Follow the River Read Free Page A

back inside the cabin. She grabbed Will’s loaded rifle off its wall pegs and waddled back to the door with it. In the front of her mind was the urgent need to save Bettie and the baby; in the back of her mind was an awful question: whether the savages had yet found her own little sons and her mother.
    The scene outside the cabin door made Mary, for the first time in her life, furious enough to kill.
    Several warriors were having sport with Bettie’s shrieking baby, tossing it back and forth between them, while another held Bettie by her dark hair and forced her to watch. She was on her knees, and her shrieks sounded as if they must be tearing out the membranes of her throat. One of the Indians was trying to hit the baby with his tomahawk as it hurtled through the air. The blade struck the baby and brought him to earth. Then the warriors scrambled for him as if they were playing some game of ball-scrimmage. They were laughing and howling; Bettie and the baby were screaming.
    Mary’s head was roaring with outrage. She tried to cock the flintlock hammer. Twice it slipped under her sweating hand.
    Now one of the Indians had the bleeding screaming baby by its ankle. Lurching away from the other two, he swung the baby in a wide arc and dashed his brains out against the corner logs of the cabin. The baby’s screams were punctuatedby that awful squishing thud. Bettie’s cries stopped also: she was beyond being able to scream.
    In that awful silence the warrior, pirouetting triumphantly and holding the baby high overhead, its smashed skull dribbling blood on him, turned to find another white woman, this one big with child, standing on a doorstoop five feet from him with a cocked rifle aimed straight at his eyes. He froze. His mouth dropped open. Baby blood was spotting the ochre and blue paint on his face.
    Mary pulled the trigger.
    The hammer clicked. The gun did not fire.
    She remembered then that Will always left the barrel loaded, but the firing pan uncharged, when he hung up the gun.
    “No,” she groaned. She simply stood there, resigned, the useless gun still at her shoulder, her eyes now darting wildly toward the berry patch for a last sight of her mother and sons. She felt strong hands grab her hair from behind and her head was yanked back and all she could see was the clear blue sky and the eave of the cabin roof.
    She felt the the gun being torn from her hands and heard the Indians laughing at her.
    * * *
    Elenor Draper loved to take her grandsons berry picking in the summer, and herb gathering and mushroom and wild-grape hunting in their season, mostly because little Thomas had such an inquisitive mind and imagination. Tommy had been born here in Draper’s Meadows and had never been anywhere else in his four years of life, but he was endlessly fascinated by the idea that his grandmother had once lived in a land far beyond a great ocean. They would reach carefully into the wild raspberry brambles and gently squeeze off the bright red berries, squeezing them ever so lightly so as not to crush them, reaching gingerly so as not to scratch their hands on the thorns, and as they did this with half their attention she would try to make him visualize what an ocean was. They had recited all this many times and surely would do it many timesmore, because his curiosity about the Atlantic Ocean seemed insatiable.
    “Now, look’ee then to th’ top o’ that mountain yonder, Tommy-lad …” He stood up straight and looked where she pointed, his dark eyes squinting, freckled nose crinkling, a breeze moving wisps of his thick red-brown hair across his forehead. “…  an’ suppose now that was water all the way to there.” He nodded in appreciation of that wonderful notion but waited to hear the rest. “And now suppose y’ come all that way on th’ water …”
    “In a boat.”
    “…  in a boat, and then
ten times that far
 …”
    He held his hands up with his ten berry-stained fingers spread.
    “…  Aye,