Follow the River Read online

  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.

  The afternoon went on and on like that. She lost her ability to take note of the route, and even forgot to keep an eye on the river. Her hair hung now in sweat-dank strands. Once she opened her eyes from a near-swoon to find little Georgie twisting and craning to look back up at her. There were his alarmed dark eyes in his dirty face. “Mama hurt?” he said.

  “Aye. But it’s a-goin’ away. Don’t y’ fret now.”

  They were down off the mountain and in a deep-shadowed, moist, still forest the next time she took any notice. It seemed to be evening and there were thousands of mosquitoes whining in her ears and nipping at her face and neck and arms. Georgie was crying and slapping violently at himself. “Hush, son,” she commanded, alarmed that the Indians might kill him to shut him up. She fanned mosquitoes away from him and then raised her sweat-soaked skirt up around her waist and draped it over him to protect him from the swarm. Doing so exposed her own thighs to the insects, and they gorged themselves freely on her blood. Their bites were so dulled by her total agony that she did not even bother to slap them. And Georgie did stop crying. Once Mary heard Bettie wail behind her:

  “Dear Lord, they’re going to drive me mad!”

  Mary felt a silent pop deep in her bowels, than a hot flood of wetness down between her thighs and onto the horse’s hairy back. There goes the water, she thought. She knew she should have been off the horse hours ago. But to have hindered the Indians’ progress she felt would have been a certain death warrant for the baby and herself. Must wait till they camp, she thought. Surely I can wait till they camp. The sun’s down. Can’t be long. Hold. Hold.

  But then that inevitable moment came: that familiar, awful sense of unstoppability, that loss of control, when her will lost its sway over her muscles. She gave a low, gurgling wail and looked up and saw the black foliage overhead and wanted to reach up and pull the forest down upon herself.

  Someone had lowered her onto the ground, or she had fallen without feeling it. She was on her back, on the forest floor. Bettie Draper was kneeling beside her, her good left hand using her skirt to wipe sweat and chase whining mosquitoes from Mary’s face. The great dark trunks of trees converged into blackness straight above. There were no horses or Indians or children nearby now. Sometimes she could hear them in the distance. Another enormous surge went down; she felt her skeleton creaking open; she was turning inside out. Her heart fluttered. She held a cry behind her throat. She reached behind her head for a tree to uproot, but got only handfuls of dirt and leaves. She raised and spread her knees and strained and tried to expel that tormenting hot wet mass out of herself, to free herself from it, from the endless agony it was causing. It eased a bit, and she sucked night air and heard Bettie saying things to her and smelled excrement.

  This alcove of the woods now had become like a dark room. Its walls were tree trunks. Its ceiling was black foliage with a hole at its peak where a star winked through. Off to her left, as if outside the room, there was a low, smoky fire burning, and men were moving around it. Indians. And now and then she would hear Tommy or Georgie say something, in little asking voices, and Henry Lenard would say something. Somewhere else outside the room a horse nickered and another snorted wetly. But here in this lightless imaginary room there were only Mary and her enormous act of expulsion, and Bettie on the edge of it saying things and praying aloud and doing half a job of midwifery with her one good hand.

  Mary watched the star until another awful bone-stretching pressure went down and the star went out and her heart trembled.

  I got through that one, she thought in triumph a moment later when the star reappeared. I got through that one; I can stand anything. Except this one that’s coming now!

  She stood that one, too, and exulted for a moment. Bettie was down there below her, touching and mopping, pulling and talking and sobbing. “Poor hapless tad; first thing ’twill feel in this life’s a bloody mosquito bite. ’Sno fair, ’sno fair a-tall …”

  The Indians were not helping in this matter. They furnished neither water nor cloth, and did not even come near. This was not a bullet wound, but a birth; it was a matter for the women. Mary was aware of that, in a moment of lucidity, and it made her angry. She looked at the star and hated men for all their meanness and hurtfulness and cruelty. Why is this happening to me? she demanded as the hideous squeezing pain returned, what have I ever
done? The star went away and then came back, and she was euphoric, and her heart grew soft and big at the thought of William.

  “Fine head o’ hair,” Bettie was saying down there. “Y’re nigh done now, Mary darlin’. Y’re a fine worker, oh, truly y’are … Come on, now, little weanie, turn y’r lovely mama loose … That’s good now, that’s very nice now …” Bettie’s voice broke with a sob, then, “… Oh, God love ye, Mary Ingles, ’tis a little jill, I do believe.”

