“I told you she was an animal,” he said. “Fucking injun blood.”
“Well she better ask her medicine man to turn her into a fish,” Richard said as they reached the water. Johnny gestured toward the stop-gate near the tail end of the pond.
“Let’s go behind it. Too open here.”
Past the stop-gate, Richard thrust her down at the water’s edge, then bent her right arm behind her back and forced her to her knees. “Time to join your ancestors, you pagan bitch!” he said as the blood slowed and grew viscous on his face. The girl inhaled sharply as he thrust her head into placid water discolored by decaying leaves. Her body was quiet for a moment, then lunged violently upward. Johnny placed his hand on top of Richard’s and together they held her head below the surface. Still clutching its weapon, her left hand flailed for another target.
The girl’s resistance subsided and her body grew quiet. Her dark hair fanned out across the water, like an aura surrounding the oppressive hands. She pulled her free arm into the pond and groped for leverage in the muck at the bottom. Then her legs and arms erupted in another spasm as she fought to push upward and back. The reddened hands and arms held fast. She tried to dive forward but was tethered by Richard’s grip on her bent arm. Her third and final lunge was a fading echo of its predecessors, and after that the girl was still.
Johnny pried the object from her fingers and laughed. “Some kind of stone leaf. Maybe a necklace…with an idiot symbol. She’s a fucking native, like we thought.” He tossed the sandstone pendant onto the bank. Richard pushed her head under the surface in disgust, then brought his hand gingerly to his face to gauge the damage while Johnny knelt back from the water and watched.
“I don’t think she caught you square in the eye.”
The girl’s head bobbed to the surface and her hair undulated on the water like sea moss.
“Maybe not,” Richard said, “but that whore got a piece of me. My eye’s too swelled up to open.” He gently washed drying blood from his face with wet fingers. “Let’s get rid of her,” he said, spitting savagely at the dirt.
The men stood up and Johnny pulled her limp body from the water and laid it on the bank. Her dark eyes were fixed at infinity and a stream of water trickled from the side of her mouth. Johnny bent to grab her ankles. One of her heels had twisted out of its shoe, and the shoe hung from her toes. Richard gripped her wrists and turned toward the thin tail of the pond.
They carried her along the drainage, continuing straight through sparse trees over flat terrain when the outlet stream swung away to the left. Accustomed to lifting heavy stones, they bore her body easily as they wove through a cordon of boulders and approached large rocks that rose to a rounded ridge. Beyond the ridge crest was blue sky.
Dragging the girl’s upper body with one arm, Richard climbed onto the base of the ridge and waited for Johnny to scramble up alongside him. The girl’s loose shoe fell and rolled into a crack in the rock. The men reclaimed their grips, sidestepped to the crest, and looked down at the river below. It ran swiftly and impassively between the cliffs of the gorge.
Staring at the swirls and folds of the current, they rested for a few breaths. Richard caught Johnny’s eye and Johnny nodded. Holding the body by its wrists and ankles, they swung it like a pendulum toward the river. On the second swing they let go at the height of the forward arc, and the girl’s body soared out into the air above the river. Her arms flew free from her sides and hung in the air like those of a dancer as her body carved a graceful arc toward the water. From the cliff above, they saw an ephemeral flash of bright water, its sound lost in the rush of the current. The body knifed into colder water beyond the reach of the sun, then rose slowly toward the surface as the river carried it away.
***
Sunday, May 8, 1831
Greyanne Alstyne pressed the sandstone pendant against the smooth stick of driftwood she held in her palm. She carefully wrapped the cord around the leaf-shaped pendant and the stick, knotting the end to hold the two together. Looking down at her husband Parry, she saw tears streaking his sunburned cheeks as he worked, and she brushed a tear away from her own eye. Sitting on a broken log he had set across the tail of the pond, he leaned forward, tools in hand, toward the stone wall.
On a waist-high block on the southern face of the stop-gate, Grace’s symbol was taking shape. He had already inscribed the curve of the G and was tapping out the vertical arm. It was a mark that Grace had designed and drawn herself, to surprise her father when she was only seven. Greyanne watched as Parry gently set his chisel to the stone and tapped rhythmically with his hammer. The prominent veins on his large hands were stained with sweat and dust. She curled her fingers around the cord that lashed the driftwood to the pendant and turned away.
Searching for Grace, they had found her necklace yesterday in the rough grass near the tail of the pond. It was only a few feet from the stop-gate that had been built last month by the vermin who killed her, with stones that Parry and the other masons had cut. Grace had met a friend at Great Falls on Tuesday morning, and a few people at the Tavern had seen her set out downstream on the towpath early that afternoon. She never made it home to Cabin John. That was five days ago now.
On Friday night one of the masons had heard the English laborer Richard Emory, whiskeyed up with his work crew, brag about how he and “Johnny” had “had our way with that little half-breed Alstyne whore out on Bear Island and then fed her to the fishes.” The mason had said that Johnny was another laborer from Liverpool – John Garrett. And that Emory’s eye was hemorrhaged and blackened.
Greyanne and Parry, and others who offered to help, had scoured Bear Island in search of Grace, hoping the boast was only half truthful, clinging to the prospect she might still be alive. They hadn’t found their only child, dead or alive, on the island or along the banks downstream. But they had found Grace’s bloodstained necklace by the stop-gate. And then worse, one of her shoes lying upside-down in a crevice on the ridge, only a few paces from the cliffs that lined the gorge.
Greyanne walked toward those cliffs now. She clenched her fingers in anger around the driftwood, knowing that even if Grace’s body were found, her killers would go free. At the base of the ridge, she fixed her long black hair into a loose knot, then climbed up onto the rocks. She switch-backed toward the rounded crest and continued a few steps to the precipice.
Two hundred feet away across the gorge, the Virginia cliffs were lit by the warm morning sun. Below her the broad coursing river reflected the soft blue sky of mid-spring. She turned toward the upper gorge and the indomitable falls beyond it, as her ancestors had while fishing this river five hundred years ago. A light breeze stirred as she spoke to her lost daughter in a clear voice and a forgotten tongue.
“Grace, those men have taken your life and cast your body into the water.
They have stolen the lives of your children and ended your line forever.
Now for ten generations, your spirit will rise with the river
to drown a son of Garrett or Emory.”
She held the driftwood with its sandstone rider aloft and flung it with all her strength into the sky above the river. It arched through the sunlit void between the cliffs and dropped into the water with a silent splash. A great blue heron on the rocks below unfolded its wings and took flight. She watched Grace’s talisman bob away in the current, then softly finished her invocation.
“In their dreams they will see and fear you,
but they will not recognize you in their waking lives,
until the floodwaters come to carry them away.”
The driftwood disappeared in the march of water and time.