Free Follow the River by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

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 shecould 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 happeningto 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