Serena (6 page)

An air presser and air hammer lay next to the entrance, in the room’s center a work bench, on it mallets and chisels, a compass saw and a slate board chalked with words and numbers. Some of the stones lining the four walls had names and dates. Others were blank but for lambs and crosses and volutes. The air smelled chalky, the room’s earthen floor whitened as if with a fine snow. Surratt sat in a low wooden chair, a stone leaning against the work bench before him. He wore a hat and an apron, and as he worked he leaned close to the marble, the hammer and chisel inches from his face.

Rachel knocked and he turned, his clothes and hands and eyelashes whitened by the marble dust. He laid the hammer and chisel on the bench and without a word went to the back of the shop. He lifted the sixteen-by fourteen-inch marble tablet Rachel had commissioned the week after her father had died. Before she could say anything, he’d set it beside the doorway. Surratt stepped back and stood beside her. They looked at the tablet, the name Abraham Harmon etched in the marble, above it the fylfot Rachel had chosen from the sketch pad.

“I think it come out all right,” the stone mason said. “You satisfied?”

“Yes sir. It looks fine,” Rachel said, then hesitated. “The rest of your money. I thought I’d have it, but I don’t.”

Surratt did not look especially surprised at this news, and Rachel supposed there were others who had come to him with similar stories.

“That saddle,” Rachel said, nodding toward the horse. “You could have it for what I owe.”

“I knew your daddy. Some found him too bristly but I liked him,” Surratt said. “We’ll work something else out. You’ll need that saddle.”

“No sir, I won’t. I sold my horse to Mr. Donaldson. After this weekend I’ll not need it.”

“This weekend?”

“Yes sir,” Rachel said. “That’s when he’s coming to pick up the horse and cow both.”

The stone mason mulled this information over.

“I’ll take the saddle then, and we’ll call it square between us. Have Donaldson bring it back with him,” Surratt said, pausing as another Model T sputtered past. “Who have you hired to haul the stone up there?”

Rachel lifted the burlap cabbage sack from the saddle pack.

“I figured to do it.”

“That stone weighs more than it looks, near fifty pounds,” Surratt said. “It’ll bust right through a sack that thin. Besides, once you get up there you still got to plant it.”

“I got a mattock with me,” Rachel said. “If you help me tie the stone to the saddle horn I can manage.”

Surratt took a red handkerchief from his back pocket, winced and rubbed the cloth across his forehead. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket as his eyes resettled on Rachel.

“How old are you?”

“Almost seventeen.”

“Almost.”

“Yes sir.”

Rachel expected the stone mason to tell her what Widow Jenkins had said, how she was just a girl and knew nothing. He’d be right to tell her so, Rachel supposed. How could she argue otherwise when all morning she’d figured wrong on everything from a baby’s teething time to what things cost.

Surratt leaned over the tombstone and blew a limn of white dust from one of the chiseled letters. He let his hand linger on the stone a moment, as if to verify its solidity a final time. He stood and untied his leather apron.

“I ain’t that busy,” he said. “I’ll put the stone in my truck and take it on up there right now. I’ll plant it for you too.”

“Thank you,” Rachel said. “That’s a considerable kindness.”

She rode back through Waynesville and north on the old toll road, but quickly left it for a different trail than the one she’d come on. The land soon turned steeper, rockier, the mattock’s steel head clanking against the stirrup. The horse breathed harder as the air thinned, its soft nostrils rising with each pull of air. They sloshed through a creek, the water low and clear. Leathery rhododendron leaves rubbed against Rachel’s dress.

She traveled another half hour, moving up the highest ridge. The woods drew back briefly and revealed an abandoned homestead. The front door yawned open, on the porch a spill of pans and plates and moldering quilts that bespoke a hasty exodus. Above the farmhouse’s front door a rusty horseshoe upturned to catch what good luck might fall the occupant’s way. Clearly not enough, Rachel thought, knowing before too long her place might look the same if she didn’t have a good harvest of ginseng.

The mountains and woods quickly reclosed around her. The trees were all hardwoods now. Light seeped through their foliage as through layers of gauze. No birds sang and no deer or rabbit bolted in front of her. The only things growing along the trail were mushrooms and toad-stools, the only sound acorns crackling and popping beneath Dan’s iron hooves. The woods smelled like it had just rained.

