Serena (8 page)

“If you find that mountain lion and get me one shot at it I’ll give you a twenty-dollar gold piece,” Pemberton said, glaring at Galloway before turning to Vaughn. “Or anyone else who can lead me to it.”

They reloaded the farm wagon and started toward camp. Galloway drove while Vaughn cradled the injured dog in his arms. The rusty springs beneath the buckboard squeaked rhythmically as they rose and fell, and the swaying motion made it appear Vaughn was rocking the hound to sleep. In the wagon bed, the other dogs huddled against the cold. The land slanted upward, and thick trunks of oaks and poplars quickly filled in the white expanse behind them.

Once they got to the ridge crest, Pemberton and Serena let the others ride on ahead. Pemberton’s pulse still beat quick, and he knew Serena’s did as well. The trail soon became only a space between trees in the day’s last light. Cold seeped in through sleeves and collars. They rode close together, and Serena reached out and clasped Pemberton’s hand with hers. He felt the coldness of it.

“You should have worn gloves,” he said.

“I like to feel the cold,” Serena said. “I always have, even as a child. My father used to walk me through the camp on days the loggers claimed it was too cold to work. I shamed them out of their shacks and into the woods.”

“Too bad you didn’t at least save a photograph of that,” Pemberton said, recalling how he’d once asked about family photographs and Serena had answered that they’d burned with the house. “It might stop some of our workers griping about the weather.”

They rode on, not speaking again until they crossed the last rise and descended onto the valley floor. Camp lights blazed in the distance. No tree unsmoothed the landscape, and the snow was tinged blue. Pemberton noted how the faint light gave the illusion they traversed a shallow sea.

“I liked the way we killed the bear together,” Serena said.

“You had more to do with killing it than I did.”

“No, it was gut shot. I merely finished it off.”

A few flurries swirled around them, sifted from a sky the color of indigo. The only sound was the crunch of snow under the horses’ hooves. In the quiet darkening Pemberton and Serena seemed to have entered a depthless space only they inhabited. Not so different from when they cleaved in the night, Pemberton realized.

“Too bad Harris couldn’t come along today,” Serena said.

“He assured me he’ll come next time.”

“Has he said anything about the Glencoe tract?”

“No, all he wants to talk about is this national park boondoggle and how we have to band together to keep it from happening.”

“I assume that
we
also includes our partners.”

“They have as much to lose as you and I do.”

“They’re timid men, especially Buchanan,” Serena said. “Wilkie’s just gotten old, but it’s Buchanan’s nature. The sooner you and I are shed of them the better.”

“We’ll still need partners though.”

“Then men like Harris, and, as soon as we can, partnerships where we have a controlling interest,” Serena said as they moved through the snow-capped stumps. “I’m going to hire a Pinkerton and find out what’s really going on in Tennessee with this park. I’ll have him check out Kephart as well. See if he’s as stellar a citizen as John Muir.”

The woods no longer sheltered them from the wind, and cold air worked its way through jacket tears the bear had made. Pemberton imagined Serena in her father’s timber camp, rousing the workers on days colder than this one.

“What you told Galloway is the truth,” Pemberton said as they entered the camp. “If the bear had attacked you instead of me, I would have done the same for you.”

“I know,” Serena said, clasping Pemberton’s hand tighter. “I’ve known it since the night we met.”

W
HEN
R
ACHEL WENT TO THE BARN TO GET A
cabbage sack for the ginseng, she found, for the third morning in a row, that no eggs warmed under the two bantams or the Rhode Island Red. A fox or weasel or dog would have killed the chickens as well, she knew, so figured it a possum or a raccoon, maybe a black snake come to fatten up for the winter. Rachel found the cabbage sack and left the barn. She thought about going ahead and getting the fishing pole and searching out a guinea egg. The sky was jay-bird blue, the day warmer than any in a week, but the chimney smoke wasn’t rising but blowing down, so a change in the weather was coming, maybe by afternoon. Another snow would make the ginseng hard to find, and she couldn’t risk that, so Rachel fetched the mattock from the shed but left the fishing pole. Something else I’ll have to do when I get back, Rachel thought.

