WHEN PEMBERTON RETURNED TO THE NORTH Carolina mountains after three months in Boston settling his father's estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a young woman pregnant with Pemberton's child. She was accompanied by her father, who carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton's heart.
The conductor shouted "Waynesville" as the train shuddered to a halt. Pemberton looked out the window and saw his partners on the platform, both dressed in suits to meet his bride of two days, an unexpected bonus from his time in Boston. Buchanan, ever the dandy, had waxed his mustache and oiled his hair. His polished bluchers gleamed, the white cotton dress shirt fresh-pressed. Wilkie wore a gray fedora, as he often did to protect his bald pate from the sun. A Princeton Phi Beta Kappa key glinted on the older man's watch fob, a blue silk handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket.
Pemberton opened the gold shell of his watch and found the train on time to the exact minute. He turned to his bride, who'd been napping. Serena's dreams had been especially troubling last night. Twice he'd been waked by her thrashing, her fierce latching onto him until she'd fallen back asleep. He kissed her lightly on the lips and she awoke.
"Not the best place for a honeymoon."
"It suits us well enough," Serena said, leaning into his shoulder. "We're here together, which is all that matters."
Pemberton inhaled the bright aroma of Tre Jur talcum and remembered how he'd not just smelled but tasted its vividness on her skin earlier that morning. A porter strolled up the aisle, whistling a song Pemberton didn't recognize. His gaze returned to the window.
Next to the ticket booth Harmon and his daughter waited, Harmon slouching against the chestnut board wall. It struck Pemberton that males in these mountains rarely stood upright. Instead, they leaned into some tree or wall whenever possible. If none was available they squatted, buttocks against the backs of their heels. Harmon held a pint jar in his hand, what remained of its contents barely covering the bottom. The daughter sat on the bench, her posture upright to better reveal her condition. Pemberton could not recall her first name. He wasn't surprised to see them or that the girl was with child. His child, Pemberton had learned the night before Pemberton and Serena left Boston. Abe Harmon is down here saying he has business to settle with you, business about his daughter, Buchanan had said when he called. It could be just drunken bluster, but I thought you ought to know.
"Our welcoming party includes some of the locals," Pemberton said to his bride.
"As we were led to expect," Serena said.
She placed her right hand on his wrist for a moment, and Pemberton felt the calluses on her upper palm, the plain gold wedding band she wore in lieu of a diamond. The ring was like his in every detail except width. Pemberton stood and retrieved two grips from the overhead compartment. He handed them to the porter, who stepped back and followed as Pemberton led his bride down the aisle and the steps to the platform. There was a gap of two feet between the steel and wood. Serena did not reach for his hand as she stepped onto the planks.
Buchanan caught Pemberton's eye first, gave him a warning nod toward Harmon and his daughter before acknowledging Serena with a stiff formal bow. Wilkie took off his fedora. At five-nine, Serena stood taller than either man, but Pemberton knew other aspects of Serena's appearance helped foster Buchanan and Wilkie's obvious surprise-pants and boots instead of a dress and cloche hat, sun-bronzed skin that belied Serena's social class, lips and cheeks untinted by rouge, hair blonde and thick but cut short in a bob, distinctly feminine yet also austere.
Serena went up to the older man and held out her hand. Though he was, at seventy, over twice her age, Wilkie stared at Serena like a smitten schoolboy, the fedora pressed against his sternum as if to conceal a heart already captured.
"Wilkie, I assume."
"Yes, yes, I am," Wilkie stammered.
"Serena Pemberton," she said, her hand still extended.
Wilkie fumbled with his hat a moment before freeing his right hand and shaking Serena's.
"And Buchanan," Serena said, turning to the other partner. "Correct?"
"Yes."
Buchanan took her proffered hand and cupped it awkwardly in his.
Serena smiled. "Don't you know how to properly shake hands, Mr. Buchanan?"
Pemberton watched with amusement as Buchanan corrected his grip, quickly withdrew his hand. In the year that Boston Lumber Company had operated in these mountains, Buchanan's wife had come only once, arriving in a pink taffeta gown that was soiled before she'd crossed Waynesville's one street and entered her husband's house. She'd spent one night and left on the morning train. Now Buchanan and his wife met once a month for a weekend in Richmond, as far south as Mrs. Buchanan would travel. Wilkie's wife had never left Boston.
Pemberton's partners appeared incapable of further speech. Their eyes shifted to the leather chaps Serena wore, the beige oxford shirt and black jodhpurs. Serena's proper diction and erect carriage confirmed that she'd attended finishing school in New England, as had their wives. But Serena had been born in Colorado and lived there until sixteen, child of a timber man who'd taught his daughter to shake hands firmly and look men in the eye as well as ride and shoot. She'd come east only after her parents' deaths.
The porter laid the grips on the platform and walked back toward the baggage car that held Serena's Saratoga trunk and Pemberton's smaller steamer trunk.
"I assume Campbell got the Arabian to camp," Pemberton said.
"Yes," Buchanan said, "though it nearly killed young Vaughn. That horse isn't just big but quite spirited, 'cut proud' as they say."
"What news of the camp?" Pemberton asked.
"No serious problems," Buchanan said. "A worker found bobcat tracks on Laurel Creek and thought they were a mountain lion's. A couple of crews refused to go back up there until Galloway checked it out."
"Mountain lions," Serena said, "are they common here?"
"Not at all, Mrs. Pemberton," Wilkie answered reassuringly. "The last one killed in this state was in 1920, I'm glad to say."
"Yet the locals persist in believing one remains," Buchanan said. "There's quite a bit of lore about it, which the workers are all aware of, not only about its great size but its color, which evolves from tawny to jet-black. I'm quite content to have it remain folklore, but your husband desires otherwise. He's hoping the creature is real so he can hunt it."
"That was before his nuptials," Wilkie noted. "Now that Pemberton's a married man I'm sure he'll give up hunting panthers for less dangerous diversions."
"I hope he'll pursue his panther and would be disappointed if he were to do otherwise," Serena said, turning so she addressed Pemberton as much as his partners. "Pemberton's a man unafraid of challenges, which is why I married him."
Serena paused, a slight smile creasing her face.
"And why he married me."
The porter set the second trunk on the platform. Pemberton gave the man a quarter and dismissed him. Serena looked over at the father and daughter, who now sat on the bench together, watchful and silent as actors awaiting their cues.
"I don't know you," Serena said.
The daughter continued to stare sullenly at Serena. It was the father who spoke, his voice slurred.
"My business ain't with you. It's with him standing there beside you."
"His business is mine," Serena said, "just as mine is his."
Harmon nodded at his daughter's belly, then turned back to Serena.
"Not this business. It was done before you got here."
"You're implying she's carrying my husband's child."
"I ain't implying nothing," Harmon said.
"You're a lucky man then," Serena said to Harmon. "You'll not find a better sire to breed her with. The size of her belly attests to that."
Serena turned her gaze and words to the daughter.
"But that's the only one you'll have of his. I'm here now. Any other children he has will be with me."
Harmon pushed himself fully upright, and Pemberton glimpsed the white-pearl handle of a bowie knife before the coat settled over it. He wondered how a man like Harmon could possess such a fine weapon. Perhaps booty in a poker game or an heirloom passed down from a more prosperous ancestor. The depot master's face appeared behind the glass partition, lingered a moment, and vanished. A group of gangly mountaineers, all Boston Lumber employees, watched expressionless from an adjacent livestock barn.
Among them was an overseer named Campbell, whose many duties included serving as a liaison between the workers and owners. Campbell always wore gray chambray shirts and corduroy pants at camp, but this afternoon he wore overalls same as the other men. It's Sunday, Pemberton realized, and felt momentarily disoriented. He couldn't recall the last time he'd glanced at a calendar. In Boston with Serena, time had seemed caught within the sweeping circle of watch and clock hands-passing hours and minutes unable to break free to become passing days. But the days and months had passed, as the Harmon girl's swelling belly made clear.
Harmon's large freckled hands grasped the bench edge, and he leaned slightly forward. His blue eyes glared at Pemberton.
"Let's go home, Daddy," Harmon's daughter said, and placed her hand on his.
He swatted the hand away as if a bothersome fly and stood up, wavered a moment.
"God damn the both of you," Harmon said, taking a step toward the Pembertons.
He opened the frock coat and freed the bowie knife from its leather sheath. The blade caught the late afternoon sun, and for that brief moment it appeared Harmon held a glistening flame in his hand. Pemberton looked at Harmon's daughter, her hands covering her stomach as if to shield the unborn child from what was occurring.
"Take your father home," Pemberton told her.
"Daddy, please," the daughter said.
"Go get Sheriff McDowell," Buchanan yelled at the men watching from the livestock barn.
A crew foreman named Snipes did as commanded, walking rapidly not toward the courthouse but to the boarding house where the sheriff resided. The other men stayed where they were. Buchanan moved to step between the two men, but Harmon waved him away with the knife.
"We're settling this now," Harmon shouted.
"He's right," Serena said. "Get your knife and settle it now, Pemberton."
Harmon stepped forward, wavering slightly as he narrowed the distance between them.
"You best listen to her," Harmon said, taking another step forward, "because one of us is leaving here with his toes pointed up."
Pemberton leaned and unclasped his calfskin grip, grabbled among its contents for the wedding present Serena had given him. He slipped the hunting knife from its sheath, settled the elk-bone handle deeper in his palm, its roughness all the better for clasping. For a lingering moment, Pemberton allowed himself to appreciate the feel of a weapon well made, the knife's balance and solidity, its blade, hilt and handle precisely calibrated as the épées he'd fenced with at Harvard. He took off his coat and laid it across the grip.
Harmon took another step forward, and they were less than a yard apart. He kept the knife held high and pointed toward the sky, and Pemberton knew that Harmon, drunk or sober, had done little fighting with a blade. Harmon slashed the air between them. The man's tobacco-yellowed teeth were clenched, the veins in his neck taut as guy wires. Pemberton kept his knife low and close to his side. He smelled the moonshine on Harmon's breath, a harsh greasy odor, like coal-oil.
Harmon lunged forward and Pemberton raised his left arm. The bowie knife swept the air but its arc stopped when Harmon's forearm hit Pemberton's. Harmon jerked down and the bowie knife raked across Pemberton's flesh. Pemberton took one final step, the hunting knife's blade flat as he slipped it inside Harmon's coat and plunged the steel through shirt cloth and into the soft flesh above the older man's right hip bone. He grabbed Harmon's shoulder with his free hand for leverage and quickly opened a thin smile across the man's stomach. A cedarwood button popped free from Harmon's soiled white shirt, hit the plank floor, spun a moment, and settled. Then a soft sucking sound as Pemberton withdrew the blade. For a few moments there was no blood.
Harmon's bowie knife fell clattering onto the platform. Like a man attempting to rescind the steps that had led to this outcome, the highlander placed both hands to his stomach and slowly walked backward, then sagged onto the bench. He lifted his hands to assess the damage, and his intestines spilled onto his lap in loose gray ropes. Harmon studied the inner workings of his body as if for some further verification of his fate. He raised his head one last time and leaned it back against the depot's boards. Pemberton looked away as Harmon's blue eyes dimmed.
Serena stood beside him now.
"Your arm," she said.
Pemberton saw that his poplin shirt was slashed below the elbow, the blue cloth darkened by blood. Serena unclasped a silver cuff link and rolled up the shirtsleeve, examined the cut across his forearm.
"It won't need stitches," she said, "just iodine and a dressing."
Pemberton nodded. Adrenaline surged through him and when Buchanan's concerned face loomed closer, his partner's features-the clipped black hedge of moustache between the pointed narrow nose and small mouth, the round pale-green eyes that always looked slightly surprised-seemed at once both vivid and remote. Pemberton took deep measured breaths, wanting to compose himself before speaking to anyone.
Serena picked up the bowie knife and carried it to Harmon's daughter, who leaned over her father, hands cradling the blank face close to hers as if something might yet be conveyed to him. Tears flowed down the young woman's cheeks, but she made no sound.
"Here," Serena said, holding the knife by the blade. "By all rights it belongs to my husband. It's a fine knife, and you can get a good price for it if you demand one. And I would," she added. "Sell it, I mean. That money will help when the child is born. It's all you'll ever get from my husband and me."
Harmon's daughter stared at Serena now, but she did not raise a hand to take the knife. Serena set the bowie knife on the bench and walked across the platform to stand beside Pemberton. Except for Campbell, who was walking toward the platform, the men leaning against the livestock barn's railing had not moved. Pemberton was glad they were there, because at least some good might come from what had happened. The workers already understood Pemberton was as physically strong as any of them, had learned that last spring when they'd put down the train tracks. Now they knew he could kill a man, had seen it with their own eyes. They'd respect him, and Serena, even more. He turned and met Serena's gray eyes.
"Let's go to the camp," Pemberton said.
He placed his hand on Serena's elbow, turning her toward the steps Campbell had just ascended. Campbell's long angular face was typically enigmatic, and he altered his path so as not to walk directly by the Pembertons-done so casually someone watching would assume it wasn't deliberate.
Pemberton and Serena stepped off the platform and followed the track to where Wilkie and Buchanan waited. Cinders crunched under their feet, made gray wisps like snuffed matches. Pemberton gave a backward glance and saw Campbell leaning over Harmon's daughter, his hand on her shoulder as he spoke to her. Sheriff McDowell, dressed in his Sunday finery, stood beside the bench as well. He and Campbell helped the girl to her feet and led her into the depot.
"Is my Packard here?" Pemberton asked Buchanan.
Buchanan nodded and Pemberton addressed the baggage boy, who was still on the platform.
"Get the grips and put them in the back seat, then tie the smaller trunk onto the rack. The train can bring the bigger one later."
"Don't you think you'd better speak to the sheriff?" Buchanan asked after he handed Pemberton the Packard's key.
"Why should I explain anything to that son-of-a-bitch?" Pemberton said. "You saw what happened."
He and Serena were getting in the Packard when McDowell walked up briskly behind them. When he turned, Pemberton saw that despite the Sunday finery the sheriff wore his holster. Like so many of the highlanders, the sheriff's age was hard to estimate. Pemberton supposed near fifty, though the sheriff's jet-black hair and taut body befitted a younger man.
"We're going to my office," McDowell said.
"Why?" Pemberton asked. "It was self-defense. A dozen men will verify that."
"I'm charging you with disorderly conduct. That's a ten-dollar fine or a week in jail."
Pemberton pulled out his billfold and handed McDowell two fives.
"We're still going to my office," McDowell said. "You're not leaving Waynesville until you write out a statement attesting you acted in self-defense."
They stood less than a yard apart, neither man stepping back. Pemberton decided a fight wasn't worth it.
"Do you need a statement from me as well?" Serena said.
McDowell looked at Serena as if he hadn't noticed her until now.
"No."
"I would offer you my hand, Sheriff," Serena said, "but from what my husband has told me you probably wouldn't take it."
"He's right," McDowell replied.
"I'll wait for you in the car," Serena told Pemberton.
When Pemberton returned, he got in the Packard and turned the key. He pressed the starter button and released the hand brake, and they began the six-mile drive to the camp. Outside Waynesville, Pemberton slowed as they approached the saw mill's five-acre splash pond, its surface hidden by logs bunched and intertwined like kindling. Pemberton braked and slipped the Packard out of gear but kept the engine running.
"Wilkie wanted the saw mill close to town," Pemberton said. "It wouldn't have been my choice, but it's worked out well enough."
They looked past the splash pond's stalled flotilla of logs awaiting dawn when they'd be untangled and poled onto the log buggy and sawn. Serena gave the mill a cursory look, as well as the small A-frame building Wilkie and Buchanan used as an office. Pemberton pointed to an immense tree rising out of the woods behind the saw mill. An orange growth furred the bark, and the upper branches were withered, unleafed.
"Chestnut blight."
"Good that it takes them years to die completely," Serena said. "That gives us all the time we need, but also a reason to prefer mahogany."
Pemberton let his hand settle on the hard rubber ball topping the gear shift. He put the car into gear and they drove on.
"I'm surprised the roads are paved," Serena said.
"Not many are. This one is, at least for a few miles. The road to Asheville as well. The train would get us to camp quicker, even at fifteen miles an hour, but I can show you our holdings this way."
They were soon out of Waynesville, the land increasingly mountainous, less inhabited, the occasional slant of pasture like green felt woven to a rougher fabric. Almost full summer now, Pemberton realized, the dogwood's white blossoms withered on the ground, the hardwood's branches thickened green. They passed a cabin, in the side yard a woman drawing water from a well. She wore no shoes and the towheaded child beside her wore pants cinched tight by twine.
"These highlanders," Serena said as she looked out the window. "I've read they've been so isolated that their speech harks back to Elizabethan times."
"Buchanan believes so," Pemberton said. "He keeps a journal of such words and phrases."
The land began a steep ascent, and soon there were no more farms. Pressure built in Pemberton's ears and he swallowed. He turned off the blacktop onto a dirt road that curved upward almost a mile before making a final sharp rise. Pemberton stopped the car and they got out. A granite outcrop leaned over the road's right side, water trickling down the rock face. To the left only a long falling away, that and a pale round moon impatient for the night.
Pemberton reached for Serena's hand and they walked to the drop-off's edge. Below, Cove Creek Valley pressed back the mountains, opening a square mile of level land. At the valley's center was the camp, surrounded by a wasteland of stumps and branches. To the left, Half Acre Ridge had been cut bare as well. On the right, the razed lower quarter of Noland Mountain. As it crossed the valley, the railroad track appeared sewn into the lowland like stitches.
"Nine months' work," Pemberton said.
"We'd have done this much in six out west," Serena replied.
