Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Damnation, it’s awful what a man’s got to go through to keep people believin’ he’s got guts, Will thought.

  Nobody had ever said Will Ingles didn’t have guts. There had been too much evidence over the years that he did have. Anybody could say, and many did, “That Will Ingles, he’s got no fear of man nor devil.”

  Well, it was true Will Ingles had guts. But there were times, like now, when it seemed the main item in those guts was a white liver.

  I wonder if Johnny’s scared as I am, he thought. I wonder if he’s asleep or lyin’ there havin’ the gollywobbles like me. You can see it when Gander Jack’s scared. You can’t ever see such a thing on Johnny. Nor you can’t on me, neither.

  But I am. And I bet Johnny is, too.

  He heard a whisper of a sound outside and his hair stood up. His eyes bulged and he raised his head and spread his ears. It had sounded something like the noise when a man half-whistles. Like a sneak-signal. Like an Indian imitating an owl, maybe.

  Or maybe like an owl imitating an Indian, he thought, trying to smile it away.

  He kept his neck craned, listening, till it ached, until his ears were ringing so hard that he couldn’t have heard a hoot owl on his shoulder. Nothing happened. He let his head back down and stared at the invisible black ceiling, the gray of the smoke-hole in its peak, and he poured cold sweat and listened to his heart clomp around in his chest like a mule on a plank floor.

  It’s just from bein’ in an Indian town, he thought. A white man don’t belong in an Indian town.

  Nor does a white woman, he thought. He had just thought of Mary.

  That was why he was here in the middle of the night in the middle of an Indian town: because his Mary was somewhere else in the middle of the night in the middle of an Indian town.

  I mean, he thought, if she’s still alive, that’s likely where she is.

  He lay now, trying to pick up what she would be thinking. They had used to talk fanciful about being able to hear each other’s minds and see through each other’s eyes; that’s how close they had been.

  He imagined her thoughts as hard as he could, and came eventually to the conclusion that she was thinking about him.

  What if she’s doing this same thing and she hears how scared I am, he thought. I got to stop thinkin’ scared. It wouldn’t do her good to know.

  That thought reminded him of something awful: It reminded him of the day of the massacre when he had seen her in captivity and had had to run away.

  She may read what’s in my heart about that, he thought. If she do, how could I ever look in her face again?

  Pray God, she don’t know that, he thought.

  But he was afraid she did. When she started thinking about what he was thinking, she usually knew.

  She might think I’m a poltroon, he thought.

  But by God, it ain’t what a man feels that counts, Mary, it’s what he does.

  And for you, Mary m’love, what I’m goin’ to do is go on down and talk to this bad Cherokee Snake Stick.

  I mean … Tears suddenly were running into his ears. I mean, I love ’ee, Mary, more than I love my life. And here in the middle of this Indian town I got no more reason for scare than you do in that Indian town you’re in. I mean, you’re but a woman!

  CHAPTER

  13

  The big catfish lay on the silty creek bottom alongside a black sunken log, no more than ten inches down in crystal-clear water. It was the biggest catfish Mary had ever seen; surely it was three feet long. Its gray-green back was so close to the color of the creekbed that she never would have seen it but for the slight motion of its whiskers and the slow undulation of fins and tail as it held itself in place against the current.

  Mary squatted on the bank above the fish. Moving as stealthily as possible, she braced herself on one knee and raised her sharpened hickory lance over her right shoulder. Ghetel was standing above and behind her, squirming with impatience and whispering what might have been prayers or advice.

  “Hush!” Mary whispered. Her hand was trembling, both because of anxiety and because she was shaky from hunger. They had walked three days since their detour around the Buffalo River without finding so much as a blackberry to eat. Ghetel today had resorted to eating grass to keep something in her stomach, but Mary had heard men say that was not a good thing to do, and so she had not. When the hunger had become unbearable in the last two days, she had simply drunk water until her stomach could hold no more. Then she would feel the hunger not in her belly but in the fibers of her limbs.

