THE LINGERING COLD DEFIED ANY CALENDAR. From October until May, snow and ice clung to the ridges. Several men died when they slipped trying to avoid falling trees or limbs. Another tumbled off a cliff edge and one impaled himself on his own axe and still another was beheaded by a snapped cable. A cutting crew lost its way during a snowstorm in January and was found days later, their palms peeling off when searchers pried the axe handles from their frozen hands. Fingers or toes lost to frostbite were among the season's lesser hazards.
The harshness of the winter was many-storied among the workers who survived it. One man who'd wintered in Alaska argued this one worse, took off his work boot to show five blackened nubs as proof. Owls frozen on tree limbs, the moon wrapping itself in clouds for warmth, the ground itself shivering-all manner of tall tales were spoken and nearly believed. Several workers argued the denuded forests had allowed winter to settle deeper into the valley, so deep it had gotten trapped in the same way as an animal caught in a rabbit gum or dead-fall trap. Men searched the sky night and day for signs of the season's end, a laying down moon, geese headed north, creasy greens on the stream banks.
The surest sign came at the end of May when Campbell killed a timber rattlesnake while surveying on Shanty Mountain. When Serena heard, she ordered every dead rattlesnake placed in an old applecart next to the stable entrance. No one knew why. One logger claimed from personal experience that rattlesnake meat was eaten in Colorado, and though it was not to his taste others had considered it a delicacy. Another worker suspected the snakes were fed to the eagle because they were a part of the bird's natural diet back in Mongolia. When a crew foreman asked Doctor Cheney what Mrs. Pemberton would want the snakes for, the physician replied that she milked the fangs and coated her tongue with the poison.
Each dawn in the following weeks, Serena walked into the stable's back stall and freed the eagle from the block perch. She and the bird spent an hour each morning alone below Half Acre Ridge where Boston Lumber had done its first cutting. For the first four days Serena rode out with the eagle behind her in the applecart, a blanket draped over the cage. By the fifth day the bird perched on Serena's right forearm, its head black-hooded like an executioner, the five-foot leash tied to Serena's upper right elbow and the leather bracelets around the raptor's feet. Campbell constructed an armrest out of a Y-shaped white oak branch and affixed it to the saddle pommel. From a certain angle, the eagle itself appeared mounted on the saddle. At a distance, horse, eagle and human appeared to blend into one being, as though transmogrified into some winged six-legged creature from the old myths.
It was mid-July when Serena freed the eagle from the block perch and rode west to Fork Ridge where Galloway and his crew worked on the near slope. The day was hot and many of the men worked shirtless. They did not cover themselves when Serena appeared, for they'd learned she didn't care.
Serena loosed the leather laces and removed the eagle's hood, then freed the leash from the bracelets. She raised her right arm. As if performing some violent salute, Serena thrust her forearm and the eagle upward. The bird ascended and began a dihedral circle over the twenty acres of stumps behind Galloway's crew. On the third circle the eagle stopped. For a moment the bird hung poised in the sky, seemingly outside the world's slow turning. Then it appeared not so much to fall but to slice open the air, its body vee'd like an axe head as it propelled downward. Once on the ground among the stumps and slash, the eagle opened its wings like a flourished cape. The bird wobbled forward, paused, and moved forward again, the yellow talons sparring with some creature hidden in the detritus. In another minute the eagle's head dipped, then rose with a hank of stringy pink flesh in its beak.
Serena opened her saddlebag and removed a metal whistle and a lariat. Fastened to one end of the hemp was a piece of bloody beef. She blew the whistle and the bird's neck whirled in her direction as Serena swung the lure overhead.
They Lord God, a worker said as the eagle rose, for in its talons was a three-foot-long rattlesnake. The bird flew toward the ridge crest then arced back, drifting down toward Serena and Galloway's crew. Except for Galloway, the men scattered as if dynamite had been lit, stumbling and tripping over stumps and slash as they fled. The eagle settled on the ground with an elegant awkwardness, the serpent still writhing but its movements only a memory of when it had been alive. Serena dismounted and offered the gobbet of meat. The bird released the snake and pounced on the beef. When it finished eating, Serena placed the hood back over the eagle's head.
"Can I have the skin and rattles?" Galloway asked.
"Yes," Serena said, "but the meat belongs to the bird."
Galloway set his boot heel on the serpent's head and detached the body with a quick sweep of his barlow knife. By the time the other men returned, Galloway had eviscerated the snake, its skin and rattles tucked inside his lunch pail.
By month's end the eagle had killed seven rattlesnakes, including a huge satinback that panicked Snipes' crew when it slipped from the bird's grasp mid-flight and fell earthward. The men hadn't seen the eagle overhead, and the serpent fell among them like some last remnant of Satan's rebellion cast from heaven. The snake landed closest to McIntyre and had just enough life left to slither a few inches and rest its head on the lay preacher's boot toe, causing McIntyre to fall backward in a dead faint.
Dunbar quickly finished off the snake with an axe while Stewart brought his spiritual mentor to consciousness by filling McIntyre's wide-brimmed preacher's hat with creek water, then dousing the unconscious man. Several wagers were made and then settled when Snipes' tape measure reached sixty-three inches from the triangle-shaped head to the last of the snake's twelve buttons.
"That eagle won't likely fetch her one bigger," Ross, the bet's winner, argued.
"Not less it flaps off to them jungles in South America and totes back a anaconder," Snipes interjected before pocketing the tape measure and wire-rimmed glasses that, though lacking lenses, the crew foreman nevertheless insisted worked because the oval frames better focused his vision.
"I'm wondering if she's of a mind to train up a whole flock of them?" Dunbar asked.
"If she done it them snakes would be clearing out like Saint Patrick himself was after them," Snipes said.
"It would sure enough be a blessing," Dunbar said, "not to have to hold your breath every time you picked up a log or limb."
Ross stashed the handful of coins he collected into his pocket.
"If I had my rathers I'd take them rattlesnakes where the Good Lord put them," he said. "At least then you'd not have the worry of them dripping out of the sky onto you."
Stewart and Dunbar looked uneasily upward.
"You're disturbing the natural order of things is what you're doing," Snipes added. "Same as Pemberton offering his gold doubloon for the feller who flushes that panther out. If that thing really is around, all it's done up to now is put the skeer in a few folks, but you start bothering a critter like that it's untelling the trouble you're stirring up."
"Still," Dunbar said wistfully as his gaze lowered to take in the mountains of east Tennessee. "If I was to be the one to find that panther, a twenty-dollar gold piece would buy me a new hat, a sure enough spiffy one with a bright-yallar hatband and feather to boot. Money left over to get me a good sparking outfit too."
"If you was still around to wear it," Ross noted. "It might end up being your burying clothes."
McIntyre, now conscious but still sprawled on the ground, looked up as well. Some frightening new thought appeared to come to him. He attempted to speak but only a few inarticulate sounds came from his throat before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he passed out again.
"I heard Campbell built that eagle a perch in the stable," Dunbar said.
"I seen it," Snipes said, shaking his head with admiration. "He made it with a lead pipe and metal soldered off an old boxcar. Used that and a big block of hickory, put some sisal rope on top for the eagle to settle its claws in. I believe Campbell could make you a flashlight out of a tin can and a lightning bug. That bird sets there on that perch like a big old rooster. Don't blink nor nothing. It's partial to the darksomeness of that stable. Keeps it calm like the hood she puts over its head."
McIntyre moaned and opened his eyes briefly before closing them again. Stewart fetched more water, then seemed to think better of pouring it on the lay preacher so instead set the pail down. He took off his stricken mentor's coat and unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt, then dipped a soiled handkerchief in the water and pressed it to McIntyre's forehead as if a poultice. The other men watched as McIntyre's eyes flickered a few moments and opened. This time he did not attempt to speak. Instead, McIntyre solemnly removed a kerchief that had been around his neck and tied it around his head, covering his eyes.
"He ain't never been in such a way as this," Stewart said worriedly, and helped McIntyre to his feet. "I'm taking him back to camp so Doctor Cheney can look at him."
Stewart helped McIntyre down the slope, moving slow and all the while holding his mentor's upper arm firmly, as if leading a fellow soldier newly blinded in battle.
"I reckon you'd argue the snake didn't land on you because of that getup you're wearing," Ross said to Snipes.
"I don't have to argue it," Snipes said. "You seen well as I did where it landed."
"Well," Dunbar said, appraising the drabness of his own outfit. "I got me a shirt red as a mule-team tomato but I still ain't wearing it out here. I need me one thing pretty to catch a gal's eye."
The men paused to watch as Stewart led McIntyre down the ridge, pausing every few steps to nervously check the sky.
"That bird, it ain't from this country," Snipes said, pausing to tamp some tobacco into his pipe. "It's from Asia, a Mongoloid, and it's worth five hundred dollars so you best not be taking no pot shots at it. It's the same kind of eagle ole Kubla Khan used to hunt with, that's what Campbell says."
"That conversing you had with Campbell must have been the most he's said at one time in his life," Dunbar noted. "He's ever one to keep thoughts to his own self."
"A wise man always keeps his counsel," Snipes said.
"We've noticed," Ross said.
"One of the cooks claimed he seen Mrs. Pemberton training that bird one day," Dunbar said. "Dragged a dead snake around on a rope and ever time that bird tore off after the snake she'd give it a piece of prime-cut beef."
Ross had unpacked his lunch and stared dubiously at his sandwich. He slowly peeled back a soggy piece of white bread in the same manner he might a scab, revealing a gray slab of meat that appeared coated with mucus. For a few moments he simply stared at the fatback.
"I'd near about chase a dead snake around my ownself for a hunk of steak," Ross said wistfully. "It's been ever so long since I had a piece of prime cow meat."
"Put it betwixt a big yallar-butter biscuit and I'd near give up the promise of heaven," Dunbar said.
A raven flew overhead, wing shadow passing over the men like a dark thought. Dunbar flinched when he saw the bird's shadow, looked upward.
"I believe you're right, Ross," Dunbar said, still staring at the sky. "It's trouble coming from every direction now."
The men watched the raven disappear over Balsum Mountain.
"Her putting that eagle in the stable all night," Dunbar said. "Ain't she afeared of some fox or other varmint getting it?"
Ross looked up from his sandwich and nodded at the dead snake.
"If it can handle a boss rattler like that one it can handle anything on four legs or even two if it come to that. I'd no more strut up and tangle with that eagle than I'd tangle with the one what can tame such a critter," Ross concluded.
IT WAS CAMPBELL WHO TOLD PEMBERTON THAT the Harmon girl had returned to the camp.
"She's waiting over at the dining hall," he said. "She wants her old job in the kitchen back."
"Where's she been all this time?" Pemberton asked.
"Living up at her daddy's place on Colt Ridge."
"Does she have the child with her?"
"No."
"Who's going to care for the child while she's working?"
"A widow-woman who lives near her. She said she'd still live up there and take the train to camp." Campbell paused. "She was a good worker before she left last summer."
"You think I owe her a job, don't you?" Pemberton said, meeting Campbell's eyes.
"All I'm saying is she's a good worker. Even if we don't need her right now, one of our dishwashers is leaving end of the month."
Pemberton looked down at his desk. The note to himself to call Harris, which he'd done earlier, lay crumpled on the foolscap showing Serena's plans for a new spur line. Pemberton stared at the charcoal etching's precise rendering of topography, the carefully calibrated degrees of ascent, all done by Serena's hand.
"I'll have to talk with Mrs. Pemberton first," he told Campbell. "I'll be back in an hour."
Pemberton got his horse and left camp. He crossed Rough Fork Creek and wove his way up the ridge through the stumps and slash. He found Serena on a down slope giving instructions to a cutting crew. The men slumped in various attitudes of repose, but all were attentive. After the foreman asked a final question, the lead chopper began notching a looming tulip poplar, the only uncut hardwood left on the ridge. Serena watched until the sawyers began their work, then rode over to where Pemberton waited.
"What brings you out this morning, Pemberton?"
"I talked with Harris. Secretary Albright called over the weekend and wants to set up a meeting. Harris says he's willing to come here."
"When?"
"Albright's willing to accommodate us on that as well. He said anytime between now and September."
"September then," Serena said. "However this turns out, the more time we have to keep logging the better."
Serena nodded, her eyes rising beyond the tulip poplar to the ridge where crews had gained a first foothold above Henley Creek.
"We've made good progress in the last six months, even with the bad weather."
"Yes we have," Pemberton agreed. "We could be finished here in eighteen months."
"I think less than that," Serena said.
The gelding snorted and stamped its foot. Serena leaned slightly forward, her left hand stroking the Arabian's neck.
"I'd better go and check the other crews."
"There's one more thing," Pemberton said. "Campbell says the Harmon girl's in camp. She wants her old job in the kitchen back."
"Does Campbell think we should hire her?"
"Yes."
Serena continued to stroke the Arabian's neck, but she looked at Pemberton now.
"What I said at the depot, about her getting nothing else from us."
"Her wages will be the same as before," Pemberton said, "and like before she won't be living in camp."
"While she's at work, who cares for the child?"
"A neighbor will keep him."
"'Him,'" Serena said. "So it's a male."
The sawing paused for a few moments as the lead chopper placed another wedge behind the blade. Serena raised her left hand and settled it over the saddle pommel. Her right hand, which held the reins, settled over the pommel as well.
"You be the one to tell her that she's hired," Serena said. "Just make it clear she has no claim on us. Her child either."
The cross-cut saw resumed, the blade's rapid back-and-forth like inhalations and exhalations, a sound as if the tree itself were panting. The Arabian stamped the ground again and Serena tightened her fist around the reins, preparing to turn the gelding's head in the direction of the cutting crew.
"One other thing," Serena said. "Make sure she's not allowed around our food."
Horse and rider made their way back through drifts of snow toward the deeper woods. Serena upright, her posture impeccable, the gelding's hooves set down almost disdainfully on the whitened earth. Cut proud, Pemberton thought.
When Pemberton returned to camp, he went into the dining hall where Rachel Harmon waited alone at a table. She wore a pair of polished but well-worn black oxford shoes and a faded blue and white calico dress Pemberton suspected was the nicest clothing she owned. When he'd had his say, Pemberton asked if she understood.
"Yes sir," she said.
"And what happened with your father. You saw it yourself, so you know I was defending myself."
A few moments of silence passed between them. She finally nodded, not meeting his eyes. Pemberton tried to remember what had attracted him to her in the first place. Perhaps her blue eyes and blonde hair. Perhaps that she'd been almost the only female at the camp who wasn't already haggard. Aging in these mountains, especially among the women, happened early. Pemberton had seen women of twenty-five here who would pass for fifty in Boston.
She kept her head slightly bowed as Pemberton surveyed her mouth and chin, her bosom and waist and the white length of ankle showing below her threadbare dress. Whatever had attracted him was now gone. Attraction to any woman besides Serena, he realized, unable to remember the last time he'd thought of a past consort, or watched a young beauty in Waynesville and imagined what her body would be like joined to his. He knew such constancy was rare, and before meeting Serena would have believed it impossible for a man such as himself. Now it seemed inevitable, wondrous but also disconcerting in its finality.
"You can start the first of December," Pemberton said.
She got up to leave and was almost to the door when he stopped her.
"The child, what's his name?"
"Jacob. It comes from the Bible."
The name's Old Testament derivation did not surprise him. Campbell's first name was Ezra, and there was an Absalom and a Solomon in the camp. But no Lukes or Matthews, which Buchanan had once noted, telling Pemberton that from his research the highlanders tended to live more by the Old Testament than the New.
"Does he have a middle name?"
"Magill, it's a family name."
The girl let her eyes glance his a moment.
"If you was to want to see him…"
Her voice trailed off. A kitchen worker came into the hall, a mop and bucket in her hands.
"You can start first of next month," Pemberton said, and went into the kitchen to have the cook make him a late lunch.
IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS, MOST OF NOLAND Mountain had been logged and crews had worked north to Bunk Ridge before turning west, following a spur across Davidson Branch and into the wide expanse between Campbell Fork and upper Indian Creek. The men worked faster now that full summer had come, in part because there hadn't been a single rattlesnake bite since the eagle's arrival. As the crews moved forward, they left behind an ever-widening wasteland of stumps and slash, brown clogged creeks awash with dead trout. Even the more resilient knottyheads and shiners eventually succumbed, some flopping onto banks as if even the ungillable air offered greater hope of survival. As the woods fell away, sightings of the panther grew more frequent, fueled in part by hopes of earning Pemberton's gold piece. No man could show a convincing track or scrap of fur, but all had their stories, including Dunbar, who claimed during an afternoon break that something large and black had just streaked through the nearby trees.
"Where?" Stewart asked, picking up his axe as he and the rest of Snipes' crew perused the nearby woods.
"Over there," Dunbar said, pointing to his left.
Ross went to where Dunbar pointed and skeptically studied ground still damp from a morning shower. Ross came back and sat on a log beside Snipes, who'd returned to perusing his newspaper.
"Maybe it was that eagle," Ross said, "because there's nary a sign of a track. You're just hoping for that flashy hat."
"Well, I thought I saw it," Dunbar said gloomily. "I guess sometimes you've got the hope-fors so much it makes you imagine all sorts of things."
Ross turned to Snipes, expecting Dunbar's comment to provoke a philosophical treatise, but the crew foreman was immersed in his newspaper.
"What's in your paper that's got you so squinch eyed, Snipes?"
"They've got a big-to-do meeting about that park in two weeks," Snipes said from behind his veil of newsprint. "According to Editor Webb here, the Secretary of the Interior of the whole U S of A will be there. Bringing John D. Rockefeller's own personal pettifogger with him too. Says they're coming to make Boston Lumber and Harris Mineral Company sell their land or face eviction."
"Think they'll be able to do that?" Dunbar asked.
"It'll be a battle royal," Snipes said, "not a smidgen of doubt about that."
"They won't beat them," Ross said. "If it was just Buchanan and Wilkie they might, but not Harris and Pemberton, and especially not her."
"We better hope that's the way of it," Dunbar said. "If this camp gets shut down we'll be in the worst kind of fix. We'll be riding the boxcars sure enough."
"JUST Albright and Rockefeller's lawyer," Pemberton replied that evening as he and Serena prepared for bed. "Albright wanted no state politicians at the meeting. He said even with Webb and Kephart there we'll still have a five to four advantage."
"Good, we'll get this settled, once and for all," Serena said, her eyes settling on the Saratoga trunk at the foot of the bed, a trunk whose contents Pemberton had yet to see. "It jeopardizes more important matters."