"We get four times the amount of rain here. Plus we had to lay down track into the valley."
"That would make a difference," Serena acknowledged. "How far do our holdings go?"
Pemberton pointed north. "The mountain beyond where we're logging now."
"And west."
" Balsam Mountain," Pemberton said, pointing it out as well. "Horse Pen Ridge to the south, and you can see where we quit cutting to the east."
"Thirty-four thousand acres."
"There were seven thousand more east of Waynesville that we've already logged."
"And to the west, Champion Paper owns that?"
"All the way to the Tennessee line," Pemberton said.
"That's the land they're after for the park?"
Pemberton nodded. "And if Champion sells, they'll be coming after our land next."
"But we'll not let them have it," Serena said.
"No, at least not until we're done with it. Harris, our local copper and kaolin magnate, was at the meeting I told you about, and he made clear he's against this national park scheme as much as we are. Not a bad thing to have the wealthiest man in the county on our side."
"Or as a future partner," Serena added.
"You'll like him," Pemberton said. "He's shrewd and he doesn't suffer fools."
Serena touched his shoulder above the wound.
"We need to go and dress your arm."
"A kiss first," Pemberton said, moving their joined hands to the small of Serena's back and pulling her closer.
Serena raised her lips to Pemberton's and pressed them firm against his. Her free hand clutched the back of his head to bring him nearer, a soft exaltation of her breath into his mouth as she unpursed her lips and kissed fiercer, her teeth and tongue touching his. Serena pressed her body fully into his. Incapable of coyness, as always, even the first time they'd met. Pemberton felt again what he'd never known with another woman-a sense of being unshackled into some limitless possibility, limitless though at the same time somehow contained within the two of them.
They got in the Packard and descended into the valley. The road became rockier, the gullies and washouts more pronounced. They drove through a creek clogged with silt, then more woods until the woods were gone and they were driving across the valley floor. There was no road now, just a wide sprawl of mud and dirt. They passed a stable and a shotgun frame building whose front room served as the payroll office, the back room a bar and dining area. To the right were the workers' dining hall and the commissary. They crossed over the railroad track, passing the line of flat cars waiting for morning. A caboose that served as a doctor's office sat next to the track, its rusting wheels sunk into the valley floor.
They passed below a row of three dozen stringhouses set precariously on Bent Knob Ridge, their foundations propped by ragged locust poles. The stringhouses resembled cheap wooden boxcars, not just in size and appearance but also in the way cable connected each in the line to the other. On top of every one was an iron rung. Axes had gouged splintery holes through the wood to serve as windows.
"The workers' housing, I assume," Serena said.
"Yes, as soon as we're finished here we can set them on flat cars and haul them to our new site. The workers don't even have to move their belongings."
"Very efficient." Serena said, nodding as she spoke. "How much is the rent?"
"Eight dollars a month."
"And their pay."
"Two dollars a day right now, but Buchanan wants to raise it to two-ten."
"Why?"
"He claims we'll lose good men to other camps," Pemberton said as he pulled up in front of their house. "I say these government land grabs mean a surplus of workers, especially if Champion sells out."
"What does Wilkie think?"
"Wilkie agrees with me," Pemberton said. "He says the one good thing about this stock market crash is cheaper labor."
"I agree with you and Wilkie," Serena said.
A youth named Joel Vaughn waited on the front steps, beside him a cardboard box, in it meat and bread and cheese, a bottle of red wine. As Pemberton and Serena got out of the Packard, Vaughn stood and doffed his wool golf cap, revealing a thatch of carrot-colored hair. A mind equally bright, Campbell had quickly realized, and trusted Vaughn with responsibilities usually given to much older workers, including, as evidenced by the scraped forearms and purple swelling on his freckled left cheekbone, tussles with a horse as spirited as it was valuable. Vaughn retrieved the grips from the car and followed Pemberton and his bride onto the porch. Pemberton opened the door and nodded for the youth to enter first.
"I'd carry you over the threshold," Pemberton said, "but for the arm."
Serena smiled. "Don't worry, Pemberton. I can manage."
She stepped inside and he followed. Serena examined the light switch a moment as if skeptical it would work. Then she turned it on.
In the front room were two Coxwell chairs set in front of the fireplace, off to the left a small kitchen with its Homestead stove and ice box. A poplar table with four cane-bottom chairs stood beside the front room's one window. Serena nodded and walked down the hall, glanced at the bathroom before entering the back room. She turned on the bedside lamp and sat on the wrought iron bed, tested the mattress's firmness and seemed satisfied. Vaughn appeared at the doorway with the steamer trunk, which had belonged to Pemberton's father.
"Put it in the hall closet," Pemberton said.
Vaughn did as he was told and went out, came back with the food and wine.
"Mr. Buchanan thought you might be needful of something to eat."
"Put it on the table," Pemberton said. "Then go get iodine and gauze from the caboose."
The youth paused, his eyes on Pemberton's blood-soaked sleeve.
"You wanting me to get Doctor Cheney?"
"No," Serena said. "I'll dress it for him."
After Vaughn left, Serena stepped closer to the bedroom window and peered out at the stringhouses.
"Do the workers have electricity?"
"Just in the dining hall."
"It's best that way," Serena said, stepping back into the room's center. "Not just the money saved but for the men. They'll work harder if they live like Spartans."
Pemberton raised an open palm toward the room's bare rough-board walls.
"This is rather Spartan as well."
"Money freed to buy more timber tracts," Serena said. "If we'd wished our wealth spent otherwise we'd have stayed in Boston."
"True enough."
"Who lives next door?"
" Campbell. He's as valuable as any man in this camp. He can book keep, repair anything, and uses a Gunter's chain as well as any of the surveyors."
"And the last house?"
"Doctor Cheney."
"The wag from Wild Hog Gap."
"The only doctor we could get to live out here. Even to get him we had to offer a house and an automobile."
Serena opened the room's chifforobe and looked inside, perused the closet as well.
"And what of my wedding present, Pemberton?"
"In the stable."
"I've never seen a white Arabian."
"It's an impressive horse," Pemberton said.
"I'll take him for a ride first thing tomorrow."
When Vaughn had delivered the iodine and gauze, Serena sat on the bed and unbuttoned Pemberton's shirt, removed the weapon wedged behind his belt. She took the knife from the sheath, examined the dried blood on the blade before placing it on the bedside table. Serena opened the bottle of iodine.
"How does it feel, fighting a man like that? With a knife I mean. Is it like fencing or…more intimate."
Pemberton tried to think of how what he'd felt could be put in words.
"I don't know," he finally said, "except it feels utterly real and utterly unreal at the same time."
Serena gripped his arm harder but her voice softened.
"This will sting," she said, and slowly poured the auburn-colored liquid into the wound. "The cause of your notoriety in Boston, did that knife fight feel the same as the one today?"
"Actually, it was a beer stein in Boston," Pemberton replied. "More of an accident during a bar room brawl."
"The story that I heard involved a knife," Serena said, "and made the victim's demise sound anything but accidental."
As Serena paused to dab iodine leaking from the wound, Pemberton wondered if he detected a slight disappointment in Serena's tone or only imagined it.
"But this one, hardly an accident," Serena noted. "Myself will grip the sword-yea, though I die."
"I'm afraid I don't recognize the quote," Pemberton said. "I'm not the scholar you are."
"No matter. It's a maxim best learned the way you did, not from a book."
As Serena loosed gauze from its wooden spool, Pemberton smiled.
"Who knows?" he said lightly. "In a place this primitive I suspect knife-wielding is not the purview of one sex. You may do battle with some snuff-breathed harridan and learn the same way I have."
"I would do it," Serena said, her voice measured as she spoke, "if for no other reason than to share what you felt today. That's what I want, everything a part of you also a part of me."
Pemberton watched the cloth thicken as Serena wrapped it around his forearm, iodine soaking through the first layers, then blotted by the dressing. He remembered the Back Bay dinner party of a month ago when Mrs. Lowell, the hostess, came up to him. There's a woman here who wishes to be introduced to you, Mr. Pemberton, the matron had said. I should caution you, though. She has frightened off every other bachelor in Boston. Pemberton recalled how he'd assured the matron he was not a man easily frightened, that perhaps the woman in question might need to be cautioned about him as well. Mrs. Lowell had noted the justness of Pemberton's comment, matching his smile as she took his forearm. Let us go meet her then. Just remember you were warned, just as I've warned her.
"There," Serena said when she'd finished. "Three days and it should be healed."
Serena picked up the knife and took it into the kitchen, cleaned the blade with water and a cloth. She dried the knife and returned to the back room.
"I'll take a whetstone to the blade tomorrow," Serena said, setting the knife on the bedside table. "It's a weapon worthy of a man like you, and built to last a lifetime."
"To extend a lifetime as well," Pemberton noted, "as it has so fortuitously shown."
"Perhaps it shall again, so keep it close."
"I'll keep it in the office," Pemberton promised.
Serena sat down in a ladderback chair opposite the bed and pulled off her jodhpurs. She undressed, not looking at what she unfastened and let fall to the floor. All the while her eyes were fixed upon Pemberton. She took off her underclothing and stood before him. The women he'd known before Serena had been shy with their bodies, waiting for a room to darken or sheets to be pulled up, but that wasn't Serena's way.
Except for her eyes and hair, she was not conventionally beautiful, her breasts and hips small and legs long for her torso. Serena's narrow shoulders, thin nose and high cheekbones honed her body to a severe keenness. Her feet were small, and considering all other aspects of her features, oddly delicate, vulnerable looking. Their bodies were well matched, Serena's lithe form fitting his larger frame and more muscular build. Sometimes at night they cleaved so fiercely the bed buckled and leaped beneath them. Pemberton would hear their quick breaths and not know which were Serena's and which his. A kind of annihilation, that was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly.
Serena did not come to him immediately, and a sensual languor settled over Pemberton. He gazed at her body, into the eyes that had entranced him the first time he'd met her, irises the color of burnished pewter. Hard and dense like pewter too, the gold flecks not so much within the gray as floating motelike on the surface. Eyes that did not close when their flesh came together, pulling him inside her with her gaze as much as her body.
Serena opened the curtains so the moon spread its light across the bed. She turned from the window and looked around the room, as if for a few moments she'd forgotten where she was.
"This will do quite well for us," she finally said, returning her gaze to Pemberton as she stepped toward the bed.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING PEMBERTON INTRODUCED his bride to the camp's hundred workers. As he spoke, Serena stood beside him, dressed in black riding breeches and a blue denim shirt. Her jodphurs were different from the ones the day before, European made, the leather scuffed and worn, toes rimmed with tarnished silver. Serena held the gelding's reins, the Arabian's whiteness so intense as to appear almost translucent in the day's first light. The saddle weighting the horse's back was made of German leather with wool-flocked gusseted panels, its cost more than a logger earned in a year. Several men made soft-spoken observations about the stirrups, which weren't paired on the left side.
Wilkie and Buchanan stood on the porch, cups of coffee in their hands. Both were dressed in suits and ties, their one concession to the environment knee-high leather boots, pants cuffs tucked inside so as not to get muddied. It was clothing Pemberton, whose gray tiger cloth pants and plaid workshirts differed little from the workers' attire, found faintly ridiculous in such an environment, now even more so in light of Serena's attire.
"Mrs. Pemberton's father owned the Vulcan Lumber Company in Colorado," Pemberton said to the workers. "He taught her well. She's the equal of any man here, and you'll soon find the truth of it. Her orders are to be followed the same as you'd follow mine."
Among the gathered loggers was a thick-bearded cutting crew foreman named Bilded. He hocked loudly and spit a gob of yellow phlegm on the ground. At six-two and over two hundred pounds, Bilded was one of the few men in camp big as Pemberton.
Serena opened the saddle bag and removed a Waterman pen and a leather-bound notepad. She spoke to the horse quietly, then handed the reins to Pemberton and walked over to Bilded and stood where he'd spit. She pointed beside the office at a cane ash tree, which had been left standing for its shade.
"I'll make a wager with you," Serena said to Bilded. "We both estimate total board feet of that cane ash. Then we'll write our estimates on a piece of paper and see who's closest."
Bilded stared at Serena a few moments, then at the tree as if already measuring its height and width. He looked not at Serena but at the cane ash when he spoke.
"How we going to know who's closest?"
"I'll have it cut down and taken to the saw mill," Pemberton said. "We'll know who won by this evening."
Doctor Cheney had now come on the porch to watch as well. He raked a match head across the railing to light his after-breakfast cigar, the sound audible enough that several workers turned to find its source. Pemberton looked also, and noted how morning accentuated the doctor's unhealthy pallor, making the corpulent face appear gray and malleable, like dirty bread dough. An effect the wattled neck and pouchy cheeks further emphasized.
"How much we wagering?" Bilded asked.
"Two weeks' pay."
The amount gave Bilded pause.
"There ain't no trick to it? I win I get two weeks' extra pay."
"Yes," Serena said, "and if you lose you work two weeks free."
She offered the pad and pen to Bilded, but he didn't raise a hand to take it. A worker behind him snickered.
"Perhaps you want me to go first then?" Serena said.
"Yeah," Bilded said after a few moments.
Serena turned toward the tree and studied it a full minute before she raised the pen in her left hand and wrote a number. She tore the page from the pad and folded it.
"Your turn," she said and handed the pen and notepad to Bilded.
Bilded walked up to the cane ash to better judge its girth, then came back and examined the tree a while longer before writing his own number. Serena turned to Pemberton.
"Who's a man we and the workers both trust to hold our estimates?"
" Campbell," Pemberton said, nodding toward the overseer, who watched from the office doorway. "You all right with that, Bilded?"
"Yeah," Bilded said.
Serena rode out behind the cutting crews as they followed the train tracks toward the south face of Noland Mountain, passing through acres of stumps that, from a distance, resembled grave markers in a recently vacated battlefield. The loggers soon left the main train line that went over the right side of the mountain and instead followed the spur, their lunches in tote sacks and paper bags, metal milk pails and metal boxes shaped like bread loaves. Some of the men wore bib overalls, others flannel shirts and pants. Most wore Chippawah boots and a few wore shoes of canvas or leather. The signal boys went barefoot. The loggers passed the Shay train engine they called a sidewinder and the two coach cars that brought and returned workers who lived in Waynesville, then the six flat cars for timber and the McGiffert loader and finally at the spur's end the hi-lead skidder already hissing and smoking, the boom's long steel cables spooling off the drums and stretching a half mile upward to where the tail block looped around a massive hickory stump. From a distance, the boom resembled a huge rod and reel, the cables like cast lines. The boom angled toward the mountain, and the cables were so taut it looked as if the whole mountain was hooked and ready to be dragged down the tracks to Waynesville. Logs cut late on Saturday yet dangled from the cables, and men passed heedfully under them as they might clouds packed with dynamite. All the while, the air grew thinner as the workers made their way up the steep incline toward tools hidden under leaves, hung on tree branches like the harps of the old Hebrews. Not just axes but eight-foot cross-cut saws and steel wedges and blocks and pike poles, the nine-pound hammers called go-devils and the six-pound hammers called grab skips. Some of these implements had initials burned in their handles, and some were given names as might be allowed a horse or rifle. All but the newest had their handles worn slick by flesh much in the manner of stones smoothed by water.
As the men made their way through the stumps and brush they called slash, their eyes considered where they stepped, for though snakes rarely stirred until the sun fell full on the slopes, the yellow jackets and hornets offered no such respite. Nor did the mountain itself, which could send a man tumbling, especially on a day such as this when recent rains made the ground slick and yielding to feet and grasping hands. Most of the loggers were still exhausted from last week's six eleven-hour shifts. Some were hung over and some were injured. As they made their way up the mountain, the men had already drunk four or five cups of coffee, and all carried with them cigarettes and chewing tobacco. Some used cocaine to keep going and stay alert, because once the cutting began a man had to watch for axe blades glancing off trees and saw teeth grabbing a knee and the tongs on the cable swinging free or the cable snapping. Most of all the sharded limbs called widow makers that waited minutes or hours or even days before falling earthward like javelins.
Pemberton stood on the porch as Serena followed the crews into the woods. Even at a distance he could see the sway of her hips and arched back. Though they'd coupled that morning as well as last night, Pemberton felt desire quicken his pulse, summon the image of the first time he'd watched her ride at the New England Hunt Club. That morning he'd sat on the clubhouse veranda and watched Serena and her horse leap the hedges and railings. He'd never been a man easily awed, but that was the only word for what he'd felt as Serena and the horse lifted and then hung aloft for what seemed seconds before falling on the barriers' far sides. He'd felt incredibly lucky they'd found one another, though Serena had already told him their meeting wasn't mere good fortune but inevitability.
That morning at the club two women had come out on the veranda and sat nearby, dressed, unlike Serena, in red swallowtail hunting blazers and black derbies, hot tea set before them to ward against the morning's chill. I suppose she imagines riding without a coat and cap de rigueur, the younger of the women had said, to which the other replied that it probably was in Colorado. My brother's wife attended Miss Porter's with her, the older woman said. She just showed up one day, an orphan from the western hinterlands. A wealthy orphan albeit, better educated than you'd imagine, but even Sarah Porter had no luck teaching her any social graces. Rather too proud, my sister-in-law claims, even for that haughty bunch. A couple of the girls pitied her enough to invite her home with them for the holidays and she not only refused but in a very ungracious manner. She stayed there with those old school marms instead. The younger woman had noticed Pemberton listening and had turned to him. Do you know her? she'd asked. Yes, he'd replied. She's my fiancée. The younger woman had blushed, but her companion had turned to Pemberton with a smile. Well, she'd said frostily, she at least deems you worthy of her company.
