Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Blast ’ee, Bettie, for a snot-sniveler!”

  When she was making Captain Wildcat’s shirt, she was full of curious, shape-shifting daydreams. Plying her needle in tight stiches along a shoulder seam, she had a sense of the hard, manly shoulder that would eventually be clothed by this work. But the shoulder in the daydreams was not always brown and hairless; sometimes it would be fair and freckled and hairy: Will’s shoulder, somewhere at the end of a long river journey.

  She would try to remember landmarks along the rivers. She would try to make a map in her head, a map of a river twisting and rushing down through the dark mountains; and at the far end of that river map, she would see the inside log walls of her cabin, with the coats and pans and gun hanging from pegs where they had always been, and the old clock ticking; she could remember all the marks of the broad-ax upon those hewn walls, and the marks of the tooth-chisel on the fireplace stones.

  They burnt the house, she would remind herself sometimes; it’s not there anymore. I looked back and saw it burning down. But she could not remember that burning very well; she would see vaguely, for an instant, the shake roof falling in with a roar of colorless flame in the sunlight, but that vision would go away and she would see, as she had seen so often from underneath, the pole rafters above the bed, the shingles becoming distinct in the morning light, or flickering with hearthglow at night, and the house existed complete and intact in her mind, every log and beam and peg and stone of it, more real and more significant now even than when she had lived in it and touched it with her hands and swept it with a rush-broom. It was as if she had brought the real house with her in her head, and if she could go there she could set it right back down where the charred chimney must now be standing, and it would be instantly complete again, so that Will could walk in through the door with his tools on his shoulder, his big frame for a moment a silhouette in the sunny rectangle of doorway …

  And then the silhouette in her mind’s eye would become Captain Wildcat standing before her under the low roof of the trading post a few days ago with his hand on her upper arm, making his proposal to her. She would look up from the blue and white cloth then, thinking that he would be standing there, but he would not be. It would instead be Goulart standing there in her light, scratching his armpit or groin, watching his partner sew the wonderful shirts, his eyes agleam with profits. Wildcat had not come back since she had pushed his hand away, and she felt vulnerable, as if a protective wall had been torn down between her and the mass of nameless, ruddy, cruel Shawnee faces.

  Sometimes her daydreams would go up a river in the opposite direction: up this Scioto-cepe to Kispoko Town, and there she would imagine the interior of Wildcat’s wegiwa, a sleeping-pallet of boughs and hides and blankets under one sloping wall, a fire-ring of blackened stones in the center of the dirt floor, herself and Tommy and Georgie and Bettie Elenor all living under his roof.

  His squaw, she would think, putting it in words. My children his children. Ingles blood Indian blood.

  Nay! she would think, her heart thumping and her face flushed with anger and embarrassment: Nay. I’m Will’s, that’s whose I am, and that’s whose I’ll ever be!

  But even at that, when she would feel the first hint of autumnal coolness in the dawns of late summer, and think how far north they had been brought from Draper’s Meadows, she might envision again that warm pallet, those fur robes, that fire-ring; unlike Draper’s Meadows, it was a place possible to get to, and, despite herself, she would watch the street for Captain Wildcat and listen for his voice.

  He’s offered me protection and I’ve refused it, she thought. And she could be proud of herself for that. But she knew that it was still in his power to take her without her consent.

  Sometimes it seemed that she was counting on him to do that.

  “Tell Wildcat I’ve done his shirt,” she said to Goulart one afternoon, folding up the biggest and best one she’d yet made. “Tell him he can come and get it now.”

  Goulart went away, and she sat waiting, her heartbeat racing. Goulart came back alone and took the shirt from her. “He tell me to bring it to heem.”

  She felt so alone and vulnerable now she could hardly bear it. She took Bettie Elenor abruptly from Otter Girl’s breast and put her to her own. Otter Girl’s eyes glittered with tears of hurt, but Mary ignored them. Squaw, she thought contemptuously at her. Then she sat the rest of the afternoon, not sewing, the baby at her breast as a soft armor against loneliness, trying to reassemble Will’s face and form in her mind’s eye.

