SHE LEFT THE HOSPITAL SOONER THAN THE doctors or Pemberton wished. I need to be back at the camp, she told them. Serena was carried out of the hospital the same way she'd been carried in. Campbell and Pemberton lifted her into the train's coach car, the gurney settled on a foot-thick pallet of blankets to cushion her against the train's jarring. When the train got to camp, they carried her to the house. It was supper time and the workers dropped their forks and knives and gathered on the porch. Most watched from a distance, but some, mainly crew bosses she'd worked with, ventured closer, their hats off as the gurney passed before them. Serena was pale but her gray eyes were open and staring at a sky she'd not seen in seven days. The workers watched in silence as Campbell and Pemberton carried her through the camp to the house. They watched in wonder as well, especially men whose mothers and sisters and wives had died from what Serena survived.
Vaughn opened the door to the house, and Galloway and Pemberton carried her into the bedroom. They eased Serena into the bed, and Pemberton shut the curtains in hopes it would help her sleep. Early evening was the time the workers played and sang their music, or, even tired as they were, sometimes arranged baseball games and wrestling matches, gathered around an outbreak of fisticuffs. But this evening the camp was hushed, oddly vigilant, like the afterward of a violent storm.
Pemberton checked the cotton gauze over her wound for any drainage of blood or jaundiced fluid, gave Serena water and the Feosol the doctor prescribed for her anemia. As the days passed, Pemberton fed her a soft diet of eggs and pureed meat until she could lift the fork and spoon herself. He emptied the bedpan and tried, vainly, to get Serena to take the codeine for her soreness. She grew stronger each day, soon leaving the bed to use the bathroom and to make short walks around the house while Pemberton held her arm. Serena insisted he continue working, especially in pursuing investors, but Pemberton did so only after moving his office into the front room. While Serena lay in the darkened bedroom, Campbell ran the day-to-day business from the office with his usual efficiency, Vaughn taking over lesser duties.
All the while Galloway remained on the porch, allowing no trespass, taking inside himself what food or medicine or well wishes were brought. Come evening, he made a pallet in front of the door. One night Pemberton looked out the window and saw Galloway asleep on the pallet, wearing the same clothes he'd worn since the day Serena had come home. Galloway's knees were tucked tight to his stomach, head bowed inward, the nubbed wrist pressed childlike to his mouth while his hand gripped the handle of a sprung switchblade knife.
As she strengthened, Serena talked about Brazil, about going there as soon as they finished in Jackson County. Obsessed with it, Pemberton believed, especially after Pemberton had found potential investors in Asheville. Men who would be interested only in local investments, Pemberton told her, but Serena believed otherwise. I can convince them, she said. As Pemberton sat in the darkened bedroom, his chair pulled close to the bed, Serena spoke of Brazil's untapped resources, its laissez-faire attitude toward businesses, how she and Pemberton should go there and scout tracts as soon as the Jackson County camp was up and running. Not even an empire, Pemberton, a world, she told him, and spoke with such fervor Pemberton at first feared an infection might have set in and raised her temperature. What reservations Pemberton had, he kept to himself. They did not speak of the dead child.
By the second week Serena was out of bed and sitting in a chair, sending Vaughn out on horseback to monitor the work crews' progress and relay messages back and forth from the foremen. Documents and statistics and reports about Brazil, which Pemberton had not even known existed, were exhumed from Serena's Saratoga trunk. Also, a wax-engraved map of South America, which, once unfolded, consumed half the front room. The map covered the floor for days, a cane back chair set upon it so Serena could peruse its expanse more diligently, the chair occasionally lifted like a chess piece and set back down on a different square of the map.
Something planned for years, Pemberton now realized. Serena sent telegrams and letters to sources and contacts in Washington and South America. Possible investors as far away as Chicago and Quebec were contacted as well. Serena did all this with a frenetic alacrity, as if her mind had to make up for her body's inactivity. Minutes and hours seemed to move quicker, as if Serena had wrenched time itself into a higher gear. At the end of the second week, Serena insisted Pemberton return to the office where, as efficient as Campbell was, invoices and work orders and payrolls piled up.
With the help of the mild spring, they were on schedule to finish in Cove Creek Valley by October, so an increasing number of workers were being sent east to Jackson County to set down rail lines and raise buildings for the new camp. Harris had his men in Jackson County as well, teams led by geologists making exploratory sorties into cliffs and creek banks. Harris was tight-lipped about what these men searched for, but he'd also bought an adjacent hundred acres that enclosed the upper watershed. These mountains are like the finest ladies, Harris told Pemberton. They won't give you want you want until you spend a lot of time and money on them.
On Pemberton's first Saturday back in the office, a foreman drove over from the saw mill with his payroll ledger. Pemberton set a fountain pen and box of envelopes on his desk, opened the safe and pulled out a tray of one-and five-dollar bills, a cloth bag holding rolls of quarters and dimes and nickels. When Pemberton opened the ledger, he saw a new name printed on the last line. Jacob Ballard Age fifteen. After a few moments, Pemberton raised his eyes to the top of the ledger. He wrote a name on an envelope, placed two fives and two ones inside. But even as he sealed the envelope, Pemberton's eyes drifted to the bottom of the page, unable to shake the sensation of seeing the child's first name in print. He studied the five letters, the way the raised J and b shaped the word to look like a bowl waiting to be filled. Minutes passed until, for the first time since Serena's miscarriage, Pemberton took the photograph album from the bottom drawer. He set it beside the ledger and opened it to the last two pages. The photograph of himself as a two-year-old was on the left, but it was the photograph on the opposite page that held his attention. Pemberton eased the ledger closer so Jacob and the child's photograph lay side by side.
THAT afternoon Snipes' crew was cutting on Big Fork Ridge when the main cable's tail block broke free from a stump. Snipes believed that if the skidder crew got a break his men should as well, so they sat on the logs they'd just cut. A large woodpecker glided low overhead, a white lining on the black underwings, its round head tufted a brilliant red. The bird flapped its wide wings once and vanished into the uncut trees.
Henryson looked wistfully toward the woods where the bird had disappeared.
"Wish he'd have dropped off one of them head feathers," he said.
Snipes' crew was a bright-spangled assemblage now, for after Dunbar's death all to varying degrees had adopted the heraldry of their foreman. Henryson stuffed his hatband with goldfinch and jay and cardinal feathers to create a variegated winged halo around his head while Stewart wore green patches on his shoulders like chevrons and a white handkerchief sewn onto his bib, crayoned in its center a smudgy red cross. Ross bore a single patch of orange across his crotch, though an act of derision or belief no one but he knew. Snipes himself had further brightened his wardrobe by replacing his leather bootlaces with orange dynamite wire.
Most of the men rolled cigarettes and smoked while they waited. Snipes took his pipe and glasses from his bib before pulling a section of the Asheville Citizen from his overalls' back pocket. Snipes set the newspaper on his lap and took off his glasses, wiped the inner rims carefully with his handkerchief before perusing the page.
"Says here they still ain't got no suspects in the recent demise of Doctor Cheney," Snipes said. "The high sheriff in Asheville argues that some hobo hanging around the train station done it and then hopped the next freight out of town. He figures they'll likely never catch the perpetrator."
"Didn't the high sheriff find it kindly curious that hobo didn't take the train ticket to Kansas City they found in Doctor Cheney's pocket, nor his billfold for that matter?" Henryson asked. "Or why a hobo would sit the good doctor in a bathroom stall with his tongue cut out and a peppermint in each hand."
"Or figure the fellow who's driving the very car the late doctor used to drive might be the least bit involved?" Ross added.
"No sir," Snipes said. "That's what the law calls immaterial evidence."
Ross raised his head and looked upward at the blue sky, let a slow drift of smoke rise from his pursed mouth before speaking.
"I doubt they'll be looking for any other kind of evidence since the sheriff's on the Pemberton Lumber Company payroll."
"You mean the high sheriff in Asheville, not Sheriff McDowell?" Stewart asked.
"That's right," Ross said.
"I don't think Sheriff McDowell can be bought," Stewart said.
"We'll find out soon enough," Ross replied. "These folks seem to be picking up steam far as their killings. Didn't bother to make this one look like no accident neither, the way they done with Buchanan. They'll be needing every lawman in this state on their payroll at the rate they're going."
"They ain't never got to McDowell before, and we all know they've tried. I don't think they will now," Henryson said with uncharacteristic optimism.
The men paused to listen to a staccato tapping coming from the deeper woods. Henryson cocked his head slightly to better gauge the bird's location, but the tapping ceased and the woods grew silent.
"Got anything new about that park in your paper?" Ross asked Snipes.
"Just that Colonial Townsend did sell his land to the guvment," Snipes said. "The paper gives Townsend and the park folks both a big huzzah for that."
"That's bad news for my brother-in-law," Henryson said, shaking his head and looking west toward Tennessee. "He's been a sawyer for Townsend for nigh on ten years. Him and my sister got four young ones to feed."
"Is he a good worker?" Snipes asked.
"He can handle a axe good as any man I know."
"I'll put in a word for him with Campbell," Snipes said, "but so many folks is perched on them commissary steps now you about have to draw lots for a seat. They's workers already herding at the new camp and it not even open yet."
"Who told you that?" Henryson asked.
"Nobody told me," Snipes said. "I seen it my ownself last Sunday. One of them on the porch steps picked up his axe and said he was headed to Jackson County, and a good dozen men up and followed like he was Moses leading them to the promised land."
"Your brother-in-law don't do no doctoring, does he?" Ross asked Henryson. "Got an opening there."
"No," Henryson replied, "but even if he was I'd as lief have him stick to the logging. At least you've got a chance to dodge a tree or axe blade. I ain't of a mind to say the same of Galloway."
SHE'D BEEN TOLD TO STAY IN BED FOR SIX weeks, but when a month had passed Serena resumed supervising the cutting crews. When she stepped off the front porch, Galloway waited. They went to the stable together and Serena came out on the Arabian, the eagle on its perch. She rode slowly out of camp, Galloway following in his shambling gait, a constant and resolute shadow. The land had been cleared up Rough Fork to Wash Ridge. From a distance, the valley's forests appeared not so much cut down as leveled by some vast glacier. Though the rains had lessened, silt-stalled creeks continued to make traversing the bottomland a precarious business. Men stumbled and slipped, came up cursing and wiping mud from their faces and clothes. Two workers broke bones in the miasma and several more lost tools. A sawyer who'd once logged on the coast said the only difference between the valley and a Charleston County swamp was the absence of cottonmouth moccasins.
Pemberton watched from the office porch as Serena and Galloway slogged on through the wasteland and disappeared up Cove Creek. As the morning passed, he worked on invoices and talked with Harris about meeting two potential investors. Every half hour, Pemberton got up from his desk and looked west to where Serena was. At eleven, it was time to check in with Scruggs, the man who'd overseen the saw mill operation since Buchanan's death. But Pemberton was reluctant to leave the camp, and not just because he was worried about Serena. For the first time he could remember, Campbell hadn't shown up for work. Pemberton found Vaughn and told him to stay in the office and answer the telephone. As Pemberton drove out of camp, he saw Serena and the horse ascending Half Acre Ridge. He remembered the workers' surprise at how the thin mountain air never affected her, even in her first days when she'd ridden into the tract's highest elevations. They forget where I'm from, Serena had told him.
When Pemberton arrived at the saw mill, he found Scruggs at the splash pond supervising two workers guiding timber toward the log buggy. Using their eight-foot-long jam pikes like acrobats, the men moved quickly across the splash pond's surface, stepping log to log with a confidence that belied the job's dangers. Pemberton saw that the older man was Ingledew, a foreman who'd worked at the saw mill since it had begun operation. Ingledew wore cutter boots, their steel points grabbing the wood like claws, but the youth with him still worked barefoot, despite being at the saw mill a month.
"Is that Jacob Ballard?"
"Yes sir," Scruggs said, a slight surprise in his voice. "I didn't know you knew him."
"I remember his name on the payroll," Pemberton said. "Why hasn't he bought his cutter boots yet?"
"I been telling him to," Scruggs said, "but he's sparking some girl over in Sevierville every Sunday. Young Ballard there would rather waste his money buying gewgaws for her."
Pemberton and Scruggs watched as the youth stepped barefoot across the pond's all but hidden surface, now wielding the jam pike like a harpoon as he jabbed and herded the timber into position for the log buggy, Ingledew behind him untangling timber as well. Most of the logjams gave readily, but some had knit together like stitches, the whole jam moving instead of a single log, forcing the two men to crouch and untangle the timber by hand.
"Good at it though, ain't he, especially to be so green," Scruggs said. "He glides over that pond like a water spider."
Pemberton nodded as they watched Ballard scamper to another log, prod more timber toward the buggy where a third worker waited to transport it onto the log carrier. Ballard was skinny but Pemberton could tell from the way he shoved the logs around that, like so many of the highlanders, he possessed a wiry strength.
Pemberton was about to leave when he saw Ingledew unlock another logjam and free the lower trunk of a large poplar, push it toward the single slab of timber Ballard rode. The poplar log bumped against a smaller one only a yard behind the younger worker, it in turn bumping the timber the youth rode. It was hardly more than a tap, but enough. The log rolled and Ballard slipped. He plunged feet first through a small breech in the timber as through a trap door. Legs, trunk, and then head fell in a blur, all vanished except for a hand and a few inches of wrist. Somehow Ballard managed to hold onto the jam pike with his right hand. For a few moments, Pemberton thought it might save him, because each end of the pike had snagged timber. Pemberton watched the hand gripping the pike, willing the boy to hold on while Ingledew hurdled logs to come help. As Ingledew came closer, his wake caused the timber near where the youth fell to shift, and the breech Ballard had fallen through became no wider than the fist poking through to clutch the jam pike.
Another five seconds and Ingledew might have been able to pull him out, but Ballard's hand let go of the jam pike to make a last clawing grab at a log, his fingertips breaking off a piece of oak bark. The last breech in the gap disappeared along with the hand. Ingledew frantically opened a hole in the timber, but Pemberton knew as well as the workers that under the splash pond's calm surface the creek's old currents yet swirled. Ingledew kept moving, prying open more holes nearby as Pemberton and Scruggs scoured the pond for a logjam rocked or swayed by Ballard pushing from underneath. The man operating the log buggy was on the water as well now, but Ballard was lost. After twenty minutes Ingledew and the other man gave up and came to shore.
Scruggs, the sole Catholic in the camp and perhaps the whole county, bowed his head and crossed himself.
"Them logs sealed that boy up like a coffin lid," Scruggs said softly.
Pemberton stared out at the pond's timbered surface, so calm now that the logs could have been perceived as resting on land, not water. The world suddenly appeared to Pemberton to widen in distance between the earth and sky, followed by a lightheadedness like what had caused him to pass out on the hospital gurney. For a moment, Pemberton feared his legs would give way. He bent his knees slightly and lowered his head, hands against thighs as he waited for the feeling to pass.
"You all right?" Scruggs asked.
"Just give me a second," Pemberton said and slowly raised his head.
Pemberton saw that not just Scruggs but also Ingledew and the other worker watched him. Scruggs reached out to steady him, but Pemberton waved the proffered arm away. He took slow breaths, let the space between the sky and world contract, steady itself.
"You want to sit in the office for a while, Mr. Pemberton?" Scruggs asked.
Pemberton shook his head. The lightheadedness had been replaced by nausea, and he wanted to be gone from this place before it got worse.
"Come into camp tomorrow and we'll get you a new man," Pemberton said, already walking back to his car, "and this time make it clear he buys cutter boots with his first week's pay."
"Yes sir," Scruggs said.
Pemberton got in the Packard and drove until he was out of sight of the saw mill. He pulled off the road and opened the door, waiting to see if his stomach was strong enough to hold its moiling contents.
Once back at camp, Pemberton found that Campbell still hadn't shown up, so he sent Vaughn instead to check on a problem with the second skidder. Pemberton went back to the invoices on his desk, but after getting up and standing by the window a third time, he placed the checkbook back in the Mosler safe and went to the stable after telling Vaughn that he'd return in the late afternoon. Pemberton mounted his horse and rode through slash and mud to Wash Ridge where he found Serena talking to a crew boss. The eagle's hooded head swung in Pemberton's direction as he approached.
"Come to check up on me, Pemberton?" Serena said as he rode up beside her.
"You'd do the same."
"True enough," Serena said, and reached out and touched his cheek. "But you're the one who looks a little peaked. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," Pemberton said.
As the foreman asked Serena a final question, Pemberton thought of Ballard's hand grasping the jam pike. He imagined the youth hanging in the murky water, debating whether or not to let go, to try and save himself or wait to be saved. Those seconds would have felt like minutes, Pemberton knew, the same way it had been when the bear enveloped him. Closing over the youth like a coffin lid, Scruggs had said. It would have felt that way, Pemberton knew, just as black and hopeless.
The foreman nodded to Serena that he understood. He doffed his battered felt hat and went back to his men as Pemberton moved his horse alongside the Arabian.
"Harris called," Pemberton said. "We meet our potential investors at the Cecils this weekend."
"So I see the castle at last," Serena said. "What else did Harris say about them?"
"The Calhouns are old-money Charleston. They summer in Asheville and stay part of the time with the Cecils, which is why we're meeting there. Lowenstein's a businessman in New York City, a very successful one."
"Why is he here?"
"His wife has tuberculosis."
Pemberton paused and watched the workers as they walked into the deeper woods, still watching them as he spoke again.
"As far as Brazil, Harris told me they're only considering investments in this region."
"Then we'll have to change their minds," Serena said.
For a few moments neither of them spoke. The eagle's jesses and swivels rustled as the bird raised its wings. Serena stroked the eagle's keel with the back of her index finger and the bird calmed.
"We lost a man at the saw mill today," Pemberton said. "One of the new hires Scruggs was high on."
"If Scruggs liked him, then it is a loss. He's a good judge of workers," Serena said, pausing as she glanced east towards camp. "Has Campbell shown up?"
"No," Pemberton said. "I sent Vaughn to look for him, but he didn't have any luck."
"Then it's true."
"What's true?"
"A sawyer claimed that he's deserted us," Serena said. "We'll give him until morning before we send Galloway after him."
"Why bring him back? If he doesn't want to work for us, the hell with him."
