by Ron Rash
Jubal realized he had not eaten, so went to the larder and got the cornbread. To crumble it into a glass of buttermilk would be all the better, but the hat and coat he’d set by the hearth weren’t ready for another trip to the springhouse. He slathered the bread with blackberry jam and ate it before swallowing the last of the coffee. Jubal checked on the child and went back onto the porch. The boulder was gone. Where it had been, the water appeared smooth, almost calm, that illusion holding until driftwood and trees swept past, then a chicken coop and a flatboat that slowly twirled as if searching for the river it had once known.
The fence was gone now and so was most of the pasture. The cow and its calf huddled in the upper corner. More things once alive sped by—chickens and dogs, livestock, then a body. It swept past so quickly Jubal could do nothing but stare. Holding an old field jacket over his head, he crossed the soaked ground. He opened the latch-gate and herded the cow and calf out. Back on the porch, Jubal saw what was more a portent than the one body. A barn lay on its side, drifting down the valley like an overturned ark.
He had built this house himself. Jubal knew it was solid, but what held it to the earth were flat creek rocks and four locust beams. No one lived close by except Rob and Lizzie, and their house was closer to the river than this one, so the only shelter was here. He went to the back room and sat beside the child. “You been lucky once,” Jubal told the boy softly. As if evoking a talisman for the both of them, Jubal thought again of Chickamauga, that moment in the cavalry skirmish when his horse buckled and hurled him to the ground. He had rolled onto his back just as the enemy cavalryman slowed his mount and leaned toward Jubal, the pistol’s muzzle only feet away. Jubal did not hear the shot but saw the flash and then smoke from the charge. The man rode on as Jubal waited for the pain, and what would surely relieve it. He’d placed an open palm beneath his shirt and slid it slowly down his stomach, then under the belt and trousers. No blood or torn flesh. Some sort of misfire, he’d concluded, rising to his feet. The battle had moved on, leaving dead men and horses scattered around him. Only then had Jubal looked for a tear in his jacket, saw instead the indention where the minié ball had struck the brass buckle.
Jubal listened for a few moments and noticed a change in the rain’s cadence. He placed a hand on the boy’s hair and stroked it. The child shifted a bit, but his eyes did not open. Jubal stepped out on the porch and found the rain was indeed slackening. To the east, the sky had begun paling. But too late. The pasture was under the river now. Jubal watched a rattlesnake attempt to swim across the current, fail to make the porch steps only yards away. A hog pen swept by, the hog itself roiling behind it. It’s got to crest soon, he told himself, but the water had reached the first step and begun seeping under the house. Crying came from the back room, so Jubal went inside and lifted the child into his arms, felt the hippin.
“Best keep it that way, boy,” Jubal told the child. “It might be the onliest thing dry on you soon.”
They went to the front porch. The rain had almost stopped but water continued thickening around the steps. Soon it would be all the way under the house. Jubal went back inside and changed his shoes for boots. He got the child out of his gown and into his rompers, wrapped him in the blanket, and went to the back porch. There was nowhere to go except up the ridge, but after he’d gained a few yards of ground Jubal slipped, turning onto his side to protect the child. He slid almost to the back steps before stopping. For a moment he lay there, breathing hard as the child squalled in his arms. Something had twisted or torn in his knee, so first he kneeled, then slowly got to his feet. The brown floodwater reached all the way to the ridge now, and Jubal knew they wouldn’t survive another slide, so he sloshed through the water to where mountain laurel grew. He did not try to stand but got on his knees, holding the child in one arm as he worked his way upward. One plant pulled free of the earth, but he caught hold of another before they started to slide.
When there was no more laurel, he stopped. Jubal’s heart banged so hard against his chest the ribs felt like a rickety fence about to shatter. If it’s lasted eighty-one years it can last a few more minutes, he told himself, and tried to figure out what to do next. He patted the child through the blanket. A few yards above them was a stand of tulip poplars. Though their branches were too high to grasp, a trunk to grab hold of might be enough to keep them alive.
