Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Cut a mark on the trees en route,” he said. “Then you find your way back, savez?”

  She held the tomahawk and looked at it. Having it in her hand gave her many thoughts. She looked up. “Yes. I’ll do that.”

  “Goulart does not want to lose Madame,” he said, winking and grinning. He reached around and pinched her haunch.

  He never suspected how close Mary came that moment to sinking the sharp blade between his eyes.

  Ghetel!”

  The old woman, stooping in the edge of a marsh pond to rake arrowleaf tubers out of the mud with clawed fingers, turned quickly at the intensity of Mary’s voice. She stood there with muddy water dribbling from her fingers. The chill that went through her was caused not by the cold water she stood in but by the fierce blaze in the eyes of the slender young woman.

  “Ghetel, listen to me.”

  “I listen. Wot?”

  “I am going to leave. Will you come with me?”

  “Hah! Nah, two more hours daylight. We just started. Help me dig, come. Plenty here. Very good, boiled and salted.” She stooped again.

  “Ghetel, listen to me!”

  “Wot? I listen! You go back then. I busy.”

  “Not back, Ghetel! Home!”

  The old woman straightened up quickly.

  “You said wot?”

  “Home.” She pointed eastward. The old woman looked in that direction, then at Mary, then stopped again with a shake of her head.

  “Not too funny,” she said.

  “No, I mean it.”

  This time when Ghetel stood up, her face was in a grimace. “You talk mad. Stop this.”

  “Look. We have blankets. This axe. Shoes. No Indians around. We could go. Just go!”

  “Mein Gott! We would starf!”

  “No! We feed a dozen lazy men on what we find in the woods.”

  “But they kill meat. This is only added.”

  “It would feed two of us.”

  “Mad talk, May-ry Inkles. I dun’ want t’ hear dis.”

  “I’ll go alone, then. But two of us is better.”

  “Gott, I dun’ wan’ t’ hear!”

  “Don’t holler!”

  “Dun’ talk mad, den!”

  “I’m not talkin’ mad! We could do it!”

  “A crazy woman talks. Gott help me.”

  The baby began to cry. It was upset by their voices. A gust of cool wind blew Mary’s hair across her face and brought a shower of yellow leaves down onto the pond. It was very strange, two white women standing here in the middle of the wilderness shouting at each other while a baby cried. Mary felt how strange it was. Ghetel was grubbing in the mud again, but absently. Her face was still working and she was muttering in her own language. She was thinking about it, Mary knew. She was upset by the notion.

  “Think of it, Ghetel. You could go home to your kitchen and bake honeycakes.”

  It was a while before Ghetel said, “I haf no kitchen. No more home. All burn. Ev’rybody dead but me.”

  “Then come to my family. We have rich land and a good house.” No, we don’t, she reminded herself. It’s all burnt too But she went on: “You could live with us and cook for us. We have a great, rich house,” she lied. She had threatened to go alone but was deathly afraid of that, afraid of the nights, and would say anything to persuade her.

  The baby was still crying.

  “Her,” Ghetel said, straightening again and pointing a mucky paw at the baby. “They would hear her and find you.”

  Mary shook her head. “We’d be miles a-gone before they knew. We could mark a trail one way and then go back another. I know the way home. By the rivers.”

  Ghetel was listening in spite of herself, and the admission of an argument was making her angry. Then she shook her head violently. “Nah. The baby would die. She would die first. And then me and then you.”

  Mary remembered: she had already told herself that.

  “If we do, we do,” she said. “Better than to live like this, isn’t it?”

  The old woman sighed. “I dun’ know.” She blew through her lips like a horse. “No. Maybe.”

  “Better than this.”

  “You say so, eh?”

  “Aye, I say it. I’m no slave o’ the heathen, by my Lord God I’m not!” She breathed deeply and shivered with the thrill of saying it.

  “I have to think,” Ghetel said. “Come back to the camp now. We will talk. We will make a plan.”

  “We canno’ talk there. And there’s not so much time left,” Mary said. “They’ll take us back to the town soon. We could never walk away from there, I’ll vow.”