  Beside the smoky fire they had built to baffle mosquitoes, the Indians stopped talking when they heard a baby’s cry quaver in the nearby darkness among the calls of owls and crickets. They all looked to the chieftain, who stared in that direction and nodded.

  He was very impressed. He had not heard the white mother cry out a single time.

  Mary had to bite off and tie the cord herself because of Bettie’s crippled hand. They dried the bloody slime and feces off the baby with their skirts. Bettie tossed the afterbirth away into the bushes. Mary unbuttoned her dress and put the baby inside against her skin and they covered it with Bettie’s apron to keep the mosquitoes off.

  The baby began suckling sometime during the night as Mary lay awake in the leaves listening to the breathing of the sleepers and the whine of mosquitoes and the stealthy rustlings of wild animals in the woods. It sucked hard on her sore nipple, making an exquisite pain, while the rest of her body ebbed into numbness and forgot its sufferings.

  What shall we name ’er, Will, m’ love? Mary thought as sleep began to overpower her and the stars she was watching through the treetop blurred. Elenor, after my mother? Or Bettie? Maybe Bettie Elenor Ingles. Now, that’s a fine sound, aye? How say y’ to that, my Will?

  Before dawn the horses were spooked by the scent of a starving lame wolf, which crept to the edge of the camp and stole the afterbirth.

  CHAPTER

  5

  William Ingles and Johnny Draper rode whip-and-spur down Sinking Creek, at the head of a column of thirty armed horsemen that Captain Buchanan had raised for them in the upriver settlements. Among them were Will Ingles’ younger brothers, John and Matthew.

  “Buzzards,” Johnny Draper shouted over the thunder of hooves.

  “At Phil Barger’s I’d say,” yelled Will.

  There was little left of the old man’s headless body: shreds of putrid flesh and the rags of clothing brown with old blood. They turned the skeleton over and disturbed a thousand busy maggots. They scraped out a shallow temporary grave and put in the stinking bundle of bones and covered it up and rode hell-bent on down the creek toward Lybrook’s with the stench still in their nostrils.

  Philip Lybrook and his wife and son unbolted their cabin door when they saw that the riders were white men. Lybrook had hurried back over the mountain after he and Prescott had discovered the burning settlement four days before. Mrs. Lybrook told the militiamen what she had seen: the number of Indians she guessed had been about twenty, though she had been too stunned to count them or really even look. Yes, they had had Mrs. Ingles and Mrs. Draper with them, and the little boys. And a man on a rope, Henry Lenard, she seemed to recall. Raccoons or something had carried away the bag with Mr. Barger’s head in it; one minute it had been lying there at the edge of the garden where she had thrown it, and later it was simply gone. Then she broke down and couldn’t tell them any more, but there really was nothing more to tell.

  “Down Sinking Creek to the New River, then, I’ll wager,” said Will Ingles. His eyes were crackling, his mouth was bitten white. “Let’s go. Lickety-cut.”

  Captain Buchanan’s scarlet coat blazed in the sunlight. “Sir,” he said to Philip Lybrook, “I reckon you know the place upriver called Dunkard’s Bottom?”

  “Aye.”

  “I recommend y’ take your family and go there, with all your goods and whatever harvest y’ have already. Folks are a-gatherin’ there. They’re a-buildin’ a fort.”

  “We’ll go, Cap’n. We’ve had enough for now.”

  The force rode on down Sinking Creek at as brisk a pace as the terrain would allow. William Ingles kept his eye on the sky for buzzards. At every turn in the river he expected to find the remains of Mary or Bettie, or one of the children.

  There was no sign of the Indians’ passage yet, as they apparently had stayed in the creek. One of Captain Buchanan’s men was an accomplished tracker, a Tuscarora half-breed named Gander Jack, and he scanned the creek banks with hungry eyes for any sign that the Indians might have left the creekbed. Such signs, if there were any, would be faint because of the passage of four days since the massacre. But there had been no rain in the region, so there was hope that a spoor might remain.

  Captain Buchanan rode up between Will and Johnny late in the afternoon. “We ought to ease off, gentlemen. We’ve rid hard two days. We’ll burn the horses out.”

  “The trail’s old enough, Cap’n. I don’t want it to fade altogether.”

  “Then, too,” the captain persisted, “I don’t intend to run my boys into an ambuscade. I share y’r urgency, Mr. Ingles, but I advise caution.”