Serena took off her jodphurs and placed them in the chifforobe. Overhead, a few tentative taps announced the hard rain promised all afternoon by clouds draped low across Noland Mountain. The rain steadily picked up pace, soon galloping on the tin roof. Pemberton began to undress, reminded himself to get his hunting boots from the hall closet. Don't fret none if it rains tonight, Galloway had told him that afternoon. Momma says it'll clear up by morning. She's counting on that as much as we are.
Serena turned from the chifforobe.
"What's the bard of Appalachia like, in person?"
"Stubborn and cranky as his buddy Sheriff McDowell," Pemberton said. "Kephart told me at the first meeting how it pleased him to know I'd die and eventually my coffin would rot, and how then I'd be nourishing the earth instead of destroying it."
"Which is one more thing he's wrong about," Serena said. "I'll make sure of that, for both of us. What else?"
"He's also overly fond of the bottle, not nearly the saint the newspapers and politicians make of him."
"Though they have to make him appear so," Serena said. "He's their new Muir."
"Galloway says we'll be going right past Kephart's cabin tomorrow, so you could see the great man himself."
"I'll meet him soon enough," Serena said. "Besides, Campbell and I are putting down the stobs for the new spur line."
Serena stepped out of her undergarments. As Pemberton gazed at her, he wondered if it was possible that a time would come when he'd look at her naked and not be stunned. He couldn't imagine such a moment, believed instead that Serena's beauty was like certain laws of math and physics, fixed and immutable. She walks in beauty. Words recited years ago in a voice dry as the chalk dust choking the classroom's air, part of a poem Pemberton had paid attention to only so he might laugh at its sentiment. But now he knew the truth of the words, for Serena's beauty was like that-something the world opened a guarded space around so it could go forth unsullied.
After they'd coupled, Pemberton listened to Serena's soft breaths mingle with the rain hitting the roof. She slept well now, in a deepness beyond dreams, she claimed. It had been that way since she'd stayed in the stable with the eagle, as though the nightmares had come those two sleepless nights and, with no dream to enter, gone elsewhere, the way ghosts might who find a house they've haunted suddenly vacated.
The rain stopped during the night, the sky blue and cloudless by midday. Scouting, not hunting, Galloway had called their trip, searching for tracks and scat, a fresh-killed deer carcass with its heart ripped out, but Pemberton took his rifle from the hall closet, just in case.
When Pemberton walked down to the office, he found not only Galloway on the porch but also Galloway's mother. She wore the same austere dress as last summer and a black satin bonnet that made her face recede as if peering from a cave mouth. The old woman's shoes were cobbled out of a reddish wood that looked to be cedar. Comical looking, but something else as well, Pemberton realized, a disconcerting otherness that was part of these mountains and would always be inexplicable to him.
"She likes to get out on a pretty day like this," Galloway explained. "Says it warms her bones and gets her blood to flowing good."
Pemberton assumed getting out meant the office porch, but when he walked over to the Packard, the old woman shuffled toward the car as well.
"Surely she's not going with us?"
"Not on the traipsing part," Galloway said, "just the riding."
Galloway did not give Pemberton a chance to argue with the arrangement. He opened the Packard's back passenger door and helped his mother in before seating himself beside Pemberton.
They drove toward Waynesville a few miles before turning west. The old woman pressed her face close to the window, but Pemberton couldn't imagine what her blighted eyes could possibly see. They shared the road with families returning from church, most walking, some in wagons. As Pemberton passed these highlanders, they characteristically lowered their eyes so as not to meet his, a seeming act of deference belied by their refusal to sidle to the road's shoulder so he might get around them easier. When they drove into Bryson City, Galloway pointed at a storefront, SHULER DRUGSTORE AND APOTHECARY lettered red on the window.
"We got to stop here a minute," he said.
Galloway came out of the store with a small paper bag, which he gave to his mother. The old woman clutched the folded top of the bag with both hands, as if the bag's contents might attempt to escape.
"She's a fool for horehound candy," Galloway said as Pemberton shifted the car into gear.
"Does your mother ever speak?"
"Only if she's got something worth listening to," Galloway said. "She can tell your future if you want. Tell you what your dreams mean too."
"No thanks," Pemberton said.
They drove another few miles, passing small farms, a good number inhabited only by what creatures sheltered inside the broken windows and sagging roofs, foreclosure notices nailed on doors and porch beams. In the yard or field always some remnant left behind-a rusty harrow or washtub, a child's frayed rope swing, some last forlorn claim on the place. Pemberton turned where a leaning road sign said Deep Creek, traversing what might have been a dry river bed for all its swerves and rocks and washouts. When Pemberton got to where the road ended, he saw that a car was already parked in the small clearing.
"Kephart's?" Pemberton asked.
"He ain't got no car," Galloway said, and nodded at a tan lawman's hat set on the dash. "Looks to be the high sheriff's. Him and that old man is probably out looking for pretty bugs or flowers or some such. The sheriff's near hep on naturing as Kephart is."
Galloway and Pemberton got out of the car, and Galloway opened the back door. The old woman was motionless except for her cheeks creasing and uncreasing like bellows with each suck of the candy. Galloway went around and opened the other back door as well.
"That way she can get her a nice breeze," Galloway said. "That's what she's been craving. You don't get no breeze in them stringhouses."
They walked down the path a hundred yards before the trees fell away to reveal a small cabin. Sheriff McDowell and Kephart sat in cane chairs on the porch. A ten-gallon hoop barrel squatted between them, on it a tattered topographical map draped over the barrel like a tablecloth. McDowell watched intently while Kephart marked the map with a carpenter's pencil. Pemberton placed a boot on the porch step, saw that the map encompassed the surrounding mountains and eastern Tennessee. Gray and red markings covered the map, some overlapping, some partially erased, as if a palimpsest.
"Planning a trip?" Pemberton asked.
"No," Kephart replied, acknowledging Pemberton for the first time since he'd stepped into the clearing. "A national park."
Kephart laid the pencil on the barrel. He took off his reading glasses and set them down as well.
"What are you doing on my land?"
"Your land?" Pemberton said. "I assumed you'd already donated it to this park you're wanting so bad. Or is it just other people's property that the park gets?"
"The park will get any land I own," Kephart said. "I've already taken care of that in my will, but until then you're trespassing."
"We're just passing through," Galloway said, beside Pemberton now. "Heard a panther might be roaming around here. We're just helping to protect you."
McDowell stared at the rifle in Pemberton's hands. Pemberton motioned at the map with the gun's barrel.
"You for that park, too, Sheriff?"
"Yes," McDowell said.
"I wonder why that doesn't surprise me," Pemberton said.
"Move on, or I'll arrest you for trespassing," McDowell said. "And if I hear that gun go off, I'll arrest you for hunting out of season."
Galloway grinned and was about to say something, but Pemberton spoke first.
"Let's go."
They walked around the cabin, then passed a woodshed, behind which a rusty window screen lay atop two sawhorses. On the screen were arrowheads and spear points, other stones various in size and hue, including some little more than pebbles. Galloway paused to inspect these, lifting one into the light to reveal its murky red color.
"I wonder where he found you," Galloway mused.
"What is it?" Pemberton asked.
"Ruby. These ain't big enough to be worth anything, but if you was to find a bigger one, you'd have something that sure enough would get your pockets jingling."
"Do you think Kephart found them around here?"
"Doubt it," Galloway said, tossing the stone back on the screen. "Probably found them over near Franklin. Still, I'll keep my eyes open while we're sauntering around the creek. Might be something hiding around here besides a panther."
They walked on past the woodshed and followed the trail into the forest. Few hardwoods rose around them, and those that did were small. After a while Pemberton heard the stream, then saw it through the trees, larger than he'd imagined, more a small river than a creek. Galloway's eyes focused intently on the sand and mud. He pointed to a small set of tracks on a sand bar.
"Mink. I'll be back to trap him this winter when his fur thickens up."
They moved upstream, Galloway stopping to peruse tracks, sometimes kneeling to trace their indentions with his index finger. They came to a deep pool, above it a boggy swath of mud printed with tracks larger than any they'd yet seen.
"Cat?" Pemberton asked.
"Yeah, it's a cat."
"I'd have thought there'd be claw marks."
"No," Galloway said. "Them claws don't come out until it's time to do some killing."
Galloway grunted as he settled himself on one knee. He placed a finger to the side of a track, pressed into the mud so water drained from the print.
"Bobcat," Galloway said after a few more moments. "A damn big one, though."
"You're sure it can't be a mountain lion?"
Galloway looked up, something of both irritation and amusement on his face.
"I reckon you could stick a tail on it and claim it for a panther," Galloway snorted. "There's fools that'd not know the difference."
The highlander stood up and stared at the sun to gauge the time.
"Time to go," he said, and stepped onto the bank. "Too bad Mama's with us or we could stay longer. If that panther's really around, come the nightfall we might hear him."
"What do they sound like?" Pemberton asked.
"Just like a baby crying," Galloway said, "except after a few seconds it shuts off of a sudden like something that's had its throat slashed. You'll have need to hear it only once to know what it is. It'll make the back of your neck bristle up like a porcupine."
They made their way back up the ridge, the sound of the stream's fall and rush dimming behind them. In a few minutes, Kephart's cabin came into view.
"Want to find out if that sheriff has some real sand in him or is just talk?" Galloway asked.
"Another time," Pemberton said.
"All right," Galloway said, veering right and crossing a small creek. "This way then. But I'm getting some water out of that springhouse. Mamai will be thirsty after sucking on that candy."
When they came to the springhouse, Galloway took a tobacco tin from his back pocket and poured out what crumbs remained in it. As Galloway filled the tin, Pemberton looked through the trees at the cabin. A chess board had replaced the map, and Kephart and McDowell stared at it intently. One of Pemberton's fencing partners at Harvard had introduced him to the game, claiming it was fencing with the mind instead of the body, but Pemberton had found the slow pace and lack of physical movement tedious.
The match was nearing its end, fewer than a dozen pieces left on the board. McDowell placed his finger and thumb on his remaining knight and made his move, its forward-left motion angling not only toward Kephart's king but also into the path of his rook. Pemberton thought the sheriff had made a mistake, but Kephart saw something Pemberton didn't. The older man resignedly took the knight with his rook. The sheriff moved his queen across the board, and Pemberton saw it then. Kephart made a final move and the match was over.
"Let's go," Galloway said, holding the tin so as not to slosh out the water. "I got better things to do than watch grown men play tiddly-winks."
They walked on, finding Galloway's mother just as they'd left her. The only sign that she'd made the slightest movement was the wadded paper bag on the floorboard.
"Brought you some cold spring water, Mama," Galloway said and lifted the tobacco tin to his mother's cracked purplish lips.
The old woman made sucking sounds as her son slowly tilted the container, pulled it back so she could swallow before pressing it to her lips again. Doing this several times until all the water had been drunk.
As they drove back to camp, Galloway looked out the window toward the Smokies.
"Don't worry," he said. "We'll get you a panther yet."
They rode the rest of the way in silence, following the blacktop as it made a convoluted circuit through the landscape's see-saws and swerves. Outside Bryson City, the mountains swelled upward as if taking a last deep breath before slowly exhaling toward Cove Creek Valley.
As they drove into camp, Pemberton saw a green pickup parked beside the commissary. Shakily affixed to its flatbed was a wooden building, steep-pitched and wide-doored, resembling a very large doghouse or very small church. On the sides in black letters R.L. FRIZZELL-PHOTOGRAPHER. Pemberton watched as the vehicle's owner lifted his tripod and camera from the truck's work shed, set up the equipment with the swift deftness of one long practiced in his trade. The photographer looked to be in his sixties, and he wore a wrinkled black suit and wide somber tie. A loupe dangled from the silver chain around his neck, the instrument worn with the same authority a doctor might wear a stethoscope.
"What's going on over there?" Pemberton asked.
"Ledbetter, the sawyer that got killed yesterday," Galloway said. "They're taking his picture for a remembering."
Pemberton understood then. Another local custom that fascinated Buchanan-taking a picture of the deceased, the photograph a keepsake for the bereaved to place on a wall or fireboard. Campbell stood behind the photographer, though for what reason, if any, Pemberton could not discern.
"Put this in the office," Pemberton said, and handed Galloway the rifle before walking toward the commissary to stand with Campbell.
An unlidded pine coffin leaned against the commissary's back wall, the deceased propped up inside. A placard bearing the words REST IN PEACE had been placed on the coffin's squared head, but the corpse's tight-shouldered rigidity belied the notion, as if even in death Ledbetter anticipated another falling tree. Frizzell squeezed the shutter release. On one side of the coffin was a haggard woman Pemberton assumed was Ledbetter's wife, beside her a boy of six or seven. As soon as a click confirmed the picture taken, two sawyers came forward and placed the lid on the coffin, entombing Ledbetter in the very thing that had killed him.
"Where's my wife?" Pemberton asked Campbell.
Campbell nodded toward Noland Mountain.
"She's up there with the eagle."
The photographer emerged from beneath the cloth, eyes blinking in the mid-afternoon light. He slid the negative into its protective metal sleeve, then went to his truck and took out a wicker fishing creel he slung over his shoulder before procuring another plate. Frizzell inserted the new plate before lifting the camera and tripod into his arms and making awkward sidling movements toward the dining hall where Reverend Bolick's congregation had taken advantage of the warm day and brought tables from the dining hall for an after-service meal. The food had been eaten and the tables cleared, but many of the congregants lingered. The women wore cheap cotton-print dresses, the men rumpled white dress shirts and trousers, a few in threadbare coats. The children were arrayed in everything from cheap bright dresses to jumpers fashioned out of burlap potato sacks.
Frizzell set up his camera, aiming at a child wearing a blue gingham smock. The photographer disappeared under the black cloth, attempting to hold the child's attention with all manner of gee-gaws brought forth from the wicker creel. After a toy bluebird, rattle and whirligig had failed, Frizzell rose from beneath the cloth and demanded the child be made to sit still. Rachel Harmon emerged from behind the other churchgoers. Pemberton had not seen her until that moment. She spoke to the boy quietly. Still hunched over, she backed slowly away as if afraid any sudden movement might startle the child back into activity. Pemberton stared at the child, searching for a feeling, a thought, that could encompass what lay before him.
When Campbell made a motion to leave, Pemberton grabbed him by the arm.
"Stay here a minute."
The photographer disappeared under the cloth again. The child did not move. Nor did Pemberton. He tried to make out the boy's features, but the distance was too great even to tell eye color. A flash of light and the picture was done. Rachel Harmon lifted the child in her arms. Turning and seeing Pemberton, she did not avert her eyes. She shifted the child so it gazed in Pemberton's direction. Her free hand brushed the child's hair behind its ears. Then an older woman came and the child turned away, the three of them heading toward the train that would take them to Waynesville.
"Pemberton took out his billfold and handed Campbell a five-dollar bill, then told him what he wanted.
That night Pemberton dreamed he and Serena had been hunting in the same meadow where they'd killed the bear. Something hidden in the far woods made a crying sound. Pemberton thought it was a panther, but Serena said no, that it was a baby. When Pemberton asked if they should go get it, Serena had smiled at him. That's Galloway's baby, not ours, she had said.
SHE HAD FORGOTTEN HOW MUCH LOGGERS COULD eat, how it was like stoking a huge fire that burned wood faster than you could throw it on. Rachel worked the early shift, the hardest because breakfast was the camp's biggest meal. She lit the lantern and took Jacob to Widow Jenkins each morning and then walked down to the depot and rode the train to camp, arriving at 5:30 to help fill the long tables, setting out first the tin forks and spoons and coffee cups, thick kaolin plates and bowls soon to be heaped with food. All the while the fire boxes roared, their mouths opened and stuffed with hickory, their heat passing through the thin pig-iron partitions into the twin thousand-pound Burton grange stoves. Inside the oven doors, puddles of bread dough rose and browned while on the stove eyes pots rattled and steamed like overheated engines. The kitchen thickened with smoke and heat, soon hotter and more humid than the worst July afternoon. Sweat beaded the workers' skin with an oily sheen as they came and went. Then the food itself was brought forth from the yard-wide oven racks, ladled and poured from the five-and ten-gallon pots, slid and peeled off black skillets big around as harrow discs. Gallon bowls were filled with stewed apples and fried potatoes and grits and oatmeal, straw bread baskets stuffed with cat-head biscuits, heaped platters of hotcakes and fatback, thick wedges of butter and quart mason jars of blackberry jam. Last the coffee, the steaming pots set on plates, cups of cream and sugar as well though nearly all the men drank it black.
For a few moments everything waited-the kitchen workers, the long wooden benches, the plates and forks and cups. Then the head cook took his gut-hammer and clanged the three-foot length of train track hung outside the main door. The timber crews came in, and for fifteen minutes the men hardly spoke to one another, much less to Rachel and the other kitchen workers. They raised their hands and pointed to empty bowls and platters, their mouths still working as they did so. After fifteen minutes passed, the work bell rang. The men left so quickly their cast-down forks and spoons seemed to retain a slight vibration, like pond water rippling after a splash.
The tables were cleared immediately, but the dishwashing and preparation for the next meal were put off until after the kitchen staff themselves ate. Rachel had always found these moments the best in the workday. The chance to catch a breath after the rush of feeding the men, to talk to some of the folks who worked with her, it was something she'd looked forward to after months hardly speaking to an adult besides Widow Jenkins. But Bonny had gotten married and moved to South Carolina, and Rebecca had been fired. The older women hadn't had much to do with her before and even less so now. Rebecca's replacement, a woman named Cora Pinson from Grassy Bald, hadn't been especially friendly either, but she was younger than the other women and a new hire. After three weeks of eating alone, Rachel set her plate down where Cora and Mabel Sorrels had a table to themselves.
"Would you mind if I was to sit with you?" Rachel asked.
Mrs. Sorrels just stared at her as if she wasn't worth the bother of replying to. It was Cora Pinson who spoke.
"I don't sit with whores."
The two women lifted up their plates and turned their backs to Rachel as they moved to another table.
Rachel sat down and looked at her plate. She could hear several of the other women talking about her, not bothering to whisper. Go ahead and eat like it don't bother you, she told herself. She took a bite of biscuit, chewed and swallowed it though it went down like sawdust. Rachel set her fork in a piece of stewed apple, but she didn't raise it to her mouth, merely stared at it. She didn't even see Joel Vaughn until he set his plate opposite her. He took off his blue and black mackinaw and draped it on an empty seat.
"Don't pay no mind to them old snuff mouths," Joel said as he pulled back a chair and sat down. "I see them every morning out back sneaking them a dip. Don't want Preacher Bolick to see that nasty tobacco juice dripping down their chins like brown slobber."
Joel said his words loud enough for the women to hear them. Rachel lowered her head, but a smile creased her lips. Cora Pinson and Mabel Sorrels got up in a huff and went to the kitchen with their trays.