Except for Mrs. Lowell's brief comment about previous suitors, that morning had been the only time he'd heard Serena's past spoken of by anyone besides Serena. She'd volunteered little herself. When Pemberton asked about her time in Colorado or New England, Serena's answers were almost always cursory, telling him that she and Pemberton needed the past no more than it needed them.
Yet Serena's bad dreams continued. She never spoke of them, even when Pemberton asked, even in those moments he pulled her thrashing body out of them as if pulling her from a treacherous surf. Something to do with what had happened to her family back in Colorado, he was sure of that. Sure also that others who knew her would have been astonished at how childlike Serena appeared in those moments, the way she clung so fiercely to him until she whimpered back into sleep.
The kitchen door slammed as a worker came out and hurled a washtub of gray dishwater into a ditch reeking of grease and food scraps. The last logger had disappeared into the woods. Soon Pemberton heard the axes as the lead choppers began notching trees, a sound like rifle shots ricocheting across the valley as workers sawed and chopped another few acres of wilderness out of Haywood County.
By this time the crew chosen to fell the cane ash had returned to camp with their tools. The three men squatted before the tree as they would a campfire, talking among themselves about how best to commence. Campbell joined them, answering the loggers' questions with words arranged to sound more like suggestions than orders. After a few minutes Campbell rose. He turned toward the porch, giving Pemberton a nod, allowing his gaze to linger long enough to confirm nothing more was required of him. Campbell 's hazel eyes were almond-shaped, like a cat's. Pemberton had found their wideness appropriate for a man so aware of things on the periphery, aware and also cautious, reasons Campbell had lasted into his late thirties in an occupation where inattentiveness was rarely forgiven. Pemberton nodded and Campbell walked up the track to talk to the train's engineer. Pemberton watched him go, noting that even a man cautious as Campbell had a missing ring finger. If you could gather up all the severed body parts and sew them together, you'd gain an extra worker every month, Doctor Cheney had once joked.
The cutting crew quickly showed why Campbell picked them. The lead chopper took up his ax and with two expert strokes made an undercut a foot from the ground. The two sawyers got down on one knee and gripped the hickory handles with both hands and began, wedges of bark crackling and breaking against the steel teeth. The men gained their rhythm, and soon sawdust mounded at their feet like time sieving through an hourglass. Pemberton knew the workers who used them called the cross-cut saws "misery whips" because of the effort demanded, but watching these men it appeared effortless, as if they slid the blade between two smooth-sanded planks. When the saw began to pinch, the lead chopper used the go devil to drive in a wedge. In fifteen minutes the tree lay on the ground.
Pemberton went inside and worked on invoices, occasionally looking out the window toward Noland Mountain. He and Serena hadn't been apart for more than a few minutes since the marriage ceremony. Her absence made the paperwork more tedious, the room emptier. Pemberton remembered how she'd waked him that morning with a kiss on his eyelids, a hand settled lightly on his shoulder. Serena had been drowsy as well, and when she'd brought Pemberton ever so languidly into her arms, it was as if he'd left his own dream and together they'd entered a better richer one.
Serena was gone all morning, getting familiar with the landscape, learning the names of workers, ridges and creeks.
The Franklin clock on the credenza chimed noon when Harris' Studebaker pulled up beside the office. Pemberton set the in voices on the desk and walked out to meet him. Like Pemberton, Harris dressed little better than his workers, the only sign of his wealth a thick gold ring on his right hand, in the setting a sapphire sharp and bright-blue as its owner's eyes. Seventy years old, Pemberton knew, but the vigorous silver hair and shiny gold tooth fillings were congruent for a man anything but rusty.
"So where is she?" Harris asked as he stepped onto the office porch. "A woman as impressive as you claim shouldn't be hidden away."
Harris paused and smiled as he turned his head slightly, his right eye focused on Pemberton as if to better sight a target.
"Though on second thought, maybe you should hide her away. If she is all you say."
"You'll see," Pemberton said. "She's over on Noland. We can get horses and ride up there."
"I don't have time for that," Harris said. "Much as I'd enjoy meeting your bride, this park nonsense takes precedent. Our esteemed Secretary of the Interior got Rockefeller to donate five million. Now Albright is sure he can buy out Champion."
"Do you think they'll sell?"
"I don't know," Harris said, "but just the fact that Champion's listening to offers encourages not only Secretary Albright but the rest of them, here and in Washington. They're already starting to run farmers off their land in Tennessee."
"This needs to be settled once and for all," Pemberton said.
"Goddamn right it needs to be settled. I'm tired as you are of lining the pockets of those Raleigh pettifoggers."
Harris pulled a watch from his pocket and checked the time.
"Later than I thought," he said.
"Have you had a chance to look at the Glencoe Ridge tract?" Pemberton asked.
"Come by the office Saturday morning and we'll go see it together. Bring your bride along too," Harris said, and paused to nod approvingly at the valley's stumps and slash. "You've done well here, even with those two fops you have for partners."
Pemberton did not go back into the office after Harris left but instead rode out to Noland Mountain. He found Serena eating lunch with two foremen. Between bites of sandwiches, they discussed whether buying a second hi-lead skidder would be worth the extra cost. Pemberton got off his horse and joined them.
"The cane ash is at the saw mill," Pemberton said as he sat down beside her, "so Campbell will have the board feet by five-thirty."
"Any of the other men make side bets with you?"
"No."
"Would either of you care to wager?" Serena said to the foremen.
"No ma'am," the older worker replied. "I don't have a hankering to bet against you on anything concerning lumber. I might have before this morning, but not now, especially after you showed us that trick with the choker."
The younger worker merely shook his head.
The two men finished eating and gathered their crews. Soon the sounds of axes and cross-cut saws filled the nearby woods. The Arabian snorted and Serena walked over and placed her hand on the horse's mane. She spoke to the horse softly and the gelding calmed.
"Harris came by," Pemberton said. "He wants the three of us to go look at the Glencoe Ridge tract Saturday."
"Will he be looking for anything other than kaolin and copper?"
"I doubt it," Pemberton said, "though some gold has been panned from creeks in the county. There are ruby and sapphire mines near Franklin, but that's forty miles from here."
"I hope he finds something," Serena said, stepping closer to take Pemberton's hand. "It will be another beginning for us, our first real partnership."
Pemberton smiled. "Plus Harris."
"For now," Serena said.
As Pemberton rode back to camp, he thought of an afternoon back in Boston when he and Serena were lying in bed, the sheets damp and tangled. The third, maybe the fourth day he'd been with her. Serena's head had lain on his shoulder, her left hand on his chest.
"After Carolina, where to next?"
"I haven't thought that far ahead," Pemberton had replied.
"'I'?" she'd said. "Why not 'we'?"
"Well since it's 'we', Pemberton had replied playfully, "I'll defer to you."
Serena had lifted her head and met his eyes.
" Brazil. I've researched it. Virgin forests of mahogany and no law but nature's law."
"Very well," Pemberton had said. "Now the only decision 'we' have to worry about is where to have dinner. Since you've decided everything else for us, am I allowed to choose?"
She had not answered his question. Instead, she'd pressed her hand more firmly against his chest, let her palm stay there as she measured the beat of his blood.
"I'd heard you had a strong heart, fearless," she'd said, "and so it is."
"So you research men as well as potential logging sights?" Pemberton had asked.
"Of course," Serena had said.
AT six, every worker in camp gathered in front of the office. Though most cutting crews consisted of three men, a crew that lost a man often attached to another, an arrangement that wasn't always temporary. A man named Snipes acted as leader for such a crew since the other foreman, Stewart, was a diligent worker but of dubious intelligence. Stewart was relieved as anyone by this arrangement.
Among Snipes' crew was an illiterate lay preacher named McIntyre, who was much given to vigorous pronouncements on the imminent apocalypse. McIntyre sought any opportunity to espouse his views, especially to Reverend Bolick, a Presbyterian cleric who held services at the camp on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. Reverend Bolick considered his fellow theologian not only obnoxious but demented and went out of his way to avoid McIntyre, as did most men at the camp. McIntyre had been absent all morning with a bout of the flux but had come to work at noon. When he saw Serena standing on the office porch in pants, he choked on the peppermint he sucked to ease his stomach.
"There she is," McIntyre sputtered, "the whore of Babylon in the very flesh."
Dunbar, the youngest member of the crew at nineteen, looked toward the porch incomprehensively. He turned to McIntyre, who was dressed in his black preacher's hat and frayed black dress coat he wore even on the hottest days as a sign of his true calling.
"Where?" Dunbar asked.
"Right there on that porch, standing there brazen as Jezebel."
Stewart, who along with McIntyre's wife and sister comprised the whole of the lay preacher's congregation, turned to his minister and spoke.
"Why are you of a mind to say such a thing as that, Preacher?"
"Them pants," McIntyre proclaimed. "It's in the Revelations. Says the whore of Babylon will come forth in the last days wearing pants."
Ross, a dour man not kindly disposed to McIntyre's rants, stared at the lay preacher as he might a chimpanzee that had wandered into camp and begun chattering.
"I've read Revelation many a time, McIntyre," Ross said, "and somehow missed that verse."
"It ain't in the King James," McIntyre said. "It's in the original Greek."
"Read Greek, do you?" Ross said. "That's ever amazing for a man who can't even read English."
"Well, no," McIntyre said slowly. "I don't read Greek, but I've heard from them what does."
"Them what does," Ross said, and shook his head.
The crew foreman, Snipes, removed a briar pipe from his mouth to speak. His overalls were so worn and patched that the original denim seemed an afterthought, but there'd been no attempt to blend new colors with old. Instead, the crew foreman's overalls were mended with a conflagration of yellow, green, red, and orange cloth. Snipes considered himself a learned man and argued that, since colors bright and various were known in nature to warn other creatures of danger, such patches would deter not only varmints both large and small but might in the same manner also deter falling limbs and lightning strikes. Snipes held the pipe out before him, contemplated it a moment, then raised his head and spoke.
"They's differences in every language in the world," Snipes said sagely, and appeared ready to expound on this point when Ross raised an open palm.
"Here comes the tally," Ross said. "Get ready to have your pockets lightened, Dunbar."
Campbell stood on the ash tree's stump and took a pad from his coat pocket. The men grew silent. Campbell looked at neither the men nor the owners. His gaze remained on the pad as he spoke, as if to belie any favoritism even as he rendered the verdict.
"Mrs. Pemberton the winner by thirty board feet," Campbell said, and he stepped down without further comment.
The men began to disperse, those who had bet and won, such as Ross, stepping more lightly than the losers. Soon only those who'd watched from the porch remained.
"Cause for a celebratory drink of our best scotch," Buchanan announced.
He and Wilkie followed Doctor Cheney and the Pembertons into the office. They passed through the front room and entered a smaller room with a bar on one wall and a fourteen-foot dining table in the center, around it a dozen well-padded captain's chairs. The room had a creek-stone fireplace and a single window. Buchanan stepped behind the bar and set a bottle of Glenlivet and soda water on the lacquered wood. He lifted five Steuben tumblers from under the bar and filled a silver canister with chips from the ice box.
"I call this the Recovery Room," Doctor Cheney said to Serena. "You see it is well stocked with all manner of alcohol. I find it quite sufficient for my own medicinal needs."
"Doctor Cheney has no need for a recovery room elsewhere, because the good doctor's patients rarely recover," Buchanan said from behind the bar. "I know these rogues' preferences, but what is yours, Mrs. Pemberton?"
"The same."
Everyone sat except Buchanan. Serena studied the table, let the fingers of her left hand trail across its surface.
"A single piece of chestnut," Serena said appreciatively. "Was the tree cut nearby?"
"In this very valley," Buchanan said. "It measured one-hundred-and-twelve feet. We've yet to find a bigger one."
Serena raised her eyes from the table and looked around the room.
"I'm afraid this room is quite austere, Mrs. Pemberton," Wilkie said, "but comfortable, even cozy in its way, especially during winter. We hope you'll take your evening meals here, as the four of us have done before the pleasure of your arrival."
Still apprising the room, Serena nodded.
"Excellent," Doctor Cheney said. "A woman's beauty would do much to brighten these drab surroundings."
Buchanan spoke as he handed Serena her drink.
"Pemberton has told me of your parents' unfortunate demise in the 1918 flu epidemic, but do you have siblings?"
"I had a brother and two sisters. They died as well."
"All in the epidemic?" Wilkie asked.
"Yes."
Wilkie's moustache quivered slightly, and his rheumy eyes saddened.
"How old were you, my dear?"
"Sixteen."
"I lost a sibling as well in that epidemic, my youngest sister," Wilkie said to Serena, "but to lose your whole family, and at such a young age. I just can't imagine."
"I too am sorry for your losses, but your good fortune is now our good fortune," Doctor Cheney quipped.
"It was more than good fortune," Serena replied. "The doctor said so himself."
"What then did my fellow healer ascribe your survival to?"
Serena looked steadily at Cheney, her eyes as inexpressive as her tone.
"He said I simply refused to die."
Doctor Cheney slowly tilted his head, as if peering around a corner. The physician stared at Serena curiously, his thick eyebrows raised a few moments, then relaxed. Buchanan brought the other drinks to the table and sat down. Pemberton raised his drink, offered a smile as well to lighten the moment.
"A toast to another victory for management over labor," he said.
"I toast you as well, Mrs. Pemberton," Doctor Cheney said. "The nature of the fairer sex is to lack the male's analytical skills, but, at least in this instance, you have somehow compensated for that weakness."
Serena's features tightened, but the irritation vanished as quickly as it had appeared, swept clear from her face like a lock of unruly hair.
"My husband tells me that you are from these very mountains, a place called Wild Hog Gap," Serena said to Cheney. "Obviously, your views on my sex were formed by the slatterns you grew up with, but I assure you the natures of women are more various than your limited experience allows."
As if tugged upward by fishhooks, the sides of Doctor Cheney's mouth creased into a mirthless smile.
"By God you married a saucy one," Wilkie chortled, raising his tumbler to Pemberton. "This camp is going to be lively now."
Buchanan retrieved the bottle of scotch and placed it on the table.
"Have you ever been to these parts before, Mrs. Pemberton?" he asked.
"No, I haven't."
"As you've seen, we are somewhat isolated here."
"Somewhat?" Wilkie exclaimed. "At times I feel I've been banished to the moon."
" Asheville is only fifty miles away," Buchanan said. "It has its village charms."
"Indeed," Doctor Cheney interjected, "including several T.B. sanatoriums."
"Yet you've no doubt heard of George Vanderbilt's estate," Buchanan continued, "which is there as well."
"Biltmore is indeed impressive," Wilkie conceded, "an actual French castle, Mrs. Pemberton. Olmsted himself came down from Brookline to design the grounds. Vanderbilt's daughter Cornelia lives there now, with her husband, a Brit named Cecil. I've been their guest on occasion. Very gracious people."
Wilkie paused to empty his tumbler and set it on the table. His cheeks were rosy from the alcohol, but Pemberton knew it was Serena's presence that made him even more loquacious than usual.
"I heard a phrase today worthy of your journal, Buchanan," Wilkie continued. "Two workers at the splash pond were discussing a fight and spoke of how one combatant 'feathered into' the other. It apparently means to inflict great damage."
Buchanan retrieved a fountain pen and black leather notebook from his coat's inner pocket. Buchanan placed the pen on the notebook's rag paper and wrote feathered into, behind it a question mark. He blew on the ink and closed the notebook.
"I doubt that it goes back to the British Isles," Buchanan said. "Perhaps instead a colloquialism to do with cockfighting."
"Kephart would no doubt know," Wilkie said. "Have you heard of him, Mrs. Pemberton, our local Thoreau? Buchanan here is quite an admirer of his work, despite Kephart's being behind this national park nonsense."
"I've seen his books in the window at Grolier's," Serena said. "As you may imagine, they were quite taken with a Harvard man turned Natty Bumpo."
"As well as being a former librarian in Saint Louis," Wilkie noted.
"A librarian and an author," Serena said, "yet he'd stop us from harvesting the very thing books are made of."
Pemberton drained his second dram of scotch, felt the alcohol's smooth slide down his throat, its warm glow deepening his contentment. He felt an overwhelming wonder that this woman, whom he'd not even known existed when he'd left this valley three months earlier, was now his wife. Pemberton settled his right hand on Serena's knee, unsurprised when her left hand settled on his knee as well. She leaned toward him and for a few seconds let her head nestle in the space between his neck and shoulder. Pemberton tried to imagine how this moment could be better. He could think of nothing other than that he and Serena were alone.
At seven o'clock, two kitchen workers set the table with Spode bone china and silver cutlery and linen napkins. They left and returned pushing a cart laden with wicker baskets of buttered biscuits and a silver platter draping with beef, large bowls of Steuben crystal brimmed with potatoes and carrots and squash, various jams and relishes.
They were midway through their meal when Campbell, who'd been bent over the adding machine in the front room, appeared at the door.
"I need to know if you and Mrs. Pemberton are holding Bilded to the bet," Campbell said. "For the payroll."
"Is there a reason we shouldn't?" Pemberton asked.
"He has a wife and three children."
The words were delivered with no inflection, and Campbell 's face was an absolute blank. Pemberton wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to play poker against this man.
"All for the better," Serena said. "It will make a more effective lesson for the other workers."
"Will he still be a foreman?" Campbell asked.
"Yes, for the next two weeks," Serena said, looking not at Campbell but Pemberton.
"And then?"
"He'll be fired," Pemberton told the overseer. "Another lesson for the men."
Campbell nodded and stepped back into the office, closing the door behind him. The clacking, ratchet and pause of the adding machine resumed.
