Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  If she throws it, Mary thought, she could miss and then I’d have it again.

  She kept stepping backward, feeling with her feet for rocks that might trip her. Ghetel came on, grinning, her laughter now voiceless, a kind of quaking whisper. Ghetel’s conception of the hickory stick as a true, fearful weapon, that conception Mary had tried so hard to nurture to keep the old coot under control, seemed to remain now that it was in her hands. Now Mary had to keep telling herself that it was only a stick after all. She had to keep telling herself that, to keep from growing panicky. Just a stick, she thought. Just an ol’ stick.

  Talk to her, she thought. Talk. Surely even a crack-brain can’t try to kill somebody who’s talking to her. “Well, now, hon,” her voice came out, strained, “looks like you got th’ old walkin’-stick you wanted so bad. Well, that’s good, hon … y’ should have it awhile; I know the walkin’s been hard, and that’ll make it easier for you …” Ghetel came on, still with that hissing laugh.

  “Well, now, hon, don’t know ’bout you, but I’m just tuckered,” Mary continued, “an’ I think we walked fur enough for one day, don’t you? We ought t’ find a nice holler place t’ roll in an’ go beddie bye-lo, eh? or maybe, uh, maybe … I ’spect there’s ’nough light yet we could … grub up some nice roots ’round here … I reckon we could pull up that shrub back yonder, if … we’s to tug on it together a mite more, eh? Why don’t we do …”

  “I eat no roots anymore,” Ghetel said, then laughed that strange breath-laughter again and kept coming on.

  “Aye. Well, y’know, I’m kind o’ tired o’ roots, too, now’t you mention it … ’specially after those a few days ago, made us so sick …” Her retreat was backing her up against the bluff, where she would be cornered, so she began veering up along the bank. “… Maybe we could find some nice buds, then … or maybe there’s nuts th’ squirrels’ve not got yet …”

  “Those too I dun eat.”

  Mary had backed away from the cliff now and was retreating toward the open shingle along the river bank to keep from getting trapped in the shrubbery and driftwood she could glimpse out of the corner of her eyes. She was more afraid of Ghetel’s strange, sudden coherence and purpose than of her possession of the “weapon.” The old woman had been bothersome when she was whining, bawling and helpless, but now she was sinister. Had her capture of the spear transformed her so abruptly, or had she been feigning helplessness all this time with her eye on obtaining it? Mary had heard people speak of the cunning of the crazy, and now it was something she could comprehend. She sighed now and smiled and tried again to molify her with chatter. “Well, then, might be we could try our hand at, uh, spearin’ a fish with that thing … if’n it ain’t too dark … Been a long while since we tried to get us a nice big fish t’ eat …”

  “Dun’ eat fish, too.”

  Mary forced a gay little laugh. “Well, dearie, that’s about all th’ choices we got on our bill o’fare … Not a whole lot, as y’ well know by now …”

  “I can eat May-ry!”

  The words came with a jolt. Mary realized this was no jest. She remembered suddenly the awful bite-mark Ghetel had left in her thigh when they had fought for the tomahawk.

  Mary was unable to move for a moment, as this appalling comprehension rooted itself in her. Ghetel had continued closing the gap between them and was near enough to strike.

  Fear suddenly shot a bolt of energy through Mary’s exhausted muscles. She spun, crouched and ran along the river bank.

  Her legs and lungs gave out within fifty yards, and she fell sprawling on the shore gravel. She lay panting, hearing Ghetel coming along, saying cheerfully:

  “Dun’t run! Dun’t run! I get you!”

  She hauled herself to her feet, breath rasping, heart pounding, and stumbled ahead, to keep distance between them. It would be dark soon; shapes were receding into the gloom; if she could stay out of reach for a little longer she might lose Ghetel.

  If she could.

  She tripped over a rock and fell in the gravel again. She took two breaths, rose painfully once more, looking back at the approaching figure, staggered a few more steps, and tripped on a root and took a fall among rocks, a flash of pain bursting behind her eyes. Ghetel gained several yards on her while she was down. When Mary got up again, the old woman was within fifteen feet of her.

