After midnight the snow stopped falling and the clouds scudded out from under the moon, and the palisade towered silent and dark among the silvery mountains.
CHAPTER
29
She knew she should have died during that long night, but there in the east the sky was pale and she was looking at it and seeing it. The snow was pale blue and the last of the stars had winked out, and low in the west over the far shore of the river, looking thin and translucent against the fading sky, was a shaving of moon. Steam was rising off the river. Mary was shaking continuously now. Her arms and legs felt paralyzed.
The eastern sky warmed to the hues of a peach. Mary heard a tiny buffeting sound and opened her eyes to see a tiny black bird with a white breast swaying on a slender twig a few inches above her face, looking at her. Mary tried to grab it but could not raise her arm. The bird darted away and snow dust fell off the disturbed twig.
How do they stay alive? Mary wondered.
She had been seeing without thinking. But now she was thinking. She had wondered how birds stay alive in the winter, and she had noticed that she herself was still alive when she should not have been.
She remembered something her mother had said once, once at the breakfast table on a Sunday morning, when they would all try to talk a little like preachers because real preachers had seldom come over the Blue Ridge to Draper’s Meadows. Her mother had said, in her brogue, with a cheerful glow in her face:
“Any marnin’ th’ good Lord lets’ee open your eyes, that’s a day he’s got somethin’ f’r ye t’ do.”
Do what? Mary wondered. There was that cold river; at the base of the cliff its surface was dimpled with turbulence, and she remembered the force with which it had tugged the sounding-pole out of her hand last night. Even in morning light the cliff above looked as ominous and insuperable as it had in the night; it looked now, silhouetted against the chilling dawn, like the walls and crenels and battlements of a storybook castle. What, she wondered, has th’ Lord for me t’ do?
She peered up at the craggy rampart against the sky and once again remembered the night the captives had spent up there, almost five months ago, that miserable and terrifying night which since had been eclipsed by a hundred nights more miserable and terrible. She remembered how the land below had looked from that high brink: the land dark with summer foliage, the depths below shrouded in river fog; the mountain range dwindling away eastward toward Draper’s Meadows …
That, of course, was the only recourse. The Indians had brought them over the cliff because there was no other way to pass it.
The only possible way to get home to Will, then, was to climb around and over this gigantic obstacle.
O that’s mad, she thought; I’ve not th’ strength to lift an arm.
But any day th’ good Lord lets’ee open your eyes, that’s a day he’s got somethin’ f’r ye t’ do.
“All right, then; so be it,” she whispered, as if replying to her mother. She tried to straighten her limbs, to rise out of the snow. They were swollen huge, and as cold and stiff as the limbs of a corpse. She looked at her right hand as she tried to open it. The fingers felt as if they were breaking rather than bending. The fingertips were brown with dried blood and the hand was swollen to twice its normal size. When she tried to lift her head from the ground it felt as if her neck would snap. Snow fell from her cheek and from her hair.
It was half an hour before she could uncurl her body. Her hips and knees were the most agonizing.
I’m like a whole set o’ rusted hinges, she thought. She imagined her joints squealing as she moved them, and the thought was nearly funny.
It’ll be funny someday when I can tell it t’ folks, she thought.
To folks!
O what a lovely idee! she thought. To talk to folks! It had dawned on her then, for the first time in months, that there were folks in the world, people who spoke her language and knew her name, people of her own kind, with whom one could sit by a fire or in the sungold of a summer eve, just … just talkin’ ordinary … just palaverin’ about the twaddle and the piffle of the day …
Because for most people, for most of their lives, she thought, there’s lesser things on mind day by day than stark survivance.
Oh, dear heaven, yes, I’d nigh forgot th’ happy time ordinary folk pass in trifles and flummadiddle …
O, get home! she thought. Get home! Y’been too long on th’ bare edge o’ livin’ …
And after a while she was up, standing unsteady, leaning on a rock to keep from falling. Her feet were huge and blue and puffy, and as her blood flowed down into them they felt full of sparks, almost unbearable sparks.
She forced herself to move. She went back a few painful paces, looking up the palisades for a place to begin her climb.
In the daylight now she could study the strange formation of the cliff. The stone of the cliff was rotten and crumbling. Between the columns of stone there were eroded gaps, full of dirt and rock debris, scrub and roots, saplings and gnarled black grapevines. It appeared that the only way to the top of the cliff would be up through these gaps. While steep, they were not quite vertical, as were the rock columns themselves.
Raising her arm to reach the first handhold caused such a stab of pain in her shoulder that she almost swooned. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath and reached up again and hooked her stiff fingers over a root. Sharp twinges and prickles went down the arm. She winced against the grind of her hip socket and got her left foot up onto a lichen-spotted chunk of rock jutting from the slope. With this handhold and foothold she drew herself a few inches up the slope. She was on her way. She hung there for a moment, saw a little leafless dogwood sapling two feet above her head. She got her numb left hand up to it and around it, forced the fingers to close, and pulled herself, panting and squinting, a little further up, her naked abdomen and thighs scraping over snow and rock and frozen soil, her cold-petrified toes trying awkwardly to gain traction.