Jubal did not look back because he did not need to. He could hear the water rising behind them. The child was silent now, as if he too listened. Then came a loud rending as the house pulled free of its moorings. Jubal’s heart continued to hammer and his knee burned. Between the poplars and the laurel was a scrub oak. He stabbed his free hand deep into the soggy ground and pulled closer. Only then did he see what coiled around it. This snake wasn’t as large as the one he’d watched earlier from the front porch, but it had the same triangular head and blunt tail.
“I just want to share it with you a minute,” Jubal said softly. “Then me and this chap will be on our way.”
Jubal slowly grasped the sapling inches above the snake, but as he pulled himself closer his hand slipped downward, pressed the snake’s cold scales. Its muscles tensed and then contracted tighter around the trunk. The rattle buzzed twice, ceased. Neither of them moved until Jubal felt the water rising onto his boots. “Git on, now,” he told the snake, and pressed his hand slowly but firmly on its body. The snake gave a brief rattle, then unspooled and slithered past them into the water. Jubal pulled himself even with the scrub oak. He was so tired, so old. The river whispered for him to surrender. Everything else has, the water said. Jubal pushed ahead and reached his free arm around the closest poplar. He looked up at the branches, the nearest thirty feet above him. Even if he could have gone on, there was nothing farther up the ridge to hold on to. Beyond the branches was only a too-late clearing sky. He looked back. All he could see was water.
Jubal touched the buckle.
“Be lucky one more time,” he told it.
* * *
—
They found him late the next morning. The sun was out and something flashed from within a stand of poplars. Some kind of signal, the two men in the flatboat thought, and lifted their oars and made their way across the drowned farm. At first they thought it an apparition caused by fatigue, because the child seemed to be hovering above the water. Then they saw the belt around the tree trunk, heard a soft whimpering, and they marveled at a child held aloft and alive in the grasp of an eagle.
In the Valley
When Serena Pemberton stepped out of the Commodore seaplane in July of 1931, a small but fervent contingent of reporters and photographers awaited her. Except for the pilot, she was alone. Those who would accompany her to the logging camp, both beast and human, had arrived by ship the night before. They were already on the train that would take them from Miami to North Carolina. All except for her minion Galloway, who’d procured an automobile to drive Serena to the station. As the metal ramp was readied, Galloway positioned himself beside the bottom step. He was short and wiry, shabbily dressed, a purple stump protruding from one sleeve. As cameras flashed mere inches from his face, he did not blink.
As Serena descended, the first question shouted at her addressed the rumors surrounding her husband’s death. For a moment, it didn’t appear she would answer, but when her booted feet settled securely on the ground, the question was asked again, but with a caveat, had she loved her husband?
“I loved my husband, but one always learns from disappointments.”
“But what of his death, Mrs. Pemberton, and what of so many others of your acquaintance?” the reporter asked.
“Logging is a dangerous business,” she answered.
Galloway was in front of her now, but Serena, almost a head taller, was clearly visible. He cleared a path as more questions came:
Would she continue to fight against the national park, and would she address the rumo
r that she was connected to the recent demise of Horace Kephart, the park’s chief advocate?
Did she oppose the Davis-Bacon Act?
Why risk a trans-Atlantic enterprise when she and her late husband had achieved so much in the States?
Galloway opened the DeSoto’s passenger door. Serena was about to get in when the sole woman in the group, a reporter for The New Republic, stepped close. She was very young but, like Serena, tall and blond.
“When will you have achieved all your ambitions, Mrs. Pemberton?” she asked, as others jostled around them.
“When the world and my will are one,” Serena answered.
