Follow the River (7 page)

When the river was out of sight for very long, Mary would suffer a dread suspicion that they were leaving it for good, and that they were being taken by some profound wilderness byway through which she could never find her way back for lack of landmarks. In those times she would glance back continuously, trying to find something to memorize. But those backward views were already becoming vague and muddled in her memory.

You can only count on the river, she thought. Dear God let it be true that they never stray far from this river, or we all are lost, lost, lost from the way home.

And then, just as she could hardly bear the dread another minute, a break in the forest would reveal the river, still coming along hundreds of feet below them; or sometimes, after they had descended a long ravine, they would suddenly come out from between two hills and find themselves right at the river’s edge, with bluffs and mountains towering on both sides as they picked their way along.

Mary could no longer even estimate the distances they were traveling.

I must at least, she thought, start keeping a count of the days.

This day, she thought, which began on an eagle’s roost above a stone arch in a sharp riverbend, shall be known as our second day out. Our second day out.

She committed it to her memory.

By the end of their second day out, the Indians seemed to have lost much of their anxiety about being pursued. They stopped in a glade and spent an hour burying their two dead warriors and chanting over them.

They did not ride late into the evening; instead they stopped at the base of a sheer cliff while there was still an hour of daylight. There were caves in the cliff, a few feet above the river level, and the warriors made the camp in one
of these. It had a packed dirt floor, and old fire-beds made of circles of sooty stones. Pieces of Indian pottery and a few unbroken clay vessels lay here and there in the dim, cool interior, and there were old stacks of straight, slim, peeled poles and sticks which indicated that some industry—arrow making and canoe building, Mary guessed—had been conducted here in years past. In one corner lay pieces of arrowheads and a few broken stone axe heads.

Tommy and Georgie were quite taken with the cave, and were cheerful and quiet, despite their fatigue and their general wariness of the Indians.

The horses had been corralled in a grassy compound surrounded by dense brush at the river’s edge outside the cave, and a rope was strung from bush to bush to keep them from straying. Mary saw the chieftain send two braves climbing, with their guns slung on their backs, up the face of the cliff, one upstream and one downstream a few yards. They vanished into the cliff above, apparently into small caves overlooking the approaches to the canyon.

Mary was scarcely able to move for the first few minutes after dismounting. Her back and pelvis were a mass of aches and stabbing pains, and her thighs cramped several times before she could knead out the muscles and straighten her limbs.

When she was at last able to rise, she waddled to the chieftain, who stood in the mouth of the cave surveying the river and watching his braves bring firewood into the cave. He looked at her without expression, without the slightest trace of friendliness in his eyes. His severity, and the great quantity of wood the braves were fetching, suddenly alarmed Mary. A notion jumped into her mind that some of the hostages might be burned for the Indians’ entertainment. Or food! She felt a chill of the soul, and her legs began to tremble.

Of course, she thought. The less they fear pursuit, the less they need us. For a moment she was rendered speechless by the thought, and stood with her mouth gaping while the chieftain waited to hear what she wanted.

Be dignified
, she reminded herself.
Whatever it is, be dignified
. She shut her mouth, stood as straight as she could and
stared straight into his black-slit eyes. Then she pointed at Bettie, who sat with her back to a boulder, quiet and stoical, but going an awful pale gray in the face with the pain of her crudely splinted arm.

“Mister,” Mary began, “I have to do something for her. I have to find something—some medicine leaves, do you understand?—for her arm.” Mary touched her own right upper arm and then pointed again at Bettie. “And I need hot water.” Even while asking for hot water, Mary remembered tales she had heard about savages ripping unborn infants from the womb and throwing them into stewpots to boil before the very eyes of their dying mothers. She remembered the warrior who had threatened to cut her open at the settlement. Was this what they were planning, with all their wood gathering? At that moment a brave entered the cave carrying a large iron sugaring kettle that had belonged to Casper Barrier at the settlement, and again Mary had to bite inside her cheeks to keep from whimpering. And as if to confirm her fears, the chieftain let a suggestion of a grim smile move the corner of his mouth.

But in the meantime, there was Bettie to be taken care of.

