Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

“Eh, well.” Mary was frightened, but she was hurt and angry. She made her own left hand hard like an eagle’s claws and grabbed Ghetel’s arm and squeezed as tightly as she could, digging her broken, jagged fingernails in hard. “I am hungry, too,” she said in a harsh voice. “Remember that!”

  Ghetel’s eyes suddenly went shrewd. She looked at Mary’s eyes until stared down, then looked down at Mary’s hand on her arm. “It hurts,” she said.

  “Well I know.”

  Ghetel winced, then put her hand on Mary’s hand and tried to remove it. After a moment, Mary let go, and sat looking at Ghetel, alert.

  The old woman seemed to have been subdued. She would not look in Mary’s eyes.

  “So now,” Mary said. “Let’s get off this mountain and go on.”

  And they did. But Mary could not shake the old woman’s crazed and awful words out of her mind.

  Yesterday Mary had inquired why God had sent her, a decent woman, into hell.

  And today Ghetel, speaking in unearthly tones on a mountaintop, had said Mary was a bad woman.

  Because of the baby, she had said.

  The old woman was tetched, of course.

  But it is said that the tetched know God.

  For a mile or so after coming down from the mountain that afternoon, they had comparatively easy going. They were in the inside of a bend in the river now, and the river had deposited a few hundred yards of silt and gravel along the base of a mountain. The other side of the river was another undercut cliff.

  The curving beach was overgrown with shrubs and there was a low place where the mouth of a backwater had silted up; in this stale pool they found a stand of reeds, and hobbled over to pull them up and muck about for their roots. The yield, after they had all but turned the slough upside down, was a dozen black-skinned, finger-sized tubers which, when snapped in two, revealed white centers. They scraped off as much of the repulsive dark covering as they could, and then, teeth aching, they masticated the crunchy, tasteless flesh as if it were the finest delicacy. Two more of Ghetel’s front teeth came out in the mass, and she picked them out and put them on the ground. The longer they chewed the pulp, the bigger it became. Soon their shrunken stomachs were turgid with the mass they had swallowed; a few minutes of near-nausea followed, and they kept swallowing it back until it subsided. Mary had been unable to eat the last one of the tubers, and she secreted it in her hand for later as they left, smeared with cold mud but almost happy, and continued up the bank toward the next bend in the river. Mary was singing, but just above a whisper.

  Over the hush of wind and water they began detecting a low rumble.

  It was a familiar sound, a dreaded sound. Ghetel looked terrified, and stopped where she stood on the narrow spit of land, shaking her head.

  “Aye, another waterfall,” Mary said. “No fear. Likely we can climb right past this’n.” She was not going to make the mistake of getting wedged in as she had at the other falls, even if she had to climb a mile-high mountain to get around it.

  As they worked their way into the bend of the river, they saw an enormous black bird swoop low over the shore a few yards ahead and disappear on the other side of a huge rock.

  Eagle, Mary thought at first.

  But then a shadow flickered over their path. Looking up, she saw another great dark bird, descending on graceful outstretched wings turned up at the tips. A buzzard.

  It was a moment before she remembered the meaning of buzzards: there would be something dead up there.

  “Hurry,” she said.

  There were three buzzards there, hunched over something small, working on it, now and then pushing one another aside, beating each other with their wings, hobbling awkwardly on the flat rock. Beyond them, silhouetting them, was a vast, seething, churning pool of water and the right edge of a waterfall visible around the bend. Sunlight striking the rising mist made a fragment of rainbow at the river’s edge.

  Mary plucked up her courage and hobbled over the rock shouting, “Hey, hey!” at the buzzards and swinging her stick. The birds arched their wings and stumbled about, then beat the air and rose off, one at a time.

  The object of their attention lay near the edge of a slanting table of rock where it had been washed up: a little mass of dark fur, torn open to show tattered pale flesh and white bone. It appeared to have been a muskrat or some such thing, probably killed by a plunge over the waterfall. It was not fresh, and the buzzards had been at it for a while, leaving little. It was tainted with the contents of its own shredded bowels. Mary squatted at the water’s edge and washed the little wreck of a carcass, and then with the sharp edge of a broken rock, extracted the little flesh the buzzards had left. This amounted to two or three ounces of flesh and organs for Ghetel and a like amount for herself.