She wrapped Jacob in his bundlings, and they crossed a pasture whose barbed wire now kept nothing in, empty for the first time in her life. Rachel saw the trees they walked toward had all their fall colors now, their canopy bright and various as a button jar. Before long the land slanted up the north face of Colt Ridge. They entered a stand of silver birch and hemlock, which Rachel passed through without slowing down. Far off toward Waynesville, she heard a whistle and wondered if it was the lumber company train. She thought about Bonny and Rebecca, the two girls she’d worked with in the kitchen, and how much she missed being around them. And how she missed Joel Vaughn too, who could be a smart aleck, but had always been nice to her, not just in the camp but as kids on Colt Ridge when they’d been in elementary school together. He’d even given her a valentine in the sixth grade. She remembered how, after her belly showed and other folks in the camp shunned her, Joel hadn’t.

The land’s angle became more severe, the light waning, streaked as if cut with scissors and braided to the ridge piece by piece. Soon poplars and hickories replaced the softwoods. Rachel saw a witch hazel shrub and paused to pull off some leaves, their pungent smell evoking memories of chest salves and days sick in bed. Moss furred the granite outcrops a dark plush green. She walked slowly, looking not just for the four-pronged yellow leaves but bloodroot and cinnamon ferns and other plants her father had taught her signaled places where ginseng grew.

Rachel found the bloodroot first, under a shaded outcrop where a spring head seeped. She tugged the plants carefully from the ground and placed them in her sack. When she accidentally broke a stem, the red juice used for a tonic stained her fingers. A squirrel began chattering in a tree farther up the ridge and was soon answered.

Rachel stepped carefully across the boggy ground. An orange salamander scuttled out from beneath a matting of soggy oak leaves. She remembered how her father once told her never to bother salamanders in a spring because they kept the water pure. On the other side of the outcrop, she found more bloodroot and a thick growth of cinnamon
ferns. The ferns felt like peacock feathers as she moved through them. They made a whispery sound against her dress, and the sound seemed to soothe Jacob because his eyes closed.

She entered another stand of hardwoods and there it was, the yellow leaves shimmering against the gloamy woods. Jacob was now asleep so she laid him down, loosening the bundling so she could fold some of the cloth back to cradle his head. Rachel dug a good six inches around the ginseng plant to insure she didn’t cut the root. Then she pulled her dress up above her knees and kneeled in front of the plant, held the mattock’s handle inches from the blade as she raked dirt from around the stem and tugged free a pale root shaped like a veiny carrot. She separated the berries from the ginseng plants and placed them in the broken soil, covered them up and moved on to the next plant.

They stayed in the woods until dark clouds began forming above the ridge crest. By then she’d searched out all the ginseng that could be found and gathered what other plants she’d wanted as well. As she and Jacob made their way out of the woods, Rachel’s back already ached, and she knew it’d be sorer come morning. But the cabbage sack was a quarter filled, at least two pounds worth of roots she’d sell to Mr. Scott after they’d dried a month in the barn. Jacob was wide awake now, worming inside of the bundling, making it harder to hold the sack and mattock with her left hand.

“It ain’t far now,” she said, as much to herself as the child. “We’ll put the mattock in the shed and take the Widow this bloodroot.”

As they entered the pasture, Rachel heard dogs barking somewhere in the far woods and wondered if they were the same ones she’d seen at the cemetery. She walked faster, remembering a story she’d heard about wild dogs carrying off a child set down at a field edge. The child had never been found, only the bloody tatters of its blanket. Rachel watched the tree line until they were out of the pasture. She leaned the mattock against the shed, and they walked on to the Widow’s cabin.

“I brought you some bloodroot,” Rachel said, “for keeping Jacob the other day.”

“That’s sweet of you,” Widow Jenkins said, accepting the handful of plants and placing them in the sink.

“I’ve got witch hazel too if you’ve got need of it.”