Buchanan appeared about to speak, but didn't.
"A problem, Buchanan?" Pemberton asked.
"No," Buchanan said after a few moments. "The wager did not involve me."
"Did you note how Campbell attempted to sway you, Pemberton," Doctor Cheney said, "yet without doing so outright. He's quite intelligent that way, don't you think?"
"Yes," Pemberton agreed. "Had his circumstances been such, he could have matriculated at Harvard. Perhaps, unlike me, he would have graduated."
"Yet without your experiences in the taverns of Boston," Wilkie said, "you might have fallen prey to Abe Harmon and his bowie knife.
"True enough," said Pemberton, "but my year of fencing at Harvard contributed to that education as well."
Serena raised her hand to Pemberton's face and let her index finger trace the thin white scar on his cheek.
"A Fechtwunde is more impressive than a piece of sheepskin," she said.
The kitchen workers came in with raspberries and cream. Beside Wilkie's bowl, one of the women placed a water glass and bottles containing bitters and iron tonics, a tin of sulpher lozenges, potions for Wilkie's contrary stomach and tired blood. The workers poured the cups of coffee and departed.
"Yet you are a woman of obvious learning, Mrs. Pemberton," Wilkie said. "Your husband says you are exceedingly well read in the arts and philosophy."
"My father brought tutors to the camp. They were all British, Oxford educated."
"Which explains the British inflection and cadence of your speech," Wilkie noted approvingly.
"And no doubt also explains a certain coldness in the tone," Doctor Cheney added as he stirred cream in his coffee, "which only the unenlightened would view as a lack of feeling towards others, even your own family."
Wilkie's nose twitched in annoyance.
"Worse than unenlightened to think such a thing," Wilkie said, "cruel as well."
"Surely," Doctor Cheney said, his plump lips rounding contemplatively. "I speak only as one who hasn't had the advantages of British tutors."
"Your father sounds like a most remarkable man," Wilkie said, returning his gaze to Serena. "I would enjoy hearing more about him."
"Why?" Serena said, as if puzzled. "He's dead now and of no use to any of us."
DEW DARKENED THE HEM OF HER GINGHAM dress as Rachel Harmon walked out of the yard, the grass cool and slick against her bare feet and ankles. Jacob nestled in the crook of her left arm, in her right hand the tote sack. He'd grown so much in only six weeks. His features transformed as well, the hair not just thicker but darker, the eyes that had been blue at birth now brown as chestnuts. She'd not known an infant's eyes could do such a thing and it unsettled her, a reminder of eyes last seen at the train depot. Rachel looked down the road to where Widow Jenkins' farmhouse stood, found the purl of smoke rising from the chimney that confirmed the old woman was up and about. The child squirmed inside the blanket she'd covered him in against the morning chill.
"You've got a full belly and fresh swaddlings," she whispered, "so you've no cause to be fussy."
Rachel tucked the blanket tighter. She ran her index finger across the ridge of his gums, Jacob's mouth closing around the finger to suckle. She wondered when his teeth would come in, something else to ask the widow.
Rachel followed the road as it began its long curve toward the river. On the edges, Queen Anne's lace still held beaded blossoms of dew. A big yellow and black writing spider hung in its web's center, and Rachel remembered how her father had claimed seeing your initial sewn into the web meant you'd soon die. She did not look closely at the web, instead glanced at the sky to make sure no clouds gathered in the west over Clingman's Dome. She stepped onto the Widow's porch and knocked.
"It ain't bolted," the old woman said, and Rachel stepped inside. The greasy odor of fry pan lard filled the cabin, a scrim of smoke eddying around the room's borders. Widow Jenkins rose slowly from a caneback chair pulled close to the hearth.
"Let me hold that chap."
Rachel bent her knees and laid down her tote sack. She shifted the child in her arms and handed him over.
"He's acting fussy this morning," Rachel said. "I'm of a mind he might be starting to teethe."
"Child, a baby don't teethe till six months," Widow Jenkins scoffed. "It could be the colic or the rash or the ragweed. There's many a thing to make a young one like this feel out of sorts, but it ain't his teeth."
The Widow raised Jacob and peered into the child's face. Gold-wire spectacles made her eyes bulge as if loosed from their sockets.
"I told your daddy to marry again so you'd have a momma, but he wouldn't listen," Widow Jenkins said to Rachel. "If he had you'd know some things about babies, maybe enough to where you'd not have let the first man who gave you a wink and a smile lead you into a fool's paradise. You're still a child and don't know nothing of the world yet, girl."
Rachel stared at the puncheon floor and listened, the way she'd done for two months now. Folks at her Daddy's funeral had told her much the same, as had the granny woman who'd delivered Jacob and women in town who'd never given Rachel any notice before. Telling her for her own good, they all claimed, because they cared about her. Some of them like Widow Jenkins did care, but Rachel knew some just did it for spite. She'd watch their lips turn downward, trying to look sad and serious, but a mean kind of smile would be in their eyes.
Widow Jenkins sat back down in her chair and laid Jacob in her lap.
"A child ought to carry his daddy's name," she said, still speaking like Rachel was five instead of almost seventeen. "That way he'll have a last name and not have to go through his life explaining why he don't."
"He's got a last name, Mrs. Jenkins," Rachel said, lifting her gaze from the floor to meet the older woman's eyes, "and Harmon is as good a one as I know."
For a few moments there was no sound but the fire. A hiss and crackle, then the gray shell of a log collapsing in on itself, spilling a slush of spark and ash beneath the andirons. When Widow Jenkins spoke again, her voice was softer.
"You're right. Harmon is a good name, and an old woman ought not have to be reminded of that."
Rachel took the sugar teat and fresh swaddlings from the tote sack, the glass bottle of milk she'd drawn earlier. She laid them on the table.
"I'll be back soon as I can."
"You having to sell that horse and cow just to get by, and him that's the cause of it richer than a king," Widow Jenkins said sadly. "It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming into it. Tears from the very start."
Rachel walked back up the road to the barn and took a step inside. She paused and let her gaze scan the loft and rafters, remembering, as she always did, the bat that had so frightened her years ago. She heard the chickens in the far back clucking in their nesting boxes and reminded herself to gather the eggs soon as she returned. Her eyes adjusted to the barn's darkness, and objects slowly gained form and solidity-a rusting milk can, the sack of lice powder to dust the chickens with, a rotting wagon wheel. She looked up a final time and stepped all the way inside, lifted the saddle and its pad off the rack and went to the middle stall. The draft horse was asleep, his weight shifted so the right hoof was at an angle. Rachel patted his rear haunches to let him know she was there before placing the cabbage sack in the pack. She tethered the mattock to the saddle as well.
"We got us a trip to make Dan," she told the horse.
Rachel didn't take the road past Widow Jenkins' house but instead followed Rudisell Creek down the mountain to where it entered the Pigeon River, the path narrowed by sprawling poke stalks that drooped under the weight of their purple berries and goldenrod bright as caught sunshine. Enough dew yet remained on the leaves to dampen her legs and dress. Rachel knew in the deeper woods the ginseng leaves would soon begin to show their brightness as well. The prettiest time of year, she'd always believed, prettier than fall or even spring when the dogwood branches swayed and brightened as if harboring clouds of white butterflies.
Dan moved with care down the trail, gentle and watchful with Rachel as he'd always been. Her father had bought the horse a year before Rachel was born. Even when he'd been at his drunkest or angriest, her father had never mistreated the animal, never kicked or cursed it, never forgotten to give it feed or water. Selling the horse was another lost link to her father.
She and Dan came to the dirt road and followed the river south toward Waynesville, the sun rising over her right shoulder. A few minutes later Rachel heard an automobile in the distance, her heart stammering when she glanced up and saw the vehicle coming toward her was green. It wasn't the Packard, and she felt ashamed that a part of herself, even now, could have wished it was Mr. Pemberton coming to Colt Ridge to somehow set things right. The same as when she'd gone to the camp's church service the last two Sundays, dawdling outside the dining hall with Jacob in her arms, hoping Mr. Pemberton would walk by.
The automobile sputtered past, leaving its wake of gray dust. Soon she passed a stone farmhouse, hearth smoke wisping from the chimney, in the fields plump heads of cabbage and corn stalks taller than she was, closer to the road pumpkins and squash brightening a smother of weeds. All of which promised the kind of harvest they might have had on Colt Ridge come fall if her father had lived long enough to tend his crops. A wagon came the other direction, two children dangling their legs off the back. They stared at Rachel gravely, as if sensing all that had befallen her in the last months. The road leveled and nudged close to the Pigeon River. In the morning's slanted light, the river gleamed like a vein of flowing gold. Fool's gold, she thought.
Rachel remembered the previous August, how at noon-dinner time she'd take a meal to Mr. Pemberton's house and Joel Vaughn, who'd grown up with her on Colt Ridge, would be waiting on the porch. Joel's job was to make sure no one interrupted her and Mr. Pemberton, and though Joel never said a word there'd always be a troubled look on his face when he opened the front door. Mr. Pemberton was always in the back room, and as Rachel walked through the house she looked around at the electric lights and the ice box and fancy table and cushioned chairs. Being in a place so wondrous, even for just a half hour, made her feel the same way as when she pored over the Sears wish book. Only better, because it wasn't a picture or description but the very things themselves. But that wasn't what had brought her to Mr. Pemberton's bed. He'd made notice of her, chosen Rachel over the other girls in the camp, including her friends Bonny and Rebecca, who were young like her. Rachel had believed she was in love, though since he'd been the first man she'd ever kissed, much less lain down with, how could she know. Rachel thought how maybe the Widow was right. If she'd had a mother who'd not left when Rachel was five, maybe she would have known better.
But maybe not, Rachel told herself. After all, she'd ignored the warning looks of not only Joel but also Mr. Campbell, who'd shook his head No at Rachel when he saw her going to the house with the tray one noon. Rachel had just smiled back at the hard stares the older women in the kitchen gave her each time she returned. When one of the men who cooked said something smart to her like don't look like he had much of an appetite today, for food at least, she'd blush and lower her eyes, but even then a part of her felt proud all the same. It was no different than when Bonny or Rebecca whispered Your hair's mussed up, and the three of them giggled like they were back in grammar school and a boy had tried to kiss one of them.
One day Mr. Pemberton had fallen asleep before she left his bed. Rachel had gotten up slowly so as not to wake him, then walked room by room through the house, touching what she passed-the bedroom's gold-gilded oval mirror, a silver pitcher and basin in the bathroom, the Marvel water heater in the hallway, the ice box and oak-front shelf clock. What had struck her most was how such wonders appeared placed around the rooms with so little thought. That was the amazing thing, Rachel had thought, how what seemed treasures to her could be hardly noticed by someone else. She'd sat in one of the Coxwell chairs and settled the plush velvet against her hips and back. It had been like sitting on a plump cloud.
When her flow stopped, she'd kept believing it was something else, not telling Mr. Pemberton or Bonny or Rebecca, even when one month became three months and then four. It'll come any day now, she'd told herself, even after the mornings she'd thrown up and her dress tightened at the waist. By the sixth month, Mr. Pemberton had gone back to Boston. Soon enough she didn't have to tell anyone because despite the loose apron her belly showed the truth of it, not only to everyone in the camp but also to her father.
Outside of Waynesville the dirt road merged with the old Asheville Toll Road. Rachel dismounted. She took the horse by the reins and led it into town. As she passed the courthouse, two women stood outside Scott's General Store. They stopped talking and watched Rachel, their eyes stern and disapproving. She tethered Dan in front of Donaldson's Feed and Seed and went in to tell the storekeeper she'd take his offer for the horse and cow.
"And you won't pick them up till this weekend, right?"
The storekeeper nodded but didn't open his cash register.
"I was hoping you could pay me now," Rachel said.
Mr. Donaldson took three ten-dollar bills from his cash register and handed them to her.
"Just make sure you don't lame that horse before I get up there."
Rachel took a snap purse from her dress pocket, placed the money in it.
"You want to buy the saddle?"
"I've got no need for a saddle," the storekeeper said brusquely.
Rachel walked across the street to Mr. Scott's store. When he produced the bill, it was more than she'd expected, though what exactly Rachel expected she could not say. She placed the remaining two dollar bills and two dimes in her snap purse and went next door to Merritt's Apothecary. When Rachel came out, she had only the dimes left.
Rachel untethered Dan and she and the horse walked on by Dodson's Café and then two smaller storefronts. She was passing the courthouse when someone called her name. Sheriff McDowell stepped out of his office door, not dressed in Sunday finery like three months ago but in his uniform, a silver badge pinned to his khaki shirt. As he walked toward her, Rachel remembered how he'd put his arm around her that day and helped her off the bench and into the depot, how later he'd driven her back up to Colt Ridge and though the day wasn't cold, he'd built a small fire in the hearth. They'd sat there together by the fire, not talking, until Widow Jenkins arrived to spend the night with her.
The sheriff tipped his hat when he caught up to her.
"I don't mean to hold you up," he said, "just wanted to check and see how you and your child were doing."
Rachel met the sheriff's eyes, noting again their unusual hue. Honey-colored, but not glowy like that of bees fed on clover, but instead the darker amber of basswood honey. A warm comforting color. She looked for the least hint of judgment in the sheriff's gaze and saw none.
"We're doing okay," Rachel said, though there being only two dimes in her snap purse argued otherwise.
A Model T rattled past, causing the horse to shy toward the sidewalk. Sheriff McDowell and Rachel stood together in the street a few moments more, neither speaking until McDowell touched the brim of his hat again.
"Well, like I said, I just wanted to see how you're doing. If I can help you, in any way, you let me know."
"Thank you," Rachel said and paused for a moment. "That day Daddy was killed, I appreciate what you did, especially staying with me."
Sheriff McDowell nodded. "I was glad to do it."
The sheriff walked back toward his office as Rachel tugged Dan's reins and led him on past the courthouse.
At the end of the street Rachel came to a wooden frame building, in its narrow yard a dozen blank marble tombstones of varying sizes and hues. Inside she heard the tap tap tap of a hammer and chisel. Rachel tethered the horse to the closest hitching post and crossed the marble-stobbed yard. She paused at the open door above which was written LUDLOW SURRATT-STONE MASON.
An air presser and air hammer lay next to the entrance, in the room's center a work bench, on it mallets and chisels, a compass saw and a slate board chalked with words and numbers. Some of the stones lining the four walls had names and dates. Others were blank but for lambs and crosses and volutes. The air smelled chalky, the room's earthen floor whitened as if with a fine snow. Surratt sat in a low wooden chair, a stone leaning against the work bench before him. He wore a hat and an apron, and as he worked he leaned close to the marble, the hammer and chisel inches from his face.
Rachel knocked and he turned, his clothes and hands and eyelashes whitened by the marble dust. He laid the hammer and chisel on the bench and without a word went to the back of the shop. He lifted the sixteen-by fourteen-inch marble tablet Rachel had commissioned the week after her father had died. Before she could say anything, he'd set it beside the doorway. Surratt stepped back and stood beside her. They looked at the tablet, the name Abraham Harmon etched in the marble, above it the fylfot Rachel had chosen from the sketch pad.
"I think it come out all right," the stone mason said. "You satisfied?"
"Yes sir. It looks fine," Rachel said, then hesitated. "The rest of your money. I thought I'd have it, but I don't."
Surratt did not look especially surprised at this news, and Rachel supposed there were others who had come to him with similar stories.
"That saddle," Rachel said, nodding toward the horse. "You could have it for what I owe."
"I knew your daddy. Some found him too bristly but I liked him," Surratt said. "We'll work something else out. You'll need that saddle."
"No sir, I won't. I sold my horse to Mr. Donaldson. After this weekend I'll not need it."
"This weekend?"
"Yes sir," Rachel said. "That's when he's coming to pick up the horse and cow both."
The stone mason mulled this information over.
"I'll take the saddle then, and we'll call it square between us. Have Donaldson bring it back with him," Surratt said, pausing as another Model T sputtered past. "Who have you hired to haul the stone up there?"
Rachel lifted the burlap cabbage sack from the saddle pack.
"I figured to do it."
"That stone weighs more than it looks, near fifty pounds," Surratt said. "It'll bust right through a sack that thin. Besides, once you get up there you still got to plant it."
"I got a mattock with me," Rachel said. "If you help me tie the stone to the saddle horn I can manage."
Surratt took a red handkerchief from his back pocket, winced and rubbed the cloth across his forehead. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket as his eyes resettled on Rachel.
"How old are you?"
"Almost seventeen."
"Almost."
"Yes sir."
Rachel expected the stone mason to tell her what Widow Jenkins had said, how she was just a girl and knew nothing. He'd be right to tell her so, Rachel supposed. How could she argue otherwise when all morning she'd figured wrong on everything from a baby's teething time to what things cost.
Surratt leaned over the tombstone and blew a limn of white dust from one of the chiseled letters. He let his hand linger on the stone a moment, as if to verify its solidity a final time. He stood and untied his leather apron.
"I ain't that busy," he said. "I'll put the stone in my truck and take it on up there right now. I'll plant it for you too."
"Thank you," Rachel said. "That's a considerable kindness."
She rode back through Waynesville and north on the old toll road, but quickly left it for a different trail than the one she'd come on. The land soon turned steeper, rockier, the mattock's steel head clanking against the stirrup. The horse breathed harder as the air thinned, its soft nostrils rising with each pull of air. They sloshed through a creek, the water low and clear. Leathery rhododendron leaves rubbed against Rachel's dress.