“Medicine leaves,” Mary repeated.

“Mo-ther go there, be still,” the chieftain ordered, pointing to Bettie and the children.

“Please, Mist …”

“There.”

And so the prisoners huddled together near the mouth of the cave and watched the Indians build two fires, a large one and a smaller one. The warriors rigged a wooden frame over each fire. They hung a small kettle over the smaller fire and the big kettle over the larger fire. They brought vessels of water and filled the kettles. The Indians had built and managed the fires so that they were virtually smokeless, and the little smoke that did rise from them flowed up a natural draft out of the cave mouth and up the face of the cliff.

Mary did not express her fears to Bettie or Henry. Perhaps those or similar fears were haunting them already. But to talk of them would only worsen the fright that was already as much as they could bear in dignity. Mary settled the children
side by side in a niche floored with soft, dusty earth, and told them to take a nap before supper. It was like a down mattress compared with the flinty cliff-top of the first night’s camp, and the boys’ eyes grew heavy immediately and they fell into a sound sleep. God be merciful, Mary thought. If they’re to be murdered, let it be in their sleep so’s they won’t see it coming. Then she turned to the care of Bettie’s arm. Being careful not to unsettle the position of the bones, she untied the knots in the splint’s bindings and laid back the sticks. “Some nice, for a riggin’ done blind,” observed Henry Lenard with satisfaction as he knelt and helped. “We can make a better, though, with some o’ them sticks yonder.”

“Aye,” Mary said. “But I don’t care f’r th’ looks o’ that flesh.” The edges of the wound were swollen and were issuing a mass of greenish-white pus. There were bits of dirt and bark, even some dead gnats, in the pus, the result of their having dressed the wound by feel in the darkness. Mary knelt close, straining over her own massive, hurting belly, and sniffed the wound. The baby within her kicked, as if demanding more room. “Not stinkin’ a whole lot yet. How’s it feel, Bet?”

“Hurts somethin’ unspeakable. An’ itches.”

“Well, by the Eternal, if these savages have got no humanity to a sick woman, I sh’ll … Got to clean that. Raise up there, darlin’. I need your apron.” She removed it, then rose with a wheeze and stood. She went dizzy, and had to grope for a handhold on a boulder. Her vision cleared. She carried the apron straight to the small kettle and, before any warrior could move to stop her, dipped it into the boiling water. She raised it out steaming and, tossing it from hand to hand to avoid scalding herself, carried it back to Bettie’s side and stooped. “Hot, now,” she said. “Don’t jerk your arm.” And, deftly folding it into a pad, she laid it on the suppurating wound and held it there snug with her palms. Bettie lurched at the contact of the heat, but she kept the arm still.

“Oh, merciful God,” she groaned. “Thankee, Mary. Oh, I feel it’s helpin’. Oh, leave it there. Oh, I feel it’s just a-pullin’ that corruption out …”

Mary gathered herself to rise. “Got to rinse it hot again.” She swabbed the wound gently as she took the cloth away.

The chieftain stood between her and the kettle, frowning. “ ’Scuse me, Mister,” she muttered, going around him. But he grabbed her arm and held her back.

“You not do,” he said. “See this.” He nodded to a warrior who stood over the kettle with an armful of various leaves and strips of green bark. As he spilled them into the boiling water, Mary recognized some of the plants as comfrey. “Go be still,” the chieftain said, shoving her back toward the other captives.

Mary hardly dared to hope. She sat holding the sopping apron against Bettie’s wound, feeling the baby kick within herself, and tried to watch the proceedings at the fires. Into the big kettle the Indians were putting barley and cutting pieces of the venison they had taken from Mrs. Lybrook’s house. A short, slight, older warrior was bent over the smaller pot, stirring and mashing the plants in the water. The smell of a stew began to mingle with a sharp, bitter medicinal steam from the other kettle.

And then the Indian brought a piece of cloth and a gourd to the kettle. He dipped a mass of green slime out of the kettle and into the cloth, then folded the cloth over and over to contain it. Holding it gingerly by the corners then, he brought it to Mary and held it forth to her, nodding in the direction of Bettie’s arm.

