Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  And yet it was, in a way, a kind of sacred place, where Bettie had bled from her wound, and where they had labored together in the darkness to help each other. And to recross this cliff now on her return, without going out on that precipice to touch that place, would be a sacrilege, somehow. So she crept out on it.

  It was different now. There were no leaves on the shrubs; the ground was covered with snow and ice. Far below there was that hard earth in the bend of the river, snowy ground etched with black bare trees, range after range of naked white hills stretching away to the southeast and finally the Blue Ridge as the last horizon. Aye, here were the fragments of rock that had tortured their sleep. There was no trace of Bettie’s blood now.

  I was so full of child then, and so full of fear.

  Now I am empty of everything. I am even empty of fear, finally.

  She looked down over the brink. The river was three hundred feet straight down. To her right there stood pillars that were entirely independent, detached from the cliff itself; they stood like gigantic stone tree trunks on the edge of the river. And to her left was the way down, the way home. She could see from here the gunpowder spring. And somewhere above it there should be the Harmons’ camp hut …

  She could not quite see it, and strained far forward on the ledge to look for it.

  A shower of pebbles tore loose under her hand and dropped silently through space for many seconds, then plipped into the cold river far below with tiny white splashes.

  Aye, there it is, she thought. The little hut. It was a tiny dark rectangle among the etched trees, at the mouth of a ravine above the spring. There was a sere cornpatch below it.

  My, she thought. It looks cozy. That’s the place to lodge tonight when I get down off this accursed scarp. Swear I can see smoke comin’ off that …

  No, she thought. Y’re daydreamin’ again.

  No. It was no mirage. She knew chimney smoke when she saw it. And there was chimney smoke above that little hut down there. No more than a half a mile away. Her heart tripped.

  It could be Indians, she thought.

  Or it could be Adam Harmon.

  It didn’t make much difference. She would have gone to Indians now. Even an Indian would have fed and warmed someone in her condition. Maybe he would kill her later but he would feed her first.

  She opened her mouth and tried to call out. But she was still without voice.

  While there’s still daylight, she thought, get down off here to that lovely cabin.

  She felt giddy, wonderfully giddy.

  I could spread my arms, she thought, and just sail down there like any old buzzard.

  CHAPTER

  30

  Adam Harmon laid in the poles to close the cow pen behind the hut. Two brown cows and a calf moved close together for warmth and stood looking at him, their breath clouding in the twilight.

  Adam bent his stocky old body and gathered the last armload of the pea-vine fodder from under the eave of the hut and dumped it over the fence to them. Then he brushed chaff off the front of his shaggy bearhide weskit with his huge hands, while scanning the valley with quick, keen brown eyes. The squint-lines showed them to be merry eyes, but they were serious and suspicious now. He ran his tongue back and forth between his lower teeth and lower lip as he searched the valley shadows, and smoothed down his grizzled beard with the palm of his right hand. “Hank Boy, come ’round ’ere.”

  Adam Harmon’s elder son, even taller and thicker than his father, came around the corner of the hut with a greasy, bloody knife in his hand. His sleeves were turned up and his hands were slick with animal fat. He had been flensing an elk hide that was stretched over poles at the front of the hut. “Aye, Pa?”

  “Quit that f’r now. We’d best go down, he’p Junior with th’ corn while there’s still light. I got me a spookish sense we oughter light out f’r Dunkard’s Bottom come mornin’.”

  “Gettin’ t’ you too now, eh?”

  “Mhm,” Adam Harmon admitted.

  Hank threw the knife at the hut and it stuck in a corner log and quivered. He wiped his hands on the thighs of his breeches and turned down his sleeves. They picked up their rifles, which had been leaning against the side of the hut, and went down toward the corn patch. Passing Indian bands evidently had taken much of it; wild animals had destroyed some, and the rest was dry and hard. They had been late getting down to this New River camp of theirs from the settlement because of Indian alarms. They had come down only three weeks before, and had spent much of the time hunting in the hills across the river. Only yesterday, Adam Junior had hastily abandoned a little hunting camp about two leagues down, spooked out by Indian signs. He had fled in such a hurry that he had left a kettle of stewing meat over a fire, a pair of leather breeches, and a hobbled old pack mare that had wandered out of sight of the camp. He had been a little ashamed of himself since, and had not said much, and had worked by himself, sullen, away from his father and brother. A couple of times he had said he might go back down there and retrieve the horse. “No, forget ’er,” Adam Senior had said. “She’s no’ worth th’ risk o’ goin’ back there alone. If they was savages there, they got ’er by now anyhoo.”