"He knows who we've paid off and what for," Serena said, "which might become a problem. Besides, the workers need to understand the necessity of loyalty."
"Campbell will keep his mouth shut. If Galloway does bring him back, it'll look to the men like we can't run this place ourselves."
"He won't be bringing him back," Serena said, addressing both Pemberton and the man behind him.
Galloway leaned against a chestnut tree whose trunk outspanned his narrow shoulders. Despite wearing a blue denim shirt, Galloway had been so still Pemberton hadn't seen him. He didn't acknowledge Pemberton, but Pemberton knew Galloway had been listening all the while. Still listening. Pemberton looked down for a moment. His left hand folded inward slightly, and he saw that his thumb rubbed the index finger's gold. An image came to him from his childhood of a turbaned genie rubbing a lamp. He closed the hand completely and looked up.
"All right," Pemberton said.
"MCINTYRE'S doing some better," Stewart said that evening as the men set their tools down for the day, rested a minute before walking the half-mile back to camp. "Me and his missus done what you all suggested."
"Hung him up on a stick?" Ross asked.
"No, got him in the sunlight. He wouldn't leave his bed so me and his missus had to tote him out on it. We set him and that bed in the cow pasture where there ain't no shadows."
"Help any?" Henryson asked.
"Seemed to for a while," Stewart said. "He wasn't talking none but did get to where he'd pick up his axe and cut some firewood, but then a big hoot owl flapped over the pasture and give him the fantods again. He figured it for a portent of something bad a-coming."
Ross cleared his throat and spit, nodded across the quarter-mile of stumps and slash to the south where the Pembertons and Galloway had appeared. Galloway was on foot but the Pembertons rode on horseback, the eagle rigid as a sentinel as it perched on Serena's arm.
"You want a portent of something bad a-coming there it is," Ross said.
Henryson nodded. "They say death always comes in threes, and if that ain't the thing itself then I'm the king of England."
The men paused and stared out at the wasteland and watched the Pembertons and Galloway pass below them, Serena's white gelding gleaming against the stark backdrop, Galloway trailing the procession, his hat brim low against the evening sun.
"Look at them rattles on Stub's hat," Ross said. "They's tilted up like a satinback ready to pour its teeth into you."
Henryson leaned over and raised his pant leg, examined a fist-sized bruise left by a limb whipping against it.
"I'm of a mind it's a good thing for Stub to have them rattles," he said, "especially if they give a little shake once in a while. Leastways you'd know he was around. That fellow could hide from his own shadow."
The men were silent a few moments.
"Campbell didn't come to work today," Henryson said.
"And that ain't like him," Stewart added.
"It ain't like him to haul a grip full of clothes and leave his front door open either," Henryson said, rolling down his pants leg. "Vaughn got up late last night to piss and seen him packing his car and heading out. I reckon Campbell read the writing on the wall. He was ever always a clever man."
"Like I told you," Ross noted, "Campbell's going to look after number one when things get too hot, like any other man."
"I think he was sick of being part of all their meanness," Stewart said. "You could tell he never cottoned to them, even if he never said so."
"They'll not abide his taking off like that," Henryson said, his eyes on the Pembertons and Galloway as he spoke.
"No," Ross agreed. "If you book keep, you know where the checks go, including the ones them senators in Raleigh stuff in their pockets."
"How long you figure her to give Campbell before she sics Stub there after him?" Henryson asked.
"I'd guess a day," Ross said, "just to give some sport to it."
"Some claims Galloway's mama helps him with his murderings," Stewart said. "All she's got to do is get a good look at you. Then she tells Galloway what he needs to do. That's what some say."
"There's some likely in that conclusion," Snipes said, finding a segue into the discussion. "Even your scientists and such argue some folks got uncertain ways of knowing things."
"Which is why you'll not hear me calling him Stub," Ross said to Henryson, "and I'd advise you not to call him that unless you're wanting to join the others he's taken a disliking to."
They watched the party enter the fold of land where Rough Fork Creek flowed into the valley. Their vanishing forms appeared to wobble and haze, miragelike. Then they were gone as if consumed by the air itself.
ON SATURDAY EVENING PEMBERTON FOLLOWED the blacktop through the declining hills and into the Pigeon River valley. A month earlier the last dogwood blossoms had wilted and fallen in the passing forests, the understory now the bright green of dogwood leaves and scrub oak, the denser green of mountain laurel and rhododendron. Pemberton suspected someday soon there'd be a poison to eradicate such valueless trees and shrubs and make it easier to cut and haul out hardwoods.
Pemberton raised his index finger and loosened the silk tie around his collar. He'd dressed up for the first time since his wedding. The white Indian cotton suit lay light over his body, but it still felt constrictive. Yet worth it to see Serena in the same dress she'd worn the first evening they'd met. Now as then the dress seemed in motion as it revealed her body's clefts and curves, its thin green current of silk coursing from neck to ankle. Pemberton placed his right hand on Serena's knee. As he felt the smooth skin beneath the smoothness of the silk, Pemberton tried to make its promise of later pleasure eclipse other concerns. But it didn't. As the road began its ascent from the valley, Pemberton lifted his hand and shifted the Packard into a lower gear.
"I heard McDowell came into the commissary last evening," Pemberton said, keeping his hand on the knob. "He was asking the men about Campbell."
"If he's asking questions, he must not have the answers," Serena replied, turning so her body angled toward Pemberton. "How is Meeks working out?"
"Considering it was his first week, pretty well. He has trouble with the local brogue, but he got the payroll numbers right."
The land leveled and then fell as they crossed the French Broad, the river brown and swollen from an afternoon rain. It was eventide and streetlights were flickering on as the Packard skirted Asheville. They crossed the Swannanoa River, then passed through the Biltmore Estate's main gate and began the winding three-mile drive to the mansion. The forest pressed close to the road, blotting out any light other than the Packard's beams.
The road curved and then straightened, revealing a grassy esplanade. Pemberton made the last turn, and the mansion appeared before them like a cliff of lights. Towers and spires surged upward in silhouette. Gargoyles leaned from the parapets, their scowling features backlit by the glow of windows. The limestone veneer bespoke solidity, a confidence that the Vanderbilt family's place in the world was beyond the vagaries of stock markets and industry.
"Chambord transported to the hinterlands," Serena said derisively as Pemberton braked, the Packard taking its place in line behind other cars.
At the mansion's main entrance, an attendant in black tails and top hat opened Serena's door and took the car keys. The Pembertons joined other guests walking up the wide steps. As they passed the marble lions, Serena placed her hand on Pemberton's forearm, held it firmly as she leaned closer and kissed him softly on the cheek. As she did, Pemberton felt some of his disquiet begin to lift.
They waited for three couples ahead of them to enter. Pemberton placed his hand on the small of Serena's back and moved his hand downward. Pemberton felt the silk cool against his fingers and palm as he caressed the flank of her upper hip. An image came back to him with such vividness that it might have been framed before him in glass-Serena in the dawn light of her Revere Street apartment, laying her Ram's Head overcoat on a chaise lounge as Pemberton entered the room behind her. She hadn't offered him something to drink or a place to sit, or even offered to take his coat. She'd only offered him herself, turning with her left hand already on the dress's green strap, pulling it off her shoulder and letting it fall, exposing the pale globe of her breast, the ruddy nipple beaded by the cold. The line shifted forward, bringing Pemberton out of his reverie.
In the entrance hall, a tuxedoed butler stepped forth and offered champagne flutes from a silver tray. Pemberton handed Serena one and took one for himself before they stepped forward to greet their hosts.
"Welcome to our domicile," John Cecil said, bowing after an exchange of names.
The host's left arm opened outward to the expansiveness behind him. Cecil's hand clasped Pemberton's as he kissed Serena demurely on the cheek. Cornelia Cecil stepped closer, let her lips brush Pemberton's cheek, then turned to Serena and embraced her.
"I'm so sorry, dear. Lydia Calhoun told me of your recent misfortune. To carry a child that long and lose it, such a terrible thing."
Mrs. Cecil broke the embrace but rested her hand on Serena's wrist.
"But you are here, and looking so well. That's something to be thankful for."
Serena's shoulders tensed as several other women came forth to offer condolences. Pemberton quickly took Serena's arm and told the women he needed his wife's presence for a few minutes. They walked to the far end of the room. As soon as they were alone, Serena took a long swallow from the crystal flute.
"I'll need another of these," she said as they made their way toward the music room.
In the music room a jazz band played "Saint Louis Blues." Several couples danced but most stood on the periphery with drinks in hand. Serena and Pemberton lingered by the doorway.
"My partners," Harris said loudly as he came up behind them.
Accompanying Harris was a man in a tuxedo who looked to be in his fifties. Both men moved in unsteadily gaits, whiskey in hand. Harris clasped Pemberton's shoulder with his free hand.
"Bradley Calhoun," Harris said, nodding at the man beside him. "I'll go get Lowenstein."
As Harris walked off, Pemberton offered his hand. Calhoun's handshake was firm and confident, but it could not hide the palm's plump softness. Calhoun took Serena's hand and bestowed a kiss upon it, his drink sloshing as he did so. After he let go her hand, Calhoun brushed back a lock of long yellow-gray hair with a flourish.
"The woman who tames eagles," Calhoun said in a cultivated Southern accent. "Your reputation precedes you, Mrs. Pemberton."
"I hope as a business partner as well," Serena replied.
Harris returned with Lowenstein, a man younger than Pemberton had expected. The New Yorker wore a dark-blue gabardine suit, which Pemberton assumed had been made in one of Lowenstein's own garment shops. Unlike the boisterous Calhoun, Lowenstein possessed the watchful reticence of a self-made man. Harris, his face already flushed by alcohol, raised his glass and the others did as well.
"To fortunes made in these mountains," Harris said, and they all drank.
"But why limit ourselves to just what's here," Serena added, still holding her champagne flute aloft. "Especially when there's so much more to be gained elsewhere."
"And where would that be, Mrs. Pemberton?" Lowenstein asked, his words precisely enunciated, perhaps to counter the vestiges of a European inflection.
"Brazil."
"Brazil?" Lowenstein said, giving Harris a puzzled look. "I'd assumed your plans were for local land investments."
"My husband and I are more ambitious than that," Serena said. "I think you will be also, once you learn of the possibilities."
Lowenstein shook his head.
"My hopes were something here, not Brazil."
"As was I," Calhoun said.
"Gentlemen, local purchases are certainly a possibility as well," Pemberton said, and was about to say more but Serena interrupted.
"Eight dollars on each dollar invested in Brazil, as opposed to two to one on your investment here."
"Eight dollars to one," Lowenstein said. "I find that hard to believe, Mrs. Pemberton."
"What if I can convince you otherwise by showing you land prices and costs of machinery and workers' pay," Serena replied. "I have the documents to prove everything. I'll bring them to Asheville tomorrow and let you peruse them for yourselves."
"Good Lord, Mrs. Pemberton," Harris sputtered, his tone balanced between amusement and annoyance. "You've barely allowed these gentlemen to sip their drinks before trying to hector them into some South America venture."
Calhoun raised his hand to halt Harris' protestations.
"I'd listen to such a proposal, tomorrow or any day for that matter, just for the pleasure of Mrs. Pemberton's presence."
"What about you, Mr. Lowenstein?" Serena said.
"I can't see myself investing in Brazil," he replied, "under any circumstances."
"Let's hear Mrs. Pemberton out, Lowenstein," Calhoun said. "Harris here claims she knows more about timber than any man he's ever met. Right, Harris?"
"No doubt about that," Harris said.
"But what about the new camp in Jackson County?" Lowenstein asked. "Won't that keep you in North Carolina for quite a while?"
"We're ready to begin cutting timber," Serena replied. "We'll be through there in a year at most."
"Brazil," Lowenstein mused. "What about you, Harris? Are you interested in Brazil, Inca gold perhaps?"
"No," Harris said. "As persuasive as Mrs. Pemberton can be, I think I'll stay in North Carolina."
"Too bad," Calhoun said. "How you and the Pembertons have profited by mining and logging the same land strikes me as rather brilliant."
"Yes," Harris said, signaling a waiter for another drink. "The Pembertons take what's above the ground and I take what's below."
"And what have you found below?" Lowenstein asked. "I'm not familiar with what is mined in this region."
"Mr. Harris has been rather reticent on that matter," Serena said.
"True," Harris admitted, "but since I've now bought the adjacent hundred acres and own the creek all the way to its source, I can be more forthcoming."
"Surely you don't mean gold?" Calhoun said.
Harris drained his glass and smiled widely.
"Better than gold. Near Franklin they've found rubies you measure by the ounce. I've seen one myself big as an apple. Sapphires and amethysts as well. All found within forty miles of our Jackson County site."
"So your tract looks promising for similar finds?" Lowenstein asked.
"Actually," Harris said, reaching into his pocket, "more than promising."
Harris opened his hand in the manner of a magician showing a vanished coin, revealing instead a small silver snuff tin. Harris unscrewed the lid and poured the contents into his palm.
"What are they?" Lowenstein asked, peering at a dozen stones shaped and sized like teardrops, all the color of dried blood.
"Rubies," Harris said. "These are too small to be worth more than a few dollars, but you can bet there are more, especially since I found these in and around the creek."
"Washed downstream from a whole cache of them, you mean?" Calhoun asked.
"Exactly, and it's often only the smaller ones that do get washed down."
Harris poured the stones back into the snuff tin, then reached into his pocket again and took out another stone the same size as the others, though this one was violet.
"Amethyst," Harris said. "The damn thing was right by the farmhouse, if you can believe that. Rhodolite garnets all over the yard as well, a sure sign you're in the right place to find more of what I just showed you."
"Sapphires and rubies," Calhoun exclaimed. "It sounds like a veritable El Dorado."
"I would never have believed such riches could be in these hinterlands," Lowenstein said.
"It was evidently so hard to believe there was no use mentioning it before we signed the papers," Serena said. "Right, Harris?"
Harris laughed. "You've found me out, Mrs. Pemberton."
Serena turned to Pemberton.
"I'm sure Mr. Harris realizes that our contract does not allow him to begin his mining operations until the timber is cut."
"Indeed," Pemberton said. "We may decide certain sites should remain uncut a whole decade."
Harris' face sagged a moment, then reset into a craggy grimace.
"Damn if I shouldn't put a clamp on my tongue whenever I drink," Harris muttered. "I won't go more than ten percent."
Calhoun shook his head admiringly.
"Not many could outfox this old fox. I'd hold out for twenty percent, Mrs. Pemberton, really make him pay for his skullduggery."
"I doubt it matters," Serena replied. "These rubies, Harris, how far upstream did you find them?"
"Not far at all," Harris replied. "I'd barely got to the creek when I saw the first one."
"How far did you go that first day?" Serena said. "Up the creek I mean."
"A third of a mile, but I've been all the way to the springhead since. That's nearly a whole mile."
"But how far upstream did you find the rubies?"
"What are you getting at, Mrs. Pemberton?" Lowenstein asked.
"Not far," Harris said, and raised his nose slightly as if detecting the first whiff of an unpleasant odor.
"I would suspect within fifty yards of the farmhouse," Serena said.
You don't think," Harris stammered. "But the stones weren't cut or cleaned off. Most people wouldn't even have known they were rubies. There weren't any footprints, not even around the waterfall."
Harris didn't speak for a few moments. His blue eyes widened in understanding even as his head swayed back and forth, as if part of his body hoped yet to dissuade him of the truth.
"That son-of-a-bitch Kephart waded up that creek," Harris said, and raised the crystal tumbler in his hand, seemingly ready to fling it against the wall. "God damn them."
Harris swore his oath again, this time loud enough that several nearby couples looked his way. Serena's face remained placid, except for her eyes. Pemberton thought of Buchanan and Cheney, who'd received similar looks. Then, as if a shutter had fallen, Serena's self-control reasserted itself.
"I saw Webb in the billiard room," Harris said, his face coloring. "I'll have a few words with him this evening. I'll catch up with Kephart later."
Pemberton looked over at Calhoun, who appeared amused, and Lowenstein, who seemed unsure if he should be listening or easing away.
"Let's not dwell on old matters," Serena said, "especially when we have such promising new ventures before us."
Harris finished his drink, wiped a drop of the amber-colored whiskey from his moustache. He looked at Serena with unconcealed admiration.
"Would I have married a woman like you, Mrs. Pemberton, I'd be richer than J.P. Morgan now," Harris said, and turned to Lowenstein and Calhoun. "I haven't heard a word about this Brazil business, but if Mrs. Pemberton thinks it can be successful I'll buy in, and you'll do well to do likewise."
"We'll all talk tomorrow in Asheville," Calhoun said.
Lowenstein nodded in agreement.
"Good," Serena said.
The band began playing "The Love Nest," and several couples strolled hand in hand onto the dance floor. Harris' face suddenly soured when he saw Webb standing in the lobby.
"Excuse me," he said. "I'll have a word with that man."
"No fisticuffs, Harris," Calhoun said.
Harris nodded, not entirely convincingly, then left the room.
As the song ended, Cecil stepped onto the jazz band's podium and announced it was almost time for dinner.
"But first to the Chippendale Room to show you the Renoir," the host said, "newly reframed to better show its colours."
Mr. and Mrs. Cecil led the guests up the marble stairs and into the second floor's living hall. They passed a life-sized portrait of Cornelia, and Serena paused to examine the painting more closely. She shook her head slightly and turned to Pemberton, who lingered beside her as the others walked on.
"I cannot understand how she endured it."
"What?" Pemberton asked.
"So many hours of stillness."
The Pembertons moved down the wide hallway, passing a portrait of Frederick Olmsted and then a Currier & Ives print. Beneath them a burgundy carpet softened their footsteps as the passageway veered left into another row of rooms. In the third, they rejoined the Cecils and the other guests, who huddled around the Renoir.
"It is magnificent," a woman in a blue evening dress and pearls declared. "The darker frame does free the colors more, especially the blue and yellow on the scarf."
Several guests respectfully stepped back to allow an elderly white-haired man to approach. His feet moved with short rigid steps, in the manner of some mechanical toy, a likeness enhanced by the metal band around his head, its dangle of wires connecting the metal to a rubber earpiece. He took a pince-nez from his coat pocket and examined the painting carefully. Someone behind the Pembertons whispered he was a former curator at the National Gallery of Art.
