Frontier's Edge

Prompt: Cut Throat | Word Count: 750 words Exactly | Genre: Historical Fiction 
Due 4/24

Frontier’s edge by Peggy Rockey
 
Mary Frary can see her breath, ghost-like exhalations that hover in the frosty air. It gives her something to focus on, something normal and sane to counter the unspeakable carnage that has come to her village. She pulls her elbows close to her chest, rubbing hands against goose-fleshed arms, generating brittle warmth against the biting, bone chilling wind.
 
She's dressed only in a long woolen gown, linen shift, and petticoats, sorely wishes for cape and hood. Mary is a woman to count her blessings, though, even in the direst of circumstances, and she thanks God her captors allowed her time to dress at all, before forcing her from her home into the middle of this freezing February dawn.
 
Inhuman cries of attacking Indians ululate across the town. Loud, rapid gun fire breaks out, along with incomprehensible commands shouted in French. A few of the homes at the north end of town have been set afire. The awful stench of burning flesh carries in the wind. Mary is too far away to hear screaming, and can only pray these neighbors were dead before flames consumed them.
 
The nightmare has come again. Indian’s are raiding Deerfield. The first time had been in 1675, back when she was thirty-three, seven months pregnant with three young children to care for, and an idealistic husband who had thought to settle out here on the edge of the Massachusetts frontier. They had evacuated Deerfield then, but had come back eight years later. Now she’s a sixty-two year old matron, and this is the fourth time she’s relived this nightmare.
 
She wants to be furious with her husband. To rant and rail at him for insisting on returning to this God forsaken place; where six year old Johnny was killed in the raid of ’75, their home and all their belongings burnt to the ground. Where son in law, Hezekiah, was struck down in the raid of ’90; their daughter, Hitte, in ’98.
 
But Mary finds it impossible to be angry at the man when she’s just seen his head split apart by a tomahawk. The same Indian ordered her to dress, allowed her to don shoes, while Mary tried to convince her granddaughter to cooperate as well.
 
Mercy would not be consoled into cooperation, though, and the Indian cut her throat in a single, savage motion. Scalped her in the next. Mercy’s long, thick braid dangles on a belt at his waist. Her blood is spattered on Mary’s gown and shoes.
 
Bile tingles the back of her throat, her chest is tight with the denied need to scream.
 
Mary is prodded mercilessly towards a large group of people, neighbors and townsfolk, all as stunned as she, and shocked into obedience. French soldiers in red and blue uniforms herd them towards the river.
 
The sun crests the horizon as they pass the cemetery. How the sun can shine when her world has plunged into such deep darkness, she can’t fathom. The glare is bright. Her pain brighter. She’s blinded by tears that fall in silent rivulets down her cheeks. Who will bury Samson? God, how will she live without him? Forty-four years they’ve been married. She loves him more than life itself. Even when he’d brought her out here to the frontier’s edge, where life is hard and loss is great, still they’d had each other and who needed more than that? He had lit up her world as the sun now lit up these snow-covered headstones.
 
Grief strikes her like a blow and she stumbles and falls. Mary almost welcomes the pain when she is grabbed from behind, pulled to her feet by her braid. She expects to be killed, like Mercy; instead she is pushed and prodded with the rest of the captives, guarded by numerous war-painted Indians and a full contingent of French soldiers.
 
A murmuring buzz teases Mary’s ears, sounds of crying, of whispered prayers and muted curses, of shuffling footsteps on frozen dirt and then on frozen ice as they cross the river. She pieces together the whispers enough to understand they have begun a long, forced march through the wilderness to Montreal, Canada.
 
She closes her eyes to the atrocities that continue around her, thinking instead of her two remaining children and her grandchildren, thankful they moved away from Deerfield in ’99, to be spared this violence. Mary Frary focuses on the ghost-like exhalations of her breath, suddenly bone weary and heartsick. She dearly prays she does not survive this trek.