  Her body could remember the tickle of his hair and his weight upon her and the sour smell of his work-sweat and the breath-taking entry of his rigid flesh into her moist, wanting flesh; her body could still remember all this. But every day it was harder to see his face in her daydreams.

  Then there was a long day of councils and drums. The Frenchmen came back from the council lodge late that day glowing with excitement and talking sonorously to each other with much waving of arms and gesturing of hands. They drank from cups of rum and discoursed for a long time while Mary sewed. After a while, she began to think she was hearing a familiar name, and she interrupted:

  “Are you saying ‘Washington’?”

  They turned and looked at her curiously, then LaPlante replied: “Yes. That was the name.”

  “What of Washington?”

  “Eh,” Goulart said. “A chief of this town named Red Hawk. He was in the grand victory at Duquesne. He say that he aimed onze—ah, eleven—times at the Virginia colonel, Washington, most clearly, but his bullets do not kill him. Red Hawk says then he does not shoot at him again as the Great Spirit must protect thees Washington. Red Hawk says he believes this because his gun never misses its mark before.”

  The story made Mary shiver with awe. She envisioned the battle in her mind, and it was very clear, because she could remember the face of the young colonel.

  “Eh, bien,” Goulart was saying. “Few of your Anglais were so protected. For every Indian or French soldier who fell, twenty of your Anglais. A thousand of your officers and soldiers were shot, madame. Sacre! Quelle victoire!”

  Mary felt a cold sweat. Surely, she thought, these are only Indian boasts and cannot be true. Surely.

  The next day began with drums.

  Mary was lying on her blanket in the open hut with the baby at her breast when the drums started thudding, regular and ominous. Something unexpected was happening, and her heart sped up as if to match the drumbeat. There had been some security in the routine pattern of the days at the trading post, and any disruption, like this drumming, could suddenly throw her fully back into the anxiety of peril.

  The drums stopped within five minutes, but by then the whole population of the town was moving up the streets toward the center of the town.

  “What d’ye suppose?” Bettie asked, up on one elbow nearby. Tommy and Georgie were sitting up, too; Tommy was yawning and Georgie was rubbing his fists in his eyes.

  “Nothing to do with us, pray,” said Mary. But the public gatherings in the Shawnee Town always seemed to have something to do with the prisoners, and she had little hope that they would be ignored today. Then, when Captain Wildcat and another warrior chieftain—both in their new checked shirts—arrived at the lean-to, she was sure that another day of reckoning was at hand. Wildcat summoned them, drawing his palm toward his chest.

  “All come,” he said. “All.”

  Blinking and rumpled, they emerged from the hut, their hearts racing at that pace which an early-morning fright can induce. Mary looked for a hint of something personal in Wildcat’s eye, but his eye was now again like the veiled eye of a reptile.

  “Blankets,” Wildcat said, again with that summoning motion. Mary stooped into the hut to gather and fold the two blankets she and the two boys had been sleeping on. Her sense of dread was heightened somehow by this. The blankets were their only possessions and they were being told to bring them.

  “This too?” Mary said, holding up her se
wing basket.

  Wildcat nodded. Mary slipped the little basket between the folds of her blanket and put the baby girl in her carrier. She slipped her arms through the straps and picked up the blankets and came out into the open with the others. A light, warm rain was sifting down from a dull sky. Ghetel squinted up malevolently.

  The chieftains led them toward the council lodge. Mary held Georgie’s hand and Bettie led Tommy. They moved along with the crowd of townspeople. They aren’t carrying clubs and switches, Mary thought. Thank the Lord for that. But notions of other tortures she had heard about through the years—rape, burning at the stake, death by slicing, dismemberment, disembowelment—kept crowding her mind and she had to fight them down with a wordless, constant prayer of faith.

  They were taken into the council lodge. It was the most spacious room Mary had ever been in, even bigger than the livery barn in Philadelphia where her parents had taken her once. It was at least ninety feet long and fifty feet wide. Its roof was held up by an ingenious framework of upright tree trunks overlaid with horizontal poles. Pale skylight filtered down into the smoky gloom through a series of smokeholes in the roof. The floor was smooth-packed, swept earth. The smell of new wood, dirt, tobacco and Indian flesh was dense.