"As pure an example of the French modernist style as we have in this country," the man proclaimed loudly, then stepped back.
Serena leaned close to Pemberton and spoke. Harris, who was close by, chuckled.
"And you, Mrs. Pemberton," Cecil said. "Do you also have an opinion on Renoir?"
Serena gazed at the painting as she spoke.
"He strikes me as a painter for those who know little about painting. I find him timid and sentimental, not unlike the Currier & Ives print in the other room."
Cecil's face colored. He turned to the former curator as if soliciting a rebuttal, but the old man's hearing device had evidently been unable to transmit the exchange.
"I see," Cecil said and clasped his hands before him. "Well, it's time for dinner, so let's make our way downstairs."
They proceeded to the banquet hall. Serena scanned the huge mahogany table and found Webb at the far end near the fireplace. She took Pemberton's hand and led him to seats directly across from the newspaperman, who turned to his wife as the Pembertons sat down.
"Mr. and Mrs. Pemberton," Webb said. "The timber barons I've told you so much about."
Mrs. Webb smiled thinly but did not speak.
The waiters brought lentil and celery soup for the meal's first course, and the room quieted as guests lifted their spoons. When Pemberton finished his soup, he contemplated the Flemish tapestries, the three stone fireplaces and two massive chandeliers, the organ loft in the balcony.
"Envious, Pemberton?" Webb asked.
Pemberton scanned the room a few more moments and shook his head.
"Why would anyone be envious," Serena said. "It's merely a bunch of baubles. Expensive baubles, but of what use?"
"I see it as a rather impressive way to leave one's mark on the world," Webb said, "not so different from the great pharaohs' pyramids."
"There are better ways," Serena said, lifting Pemberton's hand in hers to rub the varnished mahogany. "Right, Pemberton."
Mrs. Webb spoke for the first time.
"Yes, like helping make a national park possible."
"Yet you contradict your husband," Serena said, "leaving something as it is makes no mark at all."
Waiters replaced the soup bowls and saucers with lemon sorbet garnished with mint. Next were filets of fresh-caught bass, the entrée served on bone china with burgundy circles, at the center GWV engraved in gold. Serena lifted a piece of the Bacarrat crystal, held it to the light to better display the initials cut in the glassware.
"Another great mark left upon the world," she said.
An intensifying reverberation came up the hall, and a few moments later a grand piano rolled into view, two workers positioning it just outside the main door. The jazz orchestra's pianist sat down on the bench as the singer stood attentively, waiting for a signal from Mrs. Cecil. The pianist began playing and the singer soon joined in.
One thing's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get-children.
In the meantime,
In between time
"This song," Mrs. Webb said, "is it a favorite of yours, Mrs. Pemberton?"
"Not really."
"I thought perhaps Mrs. Cecil had it played in your honor. A way of cheering you up after your recent misfortune."
"You show more wit than I'd have thought, Mrs. Webb," Serena said. "I'd assumed you a dullard, like your husband."
"A dullard," Webb said, musing over the word. "I wonder what that makes Harris? He accosted me in the lobby. It seems he bought a salted claim."
"If he'd been forthright with us, we'd have figured it out," Serena said tersely.
"You may be right, Mrs. Pemberton," Webb said, "yet someone obviously counted on the fact that Harris would betray a partnership for his own self-interest."
"I think betrayal is a bit strong for what he did," Pemberton said.
"I don't," Serena said.
Webb waved his hand dismissively.
"Regardless, Colonel Townsend has accepted Albright's offer, and all the documents have been signed. That land was the lynchpin, you know. The whole project could have easily fallen through without it, but now all the parkland on the Tennessee side has been bought."
"Then that should be enough," Pemberton said. "You and your fellows can have the park in Tennessee and leave North Carolina alone."
"I'm afraid it doesn't work that way, Mr. Pemberton," Webb said. "This frees us to turn all our attention to North Carolina. With two-thirds of the proposed park land secured, eminent domain will be even easier to enact, maybe as soon as next fall from what Secretary Albright's told me."
"We'll have every tree in the tract cut down by then," Serena said.
"Perhaps," Webb admitted, "and it may take forty or fifty years before that forest will grow back. But when it does, it will be part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park."
"Pemberton and I will have logged a whole country by then," Serena said.
For a few moments no one spoke. Pemberton looked for Harris and found him five seats away, laughing at some remark a young lady had made.
"But not this land," Webb replied. "As Cicero noted, ut sementem feceris ita metes."
"Do you know how Cicero died?" Serena said. "It's certainly something a scribbler such as yourself should be familiar with."
"I've heard the story," Webb said. "I'm not easily intimidated, Mrs. Pemberton, if that's your intent."
"I don't know the story," Mrs. Webb said to Serena. "I'd prefer your threats be explained."
"Cicero made himself an enemy of Antony and Fulvia," Serena replied. "He could have left Rome before they came to power, but he believed his golden words could protect him. As your husband is aware, they didn't. Cicero's head was displayed on the Rostra in the Roman Forum, where Fulvia took golden pins from her hair and pierced his tongue. She left them there until the head was tossed out to the dogs."
"A history lesson worth heeding," Pemberton said to Webb.
"No more so than how Antony himself died, Mr. Pemberton," Webb replied.
THE Pembertons did not get back to camp until one A.M., but Galloway was waiting on the front steps.
"We won't need to wake him after all," Serena said when she saw Galloway.
Pemberton turned off the engine. The light from the office porch was not enough to see Serena's face as he spoke.
"What Harris did, I'm not so sure we wouldn't have done the same under those circumstances. And the money, we didn't lose that much."
"He made us vulnerable," Serena said. "It's like an infection, Pemberton. If you don't cauterize it, then it spreads. It won't be that way in Brazil. Our investors will be a continent away." Serena paused. "We should never have allowed it to be otherwise. Just us."
For a few moments neither spoke.
"Isn't that what we want?" Serena asked.
"Yes," Pemberton said after another pause. "You're right."
"Whether it's right wasn't my question," Serena said, her voice soft, something in it almost like sadness. "Is it what we want?"
"Yes," Pemberton said, glad the darkness concealed his face.
Pemberton opened the car door and went on inside the house while Serena talked on the porch with Galloway. He poured himself a stout dram of bourbon and sat down in the Coxwell chair that faced the hearth. Though cool weather was still months away, a thick white oak log had been placed on the andirons, newspaper and kindling set around it. Serena's voice filtered through the wall, the words muffled but the tone calm and measured as she told Galloway what she wanted done. Pemberton knew if he could see Serena's face it would be just as placid, no different than if she were sending Galloway to Waynesville to mail a letter. He also realized something else, that Serena would be able to convince Lowenstein and Calhoun to invest in her Brazil venture. Like her husband, they would believe her capable of anything.
BEFORE THE FIRST STRINGHOUSE HAD BEEN set on Bent Knob Ridge, the dining hall or train track or commissary built, an acre between Cove Creek and Noland Mountain had been set off for a graveyard. As if to acknowledge the easy transition between the quick and the dead in the timber camp, no gate led into the graveyard and no fence surrounded it. The only markers were four wooden stobs. By the time they'd rotted, enough mounds swelled the acre to make further delineation of boundaries unnecessary. Occasionally, a deceased worker would have his body taken from the valley to a family graveyard, but the majority were buried in camp. The timber that had brought them here and killed them, and now enclosed them, also marked most of the graves. These wooden crosses ranged in elaborateness from little more than two sticks tied together to finely sawn pieces of cherry and cedar with names and dates burned into the wood. On these graves, sometimes on the crosses themselves, the bereaved always placed some memento. A few evoked a fatalistic irony, the engraved axe handle that felled the tree that in turn felled the owner, an iron-spiked Kaiser's helmet worn by a man struck by lightning. But most of what adorned the graves attempted to brighten the bleak landscape, not just wildflowers and holly wreaths but something more enduring-yellow-feathered hadicaws, Christmas ornaments, military medals trailing hued ribbons, on the grave itself bits of indigo glass and gum foil and rose quartz, which sometimes were cast over the loose soil like seeds for planting, other times set in elaborate patterns to spell what might be as discernable as a name or obscure as a petrograph.
It was upon this graveyard that Ross and his fellows gazed as the crew took its afternoon break. Rain had fallen off and on all day, and the men were wet and muddy and cold, the low gray sky adding to their somberness.
"The boy killed yesterday by that skidder boom," Ross said. "There was a hell of a thing. In the ground with dirt over him before he'd worked a week. A fellow used to could count on at least a pay stub before getting killed."
"Or live long enough to shave something besides peach fuzz off his chin," Henryson added. "That boy couldn't have been no more than sixteen."
"I expect before long they'll be fittin us for coffins ahead of time," Ross said. "You'll be planted in the ground before you've got a chance to stiffen up good."
"They ever find out who his people was?" Stewart asked. "That boy, I mean."
"No," Henryson said. "Jumped off one of them boxcars coming through so there ain't no telling. Wasn't nothing in his billfold but a picture. An older woman, probably his mama."
"Nothing writ on the back of it?" Stewart asked.
Henryson shook his head.
"Nary a word."
"Your people not knowing where you're buried," Stewart said somberly. "That's a terriblesome thing. There'll be never a flower nor teardrop touch his grave."
"I heard back in the Confederate War them soldiers pinned their names and where they was from on their uniforms," Henryson said. "Leastways their folks would know what happened to them."
Snipes, who'd been trying to unfold his sodden newspaper without tearing it, nodded in affirmation.
"It's the truth," he said. "That's how they knew where my grandpappy was buried. He got killed over in Tennessee fighting for the Lincolnites. They buried him right where he fell, but leastways his mama known where he was laid."
"Anything more on Harris in your newspaper?" Ross asked.
Snipes delicately set the wide wings of the paper onto his lap.
"There is. Says here the county coroner still has the brass to claim Harris' death was an accident, and that's after Editor Webb's article about the coroner being in the Pembertons' pocket."
"Makes you wonder who's next, don't it?" Henryson said.
"I'd not be surprised if Webb's moved up a spot or two with that editorial," Ross said. "I hope his house don't have a second floor. He might take the same tumble Harris did."
The men grew silent. Stewart unfolded the oilcloth that kept his Bible dry and began reading. Ross reached into his pocket and brought out his tobacco pouch. He removed his rolling papers and found them sodden as Snipes' newspaper. Henryson, who also was anticipating a cigarette, found his papers in the same condition.
"I was at least hoping my lungs might be warm and dry a minute," Ross complained.
"You'd think there'd be one little pleasure you could have, even on a day scawmy as this one," Henryson said. "You ain't got no rolling papers, do you Stewart?"
Stewart shook his head, not raising it from his Bible.
"How about a few pages of your Bible there?" Ross asked. "That'd make a right fine rolling paper."
Stewart looked up incredulously.
"It'd be sacrilegious do such a thing as that."
"I ain't asking for pages where something important's being said," Ross entreated. "I'm just asking for two pages where there's nothing but a bunch of so and so begot so and so. There ain't nothing to be missed there."
"It still don't seem right to me," Stewart said.
"I'd say it's exactly the Christian thing to do," Henryson countered, "helping out two miserable fellows who just want a smoke."
Stewart turned to Snipes.
"What do you think?"
"Well," Snipes said. "Your leading scholars has argued for years you'll find cause to do or not do most anything in that book, so I'm of a mind you got to pluck out the verse what trumps the rest of them."
"But which one's that?" Stewart asked.
"How about love thy neighbor," Henryson quickly volunteered.
Stewart bit his lower lip, deep in thought. Almost a minute passed before he opened the Bible and turned to Genesis. Stewart perused some pages before carefully tearing out two.
ON the following Sunday afternoon, the Pembertons mounted their horses for a ride to Shanty Mountain. Pemberton hadn't especially wanted to go, but as it was something Serena expected of him, he followed her to the barn. A sawyer had been killed by a snapped cable on Saturday morning, and as Pemberton and Serena made their way out of the camp, they encountered a funeral party proceeding toward the cemetery where an unfilled grave waited amid the stumps and slash. Leading the mourners was a youth wearing a black armband on his sleeve, in his hands a three-foot-tall oak cross. Two workers carrying the coffin came next, then a woman dressed in widow's weeds. Reverend Bolick and a dozen men and women followed. Two of the men walked with shovels leaned on their right shoulders, like military men at arms. Reverend Bolick carried his Bible, its black weight held skyward as if to deflect the sun's glare. Last came the women, bright-hued wildflowers in their hands. They moved through the blighted landscape slowly, looking as much like refugees as mourners.
Pemberton and Serena traveled west, the land rising quickly, the air stingier. An hour later the Pembertons made the last switchback in the trail and stood atop Shanty Mountain. They had not spoken the whole way. Serena and Pemberton looked over the valley and ridges and surveyed what timber remained.
"What Harris did, it was a needed reminder," Serena said, breaking their silence.
"A reminder of what?" Pemberton asked, still staring out at the valley.
"That others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better."
Pemberton met her eyes, and saw within Serena's gaze a stark unflinching certainty, as though to think otherwise was not just erroneous but unimaginable. She patted the Arabian's flank and moved off a few paces to check the depth a steel cable had bitten into a hickory stump. Pemberton looked down at the camp. The sun shone full on the train tracks, and the linked metal gleamed. Soon it would be time to pull up the rails, starting with the spurs and moving backward to undo what they'd bolted to the land.
Just remember you were warned, Mrs. Lowell had said that first night in Boston. Serena told him later she'd come only because she'd heard a timber man named Pemberton would be present at the party. She'd made a few inquiries to people in the business and decided it worth her time to meet him. After Mrs. Lowell had introduced them, Pemberton and Serena quickly left the others and talked on the verandah until midnight. Then she'd taken him to her apartment on Revere Street and he'd stayed until morning. Weren't you afraid that first evening I'd think you a strumpet with such boldness, he'd teased her later. No, she'd replied. I had more faith in us than that. Pemberton remembered how Serena had not spoken as she unlocked the apartment's door. She'd just stepped inside, leaving the door open. Serena had turned and fixed her eyes on him. Then, as now, they'd contained the utter certainty that Pemberton would follow her.
AS they rode back, the sun's last light embered on the western ridge tops. A breeze had cooled the air on Shanty, but as Pemberton and Serena made their descent the air became stagnant, humid. In the graveyard only one worker remained, methodically shoveling the last clods of dirt over the coffin.
Serena and Pemberton ate their supper in the back room and alone, as they always did now, then returned to the house. At eleven Pemberton went into the back room to prepare for bed. Serena followed him but did not begin to undress. Instead, she sat in a chair across the room, watching him intently.
"Why aren't you undressing?" Pemberton asked.
"I have one more thing to do tonight."
"It can't wait till morning?"
"No, I'd rather get it done tonight."
Serena rose from the ladderback chair, came over and kissed Pemberton full on the mouth.
"Just us," she whispered, her lips still touching his.
Pemberton followed her to the door. As Serena stepped onto the porch, Galloway, seemingly unbidden, emerged from the shadows.
Pemberton watched as they walked to the office. Vaughn came out a few moments later and brought Galloway's car from behind the stable. When Galloway and Serena stepped onto the office porch, Pemberton saw something was in Serena's hand. As she passed directly under the porch's yellow light bulb, it gave off a silvery wink.
Galloway handed Vaughn a pen and notepad, and the youth wrote on it, pausing a moment to make movements with his index finger when Galloway asked something further. Pemberton watched Serena and Galloway drive off, his gaze following the headlights as the automobile moved across the valley floor, then disappeared. Vaughn, who'd watched the car beams diminish as well, went inside the office and closed the door. In a few minutes, Vaughn came out. He turned off the porch light and walked rapidly toward his stringhouse.
Pemberton went back into the house but did not go to bed. He set invoices before him on the kitchen table, attempting to lose himself in calculations of board feet and freight costs. Since the moment Serena and Galloway had driven off, he'd tried to block his mind from imagining where they were going. If he didn't know, he couldn't do anything about it.
But his mind worked in that direction anyway, wondering if what Serena had whispered was not "just us" but instead a single word. He figured the only way to stop the flow of thoughts was with the half-filled bottle of Canadian bourbon in the cabinet. Pemberton didn't bother with a glass. Instead, he tipped the bottle and drank until he gasped for breath, the bourbon scalding his throat. He drank again and finished off the bottle. He sat in one of the Coxwell chairs and closed his eyes, waited for the whiskey to take hold. Pemberton hoped the half-quart was enough and tried to help it along. He imagined the thoughts seeking connection in his head were like dozens of wires plugged into a switchboard, wires the whiskey would begin pulling free until not a single connection was possible.
In a few minutes, Pemberton felt the alcohol expanding in his skull, the wires pulling free, one at a time, the chatter lessening until there was no chatter at all, just a glowing hum. He closed his eyes and let himself sink deeper into the chair.
When the clock on the fireboard chimed midnight, Pemberton stepped back out on the porch. The whiskey made his gait unsteady, and he held onto the porch railing as he looked down at the camp. No light glowed through the office window, and Galloway's car was still gone. A dog barked near the commissary, then quit. Someone in a stringhouse played a guitar, not strumming but plucking each string slowly, letting the note fade completely before offering another. In a few minutes the guitar stopped, and the camp was completely silent. Pemberton raised his head, felt a moment of vertigo as he did so. Soon the last coal-oil lamp in the stringhouses was snuffed. To the west, a few mute spasms of heat lightning. Dark thickened but offered no stars, only a moon pale as bone.
SHERIFF MCDOWELL DROVE INTO CAMP AT MID-MORNING. He didn't knock before entering the office. Pemberton found the sheriff's manner typically insolent and remembered it was Wilkie who'd advocated McDowell remain in office when the timber camp first opened. It will mollify the locals to have one of their own in the position, Wilkie had argued. Pemberton did not offer McDowell a seat, nor did the sheriff ask for one. Pemberton still felt the effects of the whiskey, not just the hangover but a residue of drunkenness as well.
"What brings you here that a telephone call couldn't convey?" Pemberton asked, looking at the invoices on his desk. "I've got too much work to deal with uninvited guests."
McDowell did not speak until Pemberton's gaze again focused on him.
"There was a murder up on Colt Ridge last night."