The trail rose a last time and ended at the road. On the other side stood a deserted white clapboard church. The wide front door had a padlock on it, and the white paint had grayed and begun peeling. So many people lived in the timber camp now that Reverend Bolick held his services in the camp’s dining hall instead of the church. Mr. Surratt’s truck was not parked by the cemetery gate, but Rachel saw the stone was set in the ground. She tied Dan to the gate and walked inside. She moved through the grave markers, some just creek rocks with no names or dates, others soapstone and granite, a few marble. What names there were were familiar—Jenkins and Candler and McDowell and Pressley, Harmon. She was almost to her father’s grave when she heard howling down the ridge below the cemetery, a lonesome sound like a whippoorwill or a far-off train. A pack of wild dogs made their way across a clearing, the one who’d raised his throat to the sky now running to catch up with the others. Rachel remembered the mattock strapped to the saddle and thought about getting it in case the dogs veered up the ridge, but they soon disappeared into the woods. Then there was only silence.

She stood by the tombstone, dirt the stone mason had displaced darkening the grave. Her father had been a hard man to live with, awkward in his affection, never saying much. His temper like a kitchen match waiting to be struck, especially if he’d been drinking. One of Rachel’s clearest memories of her mother was lying on her parents’ bed on a hot day. She’d told her mother that the blue bedspread felt cool and smooth despite the summer heat, like it’d feel if you could sleep on top of a creek pool.
Because it’s satin
, her mother said, and Rachel had thought even the word was cool and smooth, whispery like the sound of a creek. She remembered the day her father took the bedspread and threw it into the hearth. It was the morning after her mother left, and as her father stuffed the satin bedspread deeper into the flames, he’d told Rachel to never mention her mother again, if Rachel did he’d slap her mouth. Whether he would have or not, she had never risked finding out. Rachel heard an older woman at the funeral claim her father had been a different man
before her mother left, less prone to anger and bitterness. Never bad to drink. Rachel couldn’t remember that man.

Yet he’d raised a child by himself, a girl child, and Rachel figured he’d done it as well as any man could have alone. She’d never gone wanting for food and clothing. There were plenty of things he hadn’t taught her, maybe couldn’t teach her, but she’d learned about crops and plants and animals, how to mend a fence and chink a cabin. He’d had her do these things herself while he watched. Making sure she knew how, Rachel now realized, when he’d not be around to do it for her. What was that, if not a kind of love.

She touched the tombstone and felt its sturdiness and solidity. It made her think of the cradle her father had built two weeks before he died. He’d brought it in and set it by her bed, not speaking a single word acknowledging he’d made it for the child. But she could see the care in the making of it, how he’d built it out of hickory, the hardest and most lasting wood there was. Made not just to last but to look pretty, for he’d sanded the cradle and then varnished it with linseed oil.

Rachel removed her hand from a stone she knew would outlast her lifetime, and that meant it would outlast her grief. I’ve gotten him buried in Godly ground and I’ve burned the clothes he died in, Rachel told herself. I’ve signed the death certificate and now his grave stone’s up. I’ve done all I can do. As she told herself this, Rachel felt the grief inside grow so wide and deep it felt like a dark fathomless pool she’d never emerge from. Because there was nothing left to do now, nothing except endure it.

Think of something happy, she told herself, something he did for you. A small thing. For a few moments nothing came. Then something did, something that had happened about this time of year. After supper her father had gone to the barn while Rachel went to the garden. In the waning light she’d gathered ripe pole beans whose dark pods nestled up to the rows of sweet corn she’d planted as trellis. Her father called from the barn mouth, and she’d set the wash pan between two rows, thinking he needed her to carry the milk pail to the springhouse.

“Pretty, isn’t it,” he’d said as she entered the barn.

