade with their damnable yowling, cutting babies apart and slashing women to ribbons with knives, and the screaming and sobbing was just too much to bear. He groaned with rage at his helplessness and watched as a scowling Indian with a bear-claw necklace bent over him and grabbed his hair and sliced into his scalp.

By midafternoon everyone in Vass’ Fort was dead or standing naked in the cold mud roped together by the necks, watching the buildings burn. Those with any wits left about them were remembering how they had ignored the warnings of that poor strange Ingles woman.

The westerly wind at their backs all but blew them over the pass through the Blue Ridge; their cloaks flapped forward and the horses’ manes shivered and ruffled and parted. Before and below, the rolling lowlands sloped away and away into a pearl-pale haze toward the seaboard. Real civilization was down there, a day’s downhill ride away.

They halted their horses in the pass and looked back once, the wind wailing and making them squint and weep; they looked back at the somber ranks of crests stretching westward under the sinking sun. That was the wild world where these two had wed, and had raised and lost their children, and had lost any softness that once might have been in their souls: back in those dark and merciless mountains their souls had been forged.

Will reined his horse around as if to shelter her from that whipping wind, and they sat close together now, facing each other for a moment, seeing the distance and the longings and the sorrow in each other’s eyes, the big ruddy man and the little pale woman, now knowing each other’s feelings enough to understand that they would one day go back, as westward was where the future lay.

Then Will saw a special darkness go over her face, like the shadow of a cloud blowing over a meadow.

“Reckon what?” he asked.

“I just wish they’d a-come with us,” she said. “I still feel it strong, about Vass’.”

“Well, I pray y’re wrong for once.” He sighed. “Now tell me,” he said. “What d’yre foreshow on Tommy and Georgie and Bet?”

“Only that we sh’ll never stop a-looking’ till we know for sure.”

“That I swear,” he said. And then he said: “Now, Mary, y’know there’s one big matter y’ve not told me yet. Let’s get it over with, while there’s just us two t’ hear’t.”

She leveled her gaze at him and set her jaw and squinted against the wind and the winter sun behind him, or against whatever would be in his eyes when she told him. “She was born on th’ ground three days after th’ massacree,” Mary said. She saw his eyes moisten and saw his lips forming the silent word
she
. “I toted an’ suckled ’er three months. Then …” Her gaze fell and her brow knotted.

“What?” he said. He thought the wind had blown her words away.

“…  Then,” she said, looking defiantly at her husband, braced for whatever he might say, “…  then I had to leave ’er with a nurse squaw. Or she’d ’a’ perished, as y’ can see by th’ sight o’ me.” There. She had dared to say it.

A blast of wind buffeted her ears and the hood of her cape and Will had to reach up and hold his hat to keep it on his head. He stared at her, and finally he said:

“And did y’ give this girleen a name?”

“Aye. But you oughtn’t t’ know it. I intend to forget, quick as I can.”

He sat there and looked at her. She did not know how he was going to take this. Finally, he said:

“As it should be.” His mouth was firm and the tears in the corners of his eyes could as well have been from the cold gale.

“And hav’ee somethin’ t’ say to me?” she asked after a while.

He ran his tongue across his lower teeth and inhaled.

“Only this: When I saw the savages takin’ y’off, I had t’ run
t’other way.” He sighed and looked as if he wanted to gaze off somewhere, but kept his eyes on hers.

And she said:

“As it should be. If y’d been fool enough t’ run into a massacree, where would
I
be now?”

They both bared their teeth in unsmiling grins now and allowed themselves to gaze off over each other’s shoulders. Finally Will reached and took her hand.

“We’ll start us a new family, when y’re well. Look’ee.” He gazed westward over the Alleghenies. “We’re just where we were five year back. On Blue Ridge. Just us two. Lookin’ yonder.”

“Aye. And I love’ee more, Will Ingles.”

He swallowed hard, hearing this at last. “Is that true, Mary Ingles?”

“Proof of it: ain’t I here?”

Now they both were really smiling.

“Come,” he said. “Let’s ride down out o’ this wind-blast ’fore it blows us plumb away.”

William Ingles spurred his horse and galloped ahead of his two traveling companions, up a road through a yellow-green meadow to the rounded shoulder of a hill. He reined his horse to a standstill, rose in his stirrups and looked down into the New River Valley. There it all lay, his domain, peaceful among the golden leaves of the woods: Ingle’s Ferry and Inn, the neat house and barn and public house close by the ferry
road, woodsmoke curling up from the chimneys, the cornfields yellowing on the gentle slope above the buildings, the stone well in the yard beside the inn, all as peaceful as he had left it three months before to go on this mission.

Will Ingles, now prosperous and sturdy, mantled in a fine wool cape, wearing a blue and white checked flannel shirt under his buckskin coat, turned, grinning through his white-streaked whiskers, as his companions rode up beside him. One of them was Bill Baker, a rugged, black-haired adventurer who had spent many years as a captive among the Shawnees. Baker had learned the Shawnee tongue and was a superb guide and interpreter.