  But now Ghetel was flagging and stumbling, too. This was a pursuit neither had the strength to maintain for long.

  A thicket grew down toward the river’s edge here. Mary plunged into it, hoping to lose Ghetel. Twigs and limbs slashed at her and held her back. She fought through them with flailing arms, and in minutes was again fully spent. She hung in the bushes by her arms to keep from falling, and sucked for air. Over the sounds of her own rattling breath she could hear twigs snapping and swishing a few feet back, and Ghetel’s terrible chuckling and the ringing of her crazy bell.

  A few more breaths and then Mary lunged forward again, hands in front of her face to protect her eyes. Once she glanced back, and could not see Ghetel, only the gray and black tracery of bare branches, but she could still hear Ghetel crashing and clanking through after her.

  If she couldn’t hear me maybe she couldn’t find me, Mary thought. She darted aside and stopped still.

  The crushing and crackling of the old woman’s progress came very close, then fell still.

  It seemed now that Ghetel would be able to hear her heartbeats and grating inhalations.

  She’s stopped and’s listenin’ for me, Mary thought. Lord God, how can ’ee permit such a wickedness?

  “Oh, ho ho, ho ho!” The old woman’s voice, laughing, panting, taunting all at once, was coming from a few feet away in the thicket, somewhere between Mary and the hillside. “I get you, May-ry!”

  Mary began edging toward the river, as quietly as she could move. But silence was impossible. The thicket crackled and rustled with every movement.

  “I hear you! I get you, May-ry!” Now she too was again moving through the brush.

  It was all too crazy. It demanded an explanation. Mary had helped her through every imaginable suffering and now was being hunted like an animal. Her face contorted; she could feel it twisting all up as it would when, as a child, she could not keep from crying. Tears trickled down her face, and she cried out: “Why?”

  And Ghetel’s voice, so recently full of madcap glee, now came through the thicket a pitiful, strained, half-weeping cry:

  “Becauss! I’m hung-ry!”

  Then she was moving again, sobbing, but coming after Mary relentlessly all the same. Mary crouched low and moved as swiftly through the deep dusk as she could, going toward the open space at the river’s edge. And Ghetel’s voice followed her, still sobbing and whining like a heartbroken child’s: “I can’t stand it any more, Mary-ry! I can’t any more! I … I … I’m hunnng-ry!”

  Mary imagined now that if she could get back out of the thicket a few seconds before Ghetel, she could move quickly and quietly enough to hide herself somewhere along the river bank. Branches whipped her face: she turned her ankles and stumbled repeatedly among the roots and fallen wood and rocks in the thicket. A prayer of deperation backed up in her throat but there was nowhere to send it now; it seemed that a God that would permit such an evil as this was not a God worth praying to. No, she thought. Forget a god. There’s none.

  It outraged her, and she gained a spurt of strength from the anger. She shoved her way out of the thicket and stumbled along the rock shore, grimacing, often having to touch the ground with her hands to keep from pitching face-forward.

  “MAY-RY!” Ghetel’s voice was such a desperate wail now that Mary glanced back over her shoulder, shuddering at the sound of it, and saw the old woman burst from the thicket only twenty feet behind. She saw her stop and raise her arm, saw her lunge forward, saw the slim hickory spear come arcing through the air toward her. She shut her eyes and, too late, tried to raise her hands to ward it off.

  It whiffed past her ear.
She heard a soft slurp! as it plunged point first into the river.

  And now neither had a weapon. The two women stood twenty feet from each other, heaving for breath, looking at each other, each trying to comprehend just how the situation had changed so suddenly again. Mary’s heart was thudding and her emotions were in an uproar of relief, hatred, love, despair and fear. Ghetel seemed to find herself suddenly powerless again: she was blinking, looking down at her empty hands. The blanket, which she had somehow managed to hang onto in her plunge through the thicket, was now at her feet, having slipped off her shoulders when she threw the spear. Their faces looked ghostly gray in the deepening twilight and everything else around them was a deeper, violet-tinged gray. The river, full of dull silver evening sky, burbled and sighed a few feet away.

