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“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. Joh
“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. Joh
The girl’s resistance subsided and her body grew quiet. Her dark hair fa
Joh
“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 Joh
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 Joh
Staring at the swirls and folds of the current, they rested for a few breaths. Richard caught Joh
***
Sunday, May 8, 1831
Greya
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. Greya
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 “Joh
Greya
Greya
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,