Joel took off his gray cap, revealing the thatch of curly bright-orange hair that had been an uncombable tangle ever since Rachel had known him.
"That young one of yours is sprouting up like June corn," Joel said. "When I seen him Sunday at church I'd have not known who it was if you hadn't been holding him. I didn't know babies grew so fast, but I reckon us boys don't know much about such things."
"I didn't know it either," Rachel said. "I don't seem to know much about babies at all."
"He's stout and healthy, so I'd say that shows you know enough," Joel said, nodding at Rachel's plate as he reached for his fork. "You best be eating too."
He lowered his eyes and ate with the same fixed attentiveness as all the other men. Rachel looked at him, and it surprised her how much he had changed but not changed. As a child, Joel had been smaller than most of the boys, but he'd caught up in his teens, not just taller but wider-shouldered, more muscled. A man now, even a thin mustache over his lip. But his face was the same, freckled and easy to grin, a boy you knew had mischief in him. Smart as a whip, and kind, a kindness you could see in his green eyes as well as his words. Joel set the fork down and raised the coffee cup to his lips, took a swallow and then another.
"You've been doing good for yourself," Rachel said. "From what folks say you'll be an overseer like Mr. Campbell before too long. There's no surprise in that though. You always had the most smarts of any of us at school."
Joel's face reddened into a blush. Even his freckles appeared to darken.
"I just fill in where they need me. Besides, soon as I can find another job I'm leaving here."
"Why do you want to leave?" Rachel asked.
Joel met her eyes.
"Because I don't like them," he said, and turned back to his food.
Rachel looked at the clock by the doorway and saw it was time for her to get back to work. She could already hear the clatter of crockery and metal being washed and rinsed in the fifty-gallon hoop barrels, but she didn't want to get up. It had been so long since she'd talked to someone her own age. Rachel remembered how growing up she'd thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be.
"We had some good times at that school," she said as Joel finished the last bit on his plate. "I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it."
"We did have some fun," Joel said, "even if Miss Stephens was a grumpy old sow."
"I remember the time she asked where in the United States we'd want to go, and you said far as you could get from her and the schoolhouse. That really got her out of sorts."
The dining hall suddenly grew quiet as Galloway opened the side door and took a step inside, his head cocked slightly to the right as he scanned the room. He found Joel and jerked his head toward the office.
"I better go and see what old flop arm wants," Joel said, and got up.
Rachel got up as well, speaking softly across the table as she did so.
"Have you ever heard Mr. or Mrs. Pemberton say anything about me?"
"No," Joel said, his face clouding.
Joel looked like he wanted to say something more, and whatever that something more was it wouldn't be said in a playful tone or with a smile on his face. But he didn't. He put on his cap and mackinaw.
"Thanks for sitting with me," Rachel said.
Joel nodded.
As Joel went out the door, Rachel saw Mrs. Pemberton through the dining hall's wide window. Horse and rider moved briskly through the last crews walking toward the woods. Rachel watched until Mrs. Pemberton and the horse began their ascent onto the ridge. She raised herself from the chair, her eyes about to turn away from the window when Rachel saw her own reflection. She did not bend to pick up her plate but let her gaze linger. Despite the apron and her hair tied back in a bun, Rachel saw that she was still pretty. Her hands were chapped and wrinkled by the kitchen work, but her face was unlined and smooth. Her body hadn't yet acquired the sagging shapelessness of the other women in the kitchen. Even the soiled apron could not conceal that.
You're too pretty to stay covered up, Mr. Pemberton had told her more than once when Rachel waited until she was in bed to take off her dress and step-ins. She remembered how after the first few times there'd been pleasure in the loving for her as well as him, and she'd had to bite her lip to not be embarrassed. She remembered the day she'd walked through the house while he slept, touching the ice box and the chairs and the gilded mirror, Rachel also recalling what hadn't been there-no picture of a sweetheart hung on the wall or set on a bureau, just as there'd been no woman come down from Boston like Mrs. Buchanan had once. At least not one until Serena.
Someone called Rachel's name from the kitchen, but she did not move from the window. She remembered again the afternoon at the train station when Serena Pemberton held the bowie knife by its blade, offering the pearl handle to her. Rachel thought how easily she might have grasped the bowie knife's handle, the blade that had just killed her father pointed at the other woman's heart. As Rachel continued to stare at her reflection, she suddenly wondered if she'd been wrong about having had only one real choice in her life, that in that moment at the depot Serena Pemberton had offered her a second choice, one that could have made laying down in bed with Mr. Pemberton the right choice after all, even at the cost of her father. Don't think a thing that terrible, Rachel told herself.
Rachel turned and walked into the kitchen, setting her plate and fork on the oak stacking table before settling herself beside the hoop barrel closest to the back door. She picked up the scrub brush in her right hand and the slab of Octagon soap in the left, dipped her hands in the gray water and scuffed the wood bristles against the tan-colored soap to make her lather. As Rachel took up her first plate to clean, one of the other kitchen workers shouldered open the back door. In her hands was a tin tub filled with breakfast dishes and silverware from the office.
"Mr. Pemberton wants more coffee brought to his office," the woman said to Beason, the head cook.
Beason looked around the kitchen, his eyes passing over Rachel before settling on Cora Pinson.
"Take a pot of coffee over there," Beason said to her.
As Cora Pinson went out the back door, Rachel thought of Mrs. Pemberton astride the great horse, erect and square-shouldered, not looking anywhere but straight ahead. Not needing to, because she didn't have to care if someone stepped in front of her and the horse. She and that gelding would go right over whoever got in their way and not give the least notice they'd trampled someone into the dirt.
Smart of her, Rachel thought, not to allow me near her food.
THE MEETING WITH THE PARK DELEGATION WAS set for eleven on Monday morning, but by ten o'clock Pemberton, Buchanan and Wilkie had already gathered in the office's back room, smoking cigars and discussing the payroll. Harris also sat at the table, reading the morning's Asheville Citizen with visible ire. Campbell stood in the corner until Pemberton checked his watch and nodded it was time to get Serena.
"They're early," Buchanan said minutes later when the office door opened, but it was Doctor Cheney and Reverend Bolick instead. They came into the back room, and Cheney settled into the closest chair. Bolick held his black preacher's hat in his hand, but he sat down without being asked and placed his hat on the table. Pemberton couldn't help but admire the man's brazenness.
"Reverend Bolick wishes to have a word with you," Doctor Cheney said. "I told him we were busy but he was insistent."
The morning was warm and the preacher dabbed his forehead and right temple with a cotton handkerchief, not touching the left side of his face where the skin was withered and grainy, thinner seeming, as if once shaved with a planer. Caused by a house fire during his childhood, Pemberton had heard. Bolick placed the handkerchief in his coat pocket and set his clasped hands before him.
"As you have guests arriving soon, I'll be brief," Reverend Bolick said, addressing them all but looking specifically at Wilkie. "It's about the pay raise we've discussed. Even half a dollar more a week would make a huge difference, especially for the workers with families."
"Have you not seen all those men on the commissary steps?" Wilkie said, his voice quickly shifting from annoyance to anger. "Be grateful your congregation has work when so many don't. Save your proselytizing for your congregation, Reverend, and remember you serve here at our indulgence."
Bolick glared at Wilkie. The fire-scarred side of the preacher's face appeared to glow with some lingering of that long-ago violence.
"I serve only at God's indulgence," he said, reaching for his hat.
Pemberton had been looking out the window and now he spoke.
"Here comes my wife," he said, and the others turned and looked out the window as well.
Serena paused at the ridge crest before her descent. Lingering fog laid a thick mist on the ground and the ridge, but the morning's brightness broke full on the summit. Threads of sunlight appeared to have woven themselves into Serena's cropped hair, giving it the appearance of shone brass. She sat upright on the gelding, the eagle perched on the leather gauntlet as if grafted to her arm. As Bolick pushed back his chair to rise, Wilkie turned his gaze from the window and met Bolick's eyes.
"There's a true manifestation of the godly," Wilkie said admiringly. "Such an image gave the Greeks and Romans their deities. Gaze upon her, Reverend. She'll never be crucified by the rabble."
For a few moments no one spoke. They watched Serena descend into the swirling fog and vanish.
"I'll listen to no more of this blasphemy," Bolick said.
The preacher put on his hat and quickly walked out of the room. Doctor Cheney remained seated until Pemberton told him his services were no longer needed.
"Of course," Cheney said dryly as he got up to leave. "I forgot my input is needed only in matters of life and death."
Pemberton went to the bar and brought a bottle of cognac to the table, went back and got the crystal tumblers. Buchanan looked at the bottle and frowned.
"What?" Pemberton asked.
"The liquor. It could be perceived as a provocation."
Harris looked up from his newspaper.
"I was under the impression we were meeting the Secretary of the Interior, not Eliot Ness."
THE park delegation was twenty minutes late, by which time Wilkie had gone to the commissary for a bromide. Everyone shook hands, the visitors unsurprised when Serena offered hers. Pemberton surmised they'd been told she was not a woman of deference, and that it might help their cause to acknowledge as much. Except for Kephart, who was dressed in a clean flannel shirt and dark wool pants, the visitors wore dark suits and ties, lending the meeting a formal air despite the room's rusticity. Albright and Pemberton sat at opposing ends of the table. Davis, Rockefeller's lawyer, seated himself to the right of Albright, Kephart and Webb near the table's center. Cuban cigars and cognac were passed around. Several of the late arrivals took a cigar, but all in the visiting contingent politely declined the alcohol except Kephart, who filled his tumbler. Gunmetal-blue streams of cigar smoke soon rose, raveled into a diaphanous cloud above the table's center.
Harris folded the newspaper and laid it on the table.
"I see you've folded the paper to my most recent editorial, Mr. Harris," Webb said.
"Yes, and as soon as my constitution allows, I plan to wipe my ass with it."
Webb smiled. "I plan to write enough articles on this park to keep you well supplied, Mr. Harris. And I won't be alone. Secretary Albright informs me a New York Times reporter will arrive this weekend to write about what land has already been purchased, as well as complete a profile on Kephart's role in the park's creation."
"Perhaps the article will discuss Mr. Kephart's desertion of his family," Serena said, turning to Kephart. "How many children were left in Saint Louis for your wife to raise alone, was it four or five?"
"This is not really relevant," Albright said, looking at the table as if for a gavel.
"It's very relevant," Serena said. "My experience has been that altruism is invariably a means to conceal one's personal failures."
"Whatever my personal failings, I'm not doing this for myself," Kephart said to Serena. "I'm doing it for the future."
"What future? Where is it?" Serena said sarcastically, looking around the room. "All I see is the here and now."
"With all respect, Mrs. Pemberton," Albright said. "We are here to discuss a reality, the creation of a national park, not engage in sophistry."
"The sophistry is on your side," Harris said. "Even with the land you've bought, this park is still nothing more than a fairy dream on a goat hill."
"Rockefeller's five million dollars is real enough," Webb countered. "This country's eminent domain law is real enough also."
"So the threats begin," Harris said.
The door opened and Wilkie entered. He apologized profusely to all though Pemberton noted the old man's eyes were on Secretary Albright as he spoke. Albright stood and offered his hand.
"No need to apologize, Mr. Wilkie," Albright said as they shook. "It's good to finally meet you in person. Henry Stimson speaks highly of you as both a businessman and a gentleman."
"That's kind of him to say," Wilkie replied. "Henry and I go back many years, all the way to Princeton."
"I'm a Princeton man myself, Mr. Wilkie," Davis said, offering his hand as well.
Pemberton spoke before Wilkie could respond.
"We are very busy, gentlemen, so please tell us about your proposition."
"Very well, then," Albright said, as Wilkie took his seat. "The initial price we offered Boston Lumber Company for its 34,000 acres was, I admit, too low, and with the generous help of Mr. Rockefeller we can make a far more substantial offer."
"How much?" Pemberton asked.
"Six hundred and eighty thousand."
"Our price is eight hundred thousand," Pemberton said.
"But the land has been appraised at six hundred and eighty thousand," Davis objected. "This country is in a potentially long-term depression. In this market our offer's more than fair."
"What about my eighteen thousand acres?" Harris asked.
"Thirty-six thousand, Mr. Harris," Davis said. "That's two dollars an acre, and, as with Boston Lumber, a substantial increase on our initial offer."
"Not nearly good enough," Harris replied.
"But think how much you already have profited here," Webb said with exasperation. "Can't you give something back to the people of this region?"
Serena raised her index finger to her chin, held it there a moment as if bemused.
"Why is this pretense necessary, gentlemen?" she said. "We know what's going on with these land grabs. You've already run two thousand farmers off their land, that's according to your own census. We can't make people work for us and we can't buy their land unless they want to sell it, yet you force them from their livelihood and their homes."
Davis was about to speak but Albright raised his hand. The Secretary's visage achieved a profound solemnity Pemberton suspected was an innate talent of undertakers as well as career diplomats.
"An unfortunate aspect of what has to be done," Albright said. "But like Mr. Webb, I believe it's ultimately for the common good of all people in these mountains."
"And therefore all should sacrifice equally, correct?" Serena said.
"Certainly," Albright agreed, and as he did so Davis grimaced.
Serena took a sheaf of papers from her pocket and placed them on the table.
"This is part of the bill passed by the Tennessee legislature. In it are provisions stating that a number of wealthy landowners will be exempt from eminent domain. They get to keep their land, even though it's inside your proposed park. Perhaps your New York Times reporter can do an article about that."
"We had to have their support at that time," Davis replied. "If we hadn't, the park would have been doomed from the start. That was 1927, not today."
"We expect nothing more than to be treated like other wealthy landowners," Serena said.
"That just can't be done now," Davis said, shaking his head.
"Can't or won't?" Harris jeered.
"We'll get this land either way," Davis said, his voice now strident, "and if it's by eminent domain you'll be lucky to get half what we're offering now."
Albright gave a deep sigh and leaned back.
"No final answer is needed today," he said, looking at Buchanan and Wilkie, who'd been silent during the exchange. "Discuss it among yourselves. And consider the fact that Mr. Rockefeller is a businessman like all of you, yet he has given five million dollars. Think about how little in comparison we're asking of Boston Lumber Company."
Buchanan nodded. "We'll certainly discuss the matter."
"Yes," Wilkie said. "We appreciate your coming all this way to talk to us personally."
"My pleasure," Albright said and raised his hands, palms open in a gesture of mollification. "As I said, nothing need be decided today. We'll be in Tennessee this weekend but back in Asheville Monday. We're beginning negotiations with your fellow timberman, Colonel Townsend. His Elkmont tract has more virgin hardwoods than any land in the Smokies, yet we're offering you the same price per acre as him."
"He's taking your offer seriously?" Serena said.
"Very much so," Davis said. "He's smart enough to know a small profit is better than a big loss."
Secretary Albright stood and the rest of the delegation rose as well. Wilkie and Buchanan accompanied them as they walked back to the train.
"A total waste of time," Harris complained on the office porch.
"I disagree, Mr. Harris," Serena said. "We may have learned about a tract we can invest in together."
"Ah," the older man said, his smile broadening enough to show glints of gold. "That would be something, wouldn't it? Buying Townsend's land out from under them would really throw a monkey wrench in this park business."
Harris paused and watched as the train pulled out and headed back to Waynesville. He took out his car keys, jangled them loosely in his palm before enclosing them in his fist, mimicking a throw of the dice.
"Let's get it in touch with Townsend. They've mined copper on that tract. I don't know how much, but I can find out. This could be a boon for both of us, virgin hardwoods for you and copper for me."
Harris walked out to his Studebaker and drove off. As Pemberton and Serena walked toward the stable, Pemberton saw Buchanan and Wilkie lingered beside the tracks though the train had disappeared over McClure Ridge.
"I believe Buchanan's wavering."
"No, he's not wavering" Serena said. "He's already decided."
"How do you know?"
"His eyes. He wouldn't look our way, not once." Serena smiled. "You men notice so little, Pemberton. Physical strength is your gender's sole advantage."
Pemberton and Serena stepped inside the stable, pausing a moment to let their eyes adjust. The Arabian stamped his foot impatiently at Serena's approach. She unlatched the wooden door and led the gelding out.
"Wilkie wasn't as resolute as he usually is either," Pemberton said.
"Hardly," Serena said. "They stroked him like a housecat and he purred."
She paused and lifted the saddle, placed it below the horse's withers.
"So if Buchanan sides against us," Pemberton said, "you believe Wilkie could be swayed as well?"
"Yes."
"So what should we do?"
Serena led the Arabian to the mounting block and handed the reins to Pemberton.
"We'll rid ourselves of Buchanan."
She strapped the gauntlet on her right forearm and opened the adjacent stall where the eagle waited quiet and unmoving as a soldier at attention. It's a Berkute, Serena had told Pemberton the week after the creature arrived, much like the golden eagles she and her father hunted with in Colorado, only bigger and stronger, more fierce. The Kazakhs hunted wolves with them, and Serena had claimed Berkutes attacked even snow leopards given the opportunity. Looking at the eagle's huge talons and muscled keel, Pemberton believed it possible.
Serena emerged from the stall, the bird on her arm. She stepped onto the mounting block, then slipped her left foot in the stirrup and swung onto the saddle. Serena's legs and hips clinched the horses saddled midsection as she balanced herself. It was a deft maneuver, equal parts strength and agility. The eagle raised its wings a moment, resettled them as if also balancing itself.
"Are you still hunting with Harris Sunday?" Serena asked.
"Yes."
"Ask Buchanan to come along as well. Tell him it'll give the two of you a chance to discuss the Secretary's offer. On the way out there, talk to Harris some more about the Townsend land, maybe also mention the Jackson Country tract Luckadoo called you about. You probably won't have a chance to talk afterward."
Because? Pemberton almost said, but then understood. Serena stared fixedly at Pemberton, her pupils waxing in the barn's muted light.
"I need to get that second skidder up and running Sunday morning, but I could join you in the afternoon. I can do it, if you want me to."
"No. I'll do it."
"Another time for me, then," Serena said.
THE PARTY GATHERED SUNDAY MORNING IN FRONT of the commissary. Galloway suggested they hunt an abandoned homestead at the headwaters of Cook Creek, an apple orchard that had drawn game all winter. Fresh tracks showed plenty of deer yet lingered. Enough to draw any panther that might be around, Galloway had added, and told Pemberton to carry the twenty-dollar gold piece in his front pocket, just in case. Vaughn and Galloway and the hounds rode in the wagon while the other men followed on horseback.
