Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  A loud splash a few feet in front of her made her recoil and break out in a cold sweat, and she stood with thudding heart until she decided that she had only startled a sunning bullfrog. She crept farther into this world of black mud and shimmering vertical lines, her shoes filling with cold water, but found no sign of a canoe. Eh, well, she thought. Likely some outbound party’s left it on t’other shore. As she started to run back, her eye caught a glistening dark lump in the shallows almost at her feet; it was pulsating.

  It was a huge bullfrog, half-submerged, gathering itself to leap away.

  With a quick, desperate stab of her spear she impaled it. She turned her face from its sudden awful thrashing and squirming and waited until it was still.

  “May-ry? May-ry?” the old woman had begun querying, when Mary emerged from the brake proudly holding up her stick with the limp frog on the end of it.

  “Look, Ghetel. Look. Our first meat.”

  They twisted its big legs off and slid the slimy skin off as if pulling off stockings, and hunkered there on the river bank like a pair of aborigines, gnawing at the cold raw pink-white meat. Mary glanced up once from her own bone-picking and saw a string of slobber running from Ghetel’s underlip as she threw away her frogleg bones and started examining the rest of the frog.

  When Ghetel reached for it and began pulling off its tiny little arms, Mary had to look away.

  Something about the look of Ghetel’s hunger had sent a cold bolt of unnameable horror through her.

  They went five miles up the west bank of that river, stumbling through ravines and forcing their way through thickets and brambles that cut and lashed their skin and further shredded their rags, before finding a shallows of sand and gravel bottom where they could ride the mare across. Then they returned down the east bank. Here they had to lead the horse and walk through a vast tangle of grapevines and thorny locusts. There were a few leathery, hard, wrinkled grapes within reach, but obviously their season was past and they were no pleasure to eat. Nonetheless, the women gathered a few bunches and slipped them into the blanket bundles with their remaining corn. They were certain that there would come a time when even these would taste good.

  They were smeared with their own blood when they struggled at last out of the thorn ticket. They rinsed their limbs with river water, dug little black thorn-ends out of their wounds and continued downstream toward the O-y-o. Almost immediately they came to a creek mouth no more than knee-deep but strewn for yards with mossy, flat, sharp-edged rocks the size of dinner plates and tabletops, which tilted and slid and turned under their feet. By the time they had teetered and crashed across these to the other side, their rotten shoes had finished falling apart, and they were forced to abandon them and continue down the shore on bare, bloody feet that felt as if every bone in them had been fractured. They minced and winced at the stabs of twigs and stones in their soles, until their tender feet were at last so full of throbbing pains that new jabs could scarcely be felt. They took turns riding, but it seemed their feet hurt even worse hanging free beside the horse’s ribs than when they were being walked on.

  And, even more alarming, the mare herself was limping since the passage over the rocks. Mary examined her and found oozing abrasions, one on the pastern of her left foreleg and one under her right hind fetlock—very critical places, Mary knew, which could render her lame and useless if they were unlucky.

  So the women both dismounted and walked. They stopped for the day at midafternoon when the O-y-o came in view.

  Here they retied the neck halter into a hobble and set the mare to grazing. Mary limped about for a while looking for comfrey to make dressings for their feet and the mare’s legs, but found none and presumed that the season for finding it was now past. With little certainty, then, she decided to dredge up some muck from the river’s edge and put it on the mare’s wounds, feeling that this would at least sooth them. While stooping there she saw a long dark shape lying among the reeds—a rotting log, she thought at first—which closer examination revealed to be a ruined Indian canoe, half-sunk in the shallows, with slabs of its bark cover fallen away from its hickory frame. This only reminded her that their entire route followed well-used Indian trails, and that there could be no carelessness or excessive noise. And though she yearned for the comfort of a campfire, for hot water to heal their feet, and she probably could have started one even without flint and steel—she had watched squaws at the Shawnee town ignite tinder with an easily made bow-and-drill device—it would be foolhardy in the extreme to do it.