The sheriff's eyes absorbed Pemberton's surprise. The only sound in the room was the Franklin clock on the credenza. As Pemberton listened, the clock's ticking seemed to gain volume. Wires the alcohol had severed reconnected. Pemberton felt something shift inside him, something small but definite, the way a knob's slight twist allowed a door to swing wide open.
"A murder," Pemberton said.
"A murder," the sheriff repeated, emphasizing the first syllable. "Just one, Adeline Jenkins, an old widow-woman who never harmed anyone. Her throat was slashed. Cut left to right, which means whoever did it was left-handed."
"Why are you telling me this, Sheriff?"
"Because whoever did it didn't bother to step around the blood on the floor. I found two sets of boot prints. One's just a brogan, nothing special about it except small-sized for a man, but the other is something fancy. Narrow toed, nothing you'd buy around here. From the size and shape I'm betting it's a woman's. All I've got to do is find a match, and the fact that I'm here should tell you I know where to look."
"I'd be careful about any accusations," Pemberton said. "I have no idea who this Jenkins woman is. She doesn't work for me."
"Your wife and that henchman of hers thought she'd tell them where the Harmon girl and her child were. That's what I think. They went to the girl's cabin first. The door was wide open this morning, and I know for a fact it was fastened last night. Cigarette butts by the barn as well. Only I don't know which one they were after." McDowell paused. "Which one was it, the child or the mother? Or was it both?"
"The Harmon girl and the child," Pemberton said. "You're saying they weren't harmed?"
"Ask your wife."
"I don't need to," Pemberton said, his voice not as assertive as he wished. "Whatever happened, she wasn't involved. Any tramp off a train could have killed that old woman. If you're looking for a suspect, you should go down to the depot."
McDowell looked at the floor a few moments as if studying the grain of the wood. He slowly raised his eyes and stared directly at Pemberton.
"Do you people think you can do anything?" McDowell asked. "I went over to Asheville last week and found out more about Doctor Cheney's killing. There were at least five possible causes of death and all of them slow. Campbell at least got killed quick, the Nashville sheriff says. Harris did too."
"Harris fell and broke his neck," Pemberton said. "Your own coroner said it was an accident."
"Your coroner, not mine," McDowell replied. "I'm not the one paying him off every month."
The sheriff's uniform was rumpled, as if he'd slept in it the night before. McDowell suddenly seemed conscious of this, and tucked his shirt tail tighter into his pants. As he raised his eyes, his features pinched into a rictus of loathing.
"I can't do anything about Buchanan or Cheney or Harris, maybe not Campbell either, but I vow I'll do something about the murder of an old woman, and I'll not let a mother and her child be killed," McDowell said, then more softly. "Even if it is your child."
For a few moments neither man spoke. The sheriff splayed his fingers and ran them through hair he'd obviously not combed that morning, revealing a few streaks of gray Pemberton had never noticed before. The sheriff let the raised hand settle over the right side of his face. He rubbed his forehead as if he'd banged it against a door jamb or window sill. The hand was withdrawn, resettled on the side of McDowell's leg.
"When's the last time you saw that boy?"
"January," Pemberton answered.
"Amazing how much he favors you. Same eyes, same hair color."
Pemberton nodded at an invoice on the desk.
"I've got work to do, Sheriff."
"Where's your wife?"
"Out with the cutting crews."
"How far from here?"
"I don't know," Pemberton said. "She could be anywhere between here and the Tennessee line."
"That's convenient."
McDowell looked at the clock, kept his eyes on it a few moments.
"I'll be back," he said, and turned and walked toward the door, "and I'll have an arrest warrant next time."
Pemberton watched from his window as the sheriff got in his car and drove across the valley toward Waynesville. He went to the gun rack and opened the drawer beneath the mounted rifles. The hunting knife was in the same place as before, but when Pemberton pulled its elk-bone handle from the sheath, he saw that blood stained the blade. The blood was black, clotted. Pemberton scratched a fleck free and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He felt a residue of moisture.
The phone rang and Pemberton almost didn't answer it, picking up the receiver only after the eighth ring. Calhoun was on the line, asking a question about the contract Serena had shown him and Lowenstein. Pemberton's voice felt hardly a part of himself as he told Calhoun that the paperwork was nearly done.
Pemberton did not set the receiver back on the hanger. Instead, he made a call to Saul Parton in Waynesville and left a message with the coroner's wife. The knife still lay on the desk, and Pemberton picked it up, briefly considered taking the weapon to the saw mill and throwing it in the splash pond. But it was, Pemberton reminded himself, his wedding present. For a few moments, he allowed that scalding thought to resonate through him. Then he wet a handkerchief with his spit and wiped off the blood. Pemberton slipped the knife in the sheath and placed it back in the gun rack's drawer. He picked up the receiver again and told the operator he wished to make a call to Raleigh.
Afterwards, Pemberton left the office and searched for Vaughn but had no luck. He did find Meeks in the dining hall, discussing next month's payroll with the head cook. The conversation was a halting exchange, the North Carolina highlander and New England yankee struggling with each other's dialects like two ill-trained interpreters.
"I've got to go to Waynesville," Pemberton told Meeks. "Stay in the office and answer the phone. If Saul Parton calls, tell him not to send his report to Raleigh until I see him."
"Very well," Meeks said with exasperation, "though I'm a bookkeeper, not a linguist. If your callers speak the same barbarous parlance as this fellow I'll have no idea what they are saying."
"If you see Vaughn, he can spell you. I'll be back as soon as I can."
As he drove out of the valley, Pemberton saw Galloway sitting on the commissary steps, a half-eaten apple in his hand, enjoying a day off for working late last night. Pemberton wondered if Galloway had seen the sheriff's car. As the Packard passed, Galloway's gray eyes looked up, but they were as blank and fathomless as his mother's.
McDowell's patrol car was parked outside the courthouse, a relief since Pemberton wouldn't have to search around town for him. Pemberton found a parking place and walked up the sidewalk, crossed the courthouse lawn. Only the desk's lamp was on when he entered the office, and Pemberton's eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloaming. McDowell was in the room's one cell pulling a dingy mattress off its spring base. As the sheriff did so, dust motes floated upward, suspended in the cell window's barred light as if in a web.
"Checking for hacksaws and files, Sheriff?"
"Bedbugs," McDowell replied, not looking up. "I suspect you and Mrs. Pemberton have them as well. They aren't particular about who they lay down with."
Pemberton seated himself in a rickety shuck bottom chair set in front of the sheriff's desk. Above, a ceiling fan stirred the air with no noticeable effect. McDowell took the mattress from the cell and down the narrow hall to the open back door and set it outside. He came back in and repositioned the regulator clock's calendar hand. Only then did he sit down behind his desk.
"Come to turn in your wife?" McDowell asked.
"I've come to make an offer for your cooperation," Pemberton said, "a final one."
"You know my answer. You've known it for three years."
Pemberton eased back into the chair he suspected the sheriff deliberately wanted uncomfortable, spreading his legs to better balance his two-hundred pounds.
"It's not just money this time. It's whether you want to continue being sheriff."
"Oh, I'm going to continue," McDowell replied. "I found me a fisherman who saw Galloway's Ford crossing the bridge near Colt Ridge last night. Since Galloway doesn't have a left hand, I'd say that kind of narrows who did the actual killing."
"I just got off the phone to a state senator who can have you fired within a week," Pemberton said. "You want to keep your job or not?"
McDowell looked intently at Pemberton.
"What's interesting to me is how you were surprised this morning. I guess I can take that a couple of ways, can't I?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Pemberton answered.
"No, maybe you don't," McDowell said after a few moments. "Maybe you're such a worthless son-of-a-bitch that you wanted it done same as she did, but you were too gutless to go with her."
McDowell stood up, his chair scraping against the wood floor as he shoved it backward. He was not nearly as big a man as Pemberton, no more than five-ten. Yet there was a visible strength in McDowell's body, wiry but muscled in the biceps and forearms, wrists thicker than expected for his frame. No gun and holster clinched around the sheriff's waist. Pemberton stood up as well. It would be a good fight, Pemberton told himself, because the highlanders considered it a matter of honor never to cut and run, or quit once a brawl had begun. He'd be able to pummel McDowell for ten or fifteen minutes. Adrenaline surged through his veins, and with it Pemberton felt a revived sense of his own strength that had been dormant too long. The world suddenly became simpler than it had been in a long while.
But before they could start, there was a knock on the door, another soon after, still light but more insistent. McDowell looked toward the door. Pemberton thought the lawman would walk over and lock it, and perhaps he would have, but at that moment the brass doorknob turned and the door opened. An older woman, her gray hair tied in a taut bun, entered the office, behind her Rachel Harmon, the child in her arms.
Pemberton looked at Jacob and saw the sheriff was right about his features, even more obvious now than in January. He thought about the photograph of himself and wondered if Serena had found it last night as she searched for the hunting knife. She might have opened the desk drawer and found the album, turned the pages until she came to the last two. It suddenly occurred to Pemberton then that Serena might have taken not only the knife but also a photograph with her.
Sheer lunacy to imagine such a thing, Pemberton told himself, but his mind continued to assemble its own fevered logic. Pemberton remembered the glint of the knife blade when Serena stepped onto the porch last night. He tried to recall if something had been in her right hand as well. It could have easily been there, a photograph taken to confirm a child that, as far as Pemberton knew, Serena had never seen. Taken to make sure-except it wouldn't be the photograph of Jacob as an infant, Pemberton suddenly realized. Because even if Serena knew it was a picture of Jacob, she'd need a picture of the child the way he looked now, at two years of age. Serena would have taken the photograph of Pemberton.
Pemberton continued to stare at Jacob. It was impossible not to. The dark-brown eyes solemnly stared back at him. The Harmon girl noticed and turned the boy away. For a few moments no one moved, as if all awaited someone else to enter the office and set something yet unknown into motion. The only sound was the tick of the brass chain against the ceiling fan's motor.
McDowell opened the desk drawer and pulled out his revolver. The sheriff clicked off the safety and pointed it at Pemberton.
"Get out of here."
Pemberton was about to speak, but McDowell thumbed back the hammer and aimed directly at Pemberton's forehead. The sheriff's raised arm and hand did not tremble as the index finger settled against the trigger.
"If you say a word, one single word, I swear to God I'll kill you," McDowell said.
Pemberton believed him. He stepped away from the desk and walked across the room, the Harmon girl clutching the child tighter in her arms as if Pemberton might try to snatch away the boy. Pemberton opened the door and stepped blinking into the midday light.
The town was still there, the streetlamps and shops and the not quite obsolete hitching post, the clock face on the courthouse steeple. Pemberton watched as the ponderous minute hand lurched forward and nudged away another bit of time. He recalled one of the few occasions he'd attended his physics class at Harvard, the professor lecturing on an idea espoused by an Austrian scientist about the relativity of time. It seemed that way to him now, as if time was no longer brisk measured increments but something more fluid, with its own currents and eddies. Something that could easily sweep him away.
A Model T blared its horn and pulled around him. Only then did Pemberton realize he stood in the middle of the street. Pemberton walked to his car and got in, but he did not turn the key and press the starter button.
In a few minutes the office door opened. The older woman went up the street, but the girl and child got in the sheriff's car. Pemberton let them get far enough away and then pulled out and followed the sheriff's car west. After a while the blacktop became dirt, and gray roostertails of dust rose in the police car's wake. Pemberton dropped farther behind, no longer following the car but the haze of dust. The dust trail soon left the main road, turned down the washout that led to Deep Creek. Pemberton knew where they were headed.
Pemberton did not follow but drove fifty yards past. He turned the Packard around and parked it on the road's weedy shoulder. The day was warm, but he didn't roll down the passenger window. He wanted to blame the heat for the sweat matting his shirt. Twenty minutes later the sheriff's car came back up the secondary road and turned toward Waynesville.
There was a two-foot-long Stillson wrench in the trunk, and for a few minutes he imagined the ten pounds of iron in his grasp. It would be enough. Or he could simply make a phone call to Meeks, a few words passed on to Galloway. He turned the key and his foot pressed the starter button. Pemberton let his hand settle over the black gear shift knob. He squeezed and felt the ball of hard rubber in his grip. He pressed the clutch and paused a moment longer, then shifted the Packard into gear. When he came to the Deep Creek turnoff, Pemberton did not slow but kept on going. He drove into Waynesville, on past the hospital and elementary school and the train depot, then on toward Cove Creek Valley.
As Pemberton passed the saw mill, he remembered his father's funeral, though "remembered" didn't seem as apt a word to him as "recovered." He could not recall the last time he'd thought of the funeral since his return from Boston. Or when he'd last thought of his mother or two sisters. The letters they'd written him those first months had been thrown away unopened. Partly it had been his freeing himself of the past, as Serena advocated, but it had also been a self-willed amnesia, a spell willingly succumbed to.
Pemberton was halfway to the camp when he pulled off at the summit where he'd first shown Serena the lumber company's holdings. He stepped to the precipice and looked down at the vast dark gash they'd made on the land. Pemberton stared at the razed landscape a long time, wanting it to be enough. He looked beyond the valley and ridges and found Mount Mitchell. The highest point in the eastern United States, Buchanan had claimed, and so it appeared to be, its tip closer to the clouds than any other in sight. Pemberton gazed at the peak a long time, then let his eyes fall slowly downward, and it was as if he was falling as well, falling slow and deliberate and with his eyes open.
BEFORE SHE SAW THE LATE MORNING LIGHT, Rachel had felt it, the sun's heat and brightness lying full on her closed eyelids. She heard Jacob's steady breaths and something, something not remembered in those first moments of waking, caused her to know the importance of his breaths, that he was breathing. She reached her arms around the child, pressed him closer. He made a soft complaint, but his breath soon soothed into the calmness of sleep. It all came back to her then-the sheriff at the cabin door, a dress and shoes quickly pulled on and a carpetbag stuffed with what Jacob would need. Maybe nothing, just a rusty, the sheriff had told her, but he didn't want to take a chance. He'd brought her to the boarding house, given her and Jacob his own room for the night. Rachel had listened to the grandfather clock in the hallway chime the hours toward dawn, unable to sleep until first light filtered through the window and Jacob had whimpered and she'd suckled him. Only then did she fall asleep.
Now, in the early afternoon, she and Jacob were in the back seat of Sheriff McDowell's police car, heading down what was little more than a skid trail along Deep Creek. They made another turn, the road now nothing more than a winding gap between trees. Sapling branches raked the car's sides, the seat springs creaking and bobbing beneath her and Jacob. The road made a sharp final bend and then was simply gone. Nothing but a stand of maple trees, a foot-wide path leading into them. The sheriff backed up and turned the car around to face the way they'd come. He cut off the engine but did not make a move to get out. Rachel had no idea where they were. When she'd asked the sheriff where they were going, the only words she'd spoken since his landlady had brought her and Jacob to the courthouse, he'd just answered somewhere safe. The sheriff looked in the rearview mirror, met her eyes.
"You'll be staying down here a few hours with a man named Kephart. You can trust him."
"It could have been just a rusty somebody was playing, couldn't it, like you said?"
The sheriff turned and placed his arm on the seat.
"Adeline Jenkins was murdered last night. I think the folks who killed her thought she could tell them where you and that child were."
The car's metal and cloth upholstery seemed to thin and lighten, the seat beneath her and Jacob seeping away, a sense of weightlessness like the moment between the rise and fall on a rope swing. She pressed Jacob tighter, closed her eyes for a few moments, opened them.
"You mean the Widow?" Rachel said, saying it that way because if it was a question it could still, for a few moments longer, be a question and not a confirmation.
"Yes," McDowell said.
"Who would do such a thing?"
"Serena Pemberton and a man who works for her named Galloway. You know who he is, don't you?"
"Yes sir."
Jacob squirmed in her lap. Rachel looked down and saw his eyes were open.
"Mr. Pemberton…," Rachel said, and could think of no more words to follow.
"He wasn't up there, I know that," the sheriff said. "I'm not even sure he knew what they were going to do."
McDowell let his gaze settle on Jacob.
"I've got my own ideas about why she'd do this, but I'd be interested in yours."
"I think it's because I could give him the one thing that she couldn't," Rachel said.
The sheriff gave a nod so slight it seemed to Rachel more an acknowledgment that he'd heard her than a sign of agreement. He turned back around, seemingly lost in his own musings. Somewhere in the trees Rachel heard a yellowhammer tapping at a tree. It started up, then paused, then started again, like someone knocking on a door and waiting for a response.
"You're sure she's dead?" Rachel said, "not just hurt bad?"
"She's dead."
They did not speak for a few moments. Jacob fussed again but when Rachel checked his swaddling it was dry.
"If he's hungry I can get out and give you some privacy," Sheriff McDowell said.
"It's too soon for him to be hungry. He's just put out because I forgot to bring him some play-pretties."
"We'll stay here a couple more minutes," McDowell said, checking his watch, "just to be sure we weren't followed. Then we can walk down to Kephart's place. It's not far."
Jacob fussed some more, and she took the sugar teat from the carpetbag, put it in his mouth. The child calmed, a soft kissing sound as he worked the cheesecloth and sugar between his gums.
"What it was that happened," Rachel asked. "They done it to her in her house?"
"Yes."
Rachel thought about Widow Jenkins, how the old woman had loved this child in her arms. As far as Rachel knew, the one other person in the world who loved him. She thought of the old woman in her chair by the hearth, knitting or just watching the fire and hearing a knock on the door and probably thinking it could only be Rachel, thinking that maybe Jacob had the flux or a fever and Rachel needed her help.
"They had no cause to kill her," Rachel said, as much to herself as to Sheriff McDowell.
"No, they didn't," the sheriff replied, and reached for his door handle. "We can go now."
McDowell carried the carpetbag and Rachel carried the child. The trail was steep and narrow, and she watched for roots that could send her and Jacob sprawling. Purple-tinged pokeberry clustered beside the path, the berries shiny-dark as water beetles. Come the first frost, Rachel knew the stems would sag and the berries wither. Where will me and this young one be then, she wondered. They crossed a weathered plank that wobbled over a tight rush of whitewater, and the land leveled out.
The cabin was small but well built, the wattle and clay daubing packed with care between the hand-hewn logs, not so different from her and Jacob's cabin. A drift of smoke rose from the corbelled chimney, the door partway open.