The hunting party crossed Noland Mountain and then Indian Ridge, moving beyond the last timbered land. Buchanan and Harris rode side by side. Pemberton followed. Woods soon surrounded them, newly fallen leaves softening the trail. A few large hardwoods caught Pemberton's eye, but much of what they passed through was white pine and fir, near a creek a stand of river birch. Pemberton noted as much to Buchanan, who only nodded in response, his gaze fixed ahead of him. They began their descent into the gorge. The trail followed a creek, and Harris' eyes scanned the bedding of the exposed rock.
"Think there might be something of value here?" Pemberton asked.
"Up top there was granite, maybe enough for a quarry, but this is more interesting."
Harris tethered his horse to a sycamore and stepped across the creek. He ran his finger across the lighter color streaking an outcrop.
"Copper," Harris said, "though impossible to say how much without some blasting and sediment samples."
"But not coal?" Pemberton asked.
"Wrong side of the Appalachians," Harris said. "The Allegheny plateau, that's where the coal is. You have to go to Pennsylvania to find any on the eastern slopes."
Harris kneeled on the creek bank and used his fingers to sift through sand and silt. He picked out a few small stones, examined each a moment before flicking it into the water.
"Looking for something special?" Pemberton asked.
"No," Harris replied, and stood up, brushing wet sand off his corduroy breeches.
"I talked to Colonial Townsend last night," Pemberton said as the older man remounted. "He's as willing to sell to us as to Albright."
"Good," Harris said. "I know a geologist who's worked for Townsend. I'll have him send me a report."
"We also found nine thousand acres in Jackson County that looks promising, a recent foreclosure."
"Promising for who," Harris said brusquely. "That Glencoe Ridge tract was 'promising' as well, but only for you and your wife."
They rode on. The trail narrowed and they traveled single file behind the wagon, Buchanan first, then Pemberton. Harris trailed, still studying the landscape's geology. Buchanan wore a black split-tailed fox hunting coat ordered from London, and as they passed through the narrowest portion of the trail Pemberton kept his eyes on Buchanan's coat, using its dark cloth to better summon forth a picture of the past.
Buchanan's wedding had been at Saint Marks in downtown Boston. Unlike the Pembertons' civil ceremony, it had been a large and elegant affair, Buchanan and the groomsmen and the bride's father in tuxedos, the reception afterward at the Hotel Touraine. Buchanan and his bride had stood at the head of the receiving line as guests entered the ballroom. Pemberton had shaken his partner's hand and hugged Elizabeth. Pemberton recalled how small her waist had been as they embraced, an hourglass figure a recent photograph in Buchanan's office showed she'd retained.
Pemberton closed his eyes a moment, trying to raise an image of who'd been next in the receiving line. Buchanan's parents were dead, so it had to have been Elizabeth's parents. A dim face surfaced and then receded, nothing more than white hair and spectacles. Of the mother he could remember nothing, nor of Buchanan's siblings. Their lack of any lasting impression boded well, Pemberton realized. He'd always believed himself good at recognizing formidability in others.
"Your siblings, Buchanan," Pemberton said. "A brother and sister?"
Buchanan switched the reins to his right hand and turned.
"Two brothers," he said.
"And their occupations?"
"One teaches history at Dartmouth. The other is studying architecture in Scotland."
"And Mrs. Buchanan's father?" Pemberton asked. "What's his occupation?"
Buchanan did not answer. Instead he looked at Pemberton with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. Harris listened as well and entered the conversation.
"Such reticence must mean he's a bootlegger or bawdy house owner, Pemberton. Whichever it is, I'll make every effort to sample his product the next time I'm in Boston."
"I'm sure it's nothing unseemly," Pemberton suggested. "I thought perhaps a banker or lawyer."
"He's a physician," Buchanan said tersely, not bothering to turn around as he spoke.
Pemberton nodded. The coming negotiations would be easier than expected, good news he'd soon enough share with Serena. He'd call Lawyer Covington tonight and have him prepare the necessary documents to make an offer for Buchanan's third interest. His right hand felt the rifle holstered to the saddle. One well-aimed shot. Then it would be just Serena and him.
Soon the trees fell away and the men entered an old pasture. Locust fence posts still stood, draping brown tendrils of barbed wire. Milking traces were faint but visible, indenting the slantland like the wide steps of some Aztec ruin. Though wisps of fog held fast to the coves and valleys, sunlight leaned into the pasture. The air was bracing, more reminiscent of fall than spring.
"A good day for a hunt," Harris said, glancing skyward. "I was afraid it might start raining again, but from the looks of it we'll be able to stay out until evening."
Pemberton agreed, though he knew they wouldn't be gone that long. He would be back with Serena by early afternoon. Do this one thing, he told himself, reciting the words like a mantra, as he'd done since he'd awakened at first light.
They splashed through Cook Creek and soon came to the homestead. No deer grazed the orchards, so Galloway and Vaughn unleashed the dogs and they moved in a swaying wave across the orchard, quickly into the deeper gorge. Vaughn unloaded the wagon and gathered wood for a cooking fire.
"We'll give Harris the upper orchard," Pemberton told Buchanan. "You and I can take the lower."
Pemberton and Buchanan walked to where the orchard ended at a sagging farmhouse, beside it a barn and well. The well bucket dangled from a rotting rope, a rusty dipper beside the well mouth. Pemberton dropped the dipper into the darkness, unsurprised when he heard no splash.
"You take this side," Pemberton said. "I'll be near the barn."
Pemberton walked a few paces, then stopped and turned.
"I almost forgot, Buchanan. Mrs. Pemberton wanted me to tell you that you are wrong about the origin of 'feathered into.'"
"How so?" Buchanan asked.
"She says the phrase is indeed from Britain. The feathers referred to are the fletching of an arrow. If you've feathered into your opponent, the arrow's so deep the feather itself has entered the body."
Buchanan gave a slight nod.
Pemberton walked on toward the barn, the smell of hay and manure yet lingering inside the gray wood. The front had collapsed but the back portion's spine remained level. From the side, the barn resembled the petrified remains of an immense kneeling animal. As Pemberton got closer, he saw something on the barn's back wall. Little more than withered rags of skin and fur held by rotting nails, but Pemberton knew what it was. He touched a tawny boll of fur.
Half an hour passed before the Redbones' long-spaced howls quickened. Shortly thereafter a deer came into Harris' shooting alley. He fired twice and a few moments later a buck staggered through the orchard's center row toward Pemberton and Buchanan. The animal was shot in the hindquarters, and when it fell Pemberton knew it would not get up. Buchanan stepped into the orchard.
"Save your bullet," Pemberton said. "The dogs will finish it off."
"I can afford the damn bullet," Buchanan said, pausing to glare at Pemberton.
Pemberton released his safety, the click so audible in the crisp morning air that for a moment he thought Buchanan might have heard. But Buchanan's eyes stayed on the deer. The buck's head lifted, dark eyes rolling. Its forelegs treaded the air, the torso flinging blood as the animal tried vainly to rise. Buchanan aimed but the deer's writhing allowed no clean head shot. He took off the fine English hunting jacket and set it behind him. Laid on the grass but nevertheless neatly folded, Pemberton noted, a man of propriety to the very end. Something about Buchanan's fastidiousness extinguished Pemberton's last misgiving.
Buchanan placed the barrel against the buck's skull, pressed hard enough to hold the deer's head still. Pemberton stepped into the apple orchard and aimed his rifle as well.
VAUGHN had gone ahead of the party, racing back to camp on Buchanan's horse although Doctor Cheney would only be able to confirm what Vaughn and the rest of the hunting party already knew. It was early afternoon when the wagon crested the last ridge and rolled into camp. The scene appeared almost Egyptian, Buchanan wrapped inside an oilcloth, the Plotts and Redbones gathered around the corpse like the animals of old pharaohs accompanying their master into the afterlife. Pemberton and Harris followed the wagon, Buchanan's black hunting jacket tied to the hitch-gate's top slat like a banner of mourning. The wagon halted in front of the office.
The procession had barely come to a stop when Frizzell's green pickup jolted up beside the commissary. Pemberton suspected the photographer had heard there'd been an accident and assumed the dead man a highlander. Doctor Cheney and Wilkie stepped off the office porch. Sheriff McDowell, who'd been sitting on the cane ash stump, got up and walked over to the wagon as well.
For a few moments the three men did nothing but stare at the shrouded body. Galloway came around and lifted the hitch-gate from its tracks and shooed the Plotts and Redbones off the wagon. When the last dog was out, Doctor Cheney climbed aboard. He unwrapped Buchanan's corpse so it lay face upward on the planked bed, then probed where the bullet had passed through the heart before shattering the spine. Rifle, Cheney said softly, as much to himself as McDowell. Doctor Cheney picked up something from the wagon bed, rubbed the blood from its oval shape to reveal a dull whiteness. Sheriff McDowell placed his hands on the wagon's sideboard and leaned forward.
"Is that a button?"
"No," Doctor Cheney said, "a piece of vertebrae."
Wilkie's face paled. Sheriff McDowell turned to Pemberton and Harris, who were still on their horses.
"Who shot him?"
"I did," Pemberton said. "He was in the orchard. He was supposed to be farther away, over by the barn. I wouldn't have shot otherwise."
"Anybody else with you?" Sheriff McDowell asked.
"No."
McDowell looked at the dead man.
"Interesting how your shot hit dead center in the heart. I'd call that a rather amazing accident."
"I would call it an especially unfortunate accident," Pemberton said.
The sheriff raised his eyes, looking not at Pemberton but at Serena, who watched from the Pembertons' porch, a boot she was polishing in her right hand, a rag dabbed black in the other.
"Mrs. Pemberton doesn't seem particularly distressed by the loss of your partner."
"It's not her nature to make outward shows of emotion," Pemberton said.
"What about you, Wilkie?" McDowell asked. "Any suspicions as to why your partner might be shot, other than an accident."
"None at all," Wilkie quickly said, then walked toward the office, stepping through a mud hole he seemed not to notice until his right pant cuff got soaked.
Sheriff McDowell pulled the oilcloth over Buchanan's head and torso, the legs alone visible. Several loggers had wandered over to look into the wagon. They stared at Buchanan's corpse impassively.
"Put his body on the train," McDowell told the loggers. "I'm going to have an autopsy done."
As the men lifted the corpse out of the wagon, the sheriff looked over at Galloway, who stood amid the hounds.
"You got anything to add?"
"It was an accident," Galloway said.
"How do you know that?" McDowell asked.
Galloway nodded at Pemberton, baring a grin toothless but for a few nubs of brown and yellow.
"He ain't a good enough shot to do it on purpose."
McDowell turned to Vaughn, who had not moved from the buckboard. The youth looked frightened.
"What about you, Joel?"
"No sir," Vaughn said, looking at the floorboard when he spoke. "I stayed with the horses and wagon."
"Anything else, Sheriff?" Pemberton asked.
McDowell did not acknowledge the comment, but in a few moments he got in his car and left. Galloway herded the dogs back into the wagon bed. He took the reins from Vaughn and followed the police car's dusty wake out of the camp. Doctor Cheney lingered a few more moments, then walked toward his house. As Pemberton turned to join Wilkie on the porch, he saw the photographer's truck had left as well.
Wilkie sat in a ladderback chair. He dabbed his forehead with a blue silk handkerchief that was usually no more than an ornament. Pemberton joined Wilkie on the porch, pulling up a chair in front of his partner.
"It must give you pause to see someone three decades younger die so suddenly," Pemberton said. "As a matter of fact, I'd think it would persuade you to sell your third interest and go back to Boston, live out what time you have left in comfort instead of in these inhospitable mountains."
Pemberton shifted the chair closer, their knees touching now. Pemberton could smell the shaving cream mailed from Boston each month, see a small razor nick just below Wilkie's left ear lobe.
"Perhaps you were already thinking something similar when the politicians were courting you Thursday morning."
Wilkie looked not at Pemberton but at the silk handkerchief in his lap. The old man's gnarly fingers rubbed the cloth as if fascinated with its texture. It was an oddly childlike gesture, and Pemberton wondered if Wilkie was succumbing to dotage at that very moment.
"Mrs. Pemberton and I will pay half of what the park service offered for your share."
"Half?" Wilkie said, the proposal's unjustness rousing him to meet Pemberton's eyes.
"It's more than enough to live out your remaining years in comfort. Think of it as a kind of eminent domain."
"But half," Wilkie said, his voice teetering between dismay and anger.
The old man looked past Pemberton at a cur come down from one of the stringhouses. The dog hunched where the wagon had been, its long tongue licking dust moistened by Buchanan's blood. Another cur came, sniffed the ground and began licking as well.
"All right," Wilkie said bitterly.
"We'll draw the papers up this evening," Pemberton said. "Doctor Cheney is a notary and Campbell can be a witness. I'll have Campbell take the papers to Lawyer Covington tonight. We can have the complete transaction done at Covington's office tomorrow. And a handshake, of course. We are, after all gentlemen, even here in this forsaken landscape."
Pemberton offered his hand. Wilkie raised his also, but very slowly, as if lifting some invisible weight. The old man's palm was moist, and he made no effort to match Pemberton's confident grip.
Pemberton left Wilkie on the porch. He walked across the yard to the house and went inside. He found Serena looking out the back room's window at the stumps and slash that covered a quarter-mile before rising upwards to the ridge crest. Her boots dried in the corner on a piece of newspaper. The gray cotton stockings she wore were pulled off as well. In the muted light, Serena's feet and ankles shown pale as alabaster.
Pemberton came and stood behind her, placed his arms around her waist, his head leaned close to hers. Serena did not turn but eased back into him. He felt the curve of her hips against his groin, and desire seemed to fill not only his body but the whole room. The air felt charged with some small but discernable electrical current. What light slanted through the window gave the room a honeyed tinge.
"So it's done," Serena said, her right hand taking his and pressing it to her thigh.
"Yes."
"And the sheriff?"
"Suspicious, but he has no proof or witness to show it wasn't an accident."
"And our senior partner's agreed to sell his share?"
Pemberton nodded.
"What did you learn about Buchanan's siblings?"
"One's a student, the other a professor."
"Good news all around," Serena said, staring out the window. "You'll have to spend more time at the saw mill, at least at first, but we'll promote a foreman and hire a few new men. From what I've heard, it's the foremen who have run the day-to-day operation, even when Wilkie and Buchanan were there. Campbell can help eventually, but first he needs to walk the Jackson County land, Townsend's tract as well."
Serena's hand slid down a few inches, her fingers molding his to the curve of her thigh. Serena's gold band settled over Pemberton's. The current he'd felt since entering the room intensified, as if the touching gold provided a conduit for the energy to flow directly through Serena into him. Part of Pemberton ached to move his hand so he could lead her to the bed, but another part did not want to move, even slightly, lest the touching bands separated and the current became more diffuse. Serena seemed to feel the same energy, because her hand remained where it was. She shifted slightly, pressed her body deeper into his.
"You didn't shoot him in the back, did you?"
"No," Pemberton said.
"I knew you wouldn't. But concerns like that don't matter. We're beyond them, Pemberton."
"He's dead," Pemberton replied. "That's all that matters. It's over and done with and we've got all we wanted."
"At least for today," Serena said. "A start, a true beginning."
Pemberton bowed his head, smelled the French cologne he'd ordered at Christmas, which Serena wore only after her evening bath and only at his behest. He let its smell, the touch of his lips against her neck, overwhelm everything else.
Serena lifted her hand from Pemberton's and stepped out of his embrace. She began to undress, letting her clothes fall to the floor. When Serena was completely naked, she turned and pressed her body full against his. The pants he wore were still damp from helping carry Buchanan to the wagon, and when Serena stepped back Pemberton saw a thin smear of red on her lower stomach. Serena saw it as well but did not go to the bathroom for a washcloth.
Pemberton sat on the bed and took off his boots and clothes. He reached to open the lamp table's drawer for a condom, but Serena grasped his wrist, settled his hand firm against her hip.
"It's time to make our heir," Serena said.
THE PREVIOUS DECEMBER, BUCHANAN HAD suggested all the workers be given Christmas presents. If for no other reason a matter of morale, he'd argued to Pemberton and Wilkie, so Campbell, who'd been put in charge of the buying, went to Waynesville on Christmas Eve, taking Vaughn with him. This Christmas, on his own volition, Campbell did the same. He and Vaughn loaded a flat car with all manner of gifts from Scott's General Store, stopping at the saw mill to retrieve items purchased earlier. Once the train returned to camp, the flat car's bounty filled makeshift shelves on the commissary porch. Campbell and Vaughn unloaded and arranged the gifts, finishing well after midnight. Come morning, the camp's employees ascended the commissary porch. Campbell had chosen the gifts with a wide sympathy of taste and imagination, ordering what he could not find in Scott's General Store from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue and a Soco Gap moonshiner, so the workers had much to choose from with their fifty-cent allowance. Those with children came up first. Because Campbell wouldn't allow it otherwise, these men spent at least half their portion lightening the shelf that held licorice whips and oranges, another shelf of dolls and teddy bears and pop guns, bright-metal toy cars and toy train engines. While Vaughn checked off names, Campbell tabulated each worker's allotment in his head.
The rest of the workers came next and chose from fishing lines and fish hooks, hats more rakish than pragmatic, cigarette papers and pipes and jackknives and, placed discretely on a bottom shelf, pint jars of moonshine. On another set of shelves, items for wives and girlfriends and the women in the kitchen-lengths of calico and lace, scarves and perfume, hair braids and bracelets. Strewn among these more traditional offerings were Campbell's more esoteric choices. These gifts were singular in nature, a teakwood flute, a pair of red-and-green baseball stockings, a jigsaw puzzle of the United States. Though the workers could, not one ventured into the commissary itself, lest they be tempted to use their fifty cents in trade to acquire something more utilitarian, such as gloves or step-ins, a new axe head or wool socks. They instead wandered the porch, lifting one item, possessing it a moment, and then setting it aside to pick up another. An occasional quarter was flipped in the air, caught, and slapped on the back of the hand, leaving the final decision to some other power.
By mid-morning the shelves were half empty, yet there was a steady traffic up and down the porch steps, among them workers brought by train from Waynesville, occupants of the stringhouses who decided a few rare hours of extra sleep worth a more desirous gift. Snipes and his crew had been among the early arrivals. Except for Stewart, who'd left to eat a Christmas meal at Preacher McIntyre's house, the crew remained, watching the comings and goings from the dining hall's porch steps. Their gifts were already on display. Snipes' red-and-green baseball stockings sprouted out of his brogans to cover his overalls up to his knees. Dunbar donned his felt hat that, though a dusty brown, had a rakish tilt to its brim. Ross had chosen the moonshine, most of which now smoldered in his stomach.
Ross raised his pint jar and took another swallow. His eyes watered and his lips made a fleshy O as he vigorously exhaled a plume of white breath.
