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Jenny Jump

a true story by

Richard Broderick

© 2012 by Kraken Press

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Stanhope, New Jersey, 1747

The best raspberries were to be found along the sun-dappled path that led back from the falls overlooking the farmstead. Her mother had told her not to up there, at least not alone. “It isn’t safe,” she’d say as she sat at the spinning wheel, Jenny removing new balls of yarn from the spindle. “If something happened to you, your father and I would have no way of knowing.” Then her mother would frown in a peculiar way and look toward the little window on the south side of the cabin. She’d borne four children – two boys, and two girls. Jenny was the only one still alive.

“Yes mother,” Jenny would respond, nodding.. Just as quickly, she’d forget the warnings. She was 15 – old enough to be married herself, though none of the young men around here interested her in the least – and felt safe

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and secure in her little corner of the world. She knew her mother’s chief concern was about the natives, but in Jenny’s experience, these people were quite harmless, even benign. Certainly, the Indians who came into the village to trade corn and beans for dry goods and other supplies posed no threat. Slender, often sickly looking, they mostly kept to themselves. She’d taught herself a few words in their tongue and, in moments of high spirits, would greet them in it, an act that surprised and greatly pleased them, setting off an excited exchange of what appeared to be near wonderment. Yes, there had been much talk lately of unrest among the tribes further west in the mountains beyond the big river, talk about war parties and killings of settlers at remote farmsteads, but as far as she was concerned, these were nothing but rumors retailed by the village’s always busy core of gossipmongers. She paid little heed.

The summer had been hot and wet, with heavy rains all May and June, followed by dry but sticky conditions. By

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now, the raspberries would be ripe and more than ripe for picking and she was mindful of the need to get to them before they were all eaten by the birds or dropped of their own weight and rotted on the ground.

That morning, she rose even earlier than usual, the eastern sky just turning pink. In the loft above the main room, she could hear her parents beginning to stir as she slipped out the door, two large tin buckets in hand. She was barefoot as on most warm days and wore her work dress and a cotton scarf that she could later use to cover her neck and head when mosquitoes began to worry her.

The climb up the steep slope of the bluff left her a little breathless – she was still not quite awake – her progress accompanied by the roar of the nearby falls; by autumn they would be reduced to little more than a trickle, but now the water surged mightily, the white currents tumbling over the edge of a lip in the limestone cliff and plummeting more than 150 feet into the pool below. As she walked, Jenny imagined the feel of the slippery rocks that lay

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around the edges of that pool, of the shock when her body first entered the water, of the deep contentment that would follow once she got used to the frigid temperature and she could rest chest deep in her underclothes and look up at the clouds floating past. Later today, she’d make a point of slipping away to refresh herself in those cold waters.

Once she reached the top of the bluff it took only a few minutes to come upon the first rakes, hanging low over the path under a burden of bright purple-red fruit. She almost filled one entire bucket with the berries from just this first patch before moving further along the path, stopping at the patches of raspberries that grew smaller and smaller the deeper the path penetrated the primeval forest. The silence up here was trancelike and she went about her task full of love for the green hush of her surroundings, almost oblivious to the mosquitoes beginning to swarm around her.

It was when the second bucket was nearly full and she was beginning to think about the walk back home when

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she heard something that made her pause and tilt an ear. Whatever it had been was gone now and she shook her head and went back to picking berries. But there it was again, the unmistakable noise of some large creature or creatures moving through the forest’s light undergrowth.

With a start, she saw them: three young men standing in the shadows and gazing at her almost quizzically from a small opening in the brush on the far side of the path. They did not resemble the natives who came to the village. They were darker, taller, lean but muscular, their heads cropped to the scalp on either side of their skulls and the way they were watching her, attentively, without looking away or with any sign of greeting, was a far cry from the diffident manner of any of the Indians she’d previously encountered. Along their cheekbones and the cleft of their chins they wore something that looked like streaks of colored clay and as she continued to study them she saw that they were carrying polished curved lengths of wood to which were strapped stones about the size of a big man’s

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fists: war clubs.

The moment the men began to move toward her, she hurled one of the berry-laden buckets at them and began to run back down the path, glancing over her shoulder just long enough to see one of the men stumble over the bucket but then instantly regain his balance and resume the chase, his mouth drawn back in a grimace, his eyes glinting with rage. She ran on, as fast as she could, trying to muster all of her strength to overcome the weakness in her knees, the heaviness overcoming her limbs. Ahead, only fifty rods or a little more, lay her life, lay everything she knew – her parents, the farm, the pool at the bottom of the falls, the lush valley in which the farm lay, the smoky haze of the long ridgeline to the west, her sheep, her cow, her home, safety. Everything, everything and if only she could reach the edge of the bluffs before her captors succeeded in catching her…!