"Kephart," the sheriff said, addressing not just the cabin but the nearby woods.
A man Rachel guessed to be in his late sixties appeared in the doorway. He wore denim breeches and a wrinkled chambray work shirt. His gallouses were unstrapped from his shoulders, and a gray stubble showed he hadn't shaved in several days. The skin below his eyes was puffy and jaundiced looking, the eyes themselves bloodshot. Rachel knew from being around her father what that meant.
"I need a favor," Sheriff McDowell said, and nodded toward Rachel and Jacob. "They need to stay here, maybe just till this evening, maybe till morning."
Kephart looked not at Rachel but at the child, who'd fallen back asleep. His tan weathered face revealed neither pleasure nor irritation as he nodded and said all right. Sheriff McDowell stepped onto the porch and set the carpetbag down, turned and looked at Rachel.
"I'll get back soon as I can," he said, and walked down the trail and soon disappeared.
"I have a bed you can lay him on if you like," Kephart said after an awkward minute had passed.
Kephart's voice sounded different from any she'd heard before. Flatter, leveled out as if every word had been sanded to a smooth sameness. Rachel wondered where he was from.
"Thank you," Rachel said and followed him into the cabin. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but then she saw the bed in the back corner. Rachel laid the child on the bed and opened the carpetbag, removed first Jacob's bottle and then the pins and clean swaddlings. Shadows cloaked the cabin's corners, and Rachel knew that even had the two oil lamps been lit shadows would remain, like a root cellar where so much dark had gathered for so long it could never be gotten completely rid of.
"When's the last time you two ate?' Kephart asked.
"I fed him near noon."
"And you?"
It took Rachel a few moments to remember.
"Supper last night."
"I've got beans simmering in that kettle," Kephart said. "That's about all I have but you're welcome to it."
"Beans is fine."
He filled a bowl and placed it on the table with a tin of cornbread.
"You partial to sweet milk or buttermilk?"
"Buttermilk would be my rathering," Rachel said.
Kephart took two pint jelly glasses outside. He came back with one brimmed with buttermilk, the other sweet milk.
"I figure that chap will be hungry again before too long," he said. "I got another pot to put on the fire if you want to warm him a bottle."
"That's alright. He's learned to drink it cold."
"Get your bottle then. I'll pour this in and set it in the springhouse so it'll be ready when he wakes up. Got some graham crackers too if he wants something to nibble."
Rachel did what he suggested, knowing he'd done these things before, maybe a long time ago, but sometime. She wondered where his wife and children were and almost asked.
"Have a seat," Kephart said, and nodded at the table's one chair.
Rachel looked around the room. Another chair and table were in the corner opposite the hearth. On the table was one of the room's oil lamps, beside it paper and a typewriter, the words REMINGTON STANDARD stamped in white beneath the keys. A mason jar filled with a clear liquid was also on the table. The lid lay beside the jar.
While she ate, Kephart took Jacob's bottle to the springhouse. Rachel was ravenous and ate every bean in the bowl. Kephart refilled her jelly jar and she drank half, then crumbled a square of cornbread in it. It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you'd eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did.
When Rachel finished, she went out to the creek with the bowl and spoon. She laid them on the mossy bank and went into the woods to squat. She came back to the creek and cleaned the bowl and spoon with water and sand and brought them inside. Jacob was awake, clutching the bottle to his mouth. Kephart sat on the bed beside the child.
"He wasn't of a mind to wait for you, so I figured I'd oblige him."
Kephart lingered a few moments longer and then went outside. When Jacob finished the bottle, Rachel burped him and changed his swaddlings. The room felt cozy, but it didn't seem right to be in the cabin without Kephart there, so she took Jacob outside. Rachel sat on the lowest porch step and placed the child on the grass. Kephart came and perched on the top step. Rachel tried to think of something to make conversation, hoping it'd take at least some of her thinking off Widow Jenkins, them that would do the same to her and Jacob.
"You live here all the time?" Rachel asked.
"No, I got a place in Bryson City," Kephart answered. "I come out here when I'm tired of being around people."
He hadn't said the words in a mean sort of way, the way he would have if he meant to make her feel bad, but they made Rachel feel even more like a bother. Half an hour passed and they didn't speak again. Then Jacob began to fuss. Rachel checked his swaddlings and set him on her lap, but he continued to whine.
"I got something in the shed I bet he'll like," Kephart said.
Rachel followed him behind the cabin. He opened the shed door. Inside two fox kits nestled against each other on a bed of straw.
"Something got their mama. There was another one, but it was too weak to live."
The kits rose, mewing as they came to Kephart, who scratched them behind their ears as he might pups.
"How do you feed them?" Rachel asked.
"Table scraps now. The first few days cow milk in a medicine dropper."
Jacob reached out his hand toward the kits, and Rachel stepped inside, kneeled as she held Jacob by the waist.
"Pet them soft, Jacob," Rachel said, and took the child's hand and brushed it over one of the kit's fur.
The other kit nudged closer, pressed its black nose against Jacob's hand as well.
"It's about time for them to go out and fend for themselves," Kephart said.
"They look fat and sassy enough," Rachel said. "You look to have been a good parent."
"It'd be the first time," Kephart said.
After a while, Rachel and Jacob went back to the front steps and watched as the afternoon settled into the gorge. It was the kind of early fall day Rachel had always loved, not warm or cold, the sky all deep-blue and cloudless and no breeze, the crops proud and ripe and the leaves so pretty but hardly a one yet fallen-a day so perfect that the earth itself seemed sorry to let it pass, so slowed down its roll into evening and let it linger. Rachel tried to lose herself in that, let it clear her mind, and for a few minutes she could. But then she'd think of Widow Jenkins, and she could just as well have been sitting in a hailstorm for the comfort the day gave her.
Soon shadows splotched the yard and began to spread. The air cooled and a breeze stirred the higher branches. In that breeze Rachel felt a tinge of the cold weather coming. Kephart went back into the cabin, and the typewriter's rat-tat-tat began. A few minutes later, as if in reply, the yellowhammer found a closer tree to peck. The typewriter's sound seemed to soothe Jacob, because he soon crawled into Rachel's lap and napped.
IT was early evening when Rachel heard footsteps coming up the path. The sheriff stepped into the clearing, a cardboard container slightly smaller and shallower than a cigar box in his right hand.
"Something for him when he gets fussy," the sheriff said, handing the container to Rachel. "Got them from Scott at the general store."
She set the container between her and Jacob, the contents shifting and rattling inside. Rachel lifted the lid and found it held marbles.
"Scott said there's cat eyes and solids and swirls. Some steel shooters in there too."
Kephart, who'd come out on the porch, shook his head and smiled.
"What?" McDowell asked.
"They're usually not shooting marbles till they're a tad older."
The sheriff's face reddened.
"Well, I guess he can grow into them."
"Look here, Jacob," Rachel said, and lifted the box slightly so marbles rolled and clacked. The child placed his hand inside, lifted as many as he could hold and let them drop back in. He picked up more, dropped them as well. Rachel watched to make sure he didn't put one in his mouth.
"We'd better go," Sheriff McDowell said, and stepped onto Kephart's porch to get the carpetbag.
"Just a moment," Kephart said, and disappeared into the cabin, came back with a gray wool sock. "There's only one thing for a boy to keep his marbles in, and that's a sock."
Kephart kneeled beside Jacob, the sock soon bulging with marbles. He knotted the sock above the heel.
"There. Now they'll not be spilling out like they would in that cardboard."
Rachel took the sock, its heft more than she'd imagined, at least a pound. She lifted Jacob with one arm and handed the sock to the child, who clutched it like a poppit-doll.
"Thank you for letting them stay here," Sheriff McDowell said.
"Yes, thank you," Rachel said. "It was a considerable kindness."
Kephart nodded.
They walked out of the yard and down the path. Rachel glanced back and saw Kephart watched from the porch, the mason jar now in his hand. He raised it slowly to his lips.
"Where's Mr. Kephart from?" Rachel asked once they had entered the woods.
"The midwest," Sheriff McDowell said. "Saint Louis."
When they got to the trail end, the police car had been replaced by a Model T Ford.
"This car will be less conspicuous," the sheriff said.
"I ain't got clothes and swaddlings but for two days," Rachel said as they drove out of the gorge. "Can we go by my cabin?"
The sheriff didn't say anything, but when the road forked a few miles later he turned toward Colt Ridge. The sheriff drove faster now, and the automobile's rapid motion seemed to make her mind move faster as well. So much had happened so quickly she hadn't even begun to take it all in. While she'd been at Kephart's cabin, it all hadn't felt quite real, but now what had happened to Widow Jenkins and what could have happened to her and Jacob came full at her, and it was like running ahead of a barn-high wave of water. Running hard to stay ahead of it, Rachel thought despairingly, because when it all did take hold of her she didn't know if she could bear the burden of it.
They parked next to the cabin. Rachel set Jacob on the ground beside the porch steps as the sheriff opened the trunk.
"We'll put the things you need in here," Sheriff McDowell said, following Rachel onto the porch. "I can help you carry out what you need."
"You think it could be a long while before we come back here?"
"Probably. Leastways if you want that child to be safe."
"There's a box trunk in the front room," Rachel said. "If you can fetch it I'll get the rest."
Rachel stepped inside, the cabin somehow different than when she'd left it last night. It appeared smaller, and darker, the windows letting in less light. Nothing had been disturbed that she could tell except that the loft ladder had been set upright. Thinking me and Jacob might have hid up there, Rachel knew. She gathered what she needed as quickly as she could, including Jacob's toy train engine. As she moved through the cabin filling the carpetbag, Rachel tried not to think about what could have been.
"I'll put that in the trunk for you," the sheriff said when she came outside. "You get the boy."
Rachel kneeled beside Jacob. She took the child's hand and pressed it to the dirt. Her father had told Rachel that Harmons had been on this land since before the Revolutionary War.
"Don't ever forget what it feels like, Jacob," she whispered, and let her hand touch the ground as well.
The woodshed's door was open, and a barn swallow swung out of the sky and disappeared into its darkness. A hoe leaned against the shed wall, its blade freckled with rust, beside it a pile of rotting cabbage sacks. Rachel let her gaze cross the pasture, the spring clotted with leaves, the field where only horseweed and dog fennel grew over winter-shucked corn stalks, no more alive than the man who'd planted them.
They got back in the car. As they approached the Widow's house, Rachel remembered the cradle her father had made.
"There's something I got to get from Widow Jenkins' house," she said. "It'll just take a second."
The sheriff pulled up beside the farmhouse.
"What is it?"
"A cradle."
"I'll go in and get it," the sheriff said.
"I don't mind. It ain't heavy."
"No," Sheriff McDowell said. "It's best I get it."
Rachel understood then. You'd have walked right in and not realized until you seen the blood or whatever else it is he don't want you to see, she told herself. But as Rachel watched the sheriff enter the front door, it was hard to believe the farmhouse itself was still there, because a place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world. The earth itself shouldn't be able to abide it.
Sheriff McDowell placed the cradle in the trunk. When he got back in the car, he passed back a brown paper bag.
"It'll be a while before we get where we're going, so I got you a hamburger and co-cola. I loosened the cap, so you won't need an opener."
"Thank you," Rachel said, setting the bag beside her, "but what about you?"
"I'm fine," the sheriff said.
Rachel smelled the grilled meat and realized she was hungry again despite the bowl of beans, the cornbread and buttermilk. She settled Jacob deeper into her lap, then unwrapped the wax paper moist with grease. The meat was still warm and juicy, and she pinched off a few bits for Jacob. She took out the drink and pressed her thumb against the metal cap, felt it give. A kindly thing for him to have done that, Rachel thought, just his thinking to do it, same as buying the marbles. When she'd finished, Rachel put the bottle and wrapper in the bag and set it beside her.
They skirted Asheville and passed over the French Broad. As Rachel stared at the river, she told herself to think of something that wasn't fretful, so she thought of the sheriff's room, how you'd have known it was a man's room as much from what wasn't in it as what was-no pictures on the wall or lacy curtains over the window, no flowers in a vase. But there had been a neatness she'd have not have reckoned on. On the bedside table, a shellcraft pipe and stringed cloth tobacco pouch, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a pearl pen knife he'd pare his nails with. Across the room on the bureau, a looking glass, in front of it a black metal comb, a straight razor and its lather bowl and brush. On the chest of drawers, a Bible and a Farmers' Almanac, a tall book titled Wildlife of North America and another called Camping and Woodcraft, all stacked in a tidy row like in a library. Everything looked to have its place, and that place seemed to have been set and determined for a long time. A lonely sort of room.
In a while they passed a sign that said Madison County. The mountains around them rose higher, blotted out more of the sky.
"Where are we going?" Rachel asked.
"I called a relation of mine," the sheriff said. "She's an older woman who lives by herself. She's got an extra room you can stay in."
"She your aunt?"
"No, that would be too close of kin. A second cousin."
"Where does she live?"
"Tennessee."
"Her name McDowell too?"
"No, Sloan. Lena Sloan."
They drove west now, the road rising steadily toward mountains where the day's last light limned the ridge tops red. Jacob waked for a few minutes, then nuzzled against Rachel's breast and fell back asleep. It was full dark when she and Sheriff McDowell spoke again.
"You ain't tried to arrest them?"
"No," Sheriff McDowell said, "but I think soon I'll get enough on them that I can. I'm going to have the state coroner in Raleigh help me. But until then you've got to stay as far from them as possible."
"How'd you know they was coming after us?"
"A telephone call."
"A call last night?"
"Yes."
"And they said Jacob was in danger, not just me?"
"Yes, both of you."
"Do you know who it was, the one that called?"
"Joel Vaughn."
"Joel," Rachel said.
For a few moments she didn't speak.
"They'll kill him for that, won't they?"
"They'll try."
"Do you know where he is?"
"I drove him to Sylva this afternoon so he could hop a freight car," Sheriff McDowell answered, "one that wouldn't be going near Waynesville or Asheville."
"Where's he going?"
"If he did what I told him, as far from these mountains as possible."
The road leveled out a few yards before unfurling downward. Below in the distance were a few muted clusters of light. Rachel remembered how a month ago she'd sat before a hearth of glowing coals and listened to Jacob's breathing, thinking how after her mother had left when Rachel was five there'd been so much emptiness in the cabin she could hardly bear to be inside it, because everywhere you looked there was something that had reminded her that her mother was gone. Even the littlest thing like a sewing needle left on the fireboard or a page turned down in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. The same after her father died. But that night a month ago, as she'd listened to Jacob breathing, the cabin had felt fuller than it had in a long time. More alive too, a place where the living held sway more than those dead or gone.
Now everywhere was emptiness, the only thing left the child sleeping in her lap. She thought about Widow Jenkins and Joel, gone now as well. A part of her could almost wish Jacob too were gone, because it would all be so much easier. If it was just her left, she wouldn't even have to be afraid because all they could take from her was her life, and that seemed a piddling thing after all that had happened. Rachel thought about the bowie knife in the box trunk, how easy it would be to hide in her dress pocket, then wait until the last light in the camp went out and walk up to the Pemberton's house.
But Jacob was alive, and she'd have to protect him because there was nobody else to. She'd have to be afraid, for the both of them.
"We just crossed into Tennessee," Sheriff McDowell said. "They won't find you here. Just don't use your real name and don't take the young one with you when you go into town."
"Besides them two you told me about, is there anyone else you figure might come after us?"
"Maybe Pemberton, but I doubt it. Probably not her either. Most likely it'll be Galloway."
Rachel looked out the window.
"I've never been to no other state before."
"Well, you have now," Sheriff McDowell said. "Not much difference though, is it?"
"Not from what I can see."
The blacktop curved and the sheriff shifted gears. The road made a last brief rise and then plunged downward. They drove another thirty minutes before coming into a town. The Model T turned and bumped over railroad tracks, then passed a depot before stopping in front of a small white house.
"Where are we?" Rachel asked.
"Kingsport."
"A RATHER DAINTY APPETITE TONIGHT," SERENA said. "Are you feeling ill?"
They sat across from each other in the back room, the table's width between them, the empty chairs set against the walls. Pemberton noted the sound of Serena's silver cutlery ringing against the bone china, how it further accentuated the room's emptiness. Serena set her knife down.
"No," Pemberton said, and poured himself a fifth glass of red wine, staring at the crystal and its contents for a few moments before lifting the glass to his lips and drinking deeply. He set it back down, half emptied.
"You didn't used to drink this much."
The words were not spoken in a harsh or chiding way or even in a tone of disappointment. Pemberton looked up, and saw only concern on Serena's face.
"You haven't asked about the other night," Serena said, "when I went to Colt Ridge."
Pemberton reached for the glass but Serena lunged across the table, grabbing Pemberton's wrist so violently that the wine splashed onto his shirt sleeve. She leaned her face near as she could, not letting go her hold.
"We've both killed now," Serena said urgently. "What you felt at the depot, I've felt too. We're closer, Pemberton, closer than we've ever been before."
Madness, Pemberton thought, and remembered the first evening back in Boston, the walk down the cobbled streets to Serena's lodging, the hollow sound of their footsteps. He remembered the moment he'd stood on the icy top step as Serena unlocked the door and went inside, pressed the front room light on. Even when Serena had turned and smiled, Pemberton had lingered. Some dim troubling, almost visceral, keeping him there on the step, in the cold, outside the door. He remembered how he'd pulled off his gloves and stuffed them in his overcoat pocket, brushed some snow flurries off his shoulders as he delayed his entrance a few more moments. Then he'd stepped inside, stepping toward this room as well, into this moment.
Serena withdrew her hand and sat back. She said nothing more as Pemberton poured himself more wine.
The day had been warm so the window was open. Someone on the commissary steps strummed a guitar and sang about a big rock candy mountain. Pemberton listened to the words intently. It was the same tune he'd heard the porter whistling on the train the day Pemberton had brought Serena from Boston. Just twenty-six months ago, but it felt so much longer than that. The servers came and brought dessert and coffee. Pemberton finally felt the alcohol spread its calming glow inside his head. He let the wine have its way with him, glide him past where he didn't want to dwell.
Pemberton and Serena were finishing their coffee when Galloway came in. He acknowledged only Serena.
"I got something to tell you."
"About what?" Serena said.