Her father pointed to a large silver-green moth. For a few minutes the chores were put off as the two of them just stood there. The barn’s stripes of light grew dimmer, and the moth seemed to brighten, as if the slow open and close of its wings gathered up the evening’s last light. Then the creature rose. As the moth fluttered out into the night, her father had lifted his large strong hand and settled it on Rachel’s shoulder a moment, not turning to her as he did so. A moth at twilight, a touch of a hand on her back. Something, Rachel thought.

As she rode back down the trail, she remembered the days after the funeral, how the house’s silence was a palpable thing and she couldn’t endure a day without visiting Widow Jenkins for something borrowed or returned. Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left—that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.

And now this brown-eyed child. Don’t love it, Rachel told herself. Don’t love anything that can be taken away.

W
HEN THEY’D LAID THE TRAIN TRACK THE PREVIOUS
September, Pemberton worked alongside the three dozen men hired for the job. He was as broad shouldered and thick armed as any of the highlanders, but Pemberton knew his fine clothes and Boston accent counted against him. So he’d taken off his black tweed coat, stripped to his waist and joined them, first working with the lead crews as they used picks and shovels and wheelbarrows to move earth and remove stumps, make the fills and cuts and ditching. Pemberton cut trees for crossties and set them on the proper gradient, unloaded flat cars stacked with rails and angle bars and switch gear, laid down relay rails and hammered spikes and never took a break unless the other men did. They worked eleven hour days, six days a week, moving across the valley floor in a fixed line. What obstacles not dug up or filled in were leveled with dynamite or trestles.
When a new piece of track was set down, the Shay engine lurched forward immediately to cover it, as though the wilderness might seize the rails if they weren’t gripped and held by the iron wheels. From a distance, train and men appeared a single bustling entity, the steel rails left in their passing like a narrow gleaming wake.

He’d enjoyed the challenge of working with the men, the way they’d watched for a first sign of weakness, for Pemberton to linger by the water pail or lean too long on a shovel or sledge hammer. To see how soon he joined Buchanan and Wilkie on the porch of the newly built office. When a month had passed and all but the spur lines were built, Pemberton put his shirt back on and went to the office where he’d spend most of his time from that point on. By then he’d gained more than just the workers’ respect. He’d found among them a capable lieutenant in Campbell, and Pemberton knew first-hand which men to keep and which to let go when Boston Lumber Company hired the actual cutting crews.

Among those Pemberton insisted be retained was an older man named Galloway. Already in his forties, Galloway was at an age when most loggers were too worn down and damaged to do the job, but despite his graying hair, small stature and wiry build, he outworked men half his age. He was also an expert tracker and woodsman who knew the region’s forests and ridges as well as anyone in the county. A man who could track a grasshopper across caprock, workers claimed, as Pemberton himself had learned when he’d used Galloway as a hunting guide. But Galloway had spent five years in prison for killing two men during a card-game dispute. Other workers, many with violent tendencies of their own, gave Galloway a wary respect, as they did his mother, who shared a stringhouse with her son. When Pemberton had suggested they make Galloway a crew boss, Buchanan had been against the idea. He’s a convicted murderer, Buchanan had protested. We shouldn’t even have him in camp, much less leading a crew.

Now, a year later, Pemberton again suggested Galloway be made a foreman, this time as Bilded’s replacement.

“It’s the most undisciplined crew in the camp,” Pemberton said between bites of his steak. “We need someone they’ll be afraid to buck.”

“What if he tries to buck us instead?” Buchanan asked. “Besides being a convicted murderer, he’s surly and disrespectful.”

“A crew won’t be laggards for a foreman they’re afraid of,” Serena said. “I would argue that’s more important than his lack of social graces.”

Buchanan was about to continue the argument when Wilkie raised a hand to silence him.

“Sorry, Buchanan,” Wilkie said, “but I’m siding with the Pembertons this time.”

“It appears Mr. and Mrs. Pemberton rule the day,” Doctor Cheney said, his tone becoming manneredly casual. “Your wife, Buchanan, I assume she plans to summer again in Concord?”

“Yes,” Buchanan said tersely.

“Perhaps you have similar plans to return to Colorado for the summer, Mrs. Pemberton?” Cheney asked. “I’m sure the family manse is much grander than your present abode.”

“No, I don’t,” Serena said. “Once I left Colorado I’ve never returned.”

