Serena (12 page)

“Another time,” Pemberton said.

“All right,” Galloway said, veering right and crossing a small creek. “This way then. But I’m getting some water out of that springhouse. Mamai will be thirsty after sucking on that candy.”

When they came to the springhouse, Galloway took a tobacco tin
from his back pocket and poured out what crumbs remained in it. As Galloway filled the tin, Pemberton looked through the trees at the cabin. A chess board had replaced the map, and Kephart and McDowell stared at it intently. One of Pemberton’s fencing partners at Harvard had introduced him to the game, claiming it was fencing with the mind instead of the body, but Pemberton had found the slow pace and lack of physical movement tedious.

The match was nearing its end, fewer than a dozen pieces left on the board. McDowell placed his finger and thumb on his remaining knight and made his move, its forward-left motion angling not only toward Kephart’s king but also into the path of his rook. Pemberton thought the sheriff had made a mistake, but Kephart saw something Pemberton didn’t. The older man resignedly took the knight with his rook. The sheriff moved his queen across the board, and Pemberton saw it then. Kephart made a final move and the match was over.

“Let’s go,” Galloway said, holding the tin so as not to slosh out the water. “I got better things to do than watch grown men play tiddly-winks.”

They walked on, finding Galloway’s mother just as they’d left her. The only sign that she’d made the slightest movement was the wadded paper bag on the floorboard.

“Brought you some cold spring water, Mama,” Galloway said and lifted the tobacco tin to his mother’s cracked purplish lips.

The old woman made sucking sounds as her son slowly tilted the container, pulled it back so she could swallow before pressing it to her lips again. Doing this several times until all the water had been drunk.

As they drove back to camp, Galloway looked out the window toward the Smokies.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you a panther yet.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence, following the blacktop as it made a convoluted circuit through the landscape’s see-saws and swerves. Outside Bryson City, the mountains swelled upward as if taking a last deep breath before slowly exhaling toward Cove Creek Valley.

As they drove into camp, Pemberton saw a green pickup parked beside the commissary. Shakily affixed to its flatbed was a wooden building, steep-pitched and wide-doored, resembling a very large doghouse or very small church. On the sides in black letters
R.L. FRIZZELL—PHOTOGRAPHER.
Pemberton watched as the vehicle’s owner lifted his tripod and camera from the truck’s work shed, set up the equipment with the swift deftness of one long practiced in his trade. The photographer looked to be in his sixties, and he wore a wrinkled black suit and wide somber tie. A loupe dangled from the silver chain around his neck, the instrument worn with the same authority a doctor might wear a stethoscope.

“What’s going on over there?” Pemberton asked.

“Ledbetter, the sawyer that got killed yesterday,” Galloway said. “They’re taking his picture for a remembering.”

Pemberton understood then. Another local custom that fascinated Buchanan—taking a picture of the deceased, the photograph a keepsake for the bereaved to place on a wall or fireboard. Campbell stood behind the photographer, though for what reason, if any, Pemberton could not discern.

“Put this in the office,” Pemberton said, and handed Galloway the rifle before walking toward the commissary to stand with Campbell.

An unlidded pine coffin leaned against the commissary’s back wall, the deceased propped up inside. A placard bearing the words
REST IN PEACE
had been placed on the coffin’s squared head, but the corpse’s tight-shouldered rigidity belied the notion, as if even in death Ledbetter anticipated another falling tree. Frizzell squeezed the shutter release. On one side of the coffin was a haggard woman Pemberton assumed was Ledbetter’s wife, beside her a boy of six or seven. As soon as a click confirmed the picture taken, two sawyers came forward and placed the lid on the coffin, entombing Ledbetter in the very thing that had killed him.

“Where’s my wife?” Pemberton asked Campbell.

Campbell nodded toward Noland Mountain.

“She’s up there with the eagle.”