  There are some things I shan’t want to tell back home when I get there, Mary thought. Leaving my babe with a squaw, for one. And eating after buzzards.

  But truly I’m not a bad woman, Heavenly Lord. Or thou’d not have give me meat.

  Thank’ee, O Lord, she thought, remembering to give grace only after she had eaten.

  This waterfall was as beautiful as the other had been fearsome. Perhaps it was the sunny day, the shaft of rainbow leaning above it. Perhaps it was that they were looking at it with a little something in their stomachs.

  The river was wide here, came flowing broad and smooth down from a curve between gently sloping hills and then spilled twenty or thirty feet over the great crooked stone sill of the falls, foaming and misting and thundering onto the huge chunks of stone that had broken away and fallen in the pool at its base.

  And this cascade would be easier to bypass. A heap of boulders lay where the falls swept past the shore, and these could be climbed to put the women on the upper level of the river. They lifted and pulled themselves up these and in ten minutes were above the falls.

  The mountainside they were traversing now was steep but not precipitous, and they were able to walk upright most of the time, not having to hang on with their hands. They were passing through a magnificent forest of beech, hickory, oak and ash now, on a floor of dead leaves, now and then veering to skirt some massive outcropping of solid rock, green with moss and splotched with blue-green lichen.

  They were shuffling through dry leaves on that forest floor, alongside just such a subtly colored bluff, when the strange sweating started. Mary felt her skin prickling all over. Her vision blurred as sweat ran into her eyes. When she wiped her hand across her brow it came away wet. Cold drops were coursing down her flanks. Her face felt hot just under the skin but icy on the surface. And the hues of the mottled rocks faded suddenly, everything going white and shadowless. Her heartbeat was racing. Suddenly her knees went limber and she sat down abruptly. Her stomach hurt—no more than it had been hurting for weeks, but differently. It was as if someone were inside it stabbing outward with a sharp object. Her stomach contracted hard with each pain, making her bend forward. Ghetel had stopped beside her, and was looking down at her, but her face was not clear; it was as if in silhouette.

  “Ghetel! I … I think we shouldn’t’ve et those roots. Ah! Ah! Share me th’ blanket, would y’ please? Oh! oh, dear heaven. You feel it too? Oh! OH!” She doubled over and her forehead touched her knees. Ghetel knelt by Mary and saw that she was shivering visibly. Her skin was white but splotched red, and covered with gooseflesh and a sheen of perspiration.

  Ghetel knelt beside her, confused, and drew her inside the blanket with her. She held her there and looked around her at the trackless woods, the ranks of dark mountains stretching away up the rivercourse. When Mary was not moving ahead, Ghetel had no notion of where to go or what to do.

  She knelt there and hugged the convulsing young woman to her, while the sun descended behind a ridge and left them in chilly blue shadows. The other shore of the river was bathed in a creamy, rosy glow of winter sunlight, and that glow dimished upward as the sun descended. It was during this time that Ghetel too began to wince with stomach pains an
d feel dizzy and wet. She slowly keeled over, drawing Mary to the ground with her, and they lay there on the leafy slope for a measureless time as the valley darkened. After a while they began feeling a powerful backing-up of pressure in their chests. Mary began heaving first, then Ghetel. Nothing was coming up, but their bodies were trying to get rid of the alien matter in their stomachs.

  They retched dryly for a long time, retched and moaned, shivering and drooling uncontrollably. Night came, unnoticed. There were blank spaces in time, then moments of feverish, shuddering wakefulness, then more cold blank spaces. Sometimes Mary would come to and be aware of Ghetel writhing beside her, of her own tripping heartbeat and stomach spasms, of the profuse watering from her mouth and nose, of the darkness and the cold, the sound of the river, the tilt of her body as she lay on the slope. Once she saw, or imagined she saw, the face of a wolf in the starlight a few feet away. Then she would dream of falling—soaring, rather—from high, bright places.