She pictured now the view from the top of those bluffs, how small the cabin would look, how even smaller her

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parents would appear so far below. Behind her feet pounded frantically along the bare dirt of the path. She heard her own panting, the little gasps of panic she produced every few seconds. The men had now drawn so close that she knew that if she were to turn and swing the remaining bucket, she would hit one of her pursuers, which is what she did, catching a warrior square on the cheekbone, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise, his mouth flying open in a heavy grunt as he fell to the side. Before turning back, she glimpsed his two companions leaping to avoid their stricken friend, who now held his hand up to the blood gushing from his cheek – how different that red was from the color of raspberries, how shockingly bright, like some liquid form of fire, compared to the berries’ dull sheen. And how strange it seemed to her that not one of them, herself included, was making any sound other than the staccato rhythm of their feet on the path, their heavy breathing. No words, no shouting, not even a scream of fear or anger.

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She felt hard fingers digging into her back just below her right shoulder and she yanked her arm around, the man who almost had her in his grasp ducking just in time to avoid the bucket that swung above his head, a raw strip of her dress clutched in his hand. It wasn’t far now. A few dozen more yards, the bluff, the long slide down its slope to home and safety.

But what was this? Up ahead was someone else -- another Indian! Identical in every way to the two still chasing her he was standing in the middle of the path, knees bent slightly, his war club half-raised in anticipation. At last she broke her silence, shrieking a guttural cry of shock and anger as she veered off the path and headed for home at a slight angle that would bring her into the open at some unknown point along the bluff.

“Please, God! Please, God! Please, God!” she began to pant with every step, the man who’d cut her off now racing toward her from the side, the other men still closing in from behind. This new Indian was now close enough to

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grab her but as if by some miracle – as if in answer to her pleas – in his eagerness to gather in his prey, to crush her skull with his club, he failed to see the narrow depression in the soil that lay just on the far side of the tree root he was jumping over. Coming down, he twisted his knee. He cried out, crumpling face-first into a large pool of itchweed.

As she kept running, distantly aware of the sharp pains cutting into her feet, the light before her was beginning to change, the forest floor growing brighter, patches of blue visible in the distance, a steady roar of water getting louder and louder. She was almost there! Almost home!

When she emerged from the forest, there was nothing she could do. Before her was the sharp cliff face and beyond it nothing but blue, nothing but a sheer dizzying drop to the valley floor. To her left thick coils of dark water plunged toward the edge of the falls. Behind her, the two men were still pursuing her, intent on capturing or killing her – she could not tell which would be worse.

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But then, as if by some unspoken agreement, all three of them – Jenny, the two uninjured Indians -- stopped running, paused and gasped for breath, as though trying to figure out what was going to happen next. She turned and looked at them. They stared back at her with expressions dulled by fatigue, their lithe frames gleaming with sweat, their war clubs dangling from their hands, too heavy to lift. As she moved toward the edge of precipice, the men made no attempt to follow her. For several moments she gazed down into the valley, at the little farm, her sheep grazing on the far slope, a few items of bedclothes hanging on the line her mother had put up between the cabin and the tall stump of an ash tree that had been killed three years ago by lightning.

She looked once more at the men, who seemed to be getting smaller with each passing second, winded, wounded with exhaustion, their war paint smeared and dripping. Who were these two Indians, she wondered, what were they? Nothing more than a couple of God’s children,

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wayward souls just like her, driven even as she was by instinct, by fear, by craving to enter into the ways of sinfulness.

It was a flash of revelation, of a sudden, powerful visitation by the Spirit, such as she’d heard about from the circuit preachers who came from time to time to the little building that served as the village church. Only in this case, she was not trembling, not writhing on the ground and calling out gibberish. She was calm. She knew now that she could not save herself. No, that was not possible. Whatever she was, whoever she might have been, that was over. She had lived out her allotted time, the moment of her death known until this very moment only to God, now revealed to her, a precious gift withheld from so many others. And what could she do in the little space still left to her? Then it was clear. She could perhaps still save these men, redeem them in advance from whatever damnable act they had been planning to commit. After all, was this not just one more shameful incident in the long train of shameful

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incidents that had marked the progress of mankind since the Fall: since that moment when Eve, probably no older than Jenny herself, reached up to grasp the forbidden fruit, the snake whispering encouragement in her ear.

An uncanny peace overcame her now, quickly followed by an overwhelming sense of pity. Forgive them, Father! It was just a few steps to the edge of the cliff. One of the men called out to her, something that sounded like an urgent warning of a kind you might offer to a friend in harm’s way. She lowered the remaining bucket of the now-mashed berries to the bare limestone shelf. A kind of offering. A kind of blood sacrifice.

Turning, she stood beside the falls. She pictured her mother’s face when she would happen upon the crumpled body, pictured her father’s stoical handling of the aftermath. She wished she could see them once more, tell them how much she loved and respected them, beg the forgiveness she knew would be forthcoming.

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And now, she opened her arms and reached out to embrace everything that lay before her, then stepped quickly, resolutely, into the bright rush of empty summer air.

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