"I'm ever amazed Santy Claus had the grit to come to this camp," he said, "especially after what happened to Buchanan."
"He wouldn't have if it hadn't been for Campbell just up and doing it without asking," Snipes said.
"They'd of fired any other man but him for that," Dunbar noted, "buying them gifts without asking, I mean."
"He knows they need him more than ever with Buchanan and Wilkie gone," Ross said. "Campbell's a good man but he's nobody's fool, and he's going to look after his own hide when it starts getting scorched."
"Still," Dunbar said, "there's not many a overseer would have done this for us."
"I'd not argue against that," Ross conceded.
The men turned their gazes to the commissary porch, where Rachel Harmon was setting her gifts before Campbell.
"Looks to be she picked nothing but denim cloth and a play-pretty for her young one," Snipes said. "I remember last year she got good-smelling soap and a fancy hair-bow."
"She was giggling and acting silly with them other kitchen girls all the while," Dunbar said, "but she don't look to be giggling much these days."
"Having a child and no daddy tends to take the giggle out of a gal," Ross said.
"You'd think Pemberton would own up to it and help her out some," Dunbar said. "I don't see how a man can do something like that and not tote a lot of guilt."
"I'd say maybe his missus has some say in that," Ross surmised.
"There's one fellow that / treats her good, though," Dunbar said, as Joel Vaughn came up the steps.
The crew watched as Vaughn spoke to Rachel Harmon a moment before giving her a toy train engine, its bright metal catching the late-morning light. Vaughn and the Harmon girl talked a little longer before she left, the toy train engine placed in the poke with what she'd selected. For a few minutes, the commissary porch was vacant but for Campbell and Vaughn. Dunbar turned to the dining hall's wide window and apprised himself in his new haberdashery.
"This one's got some pert to it," he said, "but I still wish it had a bright-yallar hatband."
"If it did, Snipes might have snatched it up," Ross said. "That's all you got left needing brightening now, ain't it, Snipes, your head?"
"That and my brogans."
Dunbar tilted the brim a little more and sat back down.
"What do you reckon Galloway got from Santy Claus?" Dunbar asked. "A set of fangs to go with them rattles he's wearing atop his head?"
"Maybe some rat poison for to season his victuals," Snipes suggested.
"That's what I probably ought to have got instead of this hat," Dunbar said. "Since the cold's settled in the rats has pretty much laid claim to my stringhouse. You'd think they was having a revival the way they're packing in."
"Wouldn't do no good," Ross said. "I used some of that Paris Green in my stringhouse and it's the stoutest poison going. Them rats ate it like it was no more than salt on popcorn."
"What about them traps at the commissary you bait with cheese?" Dunbar asked. "You all tried them?"
"These is some bully rats," Ross said. "They'd likely haul the traps down to the commissary and turn them back in for a rebate, same as you would a sody bottle."
"The thing to kill them is snakes," Snipes said, examining his boots as he spoke, "but that eagle has done upset what the Orientals call the yen and the yang."
"What does that mean?" Dunbar asked.
"The way things is balanced. Everything in the world has its natural place, and if you take something out or put something in that ought not be out or in, everything gets lopsided and out of sorts."
"Kindly like not having different seasons," Dunbar said.
"Exactly. If you was to have just winter all year round we'd freeze, and if it was summer all year the water would dry up and your crops die."
"I wouldn't mind spring all year round," Dunbar said. "It's warm but there's rain, and everything's sprouting and feeling alive, the birds all a-singing."
"That'd be the problem," Snipes said. "You'd have too much aliveness. Everything would be sprouting all the time, and pretty soon there'd be trees and vines and grass covering every inch of the earth. You'd need your axe every morning just to whittle you out a place to stand up."
Ross finished the last of his moonshine and raised his gaze to take in the gray and brown valley floor, the scalped ridges of Noland Mountain.
"So what happens when there ain't nothing left alive at all?" he asked.
THE next morning the camp returned to its normal work schedule. Some men were rested and some were hungover and some a bit of both. Serena went out with a crew working on Indian Ridge. She was pregnant, though none in the camp other than Pemberton knew it. When he'd asked if she should risk riding a horse, she'd smiled and told him any child of theirs could stand a little jostling.
Harris called the office in the early afternoon. He'd been out of state for two weeks and returned to find a telegram from Albright chastising Harris and the Pembertons for pursuing the Townsend tract, especially since the park was inevitable, as was eminent domain for those unwilling to sell.
"He's given up being a diplomat," Harris seethed. "Thinks if he bares his teeth we'll roll over and show our belly the same way Champion did. Luckadoo at the Savings and Loan had a message for me too. He said Webb and Kephart have been over there inquiring about that Jackson County tract you like. God knows what that's about, but it can't be good."
After Harris hung up, Pemberton went to the stable and rode east toward Indian Ridge. As he rode through the camp, Pemberton saw a few wreaths yet adorned the stringhouses. Some of the highlanders considered the true Christmas to be on January fourteenth. Old Christmas, they called it, believing it was the day the magi visited the Christ child. Another tidbit Buchanan had written in his notebook. Remembering the notebook brought with it a memory of the man, but only for a few moments before Pemberton turned his thoughts to Serena and the life she held within her.
He found her with a crew helping to build a new spur line, the four of them contemplating a massive white oak that blocked the rail path. Serena made a final suggestion and rode over to Pemberton. Pemberton told her about the telegram.
"If the park's inevitable, Albright wouldn't bother," Serena said. "Townsend's tract must be more valuable to them than they want us to know, probably because of those virgin hardwoods. They'll use them to sway the public the same way Muir used his redwoods in Yosemite. Let them keep blustering and we'll keep cutting."
A momentary silence fell over the nearby woods as the lead cutter finished his notching and stepped away. The two sawyers kneeled on the frozen ground where yesterday's snow lingered, between them the twelve-foot cross-cut saw used only on the biggest trees. As they lifted the saw to slide into the notching, the afternoon sun fell full upon the polished blade, and it appeared the steel was being forged anew to confront the white oak. Serena and Pemberton watched as the men gained their rhythm after a few slips and catches. The crew foreman raised his hand and signaled to Serena that whatever problem had confounded the crew had been surmounted.
"Webb and Kephart came by the Savings and Loan," Pemberton said. "Luckadoo told Harris they were inquiring about the Jackson County tract. For more park land, Harris thinks. Harris said they're starting to believe they can do anything."
Serena had been watching the sawyers, but she turned to Pemberton now.
"But that makes no sense when all the other park land's at least twenty miles away."
"Let them do what they like over there," Pemberton said. "Campbell claims Townsend's land is the better buy for us. Anyway, Harris is so flummoxed about this park that he may be completely wrong about Webb and Kephart's inquiry."
"But they are growing more confident," Serena said, watching the cross-cut's blade work its way into the heartwood. "Harris is right about that."
ON THE FIRST SUNDAY OF THE NEW YEAR, THE Pembertons and Harris drove east toward Jackson County to look at the land Waynesville Savings and Loan had repossessed six months before, land Harris suddenly insisted on seeing before committing to the Townsend tract. Harris sat in the backseat, using a wool overcoat and a flask of whiskey to keep himself warm. Sleet had fallen the day before, and though now only drizzle smudged the windshield, scabs of ice lingered on bridges and curves where cliff hangs shaded the blacktop. Pemberton drove cautiously, staying in the road's center whenever possible, all the while wishing Serena hadn't insisted on coming.
Harris leaned forward and offered the flask but the Pembertons declined. Harris slipped the flask back into his pocket and took out the Wednesday edition of the Asheville Citizen, began to read aloud.
"While our attention to the creation of a national park is crucial to our region's future, we must also act as a state to secure our own immense but threatened natural beauty. The recent foreclosure on 9,000 acres of farmland in the Caney Creek region of Jackson County, while tragic for those who owned that land, offers a rare opportunity to buy a tract as pristine as any in our region and at a very reasonable price. This hidden jewel is rich in hardwoods and sparkling streams, as well as a profusion of plant and animal life. Mr. Horace Kephart, our region's leading authority on these matters, believes the acreage is as rich in natural resources as any he's seen in southern Appalachia. Nevertheless, Mr. Kephart argues that the time to act is now. Because of the land's proximity to Franklin, the property is beginning to receive interest from speculators who have no concern for western North Carolina other than lining their own pocketbooks. Since North Carolina, like the rest of this country, has its monetary resources stretched to the limit, now is the time for our state's wealthier inhabitants to take the lead and contribute to a legacy not only for themselves but for all North Carolinians."
Harris folded the paper and slapped it against the seat.
"I knew those bastards were up to something like this. Webb and Kephart came back to the Savings and Loan Friday. They were being damn coy about it, but Luckadoo thinks someone around here is interested in helping them, someone with a lot of money."
"Who could that be?" Pemberton asked.
"I think it's Cornelia Vanderbilt and that English fop husband of hers Cecil," Harris said. "Her fool mother gave 5,000 acres for that Pisgah Forest, so this kind of silliness runs in the family. Plus, they're friends with Rockefeller."
Harris paused long enough to sip from the flask, his ire mounting.
"It's got to be them," he fumed. "No one else has that kind of money. Why can't they just play king and queen in their goddamn castle and keep out of other people's business. All of them, from Webb to Rockefeller, they're nothing but Bolsheviks. They won't be satisfied until the government owns every acre in these mountains."
"When people finally realize it comes down to jobs or a pretty view, they'll come around," Pemberton said.
"Jobs or a pretty view," Harris said. "I like that. We can suggest that as a caption for Webb's next editorial. I assume you saw his so-called open letter to Colonel Townsend?"
"We saw it," Serena said, "but Townsend's a smart enough businessman not to be swayed by Webb's doggerel or Albright's threats."
"I should have stopped this park nonsense in 1926 when it started," Harris said. "If I didn't have so much money tied up in new machinery, I'd buy both of these tracts, just to spite all of them."
"Despite Webb's flowery description, I doubt this land can beat Townsend's," Pemberton said.
"Perhaps," Harris said, "but it's worth a couple of hours to check it, especially if some folks in Franklin are nosing around. They tend to have little interest in anything this far north."
Harris sipped again from the flask and stuffed it back in his coat pocket. The sun broke through the low clouds. Only for a little while, Pemberton suspected, but maybe enough to melt some of the ice on the blacktop, make the return trip easier. After a while, they came to a crossroads. Pemberton braked and checked a hand-drawn map Luckadoo had given him months before. He gave the map to Serena and turned right. The road made a wide curve, and soon the Tuckaseegee River appeared on the left. The water looked smooth and slow moving, as if the cold made the river sluggish. The river began to bend toward the road, and a metal one-lane bridge appeared before them. Another automobile came toward the bridge from the opposite direction. As they got closer, Pemberton saw the car was a Pierce-Arrow.
"That's that son-of-a-bitch Webb's car," Harris spat. "If we meet on the bridge, bump it into the water."
The two vehicles appeared about to arrive on the bridge simultaneously when the Pierce-Arrow braked. The bridge's iron frame shuddered as the Packard drove on across.
"Stop," Harris told Pemberton.
Pemberton eased up beside the Pierce-Arrow. Webb was not alone. Kephart sat beside the newspaperman, looking badly hungover, his eyes bloodshot, hair uncombed. He huddled inside a frayed mackinaw, a pair of soggy boots in his lap. Kephart stared straight ahead, no doubt envying his companion's expensive wool Ulster overcoat. Harris rolled down his window and Webb did the same.
"Didn't expect to see anyone else out on the road today," Webb said. "What brings you and your confederates to Jackson County?"
"Just checking out a tip on some good land," Harris said. "Not that it's any of your goddamn business."
"I'd argue it's the people of North Carolina's business," Webb replied.
"We are North Carolina business, you dumb shit," Harris said. "When people in this state are grubbing up roots in your parks to keep from starving, they'll realize it too and start using those trees of yours for hangings. You can pass that on to your friends as well, tell them they'd better get a moat and a drawbridge to go with their castle."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Webb said.
"No, of course you don't. Just as I'm sure there's no reason you happen to be in Jackson County this morning."
"There's a reason," Webb replied, and lifted a Hawkeye camera from the seat. "Kephart knew where an especially impressive waterfall was, so he took some photographs. I'm putting one on the front page tomorrow."
"Looks like he got wet doing it," Harris said, nodding at Kephart's boots. "Too bad he didn't fall and drown."
"Nice to stop and chat," Webb said, already rolling his window up, "but we've got a busy week ahead."
Webb released his hand brake and the Pierce-Arrow clattered on across the bridge.
"Waterfalls," Harris muttered.
They passed a thick stand of hickory and ash, then a pasture where a single birch tree rose in the center, its silver bark peeling from the trunk like papyrus. Beside the tree, a salt lick and wooden trough. The road came to an abrupt end at the farmhouse and they got out. A foreclosure notice was nailed to the front door. Hoover can go to Hell scrawled across it in what looked to be charcoal. A sense of recent habitation lingered-stacked poplar in the woodpile, on the porch a cloth sack of pumpkin seeds, a cane pole with line and hook. A dipper hung in a branch over the creek, reflecting the midday light like a crow-scat.
"They were up here," Harris said, pointing to a set of fresh tire prints.
Harris reached down and lifted a couple of stones from beside the tire's indention, examined them a moment and tossed them back on the ground. He picked up a smaller stone and looked at it more carefully.
"Looks like it could have some copper in it," he said, and placed it in his pocket.
Serena ascended the porch steps and peered through a window.
"It looks like solid oak all the way through," she said approvingly. "If we knocked down some walls, this could be used for a dining hall."
"Meet back here at five?" Harris asked.
"Fine," Pemberton said. "Just make sure you don't lose track of time contemplating the beauty of Kephart's waterfall."
"I'll make sure I don't," Harris said grimly, "though I may piss in it."
Harris tucked his pant cuffs into his boots and walked up the creek, quickly disappeared inside a green tangle of rhododendron. Pemberton and Serena followed a trail up the ridge. The mid-afternoon sun was out, spreading cold light across the slope. Last week's snow lingered beneath the bigger trees, and a springhead they stepped over was cauled by ice. Pemberton walked slowly and made Serena do the same. At the top they could see the entire tract, including a section where several towering chestnuts rose.
"Campbell's right," Pemberton said. "A good deal at twenty an acre."
"But still not as good as Townsend's price," Serena said, "especially with the expense of building a trestle over the river. That's slow work as well, and you always lose some men."
"I hadn't thought of that."
Serena placed a hand on her coat where the wool cloth covered her stomach. Pemberton nodded at a boulder smooth and flat as a bench.
"Sit down and rest."
"Only if you do as well," Serena said.
They sat and gazed out at the vast unfold of mountains, some razed but many more yet uncut. The Tuckaseegee flowed to the west, low drifts of fog obscuring the banks. To the far north, Mount Mitchell pressed against a low graying sky that promised snow. A skein of blue smoke rose from nearer woods, probably a hunter's campfire.
Pemberton reached out, placed his hand inside Serena's coat and laid his palm lightly on her stomach, held it there a few moments. Serena gave him a wry smile but did not remove his hand, instead placed her hand on top of his, her words whitened by the cold as she spoke.
"The world lies all before us, Pemberton."
"Yes," Pemberton agreed, looking out on the vista. "As far as we can see."
"Farther," Serena said. "Brazil. Mahogany forests the same quality as Cuba's, except we'll have them all to ourselves. There's not a single timber company in operation there, just rubber plantations."
It was the first time Serena had spoken in any detail about Brazil since they'd left Boston, and Pemberton now, as then, responded to Serena's fancy with good-humored irony.
"Amazing how no one else has ever thought of harvesting those trees."
"They have," Serena said, "but they're too timid. There are no roads. Miles that miles that never have been mapped. A country big as the United States, and it will be ours."
"We have to finish what we've started here first," Pemberton said.
"Investors' money we raise for Brazil can help us finish quicker here as well."
Pemberton said nothing more. They waited a while longer, silent as they watched the afternoon wane before them, then slowly walked down the ridge, Pemberton stepping ahead of Serena where the ground was icy, holding her arm. It was almost five when they got to the farmhouse, but Harris was still off scouring the creek and outcrops.
"His being gone this long," Serena said as they waited on the porch steps. "Surely that's a sign he's found something."
As though summoned by Serena's words, Harris emerged from the rhododendron. His boots were clotted with mud, and cuts on his hand showed he'd fallen. But as he stepped across the creek an enigmatic smile rose beneath his clipped moustache.
"So what do you think, Harris?" Pemberton asked as they drove back to camp.
"For my interests this tract's better," Harris replied. "Not by much, but enough to sway me. There's definitely more kaolin here. Maybe some copper as well."
Serena turned toward the back seat.
"I wish we could say the same about this tract, but Campbell's right. There's some good lumber but not nearly the hardwoods Townsend's has."
"Maybe we can get Luckadoo to lower the Saving and Loan's price to fifteen an acre," Harris said, "especially if we offer to close quickly."
"Maybe," Serena said, "but ten an acre would be better."
"I'll talk to him tomorrow," Harris said. "I suspect we can get the price down."
It was after seven when they got back to camp. Pemberton pulled in front of the office where Harris had parked his Studebaker. The older man departed the back seat slowly, due more to the empty flask than his age.
"Want to eat something before you go back to Waynesville?" Pemberton asked.
"Hell yes," Harris said. "All the scampering up and down that creek has given me the appetite of a horse."
Pemberton looked at Serena and saw that her eyes were heavy lidded.
"Why don't you go on to the house and rest. I'll get Harris fed, then bring our dinner."
Serena nodded and left. Though it was seven, the lights were on in the dining hall. From inside the building's walls, a ragged choir sang "Thy Might Set Fast the Mountains."
"We let Bolick hold evening services around Christmas and New Year's," Pemberton said. "I find it worth a few dollars of electricity to keep the workers Godly, though I will get a less bothersome camp preacher next time."
Harris nodded. "A great business investment, religion. I'll take it over government bonds anytime."
Pemberton and Harris stepped onto the side porch and opened the door. The kitchen was deserted, despite pots left on the grange stove, soiled dishes piled beside the fifty-gallon hoop barrels filled with gray water. Pemberton nodded toward the main hall's doorway, where Bolick's sonorous voice had replaced the singing.
"I'm going to get a cook and server."
"I'll go with you," Harris said. "Get my yearly dose of religion."
The men went into the back of the hall, their boot steps resonant on the puncheon floor. Workers and their families filled the benches set before the long wooden tables, women and children in front, men in the rear. Reverend Bolick stood behind two nailed-together vegetable crates that raised a rickety altar. Laid upon it was a huge leather-bound Bible, wide pages sprawling off both sides of the wood.