The photographer emerged from beneath the cloth, eyes blinking in
the mid-afternoon light. He slid the negative into its protective metal sleeve, then went to his truck and took out a wicker fishing creel he slung over his shoulder before procuring another plate. Frizzell inserted the new plate before lifting the camera and tripod into his arms and making awkward sidling movements toward the dining hall where Reverend Bolick’s congregation had taken advantage of the warm day and brought tables from the dining hall for an after-service meal. The food had been eaten and the tables cleared, but many of the congregants lingered. The women wore cheap cotton-print dresses, the men rumpled white dress shirts and trousers, a few in threadbare coats. The children were arrayed in everything from cheap bright dresses to jumpers fashioned out of burlap potato sacks.

Frizzell set up his camera, aiming at a child wearing a blue gingham smock. The photographer disappeared under the black cloth, attempting to hold the child’s attention with all manner of gee-gaws brought forth from the wicker creel. After a toy bluebird, rattle and whirligig had failed, Frizzell rose from beneath the cloth and demanded the child be made to sit still. Rachel Harmon emerged from behind the other churchgoers. Pemberton had not seen her until that moment. She spoke to the boy quietly. Still hunched over, she backed slowly away as if afraid any sudden movement might startle the child back into activity. Pemberton stared at the child, searching for a feeling, a thought, that could encompass what lay before him.

When Campbell made a motion to leave, Pemberton grabbed him by the arm.

“Stay here a minute.”

The photographer disappeared under the cloth again. The child did not move. Nor did Pemberton. He tried to make out the boy’s features, but the distance was too great even to tell eye color. A flash of light and the picture was done. Rachel Harmon lifted the child in her arms. Turning and seeing Pemberton, she did not avert her eyes. She shifted the child so it gazed in Pemberton’s direction. Her free hand brushed the child’s hair behind its ears. Then an older woman came and the child
turned away, the three of them heading toward the train that would take them to Waynesville.

“Pemberton took out his billfold and handed Campbell a five-dollar bill, then told him what he wanted.

That night Pemberton dreamed he and Serena had been hunting in the same meadow where they’d killed the bear. Something hidden in the far woods made a crying sound. Pemberton thought it was a panther, but Serena said no, that it was a baby. When Pemberton asked if they should go get it, Serena had smiled at him. That’s Galloway’s baby, not ours, she had said.

S
HE HAD FORGOTTEN HOW MUCH LOGGERS COULD
eat, how it was like stoking a huge fire that burned wood faster than you could throw it on. Rachel worked the early shift, the hardest because breakfast was the camp’s biggest meal. She lit the lantern and took Jacob to Widow Jenkins each morning and then walked down to the depot and rode the train to camp, arriving at 5:30 to help fill the long tables, setting out first the tin forks and spoons and coffee cups, thick kaolin plates and bowls soon to be heaped with food. All the while the fire boxes roared, their mouths opened and stuffed with hickory, their heat passing through the thin pig-iron partitions into the twin thousand-pound Burton grange stoves. Inside the oven doors, puddles of bread dough rose and browned while on the stove eyes pots rattled and steamed like overheated engines. The kitchen thickened with smoke and heat, soon hotter and more humid than the
worst July afternoon. Sweat beaded the workers’ skin with an oily sheen as they came and went. Then the food itself was brought forth from the yard-wide oven racks, ladled and poured from the five-and ten-gallon pots, slid and peeled off black skillets big around as harrow discs. Gallon bowls were filled with stewed apples and fried potatoes and grits and oatmeal, straw bread baskets stuffed with cat-head biscuits, heaped platters of hotcakes and fatback, thick wedges of butter and quart mason jars of blackberry jam. Last the coffee, the steaming pots set on plates, cups of cream and sugar as well though nearly all the men drank it black.

For a few moments everything waited—the kitchen workers, the long wooden benches, the plates and forks and cups. Then the head cook took his gut-hammer and clanged the three-foot length of train track hung outside the main door. The timber crews came in, and for fifteen minutes the men hardly spoke to one another, much less to Rachel and the other kitchen workers. They raised their hands and pointed to empty bowls and platters, their mouths still working as they did so. After fifteen minutes passed, the work bell rang. The men left so quickly their cast-down forks and spoons seemed to retain a slight vibration, like pond water rippling after a splash.