  They were herded into the center of the floor, where some two dozen white people, men and women and children, stood. The skylight made their faces whiter, their eye sockets and cheeks more hollow. The men’s hands were tied behind their backs. Henry Lenard raised his head in greeting when he saw Mary and her party.

  The captives were surrounded by a circle of sitting chiefs and chieftains, behind whom a large part of the town’s population stood. Smoking pipes lay on blankets before the sitting chiefs, and a thin wraith of smoke curled up from a single clay bowl of embers toward the hole in the ceiling. Mary felt as if some ceremony had been going on before they were brought in.

  They stood amid the hum of voices for a few minutes, until another group of prisoners—three men, one of them with a head wound bound in a bloody rag—was brought in. Then the white-haired chief rose in an easy motion from the blanket on which he had been sitting, and raised his right hand. The room grew still, and he began speaking. His voice was deep and loud, very resonant in the cavernous lodge.

  Then he stopped talking and stretched his hand toward one of the young warrior chieftains, and sat down. As the chieftain rose and stepped forward, Mary saw LaPlante and Goulart standing near one of the upright columns, looking on.

  The chieftain walked among the prisoners. He stopped first behind the sturdy man who had tried to strangle LaPlante at the gauntlet. He grabbed the prisoner by his bound wrists and the hair on the crown of his head, and forced him to walk to one of the columns. Warriors turned the man’s back to the column, kicked his feet out from under him, and then quickly wrapped a leather thong around his neck and around the post, so that he now sat unable to move, unable even to slump forward. He grimaced against the tightness of his bonds, and Mary saw that his front teeth had been knocked out since the other time she had seen him. The chieftain talked briefly over him, turning to look down and spit on him twice. Then all the chiefs and chieftains grunted something in response. The chief snapped out a brief statement and some warriors came forth with a bowl and swabs. They cut the big white man’s clothing off and quickly painted his chest and face black with a fluid from the bowl.

  Then the chieftain selected from among the prisoners the foreign man who had curled up whimpering at the head of the gauntlet, and tied him to another of the uprights. After a few more minutes of discussion among the chiefs, he too was painted black. He sat looking skyward and sobbing, and it was that sight that made Mary suspect that the black paint signified death. It seemed that they were going to kill one because he was too brave, and the other because he was not brave enough.

  Mary tousled the hair of Georgie, who was beginning to quake leaning against her leg. She stole a glance at Bettie, who stood braced and rigid and had probably not yet guessed the meaning of the black paint. Then she glanced at Captain Wildcat, but he was not looking in her direction. Finally she took a sidelong look in the direction of the Frenchmen. LaPlante was looking elsewhere, but Goulart caught her glance, and one of his eyes began twitching as if with a tic.

  It might have been a tic, from stress. Or it might have been a wink of reassurance.

  Mary could only pray that she had become too valuable a business asset to be painted black.

  But by that token, what’s to become o’ poor Bet, she thought. She’s o’ no earthly use to ’em …

  The chieftain then went to the third foreign man who had run the gauntlet that day, and pulled him out to stand before the chiefs. The chieftain talked briefly, got noises of assent from them and then had warriors take the man out of the council lodge. Next, the little foreign girl was brought out, discussed briefly, and then passed into the hands of a middle-aged Indian man who led her out of the lodge.

  Ghetel was the next one to be pointed out. As she stepped out before the chiefs a murmur of good humor went up in the big room. The chieftain spoke, then the chief spoke again, and then another of the elder chiefs stood up and talked, looking at the old woman from time to time. Then he sat down, and a buzz of cheerful voices followed. The old woman was led, looking bewildered, out of the lodge.

  Having thus disposed of all his captives, that chieftain resumed his seat in the square, and the chief turned to his left to address another of the warrior chieftains. This one rose and went among the captives, sorted out three, one at a time, and they too were taken out of the lodge. To Mary the process seemed like cutting horses out of a herd for sale.