  Adam Junior looked up from his picking when they walked into the cornpatch, then back down. “ ’Bout t’ quit,” he said. “Light’s gone.” He picked up the bag of corn he had gathered and moved a few feet away, set it down and twisted an ear of corn off its dead stalk with a quick rustle.

  “Let’s get all we can find,” the old man said. “We’re a-gonna pack out o’ here t’morra, first light.”

  Junior looked up, surprised. “Why, Pa?”

  Mr. Harmon grunted, shrugged. “I just feel it in m’ little finger.”

  Junior nodded. He felt better now; he was not alone in his uneasiness about Indians. Old Mr. Harmon was a bold man, as only a bold man would have built an outback camp this far from neighbors and right along a main Indian trace. And when Harmon said he felt something in his little finger, it usually meant something real was in the air. “Me too,” Junior said. “Never felt it so strong as I done yester …”

  “Husht!” young Hank cautioned suddenly, laying a hand on Junior’s arm, crouching, and raising his rifle.

  The other two turned, holding their breath and listening, and brought their rifles up and around, to point at the thicket at the far edge of the cornpatch.

  They all heard it now: a rustling; something either in the thicket or among the dry stalks of the corn. In the dusk they could see nothing yet. But they understood that it was not any wild animal. Wild animals simply did not approach talking men they could smell and hear. Therefore, they all understood, it could be only one or another of two things: a domestic animal, or Indians. The only domestic animals hereabouts were their own: the cows and calf in the pen, and their horses in the corral.

  Mister Harmon and his two sons stood now with all their senses focused on a place at the edge of the field where brush was being moved and a strange, hoarse, intense whisper was being repeated: human whisperings, they were certain; Indians passing information to each other, most likely. The three men knelt now, each on one knee, to lower their visibility and steady themselves for shooting, checked the powder in the flashpans of their guns and slowly pulled back the flintlock hammers. They aimed the long weapons at the sounds of approach and waited for their target to appear.

  “Help me, help, help me,” Mary was trying to cry out. “Help me, Mister Harmon!” But the words only came as a raspy whisper.

  She stopped and listened. She could not hear the men’s voices now, and was afraid they had left the cornfield.

  She had seen Mister Harmon and his sons as she crawled down the slope from the palisade cliff. She had seen the one youth working in the cornpatch and then she had seen old Adam Harmon and the other son start down from the hut. She had tried to walk down to the cornpatch where they were but her legs finally had failed her entirely, and she had dragged herself through the thicket toward the edge of the
corn, trying to yell for their attention through her ghostly husk of a voice.

  She tried to rise to her feet again but her legs were simply gone. She crawled into the snowy stubble of the cornfield now.

  She saw dim shapes ahead of her through the cornstalks.

  There they are, she thought.

  She shouldered past a stand of cornstalks and suddenly she was face to face with them. Her heart plunged.

  They were all aiming rifles at her face.

  “NO!” she whispered.

  Powder flashed orange in the flashpan of Junior Harmon’s rifle when he squeezed the trigger. But at that instant his father’s hand came up under the rifle and knocked it off target. The ball whickered off through the foliage and Mr. Harmon’s voice roared:

  “It’s a woman!”

  He and Hank kept their rifles cocked. They were still not sure of this situation. They knew only that there was a gaunt white face of a woman there in the corn a few feet in front of them. But the thought of Indians had not left their minds and Mister Harmon wondered for a moment whether this emaciated creature crawling toward them might be a decoy, backed by Indians.

  Mary raised herself onto her knees and reached toward the three Harmons with her hand. She could not understand why they had shot at her and did not come to her. Then she heard Mister Harmon say:

  “Damnation! Can that be Missus Ingles?”