“But who looks after your parents’ house and estate?” Wilkie asked.

“I had the house burned down before I left.”

“Burned,” Wilkie exclaimed in astonishment.

“Fire is indeed an excellent purifier after contagion,” Doctor Cheney said, “but I suspect burning the bed sheets would have sufficed.”

“What of your family’s timber holdings?” Wilkie asked. “I certainly hope you didn’t burn those as well.”

“I sold them,” Serena said. “It’s money better used here in North Carolina.”

“No doubt in a venture with Mr. Harris,” Doctor Cheney said, setting down his fork. “Despite his bluster he’s a crafty old fox, as I’m sure you ascertained when you met him.”

“I suspect Mrs. Pemberton can hold her own against Harris,” Wilkie said, and nodded at Pemberton. “And Pemberton too. I for one wish them well in any new ventures, whether it’s with Boston Lumber Company or
anyone else. We need people with confidence right now, else we’ll never get out of this depression.”

Wilkie turned his attention back to Serena, and smiled widely, smitten as Harris had been when he’d met her. Unlike the swains in Boston, these older men seemed unintimidated by Serena. Their withered genitals made her charms less daunting, Pemberton suspected, kept at an untouchable distance.

“I’m sure you feel the same, Buchanan,” Doctor Cheney said, “in regard to the Pembertons’ possible partnership with Harris.”

Buchanan nodded, his eyes not on the physician or the Pembertons but the table’s center.

“Yes, as long as our own present partnership is not neglected.”

Except for the clink of silverware, the rest of the main course was eaten in silence. Pemberton did not wait for dessert and coffee but set his napkin on the table and stood up.

“Campbell’s left for the night so I’ll go tell Galloway of his promotion. That way he’ll be ready come morning,” Pemberton said, and turned to Serena. “I’ll meet you back at the house. I won’t be long.”

As he came into the office, Pemberton saw Campbell had left two letters on the desk, a Boston postmark on each.

Pemberton stepped off the porch into the summer evening. Fireflies winked as the sun settled behind Balsam Mountain. In the distance a whippoorwill called. Next to the dining hall a rusty fifty-gallon drum smoldered with supper’s detritus. Pemberton dropped the unopened letters into its fire and walked on. He stepped onto the train rails he’d help lay and followed them toward the last stringhouse where Galloway lived with his mother. She was granted great deference by all in the camp, and Pemberton had assumed it was because Galloway was her son. He’d noted as much to Campbell one afternoon as they watched the old woman, whose eyes were misted by cataracts, being helped up the commissary steps by two large bearded workers.

“It’s more than that,” Campbell said. “She can see things other folks can’t.”

Pemberton had snorted. “That old crone’s so blind she couldn’t even see herself in a mirror.”

For the only time they’d worked together, Campbell had spoken to Pemberton without deference, his reply acerbic and condescending.

“It ain’t that kind of seeing,” Campbell had said, “and it ain’t nothing to be made light of either.”

Galloway met him at the door. The older man wore no shirt, revealing a span of pale skin stretched taut over shoulders and ribs, paired knots of stomach muscle. Veins on his neck and arms rippled blue and varicose, as if Galloway’s flesh could not fully contain the surge of blood within it. A body seemingly incapable of repose.

“I’ve come to tell you I’ve fired Bilded. You’re the new crew foreman.”

“I figured as much,” Galloway replied.

Pemberton wondered if Campbell had come by and mentioned the promotion. He looked past Galloway into a room completely dark except for the glow of a coal-oil lamp on the table. The thick lamp glass made the light appear not just encased but fluid, as though submerged in water. Galloway’s mother sat before the lamp, eyes only inches from the flame. Her white hair was clinched in a tight bun, and she wore a black front-buttoned dress Pemberton suspected had been sewn in the previous century. Galloway’s mother raised her eyes and stared directly at him.
Looking at the direction of my voice
, Pemberton told himself, but it was somehow more than that.

“Anyway,” Pemberton said, taking a step back, “I wanted you to know before morning.”