She traveled another half hour, moving up the highest ridge. The woods drew back briefly and revealed an abandoned homestead. The front door yawned open, on the porch a spill of pans and plates and moldering quilts that bespoke a hasty exodus. Above the farmhouse's front door a rusty horseshoe upturned to catch what good luck might fall the occupant's way. Clearly not enough, Rachel thought, knowing before too long her place might look the same if she didn't have a good harvest of ginseng.
The mountains and woods quickly reclosed around her. The trees were all hardwoods now. Light seeped through their foliage as through layers of gauze. No birds sang and no deer or rabbit bolted in front of her. The only things growing along the trail were mushrooms and toad-stools, the only sound acorns crackling and popping beneath Dan's iron hooves. The woods smelled like it had just rained.
The trail rose a last time and ended at the road. On the other side stood a deserted white clapboard church. The wide front door had a padlock on it, and the white paint had grayed and begun peeling. So many people lived in the timber camp now that Reverend Bolick held his services in the camp's dining hall instead of the church. Mr. Surratt's truck was not parked by the cemetery gate, but Rachel saw the stone was set in the ground. She tied Dan to the gate and walked inside. She moved through the grave markers, some just creek rocks with no names or dates, others soapstone and granite, a few marble. What names there were were familiar-Jenkins and Candler and McDowell and Pressley, Harmon. She was almost to her father's grave when she heard howling down the ridge below the cemetery, a lonesome sound like a whippoorwill or a far-off train. A pack of wild dogs made their way across a clearing, the one who'd raised his throat to the sky now running to catch up with the others. Rachel remembered the mattock strapped to the saddle and thought about getting it in case the dogs veered up the ridge, but they soon disappeared into the woods. Then there was only silence.
She stood by the tombstone, dirt the stone mason had displaced darkening the grave. Her father had been a hard man to live with, awkward in his affection, never saying much. His temper like a kitchen match waiting to be struck, especially if he'd been drinking. One of Rachel's clearest memories of her mother was lying on her parents' bed on a hot day. She'd told her mother that the blue bedspread felt cool and smooth despite the summer heat, like it'd feel if you could sleep on top of a creek pool. Because it's satin, her mother said, and Rachel had thought even the word was cool and smooth, whispery like the sound of a creek. She remembered the day her father took the bedspread and threw it into the hearth. It was the morning after her mother left, and as her father stuffed the satin bedspread deeper into the flames, he'd told Rachel to never mention her mother again, if Rachel did he'd slap her mouth. Whether he would have or not, she had never risked finding out. Rachel heard an older woman at the funeral claim her father had been a different man before her mother left, less prone to anger and bitterness. Never bad to drink. Rachel couldn't remember that man.
Yet he'd raised a child by himself, a girl child, and Rachel figured he'd done it as well as any man could have alone. She'd never gone wanting for food and clothing. There were plenty of things he hadn't taught her, maybe couldn't teach her, but she'd learned about crops and plants and animals, how to mend a fence and chink a cabin. He'd had her do these things herself while he watched. Making sure she knew how, Rachel now realized, when he'd not be around to do it for her. What was that, if not a kind of love.
She touched the tombstone and felt its sturdiness and solidity. It made her think of the cradle her father had built two weeks before he died. He'd brought it in and set it by her bed, not speaking a single word acknowledging he'd made it for the child. But she could see the care in the making of it, how he'd built it out of hickory, the hardest and most lasting wood there was. Made not just to last but to look pretty, for he'd sanded the cradle and then varnished it with linseed oil.
Rachel removed her hand from a stone she knew would outlast her lifetime, and that meant it would outlast her grief. I've gotten him buried in Godly ground and I've burned the clothes he died in, Rachel told herself. I've signed the death certificate and now his grave stone's up. I've done all I can do. As she told herself this, Rachel felt the grief inside grow so wide and deep it felt like a dark fathomless pool she'd never emerge from. Because there was nothing left to do now, nothing except endure it.
Think of something happy, she told herself, something he did for you. A small thing. For a few moments nothing came. Then something did, something that had happened about this time of year. After supper her father had gone to the barn while Rachel went to the garden. In the waning light she'd gathered ripe pole beans whose dark pods nestled up to the rows of sweet corn she'd planted as trellis. Her father called from the barn mouth, and she'd set the wash pan between two rows, thinking he needed her to carry the milk pail to the springhouse.
"Pretty, isn't it," he'd said as she entered the barn.
Her father pointed to a large silver-green moth. For a few minutes the chores were put off as the two of them just stood there. The barn's stripes of light grew dimmer, and the moth seemed to brighten, as if the slow open and close of its wings gathered up the evening's last light. Then the creature rose. As the moth fluttered out into the night, her father had lifted his large strong hand and settled it on Rachel's shoulder a moment, not turning to her as he did so. A moth at twilight, a touch of a hand on her back. Something, Rachel thought.
As she rode back down the trail, she remembered the days after the funeral, how the house's silence was a palpable thing and she couldn't endure a day without visiting Widow Jenkins for something borrowed or returned. Then one morning she'd begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn't remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she'd realized again what she'd learned at five when her mother left-that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she'd worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother's voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.
And now this brown-eyed child. Don't love it, Rachel told herself. Don't love anything that can be taken away.
WHEN THEY'D LAID THE TRAIN TRACK THE PREVIOUS September, Pemberton worked alongside the three dozen men hired for the job. He was as broad shouldered and thick armed as any of the highlanders, but Pemberton knew his fine clothes and Boston accent counted against him. So he'd taken off his black tweed coat, stripped to his waist and joined them, first working with the lead crews as they used picks and shovels and wheelbarrows to move earth and remove stumps, make the fills and cuts and ditching. Pemberton cut trees for crossties and set them on the proper gradient, unloaded flat cars stacked with rails and angle bars and switch gear, laid down relay rails and hammered spikes and never took a break unless the other men did. They worked eleven hour days, six days a week, moving across the valley floor in a fixed line. What obstacles not dug up or filled in were leveled with dynamite or trestles. When a new piece of track was set down, the Shay engine lurched forward immediately to cover it, as though the wilderness might seize the rails if they weren't gripped and held by the iron wheels. From a distance, train and men appeared a single bustling entity, the steel rails left in their passing like a narrow gleaming wake.
He'd enjoyed the challenge of working with the men, the way they'd watched for a first sign of weakness, for Pemberton to linger by the water pail or lean too long on a shovel or sledge hammer. To see how soon he joined Buchanan and Wilkie on the porch of the newly built office. When a month had passed and all but the spur lines were built, Pemberton put his shirt back on and went to the office where he'd spend most of his time from that point on. By then he'd gained more than just the workers' respect. He'd found among them a capable lieutenant in Campbell, and Pemberton knew first-hand which men to keep and which to let go when Boston Lumber Company hired the actual cutting crews.
Among those Pemberton insisted be retained was an older man named Galloway. Already in his forties, Galloway was at an age when most loggers were too worn down and damaged to do the job, but despite his graying hair, small stature and wiry build, he outworked men half his age. He was also an expert tracker and woodsman who knew the region's forests and ridges as well as anyone in the county. A man who could track a grasshopper across caprock, workers claimed, as Pemberton himself had learned when he'd used Galloway as a hunting guide. But Galloway had spent five years in prison for killing two men during a card-game dispute. Other workers, many with violent tendencies of their own, gave Galloway a wary respect, as they did his mother, who shared a stringhouse with her son. When Pemberton had suggested they make Galloway a crew boss, Buchanan had been against the idea. He's a convicted murderer, Buchanan had protested. We shouldn't even have him in camp, much less leading a crew.
Now, a year later, Pemberton again suggested Galloway be made a foreman, this time as Bilded's replacement.
"It's the most undisciplined crew in the camp," Pemberton said between bites of his steak. "We need someone they'll be afraid to buck."
"What if he tries to buck us instead?" Buchanan asked. "Besides being a convicted murderer, he's surly and disrespectful."
"A crew won't be laggards for a foreman they're afraid of," Serena said. "I would argue that's more important than his lack of social graces."
Buchanan was about to continue the argument when Wilkie raised a hand to silence him.
"Sorry, Buchanan," Wilkie said, "but I'm siding with the Pembertons this time."
"It appears Mr. and Mrs. Pemberton rule the day," Doctor Cheney said, his tone becoming manneredly casual. "Your wife, Buchanan, I assume she plans to summer again in Concord?"
"Yes," Buchanan said tersely.
"Perhaps you have similar plans to return to Colorado for the summer, Mrs. Pemberton?" Cheney asked. "I'm sure the family manse is much grander than your present abode."
"No, I don't," Serena said. "Once I left Colorado I've never returned."
"But who looks after your parents' house and estate?" Wilkie asked.
"I had the house burned down before I left."
"Burned," Wilkie exclaimed in astonishment.
"Fire is indeed an excellent purifier after contagion," Doctor Cheney said, "but I suspect burning the bed sheets would have sufficed."
"What of your family's timber holdings?" Wilkie asked. "I certainly hope you didn't burn those as well."
"I sold them," Serena said. "It's money better used here in North Carolina."
"No doubt in a venture with Mr. Harris," Doctor Cheney said, setting down his fork. "Despite his bluster he's a crafty old fox, as I'm sure you ascertained when you met him."
"I suspect Mrs. Pemberton can hold her own against Harris," Wilkie said, and nodded at Pemberton. "And Pemberton too. I for one wish them well in any new ventures, whether it's with Boston Lumber Company or anyone else. We need people with confidence right now, else we'll never get out of this depression."
Wilkie turned his attention back to Serena, and smiled widely, smitten as Harris had been when he'd met her. Unlike the swains in Boston, these older men seemed unintimidated by Serena. Their withered genitals made her charms less daunting, Pemberton suspected, kept at an untouchable distance.
"I'm sure you feel the same, Buchanan," Doctor Cheney said, "in regard to the Pembertons' possible partnership with Harris."
Buchanan nodded, his eyes not on the physician or the Pembertons but the table's center.
"Yes, as long as our own present partnership is not neglected."
Except for the clink of silverware, the rest of the main course was eaten in silence. Pemberton did not wait for dessert and coffee but set his napkin on the table and stood up.
" Campbell 's left for the night so I'll go tell Galloway of his promotion. That way he'll be ready come morning," Pemberton said, and turned to Serena. "I'll meet you back at the house. I won't be long."
As he came into the office, Pemberton saw Campbell had left two letters on the desk, a Boston postmark on each.
Pemberton stepped off the porch into the summer evening. Fireflies winked as the sun settled behind Balsam Mountain. In the distance a whippoorwill called. Next to the dining hall a rusty fifty-gallon drum smoldered with supper's detritus. Pemberton dropped the unopened letters into its fire and walked on. He stepped onto the train rails he'd help lay and followed them toward the last stringhouse where Galloway lived with his mother. She was granted great deference by all in the camp, and Pemberton had assumed it was because Galloway was her son. He'd noted as much to Campbell one afternoon as they watched the old woman, whose eyes were misted by cataracts, being helped up the commissary steps by two large bearded workers.
"It's more than that," Campbell said. "She can see things other folks can't."
Pemberton had snorted. "That old crone's so blind she couldn't even see herself in a mirror."
For the only time they'd worked together, Campbell had spoken to Pemberton without deference, his reply acerbic and condescending.
"It ain't that kind of seeing," Campbell had said, "and it ain't nothing to be made light of either."
Galloway met him at the door. The older man wore no shirt, revealing a span of pale skin stretched taut over shoulders and ribs, paired knots of stomach muscle. Veins on his neck and arms rippled blue and varicose, as if Galloway 's flesh could not fully contain the surge of blood within it. A body seemingly incapable of repose.
"I've come to tell you I've fired Bilded. You're the new crew foreman."
"I figured as much," Galloway replied.
Pemberton wondered if Campbell had come by and mentioned the promotion. He looked past Galloway into a room completely dark except for the glow of a coal-oil lamp on the table. The thick lamp glass made the light appear not just encased but fluid, as though submerged in water. Galloway 's mother sat before the lamp, eyes only inches from the flame. Her white hair was clinched in a tight bun, and she wore a black front-buttoned dress Pemberton suspected had been sewn in the previous century. Galloway 's mother raised her eyes and stared directly at him. Looking at the direction of my voice, Pemberton told himself, but it was somehow more than that.
"Anyway," Pemberton said, taking a step back, "I wanted you to know before morning."
As Pemberton walked back to the house, he passed a group of kitchen workers gathered on the dining hall steps. Most still wore their aprons. A cook named Beason strummed a battered Gibson guitar, beside him a woman nestling a steel-stringed wooden instrument in her lap. She bent over the instrument, long tangled hair obscuring her face. While her right hand strummed, the middle and index fingers on her left hand made rapid presses around the narrow neck as if probing for some obscure pulse, all the while singing of murder and retribution on the shores of a Scottish loch. Border ballads were what Buchanan called such songs, and claimed the mountaineers had brought them from Albion.
The Harmon girl had once sat out on these steps after supper as well, but he'd not paid her much attention until the evening Pemberton helped haul a maimed logger off Half Acre Ridge. It was full dark by the time they'd gotten the man to camp, and he'd been so tired and dirty he'd told Campbell to have his meal brought to the house. The Harmon girl had brought the food, and something had caught Pemberton's attention. Perhaps a glimpse of bosom when she laid the tray on the table, or a shapely ankle exposed as she turned to leave. Something he could no longer remember.
Pemberton walked on, the music fading behind him as he mused on the chain of events that had led to noon trysts, later a gutted man dying on a train depot bench, a child that surely had been born by now. How far back could you trace the links in such a chain, he wondered-past the Harmon girl being chosen that night to bring his food, past the tree shattering a man's backbone due to a badly notched trunk, past that to an axe unsharpened because a man drank too much the night before, past that to why the man had gotten drunk in the first place? Was it something you never found the end to? Or was there no chain at all, just a moment when you did or didn't step close to a young woman and let your fingers brush a fall of blonde hair behind her ears, did or didn't lean to that uncovered ear and tell her that you found her quite fetching.
Pemberton smiled at himself. Dwelling on the past, the very thing Serena had shown him he, and they, had no need of. And yet, the child. As he mounted the porch steps, Pemberton forced his mind to a Baltimore furniture factory's delinquent account.
THE following afternoon a worker on Noland Mountain was struck on the thigh by a timber rattlesnake. His leg swelled so rapidly that a crew foreman had to first cut free the denim pant with a hawkbill, then slash an X into each puncture. By the time the crew got the man to camp, his pulse was no more than a felt whisper. The leg below the knee swelled black and big around as a hearth log, and the man's gums bled profusely. Doctor Cheney didn't bother to take him into his office. He told the workers to set him in a chair on the commissary porch, where the man soon gave a last violent shudder and died.
"How many men have been bitten since the camp opened?" Serena said that evening as they ate supper.
"Five before today," Wilkie replied. "Only one of them died, but the other four had to be let go."
"A timber rattlesnake's venom destroys blood vessels and tissue," Doctor Cheney said to Serena. "Even if the victim is fortunate enough to survive the initial bite, lasting damage is incurred."
"I'm aware of what happens when someone is bitten by a rattlesnake, Doctor," Serena replied. "Out west we have diamondbacks, which reach six feet in length."
Cheney gave a brief half bow in Serena's direction.
"Pardon me," he said. "I should never have doubted your knowledge of venom."
"Their coloration varies here," Buchanan said. "Sometimes they are the yellowish complexion of copperheads, but they can also be much darker. Those called satinbacks are a purplish black, and believed much deadlier. I've seen one, a surprisingly graceful creature, in its own way quite beautiful."
Doctor Cheney smiled. "Another of nature's paradoxes, the most beautiful creatures are so often the most injurious. The tiger, for instance, or black widow spider."
"I would argue that's part of their beauty," Serena said.
"The rattlesnakes cost us money," Wilkie complained, "and not just when a crew is halted by a bite. The men get overcautious so progress is slowed."
"Yes," Serena agreed. "They should be killed off, especially in the slash."
Wilkie frowned. "Yet that is the hardest place to see them, Mrs. Pemberton. They blend in so well as to be nearly invisible."
"Better eyes are needed then," Serena said.
"Cold weather will be here soon and send them up to the rock cliffs," Pemberton said. " Galloway says that after the first frost they never venture far from their dens."
"Until spring," Wilkie fretted. "Then they'll be back, every bit as bad as before."
"Perhaps not," Serena said.
WINTER CAME EARLY. ONE SATURDAY MORNING men awoke in their stringhouses to find a half-foot of snow on the ground. Wool union suits and quilts were pulled from beneath beds, the makeshift windows boarded up with oilcloths, scraps of wood and tin, the splayed hides of bear and deer, other pelts including the tattered remains of a wolverine. Smaller gaps were bunged with rags and newspaper, daubs of tobacco and mud. Before stepping outside, the workers donned coats and jackets that had sagged on nails for six months. They walked down to the dining hall tugging at sleeves and re-forming collars. Most wore mackinaws, though others wore wide-pocketed hunting jackets, black frocks or leather jerkins. Some donned what they'd once worn in more prosperous or martial times-lined submarine coats and Chesterfields, moleskin suit tops, coats from the Great War. Some wore what had been passed down from their forbearers, frayed work coats of pre-twentieth-century vintage, including ones made of raccoon and buckskin, even older cloaks whose butternut and blue colors bespoke long-ago divisions in the county.
Snipes' crew worked the crest of Noland Mountain where snow lay deepest and the wind surged across the ridge, bending the upper halves of the biggest hardwoods. Dunbar lost his stetson when a gust sent it sailing off the mountain toward Tennessee, the hat spinning and turning, falling then rising like a wounded bird.
"I should have tied it to my head," Dunbar said glumly. "That hat cost me two dollars."
"Best that you didn't," Ross said. "You might have gone sailing off with it and not touched ground till Knoxville."