  “Such a choice I can only make when I wake up. I would know in the morning. We could each get a blanket. Some food from the camp. A knife, a flint.”

  “If we took things they would be suspicious.” And then the word suddenly put Mary herself on guard. “Ghetel, if we go to the camp tonight, y’d not tell ’em what I mean t’do?”

  Ghetel’s mouth fell open. She looked as if Mary had slapped her. Then, scowling, she turned abruptly and with a muddy claw pulled open a gap in the back of her tattered dress to expose the ridged welts from her wounds of the gauntlet. Then she drew up into a stance of dignity. “May-ry Inkles, they haf done that to me.” She strode out of the border of the pond, her feet sucking mud. She came close to Mary and stared into her eyes with a trembling chin. “Who we haf but each other? You are all my family now. Gott damns me if I would tell. You hurt me.” Then tears spilled from under her drooping eyelids.

  Something turned deep inside Mary’s breast and her shrunken heart expanded so suddenly it seemed about to burst. She pulled the big old wretch to her bosom.

  And now she was aware that this was stranger yet: two ragged white women standing beside a pond in the wilderness, hugging and bawling as the infant bawled with them.

  They stayed apart that evening, with the conspirator’s instinct not to seem conspiratorial. The old woman boiled the arrowleaf tubers and served them with the venison. She had borrowed a knife from LaPlante to trim the tubers before cooking them, and only Mary saw her slip it under the edge of her blanket.

  I believe, Mary thought, that she’s going to wake up saying yes.

  Mary was too excited to fall asleep. Her heart pounded interminably as the fires died down and the Indians one by one rolled into their blankets or hides and went to sleep in their lean-tos. LaPlante and Goulart were the last to retire. She heard them mumbling their bon soirs to each other by the last glow of the campfire, then saw them both rise and go their separate ways into the darkness. For a minute then she had to listen to one of them pissing copiously into a puddle nearby.

  There was a sudden breath of movement directly in front of her; a dark shape blotted out the starlight and fireglow. Then she smelled the unmistakable rankness of Goulart’s heavy body. He was spreading his blanket inches from where she lay.

  Without moving, she flared into silent rage. So he had chosen this time and way to move in. Would God I’d decamped today when I was set to! she thought. If I have to stick this pig with his own knife I’ll not even get a chance to leave.

  So it was all up to Goulart now. The cool night creaked with late-season crickets, and Mary lay waiting to do whatever she would have to do.

  Goulart was, to his own mind, an admirably patient gentleman. He believed that for a man of his limited physical attractiveness, patience and plenty of smiling must wear down what a more dashing man might try to break through at once. That had been his experience; in his years as a trader and coureur du bois along the riverways of New France, his rare successes with white and Creole women had been achieved that way. When they had become familiar with him, they had allowed him to edge closer until, usually, they would permit him. With Indian squaws, of course, it had been a different matter, depending on the cultural traditions of the village chiefs.

  But Goulart had been even more patient than usual with this fair woman from the Virginia mountains. There was not
hing in the least saucy about her, and she had showed no sign yet of needing or wanting any man. Surely she would eventually, he was sure, as she was a woman.

  He had tired of waiting, though, and tonight he had made his first delicate advance. He had moved his bed next to hers. If she did not wake up tonight and respond, in whatever way, she would find him there in the morning, and would have to get accustomed to sleeping next to him. After that … Eh bien! he had bought her; she was his, and if nothing else, why then, when he was disposed to wait no longer, he could simply force his rights. But that was not a good way to start. He rolled off his back and lay on his left side facing her. He thought about laying his right arm over her, and then did that. He thought he felt her stiffen.

  But she did not move, and her breathing did not change. He considered exploring her bosom.

  But he was really very tired. And his left hip was bothering him. He was getting old-men’s bones at an early age. After a while he rolled onto his back and then onto his right side, facing away from her.

  At last he was snoring. Mary relaxed and went warm with a rush of relief. Thank God the man had not been bolder this night.

  He’ll not have a second night, little does he know.