Pemberton scanned the closest benches and found his cook, stepped into the makeshift aisle and motioned to the man. Pemberton moved past more tables and finally found a server, but the woman was so rapt that Pemberton was almost beside Bolick before he got her attention. The woman left her seat and made her way slowly through a bumpy aisle of knees and rumps. But Pemberton no longer looked at her.
The boy sat in his mother's lap, clothed in a gray bundling. He held a toy train engine in his hand, rolling the steel wheels up and down his leg with a solemn deliberateness. Pemberton studied the child's features intently. He'd grown immensely since the day of the photograph, but that was the least of it. More striking to Pemberton was how the face had become thinner, more defined, what had been wisps of hair now thick. Most of all the eyes dark as mahogany. Pemberton's eyes. Reverend Bolick stopped speaking and the dining hall became silent. The child quit rolling the train and looked up at the preacher, then at the larger man who stood close by. For a few moments the child stared directly at Pemberton.
The congregation shifted uneasily on the benches, many of their eyes on Pemberton as Reverend Bolick turned the Bible's wide pages in search of a passage. When Pemberton realized he was being watched, he made his way to the back of the hall where Harris and the kitchen workers waited.
"I thought for a minute you were about to go on up and deliver the sermon yourself," Harris said.
The cook and server went into the kitchen, but Harris and Pemberton lingered a few more moments. Bolick found the passage he'd been searching for and settled his eyes on Pemberton. For a few seconds the only sound was a spring-back knife's soft click as a worker prepared to pare his nails.
"From the book of Obadiah," Reverend Bolick said, and began reading.
The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the cleft of the rock, whose habitation is high, that saith in his heart, who shall bring me down.
Harris smiled. "I believe the right reverend is addressing us."
"Come on," Pemberton said, and took a step toward the kitchen as Bolick continued to read.
Harris grasped Pemberton's arm.
"Don't you think we should hear the fellow out, Pemberton?"
"Serena's waiting for her dinner," Pemberton said tersely and pulled free from Harris' grip as Bolick finished the passage.
The preacher closed the Bible with a slow and profound delicacy as if the ink on the onionskin were susceptible to smearing.
"The word of the Lord," Reverend Bolick concluded.
After Harris had eaten and left, Pemberton went to the house with his and Serena's dinner. He set the dishes on the table and went to the back room. Serena was asleep and Pemberton did not wake her. Instead, he softly closed the bedroom door. Pemberton didn't go to the kitchen and eat but instead went to the hall closet and opened his father's steamer trunk. He rummaged through the stocks and bonds and various other legal documents until he found the cowhide-covered photograph album his aunt insisted he pack as well. He shut the trunk softly and walked down to the office.
Campbell was in the front room, working on the payroll. He left without a word when Pemberton said he wished to be alone. Orange and yellow embers glowed in the hearth, and he set kindling and a hefty ash log on the andirons. Pemberton felt the heat strengthen against his back as he took Jacob's photograph from the bottom drawer. The fire's rosy glow heightened and soon spilled over the desk's surface. Pemberton turned off the lamp's bunched electric light, thought for the first time in years of a parlor and its wide fireplace. His earliest memory was of that hearth, its warmth enclosing him like an invisible blanket, light flickering on the fireboard's marble fonts where strange men with wooly legs played flutes while long-haired women in swaying dresses danced. Whenever Pemberton had watched them long enough, the figures had begun to move in the wavering flames and shadows. As Pemberton carefully opened the photograph album, he had the sensation of entering an attic on a rainy day. The desiccated binding creaked with each turned cardboard page, releasing the smell of things long stashed away. When Pemberton found a photograph of himself as a two-year-old, he stopped turning.
SLEET FELL AGAIN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE night, but by morning the sky rose blue and unclouded. Ice clung to Noland Mountain's remaining hardwoods like brittle sleeves, a marvel of shifting hues when the sun shone full on them. Most of the workers shaded their eyes as they trudged into the upland, but a few held their gaze until their eyes burned from the glare, such was the beauty of it. By the time the last man made his ascent to the ridge, the warming ice had begun to slip free from the branches. Smaller pieces at first, tinkling like bells as they hit the frozen ground. Then came water-clear downfalls that quickly covered the understory, crackled and snapped beneath every footstep. Men walked through them as they would the remnants of a vast shattered mirror.
Pemberton had just set his coffee on the office desk when Harris called, his voice even more brusque than usual.
"Webb and Kephart made an offer on the Jackson County land," Harris said. "They came in soon as Luckadoo opened up, and they're willing to pay him full price."
"Were the Cecils with them?"
"Hell no. You think they'd deign to come down from their castle for something like this. They'll wait till it's over, have that goddamn waterfall named after them."
"But you still believe it's the Cecils behind all this?"
"It doesn't matter a dog's turd who is backing them," Harris shouted. "That son-of-a-bitch Luckadoo thinks Webb and Kephart have the money. He gave me a courtesy call."
"How far along with this are they?"
"They've co-signed everything for the down payment. All that's left is the transfer deed." Harris paused. "Damn it, I knew I should have called Luckadoo last night."
"It's a good tract but so is Townsend's," Pemberton said. "You said as much yourself yesterday."
"This is the tract I want."
Pemberton started to speak, then hesitated, unsure if he wanted to risk Harris' wrath being turned on him, but it was a question he and Serena needed answered.
"Are you sure you're not just wanting to spite Webb and Kephart?"
For a few moments Harris didn't respond. Pemberton could hear the older man's breath slow. When Harris spoke, his words were more measured but just as belligerent.
"If we don't do this deal, Pemberton, we never do one, and that includes Townsend's acreage."
"But if the transaction's gone this far…"
"We can still get the land if we pay off Luckadoo. That's the only reason he called me in the first place. It's just going to cost more."
"How much more?"
"Five hundred," Harris said. "Luckadoo's giving us an hour to make up our minds. Like I said, we do this deal or we never do another one. That's the way of it, so make up your mind."
"I'll have to talk to Serena first."
"Talk to her then," Harris said, lowering his voice for a moment. "She's smart enough to know what's best in your long-term interest."
"I'll call you back as soon as I can."
"You do that," Harris said. "And make damn sure soon is within an hour."
Pemberton hung up and walked to the stable. Serena was in the back stall with the eagle, her fingers reddened from the raw meat she fed the bird. He told her about the phone call. She fed the eagle a last piece of meat and placed the hood back over its head.
"We need Harris' money," Serena said. "We'll have to humor him, this time, but have Lawyer Covington put in the contract that Harris can't begin any mining operations until the site's timber is cut. Harris has found something up there besides kaolin and some copper, something he doesn't want us to know about. We'll hire our own geologist and find out what it is, then refuse to cut the timber until Harris gives us a percentage, a good percentage."
Serena stepped out of the stall. She handed Pemberton the tin plate and lifted the wooden latch, closed the stall door. A few stringy remnants remained on the plate. Many of the workers claimed that Serena fed the eagle the hearts of animals as well, to make the bird fiercer, but Pemberton had never seen her do such a thing and believed it just one more bit of the camp's lore about Serena.
"I'd better go call Harris."
"Call Covington as well," Serena said. "I want him there when Harris talks to Luckadoo."
"Our having to pass on Townsend's land will doubtless delight Albright," Pemberton said, "but at least this will take care of Webb and Kephart on one front."
"I'm not so sure about that," Serena said.
WITH the purchase of a second skidder, the men now worked on two fronts. By the first Monday in April the northern crews had crossed Davidson Branch and made their way to Shanty Mountain, while the crews to the south followed Straight Creek west. Recent rains had slowed progress, not just forcing men to slog through mud but causing more accidents as well. Snipes' crews worked the west end of Shanty. Since McIntyre hadn't recovered from the falling snake incident, a man named Henryson had been hired as his replacement. Henryson and Ross were second cousins who'd grown up together in Bearpen Cove. Both men viewed the world and its inhabitants with a sharp and pessimistic wit. This shared dourness Snipes had duly noted, and hinted it would be the subject of some future philosophic discourse.
A cold rain had fallen all day, and by mid-morning the workers resembled half-formed Adams dredged from the mud, not yet molded to human. When Snipes signaled for a break, the men didn't bother to seek what shelter thicker trees might afford them. They merely dropped their tools where they stood and sat down on the boggy earth. They looked as one toward the camp and its day's-end promise of warmth and dryness with longing and a seeming degree of skepticism, as if unsure the camp's existence wasn't some phasma conjured in their waterlogged heads.
Ross took out his tobacco and rolling papers but found them too wet to hold fire even in the unlikely event he could find a dry match.
"I got enough mud daubed on my ass to grow a peck of corn," Ross said miserably.
"I got enough just in my hair to chink a cabin," Henryson said.
"Makes me wish I was a big boar hog, cause at least then I'd enjoy slopping around in it," Stewart sighed. "There can't be a worser job in the world."
Dunbar nodded toward the camp where several job seekers sat on the commissary porch steps, enduring the rain in hopes of proving their fortitude as potential hires.
"Yet there's folks wanting them."
"And more coming every day," Henryson said. "They's jumping off them boxcars passing through Waynesville like fleas off a hound."
"Coming from far and near too," Ross said. "I used to think hard times rooted best in these hills, but this depression seems to have laid a fair crop of them most everywhere."
The men did not speak for a few minutes. Ross continued to stare sullenly at his drowned cigarette while Snipes scraped mud off his overalls, trying to reveal some remnants of brightness amid the muck. Stewart took out the pocket Bible he'd wrapped in a square of oilcloth, shielded the book from the rain with the cloth. He mouthed the words as he read.
"Is McIntyre doing any better?" Dunbar asked when Stewart put the Bible back in his pocket.
"Not a lick," Stewart said. "His missus took him back over to the nervous hospital and for a while they was favoring electrocuting him."
"Electrocuting him?" Dunbar exclaimed.
Stewart nodded. "That's what them doctors said. Claimed it for a new thing they been talking up big in Boston and New York. They get some cables same as you'd spark a car battery off with and pinch them on his ears and run lectricity all up and down through him."
"Lord have mercy," Dunbar said, "they figure McIntyre for a man or a light bulb."
"His missus don't like the idea one bit neither, and I'm with her," Stewart said. "How could you argue such a thing would do anybody good?"
"They's a scientific principle involved in it," Snipes said, speaking for the first time since the men had stopped work. "Your body needs a certain amount of electricity to keep going, same as a radio or a telephone or even the universe itself. A man like McIntyre, it's like he's got a low battery and needs sparked back up. Electricity, like the dog, is one of man's best friends."
Stewart pondered Snipes' words a few moments.
"Then how come they use it down there in Raleigh to kill them murderers and such?"
Snipes looked at Stewart and shook his head, much in the manner of a teacher who knows his fate is to always have a Stewart in his class.
"Electricity is like most everything else in nature, Stewart. They's two kinds of humans, your good and bad, just like you got two kinds of weather, your good and bad, right?"
"What about days it rains and that's good for a man's bean crop but bad because the feller was wanting to go fishing?" Ross interjected.
"That ain't relevant to this particular discussion," Snipes retorted, turning back to Stewart.
"So you understand what I'm a getting at, there being the good and the bad in all manner of things."
Stewart nodded.
"Well," Snipes said. "That's your scientific principle in action. Anyways, what they'd use on McIntyre is the good kind of electricity because it just goes into you and gets everything back to flowing good. What they use on them criminals fries your brains and innards up. Now that's the bad kind."
THE rain had not lessened by afternoon, but despite Pemberton's protests Serena mounted the Arabian and rode to check the southern front where Galloway's crew cut on the sloping land above Straight Creek. The angled ground would have made footing tenuous on a sunny day, but in the rain the workers labored with the slipfootedness of seamen. To make matters more difficult, Galloway's crew had a new lead chopper, a boy of seventeen stout enough but inexperienced. Galloway was showing where to make the undercut on a barrel-thick white oak when the youth's knee buckled as the axe swung forward.
The blade's entry made a soft fleshy sound as Galloway and his left hand parted. The hand fell first, hitting the ground palm down, fingers curling inward like the legs of a dying spider. Galloway backed up and leaned against the white oak, blood leaping from the upraised wrist onto his shirt and denim breeches. The other sawyer stared at Galloway's wrist, then at the severed hand as if unable to reconcile that one had once been part of the other. The youth let the axe handle slip from his hands. The two workers appeared incapable of movement, even when Galloway's legs folded. His back was still against the tree, and the bark scraped audibly against Galloway's flannel shirt as he slid into a sitting position.
Serena dismounted and took off her coat, revealing the condition it had concealed for months. She lifted a pocketknife from her saddle pack and slashed free the Arabian's rein and tied it around the stricken man's forearm. She tightened the leather, and blood ceased pouring from Galloway's wrist. The men lifted their wounded foreman and held him upright on the horse until Serena mounted behind him. She rode back to camp, one arm around Galloway's waist, pressing the worker against her swollen belly.
Once at camp, Campbell and another man lifted Galloway off the gelding and carried him into Doctor Cheney's caboose. Pemberton came in a few moments later and believed he looked at a dead man. Galloway's face was pale as chalk, and his eyes rolled as if unmoored, his breathing sharp pants. Cheney emptied a bottle of iodine on the wound. He wiped blood off the forearm to check the tourniquet.
"Damn good job whoever tied this," Doctor Cheney said, and turned to Pemberton.
"You'll have to get him to the hospital if he's to have a chance," the doctor said. "Do you want the bother of that or not?"
"We need the train here," Pemberton said.
"I'll take him in my car," Campbell said.
Pemberton turned to Serena, who watched from the caboose door. She nodded. Campbell motioned to the worker who'd helped bring Galloway in. Together they lifted the injured man off the table. They placed his arms around their shoulders and dragged him to Campbell's Dodge, Galloway's boot toes plowing two small furrows in the soaked earth. Only when they got to the car did Galloway rouse himself enough to speak, turning his head toward the caboose door where Pemberton and Doctor Cheney watched.
"I'll live," Galloway gasped. "It's done been prophesied."
As Campbell's car sped off, Pemberton looked for Serena and saw her on the Arabian, already on her way back to Straight Creek. Serena's coat had been left in the woods, and Pemberton noticed several men stared at her stomach in amazement. He suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning. Doctor Cheney had been as oblivious to her pregnancy as the rest of the camp, reaffirming Pemberton's belief that the physician's medical knowledge was pedestrian at best.
Pemberton was about to return to his office when he glanced toward the stringhouses and saw Galloway's mother on the porch, her clouded eyes turned in the direction of all that had just transpired.
A week later Galloway walked back into camp. He'd witnessed enough men hurt to know Pemberton Lumber Company took no charity cases, especially when every day men arrived begging for work. Pemberton assumed Galloway had come to get his mother and take her back to their old home on Cove Creek. But when Galloway came to his stringhouse, he did not pause but kept walking, his body listing slightly rightward as if unwilling to acknowledge the lost hand. He left the valley and crossed the ridge to where the timber crews worked. For a few moments Pemberton contemplated the possibility that Galloway planned to avenge the loss of his left hand, not necessarily a bad thing since it might make other workers more careful in the future.
Pemberton was in the back room with Doctor Cheney when Galloway returned, walking beside Serena and the stallion. It was almost full dark, and Pemberton had been watching out the window for her arrival. Serena and Galloway passed the office and went on to the stable, Galloway adjusting his gait so he stayed beside the Arabian's hindquarters. They came out a few minutes later, Galloway still lagging behind Serena in the manner of a dog taught to heel. She spoke to him briefly. Then Galloway walked toward the stringhouse where his mother was.
"We need to keep Galloway on the payroll," Serena said as she sat down and filled her plate.
"What good is he to us with just one hand?" Pemberton asked.
"Anything I bid him do. Anything."
"A right-hand man with only a right hand," Doctor Cheney said, looking up from his supper. "And for a left-handed woman, no less."
"You'll be surprised, Doctor, what a man such as Galloway can do with just one hand. He's very resourceful, and very willing."
"Because you saved his life?" Cheney asked. "As one who has saved numerous lives, dear lady, I can assure you such gratitude is fleeting."
"Not in this instance. His mother prophesied a time when he would lose much but be saved."
Doctor Cheney smiled. "No doubt a reference to some brush arbor meeting where his soul would be saved for the contents of his billfold."
"Saved by a woman," Serena added, "and thus honor bound to protect that woman and do her bidding the rest of his life."
"And you believe you are that woman," Doctor Cheney said, mock disappointment in his voice. "I would have assumed a woman as enlightened as you would deny belief in augury."
"What I believe doesn't matter," Serena said. "Galloway believes it."
TWO MORE ACCIDENTS OCCURRED THE FOLLOWING week on Shanty Mountain. A log slipped free of the main cable line and killed a worker, and two days later the skidder's boom swung a fifty-pound metal tong into a man's skull. Some workers began wearing hand-whittled wooden crosses around their necks while others carried rabbit's foots and loadstones, salt and buckeyes and arrowheads and even half-pound iron horseshoes. Still others carried talismans for specific dangers-mad-stones to stop bleeding, mistletoe to avoid lightning strikes, agates to prevent falls, all manner of lucky coins, playing cards from deuce to ace set rakishly in their hat-bands. Several men were Cherokee and brought their own charms, fairy crosses and feathers, certain plants. A few believed the best response to the rash of accidents was a stashed whiskey bottle. Some adopted the bright and various coloration of Snipes and could be seen from great distances as they ascended the slopes, resembling not so much loggers as a tribe of deposed harlequins en route to a more hospitable court. Several men threatened to quit. Most grew more careful but still others grew less cautious, resigned to a violent end.
Snipes' crew worked a gap in Big Fork Ridge that looked as though a monolithic block wedge had parted the escarpment into two sections. A small creek ran through the gap and trees lined it, a few yellow poplars but mainly sycamore and birch and hemlock. Snipes and Campbell hadn't believed the trees worth the bother to harvest. To do so would be slow going, and particularly dangerous since they'd be working in close proximity to one another. But Pemberton insisted.
After another close call when a log slipped free of its tongs, Snipes gave his men a break. It wasn't time for one, but the foreman figured the fifteen minutes would cost Pemberton Lumber Company less than the time it'd take to haul an injured man back to camp. The workers gathered beside the creek.
Though it was early afternoon, little light fell into the gap. The sparse-leaved trees rose around them bleak and skeletal, particularly sycamores that the winter had bleached white. The men had been in the gap since noon yesterday, and Snipes believed the unrelenting gloaming put the workers in a darker more fatalistic state of mind, less careful than they otherwise might be. He felt it provident to make the crews aware of this.
"They's a philosophical reason the positive outlook is called a sunny disposition," Snipes said, his face tented by the newspaper he perused. "Anybody that's out in a place where the sun lays on you all day ain't got a care in the world."
Ross finished sifting tobacco onto his rolling papers and looked up.