The crews ate lunch around a brush pile they'd cleared snow off and set fire to. The men huddled close, not just for warmth but to protect the flames from gusts of snowdrift that stung their faces like sand. They shed their gloves and held their numbed hands toward the fire as if surrendering to it.
"Listen to that wind howl," Dunbar said. "For the sound of it you'd think it could lift this whole mountain."
"Barely October and snow already on the ground," Ross said. "A hard winter's coming."
"My daddy said the wooly worms was wearing a thicker coat all summer and we're sure enough seeing the truth of it," Stewart said. "Daddy allowed that wasn't the only sign. He said the hornets was building their nests close to the ground."
"Them's pagan believings, Stewart," McIntyre said to his congregant, "and you best stay clear of them."
"There's some science in it," Snipes said. "Those wooly worms was growing thicker hair for to stand a hard winter. There ain't no pagan in that. Wooly worms is just using the knowledge God give them. The hornets the same."
"The only signs you need to follow is in the Bible," McIntyre said.
"What about that sign that says No Smoking on the dynamite shed," Ross noted. "You saying we don't need to follow that one?"
"You can make sport of it," McIntyre said to Ross, "but this unnatural weather is a certain sign we're in the last days. The sun will be darkened and the moon shall not give her light."
McIntyre looked up at the gray-slate sky as if it were some Gnostic text only he was capable of deciphering. He tipped his black preacher's hat heavenward, seemingly satisfied at what he'd seen.
"There will be famines and pestilences coming after that," McIntyre proclaimed. "There'll be nary a plant sprout out of the ground but thorns and you'll have grasshoppers big as rabbits eating everything else, even the wood on your house, and snakes and scorpions and all such terrible things falling out of the sky."
"And you think all this is going to happen any day now?" Ross asked.
"Yes, I do," McIntyre replied. "I'm certain of it as old Noah himself was when he built that boat."
"Then I reckon we better start bringing umbrellas with us to work," Ross said.
"Ain't no we to it," McIntyre said. "I'll be raptured up the day before it starts. It'll be you and the other infidels has to deal with it."
The men watched the fire for a few moments, then Dunbar looked down the south slope at the valley. Snow hid the stumps, but slash piles raised white humps across the landscape like burial mounds.
"Ain't as many critter tracks as you'd think."
"They've hightailed on over to Tennessee," Ross said. "That's the direction we're herding them and they've give up fighting it."
"Maybe they got word of the new park over that way," Snipes said, "figured they'd be left alone there since all the two-legged critters have near been run out."
"They run my uncle off his place last week," Dunbar said. "Said it was eminent domain."
"What does eminent domain mean?" Stewart asked.
"It means you're shit out of luck," Ross said.
"What's the name of the hermit fellow down in Deep Creek," Dunbar asked, "the one who writes the books?"
"Kephart," Ross said.
"Yeah," Dunbar said, "him and that newspaperman in Asheville is hep on this land for the park too. Got some big bugs up in Washington on their side."
"They'll need them," Ross said. "You can count on Harris and the Pembertons fattening every wallet from the county courthouse up to the governor's mansion."
"Not Sheriff McDowell's pocket," Dunbar argued. "He never kowtowed to them from the very start. I helped lay the track, so I was here the morning Sheriff McDowell come and arrested Pemberton for driving too fast through town."
"I never knew you to have witnessed that," Stewart said. "He really threatened to handcuff him?"
"You're damn right he did," Dunbar said. "He was going to haul Pemberton off in his police car too but for Buchanan saying he'd drive him."
"I heard he kept Pemberton in that cell overnight," Snipes said.
"Not overnight," Dunbar replied. "No more than a hour before the magistrate got him out. But he put him in there, and there's not another in this county would of done that."
The flames began to wither, so Ross and Snipes got up and found more wood. They shook free the snow and gently placed the limbs crosswise on what lingered. The fire slowly revived, climbing the wood webbing like a plant ascending a trellis, flames coiling, coming forth then retreating, finally holding fast on one limb, then one more. The men watched the orange blossoming, not moving or speaking until all the branches had caught. McIntyre stared especially intently, as though awaiting another prophecy.
The snow came in thicker flakes, whitening Dunbar 's bare head. He raked his fingers through his hair, held out to the others what flakes clung to his hand.
"It'd be a good day to see that panther's tracks with snow thick and soft as this," Dunbar said.
"If there's really a panther left up here," Ross said. "Nobody's killed one in nine year."
"But folks claims to see it right regular," Stewart noted.
"Revelations says they'll be lions here when the judgment day comes," McIntyre said, still staring into the flames. "Leastways their heads will be. The yonder half of them will have legs no different than human people like us."
"Will they be wearing pants?" Ross asked. "Or is that just the whore of Babylon?"
Stewart stepped away from the fire, making sure the wind was at his back before freeing the copper buttons on his overalls.
"Be careful there, Stewart," Snipes said, "or you'll piss on Dunbar 's hat."
Stewart shifted his stream slightly eastward. He buttoned his overalls and sat back down.
"What about you, Snipes?" Dunbar asked. "You think there to be mountain lions up here or is it just folks' imaginings?"
Snipes pondered the question a few moments before speaking.
"They's many a man of science would claim there ain't because you got no irredeemable evidence like panther scat or fur or tooth or tail. In other words, some part of the animal in question. Or better yet having the actual critter itself, the whole thing kit and caboodle head to tail, which all your men of science argue is the best proof of all a thing exists, whether it be a panther, or a bird, or even a dinosaur."
Snipes paused to gauge the level of comprehension among his audience and decided further explanation was necessary.
"To put it another way, if you was to stub your toe and tell the man of science what happened he'd not believe a word of it less he could see how it'd stoved up or was bleeding. But your philosophers and theologians and such say there's things in the world that's every bit as real even though you can't see them."
"Like what?" Dunbar asked.
"Well," Snipes said. "They's love, that's one. And courage. You can't see neither of them, but they're real. And air, of course. That's one of your most important examples. You wouldn't be alive a minute if there wasn't air, but nobody's ever seen a single speck of it."
"And chiggers," Stewart said helpfully. "You'll never see one but you get into a mess of them and you'll be itching for a week."
"So you're saying you believe there's still a panther around," Dunbar said.
"I'm not certain of such a thing," Snipes said. "All I'm saying is there is a lot more to this old world than meets the eye."
The crew foreman paused and stretched his open palms closer to the fire.
"And darkness. You can't see it no more than you can see air, but when it's all around you sure enough know it."
BY LATE SUNDAY MORNING THE SNOW HAD stopped, and Buchanan and the Pembertons decided to go hunting a mile southwest of camp, a five-acre meadow Galloway had baited for a month. Wilkie, whose sporting life consisted of nothing more than an occasional poker game, stayed in Waynesville. Young Vaughn packed the Studebaker farm wagon with provisions, the gray wool golf cap pulled down over his red hair. Galloway had procured a farmer's pack of Plotts and Redbones considered the finest in the county. Galloway sat on the wagon's springboard seat with Vaughn, between them Shakes, the farmer's prize Plott hound, the rest of the dogs piled in back with the provisions. The Pembertons and Buchanan followed on horseback, crossing Balsam Mountain before veering east to enter a V-shaped gorge the mountaineers called a shut-in.
" Galloway 's baited the meadow with corn and apples," Pemberton said. "That'll bring deer, maybe a bear."
"Perhaps even your panther," Serena said, "following the deer."
"The deer carcass the men found on Noland last week," Buchanan asked Galloway. "How did you know a mountain lion didn't kill it?"
Galloway turned, his left eye narrowing. His lips veered rightward, as though trying to slide the smile off his face.
"Because its chest wasn't tore open. There's cats will eat the tongue and ears before anything else, but not a panther. It eats the heart first."
They followed the wagon as it swayed and bumped into the gorge, rock cliffs pressing closer on both sides as they descended. They went single file now, the horses' pastern joints deftly negotiating the narrowing slantland. Halfway down, Galloway stopped the wagon and examined an oak tree whose lower branches were broken off.
"At least one bear in this shut-in," Galloway said, "and goodly-sized to skin up a tree like this one done."
They soon passed directly under a cliff, spears of ice hanging from the rocks. At the tightest point, Vaughn and Galloway stopped and lifted the iron-rimmed left wheels one at a time over a rock jut, in the process spilling out three hounds and a larder filled with sandwiches. Pemberton paused to tighten his saddle's girth. After he finished, he looked up the trail and saw Serena thirty yards ahead, the Arabian blending so well with the snow that for a moment she appeared to ride the air itself. Pemberton smiled and wished a crew of loggers could have seen the illusion. Since her initial triumph over Bilded, the men ascribed all sorts of powers to Serena, some bordering on the otherworldly.
Finally the shut-in widened again, and they came to a bald where the trail ended. Galloway jumped into the back of the wagon and leashed the dogs.
"The brindled ones," Serena said. "What breed are they?"
"They're called Plotts, a local variety," Pemberton explained. "They're bred specifically for boar and bear."
"The broad chest is impressive. Is their courage?"
"Equally impressive," Pemberton said.
They took what was needed from the wagon and moved into the thickening woods, Galloway and Vaughn and the dogs well behind. The Pembertons and Buchanan progressed on foot now, the horses' reins in one hand, rifles in the other.
"Quite a few poplars and oaks," Serena noted, nodding at the surrounding trees.
"Some of our best acreage," Pemberton said. " Campbell 's found a stand of tulip poplars where the smallest is eighty feet high."
Buchanan walked beside Pemberton now.
"This stock market collapse, Pemberton. I wonder about its long-term effects for us."
"We'll be better off than most businesses," Pemberton replied. "The worst for us is less building being done."
"Perhaps the need for coffins will offset that," Serena said. "There's evidently quite a demand for them on Wall Street."
Buchanan paused, grasped Pemberton's coat by the elbow and leaned closer. Pemberton smelled Bay Rum aftershave and Woodbury hair tonic, which bespoke coifed hair and smooth cheeks as part of Buchanan's hunt preparation.
"So the Secretary of the Interior's interest in this land. You still say we shouldn't consider it?"
Serena was a few steps farther ahead and turned to speak, but Buchanan raised his palm.
"I'm asking your husband's opinion, Mrs. Pemberton, not yours."
Serena stared at Buchanan a few moments. The gold flecks in her irises seemed to absorb more light even as the pupils receded into some deeper part of her. Then she turned and walked on.
"My opinion is the same as my wife's," Pemberton said. "We don't sell unless we make a good profit."
They walked another furlong before the land briefly rose, then began falling at a sharper grade. Soon the meadow's white leveling emerged through the trees. Galloway had brought a tote sack of corn the previous day, and a dozen deer placidly ate the last of it. Fresh snow muffled the hunters' footsteps, and no deer raised its head as the Pembertons and Buchanan tethered their horses, walked on through the remaining woods and took positions at the meadow's edge.
They each picked out a deer and raised their rifles. Pemberton said now and they fired. Two deer fell to the ground and did not move, but Buchanan's ran crashing into the brush and trees on the other side. It fell, got up, then disappeared into the deeper woods.
Galloway soon joined the Pembertons and Buchanan, the Plotts and Redbones gusting Galloway in different directions as if the leashes were attached to low-flying kites. Once in the meadow, Galloway freed the strike dog and then the others. The hounds ran in a yelping rush toward the far woods where the wounded deer had gone. Galloway listened to the pack for a few moments before turning to Buchanan and the Pembertons.
"This shut-in ain't got but one way out. If you flank this meadow and put one of you in the center, there ain't nothing on four legs getting by."
Galloway crouched on one knee and listened, his left hand touching the snow as if he might feel the vibration of the dogs running in the woods below. The hounds' cries grew dim, then began steadily rising.
"You best get them fancy guns of yours ready," Galloway said. "They're coming this way."
BY late afternoon the Pembertons and Buchanan had killed a dozen deer. Galloway made a mound of the carcasses in the meadow's center, and blood streaked the snow red. Buchanan had wearied of the shooting after his third deer and sat down with his rifle propped against a tree, content to let the Pembertons make the last kills. Midday there had been the sound of ice unshackling from limbs, the woods popping and crackling as if arthritic, but now the temperature had dropped, the woods silent but for the clamor of the hounds.
What sun the day's gray sky had allowed was settling atop Balsam Mountain when the hollow cries of the Plotts and Redbones quickened into rapid barks. Galloway and Vaughn stood at the woods' edge, not far from where Pemberton waited, rifle in hand. The barks grew more resonant, urgent, almost a sobbing.
"Struck them a bear, a damn big one from the fuss they're allowing it," Galloway said, his breath whitened by the cold. "Mama told me we'd have some good hunting today."
As the hounds' barks lengthened and deepened into bays, Pemberton thought of Galloway 's mother, how her eyes were the color of pockets of morning fog the workers called bluejon, like mist filling two inward-probing cavities. Pemberton remembered how those eyes had turned in his direction and lingered. A way to stupefy the credulous, he knew, but done damn well.
"You best be ready, for that bear's coming and once he hits this meadow he won't be dawdling," Galloway said, and turned to Serena and winked. "He won't care if you're man nor woman neither."
Buchanan picked up his rifle and positioned himself on the clearing's left, Serena in the center, Pemberton on the right. Galloway moved behind Serena, his eyes closed as he listened. The hounds were frantically baying now, yelping as well when the bear turned and swatted at its pursuers. Then Pemberton heard the bear itself, crashing through the woods with the torrent of dogs in pursuit.
It came into the meadow between Serena and Pemberton. The bear paused a moment and swatted the largest Plott off its hind leg, the bear's claws raking the dog's flank. The big Plott lay on the snow a moment before rising and attacking again. The bear's paw caught the dog on the same flank, only lower this time, the Plott sent tumbling into the air. It landed yards away, the hide on the dog's right side shred thin as shoestrings.
The bear rushed onward, straight towards Pemberton, only twenty yards away when it saw the man and swerved left just as Pemberton pulled the trigger. The bullet hit between shoulder and chest, enough to make the animal fall sideways as its left front leg buckled. The hounds leaped upon the bear, draping the creature's midquarters. The bear rose onto its back legs, and the dogs rose with it like pelts hung around the bear's belly.
The animal fell forward, steadied itself for a moment before charging toward Pemberton, whose second shot clipped a Plott's ear before entering the bear's stomach. There was no time for a third shot. The bear rose and pressed its bulk against Pemberton, and he felt himself swallowed within a vast weighted shadow. His rifle slipped from his hand as the bear clutched him. Instinct pushed Pemberton deeper into the bear's grasp, so close the creature's claws could do no more than rake the back of his duckcloth hunting jacket. The dogs leaped upon them, lunging and snapping at Pemberton as if believing him now part of the bear. Pemberton's head pressed deep against the bear's chest. Pemberton felt the creature's fur and flesh and the breastbone beneath and the quickened beat of the heart and the heat stoked by that heart. He smelled the bear, the musk of its fur, its spilling blood, smelled the forest itself in the earthy linger of acorn each time the bear exhaled. Everything, even the cries of the dogs, became slower, more distinct and heightened. He felt the whole of the bear's bulk as it teetered slightly, regained balance, felt also the bear's front right limb batting his shoulder as it slashed at the hounds. The bear growled and Pemberton heard the sound gather deep in the bear's chest before rumbling upward into the throat and out the mouth.
The Plotts circled and leaped, holding onto the bear with teeth and claw a few moments before falling away only to circle and leap again, the Redbones yelping and darting in to snap at the legs. Then Pemberton felt the barrel of a rifle against his side, felt its reverberation as the weapon fired. The bear staggered two steps backward. As Pemberton fell, he turned and saw Serena place a second shot just above the bear's eyes. The creature wavered a moment, then toppled to the ground and disappeared under a moiling quilt of dogs.
Pemberton lay on the ground as well, unsure if he'd been shoved by the bear or simply fallen. He didn't move until the side of his face pressed into the snow began to numb. With the help of his forearm, Pemberton raised his head. For a few moments, he watched Galloway as the highlander stood amid the squabbling pack, leashing the hounds so Vaughn could drag them off the bear one at a time. Footsteps crunched toward Pemberton, then stopped. Serena kneeled beside him, her face keen as she brushed snow off his face and shoulders. After the sheer physicality of the bear's embrace, he felt a kind of lightness, as if his body had been set gently upon the calmest water.
Serena helped him to a sitting position, and Pemberton's head swirled for a few moments, left a residue of grogginess. Blood covered the snow, and Pemberton wondered if any of it was his. Serena pulled off his hunting jacket and lifted the wool shirt and flannel undershirt. She ran her hand across his back and stomach before pulling the clothing back down.
"I was sure it had gutted you," Serena said as she helped him put his jacket back on.
Pemberton watched tears well up in Serena's eyes. She turned and wiped her coat sleeve across her face. Seconds passed before she turned back to him. When she did, her eyes were dry, and Pemberton wondered if his muddledness had caused him to imagine the tears.
Buchanan was also beside them now. He lifted Pemberton's rifle out of the snow but seemed unsure what to do with it.
"You need me to help you get him standing?" Buchanan asked.
"No," Serena replied.
"What about his gun?"
Serena nodded to where her rifle leaned against a redbud sapling.
"Put it over there beside mine."
In a few minutes Galloway had tied the last hound to a tree. Vaughn kneeled beside the injured dog, one hand stroking the Plott's head while the other probed the wounds. Galloway walked over to the bear, kicked its massive haunches with his boot toe to verify the creature was indeed dead.
"This is a quality black bear," he said. "I'd bet him to go five hundred."
Galloway turned his gaze from the bear to Serena, letting his eyes slowly lift to take in Serena's boots and breeches and hunting jacket, finally her face, even then appearing to look not only at Serena but beyond her into the woods.