  This business continued for more than an hour, and the dwindling knot of captives stood mournfully in the middle of the lodge, awaiting fates they could not understand. No more were tied up and painted black, and the two who had been remained lashed to the posts. The soldier glared defiantly around, watching everything, his pale eyes stark and ferocious in contrast to the blackened face. The other kept his eyes closed and muttered constantly to himself.

  At last Wildcat got up, and by this time the ony prisoners left standing in the arena were those from Draper’s Meadows: Mary, with her baby on her back, Bettie, Tommy and Georgie, and Henry Lenard.

  Mary looked down at Georgie. The boy was gazing at Wildcat with the kind of wide-eyed admiration and trust he had always beamed upon his own father. She glanced back and down at Tommy, who was gazing likewise. She heard Henry clear his throat nearby.

  Wildcat went to Henry first. He pointed at him and began to speak. Today Captain Wildcat was the finest sort of Indian. There was nothing human about him today, nothing hesitant or shy or warm or humorous; he was a war chief of tomorrow, standing straight as a plank, glowing in a beautiful new blue and white shirt, slicked raven hair gleaming in the skylight from the smokehole above, filling the air with thundering words, with well-timed pauses, with graceful sweeps and powerful thrusts of his hands. Mary wondered what there could be about the culling of a slaveherd that would require such epic eloquence.

  And the worst of it was that, for the first time, his oratory seemed never to refer to her. Not once had he glanced her way. Two warriors came to the center of the room and accompanied Henry away. He did not look back.

  Then Wildcat stood by Bettie. He talked for a minute about her, then pointed to a round-faced Indian man of about fifty. The chief nodded and said, “Oui-sah.” That, Mary remembered, meant “good.” It was the only word she had understood through this whole transaction.

  Wildcat grasped Bettie’s left arm and disengaged Tommy’s hand from hers. He pointed to the round-faced man.

  “Go. Him.”

  Bettie’s eyes widened, faltered, searched Mary’s face. They glittered with sudden tears while her mouth seemed to try to form a question. Mary suddenly had the awful notion that she and Bettie would never see each other again. And Bettie’s stricken expression seemed to say that she understood that too. At once they lu
rched toward each other and embraced. Neither was able to get a word out past the little strangling noises in the top of her throat. Then Bettie was pulled away. She went away into the gloom, an indistinct shape veiled by a sudden flow of hot tears. Tommy and Georgie were both piping questions Mary was too stunned to hear.

  Mary raised her arm and put her face against the upper sleeve of her dress to dry the tears and mucus that had so suddenly poured from her eyes and nose. Above her own snuffling she could hear Wildcat talking.

  When she had gotten herself under control, LaPlante was standing beside her. “Pas de rien,” he was saying. “Pas de rien, Madame. You will be, ah, with us. In the store. Our, ah, partner. We ’ave, arranged so.”

  Anger and disgust brought her voice back to her. “Bought me,” she snapped.

  “Ehhhh …” LaPlante shrugged. But his eyes fell. Then he looked at her again with a blazing smile. “So come, eh? We make shirts, eh?” He grasped her upper arm and, with a bow to Wildcat and the chiefs, started to lead her out of the square.

  She understood, rationally, that once again she had been exceedingly lucky, that she had survived this latest perilous reckoning probably better than anybody. She was not to be put to death; she was not to be taken away to still another unknown place; she had not been given in concubinage to some savage stranger. But even this kind of fortune was not enough to outweigh her deep sense of insult: she had been sold, sold like a slave.

  And a part of the insult, it shocked her to realize—she rushed to put it out of her mind—was that it was Wildcat, her protector and advocate in this alien world, this man who had spared her the running of the gauntlet, this man who had looked at her one sun-gilded evening on the O-y-o River with some deep personal thoughtfulness, this man who once had looked at her with admiration, even tenderness, and had said she was oui-sah, good; this man who once had held her arm and offered her a proposal; it was this man who had now simply sold her off, as if she were of no importance to him. He did not want her if she did not want him. And she was immediately ashamed of herself for having felt hurt by it.