“No, I’ve got a gracious plenty of witch hazel,” the older woman said. “Did you dig up much sang?”

Rachel opened the sack and showed her the roots.

“How much you figure it worth when it dries?”

“I’d reckon Scott to give you ten dollars,” Widow Jenkins said. “Maybe twelve if his lumbago ain’t acting up.”

“I was thinking it would be more than that,” Rachel said.

“Before that stock market busted up north it might have been, but cash money’s rare these days as sang.”

Rachel stared at the hearth a few moments. The Widow always put some apple wood on the fire, not because it burned good but for the rosy color it gave off. A fire with apple wood in it is pretty to look at as any painting, the Widow claimed. Rachel felt the weight of Jacob in her arms and compared it to the cabbage sack’s lightness. The weariness of carrying the child across the pasture and ridge, hardly noticed before, overwhelmed her. She set Jacob on the floor.

“That’ll barely get us to spring,” Rachel said. “As soon as I wean Jacob, I’ll have to go back to work at the camp.”

“I don’t think you ought to do that,” Widow Jenkins said. “I don’t even like it that you go down there for Sunday church.”

“I’ve sold the cow and horse and the saddle,” Rachel said, “and now some varmint’s stealing my eggs. There’s nothing else I can do.”

“What makes you think you can get your job back when there’s folks lined up for every job in that camp.”

“I done good work when I was there,” Rachel replied. “They’ll remember that.”

Widow Jenkins leaned over, grunted softly as she lifted Jacob from the floor. She sat down in the cane back chair she kept by the hearth and settled the child in her lap. The fire’s hue reflected in the old woman’s spectacles, wavering in the glass like rose petals.

“You think that man is going to help you and this young one out,” Widow Jenkins said, speaking in a soft flat way so it wasn’t like a question or opinion but something that was simply the truth.

“Even if I was to think that, it don’t matter as far as me going back,” Rachel said. “I got to have some money to live on. That camp’s the only place I know where there might be a job.”

Widow Jenkins sighed and shifted Jacob deeper into her lap. She stared at the fire, her chapped lips pressed tight as she gave the slightest nod.

“So you’ll keep Jacob if they’ll hire me?” Rachel said, then paused. “If you don’t, I’ll find someone else to.”

“I helped raise you so I can help with this one too,” Widow Jenkins said, “but only if you wait till this boy’s a year old. That way he’ll be proper weaned. I won’t take no pay for keeping him either.”

“I wouldn’t feel right if you didn’t take some pay,” Rachel said.

“Well, we’ll worry about that when the time comes, if it comes. Maybe things will get better before then.”

Widow Jenkins jostled Jacob with her knees. The child giggled, raised his arms outward as if balancing himself.

“But if it comes to that, this chap won’t be no bother,” Widow Jenkins said. “Me and him will get along fine.”

When Rachel got back to the cabin, she spread the ginseng out on the cabbage sack so it could dry. The crows had settled into the trees and the squirrels tucked deep in their nests. The woods were hushed and attentive, the trees seeming to huddle themselves closer together, as if awaiting not just the rain but some story about to be told.

“We best find that guinea egg before the rain comes,” she told Jacob. “We can check on the bees too.”

They went into the woods behind the house, pausing first at the white bee box set at the wood’s edge. Unlike during warm weather, Rachel had to lean close to hear them, their shifting huddle soft as a drowsy wind. The bee box’s paint was chipped and fading, and she’d have to fix that by spring because white soothed the bees almost as much as smoke.

You have to tell the bees he died. They’ll leave if you don’t,
Widow Jenkins had told Rachel the day of her father’s funeral. It was something the old folks believed, and though Rachel wasn’t sure if it was true or not she’d done it. She’d taken off her dark mourning clothes and put on a worn linen dress, then walked out to the shed to find the cheesecloth veil. It was white as well, made of muslin. By then almost all of the bees had returned for the night, only a few coming and going as she’d approached the box. Rachel remembered how she’d slowly opened the super, especially how clear and clean the smell had been, like moss on a creek bank. She’d spoken to the bees calmly, her voice merging with their own slurry voices. Afterward, as she’d walked back to the house in that late-June twilight, it had struck Rachel that someone at a distance might see her and easily mistake her for a bride. She’d also thought how, if that distance had been one of months instead of furlongs, taking her back to those winter middays she’d spent in Pemberton’s bed, she could have imagined the same herself.