  She packed the cool black muck on the horse’s fetlock and pastern while Ghetel sat nearby, watching with an approving look while mashing corn and wild grapes together on a flat rock with the tomahawk. They added a handful of water to the meal later and made it into a purple paste that, while strange and awful to the palate, was certain to be nourishing, and did extend their little store of corn somewhat.

  Each time they arose to move about their camp, flashes of pain shot up from their battered feet. Mary remembered then the thoughts she had had so recently about Will, about their very personal attention to each other’s feet. She looked at the poor hag beside her, at her wrinkled, scratched skin hanging like wattles off her arms, and suddenly was drawn out of herself by a great tug of pity. “Come, Ghetel,” she said.

  And then for an hour as the late afternoon sun warmed their faces, they sat at the river’s edge, and Mary kneaded and palpated the old woman’s misshapen feet, those bundles of bones and calluses and knobby joints, with the rich mud, while Ghetel groaned deep with pain and delight. Mary talked of Will as she tended the old woman’s feet, and now and then tears would run off the end of her nose.

  Ghetel worked on Mary’s feet then, and talked to her about old Holland, whence she had come twenty years ago, “when I vas gutluckink like you,” and about great kitchens she had known, with copper pots and ladles and sausages hanging from the rafters, and cheeses maturing in cloth, and butter in the churns, and big porcelain ovens fragrant with new bread, until Mary was driven to exclaim:

  “Have mercy! Y’re caressin’ me at one end an’ torturin’ me at t’other!”

  * * *

  Their feet gave them agony the next morning when they first put their weight on them, but as they limbered with the walking, the pain lessened to a healthy ache and it became apparent that they really were very much better.

  Neither of them rode the horse that morning, but walked and led her and studied her gait. She did not limp, and did not start limping as the day wore on, so they presumed that the mud had done as much good for her as for them. “We like as not can ride ’er tomorrow,” Mary said.

  They went eastward all that morning, seeing no sign of Indians and finding nothing but a fall of acorns to supplement their dwindling corn. At midday their course began to veer southeasterly, and Mary went back over the mental library of landscapes. As she recollected, there were still three major river mouths to be crossed before they would reach the great northeasterly curve in the O-y-o’s rivercourse and find the place, that pleasant point, where the waters of the New River flowed into the O-y-o. P’raps seventy or eighty miles to that place, she thought. But it could add up to two hundred if them three rivers ’twixt here and there detour as much.

  Their good weather gave out at midday. A sudden chill blasted over the river valley, sending millions of leaves spinning away in red and yellow whirlwinds, buffeting the tree-tops with an intimidating rush and moan. Iron-gray clouds came scudding over low, dragging their dirty-looking skirts over the hilltops, and in five minutes the river was flint-colored and seething with whitecaps. Chilly gusts blew the women’s hair over their faces and flattened it against their scalps, and the air around them was full of spinning leaves and twigs. Their rags flapped and fluttered around them and they inched along squinting, staying close in the lee of the mare. And soon their skin—most of it exposed now by the disintegration of their clothes—was being pelted by cold, driven raindrops that stung like sleet
. The wind increased, so cold and powerful it seemed to suck out their breath. An enormous dead beech tree gave up its foothold on the slope a few yards above them and crashed to the ground, splitting and splintering smaller trees as it bore them to earth. The mare shied, reared and bolted. Mary hung onto its neck bridle through ten awful seconds, her feet hardly touching the ground, until she dragged the beast to a nervous, snorting standstill fifty yards farther on. Ghetel, emitting little yelps into the wind, came running to catch up, with that strange, arm-pumping trot that had carried her through the gauntlet.

  Steeling themselves against the wet cold and the shouting wind, they walked the rest of the afternoon away, both hanging on to the mare as if they might otherwise be blown aside into the river. Mary, though she had lived close to the edge of the wilderness most of her adult life, had never felt quite this way: like a weightless little speck of chaff lost in a universe of tumultuous elements, shrieking trees and indifferent mountains.