"So if I was out in the middle of the desert and had no water and there wasn't any for miles I'd not have a care in the world," Ross said, then returned his attention to the construction of his cigarette.
"That ain't exactly what my notion is," Snipes replied, lowering his newspaper and looking at Henryson as well. "I'm saying the amount of sun you get can affect how you feel. You get down in a gloomy place like this and it's like what's outside gets inside you."
"Maybe that's what wrong with Preacher McIntyre," Stewart said. "He growed up in the most way-back holler in this county. He told me once it was so darksome in there they had to use a crowbar to get any light in."
"How's McIntyre doing?" Dunbar asked.
"Well," Stewart said. "They let him out of the nervous hospital over in Morganton last Friday. Now he's home under the bed covers most all the time, and he don't let ever a word come out of his mouth."
"Tell his missus to prop him up in the cornfield on a stick," Ross said. "He can get himself a sunny disposition whilst he's keeping crows out of the corn."
Henryson stood and stretched his back, looked over at his prone foreman.
"I see you found a patch to cover that space you had on your pants pocket, Snipes," Henryson said. "Is it purple or red? It appears to my eye somewheres betwixt them."
The men turned as one and contemplated the deranged rainbow that now covered every inch of their foreman's overalls.
"It's mauve," snipes said.
"I never heard of no such color," Dunbar said.
"Well," Snipes retorted. "You're looking right at it."
"No disrespect, Snipes, but I still can't see the wearing of such a outfit," Dunbar said. "You look like you been sewed up in a crazy quilt."
"I done explained the science behind it, same as I explained what darksomeness can do to a man," Snipes said, sighing deeply. "It's ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can't see nothing."
Snipes folded his newspaper and rose, an unhinging brightness. He did not look at his crew but gazed eastward, as if communing with the spirits of his intellectual forbearers who, like him, had carried the lantern of enlightenment among those who wished only to snuff it. Ross struck a match on his boot heel and lit his cigarette. He held the match before him and watched it burn down to his finger and thumb, then extinguished it with a quick flick of his wrist, blew the wisp of smoke in Snipes' direction.
"Galloway's back," Dunbar said.
"There's some darkness for you, Snipes," Ross said. "It's like as if a black pall gets draped on everything he passes."
"That's the God's truth," Dunbar agreed.
"Or the devil's," Henryson said.
"I heard when that hand of his hit the ground it kept opening and closing like it was trying to strangle somebody," Dunbar said. "Kept on doing that for near five minutes."
"I'd not doubt it," Stewart said.
"Nobody'd touch that hand even after it quit moving," Dunbar added. "For all I know it's still out in them woods where it fell."
"I'd not have picked it up," Henryson said, "leastways without a pair of tongs and a glove."
"I'd sooner pet a mad dog than touch that hand," Dunbar said. "What Galloway's got is a sight worse than the rabies."
"I'd not argue that," Ross said, tapping ash off his cigarette. "I'm just glad he's working on the other front, and her that thought him worth saving being over there as well."
Several men murmured in assent.
"They's some claim it wasn't a tourniquet stopped that bleeding," Dunbar noted. "She just commanded it to stop and not a drip flowed out after that."
Stewart grimaced. "I'd just as lief not heard about Galloway's hand opening and closing, nor any of the rest of it. It'll be fretting me the rest of the day."
"Well, if we work hard we'll be out of this gap by tomorrow and we'll all be feeling better," Snipes said, checking his watch. "Time to get back to it."
Dunbar and Ross followed their foreman across the creek to a yellow poplar that was the biggest tree in the gap. Snipes notched the tree to fall opposite where the crew worked, aiming it so as not to snag on a cliff hang. Dunbar and Ross used the eight-foot cross-cut saw, and Snipes used the biggest wedge. As the poplar fell, its branches hit a neighboring sycamore and snapped free a piece of limb thick and long as a fence rail. Minutes passed as the limb dangled sixty feet up in the sycamore's higher junctions, one end quilled with smaller branches, the other sheared to a narrowing sharpness. Then it slipped free only to be caught again a few inches farther down, the sharp end tilting earthward as the limb hung in abeyance a few moments longer, as if deciding.
The limb fell toward Dunbar, whose back arched as his ax struck wood the same instant the sycamore limb entered between his collar bone and spine. Dunbar's face smashed against the ground as his knees hit, the rest of his body buckling inward. The white limb had not snapped or slipped free from the flesh. It remained embedded in Dunbar's back like a stalled lightning bolt, and as the limb's angled weight succumbed to gravity, Dunbar's body slowly, almost reverently, lifted to a kneeling position, as if to be given a last look at the world. Snipes knelt and laid his hand on the dying man's shoulder. Dunbar's eyes shifted in awareness of Snipes's presence, but as he left the world he offered no last words or even a final sigh, only one tear that welled in the corner of his right eye before slowly rolling down his cheek. Then he was dead.
"IT seems the men are getting killed at a rather pro digious rate these last few weeks," Doctor Cheney said that evening at dinner. "When Wilkie and Buchanan were here, there seemed to be fewer deaths."
"The men are working steeper inclines now," Serena said, "and the heavy rains make the footing tenuous."
"Much more rain than the previous years," Pemberton added.
Doctor Cheney raised his fork and knife and cut a rind of fat from his piece of ham.
"Ah, so that's the difference. Anyway, this continuing depression assures ready replacements. Men will ride a boxcar two hundred miles just on the rumor of work. I saw twenty or so at the train depot just yesterday. They were ragged as scarecrows and nearly as gaunt."
There was a knock on the door, and two young women came in with cups and a coffee pot. As the servers left, Doctor Cheney saw Galloway standing beside the office window. The light was not on, and Galloway stood so motionless as to appear a thicker shadow among other shadows.
"This latest addition to your menagerie, Mrs. Pemberton, he seems more dog than man the way he follows you about," Doctor Cheney said, lifting a piece of ham with his fingers and holding it as if he might fling it onto the office floor. "Do you allow Galloway to eat table scraps?"
Serena raised the coffee cup to her mouth and tipped it lightly. Pemberton watched as the gold flecks in Serena's irises sparked. She set the cup down, only then turned to acknowledge Cheney had spoken to her.
"First an eagle, now a two-legged dog," Doctor Cheney continued. "You acquire the strangest pets, Mrs. Pemberton, and yet you train them so well. Do you think you could teach one of those comely maidens who just retrieved our dishes to follow me to bed each night?"
"To what purpose, Doctor?"
"A remedy for their maidenhood."
Serena closed her eyes for a moment and then reopened them, as if to focus better on Cheney before she spoke. Her gaze became placid, the irises revealing only a gray muted disdain.
"But such a cure is beyond any nostrum you possess," Serena said.
"My lady, your jests are rather unjust." Cheney said, adopting a mockingly archaic tone. "And they lack humor."
"The lack of humour is yours, Doctor, not mine. Yours is choleric while mine's phlegmatic."
"A rather antiquated form of diagnosis," Cheney said.
"In some ways," Serena answered, "but I believe it still applies to the essence of our natures. Fire found fire when Pemberton and I met, and that will be the humour of our child."
"How can you be so sure?" Cheney asked. "Your own parents misconstrued your nature."
"How so?"
"Your Christian name."
"Another jape your lack of humor missed," Serena said. "My parents named me before I left the womb, because I kicked so fiercely to get out."
"But how did they know you'd be a female?"
"The midwife told them."
"A midwife told them," Doctor Cheney mused. "Colorado sounds even more medieval than western Carolina."
Cheney dabbed his mouth with a napkin and stood. He glanced out the window.
"There's light enough to search a creek for leeches," he commented dryly. "Perhaps after that I'll read up on my phrenology. Then early to bed. No doubt more casualties will come Monday."
Doctor Cheney stood and took a last swallow of coffee and left the room. Good dog, Cheney said to Galloway as he passed through the office. Pemberton looked at Serena's waxing belly. Fire finding fire, he thought, repeating Serena's words to himself.
"What news today, Pemberton?" Serena said.
"Nothing much, other than Harris calling," Pemberton replied. "It turns out that the Cecils weren't the ones backing Webb and Kephart on the Jackson County tract."
"How did Harris find that out?"
"He wheedled it out of the Cecils' banker in Asheville. But Harris still swears he'll find out who did back them."
"I don't think anyone was backing them," Serena said. "I think that it was all a ruse to get Harris interested in that tract instead of Townsend's. And it worked."
REPAIRS ON THE CABIN WERE NEEDED, THINGS that should have been done during the first warm days of spring, but Rachel had been so worn down by her camp work and caring for Jacob that she'd put it off for months. When she'd flipped the Black Draught calendar in the kitchen to June, Rachel knew the repairs could wait no longer, so the following Sunday she and Jacob didn't walk down to Waynesville and take the train to the camp. Instead, she put Jacob in the smock Widow Jenkins had sewn from overalls Rachel had taken from her father's chest of drawers. Then she dressed herself in her raggiest gingham dress.
Rachel set Jacob on the grass with the toy train engine Joel had given him for a Christmas present. She leaned the Indian ladder against the cabin. Cowhide knotted the rungs to the two locust poles, and the dried leather lashing creaked with each upward step. Once on the roof, Rachel searched for what her father had taught her to look for. On the gable end, where last winter's afternoon sun had melted the nighttime freeze, the sill showed signs of early rot. She took up the broad axe and balanced its weight in her hands.
Rachel carefully lifted the axe to hew the wide new sill, setting her feet as solidly as she could. The axe was heavy and became heavier with each stroke. Her muscles would ache come morning. After ten minutes she knelt to rest and caught sight of the gable's half-dovetail notching, the precision of it. Her father had made this cabin with care, even where he'd placed it, searching until he'd found a lean slab of granite for a hearthstone and a pasture spring that wouldn't go dry, what older folks called lasting water. Building the cabin itself with white oak logs and cedar shingles. What she'd liked best was that her father chose the west slope, the sun late arriving but holding its light longer into the day and early evening.
Rachel picked up the axe again. Her arms were leaden and watery blisters ridged her palms. She thought of how nice it would be if she was at church, not only because of the fellowship and how Preacher Bolick's words were a comfort but just the easefulness of sitting there, not having to do anything but hold Jacob, sometimes not even that because Widow Jenkins would always set him on her lap part of the service. Seven more days before I get that again, she thought.
Rachel did not stop until the hewing was done, then climbed down the ladder and sat beside Jacob. She studied the cabin as the sun finally made its way above the eastern ridgeline, sipping up the morning's last shadows. The chinking was fractured in places, slivers of light passing through a few. Which was no surprise but just part of a cabin settling and a long winter of freezing and thawing. Rachel went to the woodshed and found the trowels and a feed bucket. She gathered old horse droppings and then mud from a boggy seep below the spring, mixed it to the consistency of cornbread batter, the same lumps and heaviness. She handed one of the trowels to Jacob.
"There may come a time you need to know how to do this," she told the child. "So watch me."
Rachel dipped the trowel in the bucket and plopped several scoops onto a plank of wood. Holding the plank in her left hand, Rachel smoothed a gob of the chinking between the logs as she might apply a salve.
"Let's let you do it now."
She molded her hand around Jacob's, helped him dip the trowel into the bucket and balance a clump on the blade's flat end.
"Daub it on good," Rachel said, and led his hand to a gap between two logs.
After a while it was noon-dinner time, so Rachel stopped and went inside. She made Jacob a mush out of milk and cornbread. She ate a piece of cornbread but drank water herself. Milk always made cornbread taste better, and Rachel hoped by next spring she'd have money enough to buy a calf and have all the milk she and Jacob could drink. It seemed possible, because the coffee can on the pantry's upper shelf was slowly filling, mainly with quarters and dimes and nickels but a few dollar bills. Eight Mason jars of honey now stocked the pantry shelves as well, half of which she'd sell to Mr. Scott.
When Jacob finished eating, they went back outside. Rachel placed Jacob in the thin shadow next to the cabin and mounted the ladder to chink the highest logs. She checked occasionally to the west for rain clouds, because changes in humidity would mottle the work. All the while Jacob below her, contentedly daubing logs more than gaps. A woodcock burbled in the woods behind the cabin, and a flock of goldfinches passed overhead soon after, confirmation that full summer had almost come.
An hour passed and Jacob's swaddlings were surely wet, but he wasn't fussing, so Rachel decided to go ahead and repair the chimney. Blustery winter winds had displaced four of the flat field stones. One lay shattered near the fence edge. Rachel fetched a cabbage sack from the woodshed and placed it beside the three good stones before walking down the creek to get a fourth. She found one that suited beside a shady pool, the stone's roughness softened by green lichens that peeled away like old paint. Beard-tongue brightened the bank, and Rachel smelled the wintergreen odor of the blooms, the best kind of smell on a warm day because breathing it in seemed to cool you off from the inside out. For a few moments Rachel lingered. She gazed into the pool, seeing first her own reflection, below it tadpoles flowing across the creek's sandy bottom like black tears. The kind of thing you could see as an omen, Rachel knew, but chose instead to see an omen in the blooming beard-tongue that had, like her, survived a hard winter. She picked up the rock and walked back.
Swinging the cabbage sack over her shoulder, Rachel climbed the ladder one handed, leaning her body as she crossed the pitched roof to the chimney. Placing the stones was like solving a wobbly puzzle, finding the one that fit most snug in each of the chimney's cavities. The last stone finally locked into place, and the chimney was again as it once had been.
Rachel did not leave the roof immediately, instead looked westward. She let her eyes cross the horizon toward the higher mountains that rose where North Carolina became Tennessee. She thought of the map in Miss Stephens' classroom, not the time in the fifth grade when Joel had been such a smart aleck but a morning in first grade, just months after her mother had left, when Miss Stephens had stood by the map whose different colors were like patches on a quilt. The first state they'd learned was North Carolina, long and narrow like an anvil, everything within its lines green. And that had made sense to Rachel at six, because come winter there were still holly bushes and firs and rhododendron, even in the gray trees bright-green clumps of mistletoe. But when Miss Stephens showed them Tennessee, the red hadn't seemed right. When her father pointed out mountains that were in Tennessee, they'd always been blue. Except at sunset, when the mountains were tinged with red. Maybe that was why, she'd thought as Miss Stephens began pointing out other states.
Rachel gave the chimney a last inspection, then eased down the ladder. Once back on the ground, she picked up Jacob and studied the cabin a few moments.
"That'll get us through another winter," she said, and was about to go inside when she saw Widow Jenkins coming up the road, still dressed in her Sunday finery, a peach basket covered with a dish towel in her gnarled hand.
Rachel went to meet her, Jacob already waving at the older woman.
"I figured hard as you had to work on your day off, I'd fix you a supper," Widow Jenkins said, nodding at the basket. "There's fried okra and bacon in there, some hominy too."
"That was awful kind of you," Rachel said. "It has been some work."
Widow Jenkins looked at the roof and chimney and studied it a few moments.
"You done a good job," she said. "Your own daddy couldn't have done better."
They walked over to the porch. Rachel sat on the steps, but when the older woman set the basket down she did not sit herself.
"That cloth ought to keep those victuals warm long enough for me to hold that rascal a minute," Widow Jenkins said, taking Jacob and jostling him until he laughed. "The way he's growing these old arms won't be able to do that much longer."
She gave Jacob a final nuzzling before handing the child back to Rachel.
"I better be on my way so you can eat and get some rest."
"Sit with us a few minutes," Rachel said. "I'd like the company."
"All right, but just a few minutes."
The sun had fallen enough now that the air was cooling, the day's first breeze combing the white oak's highest branches. The bullfrog that lived above the springhouse made its first tentative grunts. Rachel knew the katydids and field crickets would soon join in. All soothing dependable sounds that always helped her fall asleep, not that she'd need them tonight.
"Joel Vaughn asked about you at the service today," Widow Jenkins said. "He was worried you or the young one was feeling puny. I told him you had some chores needing done."
Widow Jenkins paused and looked straight ahead, as if observing something in the woods beyond the barn.
"He's turned into a right handsome young man, don't you think?"
"Yes ma'am," Rachel said. "I suppose so."
"I think he'd make you a good sweetheart," Widow Jenkins said.
It was the kind of comment that would normally make her blush bright, but Rachel didn't. She shifted Jacob on her lap, let her fingers smooth the down on the back of his neck.
"I'm beginning to think us Harmons don't do very well when it comes to love," Rachel said. "It didn't for Daddy and Mama, and it didn't for me."
"Young as you are you could yet be surprised," Widow Jenkins said, "and I expect someday you probably will be."
For a few moments neither of them spoke.
"Do you know where my mother went when she left? Daddy never told me, even when I asked."
"No," Widow Jenkins said. "Your daddy met her in Alabama when he was in the army. Maybe she went there, but I don't know for sure. The one time your daddy talked about it, he said your mama never said where she was going. All she told him was that life up here was too hard."
"Hard how?"
"The farm land being so rocky and hilly, the long winters and the loneliness. But she told him the hardest thing was the way the mountains shut out the sun. She said living in this cove was like living in a coal mine."
"Did she want to take me with her?"
"She tried. She told your daddy if he really loved you that he'd let you go, because you'd have a better life if you left here. A lot of folks argued against him for not letting you. They claimed what she said, that if he really loved you he'd have let you go. They thought he did it to spite your mother."
Widow Jenkins paused and took off her glasses, rubbed them on her black skirt. It was the first time Rachel had seen the old woman without them. Eyes that had appeared pop-eyed now receded into her face. Widow Jenkins had never looked younger than at this moment-the eyes usually fogged by the thick spectacles a bright blue, the lashes long, the high-boned cheeks smoother than when the gold rims creased them. She was my age once, Rachel thought with a kind of wonder.
"Why do you think he wanted me to stay with him?" Rachel asked.
"I don't like to speak any ill about the dead," the old woman said after a few moments. "All I'll say is that he had a temper and he could hold a grudge, like every Harmon I've ever known. Your granddaddy was the same way. But your father loved you. I never doubted that and you shouldn't either. I'll tell you something else I think. It would have been wrong to take you away from these mountains, because if you're born here they're a part of you. No other place will ever feel right."
Widow Jenkins put her glasses back on. She turned to Rachel and smiled.
"Maybe that's just an old woman's silly notion, about the mountains I mean. What do you think?"
"I don't know. How can I if I've never been away from them?"
"Well, I never have either, but you're young and young folks these days get restless," Widow Jenkins said, slowly lifting herself from the steps, "so if you ever do find out you'll have to let me know."
Widow Jenkins bent down and tousled Jacob's hair.
"I'll see you in the morning, buster."