  She guessed this about Goulart:

  He wanted the Indians to see that she was his squaw. He had moved his bedding next to hers so that they would see at daylight that he was sleeping beside her. After that they would expect him to sleep with her and it would not matter what she felt about it because she would seem to have allowed it now.

  Then here is how we sh’ll deal with Mister Goulart’s presumption, she thought.

  And in the pink-silver light before dawn while the camp was still asleep, Mary silently arose, gathered up her baby and blanket, stepped softly out of the lean-to and over Goulart’s snoring bulk, and went to the high ground near the kettles, spread her blanket there, lay down and covered herself and shut her eyes.

  Thank God this is the last night I sh’ll have to outwit this swine, she thought. Such could become a very annoying game right soon.

  She did not go back to sleep after moving her bedding. She had a decision to make.

  CHAPTER

  10

  It was the most enormous decision she had ever faced in her life. She had never even known of anyone who had had to make such a decision. To turn her mind directly to it created a great awful hollowness in her breast.

  Either of her two alternatives was unthinkable, but she had to choose one. She had to choose one now. She had thought around and around it for weeks, and now there was no more time.

  She knew that to take the baby with her would be to condemn it to a slow and wretched death.

  It was not a question of whether or not she could carry the baby. She would gladly have borne its little weight the five or six hundred miles ahead—if there were any chance that it might survive. But there was no chance. It would starve while Mary starved. Ghetel had known that too.

  And if its crying did thwart their escape, she and the baby surely would be put to death together. There was no question about that, either.

  Only by being left in the camp, in the care of the Otter Girl, could the baby survive. The young squaw would adopt it and care for it. She already adored it with a full motherly passion. She pined for it on the days Mary took it with her on foraging trips, and would rush to take it in her arms on their return.

  To leave the baby with Otter Girl was the only humane choice. Yet it was as unthinkable as carrying it away to suffering and sure death. How could a mother ever say that she had abandoned her infant to savages? One could relate the circumstances and show why it had been the baby’s only way to live, but the awful fact would remain in anyone’s mind that here was a woman who had left her infant in the hands of heathens.

  Her decision was that she would leave the baby here. Give it a chance for life. It could live a tolerable life as an Indian, never having known another kind of life. The Indian squaws, as far as Mary had been able to observe, were as content with their lives as most white women Mary had ever known, and more than some. You are happy or not happy insofar as you belong, she thought. The Shawnees know they belong and to them it is everything. I do not belong to the Indians because I know I do not. This babe would not know such a thing.

  And so she would leave the baby. She had known, really, for weeks that she would leave it. That was why she had allowed herself recently to think of the baby only as it instead of as she or as Bettie Elenor. Mary had been preparing herself for something like this from the moment of the poor creature’s birth on the forest floor.

  There was, of course, a possibility that the baby might die even if Mary left it in the camp. If the Indians should guess that she was escaping deliberately, they likely would be angered to dash its brains out or throw it in a kettle of boiling brine.

  So they must believe I just got lost, she thought. If they think I got lost while foraging, or that a bear or a panther got me, then they won’t take it out on the baby.

  I must make it appear that I did not flee, she thought. That’s the best I can do for this little thing. Nay, it’s the only thing I can do.

  She looked down at the infant, whose eyes were open now, and had to look away. She could not permit herself to look at its eyes. She bared her breast and gave her nipple to it and the baby shut its eyes and sucked. Mary made her heart small and hard and cold again.

  At midmorning, while they were gathering firewood, Mary had her opportunity to talk alone with the old widow. Before she could ask, Ghetel answered:

  “Thank you I did not sleep an hour the night long. I think all night. I say, yes, no, yes, no. By the dawn time I am so weary I say, no, no, no!” Mary’s heart slipped. The old woman went on: “Comes the sunrise, I look at you, I know you are going to go, and I say, yes. And that is it. Yes! Might be I hate you for it. But I go. Because I cannot eat Shawnee food all the rest of my life.” She grinned. Then the grin melted and her eyes became intense. “And because I can not let May-ry Inkles go out there alone.”