"I've never seen a woman shoot a bear before," he said, "and I've known but a couple of men with the sand to have gone right at him the way you done."
"Pemberton would have done the same for me," Serena said.
"You sure of that, are you?" Galloway said, a grin slicing his face as he watched Serena help Pemberton to his feet. "A bear's more to handle than a drunk like Harmon."
Vaughn held the injured Plott in his arms. The youth stepped closer to the bear, showing the dog the bear was dead.
"I know a feller up on Colt Ridge who could mount that bear's head for you, Mrs. Pemberton," Vaughn said, "or tan the hide if you notioned that."
"No, leave it with the deer," Serena said, and turned to Galloway. "Carcasses are used out west to draw mountain lions. I assume it would work here as well."
"Maybe," Galloway said, looking at Pemberton though he spoke to Serena. "Like I told your Mister when he first come to these mountains, if there's one still around it's big and smart. It could end up tracking him. Let it get close as that bear did, and he'll get more than a hug."
"If you find that mountain lion and get me one shot at it I'll give you a twenty-dollar gold piece," Pemberton said, glaring at Galloway before turning to Vaughn. "Or anyone else who can lead me to it."
They reloaded the farm wagon and started toward camp. Galloway drove while Vaughn cradled the injured dog in his arms. The rusty springs beneath the buckboard squeaked rhythmically as they rose and fell, and the swaying motion made it appear Vaughn was rocking the hound to sleep. In the wagon bed, the other dogs huddled against the cold. The land slanted upward, and thick trunks of oaks and poplars quickly filled in the white expanse behind them.
Once they got to the ridge crest, Pemberton and Serena let the others ride on ahead. Pemberton's pulse still beat quick, and he knew Serena's did as well. The trail soon became only a space between trees in the day's last light. Cold seeped in through sleeves and collars. They rode close together, and Serena reached out and clasped Pemberton's hand with hers. He felt the coldness of it.
"You should have worn gloves," he said.
"I like to feel the cold," Serena said. "I always have, even as a child. My father used to walk me through the camp on days the loggers claimed it was too cold to work. I shamed them out of their shacks and into the woods."
"Too bad you didn't at least save a photograph of that," Pemberton said, recalling how he'd once asked about family photographs and Serena had answered that they'd burned with the house. "It might stop some of our workers griping about the weather."
They rode on, not speaking again until they crossed the last rise and descended onto the valley floor. Camp lights blazed in the distance. No tree unsmoothed the landscape, and the snow was tinged blue. Pemberton noted how the faint light gave the illusion they traversed a shallow sea.
"I liked the way we killed the bear together," Serena said.
"You had more to do with killing it than I did."
"No, it was gut shot. I merely finished it off."
A few flurries swirled around them, sifted from a sky the color of indigo. The only sound was the crunch of snow under the horses' hooves. In the quiet darkening Pemberton and Serena seemed to have entered a depthless space only they inhabited. Not so different from when they cleaved in the night, Pemberton realized.
"Too bad Harris couldn't come along today," Serena said.
"He assured me he'll come next time."
"Has he said anything about the Glencoe tract?"
"No, all he wants to talk about is this national park boondoggle and how we have to band together to keep it from happening."
"I assume that we also includes our partners."
"They have as much to lose as you and I do."
"They're timid men, especially Buchanan," Serena said. "Wilkie's just gotten old, but it's Buchanan's nature. The sooner you and I are shed of them the better."
"We'll still need partners though."
"Then men like Harris, and, as soon as we can, partnerships where we have a controlling interest," Serena said as they moved through the snow-capped stumps. "I'm going to hire a Pinkerton and find out what's really going on in Tennessee with this park. I'll have him check out Kephart as well. See if he's as stellar a citizen as John Muir."
The woods no longer sheltered them from the wind, and cold air worked its way through jacket tears the bear had made. Pemberton imagined Serena in her father's timber camp, rousing the workers on days colder than this one.
"What you told Galloway is the truth," Pemberton said as they entered the camp. "If the bear had attacked you instead of me, I would have done the same for you."
"I know," Serena said, clasping Pemberton's hand tighter. "I've known it since the night we met."
WHEN RACHEL WENT TO THE BARN TO GET A cabbage sack for the ginseng, she found, for the third morning in a row, that no eggs warmed under the two bantams or the Rhode Island Red. A fox or weasel or dog would have killed the chickens as well, she knew, so figured it a possum or a raccoon, maybe a black snake come to fatten up for the winter. Rachel found the cabbage sack and left the barn. She thought about going ahead and getting the fishing pole and searching out a guinea egg. The sky was jay-bird blue, the day warmer than any in a week, but the chimney smoke wasn't rising but blowing down, so a change in the weather was coming, maybe by afternoon. Another snow would make the ginseng hard to find, and she couldn't risk that, so Rachel fetched the mattock from the shed but left the fishing pole. Something else I'll have to do when I get back, Rachel thought.
She wrapped Jacob in his bundlings, and they crossed a pasture whose barbed wire now kept nothing in, empty for the first time in her life. Rachel saw the trees they walked toward had all their fall colors now, their canopy bright and various as a button jar. Before long the land slanted up the north face of Colt Ridge. They entered a stand of silver birch and hemlock, which Rachel passed through without slowing down. Far off toward Waynesville, she heard a whistle and wondered if it was the lumber company train. She thought about Bonny and Rebecca, the two girls she'd worked with in the kitchen, and how much she missed being around them. And how she missed Joel Vaughn too, who could be a smart aleck, but had always been nice to her, not just in the camp but as kids on Colt Ridge when they'd been in elementary school together. He'd even given her a valentine in the sixth grade. She remembered how, after her belly showed and other folks in the camp shunned her, Joel hadn't.
The land's angle became more severe, the light waning, streaked as if cut with scissors and braided to the ridge piece by piece. Soon poplars and hickories replaced the softwoods. Rachel saw a witch hazel shrub and paused to pull off some leaves, their pungent smell evoking memories of chest salves and days sick in bed. Moss furred the granite outcrops a dark plush green. She walked slowly, looking not just for the four-pronged yellow leaves but bloodroot and cinnamon ferns and other plants her father had taught her signaled places where ginseng grew.
Rachel found the bloodroot first, under a shaded outcrop where a spring head seeped. She tugged the plants carefully from the ground and placed them in her sack. When she accidentally broke a stem, the red juice used for a tonic stained her fingers. A squirrel began chattering in a tree farther up the ridge and was soon answered.
Rachel stepped carefully across the boggy ground. An orange salamander scuttled out from beneath a matting of soggy oak leaves. She remembered how her father once told her never to bother salamanders in a spring because they kept the water pure. On the other side of the outcrop, she found more bloodroot and a thick growth of cinnamon ferns. The ferns felt like peacock feathers as she moved through them. They made a whispery sound against her dress, and the sound seemed to soothe Jacob because his eyes closed.
She entered another stand of hardwoods and there it was, the yellow leaves shimmering against the gloamy woods. Jacob was now asleep so she laid him down, loosening the bundling so she could fold some of the cloth back to cradle his head. Rachel dug a good six inches around the ginseng plant to insure she didn't cut the root. Then she pulled her dress up above her knees and kneeled in front of the plant, held the mattock's handle inches from the blade as she raked dirt from around the stem and tugged free a pale root shaped like a veiny carrot. She separated the berries from the ginseng plants and placed them in the broken soil, covered them up and moved on to the next plant.
They stayed in the woods until dark clouds began forming above the ridge crest. By then she'd searched out all the ginseng that could be found and gathered what other plants she'd wanted as well. As she and Jacob made their way out of the woods, Rachel's back already ached, and she knew it'd be sorer come morning. But the cabbage sack was a quarter filled, at least two pounds worth of roots she'd sell to Mr. Scott after they'd dried a month in the barn. Jacob was wide awake now, worming inside of the bundling, making it harder to hold the sack and mattock with her left hand.
"It ain't far now," she said, as much to herself as the child. "We'll put the mattock in the shed and take the Widow this bloodroot."
As they entered the pasture, Rachel heard dogs barking somewhere in the far woods and wondered if they were the same ones she'd seen at the cemetery. She walked faster, remembering a story she'd heard about wild dogs carrying off a child set down at a field edge. The child had never been found, only the bloody tatters of its blanket. Rachel watched the tree line until they were out of the pasture. She leaned the mattock against the shed, and they walked on to the Widow's cabin.
"I brought you some bloodroot," Rachel said, "for keeping Jacob the other day."
"That's sweet of you," Widow Jenkins said, accepting the handful of plants and placing them in the sink.
"I've got witch hazel too if you've got need of it."
"No, I've got a gracious plenty of witch hazel," the older woman said. "Did you dig up much sang?"
Rachel opened the sack and showed her the roots.
"How much you figure it worth when it dries?"
"I'd reckon Scott to give you ten dollars," Widow Jenkins said. "Maybe twelve if his lumbago ain't acting up."
"I was thinking it would be more than that," Rachel said.
"Before that stock market busted up north it might have been, but cash money's rare these days as sang."
Rachel stared at the hearth a few moments. The Widow always put some apple wood on the fire, not because it burned good but for the rosy color it gave off. A fire with apple wood in it is pretty to look at as any painting, the Widow claimed. Rachel felt the weight of Jacob in her arms and compared it to the cabbage sack's lightness. The weariness of carrying the child across the pasture and ridge, hardly noticed before, overwhelmed her. She set Jacob on the floor.
"That'll barely get us to spring," Rachel said. "As soon as I wean Jacob, I'll have to go back to work at the camp."
"I don't think you ought to do that," Widow Jenkins said. "I don't even like it that you go down there for Sunday church."
"I've sold the cow and horse and the saddle," Rachel said, "and now some varmint's stealing my eggs. There's nothing else I can do."
"What makes you think you can get your job back when there's folks lined up for every job in that camp."
"I done good work when I was there," Rachel replied. "They'll remember that."
Widow Jenkins leaned over, grunted softly as she lifted Jacob from the floor. She sat down in the cane back chair she kept by the hearth and settled the child in her lap. The fire's hue reflected in the old woman's spectacles, wavering in the glass like rose petals.
"You think that man is going to help you and this young one out," Widow Jenkins said, speaking in a soft flat way so it wasn't like a question or opinion but something that was simply the truth.
"Even if I was to think that, it don't matter as far as me going back," Rachel said. "I got to have some money to live on. That camp's the only place I know where there might be a job."
Widow Jenkins sighed and shifted Jacob deeper into her lap. She stared at the fire, her chapped lips pressed tight as she gave the slightest nod.
"So you'll keep Jacob if they'll hire me?" Rachel said, then paused. "If you don't, I'll find someone else to."
"I helped raise you so I can help with this one too," Widow Jenkins said, "but only if you wait till this boy's a year old. That way he'll be proper weaned. I won't take no pay for keeping him either."
"I wouldn't feel right if you didn't take some pay," Rachel said.
"Well, we'll worry about that when the time comes, if it comes. Maybe things will get better before then."
Widow Jenkins jostled Jacob with her knees. The child giggled, raised his arms outward as if balancing himself.
"But if it comes to that, this chap won't be no bother," Widow Jenkins said. "Me and him will get along fine."
When Rachel got back to the cabin, she spread the ginseng out on the cabbage sack so it could dry. The crows had settled into the trees and the squirrels tucked deep in their nests. The woods were hushed and attentive, the trees seeming to huddle themselves closer together, as if awaiting not just the rain but some story about to be told.
"We best find that guinea egg before the rain comes," she told Jacob. "We can check on the bees too."
They went into the woods behind the house, pausing first at the white bee box set at the wood's edge. Unlike during warm weather, Rachel had to lean close to hear them, their shifting huddle soft as a drowsy wind. The bee box's paint was chipped and fading, and she'd have to fix that by spring because white soothed the bees almost as much as smoke.
You have to tell the bees he died. They'll leave if you don't, Widow Jenkins had told Rachel the day of her father's funeral. It was something the old folks believed, and though Rachel wasn't sure if it was true or not she'd done it. She'd taken off her dark mourning clothes and put on a worn linen dress, then walked out to the shed to find the cheesecloth veil. It was white as well, made of muslin. By then almost all of the bees had returned for the night, only a few coming and going as she'd approached the box. Rachel remembered how she'd slowly opened the super, especially how clear and clean the smell had been, like moss on a creek bank. She'd spoken to the bees calmly, her voice merging with their own slurry voices. Afterward, as she'd walked back to the house in that late-June twilight, it had struck Rachel that someone at a distance might see her and easily mistake her for a bride. She'd also thought how, if that distance had been one of months instead of furlongs, taking her back to those winter middays she'd spent in Pemberton's bed, she could have imagined the same herself.
Jacob whined and Rachel felt the first drops of a cold drizzle.
"We better get that egg," she told the child.
It took a few minutes, because the guinea was good at hiding them, but Rachel finally found an egg in a wither of honeysuckle vines. Rachel pulled the bundling over Jacob's head, because the drizzle had quickened, tinged with ice that stung her face. She walked into the barn and set Jacob on a bed of gathered straw. The whispery sound of the drizzle hitting the tin roof made the barn feel snug, as if its broad-beamed shoulders had shrugged closer together.
Rachel went to the shed and unwound the hook and line from the fishing pole and returned to the barn. With the fish hook's barb, she chipped a small hole in the egg, then guided the hook's barb and shank into the yolk until no metal showed. Rachel delicately placed the egg back on the straw and tied the six feet of fishing line to a nail head. All this trouble because she was living so close to the bone a few pennies mattered, Rachel told herself bitterly. She and her father had had hard times before. When Rachel was seven they'd lost a milk cow that had eaten cherry leaves, and when she was twelve a hail storm had destroyed the corn crop. But even in the leanest times there'd always been a few dollars left in the coffee can stowed on the pantry's top shelf, a cow or horse in the pasture yet to be sold.
Sell it, it'll fetch a good price, Mrs. Pemberton had said when she'd handed Rachel the bowie knife. And it probably would, perhaps even as much as the ginseng, but Rachel couldn't abide doing what Mrs. Pemberton had commanded her to do. She'd sell the shoes off her feet before taking the knife out of the box trunk and selling it. Widow Jenkins would say Rachel was just being prideful, and maybe Preacher Bolick would agree, but she'd had enough proud shucked off her the last few months to believe God wouldn't begrudge her keeping just a little.
THE next morning Rachel found a raccoon crouched in the stall's corner, the fishing line tugging one side of the creature's mouth. Its pink tongue was panting. The raccoon's head did not turn when she opened the stall door. Only the black-masked eyes shifted. It wasn't the eyes but the front paws that made her hesitate. They looked like hands shriveled and blackened by fire, but human hands nevertheless. A year ago her father would have done this, done what he'd done when a big cur had come into the yard and killed a rooster, done what he did when a colt was born lame. What you had to do on a farm.
Let him go and he'll be back, Rachel told herself, and you won't catch him again because a coon's too smart to be fooled twice. It'll look for the line and hook and stay clear of that one while it takes every other egg in the barn. I don't even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, and she hadn't, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you're swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive.
It ought not be like that, Rachel told herself, and she knew that for a few folks it wasn't. They could make a wrong choice and be on their way with no more bother than a cow swishing a fly with its tail. That wasn't right either. Her anger made it easier to go to the shed and get the axe.
When Rachel stepped into the stall, the raccoon didn't move. She remembered her father saying a bobcat's skull was so thin you could crush it with your hands. She wondered if a raccoon's skull was the same. She tried to decide if it was best done with the axe head or the blade. Rachel lifted the axe a few inches off the ground, thinking how if she didn't swing true with the sharp end she could slice the line.
She turned the handle so that the blunt end was what she'd strike with. She aimed and swung and heard a crack. The raccoon quivered a moment and grew still. Rachel kneeled and worried the fish hook free from the raccoon's mouth. She looked at the fur, knowing if the raccoon had come a few months later cold weather would have thickened the pelt enough to sell to Mr. Scott. She picked the raccoon up by the tail and took it out behind the cabin and flung it into the woods.
THE EAGLE ARRIVED IN DECEMBER. SERENA HAD notified the depot master it would be coming and must be brought immediately to camp, and so it was, the six-foot wooden-slat crate and its inhabitant placed on a flat car with two youths in attendance, the train making its slow ascent from Waynesville as if bringing a visiting dignitary.
With the eagle came two small leather bags. In one was a thick gauntlet of goat skin to cover the forearm from wrist to elbow, in the other the leather hood and jesses and swivels and the leash, that and a single piece of rag paper that may have been instructions or a bill or even a warning but written in a language the depot master had never seen before but suspected was Comanche. The conductor of the train that brought the bird to Waynesville disagreed, telling of the strange man who'd accompanied the bird from Charleston to Asheville. Hair black as a crow's feather and wearing a dress so bright blue it hurt your eyeballs to look at it long, the conductor told the men at the depot, and a pointy fur hat. Plus a sword on his belt nigh tall as he was that give a fellow pause about making sport of the dress he wore. No sirrie, the conductor declared, that wasn't one of our Indians.
The bird's arrival was an immediate source of rumor and speculation, especially among Snipes and his crew. The men had come out of the dining hall to watch the two boys lift their charge off the flatcar, the youths solemn and ceremonious as they carried the crate to the stable. Dunbar believed the creature would be used as a messenger in the manner of a homing pigeon. McIntyre cited a verse from Revelations while Stewart suggested the Pembertons planned to fatten up the bird and eat it. Ross suggested the eagle had been brought in to peck out the eyes of any worker who closed them on the job. Snipes uncharacteristically ventured no theory about the creature's purpose, though he did give a lengthy discourse on whether or not men could fly if they had feathers on their arms.