"Vaughn," Galloway said. "Had me a little chat with the switchboard operator. I figured that old biddy would of been listening in. It was Vaughn tipped off McDowell, which explains why the little piss ant's skedaddled." Galloway paused. "And that ain't the only thing. A sawyer seen McDowell driving toward Asheville Monday evening with that Harmon girl and her young one. The dumb son-of-a-bitch didn't think it worth telling anybody till today."
"That explains a lot," Serena said.
After Galloway left, Serena and Pemberton finished their meal in silence, then walked to the house. The porch light had not been turned on, and Pemberton stumbled on the steps, would have fallen if Serena had not caught his arm.
"Careful, Pemberton," she said, then ever so softly. "I don't want to lose you."
EDMUND Wagner Bowden the Third arrived at the camp office the following morning. He was a recent Duke graduate and, according to the senator who'd sent him, fancied the job might do for him what being police commissioner in New York had done for Teddy Roosevelt. Though, the senator had hastened to add, Bowden was no follower of Roosevelt in other ways. Bowden was exactly what Pemberton expected-soft and florid, a reflexive smirk behind a few tentative hairs attempting to pass as a moustache. The smirk disappeared when Serena quickly exhausted the young man's conversational Latin.
Bowden departed mid-morning for his first full day as the new Haywood County sheriff. He'd been gone less than an hour when he called Pemberton's office.
"Mr. Luckadoo from the savings and loan just came by to tell me that McDowell and a police detective from Nashville are at Higgabothom's Café. They've been there all morning with Ezra Campbell's brother. Mr. Luckadoo said you'd want to know."
"Did the detective come and see you first?"
"No."
"Go tell him he's collaborating with a man indicted for malfeasance," Pemberton said. "Tell him that if he's got questions you are the law in town, not McDowell."
Seconds passed and all Pemberton heard was static.
"Speak, damn it."
"This Campbell fellow is telling the detective and anyone else who'll listen not to trust me. He's claiming his brother said you and Mrs. Pemberton would try to kill him."
"What's the detective's name?"
"Coldfield."
"Let me make a few phone calls. Then I'll come over there. If they look like they're going to leave, tell Coldfield I'm on my way to talk to him."
Pemberton hesitated a moment.
"Tell McDowell I want to talk to him as well."
Pemberton hung up the receiver and went to the Mosler safe behind the desk. He stood before it and turned the black dial slowly left and right and then left, listening as if he might hear the tick of the tumblers as they found their grooves. He pulled the handle, and the immense metal door yawned open. For almost a minute, he simply stared at the stacks of bills, then gathered up enough twenties to fill an envelope. He closed the metal door slowly, the safe's contents sinking back into darkness, a crisp snap as the door locked into place.
Pemberton took the photograph album from the desk drawer. He'd tried to dismiss the idea of Serena using his photograph to identify the child, but the thought had seized his mind like a snare he couldn't pull free from. Pemberton hadn't opened the bottom drawer, although several times in the last few days he'd allowed his hand to settle on its handle. Now he did. He opened the album and found the photograph of himself still there, as was the one of Jacob. But what did that prove or disprove, Pemberton thought. Like the hunting knife, it could have been taken and returned. He carried the photograph album to the house, shuffling papers and ledgers aside to place it at the bottom of the steamer trunk.
As Pemberton drove out of the camp, he saw Serena on Half Acre Ridge, Galloway close behind. The eagle was aloft, making a slow widening circle over the valley. Their prey believes if it stays still long enough, it won't be noticed, Serena had told him, but the prey eventually flinches, and when it does the eagle always sees it.
When Pemberton arrived at the sheriff's office, Bowden told him that Campbell's brother had left but that the Nashville detective and McDowell remained at the café.
"Do you want me to go with you?"
"No," Pemberton said. "This won't take long."
Pemberton walked across the street to the café. He'd thought McDowell might go quietly, in part because the day he'd been forced to resign McDowell simply left his keys and badge and state-issue pistol on the office desk, his uniform hung neatly on the coat rack. There'd been no curses or threats, no calls to a congressman or senator. The man had simply walked out, leaving the door wide open.
Coldfield and McDowell were in the back booth, green coffee cups in front of them. Pemberton pulled a chair from the closest table and sat down. He turned to the man sitting opposite McDowell.
"Detective Coldfield, my name is Pemberton."
Pemberton held out his hand, and the detective looked at it as if he'd been offered a piece of rancid meat.
"I talked to Lieutenant Jacoby half an hour ago," Pemberton said, lowering his hand. "He and I have some mutual friends."
A waitress approached with her pencil and pad but Pemberton waved her away.
"Lieutenant Jacoby said you should call him immediately. Do you need me to write down his telephone number for you?"
"I know his number," Coldfield said tersely.
"There's a telephone in the sheriff's office across the street, detective," Pemberton said. "Just tell Sheriff Bowden you have my permission to make the call."
Coldfield got up without comment. Pemberton watched through the window as the detective walked across the street and into the sheriff's office. Pemberton pulled his chair back a few inches and studied McDowell, who stared where Coldfield had sat. McDowell seemed to be studying a small tear in the booth's padding. Pemberton placed his hands on the table and clasped them, spoke quietly.
"You know where that Harmon girl and the child are, don't you?"
McDowell turned and stared at Pemberton. The ex-lawman's amber eyes registered incredulity.
"Do you think I'd tell you if I did?"
Pemberton took the envelope from his back pocket and laid it on the table.
"That's three hundred dollars. It's for her and the child."
McDowell stared at the envelope but didn't pick it up.
"I don't want to know where they are," Pemberton said, sliding the envelope toward McDowell as he might a playing card. "Take it. You know they'll need it."
"Why should I believe this isn't a trick to find out where they are?" McDowell asked.
"You know I had nothing to do with what happened on Colt Ridge," Pemberton said.
McDowell hesitated a few moments longer, then took the envelope and placed it in his pocket.
"This doesn't change anything between us."
"No, nothing changes between you and me," Pemberton said, looking toward the entrance. "You'll soon enough see the truth of that."
The bell on the café door rang and Coldfield walked toward them, but the detective didn't sit down or look at either man.
"Lieutenant Jacoby's decided I should let Sheriff Bowden take care of the investigation on this end."
Coldfield raised his eyes, met Pemberton's gaze.
"I will tell you one thing, Mr. Pemberton. Campbell's brother has been at the station every day since his brother got killed, which is why I'm here in the first place. He won't give up."
"I'll keep that in mind," Pemberton said.
The detective tossed a quarter beside his coffee cup. The silver rang hollowly against the formica surface.
"I'll be on my way now," Coldfield said.
Pemberton nodded, and stood up to leave as well.
"YOU'D a thought at least the women and children was safe," Henryson said on Sunday afternoon as Snipes' crews sat on the commissary steps.
"It ain't enough that they killed an old woman," Snipes said. "Now they're after that girl and her child."
Henryson nodded.
"The wonder of it is they don't kill us, just for practice."
"They's content to let the saws and axes and falling limbs kill us off," Ross said. "Frees up Galloway to do his traveling."
The men sat in silence a few moments, listening to a guitar strum the last notes of "Barbara Allen." The song's plaintive refrain put the men in a pensive mood.
"Campbell's brother is in town," Ross said. "I seen him my ownself the other day."
"The one Campbell was staying with in Nashville?" Henryson asked.
"That one, the guitar picker. He was out on the courthouse steps telling how he come home from his show and found Campbell laying in bed with a hatchet back of his head. To hear tell how deep that blade was in him, you'd think Campbell's head was no more than a pumpkin."
"That's a terrible way to die," Henryson said.
"Better than what Doctor Cheney got," Snipes said.
"Campbell at least got the record for getting farthest before Galloway caught up with him," Ross said. "Hell, Campbell even made it out of the state. I reckon that's a sort of victory."
"For sure," Henryson said. "Harris didn't even make it out of his house."
"Proves one thing, though," Ross said. "One day's head start ain't enough."
"No, it ain't," Henryson agreed. "I'd say you'd likely need at least a week to even get betting odds."
"The Harmon girl and her young one likely won't get that," Ross said. "Vaughn might though. Even Galloway can't be in two places at once."
"That boy always had a good head on his shoulders," Snipes said. "He figured the right time to take off."
"Just like quail," Ross said. "They figure if they all flush in different directions there's a chance one of them will make it."
"Has Galloway started after anybody yet?" Stewart asked.
"No, but he's liable to any time now," Snipes said. "He was at the commissary last night, trying to get fellers to help figure out what town his mama was visioning. Said he'd pay a dollar to the one named it."
"What sort of visioning did that old witch have?" Henryson asked.
"Claimed the Harmon girl and her young one was in Tennessee, a town where there was a train track. Which don't tell you much of nothing, of course, but she also told Galloway the place was a crown set amongst the mountains."
"A crown?" Ross asked, reentering the conversation.
"Yes, a crown. A crown set amongst the mountains. Them's the exact words."
"It might could be the top of a mountain," Henryson said. "I've heard peaks called crowns before."
"But it was set amongst the mountains," Ross noted, "not part of the mountain."
"Which would argue for it being a crown like them that royalty wears," Snipes added.
"Anybody figure it out?" Henryson asked Snipes. "Last night, I mean?"
"One of the cooks claimed there was a Crown Ridge over near Knoxville. That was all they come up with, and Galloway had already gone over there the day before and caught nary a scent of them."
Ross stared west toward the Tennessee line and slowly nodded to himself.
"I know where they are," he said. "Or leastways I can narrow it to two places."
"You ain't going to tell Galloway, are you?" Stewart asked.
"No," Ross said. "Maybe there's nothing I can do to stop them, but I damn well won't help them. I can give that girl a few more hours head start."
Henryson shook his head.
"I'd still not give you a dime to a dollar they'll survive another week."
Ross was about to speak in agreement when he saw a curious assemblage making its way into the camp.
"What in the name of heaven is that?" he said.
Three horse-drawn prairie schooners led the procession. Grimy muslin stretched over the iron hoop frames, and each tarp bore a different proclamation. HAMBYS CARNIVAL DIRECT FROM PARIS said the first, the second SEEN BY EUROPES ROYALTY, the third ADULTS A DIME. CHILDREN A NICKEL. Behind the wagons came a tethered menagerie, around each animal's neck a wooden placard naming the species. The animals traveled two abreast, led by a pair of slump-backed Shetland ponies. Next came two ostriches, their serpentine necks bowed as if embarrassed to be part of such an entourage, then two white horses striped with what appeared to be black shoe polish. ZEBRA, their placards proclaimed. A flatbed wagon ended the parade, a steel cage filling its wood-plank bottom. WORLDS DEADLIEST CREATURE was written on a tarp concealing the cage's bottom half.
The first wagon halted in front of the commissary steps. A portly man adorned in a rumpled beige cotton suit doffed his black top hat with a flourish and bid Snipes and his fellows a good afternoon. The stranger spoke with a nasal accent none of the men had ever heard before but Snipes immediately suspected had been cultivated at a European university.
"Appears you've took a wrong turn," Ross said, nodding at the paired animals. "That ark I notion you're searching for ain't around here. Even if it was, you're a tad late to get a seat on it."
"Our destination is the Pemberton Lumber camp," the man said, puzzled. "Is this not it?"
Snipes stood up. "Yes sir, it is, and unlike Mr. Ross here I'm a man of some culture and respectful of others that has it as well. How may I assist you?"
"I need to speak with the camp's owners, for permission to perform this evening."
"That would be Mr. and Mrs. Pemberton," Snipes said. "They like to ride their horses on Sundays, but they ought to be heading back in soon enough. They'll come right by here, so's the best thing to do is just sit and wait."
"Your suggestion appears a sound choice," the man said, and despite his considerable bulk leaped off the buckboard and landed with surprising light-footedness, the top hat wobbling but remaining on his head. "My name is Hamby, and I am the owner of this carnival."
Hamby knotted the horse's reins to a porch rail and clapped his hand twice. The other three men, who up until this moment had been inanimate as statues, now tethered their wagons as well. They immediately went about various tasks, one watering the menagerie while another searched possible sights to raise the tent. The third, a small swarthy man, disappeared into his wagon.
"Say you been doing your show across the ocean," Henryson said, nodding at the second wagon.
"Yes sir," the carnival owner said. "We're only back in this country for a limited engagement. We're headed to New York, then back to Europe."
"Kind of a roundabout way to get to New York, coming through these mountains," Ross said.
"Indeed it is," Hamby said, weariness tinting his voice, "but as professional entertainers, we feel a need, dare I say a moral obligation, to bring culture to those such as yourself exiled to the hinterlands."
"Awful kind of you to do that for us," Ross said.
At that moment, the man who'd entered the wagon reemerged in black tights and a black-and-white checked shirt made of the same pliable material, four bowling pins dangling from his hands. But it was what adorned his head that most intrigued Snipes and his crew, a piece of haberdashery concocted from red and green felt and silver bells, splayed atop the man's skull like an exhausted octopus.
"What do you call that thing on your noggin?" Snipes asked.
"A cap and bells," the man said in a thick accent, then began juggling the bowling pins.
"A cap and bells," Snipes repeated. "I've read of them but yours is the first I ever seen. I'd of not notioned it to have so much color."
Snipes joined the other crew members who'd gathered around the last wagon. The worker who'd been tending to the animals walked toward it as well, a bantam chicken squawking and flapping in his grip. The worker lifted the tarp and with obvious trepidation shoved the chicken and as little of his flesh as possible between the steel bars. He jerked his hand back and looked at it dubiously, as if surprised it was still there. Something very large and very powerful lunged against the cage with such force the whole wagon shook, the wheels rocking a few inches forward. A flurry of feathers rose into the cage's upper realm, seemed to hang a few moments before slowly floating down. One slipped through the bars, and Henryson reached out so it might settle in his hand. He peered at the feather and spoke.
"Favors chicken, does it?"
The carnival worker gave an enigmatic smile that did not balance the flinty look in his eyes.
"It favors anything that's got meat on it."
Hamby joined Snipes and the others. For a few moments the only sound came from within the cage, a brisk crunching of bones.
"I reckon you got to pay to know what sort of critter you got in there?" Henryson asked.
"Not at all, sir," Hamby said, opening his hands and arms in an expansive gesture. "It's a dragon."
Ross nodded at the zebras, one of which was licking a stripe off its shoulder, the long tongue black as licorice.
"I hope it's a sight more convincing than them."
"Convincing," Hamby spoke the word as if it had a pleasant taste. "That's the main purpose of our show, to convince our audience it has seen, in the flesh, the world's most dangerous creature. My dragon has fought a jaguar in Texas, an alligator in Louisiana, an orangutan in London, innumerable breeds of canine and several men now deceased."
"And never lost?" Stewart asked.
"Never," Hamby said. "So whatever manner of ferocious beast these mountains offer, bring it tonight, gentlemen. I welcome wagers on the side as well, to make it more sporting."
Henryson stared intently at the cage.
"How much you charge to look at it? Right now, I mean?"
"Free of charge for you men, just so you'll tell your friends of the terrifying wonder you have witnessed with your very own eyes."
Hamby nodded to the worker who'd fed the creature, and he pulled a frayed hemp cord. The muslin tarp fell away from the cage, revealing a creature shaped much like an alligator, though its skin was dusty and gray. A forked purple tongue stabbed the air as its head swayed slowly back and forth.
"Six feet in length and two hundred pounds of reptilian muscle and meanness," Hamby said. "Trapped on the isle of Komodo, its native habitat."
As the men stepped closer to the cage, Hamby motioned behind them.
"You sir, you can see the world's deadliest creature for free as well."
Galloway came forward, stared at the reptile impassively.
"Say you'll fight it against anything," Galloway said after a few moments.
"Anything," Hamby replied, signaling his cohort to raise the tarp. "Bring your champion tonight, and your billfolds, for the ultimate test against the ultimate foe."
BY nightfall the canvas tent had been raised, lamps and torches lit, at the center a waist-high steel-mesh fence linked to make a ring, inside of which the man in black tights juggled before swallowing fire and pieces of colored glass and, finally and most dramatically, a sword. The menagerie then paced around the ring while Hamby, dressed now in a red swallow-tailed coat, top hat set on the crook of his arm, held forth with great originality on the animals' various attributes and origins. Only after all this was the dragon brought forth, one section of the fence unlocked so the cage door filled the gap. A carnival worker climbed atop the steel bars and lifted the door, the dragon swaggering forth into the pit. As its purple tongue probed the new surroundings, several men tested the interlocked metal holding the creature in and decided to watch from a farther vantage point. Hamby had set up a table beside the cage. Money and paper scraps with names and initials and in a few cases distinctive X's quickly covered its surface, though the largest wager had already been made with Serena. Side bets with the carnival's other workers were more informal, including one between Snipes and the juggler.
Several men cheered when Serena entered the tent, the eagle on her arm. She raised her free hand and the men grew silent. Serena told all the workers to be as quiet and still as possible, then motioned for those closest to the fence to back up at few feet. Serena placed the eagle, still hooded, on her fist. She spoke to the Berkute in a calm voice, then softly stroked the bird's keel with the backs of two fingers. The dragon still paced but it had moved into the far corner, like a boxer awaiting the bell.
Serena nodded to Galloway, who stood where the cage closed the ring's one entry point. Galloway shoved hard against the cage bars and created an opening, small but enough. By the time Hamby and the other onlookers realized what was happening, Serena had stepped into the ring.
"Get her out of there," Hamby shouted at one of his workers, but Galloway flashed a knife.
"She comes out when she decides, not you," he said.
After speaking to the bird a last time, Serena removed its hood. The dragon and the eagle acknowledged each other at the same moment. The dragon had moved into the ring's center, but now it paused in its pacing. The eagle's head swiveled downward. As the two creatures stared at each other, something summoned forth from an older world passed between them.
Serena lifted her hand and the Berkute flapped awkwardly over the ring and landed on the fence's back portion where no lamp or torch burned and the shadows deepened. As the bird passed overhead, the dragon lunged upward with a speed and dexterity that belied its bulk.
"Another six inches and we'd have had it ended before it even started," Snipes told Stewart in a hushed tone.
The eagle did not move again for almost a minute, though its gaze remained on the dragon, which resumed pacing around the ring's center. Though she was still in the ring, the reptile appeared oblivious to Serena, who now blocked its one exit point from the pit.