After Widow Jenkins left, Rachel lingered a few more moments on the porch. The sun had fallen behind the mountains now, and the cove seemed to settle deeper into the earth, the way an animal might burrow into leaves to make a nest before it slept. All the while, the thickening shadows made the mountains appear to fold inward. Rachel tried to imagine what living here had been like for her mother, but it was impossible, because what had felt like being shut in to her mother felt like a sheltering to Rachel, as if the mountains were huge hands, hard but gentle hands that cupped around you, protecting and comforting, the way she imagined God's hands would be. She supposed Widow Jenkins was right, that you had to be born here.
Rachel lifted Jacob into her arms.
"Time for us to eat some supper," she told the child.
MEN SEEKING WORK CAME TO THE CAMP IN A steady procession now. Some camped out in the stumps and slash, waiting days for a maimed or killed worker to be brought from the woods in hopes of being his replacement. These and others more transient gathered six mornings a week on the commissary porch, each in his way trying to distinguish himself from the others when Campbell walked among them. Some went shirtless to show off powerful physiques while others held axes brought from farms or other timber camps, ready at a moment's notice to begin chopping. Still others carried Bibles and read them with great attentiveness to show they were not blackguards or reds but Godly men. Some bore tattered pieces of paper testifying to their talent and reliability as loggers or discharge papers for military service, and all brought with them stories of hungry children and siblings, sick parents and sick wives that Campbell listened to with sympathy, though how much such stories influenced his choices none of the workers could discern.
Serena continued to go out with the lead crews each morning. Galloway trailed behind her, the nubbed arm dangling like rotten fruit clinging to a branch. As Serena moved from crew to crew, no man spoke to her of the coming child, and none let his gaze settle on her stomach. Yet all in their way acknowledged her waxing belly, some offering dipperfuls of spring water, hats holding raspberries and blackberries, ferns twined around chewy combs of sourwood honey. Others gave Galloway pint mason jars filled with spring tonics made of milkweed and sassafras, mandrake and valerian root. One logger offered a double-beveled broad axe to place under Serena's birth bed to cut the pain, still another a bloodstone to prevent hemorrhaging. Foremen came running when Serena appeared so she wouldn't have time or need to dismount. On warm days, the crew bosses led the Arabian into uncut trees so Serena would be shaded.
She often drank the spring water, occasionally ate some of the proffered berries and honey. Galloway placed the tonics in his tote sack. Whether Serena drank them none knew. As Galloway followed Serena from crew to crew, the jars clinked against each other softly, like wind chimes.
Snipes' crew worked alone, having ascended to the summit of Shanty Ridge. As they took a morning break, the men watched Serena moving among the crews to the south. Stewart shook his head in dismay.
"If Preacher McIntyre was here he'd say them carrying on like that is nothing short of idolatry."
"He surely would," Snipes agreed. "He any better, McIntyre I mean?"
"A tad," Stewart said. "Enough that his wife ain't let them doctors electrocute him."
"That's too bad," Ross said. "I was hoping we could fling him in the river and he'd shock us up a mess of catfish. Bring them up the same way you do cranking a telephone."
Snipes unfolded his newspaper and perused the front page.
"What's the scuttlebutt, Snipes?" Henryson asked.
"Well, them park folks seem to be honing in on Colonial Townsend's land over in Tennessee. Says here they've about reached an agreement."
"That tract's big as the one they got Champion to sell them, ain't it?" Henryson asked.
"Says here it is."
"I figured the Pembertons to have bought it," Henryson said. "They was hot after it for a while there till Harris steered them over to Jackson County."
"I heard Harris has got him some geologists over there in Jackson trying to root up a big copper vein," Stewart said.
"Copper?" Henryson said. "I heard it was coal he was looking for."
"I been hearing near everything from silver and gold to Noah's ark to the Big Rock Candy Mountain," Ross said.
"What do you think it is?" Stewart asked Snipes.
"Well," Snipes said reflectively. "It could be a quest for one of the world's immortal treasures, as many a rich man would wish to have his name recorded in the anus of history, but knowing Harris I'm not of a mind to think he'd care much about that."
Snipes paused and picked up a pebble, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger as he might a coin he was unsure he wanted to spend.
"What I'm thinking is that, at least as the crow flies, Franklin ain't but thirty miles away," Snipes concluded. "I'd say that ought to fill in enough of the puzzle pieces for you to figure the rest."
The men were silent for a few moments. Snipes returned to his newspaper as the others continued to look southward. They watched as Serena followed the new spur line into the woods.
"I heard she's just eating bloody beef for her breakfast and supper," Stewart said. "To make that young one of hers all the fiercer. And that ain't the half of it. Come the night she bares her belly to the moon, soaking in all its power."
"I'd say somebody's bull-ragging you, Stewart," Henryson said.
"Maybe so," Ross interjected, "but if somebody told you a year ago she'd train a eagle to go flitting around picking up timber rattlers long as your arm you'd have thought that a rusty too."
"That's true," Henryson said. "We've not seen the like of her in these hills before."
IT was in the eighth month of her pregnancy that Serena awoke with pain in her lower abdomen. Pemberton found Doctor Cheney in the caboose ministering to a worker who had a three-inch splinter embedded in the sclera of his eye. The doctor used a pair of tweezers to work the splinter free, washed the wound with disinfectant and sent the man back to his crew.
"Probably something has not lain well on her stomach," Doctor Cheney said as they walked to the house.
Galloway waited on the porch, Serena's horse tacked and tethered to the lower banister.
"Mrs. Pemberton will be staying in today," Pemberton told him.
Galloway made no reply but gazed intently at Cheney's heavy black physician's bag as Pemberton led the doctor into the house.
Serena sat on the bed edge. Her face was pale, gray eyes seemingly focused on something far away, her shallow breaths such as one might use while holding something fragile or dangerous. Serena's peignoir lay open, the dark-blue silk rippling back to reveal her rounded belly.
"Lie down on your side," Doctor Cheney said, and took a stethoscope from his bag. The doctor pressed the instrument to Serena's stomach, listening attentively a few moments. He nodded to himself and lifted the bright-steel bell from Serena's skin, freed the stethoscope's prongs so the instrument hung around his neck.
"All is well, madam," Doctor Cheney said. "It's normal for women to be susceptible to minor, sometimes even nonexistent pains, especially when with child. What you're feeling is probably a mild gastrointestinal upset, or to put it less delicately, excessive gas."
"Mrs. Pemberton is no malingerer," Pemberton said as Serena slowly raised herself to a sitting position.
Doctor Cheney placed the stethoscope back in his physician's bag, pinched its metal snap closed.
"I don't mean to imply such. The mind is its own place, as the poet tells us, and has its own peculiar reality. What one feels one feels."
Pemberton watched Cheney flatten his hand as if preparing to pat his patient on the shoulder, but the physican wisely reconsidered and let the hand remain by his side.
"I assure you that she will be better by tomorrow," Doctor Cheney said when they stepped back out on the porch.
"Is there anything that will help until then?" Pemberton asked, nodding at Galloway sitting on the steps. "Galloway can go to the commissary, to town if necessary."
"Yes," Doctor Cheney said, addressing Galloway. "Go to the commissary and fetch your mistress a bag of peppermints. I find they do wonders when my stomach is sour."
Serena stayed in bed all day. She insisted Pemberton go to the office, but he did so only when she agreed to have Galloway stay in the front room. When Pemberton returned to check on her at noon and then later in the evening, Serena told him she felt better. But she remained pale. They went to bed early, and as they settled into sleep Serena pressed her back and hips into Pemberton's chest and groin, took his right hand and placed it on the undercurve of her stomach as if to help hold the baby in place. Music filtered up from the dining hall porch. Pemberton drifted to sleep as a worker sang of a woman named Mary who walked the wild moors.
The next morning Pemberton was awakened by Serena sitting up in the bed, the covers pushed back to her feet, left hand pressed between her legs. When Pemberton asked what was wrong, Serena did not speak. Instead, she raised the hand to him as if making a vow, her fingers and palm slick with blood. Pemberton jerked on pants and boots, a shirt he didn't bother to button. He wrapped Serena in the peignoir and lifted her into his arms, snatching a towel from the rack as he passed the bathroom. The train was about to make an early run to the saw mill and men had collected around the tracks. Pemberton yelled at several loitering workers to uncouple all the cars from the Shay except for the coach. Mud holes pocked the ground, but Pemberton stumbled right through them as men scurried to separate the cars and the fireman frantically shoveled coal into the tender. Campbell rushed from the office and helped get Serena into the coach and lain lengthways on a seat. Pemberton told Campbell to call the hospital and have a doctor and ambulance waiting at the depot, then to drive Pemberton's Packard there. Campbell left the coach car and Pemberton and Serena were alone amidst the shouts of workers and the Shay engine's gathering racket.
Pemberton sat on the seat edge and pressed a towel against Serena's groin to try and stanch the bleeding. Serena's eyes were closed, her face fading to the pallor of marble as the engineer placed his hand on the reverser, knocked off the brakes and opened the throttle. Pemberton listened to the train make what seemed its endless gradations toward motion, steam entering the throttle valve into the admission pipes and into the cylinders before the push of the pistons against the rod, and the rod turning the crankshaft and then the line shaft turning through the universal joints and the pinion gears meshing with the bull gears. Only then the wheels ever so slowly coming alive.
Pemberton closed his eyes and imagined the engine's meshing metal akin to the inner workings of a clock, bringing back time that had been suspended since he'd seen the blood on Serena's hand. When the train gained a steady rhythm, Pemberton opened his eyes and looked out the window, and it was as if the train crossed the bottom of a deep clear lake. Everything behind appeared slowed by the density of water-Campbell entering the office to call the hospital, workers coming out of the dining hall to watch the engine and coach car pull away, Galloway emerging from the stable, his stubbed arm flopping uselessly as he ran after the train.
The Shay began its ascent up McClure Ridge, the valley falling away behind them. Once over the summit, the train gained speed, dense woods now surrounding the tracks. Pemberton remembered what Serena had once said about only the present being real. Nothing is but what is now, he told himself as he held Serena's wrist, felt her pulse fluttering weakly beneath the skin. As the train crossed the declining mountains toward Waynesville, Pemberton pressed his lips against the limp wrist. Stay alive, he whispered, as though speaking to what blood remained in her veins.
By the time the train pulled into the depot, the towel was saturated. Serena hadn't made a sound the whole way. Saving her strength to stay alive, Pemberton believed, but now she'd lapsed into unconsciousness. Two attendants in white carried Serena off the train and into the waiting ambulance. Pemberton and the hospital doctor got in as well. The doctor, a man in his early eighties, lifted the soggy towel and cursed.
"Why in God's name wasn't she brought sooner," the doctor said, and pressed the towel back between Serena's legs. "She's going to need blood, a lot of it and fast. What's her blood type?"
Pemberton did not know and Serena was past telling anyone.
"Same as mine," Pemberton said.
Once in the hospital emergency room, Pemberton and Serena lay side by side on metal gurneys, thin feather pillows cushioning their heads. The doctor rolled up Pemberton's sleeve and shunted his forearm with the needle, then did the same to Serena. They were connected by three feet of rubber hose, the olive-shaped pump blooming in the tubing's center. The doctor squeezed the pump. Satisfied, he motioned for the nurse to take it and stand in the narrow space between the gurneys.
"Every thirty seconds," the doctor told her, "any faster and the vein can collapse."
The doctor stepped around the gurney to minister to Serena as the nurse squeezed the rubber pump, checked the wall clock until half a minute passed, and squeezed again.
Pemberton raised his shunted arm and gripped the nurse's wrist with his hand.
"I'll pump the blood."
"I don't think…"
Pemberton tightened his grip, enough that the nurse gasped. She opened her hand and let him take the pump.
Pemberton watched the clock, and when fifteen seconds passed he squeezed the rubber. He did so again, listening for the hiss and suck of his blood passing through the tube. But there was no sound, just as there was no way to see his blood coursing through the dark-gray tubing. Each time he squeezed, Pemberton closed his eyes so he could imagine the blood pulsing from his arm into Serena's, from there up through the vein and into the right and left atria of her heart. Pemberton imagined the heart itself, a shriveled thing slowly expanding as it refilled with blood.
A grammar school was across the road, and through the emergency room's open window Pemberton heard the shouts of children at recess. An attendant entered the room and helped lift Serena's legs and hold them apart as the doctor performed his pelvic exam. Pemberton closed his eyes again and squeezed the pump. He no longer checked the clock but tightened his hand as soon as he felt the rubber fill with blood. A bell rang and the sounds of the children dimmed as they reentered the school. The doctor stepped away from Serena and nodded at the attendant to lower Serena's legs.
"Get the mayo stand and a lap pack," the doctor told the attendant.
The nurse fitted a mask over Serena's face and dripped chloroform onto the cloth and wire. The attendant rolled the stand beside Serena's bed, opened the white cotton sheeting to reveal the sterilized steel. Pemberton watched the doctor lift the scalpel and open Serena's body from pubis to navel. Pemberton squeezed the pump again as the doctor's right hand disappeared into the incision, lifted up the purplish blue umbilical cord for a moment before resettling it. Then the doctor dipped both hands into Serena's belly, raised something so gray and phlegmy it appeared to be made not of flesh but moist clay. Blood daubing the body was the only indication to Pemberton it could have ever held life. The umbilical cord lay coiled on the baby's chest. Pemberton did not know if it was still connected to Serena.
For a few moments the doctor stared at the infant intently. Then he turned and handed what filled his hands to the attendant.
"Put it over there," the doctor said, and motioned to a table in the corner.
The doctor turned back to Serena but not before asking the nurse how much blood Pemberton had given.
"Over 500 cc's. Should I try and stop him?"
The doctor looked at Pemberton, who shook his head.
"I guess not. He'll be too weak before long to squeeze it anyway, or he'll pass out."
As the doctor wove dark thread through Serena's skin, Pemberton turned his head toward her. Pemberton listened to her soft inhalations and matched his breathing precisely to hers. He became lightheaded, no longer able to focus enough to read the clock or follow the words passing between the doctor and nurse. Another group of children ran out onto the grammar school's playground, but their shouts soon evaporated into silence. Pemberton squeezed the pump, his hand unable to close completely around it. He listened to his and Serena's one breath, even as he felt the needle being pulled from his forearm, heard the wheels of Serena's gurney as it rolled away.
PEMBERTON still lay on the gurney when he awoke. The doctor loomed above, an orderly beside him.
"Let us help you up," the doctor said, and the two men raised Pemberton to a sitting position.
He felt the room darken briefly, then lighten.
"Where's Serena?"
The words came out halting and raspy, as if he'd not spoken in days. Pemberton looked at the clock, its hands gradually coming into focus. Had one been on the wall, he would have checked a calendar to discern the day and month. Pemberton closed his eyes a few moments and raised his forefinger and thumb to the bridge of his nose. He opened his eyes and things seemed clearer.
"Where's Serena?" he asked again.
"In the other wing."
Pemberton gripped the gurney's edge and prepared to stand, but the orderly placed a firm hand on his knee.
"Is she alive?"
"Yes," the doctor said. "Your wife's constitution is quite remarkable, so unless something unforeseen occurs, she'll recover."
"But the child is dead," Pemberton said.
"Yes, and there's another matter I'll need to discuss with you and your wife later."
"Tell me now," Pemberton said.
"Your wife's uterus. It's lacerated through the cervix."
"And that means what?"
"That she can have no more children."
Pemberton did not speak for a few moments.
"What was the child's sex?"
"A boy."
"Had we gotten here earlier, would the child have survived?"
"That doesn't matter now," the doctor said.
"It matters," Pemberton said.
"Yes, the child probably would have survived."
The orderly and doctor helped Pemberton off the gurney. The room wavered a few moments, then steadied.
"You gave a lot of blood," the doctor said. "Too much. You'll pass out if you're not careful."
"Which room?"
"Forty-one," the doctor said. "The orderly can go with you."
"I can find it," Pemberton said, and walked slowly toward the door, past the corner table where nothing now lay.
He stepped out of the emergency room and into the corridor. The hospital's two wings were connected by the main lobby, and as Pemberton passed through he saw Campbell sitting by the doorway. Campbell rose from his chair as Pemberton approached.
"Leave the car here for me and take the train back to camp," Pemberton said. "Make sure the crews are working and then go by the saw mill to make sure there are no problems there."
Campbell took the Packard's keys from his pocket and gave them to Pemberton. As Pemberton turned to leave, Campbell spoke.
"If there's someone asks how Mrs. Pemberton and the young one are doing, what do you want me to say?"
"That Mrs. Pemberton is going to be fine."
Campbell nodded but did not move.
"What else?" Pemberton asked.
"Doctor Cheney, he rode into town with me."
"Where is he now?" Pemberton asked, trying to keep his voice level.
"I don't know. He said he was going to get Mrs. Pemberton some flowers, but he ain't come back."
"How long ago was that?"
"Almost two hours."
"I've got some business with him I'll settle later," Pemberton said.
"You're not the only one," Campbell said as he reached to open the door.
Pemberton stopped him with a firm hand on the shoulder.
"Who else?"
"Galloway. He come by an hour ago asking where Doctor Cheney was."
Pemberton took his hand off Campbell's shoulder, and the overseer went out the door. Pemberton walked across the lobby and up the opposite corridor, reading the black door numbers until he found Serena's room.
She was still unconscious when he came in, so Pemberton pulled a chair beside her bed and waited. As late morning and the afternoon passed, he listened to her breath, watched the gradual return of color to her face. The drugs kept Serena in a drifting stupor, her eyes occasionally opening but unfocused. A nurse brought Pemberton lunch and then supper. Only when the last sunlight had drained from the room's one window did Serena's eyes open and find Pemberton's. She appeared cognizant, which surprised the nurse because the morphine drip was still in Serena's arm. The nurse checked the drip to make sure it was operating and then left. Pemberton turned in his chair to face her. He slid his right hand under Serena's wrist and let his fingers clasp around it like a bracelet.
She turned her head to see him better, her words a whisper.
"The child is dead?"
"Yes."
Serena studied Pemberton's face a few moments.
"What else?"
"We won't be able to have another."
Serena remained silent for almost a minute, and Pemberton wondered if the drugs were taking hold again. Then Serena took a breath, her mouth kept open as though about to speak as well, but she did not speak, not at that moment. Instead, Serena closed her eyes and slowly exhaled, and as she did her body seemed to settle deeper into the mattress. Her eyes opened.
"It's like my body knew all along," she said.
Pemberton did not ask what she meant. Serena closed her eyes a few moments, opened them slowly.
"And yet…"
Pemberton nodded and squeezed Serena's wrist, felt again the pulse of their blood. Serena's eyes shifted to Pemberton's bruised inner elbow, the square of gauze taped to it.
"Your blood merged with mine," Serena said. "That's all we ever hoped for anyway."