  Mary told her why the Shawnees must believe they had gotten lost. And she told her of her decision about the baby. She felt as if she were exposing the most awful corner of her soul. She almost hoped the old woman would plead with her to bring the infant along. Then she waited for Ghetel’s response, for an expected repugnance in her expression.

  The old woman looked at her for a full minute, a succession of feelings reflecting in her face. Finally she put her hand on Mary’s wrist.

  “Yes,” she said. “I would do this too. Even with mine own, I would do this.”

  “My knife!” LaPlante exclaimed suddenly. He and Goulart were sitting on mammoth bones next to each other, cracking walnuts with their tomahawks, and when LaPlante had reached for his knife to use as a nutpick he had found the sheath empty. A shiver went down Mary’s back. She remembered that Ghetel had kept and hidden the knife the day before. LaPlante was on his feet, complaining in both French and Shawnee. It was a trivial incident but one that, Mary knew, might rouse suspicions in the camp and prevent them from going out foraging. Her heartbeat quickened and she threw a concealed glance to see what Ghetel was doing. The old woman appeared to be thinking very hard but was remaining calm.

  What if they find the knife under her blanket? Mary thought. God, they’ll watch us like buzzards if they do.

  LaPlante asked something of Otter Girl, and she merely cocked her head and raised her eyebrows in innocent ignorance.

  LaPlante moved around the camp in agitation, looking everywhere, turning things over with his foot. Now he was going toward the lean-to where the old woman’s bedding was.

  “Mister,” Mary called. “Look by the cooking pots yonder. We were there cutting arrowleaf yesterday. Like as not it’s right there on the ground.”

  “Ah, je me souviens,” he muttered, and went toward the kettles. Goulart went back to his walnuts. Mrs. Stumf was trying to go, as unobtrusively as her big form would allow, toward her b
edding. She moved with such exaggerated stealth that anyone seeing her would have known she was up to something devious, so Mary went to distract Goulart’s attention. He looked up suddenly when he saw the elusive object of his desires approaching him. She smiled.

  “For a favor,” she said, holding out the tomahawk he had given her for blazing trees. “This is dull. It don’ cut very well. But it’s a good head f’r crackin’ walnuts. What say y’ to trade f’r the day? Why, maybe y’ could sharpen this’n up f’r me while I’m gone. That’d be a nice favor.” She tried to keep her voice pleasant but natural and not to glance at Ghetel. Inside she was quaking.

  A cocky smile slowly established itself on Goulart’s face, which had been sullen ever since he had awakened this morning to find Mary gone from his side. Obviously he now thought Mary was just being a coquette. “But of course, chere Madame!” he said gallantly, and gave her his tomahawk and took hers.

  “Oh, thankee. Try that one on a walnut … it’s nice and heavy …”

  As he bent to place a walnut, Mary saw Ghetel sneaking toward the cookpots. The old woman dropped the knife on the ash-covered ground, stepped back and then walked about stooping as if searching the ground.

  “Here, M’shoo!” Ghetel bellowed gaily, and when LaPlante looked her way she stooped and picked the knife up from where she had dropped it and held it up for him. He broke into smiles and went to her and took it, making pleased noises in his sinuses. Mary’s heartbeat slowed and she had to hold her breath to keep from sighing out loud.

  That was enough. She had a feeling that if they did not leave immediately, something else like this was going to come up and prevent them. “Mrs. Stumf,” she said cheerfully, hoping not too cheerfully, “what say y’ to goin’ after that hickory grove we seen yonder …” She pointed southward. “… and I saw lots of sassafras. Mr. Goulart gimme a tommyhock sharp enough to cut sassafras root with!”

  “ ’Eyyy! Gut!” Ghetel exclaimed, perhaps a little too eagerly.

  “Well, then, let’s be about it,” Mary said. Her voice sounded strained and unnatural to her; her heartbeat seemed to be forcing all the air out of her lungs, and she hoped the Indians and Frenchmen would not notice the strain in her voice; surely they would sense that something was happening. She went, as usual, to roll up her blanket and sling it over her shoulder. Ghetel did the same. LaPlante and Goulart were still whacking away at walnuts, and most of the Indian men were playing their game or maintaining their guns.