The tables were cleared immediately, but the dishwashing and preparation for the next meal were put off until after the kitchen staff themselves ate. Rachel had always found these moments the best in the workday. The chance to catch a breath after the rush of feeding the men, to talk to some of the folks who worked with her, it was something she’d looked forward to after months hardly speaking to an adult besides Widow Jenkins. But Bonny had gotten married and moved to South Carolina, and Rebecca had been fired. The older women hadn’t had much to do with her before and even less so now. Rebecca’s replacement, a woman named Cora Pinson from Grassy Bald, hadn’t been especially friendly either, but she was younger than the other women and a new hire. After three weeks of eating alone, Rachel set her plate down where Cora and Mabel Sorrels had a table to themselves.

“Would you mind if I was to sit with you?” Rachel asked.

Mrs. Sorrels just stared at her as if she wasn’t worth the bother of replying to. It was Cora Pinson who spoke.

“I don’t sit with whores.”

The two women lifted up their plates and turned their backs to Rachel as they moved to another table.

Rachel sat down and looked at her plate. She could hear several of the other women talking about her, not bothering to whisper. Go ahead and eat like it don’t bother you, she told herself. She took a bite of biscuit, chewed and swallowed it though it went down like sawdust. Rachel set her fork in a piece of stewed apple, but she didn’t raise it to her mouth, merely stared at it. She didn’t even see Joel Vaughn until he set his plate opposite her. He took off his blue and black mackinaw and draped it on an empty seat.

“Don’t pay no mind to them old snuff mouths,” Joel said as he pulled back a chair and sat down. “I see them every morning out back sneaking them a dip. Don’t want Preacher Bolick to see that nasty tobacco juice dripping down their chins like brown slobber.”

Joel said his words loud enough for the women to hear them. Rachel lowered her head, but a smile creased her lips. Cora Pinson and Mabel Sorrels got up in a huff and went to the kitchen with their trays.

Joel took off his gray cap, revealing the thatch of curly bright-orange hair that had been an uncombable tangle ever since Rachel had known him.

“That young one of yours is sprouting up like June corn,” Joel said. “When I seen him Sunday at church I’d have not known who it was if you hadn’t been holding him. I didn’t know babies grew so fast, but I reckon us boys don’t know much about such things.”

“I didn’t know it either,” Rachel said. “I don’t seem to know much about babies at all.”

“He’s stout and healthy, so I’d say that shows you know enough,” Joel said, nodding at Rachel’s plate as he reached for his fork. “You best be eating too.”

He lowered his eyes and ate with the same fixed attentiveness as all
the other men. Rachel looked at him, and it surprised her how much he had changed but not changed. As a child, Joel had been smaller than most of the boys, but he’d caught up in his teens, not just taller but wider-shouldered, more muscled. A man now, even a thin mustache over his lip. But his face was the same, freckled and easy to grin, a boy you knew had mischief in him. Smart as a whip, and kind, a kindness you could see in his green eyes as well as his words. Joel set the fork down and raised the coffee cup to his lips, took a swallow and then another.

“You’ve been doing good for yourself,” Rachel said. “From what folks say you’ll be an overseer like Mr. Campbell before too long. There’s no surprise in that though. You always had the most smarts of any of us at school.”

Joel’s face reddened into a blush. Even his freckles appeared to darken.

“I just fill in where they need me. Besides, soon as I can find another job I’m leaving here.”

“Why do you want to leave?” Rachel asked.

Joel met her eyes.

“Because I don’t like them,” he said, and turned back to his food.

Rachel looked at the clock by the doorway and saw it was time for her to get back to work. She could already hear the clatter of crockery and metal being washed and rinsed in the fifty-gallon hoop barrels, but she didn’t want to get up. It had been so long since she’d talked to someone her own age. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be.