The next handhold was another root. Then a snarl of rough, black grapevines. Then a chunk of rock, slick with ice and snow. Then the rotting stump of a broken-off sapling. Then a dead branch wedged between two rocks.
Every four or five feet she had to stop and press against the slope to recover breath, coughing up gobs of phlegm.
The effort of climbing was gradually thawing her cold-stiffened body, but it was all at the cost of renewed sorenesses and stabbing pains. Gasping the cold morning air was searing her throat; her eyes watered constantly and her nose drained.
She was perhaps forty feet up, clinging for life to an ice-coated chunk of rock, when the first ray from the rising sun burnished the top of a great, tooth-shaped stone pillar a hundred feet above her. It struck her as being so beautiful, so enchantingly God-given beautiful, that she went all weepy inside with sentiment and could scarcely gather the strength to go on.
Half an hour later she was only ten feet further up. She realized that she was expending more of her waning energy in shivering and clinging desperately than in climbing. That same sun-gilded pinnacle seemed as distant as it had been.
If only that sun would touch me, she thought. It’d do me good! She remembered long-ago times when she had sat on the cabin stoop at Draper’s Meadows, leaning back against the sun-warmed log wall while the sun had eased the aching weariness of field work out of her muscles. And she remembered that recent morning when, having escaped across the river by canoe and slept in the hunter’s hut, she had leaned against the hut wall in the wintry sunlight breakfasting on a turnip. O, she thought, but that was a happy time! A little sunlight now would double my strength, she thought.
She was not likely to get any sun here on this palisade, though, not for a while. She was in the cold shadows between two enormous shafts of stone and at this rate it would be hours before she could attain the summit and rest in the sunlight.
She pulled herself up five feet more and lay gasping against the slope with a quaking arm hooked around a sapling. And then she we
nt away somewhere in her head. She returned with a shock to find herself sliding down the slope toward the river below, pulling a small avalanche of dirt and snow and shale fragments with her, rocks and roots scraping and lacerating her skin. She jolted to a stop against a small shrub, her heart slamming, and hung there, gasping and shaking and hurting, listening to the dislodged debris scrabble on down the cliff-face into the river.
She had lost about thirty feet of ground—an hour or two of climbing—and for a while was too shaken to move. She courted the notion of climbing back down to the shore and quitting. Or just letting go. She looked down longingly through the trees to the glassy river, that river now reflecting the blue of the sky.
Rivers. She had come so far along rivers. And so often she had looked deep into them, seeing permanent peace under their waters. It would be over in moments, and surely would not hurt much—not as much as to continue living.
But then she thought of Will, waiting for her to come home; she thought again of sitting on a stoop in the sunlight with people of her own kind, just folks talking.
And with a sob she started climbing again.
This time she rested every five feet or so and concentrated on the next five and did not let her mind slip away to yearning or daydreaming.
It was midday when she hauled herself the last few inches up the slope and onto a saddle of earth that ran like a bridge between two pinnacles. She lay heaving for breath with her fingers entwined in the prickly dry foliage of a cedar shrub to keep from falling.
I made it, she thought. I made it to the top o’ this devil cliff. Her nose leaked onto the ground and coughing wracked her body. After a while she opened her eyes and looked down and she was looking down onto treetops with blue-shadowed snow under them, and the river going under. Now, she thought. Now I can go across the top of this devil cliff and down the other side.
She looked over the saddle of ground and her heart sank. She was not at the top of the cliff.
The pinnacles she had reached were separated from the rest of the cliff by a deep, eroded chasm.
And the pinnacles she had reached were not the tallest ones of the cliff; they had weathered far down. She was a little more than a hundred feet above the river.
The other palisades stood nearly two hundred feet higher.
She would have to go over the saddle and down into the chasm and then up through another eroded crevice to get to the top of that higher rampart.
“O God I know thee now as a one for mean tricks,” she whispered through clenched teeth and tears.
She stayed there for a few minutes feeling the weak sun and trying to believe it was strengthening her. Then she started down the other side.
Going down into the chasm was more frightening than climbing up. She could not see where she was going. Her toes, bleeding, brittle as ice, groped for projections that might support her weight. The only way to know a projection would not support her was to feel it crumble underfoot and hear it rattle and crash down below, leaving her to hang by her hands until her foot could find another surface to test. And the ones that were strong enough to hold her were icy. Countless terrifying times a hand or a foot would slip off and she would be hanging by a single pain-wracked hand, trying by the sheer friction of skin against hillside to keep from losing her purchase and slithering down the steep chute toward the river.
Her face and the skin on the front of her body were scraped and bleeding, splinters and dirt-grains embedded in the wounds, when she reached the bottom of the chasm and started climbing up the eroded gap between two of the taller stone columns.
She had seen a chimney sweep go up the dark hearth-flue of her parents’ house in Philadelphia, when she was a little girl, and she had had nightmares about it for years afterward: of human legs disappearing up a dark stone shaft. And now this was terribly like a chimney, a dark passage up through stained and crumbly stone to a mouth of light at the top. She braced her arms and elbows out against the sides and strained toward that distant top. There was only the noise of her harsh breathing, and, now and then, coughing spasms and the sifting and dribbling of dislodged dirt and rock down through the passage.