  And in her mind.

  Now she held the tip of the lance, which she had whittled to a narrow, needle-sharp point with the tomahawk, about a foot above the surface of the water and aimed it at a spot just an inch below the catfish’s undulating fin. She thought quickly over the things she must and must not do when she struck: she must not hit an inch too high or too low, or the point would slip off the fish’s slippery side. She must strike hard enough that the point would penetrate the fish and not just knock it aside. And, as the point of the lance was not barbed to hold the fish, she must drive it all the way through the creature and pin him to the bottom and hold him there despite his thrashing, until they could plunge their hands into the water and get a grip on him. She had never realized until now that hunting was as much a thing of the mind as of the body. And when one was starving, it was hard for the mind to make the body wait until it was all figured out. She gathered the ready strength in her right arm until it felt like the cocked hammer of a gun. This was the first time in her experience that her life had depended on her killing a creature; always Will or her father had done whatever hunting or slaughtering had been necessary. They, like the Indians, had thought it to be man’s work. Her heart pounded.

  Now!

  Her arm snapped down. The spear shaft swished into the water. It seemed to bend upward under the surface and struck into the creek bottom. Clouds of roiling silt marked the place where the fish had been.

  She groaned and the old woman wailed a curse in her language.

  Because of refraction in the water, the fish had seemed higher than it actually had been. The lance had jabbed through the water a good two inches above it.

  It was a lesson she must remember the next time she had a fish lying under her sight like this. If I ever do, she thought. It had been so perfect. Too perfect. Big fish don’t just lie down where you can reach them every day, she thought.

  The old woman was stamping along the creek bank, ranting bitterly, yelling that she would do it next time. She would not have missed it, she shouted. Mary stood up weakly, little starlike dots swimming behind her eyes. The dots went away. Water and mud dribbled off the end of her lance. She fixed a hard gaze on Ghetel. The old woman’s tantrum subsided like a pan of boiling milk lifted off the fire.

  “Y’do it next time, then,” Mary muttered. “Tain’t so easy as y’d think.”

  On the eleventh day of their freedom they had to walk five miles upstream and then five miles downstream to get around another creek that had barred their progress up the bank of the O-y-o. That evening they found a clump of tall, wilting yellow flowers growing at the edge of a natural meadow. Mary had seen fields of these flowers near the Shawnee town and thus guessed that they were somehow edible. She and Ghetel tried eating the flower heads, then the leaves, but they were unbearably vile-tasting. Then Ghetel grabbed one of the stalks and pulled with all her strength. The flower came out of the ground and they saw that it had a fleshy, knobby root. Mary chopped off sections of this root with the tomahawk and found it to be white and crisp, almost as palatable as a raw potato. They pulled up all the stalks and obtained about a pound of the tubers. They ate them that evening and then lay down on a bed of leaves in the lee of a fallen log. With the awful gnawing gone out of their stomachs for the time being, they had only the pain in their battered feet and legs to keep them awake. Those miseries soon were blanketed by their numbing exhaustion and they were asleep before midnight, under a
huge sky full of chilly blue stars.

  On the twelfth day they had to go around another small tributary. Near this one, shortly before nightfall, they found a large fall of acorns under a chestnut oak. They had no fire nor kettle with which to boil the tannin out of the acorns, and so had to shell them and eat them bitter-raw. The first few tasted good even though bitter; the rest they had to force themselves to chew and swallow. But again that night they slept with something in their stomachs and awoke with a bit of strength in their limbs to continue with the thirteenth day of their escape. That day, as if thirteen were indeed unlucky, they found absolutely nothing to eat and went to bed groaning with hunger and aching limbs. Mary lay looking up at the stars and listening to the river, and through the rents in her dress she examined her body with her fingers. Her pelvic bones under her skin felt like wooden furniture covered with cloth. There seemed to be no flesh. Her belly, which had been so swollen and turgid with child at the start of this ordeal—the massacre at Draper’s Meadows now seemed years past, though it had been only three months—now sagged concave between her pelvis and her rib cage, and her breasts were hard and dry. They had stopped making milk.