“We had some good times at that school,” she said as Joel finished the last bit on his plate. “I didn’t know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that’s the way of it.”

“We did have some fun,” Joel said, “even if Miss Stephens was a grumpy old sow.”

“I remember the time she asked where in the United States we’d want to go, and you said far as you could get from her and the schoolhouse. That really got her out of sorts.”

The dining hall suddenly grew quiet as Galloway opened the side door and took a step inside, his head cocked slightly to the right as he
scanned the room. He found Joel and jerked his head toward the office.

“I better go and see what old flop arm wants,” Joel said, and got up.

Rachel got up as well, speaking softly across the table as she did so.

“Have you ever heard Mr. or Mrs. Pemberton say anything about me?”

“No,” Joel said, his face clouding.

Joel looked like he wanted to say something more, and whatever that something more was it wouldn’t be said in a playful tone or with a smile on his face. But he didn’t. He put on his cap and mackinaw.

“Thanks for sitting with me,” Rachel said.

Joel nodded.

As Joel went out the door, Rachel saw Mrs. Pemberton through the dining hall’s wide window. Horse and rider moved briskly through the last crews walking toward the woods. Rachel watched until Mrs. Pemberton and the horse began their ascent onto the ridge. She raised herself from the chair, her eyes about to turn away from the window when Rachel saw her own reflection. She did not bend to pick up her plate but let her gaze linger. Despite the apron and her hair tied back in a bun, Rachel saw that she was still pretty. Her hands were chapped and wrinkled by the kitchen work, but her face was unlined and smooth. Her body hadn’t yet acquired the sagging shapelessness of the other women in the kitchen. Even the soiled apron could not conceal that.

You’re too pretty to stay covered up
, Mr. Pemberton had told her more than once when Rachel waited until she was in bed to take off her dress and step-ins. She remembered how after the first few times there’d been pleasure in the loving for her as well as him, and she’d had to bite her lip to not be embarrassed. She remembered the day she’d walked through the house while he slept, touching the ice box and the chairs and the gilded mirror, Rachel also recalling what hadn’t been there—no picture of a sweetheart hung on the wall or set on a bureau, just as there’d been no woman come down from Boston like Mrs. Buchanan had once. At least not one until Serena.

Someone called Rachel’s name from the kitchen, but she did not move
from the window. She remembered again the afternoon at the train station when Serena Pemberton held the bowie knife by its blade, offering the pearl handle to her. Rachel thought how easily she might have grasped the bowie knife’s handle, the blade that had just killed her father pointed at the other woman’s heart. As Rachel continued to stare at her reflection, she suddenly wondered if she’d been wrong about having had only one real choice in her life, that in that moment at the depot Serena Pemberton had offered her a second choice, one that could have made laying down in bed with Mr. Pemberton the right choice after all, even at the cost of her father.
Don’t think a thing that terrible,
Rachel told herself.

Rachel turned and walked into the kitchen, setting her plate and fork on the oak stacking table before settling herself beside the hoop barrel closest to the back door. She picked up the scrub brush in her right hand and the slab of Octagon soap in the left, dipped her hands in the gray water and scuffed the wood bristles against the tan-colored soap to make her lather. As Rachel took up her first plate to clean, one of the other kitchen workers shouldered open the back door. In her hands was a tin tub filled with breakfast dishes and silverware from the office.

“Mr. Pemberton wants more coffee brought to his office,” the woman said to Beason, the head cook.

Beason looked around the kitchen, his eyes passing over Rachel before settling on Cora Pinson.

“Take a pot of coffee over there,” Beason said to her.

As Cora Pinson went out the back door, Rachel thought of Mrs. Pemberton astride the great horse, erect and square-shouldered, not looking anywhere but straight ahead. Not needing to, because she didn’t have to care if someone stepped in front of her and the horse. She and that gelding would go right over whoever got in their way and not give the least notice they’d trampled someone into the dirt.

Smart of her, Rachel thought, not to allow me near her food.