  And at the sound of her name, everything wheeled and there was another one of those blizzards of dizziness, and this time she could not fight it and her mind blew away.

  They stood over her, speechless, for minutes. They had never seen a human being in this condition. She was a skeleton covered with bruised and lacerated skin. Her hands and feet were bloody and swollen to a grotesque hugeness. Her knees were worn through to bone.

  Her hair, though matted and dirty, was white as snow.

  “Take this,” Mister Harmon said in a choked voice, handing his rifle to his son. He knelt beside the unconscious bundle of bones. He turned her onto her back and slipped one hand under her knees and one under her back and stood up.

  When he felt how light she was his throat closed up, and he carried her toward the hut blinded by tears. His sons were crying too.

  CHAPTER

  31

  “Go kill th’ calf,” Mr. Harmon said to Adam Junior. The youth looked at his father, at the broad, bewhiskered face, the old, strong face so sad in the light of the hearth fire and a tallow wick.

  “Why that, Pa?”

  “Your Ma always said beef tea’s the best thing f’r a gone body. Butcher th’ calf an’ bring me a chunk o’ loin.”

  “We got three hundred pound o’ venison and bear already, Pa,” said Hank. “Wouldn’t that do?”

  “Beef tea,” Mr. Harmon repeated, looking down at the unconscious skeleton lying under a bearskin blanket on a pallet in the corner. “An’ be quick about it, boy. You, Hank: Stoke up that fire an’ boil water.”

  They didn’t argue. That pitful hag in the corner was for them, as well as for their father, the center of the world now. They were thinking of Will Ingles, who was about the finest man they knew. If he came back from the Cherokee country and found out they’d let her die, that would be a disgrace on them.

  The fire roared.

  There was some grievous commotion outside in the night as Junior caught the calf and strung it up by its hocks and slaughtered it. He came in with blood up to his elbows and put a fat piece of meat in one of the kettles. In the other kettle, Mr. Harmon was boiling rags. He would lift them out steaming on sticks and apply them to the little woman’s swollen feet and hands.

  Late in the night the beef tea was ready, and Mr. Harmon dipped some up in a gourd and knelt by the pallet and put his hand under the pitiful knob of a skull and raised her head and put the gourd to her lips. She mumbled something and reached out from under the bear robe with her misshapen paws and held onto the gourd and sipped over its edge. Mr. Harmon had the sense to limit her to a few sips at a time.

  After a few hours, she slipped off into a slumber so deep that he had to put his ear to her mouth to determine that she was asleep rather than dead.

  Young Adam and Hank took turns standing sentry under the stars. When Hank came out to relieve his brother, they stood for a while together. Junior said:

  “I been wonderin’. Where d’y reckon she been, five months?”

  “Lost out yonder, I guess,” Hank said, waving a hand up toward the palisade cliff and Butte Mountain beyond it. “Not far, d’ reckon. Y’ know a woman. Git lost twenty yards off th’ doorstoop.”

  “Yeah,” said Adam Junior. “Poor thang. Five month! Jesus God!”

  She was warm. For the first time in many weeks, she was not shivering. All her body felt hot and sweaty. A jumble of bad dreams was dissolving like smoke as she remembered where she was. She heard a fire crackling and someone snoring. She could smell the musky bearskin robe under which she had slept, and the smell of meat stewing. Her mouth was full of saliva and kept filling with saliva as fast as she could swallow it.

  She opened her eyes as far as their swelling would allow. They were gummy and everything she saw was blurry-edged. There was firelight flickering on the pole-and-bark ceiling, but she could also see a thin, fuzzy-edged angle of gray light and knew it was daylight outlining a chink of door-crack.

  She had a very important question to ask. “Mister Harmon?” Still no voice. Her whisper gurgled with saliva and phlegm. The snoring nearby stopped and she saw dark bulks moving above her.

  “ ’Mornin’, ma’am,” rumbled Mr. Harmon’s deep, soft voice, a music so profound and comforting that her eyes unexpectedly washed with tears. Oh, my, she thought. Her miraculous deliverance had left her on the edge of such a deep, wide sea of sentiment that, she realized, anything and everything—from food to voices to fireglow—likely would drown her in weepiness.