  Mary hauled in a deep breath at last and looked at Ghetel and tried to imagine what she should do. There seemed to be no answer. She wondered whether she should simply pick up a fist-sized rock and cave in her skull and be rid of her once and for all. Of what worth was the old bedlamite anyway?

  Or should she simply walk away and let her find her own way? She had tried that once, and had found the loneliness unbearable. This valley, she knew, would crush the soul of one alone.

  She’s like t’ die any hour now and I’ll be alone anyways, she thought. Or if she don’t die, I shall.

  Mary’s mind could not seem to come back to the horror that had filled it only moments ago: that this witch, this Ghetel who by their suffering had become bonded to her as close as her own mother ever was, had been studying and stalking her for she knew not how many days as a piece of food. Mary still knew this, but as she stood here lightheaded and swaying with weakness, looking at Ghetel who was in the same condition, she could not really believe what she knew.

  Or maybe I’m the madcap, Mary thought for the first time. Maybe this’s only happening in my head.

  “Ghetel, can ’ee hear me? I think we need t’ talk,” she said, in the quiet, sad tone of a mother deeply disappointed in a child. “Ghetel, people don’t just eat each other up. D’you understand? I don’t want t’ be et up. You try it, an’ I’m a-going’ to stop ’ee.” Her voice cracked and quavered.

  The old woman was still looking at her hands, slowly moving her head from side to side, and making snuffling sounds that might or might not have been weeping. It was growing too dark to see. Mary went on, hoping somehow, even though she was almost too tired and hungry to think, that she could penetrate Ghetel’s miserable confusion with a tiny gleam of reason:

  “I mean t’ say … if one of us is to eat t’ other … if one of us sh’d die so t’ other won’t, well, then, tell me why it shouldn’t just as fair be me that eats you? Eh? Tell me that. Why, I could o’ stuck that spear through you any time and ate you up. Didn’t, though. Y’ever think, I’m as hungry as you are? And …” She paused, feeling her chin crumple up and a knot ledge in her throat because of the thought she was about to say:

  “Y’ever think I got somebody t’ live for, an’ you ain’t?” It was the cruelest thing she had ever said and she started crying immediately. And her crying precipitated a new outburst of abject howling from Ghetel. They stood there in the darkening valley twenty feet apart with their souls caving in and their knees sagging, and bawled.

  “So … so … what then d’you propose t’do?” Mary spoke out of her profound emptiness after the crying stoped. “Goin’ to come along, or …” Come along, she thought. But I can’t go another step myself.

  “I said … I haf to eat you, May-ry.”

  There it was again. That which Mary had begun to doubt she had really heard. Ghetel was serious about it. It was fixed in her mind; even if it was the only thing fixed there, it was there. Mary had no strength left to act in any way. She could only stand here feeling the cold seep back into her flesh and try to talk, try to temporize. She feared that Ghetel was likely still physically stronger than she—she could remember the clutching power of her big hands—and expected that if Ghetel were to come at her again, even barehanded, that would be the end of it and this hellish journey would have been in vain. But what could one say to someone gone cannibal?

  Then Mary remembered something she had said, something that might yet penetrate the utter darkness of Ghetel’s soul:

  “Well, fair’s only fair. If one’s to eat t’ other, then only chance can say which. I say we draw cuts. Who gets the short lot gets et. How say ’ee?” The river gurgled nearby in the gloomy silence. Mary wondered after a while if Ghetel had heard her. Then Ghetel replied:

  “Aye.”

  “That’s fair, y’ say?”

  “Aye. Fair.”

  “It means like as not I eat you.”

  “I don’ care. I eat or I die now anyvay.”

  It was said so flatly, so finally, so realistically, that Mary could believe the old woman had regained her senses. Or maybe she had had her senses all along, knowing that in this extremity the only true insanity would be in their both dying when one could have lived on the other.

  Mary felt around on the ground and found a dry twig. She snapped it into two pieces, one four inches long, the other six, and put them inside her fist. She placed the short one in a way that it extended a little higher than the long one.

  It would be proper to cheat a little, as she had no intention of eating Ghetel if Ghetel took the short one.