"I thought dragons could breathe fire," Stewart whispered to Snipes.
"They used to a far back ago," Snipes replied softly, "but they evolutioned out of it to survive."
Stewart leaned toward Snipes' ear.
"How come? It's a mighty powerful weapon to have, breathing fire."
"Too powerful," Snipes said. "They was scorching all the meat off their prey. Wasn't none left to eat."
The third time the dragon passed below the eagle, the bird pounced, wings outspread as its talons grasped the reptile's face. The dragon whipped its head back and forth, shaking free not just the eagle but a few of its feathers, but not before the eagle's talons had pierced the reptile's eyes. The bird half-leaped, half-flew back onto Serena's arm as its adversary plunged blindly into the metal, making the whole fence shudder. The dragon turned and lunged in the other direction, its slashing tail raising spumes of strawy dust off the earthen floor. It slammed against the fence's other side, only a few feet from where Serena stood, both she and the bird placid amid the dragon's frantic rushes. The mesh shuddered again.
"That fence ain't gonna hold it in," a worker shouted, eliciting a frantic rush that almost collapsed the tent as a number of onlookers shoved their way out the entrance and into the night.
Hamby now pressed his considerable bulk against the ring, causing the metal to give enough that the fence was further destabilized. The carnival owner leaned over the railing and raised both arms out, imploring his champion to rally.
The dragon's lunges were weakening, a white froth coating the rim of its mouth. The dragon turned back toward the ring's center, making a slower and slower circle, its belly dragging against the earth. Serena waited a few moments more, then lifted her arm and the eagle swooped down and landed on the dragon's neck. The bird stabbed the base of the reptile's head with its hallux talon, piercing the skull with the same force and result as a well-struck sixteen penny nail. The eagle arose and this time flew onto one of the tent's rafters as the dragon rolled over on its back, feebly righted itself. Hamby tumbled into the ring, his top hat falling off his head. He got up and watched his champion use what life it yet had to drag itself to the ring's far corner.
Hamby called for more light, and the juggler tossed him a torch. The carnival owner kneeled beside his reptile, the torch lowered so all could see that the dragon was indeed dead, its split purple tongue laid on the ground like a flag in defeat. Hamby remained hunched over the creature almost a minute, then looked up. He reached into the front pocket of his swallow-tailed coat and brought forth an elegant white handkerchief with the initials D. H. embossed on the center. The carnival owner opened his handkerchief with great formality and gently placed it over the dragon's head.
Henryson walked toward the tent's exit, Snipes joining him, now wearing the cap and bells.
"I don't see Ross picking up his winnings," Henryson noted as they passed the table where bets were being settled. "That's the first wager I've seen him lose in a coon's age."
Snipes nodded at Mrs. Pemberton, who was taking the eagle back to the stable, Galloway walking behind her with a thick stack of bills in his hand.
"Looks like she done pretty good for herself, though."
"Yes, sir," Henryson agreed. "I'd say she just bankrupted a whole carnival. I wouldn't be surprised to see the lot of them on the commissary steps tomorrow."
They stepped out of the tent and followed other workers up the ridge. Above them, the locust pole foundations made the stringhouses look like shaky dry-docked piers.
"I bet if you tugged good on just one pole every one of them stringhouses would tumble off this ridge," Henryson said. "That would be a wager near certain as betting on that eagle tonight."
Henryson paused and glanced back at the tent.
"I wonder what notion got into Ross's head to make him think her and that eagle could be beat."
"It wasn't in his head," Snipes said.
RACHEL DIDN'T SLEEP WELL THE FIRST NIGHTS in Kingsport. Every passing train waked her, and once awake she could think only of Serena and her henchman. She'd removed the pearl-handled bowie knife from the trunk and placed it under her pillow. Each time the house creaked and settled, Rachel grasped the knife's smooth handle. The child slept beside her, closest to the wall.
It wasn't until the fifth day that Rachel took Jacob outside. On an earlier trip to the grocery store, she'd found a rhubarb patch across the tracks from Mrs. Sloan's house. I can at least make her a pie, Rachel figured, a little something to thank the older woman for her kindness. She and Jacob crossed the tracks, the bowie knife and an empty tote sack in her free hand. The rhubarb was near a rusty boxcar so long motionless its wheels had sunk deep in the ground. She moved through a blackberry patch, the briars clutching at her dress. The boxcar cast a square of shade, and Rachel set the child in it. She took the sock from her dress pocket and spilled its contents before him. Now don't be putting them near your mouth, Rachel told him. Jacob placed the marbles in small groups, then pushed them farther apart.
Rachel began cutting the rhubarb, topping the plants the same way she would early-summer tobacco. It wasn't the sort of work she'd ever have thought you could miss, the purplish stalks so twiny it was like cutting rope, but it felt good to be doing something outdoors, something that had a rhythm you could fall into because you'd done it all your life. Next year I'll plant me a garden, she told herself, no matter where we are.
Soon small bouquets of crinkled leaves lay scattered around her. Rachel gathered up a handful of stalks, placed them in a stack like kindling. Jacob played contentedly, appearing glad as Rachel to be outside. A train came up the track, moving slow out of the depot. As it passed, a flagman waved from the caboose's railing. A pair of bright-red cardinals flew low across the tracks, and Jacob pointed at them before turning his gaze back to the marbles.
The sun had narrowed the boxcar's shadow by the time she'd cut the last stalk, stuffed the pile into her tote sack. More than enough rhubarb for five pies, but Rachel figured she and Mrs. Sloan could find a use for the extra. When she and Jacob recrossed the tracks, the sheriff's Model T was parked in front of the house.
"Looks like we got company," she told Jacob.
McDowell sat at the kitchen table with Mrs. Sloan, his right hand gripping a sweating glass of iced tea. An envelope lay on the table before him. Rachel set the rhubarb on the kitchen counter and sat down as well, but Jacob squirmed, began to whine.
"Probably needs changing," Rachel said, but Mrs. Sloan got up before she could and took the child into her arms.
"I'll do it." Mrs. Sloan said. "Then I'll take him out on the porch. You and the sheriff need to talk."
"Here," Rachel said, and gave the older woman the sock filled with marbles. "For if he gets fussy."
Mrs. Sloan jiggled the child in her arms, and Jacob laughed.
"Let's get you changed," she said, and disappeared with the child into the back bedroom.
McDowell took a sip of tea, set the glass before him.
"Likes the marbles, does he?"
"He plays with them every day."
"And doesn't try to eat them?"
"No, leastways not yet."
Mrs. Sloan and Jacob came out of the back bedroom and went out on the porch.
"What is it?" Rachel asked when McDowell didn't speak.
He looked out the front window where Mrs. Sloan held Jacob in her arms, the child reaching for a wind chime that dangled from the porch ceiling.
"I'm not sheriff anymore. They fired me and got them a lawman they can control."
"So there ain't nothing left to do but run and hide from them," Rachel said.
"I'm not running," McDowell said. "There's ways to beat them that don't need a sheriff's badge."
"If you do, we can go back home?"
"Yes."
"How long before you try to do something about them?"
"I have been trying," McDowell said bitterly. "My mistake was believing the law might help me. But I've come to the end of that row. If it's to be done I'll be doing it myself."
The ex-sheriff paused. He still looked out the window, but his gaze seemed upon something farther away than Mrs. Sloan and the child.
"You're going to try and kill them, ain't you?" Rachel asked.
"I'm hoping there'll be another way."
"I'd kill them if I didn't have Jacob to look after," Rachel said. "I would."
"I believe you," McDowell said, meeting Rachel's eyes.
A train hooted as it left the depot, the tea glass trembling as the train passed behind the house. McDowell reached out and held the glass still as the train clattered on south towards Knoxville. He stared at the glass as he spoke.
"If things don't work out the way I hope, you'll need to get you and the boy farther away than here."
"How far?"
"Far as this can get you," McDowell said, pushing the envelope toward her. "There's three hundred dollars in there."
"I wouldn't feel right taking your money," Rachel said.
"It's not my money."
"Where'd it come from then?"
"That doesn't matter. It's yours and the boy's now, and it may be all that keeps them from catching the both of you."
Rachel took the envelope and placed it in her dress pocket.
"You think they're still looking for us, right now I mean?"
"I know they are. If it's safe to come back, I'll come get you." McDowell said, pushing back his chair and standing up. "But until then don't take that child outside any more. I don't think they can track you here, but these folks ain't the kind you want to underestimate."
Rachel walked out on the porch with him and watched as he got back in the Model T and drove away. Then Rachel went back inside, fixed some oatmeal for Jacob. She set him on the floor and began cutting the stalks into inch-long pieces. Rachel raised a piece to her mouth, tasted its sourness and knew she'd need plenty of sugar. A freight train rattled the house, and she felt the boards beneath her shudder. Crockery shook in the cabinet.
Rachel wondered where the train was headed and remembered something from her last year of school. Where would you most want to go, Miss Stephens had asked, if you could choose anywhere on this map? One student raised a hand and said Washington, D.C., and another New York and another said Raleigh. Bobby Orr said Louisiana because he'd heard folks there ate crawdads and he'd like to see such a thing as that. Joel Vaughn, taking a notion to be a smart-aleck, said as far away from the school as possible. Now where would that be, Joel, Miss Stephens had asked, and made him come up to the front of the room. She'd taken a ruler from her drawer and made Joel go to the map and measure until he found the farthest dot, which was Seattle, Washington. I went there once, Miss Stephens had said. It's a pretty place. There's a river and a pretty blue harbor and mountains so high they have snow on them all year long.
BY EARLY OCTOBER, THE RAILROAD TRACK TO the new camp in Jackson County had been laid down and connected to the Waynesville line. Spurs sprouted into the surrounding forests, and the site itself had been cleared by workers who'd been in the Cove Creek camp just weeks before, their stringhouses set on flat cars and sent east with them. The farmhouse had been converted into a dining hall, and work had begun on houses for Meeks and the Pembertons. Little would change other than the locale.
Snipes' crew was among the ones left in the Cove Creek camp. On those last mornings they ascended the far western slopes of Shanty Mountain and Big Fork Ridge, the few acres yet unlogged. They were still one worker short due to Dunbar's death in the gap. A replacement had been brought in, but on the second morning a sapling under a felled hickory sprang free and fractured his skull, making Snipes both lead cutter and sawyer. By the time the men stopped midday to eat, Snipes was so exhausted he lay on the ground, his eyes closed.
Henryson took a bite from his sandwich. His nose wrinkled as he chewed the soggy bread and fatback, swallowed it with the relish he might a mouthful of tacks. He set the sandwich aside.
"I heard your preacher was out in his cabbage patch the other evening," Henryson said to Stewart. "He must be doing some better."
"He is, but he still ain't of a mind to say much. My sister got him a funeral to preach over there at Cullowhee, figured it would cheer him up a considerable bit, but he just shook his head at her."
"Well, there ain't nothing like seeing somebody laid in the ground to cheer a fellow up," Ross said.
"It used to done him that way," Stewart said. "He told me once the only thing he hated about dying was he wouldn't be around to do his own funeral."
Snipes eyes were still closed as he spoke.
"That's another example of the duality of man you're speaking of, Stewart. We want what's in this world but we also want what ain't."
"I don't quite get your meaning," Henryson said to Snipes.
Snipes turned his head a few inches to address Henryson, the foreman's eyelashes fluttering a few moments like insect wings vainly attempting to take flight.
"Well, I'm too tuckered to explain it right now."
The crew foreman resettled the back of his head on the ground. He placed a piece of the cap and bells' pennant-shaped cloth over each eye to blunt the sun and was soon snoring.
"If we don't get another worker soon, Snipes is going to be worn to a frazzle," Henryson said.
"Maybe they'll hire McIntyre back," Ross said. "It ain't like a man's got to wag his tongue to be a good sawyer."
"What do you think, Stewart?" Henryson asked. "Think McIntyre might come back?"
"Maybe."
"If funerals perk him up, he couldn't do better than here," Ross noted. "There's men falling dead near about fast as the trees."
A breeze stirred a white oak's high limbs. It was the last hardwood on the ridge, and a few scarlet leaves fell like an early surrendering. One drifted toward Ross, who picked it up and examined it carefully, turning the leaf to and fro as though something never seen before.
"I reckon there'll be a couple of new graves over in Tennessee in a day or two," Henryson said. "Galloway or his mama finally figured out that it wasn't so much the crown as what it stood for."
"Meaning?" Stewart asked.
"Meaning what wears one. There's a Kingston and a Kingsport, and they're both in the mountains."
"And they both got rail lines," Ross said, still studying the leaf as he spoke.
"Was that the places you figured?" Stewart asked, "when you said you knowed where they was the other day?"
Ross nodded.
"Yes it was. I knew it'd come to them sooner or later."
"Which one is Galloway going to first?" Stewart asked Henryson.
"He didn't say," Henryson replied. "All I know is he's headed out tonight."
"I reckon we'll know soon enough if Galloway picked right," Ross said.
"You figure?" Henryson asked. "He could leave them in the woods for the varmints to eat or stuff them down a dry well and none would be the wiser."
"He could but he won't. These folks ain't about you having any doubts concerning their meanness. They want it right out there in the open."
"I reckon you're right," Henryson agreed. "You heard about them finding young Vaughn's cap on the bridge with that note pinned to it. His mama claimed it for his handwriting."
"What'd it say?" Stewart asked.
"Just that he was sorry."
"I reckon he figured to save Galloway the bother of tracking him down," Ross said.
"I can understand him getting it over with," Henryson said. "That'd be a terriblesome thing to take nary a breath for the rest of your life without worrying Galloway was sneaking up behind you. I'd be tempted to get it over with too."
"But they ain't found his body yet," Stewart noted. "There's some hope in that."
"He was always a clever lad," Henryson said. "He might have been trying to throw them off his trail."
"No," Ross said, a discernable weariness in his voice. "What's left after the crawdadders and mudcats have their way with that boy will bob up somewheres downriver. Just give it a few days."
"MEEKS told me Albright called," Serena said that night as she and Pemberton prepared for bed.
"He's starting eminent domain proceedings next week," Pemberton said, "unless we take his offer."
"Is his offer what it was before?"
Pemberton nodded as he leaned to take off his boots, but did not raise his eyes…
"We'll take it then," Serena said. "Thirty-four thousand acres of stumps and slash will buy a hundred thousand acres of mahogany in Brazil."
Serena removed the last of her clothing. Pemberton noted that the scar across her stomach had not changed Serena's lack of self-consciousness. She stepped toward the chifforobe with the same feline grace and suppleness as she'd done that first night in Boston. Pemberton remembered the evening she'd returned from the hospital, how she'd stood naked in front of the mirror, studying the scar carefully, letting her finger glide across it as she stared into the mirror. My Fechtwunde, she'd told Pemberton. She'd taken his hand and had him trace the scar's length as well.
"So the Chicagoans are ready to sign?" Serena said as she placed her shirt and pants inside the chifforobe.
"Yes," Pemberton said.
"I'm assuming Garvey won't venture this far south."
"No, he's sending his lawyer to sign the contract."
"Even in the North I'm sure it's hard for him to find investments," Serena said. "He may become our best long-term partner. What about our investors from Quebec?"
"They have more questions before they sign."
"They'll sign," Serena said. "You told them of your birthday party?"
"Yes," he said tersely.
"Don't be so grim about it, Pemberton. This may well be the last time that we see any of them. Once we're in Brazil, they'll be nothing more than names on checks."
Serena stepped to the window and opened the curtains, looked toward the ridge.
"I talked with Mrs. Galloway today. I never had before but she was at the commissary. I must say I find her augury deficient," Serena said, her voice becoming more reflective. "Which may explain why the lamp in her stringhouse is still off."
Serena opened the curtains wider. She angled her head close to one of the higher panes, as if to frame it inside the mullion.
"The lunar eclipse is tonight," she said. "I've always found it stunning, not just the brightness but how the hues change. Galloway calls it a hunter's moon. He says there's not a better night to hunt."
Serena didn't turn around as she spoke. Her eyes peered beyond the stringhouses and the ridge, into a sky that had yet to usher forth its moon and stars. Pemberton's fingers paused on a shirt button as he let his gaze settle on the crescent line where the paleness of Serena's upper back and shoulders darkened at the neck. His fingers and lips had often traced that demarcation between the part of herself Serena allowed others to see and what was seen only by Pemberton. He allowed his gaze to follow the curved flex of Serena's back as she twisted to look out the windowpane, then down the tapering waist and on to the hips and the muscled calves and the ankles and finally the feet themselves, heels uplifted as Serena's weight balanced on the balls of her feet. She did not move from the window, as if holding a pose for him. A pose that that even in its stasis embodied motion as well, like a stream current beneath a calm surface.
Pemberton knew Serena was waiting for him to come and press his chest against her back, cup her breasts in his hands, feel her nipples harden against his palms as her hips pushed into his groin, her mouth turning to meet his. He did not go to her. After a while Serena turned from the window, leaving the curtains open. She got into bed and lifted the covers as Pemberton finished unbuttoning his shirt.
"Come on to bed," Serena said softly. "Let me finish undressing you."
Pemberton lay down and felt the bed's feather mattress and springs give under his back. Serena placed her knees athwart his hips and leaned over him, her hands pulling the shirt off his shoulders, freeing his arms one at a time from the cloth. Serena's hands traced a path up his ribcage as she leaned closer, pressed her lips to his as her body settled over him. He did not respond.
Serena finally eased herself off Pemberton and lay beside him, her hand resting lightly on his chest.
"What's wrong, Pemberton?" Serena said. "Is your mind elsewhere?"
RACHEL CROSSED THE TRACKS AND SOON WAS on the sidewalk, in her pocket one of the twenty-dollar bills to buy groceries. At the curb a wagon creaked by, a Holstein's black-and-white head poking through the board slats. Rachel smelled the manure and straw, so much more clear and familiar than the stew of odors in Kingsport. Probably going to be someone's milk cow, she thought, and took one step off the curb. She did not take another.
