Read Online Follow the River by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: JAMES ALEXANDER Thom
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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 sheopened 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
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 sheopened 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
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