  Ghetel had come close, and, strangely, Mary had no fear that she would be attacked now; the old woman seemed past deceit and betrayal now, ready to abide by the dictum of the straws.

  There was just enough light for them to see what they were doing at these close quarters. Mary watched Ghetel studying the two twig ends and could smell her fetid breath. She found herself looking at the old woman’s slack mouth, the big, discolored teeth; she had a sudden chilling notion of herself disappearing whole into the awful mouth …

  Ghetel studied the twigs for a long time and then slowly raised her hand toward them. She touched the short one, looked up and saw something in Mary’s face, then touched the long one. Despite the fear climbing in her heart, Mary smiled and held the smile until Ghetel saw it and moved her fingers back to the short one.

  But she still did not take it. She took a long breath, exhaled it stinking into Mary’s face and then, as if she had received a sudden divination from something besides Mary’s expression, she went back to the long one and put her fingers on it.

  She may say she didn’t care, but she wants to win, Mary thought.

  Still Ghetel didn’t draw. She moved her fingers back to the short twig and very slightly lifted at it, as if to test Mary’s hold on it.

  I see, Mary thought. She guesses I’ll hold the long one tighter.

  So she squeezed her hand to resist Ghetel’s pull on the short stick.

  And it worked; Ghetel then touched the long one again, tugging ever so lightly on it, and Mary loosened her hand so Ghetel would think it was the short one.

  But still Ghetel did not draw. She looked at the two sticks and concentrated, her face showing all the shrewdest sort of calculation, and Mary thought, suddenly chilled by dread again:

  Did th’ old loon read my mind just then?

  “Dis one,” Ghetel pronounced.

  And she took one of the sticks between her thumb and forefinger and drew it out of Mary’s hand. Mary’s heart plummeted. She was left holding the short lot.

  “Show me yours,” Ghetel said, smiling. She seemed to know she had the longer one.

  Mary opened her hand, but not until she had found footing behind her and prepared herself to flee. She drew back slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the gathering darkness, trying to get out of reach.

  Ghetel laughed. “I vin it!”

  “Now, wait, darlin’. It’s but a game, right? Why, who’d really harm a dear friend over a drawed lot?” She tried to force a chuckle. It choked in her dry throat.

  “I vin it!” Ghetel began moving forward.

  “If I’d won it, I’d not ’a
’ hurt y’ anyhow,” Mary said, still stepping backward. “Listen, Ghetel, ’twas but a game. Listen, we’re nigh home now. My husband’s O so rich … why, we’ll give ’ee banquets—O, roast duck, and … and mince pie, and frumenty … and stewed hares … and marchpane … then when ’ee can hold no more, why, we’ll give’ee gold money, and a coach an’ driver to carry’ee aboot …”

  Ghetel lunged. Mary recoiled, and the old woman’s claws caught the rags of Mary’s dress. The rotten cloth gave way. A loose rock turned under Mary’s foot and her leg buckled, and she fell, twisting. She landed prone. She heard the horse bell clank and suddenly Ghetel’s weight was on her back and her hand was in her hair, pulling her head back; then Ghetel’s other arm came snaking around, striving to encircle her throat. Both were grunting like pigs with the effort. Mary pulled against the grip in her hair and managed to get her chin down a few inches, so that the strangling arm was across her chin instead of her throat. Straining against the old woman’s unbelievable strength, she managed at last to get the bony wrist between her teeth, and bit down with all the power of her jaws until her loose teeth and spongy gums sparked with pain and she tasted blood and Ghetel’s grunts rose into a gurgling growl. The old woman began thrashing her legs and let go of Mary’s hair but stayed on top of her. Mary heard a scrabbling beside her head and saw that with her left hand Ghetel was trying to pry up a rock from the frozen ground. If she gets one I’m dead, Mary thought. She bit harder, and stretched out her left arm to clutch Ghetel’s groping hand. She got it, dug her fingernails in and held on for life, and for most of a minute they lay straining against each other on the river bank, pulling and biting but scarcely moving; then Mary began trying to buck Ghetel off and Ghetel started jerking with pain, and they struggled and twitched on the rocky beach like some insect in its death throes.