  But finally, about sunset time, when the wet leaves were cold and limp underfoot and the wet tatters of clothing stuck to the pasty gooseflesh of their skin, a dull rose glow began to burnish the bluffs across the seething river. Great horizontal rents opened in the purple clouds above the western horizon and glowed scarlet like bloody wounds. Soon a slice of setting sun looked through these rents and glinted in every droplet on every twig and every blade of grass. And finally the sun’s entire orb was freed from behind its bars of cloud; and the storm receding across the river made a vast, bruise-colored backdrop for a perfect rainbow that seemed to straddle the river. Even through her misery, Mary felt she was seeing the work of a God whom she had not thought much of for many weeks. She and Ghetel rolled up together in a wet cocoon of wool blankets that night, hugging, skin to skin, and shivered until the feeble furnaces of their hearts warmed their blood.

  While they slept, bold chipmunks and squirrels crept close and nibbled at the little pile of musty corn they had emptied out of their blankets.

  Mary rode first the next morning. Ghetel, walking barefooted on sparkling frost, led the horse. The ground was blanketed with wet leaves of every hue from livid crimson to flame-yellow, all their colors intensified by the wet and frost and wan morning sunlight. Ghetel was singing something to herself in Dutch, just above a whisper, her breath and the mare’s breath condensing. Mary had her blanket over her shoulders, Indian-style; there was little enough corn to tote in one blanket now. They had agreed that the one riding would enjoy the blanket, as the one walking would generate her own heat. But if Ghetel was warm she did not show it. Her skin was raised in bumps like a plucked turkey’s, and every few seconds a great tremor would shake her from one end to the other.

  God, but she is a rugged old thing, Mary thought. But I’d best trade places with her and give her the blanket right quick or she’s like t’ come down with a grippe ere this day is out.

  She hugged herself inside the blanket.

  In just a minute, she thought.

  Gusty weather came again the next day. Dark clouds sped over the hilltops trailing veils of rain. The wind was so strong that a cloud would pass from horizon to horizon in a minute’s time. Shrubbery shook and rattled as if being slapped to and fro by an invisible giant hand. The air was always full of flying yellow leaves; what little remained of the foliage clung and clung against the wind but invariably was picked off and swirled away, and the trees were almost bare now, bare and gray and brown, and their stark, desolate nakedness had a chilling effect on the spirit. Mary pondered on this as she walked along. I do believe the sight o’ them autumn leaves, like the colors o’ flame, kept my poor soul warm just like watchin’ a fire will do f’r a body …

  And she found herself thinking as she rode, looking down at Ghetel, who was at that moment walking and leading the mare:

  If only these blankets was red, a nice hot red instead o’ this cold gray, we’d be a sight warmer …

  And then she smiled at her fancy.

  Y’re goin’ a bit daft there, girl. Best y’ get down an’ let ol’ Ghetel sit up here a-rockin’ and a-daydreamin’ a spell …

  That day they came to another river mouth too wide and deep—and cold—to wade across. Ghetel gazed at the far shore and groaned. These detours seemed to frustrate her even more than they did Mary—perhaps because, unlike Mary, she did not know the lay of the land, and every new stream was just another unexpected obstacle, as if God were spitefully throwing down new rivers in their path every day to make their way longer.

  So they turned and started up this latest river.

  In skirting a marsh in this river’s valley, they found a stand of browning arrowleaf stalks. They tied the horse nearby and spent an hour wading in the cold ooze, feeling with their toes for the tubers, stooping to pull them up when they found some. They gathered five or six pounds of them, put them in the bundle with the musty corn and continued upstream.

  This river was wide and was running fast with brown water from the recent rains. It appeared they would have a long trek up its banks before finding a place to cross. And all the while they were aware, in the back of their minds, of the O-y-o River, their guide through the wilderness, dropping farther and farther behind them.