  “Mister Harmon,” she whispered, then swallowed, then whispered: “what d’y know o’ Will an’ Johnny?” The saying of their names nearly strangled her with bittersweetness.

  He cleared his throat. “Ah, well. They be fine, I reckon.”

  “Can ’ee take me to ’m?”

  “You eat an’ sleep a day ’r two. Then we’ll talk about movin’.” Mr. Harmon and his son whispered something to each other that she could not hear. She hissed:

  “Then maybe fetch ’em here?” They could ride down here from Draper’s Meadows in half a day, she thought. “O, sir, I must see Will this very day!” Again the tears poured.

  “Hank, dip ’er up some o’ that bear chowder,” Mister Harmon said. He wanted to get some more nourishment in her before telling her about Will and Johnny. “Now, sip this, Missus Ingles, an’ we’ll talk about what we’re going to do.”

  He spooned the savory broth to her lips. There was very tender meat in it, in tiny bits, and corn. It was the best food she had ever eaten and she appreciated it so much that she had to stop eating for a while to cry. The food churned and burbled in her shrunken stomach and made her burp with almost every breath. It was so rich that it made her drowsy and she slipped away again. When she awoke the Harmons were sitting in a circle, working on their rifles and talking low. “… an’ till we can leave,” Mr. Harmon was saying, “we’ll one at a time stand picket outside.”

  “Aye,” one of the boys said. Then it was quiet for a while, until the same voice said: “I saw ’er prints. She come down off the cliff.”

  “Th’ deuce y’ say!”

  “Yup.”

  “Sh-sh! She’s awake, boys.”

  Mister Harmon moved close to her and squatted by the pallet. He put his big rough but gentle hand on her forehead and smoothed back her hair. “Hullo. How goes’t?” She burped, nodded, then whispered:

  “Please send f’r Will.”

  He inhaled a long breath through his nostrils. “Well, mum, y’see, y’r husband ain’t hereabouts, nor ’s y’r brother John …” He saw the look of sheer dismay strike through her
wasted visage, and realized that she was believing the worse, so he hurried to explain: “They rid down southways to confabulate with Cherokees about gettin’ you ransomed, mum. Uh, might be they’re back now, even … It’s three weeks since we was at the settlement. Yup, could be they’re home by now. Soon’s y’r strong enough to ride, we’ll all go up an’ see.” He cleared his throat again. “How’s ’em feet? Hank, sop up them rags an’ lets tend to these poor feet again …”

  While these ministrations were being done, old Harmon tried to reassure her of the likelihood that Will was safe. He was not really that confident—it seemed to him that Mister Ingles’ sojourn was very long on risk—but he did not want her recovery to be complicated by worry and low spirits.

  Hank, for all his burly appearance, was a gentle nurse, and his careful treatment of her feet was soothing, and sometimes he would wince and shake his head as if he were suffering the pain of her mauled and seeping extremities himself. There was a severe case of chilblains, and perhaps some frostbite damage, but no smell of mortification yet.

  “Ma’am,” he said in awe, “looks t’me like these trailbeaters o’ your’n got a good hunnert mile on ’em.”

  She smiled strangely down over the bear robe at him. “Nay, friend,” she whispered, “more like a thousand.”

  “Yup,” he agreed, looking back down at her feet with a shy smile, thinking she was joking. “More like a thousand. They do look it.”

  “Reckon where you been?” old Harmon asked.

  She looked at the ceiling for so long, eyes glistening wet, that he thought she’d drifted off and ignored or forgotten his question. But then she whispered: “To th’ O-y-o, then way down it too.”

  Mister Harmon’s eyebrows raised slightly and he gazed at her thoughtfully, wondering whether she really had any idea what she was saying. Hank looked at his father and shook his head in pity. After a while, Mister Harmon leaned close to her and said: “It’s told that this river here,” he pointed, “goes plumb through the mountains to the O-hee-o. What say’ee to that, mum?”