  Will reined his horse back. He knew Captain Buchanan was right. And he knew too that he should abide by the militiaman’s wishes, not just for the sake of common sense, but because he was lucky even to have got his assistance for a pursuit so far into these parts. Buchanan had opined even before starting out that it likely would be a goose chase.

  But whether it was a goose chase or not, Will had to try it. It was his Mary out there in the hands of savages. And his sons. And Will knew that Johnny Draper was just as determined.

  There was nothing to do but comply with Captain Buchanan, and keep him as long as he could. The captain certainly did want to rescue the hostages. And every man with him was eager to avenge the massacre. They were all together on that. It was hard not to go headlong. The Indians had four days’ lead.

  But they’re heavy-burdened, with all they took, and with Mary pregnant, he assured himself; they can’t travel fast.

  Four days is a long lead, though, he argued back at himself.

  Especially as they know where they’re a-goin’ and we don’t.

  “Sir, they left the ravine here,” said Gander Jack. They had reached the place where the creek pooled and went underground. It was a well-trodden place, where deer and elk and bear apparently watered in great numbers. “Up that path, I’d guess, but let me range up yonder a-ways an’ see if they come back down.”

  “My guess is they went straight west to the gunpowder spring,” mused Will.

  They followed the spoor along the mountainside. It had been largely obliterated by the subsequent passage of game, but an occasional print of a horse’s hoof or moccasin led them on.

  Emerging finally at the spectacular bend in the New River, the tracker reconstructed and described for them the war party’s brief halt, then pointed out the route they had taken up onto the palisade. Captain Buchanan looked up at the towering natural fortress warily. “Reckon they might still be holed up in there?” he wondered aloud. “Hate t’go up there if they was. Looks t’me like a mean place f’r an ambuscade.”

  “No,” Will Ingles sighed impatiently. “No reason they sh’d loiter hereabouts an’ let us catch up.”

  “Except to ambush us,” said Buchanan.

  “Cap’n, they’re a-totin’ most o’ Draper’s Meadows. They got our families t’haul wherever they be a-goin’. I just doubt they got any inclination to wait about an’ wage war on an armed company. They don’t even know we’re a-comin’. I’ll stake my rep’tation on it, Cap’n, they left long since.”

  “I’ll stake my life on it,” exclaimed Johnny Draper, suddenly spurring his horse. He took the gunpowder spring in a leap and galloped full tilt for the steep ridge leading to the cliff-top.

  “And so’ll I,” said Will, whipping his mount and thundering off in the same direction. His brothers John and Matthew followed.

  Captain Buchanan hesitated for a moment, a little ashamed of his caution, but trying
to seem indignant about their reckless behavior. Finally, when they had vanished up the ridge without drawing any fire, he waved his column forward to follow.

  Atop the awesome bluff, the tracker described the particulars of what had apparently been a combat-ready first-night encampment. “Cold supper,” he said. “No fires.” He showed them a trampled place liberally spotted with horse manure. “Corral here,” he said. “Hobbled ’em too, looks like.” Then he trotted like a hunting dog over to the cliff’s edge, stooped and came back. “Limbs all fresh broke off a bush yonder,” he said. “An lookahere.” He held up a narrow torn strip of cloth—part of a dress sleeve. Johnny Draper, with a rush of emotion, recognized the weave. He snatched it out of Gander Jack’s fingers. “It’s my Bettie’s! They were here, Will! They were this far!” He was grinning through his dark whisker-stubble, his eyes almost desperately dancing with hope. “Now, man,” he said to the tracker, “lead on.”

  “Y’ might want t’ know,” drawled Gander Jack, “that somebody dribbled a lot o’ blood on yon rock thar.” He twisted his mouth and squinted up at Will Ingles. He saw Will go gray under his leather-brown skin, and saw Johnny Draper do likewise.

  “Well, but they be no bodies lyin’ round, hey?” blustered Johnny. “Heh! They’re jes’ fine, far as we know. How say y’ we move on an’ find out f’r certain?”

  Captain Buchanan looked very reluctant. He was in parts unknown, in a region he and his volunteers didn’t even know their way out of, and their own families were holed up on the Roanoke, east of the Blue Ridge, and all of them had crops ripening in their fields begging for harvest. If they went deeper into these mountains, and this Ingles and Draper got themselves killed in the heat of their quest, the whole troop might well be lost.