  Her head ached. The stars were brilliant. There was a hard, heavy knot in her stomach, as if she had swallowed a stone, but she was no longer heaving. Her throat was raw and there was a dryness in her mouth, feeling like wool and tasting like soap. She had never in her life felt so weak and shaky. Her lower body felt as if it were full of hot water.

  The poison of the roots, whatever they were, seemed to have spent itself, and she presumed that she would be all right now—though the bowels had yet to be heard from before she could say it was all over. Ghetel was sleeping, breathing heavily beside her, sometimes murmuring incoherent words. The blanket was in disarray. The ground was sparkling with frost and Mary’s legs were uncovered, stinging with cold. She tugged at the blanket until she and Ghetel both were covered as well as they could be, and the next awareness she had was of pale pink light over the mountain on the other side of the river. She could feel the damp cold coming up from the ground, permeating her flesh, making her bones ache. She lay there shivering, waiting for sufficient daylight to move by, and thought, trying to gather her understanding back to the place where it had been before the poisoning had dispersed her senses.

  This, she remembered, was to have been the day when, if she had not yet seen a familiar landmark, she was going to try to cross this river and go back down the other bank to that other river that had beckoned so strongly to her premonitions, the river just above the first falls.

  But how am I to do that when I’m doubtful I can even get me up off the ground? she thought. How can I cross the river here? It’s still wide and wild and I’ve not the strength to ride a log across. And we’re too close to the falls. We’d be dashed in the falls afore we’d get halfway across.

  Maybe we could go back below the falls and put in a log and hang on it, she thought.

  Nay, she argued. We’d be beat to death on the rapids. We might even get carried all the way down to the lower falls and over them. Put a log in this river and y’d have to go where the river takes it. It was some days to get from that falls to this one but I reckon if you were floatin’ a log y’d be swept back down to ’em in a few hours.

  She felt the worst wave of helpless frustration she had experienced at any step along this endless, aching, soul-crushing journey.

  There’s just nought to do but go on up this one and find a ford, she thought. It’s just another o’ these eternal walk-arounds, and from the looks o’ this river it could well be a hundred-mile walk-around.

  The night’s sickness had left them so weak and cold and shaky that they had to support each other when they finally arose with the dawn and started on up the river bank. They trudged awkwardly along, the blanket drawn over their shoulders, leaning on each other, their legs limber and wobbly, hands palsied, and sometimes when one started to cave in, the other could hold her up, but as often as they held each other up, they brought each other down.

  The toil of moving eventually worked out the shaky hollowness left by the poison and replaced it with the old familiar aches. About midmorning Mary’s bowels got out of control and she squatted moaning by the wayside every few minutes, groaning and spewing out the scouring fluid, while wave after wave of shivers ran down from her temples to her thighs.

  As if following Mary’s leadership even in this, Ghetel was soon having to stop every hundred yards to suffer the same miserable scouring. Each such stop left them feeling colder and more exhausted. There was an eerie kind of lightheadedness now, and a distortion of time, as if the roots had drugged them. Mary would look at an object, a tree or a chunk of rock, a few hundred feet ahead; then she would walk, her mind full of thoughts as light and formless as clouds, for what seemed an hour, and then when she became aware of the object again it would seem to be no closer. Thus when afternoon found them too exhausted to go another step, Mary had no notion of how far they had come. They sat down in leaves with their backs against the sunny side of a rock that sheltered them from the cold breeze. In minutes they were warm and lethargic, and slumped into a dazed sleep. When Mary awoke, the sun had slid low into the valley downriver. Most of the queasiness and disequilibrium was gone now and Mary saw every detail of the landscape with knife-keen clarity. Her heart had ceased its dreadful racing and tolled slowly, solemnly in her breast now like a muffled bell.

  When she stood up it was not as if she were stronger—she was too empty to feel stronger—but was as if her body had become as light as a summer garment. The pain in her feet and her joints was still there, but it seemed to be coming from a greater distance and thus, like a faraway sound, diminished.