Serena had the youths place the eagle in the back stall where Campbell had built a block perch of wood and steel and sisal rope. Serena then dismissed the two boys, and they walked out of the stable side by side, each matching his stride to his fellow's. They marched back to the waiting train and climbed onto the flat car and sat with legs crossed and faces shorn of expression, much in the manner of the Buddha. Several workers gathered around the car, inquiring of the eagle and its purpose. The youths ignored all imprecations. Only when the wheels turned beneath them did the two boys allow themselves condescending smiles aimed at lesser mortals who would never be entrusted as the guardians of things original and rare.
Serena and Pemberton remained in the stable, observing the eagle from outside the stall door. The bird's head was covered with the leather hood, and its immense yellow talons gripped the block perch inside the crate, the six-foot wingspan pressed tight to the body. Motionless. But Pemberton sensed the eagle's power as he might an unsprung coil of wrought iron, especially in the talons, which stabbed deep into the perch block's hemp.
"Those talons look very powerful," Pemberton noted, "especially the longer one at the back of the foot."
"That's the hallux talon," Serena said. "It's strong enough to pierce a human skull, or, as more often occurs, the bones of a human forearm."
Serena did not raise her eyes from the eagle as she reached out and took Pemberton's hand, but even in the barn's dim light he could see the intensity of her gaze. Serena's thin eyebrows arched as if to allow her vision to take in as much of the eagle as possible.
"This is what we want," she said, her voice deepening, the emotion so often controlled fully unbridled now. "To be like this always. No past or future, pure enough to live totally in the present."
Serena's shoulders shuddered, as if to cast off an unwanted cloak. Her face reassumed its look of measured placidity, the intensity not drained from her body but spread to a wider surface. They did not speak again until the Arabian shifted in the front stall and stamped its foot.
"Remind me to tell Vaughn to move the Arabian into the stall next to this one," Serena said. "The bird needs to get used to the horse."
"When you train the eagle," Pemberton asked, "you starve her, then what?"
"She weakens enough to take food from my glove. But it's when she bows and bares her neck that matters."
"Why?" Pemberton asked, "because it shows the bird has surrendered?"
"No, that's where she's most vulnerable. It means she trusts me with her life."
"How long will that take?"
"Two, perhaps three days."
"When will you start?" Pemberton asked.
"This evening."
Serena slept all afternoon, and at dinner she ate until her stomach swelled visibly. Afterward, she sent Vaughn to the commissary, and he returned with a chamber pot and a gallon bucket filled with water. When Pemberton asked about food or quilts, Serena told him she'd not eat or sleep again until the eagle did.
For two nights and a day Serena did not leave the stall. It was late morning of the second day when she came to the office. Dark half-moons lined the underside of Serena's eyes, her hair matted and straw-strewn.
"Come and see," she told Pemberton, and they walked out to the stable, Serena's gray eyes set in a heavy-lidded wince against the unaccustomed light. A heavy snow had fallen the day before and Serena slipped, would have fallen if Pemberton had not grabbed her arm and righted her.
"We should go on to the house," Pemberton said. "You're exhausted."
"No," Serena answered. "I need to show you."
To the west, gray clouds thickened, but the sun held sway in the center sky, the snow so bright-dazzling that as Serena and Pemberton entered the barn the day's light broke off as if cleaved. Pemberton still held Serena's elbow, but it was her eyes more than his that led them across the barn's earthen floor to the back stall. As Serena unhinged the stall door, the eagle's form slowly separated itself from less substantial darkness. The bird did not seem even to be breathing until it heard Serena's voice. Then its hooded head swiveled in her direction. Serena stepped inside the stall and removed the hood, placed a piece of red meat on her gauntlet and held out her arm. The eagle stepped onto Serena's forearm, gripping the goatskin as the head bowed to tear and swallow the meat between its talons. As the bird ate, Serena stroked the raptor's neck with her index finger.
"It's so beautiful," she said, gazing at the eagle. "It's no wonder it takes not just the earth but the sky to contain it."
Serena's tone of dreamy wonder was as disturbing to Pemberton as her feebleness. He told her again they should go to the house, but she didn't seem to hear him. Serena gave the bird the last hank of meat and settled it back on the block perch. Her hands trembled as they placed the hood back on. She turned and stared directly at Pemberton, her gray eyes glassy as marbles.
"I've never told you about going to our house after it burned down," Serena said. "I'd only been out of the hospital three days. My father's foreman, the man I was staying with, I'd told him to burn the house with everything left inside, everything. He hadn't wanted to do that, and even after saying he had I needed to make sure. He'd figured on that so he hid my boots and clothes, but I took one of his horses while he was gone, wearing just a robe and overcoat. The house had been burned, burned to the ground. The ashes were still warm when I stepped on them. When I got on the horse, I looked down at my footprints. They were black at first and then gray and then white, growing lighter, less visible with each step. It looked like something had moved through the snow before slowly rising. For a few seconds, I felt that I wasn't on the horse but actually…"
"We're going to the house," Pemberton said, taking a step into the stall.
"I didn't sleep when I was with the eagle," Serena said, as much to herself as to Pemberton. "I didn't dream."
Pemberton took her hand in his. He felt a limpness as if its last strength had been used to feed the eagle.
"All we'll ever need is within each other," Serena said, her voice barely more than a whisper. "Even when we have our child, it will only be an image of what we already are."
"You need to eat." Pemberton said.
"I'm not hungry anymore. The second day I was, but after that…"
Serena lost her train of thought. She looked around as if the thought might have drifted into one of the stall's corners.
"Come with me," Pemberton said, and led her by the hand.
Vaughn was outside the dining hall, and Pemberton motioned him over. He told the youth to get food and coffee from the kitchen. They walked slowly up to the house. Vaughn soon came with a silver platter normally used to hold a ham or turkey. Heaped on it were thick slabs of beef and venison, green beans and squash and sweet potatoes drenched in butter. Buttermilk biscuits and a bowl of honey. A coffee pot and two cups. Pemberton helped Serena to the kitchen table, placed the platter and silverware before her. Serena stared at the food as if unsure what to do with it. Pemberton took the knife and fork and cut a small piece of beef. He molded his hand around hers.
"Here," he said, and raised the fork and meat to her mouth.
She chewed methodically while Pemberton poured the coffee. He cut more pieces of beef for her and lifted the tin cup to her mouth so she could sip, allow the coffee's dense warmth to settle inside her. Serena did not try to talk, as if it took all her concentration to chew and swallow.
Afterwards, Pemberton drew her bath and helped Serena undress. As he helped her into the tub, he felt the terraced ribs and pinched stomach. Pemberton sat on the bathtub's rim and used soap and a washcloth to cleanse the reek of manure and livestock off Serena's skin. The thick tips of his fingers kneaded soap into her matted hair and quickly raised a lather so thick it gloved his hands white. A sterling silver pitcher and basin sat on the washstand, a wedding gift from the Buchanans. He rinsed Serena's hair with water poured from the pitcher. Yellow splinters of straw floated on the water's dingy surface. Outside, the sun had vanished and sleet had begun to fall. Pemberton helped Serena from the porcelain tub, dried her with a towel and helped her into her peignoir. She walked by herself to the back room, lay down and quickly fell asleep. Pemberton sat in the chair opposite the bed and watched her. He listened to the tapping of the sleet on the tin roof, soft but insistent, like something wanting in.
WHEN THE SICKNESS CAME UPON THEM RACHEL thought it was something picked up at the camp's church service, because it was a Tuesday when Jacob first glowed with fever. He fussed and his brow slickened with sweat. Rachel was no better off herself, fever sopping her dress and hair, the world off plumb and whirling like a spin-top. She laid cold poultices on the child's forehead and fed him clabber. She wet a paper and placed it around an onion and set it in the embers to bake, took the juice and mixed it with sugar and fed it to Jacob with a spoon. She used the witch hazel as well, hoping at least to clear his lungs. Rachel remembered how her father claimed a fever always broke on the third evening. Just wait it out, she told herself. But by late afternoon of the third day they both shivered as if palsied. She placed another log on the fire and made a pallet before the hearth, lay down with Jacob and waited for evening. They slept as dusk ambered the day's last light.
It was full dark when Rachel awoke, shivering though her calico dress was sweat-soaked. She changed Jacob's swaddlings and warmed a bottle of milk, but his appetite was so puny he did little more than gum the rubber nipple. Rachel pressed her hand to his brow, and it was just as hot as before. If it don't break soon I'll have to get him to the doctor, she said, talking aloud. The fire was almost out, and she laid a thick white oak log on the andirons, nestled kindling around it to make sure the log caught. She stirred the embers beneath with the poker, and sparks flew up the chimney like swarming fireflies.
The kindling finally caught and the room slowly emerged. Shadows scattered and reformed on the cabin walls. Rachel discerned shapes in them, first cornstalks and trees and then scarecrows and finally swaying human forms that steadily became more corporal. She lay back down on the pallet with Jacob, shivered and sweated and slept some more.
When Rachel woke, the fire had dimmed to a few pink embers. She pressed her palm to Jacob's brow, felt the heat against her skin. She lifted the barn lantern off the fireboard and lit it. We got to go to town, she told the child, and lifted him into the crook of her arm as her free hand clutched the lantern's tin handle.
She was feather-legged before they'd hardly left the yard, the lantern heavy as a brimming milk pail. The lantern spread a shallow circle of light, and Rachel tried to imagine the light was a raft and she wasn't on a road but on the river. Not even walking, just floating along as the current carried her towards town. She came to Widow Jenkins' house, and there was no light in its windows. She wondered why, then remembered the Widow had gone to spend New Year's week with her sister. Rachel thought about resting by Widow Jenkins's porch steps a few minutes but was afraid if she did she'd not get up.
For the first time since she'd left the house, Rachel looked at the sky. The stars were out, so many she'd have needed a bushel basket to gather them all. Plenty enough light to get her and Jacob to town, she decided, and set the lantern among the chicory and broom sedge bordering the Widow's pasture. Rachel felt Jacob's brow again and there was still no change. She shifted the child's weight closer so his head rested as much on her neck as her shoulder and they walked on.
The road followed the river now. A bat squeaked over the water, and Rachel remembered the shadowy barn loft, what she'd thought a rag draped over a cross beam. She'd brushed against the rag, and it had suddenly flapped alive and become tangled in her hair, a clawed flurry of wings trying to tear free, one leathery wing touching her face as it loosed itself and rose. Rachel had fallen to the loft floor, still screaming and raking at her hair even after her father had come and the creature had flown out the barn mouth.
The road curved closer to the river. Rachel could hear the water rubbing against the bank, smell the fresh soil loosened by recent rain. Another bat squeaked, nearer this time. The road narrowed and darkened, a granite cliff pressing close on the left side. On the right, willows lined the river, their branches leaning low overhead. The road slanted downward and the stars vanished.
Rachel stopped walking, too fevered to be sure where she was. It came to her that she'd taken a wrong turn and entered a covered wooden bridge, though she didn't understand how there could be a wrong turn if there was only one road. She felt something brush against her hair, then again. She couldn't see her feet, and she suddenly had a different notion, that the road had been washed out without her knowing it, the wooden bridge a detour that led back to the road. But that didn't make sense either. Maybe I just forgot there's always been one here, she told herself.
The sweat poured off her even more now that she'd stopped walking, not a good sweat like she'd get from hoeing in a field, but slimy feeling, like touching a snail. Rachel wiped sweat off her brow with the back of her forearm. A wooden bridge this long and dark would have bats, she knew, not just a few but hundreds of them clinging from the walls and ceilings, and if she touched the wall she would startle one and to startle one would startle them all and bring them flapping about her and Jacob in a rush of wind and wings. Something stirred her hair again. The breeze, it's just the breeze, she told herself. Rachel shifted Jacob lower in her arms, placed her free hand over his head.
The thought came to her again that this was a road she'd never been on, and she knew it could lead her anywhere. I've got to keep going, she told herself, but she was too afraid. Think of someplace good this road could take you, she told herself, someplace where you've never been. Think of that place and that you're going there, and that way maybe you won't be so afraid. She tried to imagine the map in Miss Stephens' classroom but all the map's colors blurred into one another, and after a few moments Rachel realized it wouldn't be marked on the map anyway. She imagined instead a woman standing in her front yard, who would see Rachel coming down the road and despite all the years would recognize her and call her name, come running to help her.
Walk a straight line, Rachel told herself. She took small slow steps, the same way she'd do in a cornfield with her feet following the tight furrows. Rachel imagined her mother clad in a white dress bright as a dogwood blossom, a dress whose buttons sparkled like jewels to help guide her and Jacob through the dark.
After a few yards the sky returned, widening overhead as the road made a sharp ascent, and Rachel saw she was on the right road after all. Rachel stopped to catch her breath and took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket to wipe the sweat off her brow, the tears flowing down her cheeks. She looked at the stars and they brightened and dimmed in accord with her breathing, as if one hard puff might blow the whole lot of them out like candles. She began walking again, and each step was like pushing through knee-high sand. Rachel told herself not to think about resting because if she did her body would take that thought and bull-rag it until she listened. Just a ways and you'll crest this hill, she told herself. She took one step and then another and finally the road leveled.
Rachel could see town lights now. For a moment the lights from the town and the lights from the stars merged, and Rachel had the sensation she and Jacob had come untethered from the earth. She clutched the child harder and closed her eyes. When Rachel opened them, she stared at her feet. She was barefoot, something she hadn't realized until that moment, but glad of it, because she could feel the pebbly dust sifted over the packed dirt, feel how it anchored her to the world.
Rachel let her eyes rise slowly, taking in the road ahead a few yards at a time, as if her gaze were a lever lifting the road and world back into proper alignment. She began walking again. The stars bobbed back up into the sky, and the town lights drifted down and reattached themselves to the earth. The bridge's shadowy outline became visible. Jacob woke and started fussing, though he was so puny as to sound like no more than a mewling kitten. We got to keep going, she told him, just one more hill and we'll be there.
Rachel moved downward toward the bridge, one that, unlike the covered bridge, she recognized. The trees crowding the bottomland grew taller, their branches narrowing the horizon, dimming the weathered planks and railing. They were only yards from the river when Rachel saw movement on the bridge, swirls like wisps of fog only more solid. Rachel took another step closer and saw it was three wild dogs snapping and snarling as they fought over a bloody white shirt. Two of the dogs each grabbed a sleeve and the cloth unfurled, and Rachel saw the shirt was her father's.
Rachel took two slow steps backward, then did not move. Jacob whined and she leaned to his ear and tried to shush him with soft words. When Rachel looked up, the dogs had quit fighting over the shirt. They watched her and Jacob, shoulder to shoulder, necks hackled and teeth bared. They ain't real, she said, and waited for her words to make it so. But the dogs didn't disappear.
Rachel edged over to the roadside, wondering if she might be able to wade across the river. Larger pieces of quartz and granite shoaled on the road's edge, made her wince as she looked for a breech in the trees. But there was no path down to the water, only more trees and a deeper dark where she'd be unable to find her way. She remembered the lantern, but it was too far back to fetch. The arm that held Jacob began to cramp, so she switched sides. Rachel felt the rocks underfoot and that gave her an idea. She stepped off the road edge and let her foot probe the thistles and broom sedge, finally find a fist-sized rock. She leaned and picked it up, then walked back toward the bridge.
"Git on now," she said and threw the rock, but the dogs still did not move.
She felt Jacob's forehead and the fever burned unabated. They ain't real, and even if they was I got no choice but to get past them, she told herself. Just watch your feet and don't look up and don't be afraid because a dog can smell the fear on you. Rachel took a step and paused, then took another, the pebbles and dirt sifting under her feet. Four more steps and her right foot landed on a plank. Feel how solid this bridge is, she told herself. Them dogs ain't real but this is, and it will get me and this young one to town.
Rachel took another step and both feet were on the grainy wood. She did not lift her eyes. The dogs remained silent, the only sound the river rushing beneath the planks. She closed her eyes a few moments, imagined not her and Jacob on a raft as she had before but the dogs adrift, the river carrying them farther and farther away. She opened her eyes and took more steps, and then she was back on a dirt surface and the road rose.
Rachel did not look up until she'd crested the last hill and was on Waynesville's main street. She stopped at the first house to ask where Doctor Harbin lived. The man who answered the door took one look at her and Jacob and helped them inside. The man's wife took Jacob into her arms while her husband telephoned the doctor. Lay down here on the couch, the woman told her, and Rachel was too weary to do otherwise. The room swayed and then blurred. Rachel closed her eyes. The dark behind her eyelids lightened a second, then darkened again, as if something had been unveiled but only for a moment.
WHEN Rachel came to it was morning. She did not know where she was at first, only that she'd never been tireder even after hoeing a field all day. A man sat in a chair beside the couch, the face slowly unblurring to become Doctor Harbin's.
"Where's Jacob?" Rachel asked.
"In the back bedroom," Doctor Harbin said as he stood. "His fever's broken."
"So he'll be ok?"
"Yes."
Doctor Harbin came over and laid his hand on her brow a few moments.
"But you still have a fever. Mr. and Mrs. Suttles said you can stay here today. I'll check on you again this afternoon. If you're better, Mr. Suttles will take you back home."
"I don't have the money to pay you," Rachel said, "at least not right now."
"I'm not worried about that. We'll settle up later."
The doctor nodded at Rachel's feet, and she saw they had been bandaged.
"You cut up your feet pretty good, but nothing deep enough to need stitches. That was almost a mile walk and you sick as him, and barefoot to boot. I don't know how you did it. You must love that child dear as life."
"I tried not to," Rachel said. "I just couldn't find a way to stop myself."