The other rider was a lad of seventeen years, in the buckskins and blanket and headband of a Shawnee. He rode his horse bareback. Across the horse’s withers were slung a bow and a quiver of arrows.

When the youth reached the shoulder of the hill, Bill Baker said something to him in Shawnee and pointed down the hill to the cluster of buildings. The lad leaned forward, hands braced on the horse’s neck, and looked at the place very intently. He looked then at the distant mountains with their woods in autumn color and looked up and down the curving river. Expressionless, he took it all in, and Will Ingles watched him anxiously. At last the youth nodded once, still without expression.

The three riders trotted their horses down the road into the valley. Will Ingles looked happy and proud enough to burst. Chickens clucked and hurried out of the road and a pig waatched from the yard as the men rode toward the house. Suddenly Will Ingles cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled in a piercing voice:

“Heyo! Mary! Heyo, Mary, we’re home!”

And when the three riders stopped their horses in front of the stoop of the log house, a door opened and a very handsome woman in a long blue linsey-woolsey dress, with a white shawl over her shoulders, stepped out onto the stoop and looked at them. She was straight-backed and statuesque, with a youthful ruddy complexion and a crown of thick, snow-white hair. She looked first at Will, just for a second, and
winked at him. Then she glanced at the other man and said, “Mister Baker, how d’ye?”

“Right well, Missus Ingles, and you too, I hope.”

“Tolerable,” she replied to him, but her blazing eyes had already moved on to the youth, and she stared at him. While she was studying him, her face growing pale, three little girls appeared in the open door. One was about eight years old, another six, the last, four. At once, seeing Will Ingles, they began bouncing and chorusing, “Papa! Papa!”

“Hush,” said Mary Ingles, and without taking her eyes off the youth, she spread her hands back to bar the girls from running down into the yard. Then another figure appeared in the doorway. She was a dark-haired, hard-face, slender woman of about thirty-five.

“How d’ye, Will?” this woman said.

“How d’ye, Bettie,” Will said. “Didn’t ’spect you.”

“Wouldn’t a’ missed this,” she said. “Johnny couldn’t leave the harvest, though.” Her eyes were glinting with wet and now she turned to look at the mounted youth. Johnny Draper had traced her to the Shawnee town of Chillicothe seven years before and ransomed her from the chief who had adopted her. Her face looked permanently hard and sad, but she was very sentimental and wept easily, often for no apparent reason.

“Well, Mary,” said Will Ingles.

“Well, William,” said Mary.

“Tell him,” Will said to Bill Baker. Baker reached over and tapped the shoulder of the Shawnee boy, who was staring at the white-haired woman. The boy turned to look at him and Mister Baker pointed to her and said:

“Nik-yah.”

The boy turned back to Mary Ingles and kept staring at her. Mary Ingles stared back at him.

He carries himself like Wildcat
, she was thinking.

Then she nodded to the boy. He was studying her without expression but a great deal was going on in his eyes. Suddenly he threw a leg over his horse and dropped lightly to the ground on the balls of his feet.

He handed his horse’s lead to Mister Baker and walked
toward the stoop. He was tall and slender and very dignified for someone so young.

Mary Ingles began trembling as he walked closer. The little girls were gawking at him open-mouthed and silent.

He halted a few paces from the stoop and looked at her. She took two shaky steps down onto the ground and came to stand an arm’s length in front of him. She looked at his dark eyes and his reddish-brown hair that was neatly held by a beaded headband. Her eyelids began fluttering and tears came from the corners of her eyes.

“Nee-gah,” the boy said.

She looked a question at Mister Baker.

“He says, ‘My mother.’ ”

Her chin was crumpling up with crying but her mouth smiled. She reached out and took his hand. Then with a sudden outburst of snuffling, she flung her arms around him and buried her face against his neck, and cried uncontrollably. He stood there, his hands rising slowly from his sides, and then timidly wrapped his arms around her heaving shoulders, and now his nose was running and his eyes were spilling over. Bettie on the stoop and Will on his horse were now shaking with constrained sobs and clenched teeth and their cheeks were wet.

Mary Ingles raised her head after a while and, red-nosed, the little pain-wrinkles around her mouth etched deep by her half-grimace, half-smile, searched his glimmering eyes with her own and put her palms up to the sides of his face, and she said:

“Ten times ten times ten, Tommy-lad. O, welcome home, my son!”

Mary Draper Ingles’ captivity was but one of an estimated 2,000 incidents of kidnapping of white settlers, male and female, adult and child, during the French and Indian War. The ordeals of captivity, torture and escape provided grist for the artistic imagination for many years. The tales, both factual and fictional, that grew out of these adventures made a thrilling undercurrent in American folklore, fired the prejudices that resulted in the implacable and merciless treatment of Indian nations during the westward march of American settlement and, of course, contributed to the shaping of the national character.