  “I’d say this. That partic’lar root’s one delicacy I can do without, from this day on.” Her voice sounded strange after all the silence, a clear, thin wisp of a voice that was absorbed by the vast outdoor hush. She looked over at Ghetel, who was beginning to stir, awakened perhaps by Mary’s voice. Ghetel looked at her, blinking rapidly in the light, smiled weakly, raised her eyebrows and shut her eyes again and lowered her chin onto her chest. “Nay,” Mary said. “Y’re awake now; it’s up we go.” Ghetel grumbled. Mary took her hand and coaxed her to her feet and they continued up the shore, two women under one blanket, looking rather like a misshapen gray little four-legged creature almost invisibly tiny between the high canyon wall and the turbid river, its little dull bell faintly chiming.

  But if they had by now become as one suffering creature, it was a two-headed creature, one head thinking they were going up the wrong river, the other presuming that the first knew the way.

  CHAPTER

  23

  Two days had passed since their sickness, and they had found neither food nor a place to cross the river and go back down the other side. They had found fallen logs along the shore, and each of these Mary had contemplated as a possible raft to float them over, but each time the thought of the rapids and riverbed boulders below convinced her that it would be suicide to put themselves into the grasp of that fast current.

  In these two days they had passed under or over or around half a dozen towering cliffs that reared themselves up from the water’s edge, some of them perpendicular, some actually jutting out over the water. They had crossed the screes of two more avalanches, and their legs and arms were marked with abrasions suffered in those passages.

  Ghetel had become gradually more sullen and troublesome. She had not spoken more than ten words to Mary in English for these two days, even to answer Mary’s questions; she had grown more balky at every rest stop, needing to be threatened to get up and move or needing to be left behind for a few minutes until fear of loneliness moved her to follow along; and she had been watching Mary with that cunning hostility in her eyes again, as if waiting to catch her off her guard.

  The eternal clink-clank of Ghetel’s bell had become almost unbearable. Mary turned on Ghetel with gritting teeth once and grabbed it. “Lord ’a’ mercy!” she cried. “Why couldn’t y’a lost this cussed jingle jangle, ’stead o’ tommyhocks an’ blankets?”

  But the outburst threw Ghetel into such a slump that Mary let go of the bell
and decided not to mention it again—unless it became insufferable.

  * * *

  This morning Mary had been awakened by Ghetel’s movements, in a tiny, hard-floored cave they had found for shelter, and had found the old woman trying to reach the hickory spear, which Mary always kept under one arm as she slept. Mary had grabbed it and sat up quickly, her heart pounding in alarm, and had pushed Ghetel back with it and demanded an explanation.

  “I need stick to help valk,” Ghetel had complained then. “You alvays use it.”

  “I could make you one,” Mary snapped back, “if’n you hadn’t flang away our tommyhock back yonder like a perfect fool.”

  Ghetel hadn’t answered, only scowled in the dawn light, and that was how they had started this day.

  As for the spear, it would have been of little use as a weapon now anyway. It had been thrown in vain at so many animals, and its point bumped inadvertently against so many boulders and cliffs during its use as a sounding-pole, that it had become as blunt as a finger, and without the tomahawk to sharpen it, it was in truth now little more than a walking staff. Ghetel could have armed herself just as well as Mary by picking up any straight limb or sapling from the ground, but she kept a covetous eye on Mary’s lance instead of thinking to do so, and Mary was not about to suggest it to her. As long as Mary was the only one carrying a stick that had the reputation of a spear, she had a semblance of command. She was strangely amused by this, by the absurdity of it, and when she considered it she smiled for the first time in many days.

  At one point this afternoon, when Ghetel had sat on a log, three-quarters naked in the cold, stupidly refusing to come along, Mary had a devilish idea. She stood beside a cliff, glowering back at Ghetel, and whetted the blunt point of the staff against the stone, as if sharpening the spear. It worked. Ghetel rose and came following.

  And Mary was pleasantly surprised to see that this whetting actually had sharpened the point somewhat. She stayed there for another minute and rubbed it against the stone until it was almost as sharp as it had been when she had manufactured it with the tomahawk.