What she saw first was absence, a gap in the human form where wrist and hand should be. He lounged outside the post office, a matchstick in the corner of his mouth. Even at a distance, there was no doubt in her mind. The slick black hair and small wiry frame, the way his head cocked slightly to the side. The day's waning sunlight suddenly felt thicker, more contained, almost as if she could wave a finger through it and find her skin tinged yellow. Rachel stepped back slowly, afraid a quick movement would divert his gaze from those who passed nearer.
When she was out of sight she ran, at first toward Mrs. Sloan's house. Then her body and mind swerved as one, and she ran instead toward the depot. When she made it to the entrance, Rachel paused to calm herself before stepping inside. He didn't see you, and he don't know where we're staying, she told herself. We got time.
Behind the ticket booth, a stout moon-faced man studied numbers in a wire-bound notebook. When he looked up, Rachel searched for something in his features to reassure herself and found it in his bow tie and spectacles. Like what a doctor would wear, she thought.
"Yes, ma'am," he said, his tone neither friendly nor unfriendly.
"A man who's got only one hand, not much taller than me. Has he been in here?"
"You mean today?"
"Today or yesterday."
The man shook his head.
"Not to my recollection."
"Are you sure? It's important."
"I see a lot of folks," the man said, "but I think I'd remember someone like that."
Rachel turned and glanced out the window, then placed the twenty-dollar bill on the counter.
"How far will this get me and a young one."
"Which direction you headed?"
For a few moments, Rachel did not answer. On the wall behind the ticket master was a map of the United States, black lines woven across it like a spider's web. She found Tennessee, then let her eyes follow the knitwork of lines northwest.
"We want to go to Seattle, Washington."
"Twenty dollars would get you far as Saint Louis," the man said.
For a few moments Rachel contemplated going to the house to get more money.
"Once on the train we can get tickets for the rest of the way?"
The ticket master nodded.
"Part way will have to do," Rachel said. "When does it leave?"
"An hour and a half."
"Is there one leaves sooner?"
"Nothing but freight trains."
Rachel paused a few moments, then handed over the bill.
"These will get you to Saint Louis," the man said, placing two tickets before her and the two quarters in change.
Rachel picked up the tickets but left the quarters.
"That fellow I told you about. If he comes around asking…"
The man lifted the silver from the counter and placed it in his vest pocket.
"I've not sold any tickets to a woman and a child," he said.
She paused at the depot's doorway, looking back toward town before crossing the tracks and entering the house. Mrs. Sloan sat at the kitchen table peeling apples, Jacob in the back room napping.
"That man the sheriff told me to watch for," Rachel said. "I seen him uptown."
Rachel hurried on to the back room. She took the money and bowie knife from under the pillow and stuffed them in the carpetbag with what items she thought most needed. Mrs. Sloan came into the room.
"What can I do to help you?"
"Get yourself over to your sister-in-law's and stay there," Rachel said, and lifted Jacob from the bed. "Call the sheriff and tell him Galloway's here."
The older woman came to her, the toy train engine and sock of marbles in her veiny hands.
"Don't forget these," Mrs. Sloan said, stuffing the toy train engine in the sock as well and knotting it. "He'd be put out something awful if you left them."
Rachel placed the sock in her dress pocket, and she and Jacob were quickly out of the house and crossing the tracks to the boxcar, the best place to wait because she could see both the house and the depot. See but not be seen, Rachel told herself. She crossed the last rail and looked over her shoulder toward town and saw no one. Jacob whimpered.
"Hush now," she said.
Rachel stepped quickly through the blackberry bushes, not pausing when briars clutched her dress. She lifted Jacob and the carpetbag into the boxcar before getting in herself.
At first there was only gloaming. As her eyes slowly adjusted, Rachel saw a mattress made from corn shucks stuffed between two rotting quilts, beside it yellowing newspapers and an empty sardine can. Whoever he is, he'll not come back till it cools off some, Rachel thought. She set Jacob and the carpetbag down, then stepped to the back of the boxcar and pinched the quilts between her thumbs and forefingers to slide the makeshift mattress closer to the doorway. A gray blur shot out of the pallet, its body and long tail brushing an ankle as it passed between her legs and then on through the doorway. A rustling in the briars and then nothing.
Rachel prodded the pallet with her shoe. Nothing else emerged and she slid the pallet the rest of the way. She sat down, the shucks rasping as she leaned and lifted Jacob onto her lap. The boxcar rattled as a freight train passed, moving so slow Rachel could read the words and numbers on each car as it passed wide and high before her. Several of the freight cars' sliding metal doors were open. From one of them a hobo peered out.
After the caboose glided by, Rachel fixed her gaze on the house. Soon Mrs. Sloan came out, a suitcase in her hand. The old woman walked with a steadfast stride toward town. A few minutes later a man went inside the depot, came out and walked toward town as well. The day had been warm for early fall, and the boxcar had stored the day's heat like a kiln. Beads of sweat formed on Rachel's brow, the dress cloth beginning to stick between her shoulder blades.
Jacob leaned forward and pointed at a lizard clinging to the doorway. The lizard's back and legs were as bright green as a cinnamon fern. On its throat a red bubble of flesh expanded and contracted, but otherwise the creature lay completely still.
"Pretty ain't it," Rachel told Jacob.
After a few moments, the lizard crawled farther up the rusty metal and paused again. The lizard's green dulled to a light brown, and it soon blended so perfectly with the rusty metal as to be invisible. There's a trick we could sure use, Rachel thought.
Jacob settled deeper into her lap, sleepy enough not to fret about the boxcar's heat. His breath took on the cadence of sleep, and not long after that twilight settled in. A pale swollen moon appeared in the sky, crowding out the lesser stars as it pressed closer to earth. A thin whiteness spread over the ground like hoarfrost. Another freight train passed. Less than an hour, Rachel told herself, eyes shifting from the house to the depot.
The boxcar finally began to cool, the day's heat leaking away with the light. A man and woman stepped into the depot, came out and sat on the wooden bench to await the train. Soon several other travelers joined the couple. Lights flickered on and cast the depot in a yellow light. No one approached Mrs. Sloan's house. Something rustled near the boxcar door, and Rachel saw a rat's snout tentatively emerge.
"Shoo," she said and pulled a shuck from the pallet to throw if the rodent ventured closer, but at the sound of her voice it disappeared back into the undergrowth.
Jacob woke and began to fuss. Rachel checked his swaddlings but they were dry. Hungry then, she told herself, and set the child on the pallet. She took one of the graham crackers from the carpetbag and gave it to him. The moonlight continued to thicken, the train tracks gleaming as if gilded in silver. Not a wisp of cloud passed overhead. Rachel looked up at the sky and saw the moon was no longer white but deepening into an orange hue.
A smudge of light came on in the back room of Mrs. Sloan's house. The light disappeared and Rachel hoped it might be her imagining, but then it was in the kitchen, moving around like foxfire before briefly reappearing in the back room. Rachel squinted her eyes and watched for the glow of a flashlight crossing Mrs. Sloan's yard, if not that for some denser shadow.
But she saw nothing. Galloway had vanished as completely as the light held in his hand. Could be walking straight toward town or the depot or straight toward us, Rachel thought, and moved Jacob and herself deeper into the boxcar. Minutes passed though she'd not have believed so except she heard the passenger train coming. Rachel gathered up the carpetbag and Jacob. Briars grabbed her legs, and each time there was an instant she thought Galloway had her.
Rachel finally felt cinders beneath her feet. She did not step onto the glimmering tracks but walked the edge. The train whistle blew and she took a few more steps. A big oak rose near the depot, and its limbs snared some of the moonlight. Rachel stood beneath where the dark pooled, a few yards outside the depot light's glow. She studied the travelers gathered on the platform, looked through one of the depot's wide windows but saw no one. The train pulled into the station and shuddered to a stop.
Two men got off but that was all, and soon the train began to load its new passengers. Rachel took the tickets from her pocket and moved closer, almost ready to step onto the depot's porch when something stopped her. It was not something seen but something sensed, like the time as a child when she'd started to lift the spring guard and stopped, a black widow spider big as a quarter where her fingers would have gone. The last passengers boarded, but still Rachel did not move. Then she saw him, in the shadows on the depot's far side. The last ticket holder boarded and the train pulled away, the flagman's brass lantern sweeping back and forth in farewell.
Rachel turned from the depot's glow and could not see her feet in the oak's thick shade. If I trip and fall and this young one starts squalling, we'll be goners for sure, Rachel thought. Imaginings began to get the best of her, thinking how one wrong step to the left or right and there could be a ditch or a rusty stob that would trip her. You've got to follow the same path you come here on, she told herself. She took a step into the darkness because there was no choice. Rachel took another step, the foot set tentatively before her. Like crossing a pond on thin ice, she thought, and it seemed a part of her listened for that first crackle. Seven steps and she was out of the tree's shade.
Rachel walked on toward the boxcar, quicker now, hunched low so that she was little taller than the briars and weeds. The only thing she could think to do was try to get to town and find the town's lawman, but Sheriff McDowell had warned her to trust no one but his cousin, even if that someone wore a badge. The moonlight was so stark and intense now she could see Mrs. Sloan's house clearly. She remembered then that it was October, remembered how her father called this a hunter's moon and claimed blood on the moon meant blood on the land. Rachel walked faster and got herself and Jacob into the boxcar as quickly as she could, unable to shake the feeling that Mrs. Pemberton and Galloway held sway over even the moon and stars and clouds. That they'd waited for this night and this night alone to find her and Jacob. Don't look up and see it, she told herself. Rachel pushed farther into the boxcar, clutched Jacob more tightly in her arms.
She heard a train, not the one that had departed but one coming out of the mountains into the valley, a freight train. The engine stopped beside the coal chute on the station's opposite end. Rachel lifted Jacob and the carpetbag and made her way down the track to where she'd stood before. She studied the depot, the shadowy far corner where Galloway had been fifteen minutes earlier. He wasn't there. The last of the coal clattered from the chute, and the train began moving. The engine passed in front of the depot, and when several cars had done the same Rachel gathered up the carpetbag and Jacob and walked rapidly toward the train, exposed now not just by the moon but the depot's yellow glow. She stepped onto the closer track, the train passing slowly in front of her. The fifth car gaped open, but Rachel didn't reach it in time. Six more cars creaked by before another was open. She set Jacob and the carpetbag inside, then jumped in herself. The train moved past the old boxcar and soon the darkened backs of buildings.
He was coming, beside the caboose but closing the distance between them one boxcar at a time, not even running but still gaining steadily. He stumbled, got up, and came on. He was smiling and his index finger waved in admonishment. She'd never known fear had a taste, but it did. It tasted like chalk and metal. Rachel pushed Jacob deeper into the car, so deep the child's back pressed against the rattling steel. Rachel's ribs tightened around her heart like a vise-grip.
The train sped up but not enough. Galloway's face appeared beside the car. He trotted now, his hand outstretched. A lanyard made from a dingy piece of twine was around Galloway's neck, dangling from it a dagger. Rachel thought of the bowie knife, but there wasn't time to get it from the carpetbag. She pulled the sock from her dress pocket as Galloway reached out his hand and gripped the door, the dagger glinting as it swayed back and forth across his chest. He continued to trot beside them, gathering himself to leap inside. The train whistle screamed like a final warning.
Galloway shoved himself halfway into the car, his head and belly on the metal floor, legs yet dangling. Rachel raised the sock to ear level. She paused, willing the pound of glass and steel to be enough, then brought it down as hard as she could on Galloway's leering face. His eyes went white. For a moment his body balanced half in and half out of the car. Then Rachel pressed her shoe heel against his forehead and shoved him earthward. Galloway tumbled into a gulley. Rachel leaned out and watched as the caboose passed where he'd fallen. She kept watching the tracks, but he did not rise. Jacob was squalling now and she gathered him into her arms.
"We're all right now," she told him. "We're all right."
There was hay on the boxcar's floor, and Rachel heaped some of it into a corner. She and Jacob lay on it, her arms around him. They were out of Kingsport now, headed south through the Smokies. They passed an occasional farmhouse, what wan light its windows shed skiffing the metal floor a moment, then gone. The rocking heartbeat of the train soon lulled the child asleep, herself as well. Rachel dreamed that she and Jacob stood in a cornfield where only a single green stalk grew. She and Jacob pulled shucks off the stalk's one ear and found not corn but a knife blade.
She woke in darkness, for a moment unsure where she was. Rachel spooned her body tighter around Jacob's and tried to fall back asleep but sleep did not come. She listened to the train passing over the rails, listened to Jacob's measured breaths. Rachel waited for the wheels to slow beneath her, and when they finally did she and Jacob got out and crossed rows of tracks, moving around stalled boxcars toward the depot. The sign above the front door said Knoxville. She went inside and checked the train schedule before asking to borrow the telephone mounted on the wall behind the counter. A collect call, she assured the depot master. She lifted the receiver to her ear and leaned toward the mouthpiece, Jacob clutching the black clothbound cord as Rachel spoke to the operator.
McDowell answered on the first ring.
"Where are you?" he asked, and as soon as she told him he asked when the next train left.
"The one we need don't leave for four hours."
"The next train," he said again, "to anywhere."
"There's one headed to Chattanooga in thirty minutes."
"Take it. Then when you get to Chattanooga buy the ticket to Seattle."
"You think he's already headed here, don't you?" Rachel said.
"I'd say it's likely."
For a few moments only static crossed the miles of lines between them.
"Just get to Chattanooga," McDowell said. "I'm going to end this tonight, end it for good."
"How?"
"That's not your concern. Go buy your tickets."
She did what he said. Thinking she hadn't offered enough money to the other depot master, Rachel handed this one a five-dollar bill. Then she described Galloway.
The depot master stared at the bill, a smile rising on his face that offered no comfort or sympathy.
"You must be in some serious trouble," the depot master said, "and one thing I've learned is folks with trouble ain't no different than folks with head lice or the shits. You get close enough to them and soon enough you'll get it your ownself."
The depot master looked past Rachel as he spoke, as if so pleased with his words he hoped a larger audience had heard them.
Rachel met the man's eyes, held his gaze until the smirk left his face. She no longer felt anger or fear or even weariness. What remained was just a numb acceptance that she and Jacob would or wouldn't survive. Something would happen or it wouldn't happen, and that was the way of it. Almost as if she was outside of herself, watching her and the child from some distant vantage point. As Rachel spoke, the coldness of her inflection felt outside herself as well.
"You'll help us or you won't, mister. You can make light of our troubles and smile at your own smartass sayings. You can refuse to take my money or take it and tell where we went anyway. You'll do what you want to do. But know one thing. If that man finds us he'll rake a knife blade across this young one's throat and bleed him dry like he was no more than a shoat in a hog pen. That blood will be on your hands, every bit as much as on him that does the killing. If you can handle knowing you done that, then go ahead and tell him."
The depot master placed a hand on the five-dollar bill but did not slide it toward himself. He no longer looked at Rachel but at Jacob.
"I won't tell him nor nobody else," he said, then handed the bill back to Rachel.
THAT NIGHT IT WAS NOT THE GLARE OF FLAMES or the smell of smoke that roused Pemberton but a sound, something heard but not registered until other senses lifted him from a restless sleep. When he opened his eyes, the bed was a raft adrift on a rising tide of smoke and fire. Serena had awakened as well, and for a few moments they only watched.
The front of the house disappeared in a wide rush of flame, as did the foyer leading to the back door. The bedroom's window was five feet away but hidden by smoke. Each breath Pemberton took felt like a mouthful of ash singeing his throat and lungs. Waves of heat rolled over his bare skin. Smoke seemed to have clouded inside his mind as well as the room, and for a second he forgot why the window mattered. Serena held to his arm, coughing violently as well. They helped each other off the bed and Pemberton wrapped a blanket around them, its fringe catching aflame when it touched the floor.
Pemberton used his last clear thought to gauge where the window would be. With his arm around Serena and hers around his waist, he led them stumbling and breathless toward the window. When Pemberton found it, he lowered his head and turned his shoulder and used what momentum they had to break the glass and wooden mullion. He and Serena plunged through the window clutching each other, the glass raining around them, twirling and refractive like a kaleidoscope. Their legs caught the sill a moment, slipped through. Then they were falling, so slowly it did not feel like falling but a suspension. Pemberton felt a moment of weightlessness as if they were submerged in water. Then the ground came rushing upward.
They hit and rolled free of the flaming blanket and pressed their naked flesh against each other's. He and Serena stayed on the ground, holding each other though coughs racked their bodies like seizures. Fire had burned Pemberton's forearm and a six-inch glass shard jagged deep into his thigh, but he did not break his and Serena's embrace. As the roof collapsed, orange sparks spewed upward, hovered a moment and dimmed. Pemberton shifted to cover Serena, ash and cinders stinging his back before expiring.
A tumult of shouting came toward them as what workers remained in the camp gathered to contain the fire. Meeks appeared out of the smoke and leaned over them, asking if Pemberton and Serena were all right. Serena said yes, but neither she nor Pemberton unclenched. As the heat washed over him, Pemberton thought of their stumbling rush toward the window and how, at that one moment, the world had finally revealed itself to him, and in it there was nothing but himself and Serena, everything else burning away around them. A kind of annihilation. Yes, he thought, I understand now.
Pemberton finally let go of Serena to pull free the glass shard. Meeks helped Serena and Pemberton to their feet, placing a bedsheet around them as he did so.
"I'll call a doctor," Meeks said, and walked briskly back to the office.
Serena and Pemberton began slowly walking in the same direction, arm in arm. The flames cast the whole camp into a pulsing translucence, light gathering and dispersing like brightened shadows. Pemberton made a quick inventory of what had burned inside the house that could not be replaced. Nothing. A foreman came up to Serena, his face damasked with a sooty sweat.
"I've got men checking to make sure it don't spread," he said. "When we get it put out, you want me to send the crews out?"
"Keep them around camp, just in case," Serena answered. "We'll let them rest up and get a full day from them tomorrow."
"You was lucky to have got out of there," the foreman said, looking toward the house.
Serena and Pemberton turned and saw the truth of his statement. The back portion was still aflame, but the front was a tumble of black smoking wood but for the brick steps that now rose toward nothing but singed air. A man in silhouette sat in a ladderback chair directly in front of the steps. The man watched the flames, seemingly oblivious to the workers who rushed and shouted around him. On the ground beside the chair was an empty ten-gallon canister of kerosene. Pemberton did not have to see the man's face to know it was McDowell.