Jacob whined and Rachel felt the first drops of a cold drizzle.

“We better get that egg,” she told the child.

It took a few minutes, because the guinea was good at hiding them, but Rachel finally found an egg in a wither of honeysuckle vines. Rachel pulled the bundling over Jacob’s head, because the drizzle had quickened, tinged with ice that stung her face. She walked into the barn and set Jacob on a bed of gathered straw. The whispery sound of the drizzle hitting the tin roof made the barn feel snug, as if its broad-beamed shoulders had shrugged closer together.

Rachel went to the shed and unwound the hook and line from the fishing pole and returned to the barn. With the fish hook’s barb, she chipped a small hole in the egg, then guided the hook’s barb and shank into the yolk until no metal showed. Rachel delicately placed the egg back on the straw and tied the six feet of fishing line to a nail head. All this trouble because she was living so close to the bone a few pennies mattered, Rachel told herself bitterly. She and her father had had hard times before. When Rachel was seven they’d lost a milk cow that had
eaten cherry leaves, and when she was twelve a hail storm had destroyed the corn crop. But even in the leanest times there’d always been a few dollars left in the coffee can stowed on the pantry’s top shelf, a cow or horse in the pasture yet to be sold.

Sell it, it’ll fetch a good price, Mrs. Pemberton had said when she’d handed Rachel the bowie knife. And it probably would, perhaps even as much as the ginseng, but Rachel couldn’t abide doing what Mrs. Pemberton had commanded her to do. She’d sell the shoes off her feet before taking the knife out of the box trunk and selling it. Widow Jenkins would say Rachel was just being prideful, and maybe Preacher Bolick would agree, but she’d had enough proud shucked off her the last few months to believe God wouldn’t begrudge her keeping just a little.

T
HE
next morning Rachel found a raccoon crouched in the stall’s corner, the fishing line tugging one side of the creature’s mouth. Its pink tongue was panting. The raccoon’s head did not turn when she opened the stall door. Only the black-masked eyes shifted. It wasn’t the eyes but the front paws that made her hesitate. They looked like hands shriveled and blackened by fire, but human hands nevertheless. A year ago her father would have done this, done what he’d done when a big cur had come into the yard and killed a rooster, done what he did when a colt was born lame. What you had to do on a farm.

Let him go and he’ll be back, Rachel told herself, and you won’t catch him again because a coon’s too smart to be fooled twice. It’ll look for the line and hook and stay clear of that one while it takes every other egg in the barn. I don’t even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn’t choose right, and she hadn’t, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you’re swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive.

It ought not be like that, Rachel told herself, and she knew that for a
few folks it wasn’t. They could make a wrong choice and be on their way with no more bother than a cow swishing a fly with its tail. That wasn’t right either. Her anger made it easier to go to the shed and get the axe.

When Rachel stepped into the stall, the raccoon didn’t move. She remembered her father saying a bobcat’s skull was so thin you could crush it with your hands. She wondered if a raccoon’s skull was the same. She tried to decide if it was best done with the axe head or the blade. Rachel lifted the axe a few inches off the ground, thinking how if she didn’t swing true with the sharp end she could slice the line.

She turned the handle so that the blunt end was what she’d strike with. She aimed and swung and heard a crack. The raccoon quivered a moment and grew still. Rachel kneeled and worried the fish hook free from the raccoon’s mouth. She looked at the fur, knowing if the raccoon had come a few months later cold weather would have thickened the pelt enough to sell to Mr. Scott. She picked the raccoon up by the tail and took it out behind the cabin and flung it into the woods.