With a rush of gratitude, Mary realized that her remotest hope had come true: the Indians had prepared a poultice of the comfrey and other medicinal leaves and barks. “Thank’ee, Mister, thank’ee thank’ee!” she kept saying as she squatted down and plastered the slick, squishy compress over the bullet wound. “Oh, I can’t believe this, merciful God, how thou work’st even through heathens and murtherers.” Mary was almost ecstatic. Surely this poultice would be even better than the ones they had learned to use in the settlement. She hummed softly while applying it. The chieftain came over once and looked down at the two women. He did not ask anything or show any expression, but for the first time Bettie spoke directly to him:

“Y’ll burn in etarnal hell, for what y’ done t’ my poor babe …” Mary grew alarmed for the possible consequences of such an outburst, not knowing how much of it the Indian
understood; but Bettie added, “…  may the Devil give y’ a minute’s respite, though, for this kindness. It feels better already, sir …” And then she lapsed back with a sigh and closed her eyes.

The chieftain looked at Bettie for a moment, then at Mary. “H’mm,” he said, and went away.

The barley chowder the Indians had been cooking in the big kettle was savory, and there was plenty of it, and Mary felt her strength growing afterward. But the constant tending to the poultice, and to Tommy and Georgie, and the groaning weight of her own womb had her gasping with exhaustion by nightfall. The Indians removed Henry Lenard from the company of the women and children after dinner, and put him in a back corner of the cave with his hands bound behind him and his feet tethered to a log. Mary worried for some time that they might be planning to torture or kill him. But as the night deepened and the warriors settled themselves down to conversation and tobacco smoking in the glow of the cookfires, she presumed that he was being moved only for the sake of security, as he was, after all, the only one among them well enough and unencumbered enough to have a reasonable chance of running away.

Mary at last built and bound another splint, with the rest of the poultice dressing lining the inside, and when she saw that Bettie was deep in sleep, she lay back on the dirt between her and the children. She watched the fireglow shift shadow-shapes on the irregular vault of the cave above, smelled the tobacco and the dusty, musty earth-smell of the cave, and heard the Indian men’s voices grow less distinct and the rush of the river rapids outside grow more monotonous, and tried to keep her slipping mind awake long enough to take stock of the day and what it had signified. Her eyes came open for a moment as a wolf howled somewhere outside, and a familiar, squeezing ripple of pain moved through her waist, then receded. It’s not going to be long ’til we have another of us to care for, she thought. Then she went almost overpoweringly drowsy again.

But thank God, she thought. That they made a poultice for poor Bet means something.

It means … it means for now, anyway … they’d as soon have us alive as dead.

Then she slid away into dreams of Will and her mother and beyond.

Our third day out, she thought as the pack train toiled along the endless ridge of a mountain a thousand feet above the river, this third day out I’m afraid is going to give thee, William my love, a new baby y’ may never see. I can feel it’s like to be today, and only the Lord can say how soon.

By the middle of the day, when the sun was beating straight down on their heads and the forested mountain across the valley was shimmering in the baking sunlight, Mary knew her labors were starting. But being astride the lurching horse, the pains and fatigues of her body already being so general and intense, she was unable to measure the onslaughts as she had been able to with her first two childbirths.

Tommy, her first, had been an excruciating birth, with her whole pelvis feeling it was being rendered bone from bone, but it had been a quick and regular birth withal, the pressures coming according to a predictable inner clockwork of her mind. And Georgie too had entered the world in compliance with her sense of time, and much more easily, with hardly enough pain to remember.

But these two days on horseback, with the exhaustion, the hopelessness, the endless wobbling and plunging and thumping, had destroyed that sense of reliable interval; it was as if time itself had been left back at the settlement, standing there against the wall in that old ticking family clock the Indians had been afraid to touch. Now Mary was at the mercy of unannounced waves of weakness and dizziness. She would feel an awful fear of falling down the mountainside, then a wracking twist of pain inside the greater prevailing pain; then her vision would clear and she would find her face bathed in cold sweat, her knees needing to straighten, her heartbeat slowing from a gallop almost to a dreadful standstill.