  They tried to make a meal of the arrowhead tubers that evening, encamped under an overhanging ledge with the flooding river roaring noisily a few feet below. The raw tubers had an awful, woody, bitter taste. “If’n we had a pot t’ bile ’em in,” Mary grimaced, “I swear right now I’d risk buildin’ a fire to do it.”

  But they were filling.

  They had traveled perhaps twenty-five miles up this nameless river, when, the next day, Ghetel pointed down and cried, “Look! a britch!”

  At a place where the river thundered down over a kind of rock step, a mass of driftwood had become lodged. It extended all the way across the river, a tangle of bleached logs and limbs and roots, and indeed was like a bridge. The brown water rushed through and under it, but it stayed, a great knot of debris.

  “We can cross here, neh?” Ghetel urged with a happy, yellow-toothed grin.

  But Mary looked at it dubiously. It seemed fine enough, but …

  “Wait now,” she said. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this. It don’t look none too sure t’ me, somehow.”

  Ghetel turned a darkening face on her, then pointed upstream. “Eh, how far you vant to go up dis riffer, eh? Look!”

  Above the driftwood bridge the river was still deep and swift. They might have to go another twenty-five miles before finding a fording place, maybe farther. And that would mean fifty or more back down the other bank to regain the O-y-o. That was an awful prospect.

  And here was this bridge, as if put here by Providence to save them three or four days’ travel.

  But the bridge nonetheless gave her a premonition of dread. And she was learning to take her premonitions seriously.

  “Vatch me,” Ghetel was saying. She had gone down to the river’s edge. She reached out, grasped a protruding limb for a handhold, put one foot on one of the logs. Then, cautiously, she lifted the other foot off the shore. She stood a moment on the end of the bridge, then began flexing her knees, rocking her weight on the lodgment, testing its solidity. Then she bounced more violently, crying, “Vatch! Vatch! It stays!”

  Don’t, Mary thought. It seemed too reckless a taunting of Fate.

  But it held. Ghetel backed onto the shore, grinning. “Easy,” she said. “See?”

  “Aye, for us, p’raps. But a horse canno’ walk logs, Ghetel.”

  “I t’ink she can do. It is like a britch, May-ry. Like a britch.”

  “I have this feeling …”

  “Go to the deffil wit’ a feelink!” Ghetel’s face was growing stormy with impatience. “If you don’ come over here, I do it alone! Yah, ve’ll see! Who need you and your feelink!”

  “No, Ghetel, please …”

  “Yah, by damn! Or I go alone!”

  “Then let’s test it all the way across first.”
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br />   “Yah! I do.” The old woman, bent upon showing what a lark it would be, swung lightly up onto the driftwood again. She walked the logs lightly, and found a handhold every yard or so. In two minutes she stood on the opposite shore, holding her arms up gaily and grinning. Then she hopped onto the driftwood again and came back. “You see?”

  “But the horse …”

  “It is like a britch.”

  And so Mary gave in. She and Ghetel combined their strength to pull the horse down to the water’s edge. It did not want to go. It dug its hooves in on the bank and refused to step onto the logs. Mary looked into its panicky brown eyes and her heart squeezed.

  “Move, beast,” Ghetel panted.

  It would not.

  “Eh, then, ve shall see,” Ghetel growled. “You pull, May-ry. I put a stick up dis animal’s hinder and she vill go, ve see.”

  She got one of the hickory lances and went around behind the mare. Gently at first, then harder as the horse continued to balk, she jabbed at its rump with the point. The abject terror and pain in the mare’s eyes made Mary want to cry. But she talked to it and cajoled and encouraged and pulled at the neck-halter with one hand while hanging onto a limb with another. At last the mare yielded and took a step forward.

  She got a good footing on the log jam with her forehooves and, finding something under her, resisted a little less. But she was still very skittish. The water roaring underfoot was frightening her and Mary did not blame her.

  Ghetel roared a curse or command in Dutch and jabbed the hickory point straight into the animal’s anus. With a terrible whinny, the mare gave up the shore and scrambled so suddenly onto the logjam that she almost knocked Mary off into the river.