1
Ross saw the eagle first. He was about to resume work but instead leaned his ax handle against a tulip poplar, tucked his hands in the back pockets of his overalls, and watched the bird glide above the valley floor. The rest of the crew soon saw the eagle too. Henryson stopped rolling his midmorning cigarette. Snipes lowered his newspaper and set down a last bite of biscuit. Having noticed the silence of his fellows, Quince opened his eyes and gazed drowsily upward. The eagle came toward the lower ridge, its shadow rippling over the slash and stumps the crew had left the previous day. Then the shadow paused. The eagle tucked its wings and javelined earthward. At the last moment, the wings fanned, talons stretching to seize and crush a rattlesnake’s head. The men watched as the snake’s body flogged the ground, its rattle winding down to a last feeble twitch. At the sound of a metal whistle, raptor and serpent rose as one, as though the reptile’s body were revived and sudden-winged, evoking the fire-drakes of Albion.
“She’s back,” Snipes said, as the men followed the bird’s flight toward the head of the valley. There they saw their employer of three years, a woman who at first had done things no woman they’d ever known would have dared, then later no man. As on that first morning when her now-deceased husband introduced her at the Cataloochee camp, Serena Pemberton was astride the white Arabian, rare and imperious as its owner. Those 34,000 acres having been logged, the operation had moved to this 7,000-acre tract, the last of her North American holdings. In November, shortly after her husband’s death, she’d left for Brazil, leaving the bookkeeper Meeks with instructions that the job be finished by midnight on the last day in July. Now it was July 28 and she had returned.
The crew watched as Serena swung the lure like a lariat. The eagle descended and landed beside the horse. It released the rattlesnake and took the offered hank of meat. Galloway, dagger in hand, knelt beside the reptile. He made a single swipe, then pocketed the rattle. The eagle lifted again and settled on Serena’s leather gauntlet. Horse, eagle, and rider disappeared into an outbuilding that had previously served as a garage for Meeks’s Pierce-Arrow. Galloway followed. The valley’s ridges, which for an hour had been a cacophony of axes, saws, and falling trees, were silent as the other crews also watched. When Serena and Galloway came out of the stable, two burly newcomers in dark suits lifted a steamer trunk from a boxcar, then hauled it to the two-bedroom A-frame that had served as Meeks’s living quarters. As the men took the trunk inside, Serena and Galloway went and stood on the business office’s porch.
Quince, the fourth member of Snipe’s crew, was a recent hire. He had logged twelve years in the swampy lowlands of Georgia, working among men he’d believed world-class liars with their tales of cottonmouth moccasins thick enough to clog stovepipes, alligators long as cabooses, all manner of haints and spectrals and catawampuses. But he’d found these highlanders outlied all comers. For a month he’d been told about Serena Pemberton: how she rode a horse and swung an ax like a man and how anyone who crossed her—partner, competitor, lawman, worker, husband—was good as dead. Quince had heard about Galloway also, the one-handed man who shadowed the woman and did much of the killing. The henchman had even tried to murder George Pemberton’s bastard child and the mountain girl who’d birthed it, aided by his mother, who, despite being blind and almost motionless, guided Galloway to his fleeing victims. The old crone could see into the future, Snipes’s crew had said, even prophesying that her son and Mrs. Pemberton could not die separately. Like it wouldn’t be hard enough just to kill one of them, Henryson had said.
Quince had listened indulgently to these and other wild tales and superstitions, most of which came from the crew foreman Snipes, whose bell-dangling haberdashery, like his clothing’s varied-hued patches, Quince had seen before only on playing cards. The other crew members had, albeit to a lesser degree, adopted their foreman’s belief that bright colors warded off a host of dangers, even lightning strikes. Quince had disputed nothing until Snipes made the most outrageous claim of all, that Mrs. Pemberton had trained an eagle to kill rattlesnakes and bring them back to her like a setter retrieving quail. Then Quince had heard enough. He told Snipes that he’d listened to some haystack-high bullshit in his life but none taller than this eagle yarn. When the other crew members attested it was true, Quince had laughed at the lot of them and said they’d better find some other new hire for their tomfoolery.