As Pemberton walked back to the house, he passed a group of kitchen workers gathered on the dining hall steps. Most still wore their aprons. A cook named Beason strummed a battered Gibson guitar, beside him a woman nestling a steel-stringed wooden instrument in her lap. She bent over the instrument, long tangled hair obscuring her face. While her right hand strummed, the middle and index fingers on her left hand made rapid presses around the narrow neck as if probing for some obscure pulse, all the while singing of murder and retribution on the shores
of a Scottish loch. Border ballads were what Buchanan called such songs, and claimed the mountaineers had brought them from Albion.

The Harmon girl had once sat out on these steps after supper as well, but he’d not paid her much attention until the evening Pemberton helped haul a maimed logger off Half Acre Ridge. It was full dark by the time they’d gotten the man to camp, and he’d been so tired and dirty he’d told Campbell to have his meal brought to the house. The Harmon girl had brought the food, and something had caught Pemberton’s attention. Perhaps a glimpse of bosom when she laid the tray on the table, or a shapely ankle exposed as she turned to leave. Something he could no longer remember.

Pemberton walked on, the music fading behind him as he mused on the chain of events that had led to noon trysts, later a gutted man dying on a train depot bench, a child that surely had been born by now. How far back could you trace the links in such a chain, he wondered—past the Harmon girl being chosen that night to bring his food, past the tree shattering a man’s backbone due to a badly notched trunk, past that to an axe unsharpened because a man drank too much the night before, past that to why the man had gotten drunk in the first place? Was it something you never found the end to? Or was there no chain at all, just a moment when you did or didn’t step close to a young woman and let your fingers brush a fall of blonde hair behind her ears, did or didn’t lean to that uncovered ear and tell her that you found her quite fetching.

Pemberton smiled at himself. Dwelling on the past, the very thing Serena had shown him he, and they, had no need of. And yet, the child. As he mounted the porch steps, Pemberton forced his mind to a Baltimore furniture factory’s delinquent account.

T
HE
following afternoon a worker on Noland Mountain was struck on the thigh by a timber rattlesnake. His leg swelled so rapidly that a crew foreman had to first cut free the denim pant with a hawkbill, then slash
an X into each puncture. By the time the crew got the man to camp, his pulse was no more than a felt whisper. The leg below the knee swelled black and big around as a hearth log, and the man’s gums bled profusely. Doctor Cheney didn’t bother to take him into his office. He told the workers to set him in a chair on the commissary porch, where the man soon gave a last violent shudder and died.

“How many men have been bitten since the camp opened?” Serena said that evening as they ate supper.

“Five before today,” Wilkie replied. “Only one of them died, but the other four had to be let go.”

“A timber rattlesnake’s venom destroys blood vessels and tissue,” Doctor Cheney said to Serena. “Even if the victim is fortunate enough to survive the initial bite, lasting damage is incurred.”

“I’m aware of what happens when someone is bitten by a rattlesnake, Doctor,” Serena replied. “Out west we have diamondbacks, which reach six feet in length.”

Cheney gave a brief half bow in Serena’s direction.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I should never have doubted your knowledge of venom.”

“Their coloration varies here,” Buchanan said. “Sometimes they are the yellowish complexion of copperheads, but they can also be much darker. Those called satinbacks are a purplish black, and believed much deadlier. I’ve seen one, a surprisingly graceful creature, in its own way quite beautiful.”

Doctor Cheney smiled. “Another of nature’s paradoxes, the most beautiful creatures are so often the most injurious. The tiger, for instance, or black widow spider.”

“I would argue that’s part of their beauty,” Serena said.

“The rattlesnakes cost us money,” Wilkie complained, “and not just when a crew is halted by a bite. The men get overcautious so progress is slowed.”

“Yes,” Serena agreed. “They should be killed off, especially in the slash.”

Wilkie frowned. “Yet that is the hardest place to see them, Mrs. Pemberton. They blend in so well as to be nearly invisible.”

“Better eyes are needed then,” Serena said.

“Cold weather will be here soon and send them up to the rock cliffs,” Pemberton said. “Galloway says that after the first frost they never venture far from their dens.”

“Until spring,” Wilkie fretted. “Then they’ll be back, every bit as bad as before.”

“Perhaps not,” Serena said.