After about thirty feet, the passage widened, and with a deep sigh of relief she found herself above the oppressive tunnel; now it was more like a steep trench between the two pillars, whose tops were still more than a hundred feet above.
She had to rest here. Her arms were trembling uncontrollably from tension and fatigue, and all her innards were queasy and quivering. The bits of moss and bark and buds she had eaten the day before—was it a mere day? she wondered—had been digested long since, and any nutrition from them had been burned away by a night of shivering naked in the snow, and she was as empty as if she had not had a bite for a month. Her body was still consuming its own fiber and there was little left. And there was nothing here on this crag she could even put in her mouth and pretend was food. There was not even any moss on the rocks.
She clung to the stony wall of the trench with her feet on a jutting slab of rock and looked down past her bloody, mangled toes through the crevice, then out and down onto the tops of the pillars she had surmounted earlier, and then up at the anvil-shaped tops of the columns above.
There was blood oozing and drying on the pads of her fingers. She put one finger at a time into her mouth and sucked to ease the throbbing and stinging, and she salivated as she tasted her own blood and she wondered if it could nourish her. Nay, it’s prob’ly thin as sassafras tea, she thought.
Then she was thinking of sassafras tea, and remembering how she and her mother would go up to the sassafras clump above the settlement with the little boys after the spring thaw had softened the ground, and pull and grub up the aromatic roots—ague tree, her mother called it— and shave them into the tea kettle to boil for a spring tonic to thin winter blood, and flavor it with maple or cane syrup … O she could smell it now, the steam off it …
Oh! Hold, now! No more o’ that barmy-headness or y’ll fall off the mountain …
Go now, she thought.
She looked at a rock lip just above her head. Then she looked at her right hand, and willed it to reach up and grip the rock. Then she looked up at a little crack in the pillar at her left side, then looked at her left hand and willed it to stretch up and take hold. She hauled herself up half a yard with trembling arms and dug in her toes and looked above for another handhold, and forced herself to reach up and get it. Then another. Then she had to rest again, and then she had to force herself again to continue.
She went on, three or four feet with each renewal of effort, for two hours that seemed like a lifetime. The sun had moved across and now was behind the pillar at her left and there was no more of its feeble warmth. She inched upward through a chute of frozen dirt and rock between gray monoliths flecked with snow in blue shadow.
The pain was good for her now. It had become so severe and total that it would not allow her to drift off in woolgathering. She could not daydream now, nor think of anything but bloody fingers and feet and sharp fragments of stone, of ice against skin, of the shock of cold inhalations against her bad teeth, of the fetid smell of her breath and the sores in her mouth, of the sounds of rock shards clicking and rustling down behind her, of the brilliant jabs of pain in her bone sockets, of the spells of white dizziness that would sweep like blizzards through her head. The whole world was this steep and flinty gouge in a cliffside and the salvo of agonies she was expending against it. She was more intimate with this jagged square yard of earth and stone within reach of her tortured senses than she had ever been with Will; this climbing was a process as immediate and personal and critical as giving birth. It was like giving birth: If she could survive it there would be life beyond this cliff; if she could not, there would be nothing.
At each pause for rest she would look down at the treetops and the river below them, and each time she looked down, the more enchanting she would find that world below. She seemed to belong to the riverbed. It was famili
ar; she had been down there looking up for so long that it seemed terrible and wrong to be up here looking down. She would look down almost with longing. All one would have to do, she thought, without thinking it in words, would be to let go—open these cramped and bloody hands—and fall away to eternal rest.
For a long time she looked up at her hands and played with the notion. At last she smiled a little smile and willed them to loosen their grip.
But they would not do it.
It was deep in the afternoon when she ran out of cliff. She clutched at the trunk of a small cedar and drew herself up onto a level table of stone and dirt and snow and realized that she was now on the summit.
There was a forest here on top of the cliff. There were the tables of snow-covered rock that were the tops of the stone pinnacles.
She had no spirit left to rejoice. But in her mind she knew she had done it. She lay with her face against the frozen dirt and had her say with God.
Lord, I’ll thank’ee never to give me another day like this if I grow to be eighty.
No one deserves a day like this.
This is the most terrible day I’ve had in a hell of terrible days and I’m no’ grateful for it.
Now give me the strength to make my way across and down this devil’s scarp. Do that and then maybe I can make peace with’ee.
She was too weak and shaky to walk. She went on all fours or crawled along the brink. There were places where erosion had cut far back into the summit, and she had to detour around these crumbling clefts. She stopped at one place and leaned against a tree and looked out at a narrow precipice that was covered with leafless scrub and she became certain that this was the one on which they had spent that fearful night under the eye of a Shawnee sentry. Aye, there was the very rock he’d sat on with his musket across his knees …
She really had not intended to crawl out on that eagle’s nest of a place now; it was too near the edge; it was out of her way.