But now as he stared at the office porch, Quince had the uneasy feeling that he had come to a place where all manner of strange occurrences were possible, and none of them good.
Henryson turned to Snipes.
“That deadline’s Friday, ain’t it?”
“Supposed to be.”
With the last of the west ridge almost cut, Henryson looked across the valley floor, where four hundred acres of timber remained. At the lowest elevation a few sycamore and sweetgum before they ceded to tulip poplar and hickory, white ash and maple, red oak and beech, one blighted chestnut yet standing. Nearer the crest, green-needled firs and spruce steepled skyward. The steel cables that would carry logs across the valley floor had been braced, but the skidder and McGiffert loader were still dormant, the flatcars empty. The loggers already there could hardly be seen, but their axes caught the morning sun, sent out silver sparks.
“Look at that ridge,” Henryson said. “It’s slantways as a church roof.”
“Meeks said it’s best to save the worst for last,” Quince opined.
“He’s wrong,” Henryson said. “You think the snakes is plaguesome now, just wait. They always favor a ridge facing east.”
“And we’ve been herding them that way nine months,” Snipes said. “You’d need a flock of eagles to thin them out.”
“Ain’t no way in hell we’ll make that deadline,” Henryson said.
The crew studied the uncut acreage.
“They might try to speed us up like in the cotton mill,” Quince said. “My uncle Nebuchadnezzar worked in one and this ‘efficiency expert’ come in with a watch and timed Uncle Neb changing them bobbins, like it was a race or something, then said Uncle Neb had to do it that speed all day. Uncle Neb asked that fellow if he seen a power cord coming out of his ass. The fellow said no and Uncle Neb said that’s right and he quit right then and there.”
“They’d slow down time itself give half a chance,” Henryson said.
“Who says that ain’t soon coming down the pike?” Snipes said.
Meeks walked out of the mess hall. He was nattily dressed in a white linen suit with matching white wingtips, the pants secured by purple suspenders Snipes greatly admired. When Meeks saw Serena on the office porch, his leisurely pace quickened to a trot.
“There’s a fellow you’d not want to be,” Snipes said.
“Meeks can’t help it come bad weather,” Quince said.
“That won’t matter to Mrs. Pemberton,” Snipes said.
Quince stepped away from the others and unbuttoned his trousers. As he pissed he stared at the west ridge. In a swamp you could cut down trees and know there were still fish swimming around where the trees had been, and on their stumps you’d see frogs and cooters and birds. But here the pale stumps made the land look poxed, as if infected by some dread disease. One that had killed off all the critters too, because Quince
hadn’t seen a single rabbit, deer, or bird on the land they’d cut. He thought longingly of his Georgia farm, now beneath the surface of a lake. He buttoned up his trousers and rejoined the others.
“We’re going to need all the brightness we can find,” Snipes said, turning to Quince. “That goes for you especially.”
“That trick the eagle done don’t mean all of what you’ve made a claiming for is true,” Quince said with forced bravado. “Twenty years I’ve logged and nary once heard wearing gaudy colors protects a man.”
“Cutting timber ain’t the same up here,” Snipes said. “A swamp’s so gloamy colors don’t show out.”
“That lake has made it even gloamier,” Quince said resignedly. “It weren’t enough to run us live folks off. Wouldn’t even leave our dead folks be. Dug them up like turnips and hauled them off.”
“Our folks got run out for that park,” Henryson said, turning to meet his cousin’s eyes, “but at least they’ve let our loved ones rest in peace.”
“How can we know they truly rest in peace?” Ross replied tersely, then retrieved his ax. He walked uphill to the beech tree he was notching.
“He’s got more moody in him than a mule,” Quince said softly.
“You lose a wife and children you’d be too,” Henryson said quietly, “especially if you think you could have saved them.”
“I didn’t know that last part,” Quince said.