  She looked at the stars until her eyes burned, to keep from thinking about the baby. It was not terribly difficult, now that her body was forgetting. It was almost as if there had never been a baby, except when she would envision its eyes and mouth. Mary finally went to sleep lulled by the rhythm of Ghetel’s snores, and dreamed of Tommy and Georgie and her mother.

  They had been gone two weeks from the salt camp when, toward evening, Mary glanced over the O-y-o and saw a canoe moving northward across it. The canoe was at this distance a mere sliver of sunlit gray on the green water. Mary stopped and the old woman almost stumbled over her. Mary pointed at the faraway moving shape. They watched it head straight for the northern shore and then it disappeared.

  She recognized the spot then. It was the mouth of the Scioto. Her heart thudded.

  “Ghetel!” She found herself whispering. “There! There w’d be the Shawnee town! Up that river there!”

  The old woman stared, eyes bulging, mouth hanging slack. “Gott,” she exclaimed, “yesss!”

  “Ghetel! That means … that means we’ve come along a hundred and fifty miles! Maybe more like two hundred, countin’ all them go-arounds!”

  “So, eh?” The old woman blew like a winded horse. “I’m feelink like fife hunder.”

  They rested lying concealed in high grass overlooking the river and discussed the dangers of being this close to the Shawnee town. They had come up to a place almost directly opposite the mouth of the Scioto and now in the ruddy-gold cross-light of the sunset they could see some of the fields and huts of the town on the far shore, and the haze of smoke from cooking fires. Now and then the bark of a dog or a wisp of human voice would carry to them across the wide river. They would have to move in concealment and as quietly as possible, Mary warned. She remembered the little Indian farm on this side of the river where she and her fellow captives had been held in wait for the canoes to come and ferry them across to the Shawnee town in August. Had it had dogs? She tried to remember. She seemed to remember that there had been a large yellow dog sleeping in the shade of a canoe. If it was a regular ferrying place, of course, there would likely be danger of considerable Indian traffic: war parties, hunting parties.

  “We ought to lay here the night,” she said, “then head away from the river at sunup, and go around.”

  The old woman was gazing wistfully at the smoke across the river. “Dey got food over there,” she said, clutching her belly and rocking. “I could eat a dog or two. Ach. Dog, yet.”

  Mary’s stomach too was an unrelieved silent scream of hunger. Then she remembered the cornfield at the little Indian homestead. It might not have been harvested yet.

  The more she thought of corn, the less she wanted to lie here till morning. Sleep would be impossible anyway. She began to grow desperately brave. “Come,” she whispered finally.

  The sun had descended behind the bluffs downriver and it was twilight when Mary and the old woman crawled through weeds along a pole fence, watching the Indian hut for signs of light or movement, meanwhile making their way toward the cornfield. So far they had not heard a voice nor smelled a wisp of smoke nor seen a spark of fireglow. But Mary remembered the young boys she had seen here and knew that they would be as alert as watchdogs if they were about.

  Sliding silent as snakes through the weeds along the fence, she and the old woman suddenly froze. Very close ahead they had heard a heavy footfall—or, rather, felt it through the soft ground on which they lay—and heard a heavy huff of breath like a sigh. As they flattened themselves further in the weeds with slamming heartbeats, they heard two more footfalls, followed by a dull metallic clunk. A large dark shape then moved beyond the screen of weeds not three yards in front of them, causing the metallic sound again. Mary turned her face against the ground and looked up into a dark brown eye, which was looking down at her.

  A horse!

  It was a roan horse with a bell on its neck. And at the moment she recognized what it was, the beast saw her in the weeds and shied. It half-reared, sidestepped, bell clanking loudly, then ran thumping and rustling into the scrub. Mary and Ghetel lay with their hearts pounding against the ground, covered with sudden cold sweat, now expecting the horse’s flight to bring someone out of the hut, which was but a few feet away.

  For five minutes they waited in the deepening twilight. There was not a sound or movement from the house. In the distance the horse’s bell was still clunk-clunking.

  “I do wonder, does this place be deserted,” she whispered to Ghetel. “Wait now.”

  She arose as smoothly as her grinding leg joints would allow, and stood swaying for a moment. Her feet throbbed and stung as she put her weight on them again. She leaned on her hickory stick. When the dizziness was gone she looked over the fence, which was a sort of corral; two of its poles were down nearby, explaining why the belled horse was wandering about. She could see the entire hut and much of its setting now, and grew more certain that it was deserted. Gathering more daring than she had suspected she had, she crept up to the very wall of the hut and put her ear to it, then went around slowly to the front, raised a hide door-flap, stooped and looked into the dark interior, smelling the musty, smoky closeness inside. She trembled, ready to thrust with the sharp lance if anything moved.

  Suddenly a twig snapped just behind her and a figure moved with a swish. Mary’s scalp flushed with prickles and, her heart in her mouth, she spun and thrust the hickory lance with all her strength at a hulking human figure that was suddenly there in silhouette against the evening’s hazy red afterglow.

  “AIIII!”

  The point of her spear dug into soft resistance at the moment Mary recognized the cry and the shape as Ghetel’s and a shiver of horror cascaded down her flanks.

  “Jesus in Heaven!” the old woman hissed, grabbing the shaft of the spear and yanking it out of the fabric of her dress. The point had missed Ghetel’s neck by an inch and ripped through the right side of her collar.

  Mary was in an uproar of confusion, of sinking relief and rising fury. The two stood staring at each other for long seconds. “How dare y’ creep up on a body at a time like this?” Mary finally hissed.

  “M’Gott! I t’ought you would need me!” The old woman’s voice too was quavering with indignation. They sagged toward each other then with shuddering sighs and hugged each other’s bones for support. The old woman patted Mary’s shoulder, and then the hazards of their situation dawned on them again. They had been loud with their gasps and exclamations. They stooped at the door of the hut peering about in the chilly dusk and listening. On the far shore of the river now, points of campfire light gleamed. A fingernail moon hung above a bluff in the east. Two owls were fluting to each other from different horizons. Mary wondered whether they were real owls.

  It was black inside the hut. The women had decided it was trul
y vacant. They felt around for things. They found only a broken clay pot, a strap of hide about a yard long and a bed of crushed boughs and leaves near the back wall. In the center of the hut was a circle of river stones around a pile of cold ashes. It was apparent that the Indian family had departed for some time, if not for good.

  They went out into the cornfield and found to their joy that the ears were nearly ripe but had not been harvested yet. Mary said grace under the slice of moon. “Thankee, Heavenly Lord, for this manna.” For a while then the only sounds were the rustling of cornstalks and the sounds of their gnawing and their little moans of pleasure.

  Mary soon felt a rising queasiness replacing her terrible emptiness. She swallowed a mouthful of the moist, starchy mass, then warned: “Mustn’t eat too much at once, Ghetel. Might be we’ll have a late supper too, eh?” They went down to the river and drank water out of cupped hands, then back to the fence where they had left their blankets. They sat there in the weeds with their blankets draped over their shoulders, the night air chilling their ears and scalps, listening to the burbling and stitching of frantic digestion in their distended stomachs. Occasionally they rocked to and fro, for warmth and to help the food work down. After a while Mary realized it would be hours before she would be able to eat again, but the old woman was still thinking of food as she had been for days, and she could not bear to ignore the cornfield before bedtime. She went among the stalks and gnawed the kernels off of two more ears before she would admit to herself that she was satiated.