In the Valley

by Ron Rash

  Ducked them both, he told himself, then figured the woman ducked even lower when the mustached man sent swords through the middle. But with the four sword tips poking through the box, he knew she was cornered good. The man went back to the door and slid the fifth sword into the lowest slit. The blade stopped halfway. The tent was silent as the man put both hands on the handle and shoved it on through, then had to push even harder before the sixth sword’s tip poked out. He done went and murdered her dead, a man on the front row shouted and ran out of the tent. The mustached man slowly withdrew each sword, then stood a few moments in front of the big box looking real sad. He ain’t gonna let us see her, he thought, and that ain’t a bit fair. But the man turned and slowly unbolted the door. Galloway moved closer, hands gripping the stage as he stood on his tiptoes. The door swung open and the woman came out and raised her arms with not a drop of blood on her.

  He ran outside and yanked at the man’s coat until the man whirled around.

  She didn’t get kilt. I want my nickel back.

  He didn’t leave until the man raised his cane and swatted him. As he re-crossed the railroad tracks, he saw a penny placed on a rail. It made the penny lucky to get squashed by a train. He looked around, saw no one, and figured the penny would bring more luck for him if it wasn’t squashed. He went to Darby’s Store, bought a single licorice whip and went home, chomping it to get his teeth black and sticky, still chewing when he entered the room where his mother sat facing the fireplace just as he’d left her. She stopped rocking just long enough to tell him something he could not fully understand then: It won’t be the last time you get disappointed like that.

  And it wasn’t. Because last October, three decades after entering the fairground tent, the adult Galloway saw another woman trapped inside a metal box, though this metal box was rolling on wheels and Rachel Harmon wasn’t even a full-grown woman, just a girl and her bastard child. That time, though, Galloway was the one who’d held the blade and barred the way out. Had her and her brat dead to rights, but the bitch had clubbed him with something. Then he was lying beside the tracks, watching the train’s red caboose fade into the night, carrying Rachel Harmon and the child away.

  Galloway shifted to face his sleeping mother, or he guessed she slept. He couldn’t even know if she was in the here and now. For her, time was a road traveled in both directions. Over the years she’d told him many things that would happen, including how a woman would save his life and he’d be bound to that woman ever after because the two of them could never die unless they died together. He’d asked when that would be, and his mother answered she’d never wanted to know that any more than when she herself would die. But she had warned him and Serena Pemberton, the woman he was bound to, that the Harmon girl and her child could pose a danger if allowed to live.

  For nine months he’d been patient. Though she’d tried, in Brazil his mother couldn’t conjure where the girl was. Not being on the same continent, the sea—something had interfered. Galloway had worried she might have lost sight of the girl and child forever. But once they’d arrived in Florida, his mother had felt a faint awareness.

  Galloway touched the lanyard, then the dagger itself, and closed his eyes. As it did most nights, the ache began. He rubbed the stumped forearm, though where the hand itself had been was the ache’s source. Last summer when the ax severed the hand, his mother had him bury it with the palm facing up. That way it’ll know which way to dig, she’d told him. He did so, burying the hand on a sandy creek bank. When the aching began, Galloway sensed that the hand had begun to stir.

  Rubbing the stump didn’t ease the ache, so Galloway did what he always did to ease himself asleep. He thought about the hand digging out of the sand, watched it in his mind like it was a picture show. First a couple of black fingernails, then the fingers, and last the full hand. As he grew drowsy, Galloway watched the hand flip over and crawl up the bank, head over the mountains into Tennessee to pick up the trail. When it got to a creek or river, the fingertips touched the surface and crossed over like a water strider. There’d be hungry foxes and raccoons and maybe even a panther, but the index and middle fingers would rear up like fangs and the animals would back off same as they would a tarantula. Maybe the land would level out or maybe it wouldn’t, but the hand would know exactly where to go. It’d trail the girl and her bastard down railroad tracks and city streets and dirt roads and never lose the scent.

  Galloway was dreaming now as the hand finally found its prey, not inside a metal box but in a dark room. The Harmon girl was asleep, the child beside her. The hand crawled through an open window and then over the floor and up a bedpost. It killed the girl first. Then scuttled across the covers and latched on to the child’s throat, and in that instant hand and wrist were one flesh and he was whole again.

  The throbbing woke Galloway and he rubbed the wrist. Soon, he assured himself. Soon.

  6

  When Rachel first arrived in Seattle, she had gazed out of a bus window at the ocean. It had frightened her to find nothing but emptiness as far as she could see. Even the sky had the sun and clouds, at night the moon and stars. She had walked around Seattle for months but avoided streets with an ocean view. To never see the end of something. That was what Rachel had feared since barely escaping Galloway’s knife. Knoxville to Omaha, Denver to San Francisco, Portland to Seattle, on that trip across the country she was always looking behind her, at each station checking the platform before coming or going, searching shadows for a cigarette’s glow. During those first days in Seattle, it had been worse. Each time she’d turned a street corner or opened a door, Rachel knew Galloway could be waiting, knife in hand. She rented an upstairs room at Miss Hill’s boardinghouse, hoping with other people around she’d feel safer, but each night she slept with the bowie knife under her pillow.

  At first, Seattle had overwhelmed her. Trolleys and automobiles came from all directions and the buildings all crowded together, street after street. Rachel thought she could never get used to being around so many people, the constant bells and whistles and sirens, the smells that burned your nose or made your stomach queasy. Even in the room she rented at Miss Hill’s boardinghouse, she heard the traffic on the street, people talking on the sidewalk, other boarders moving about in the hallways. But things gradually got better. She found Frink Park, where there were trees and grass and even a creek she and Jacob could sit beside and listen to. She got work at Mr. and Mrs. Bjorkland’s café. They were kind to her, even brought a crib up from their basement so Jacob could stay in the café’s kitchen while Rachel worked. We can make a life here, she’d whispered to Jacob one night, and it’ll be a good life.

  But even in the midst of this new life, lessons learned in her old one remained, most of all that the world contained more knowledge than might be seen in the light of day. The call of an owl three nights in a row, a bone-pale moon or a falling star, all were portents. Dreams were the same, inklings of not-yet-seen realities or, if heeded, realities possibly avoided. On the night before her father had died, Rachel had dreamed of a woman, her face hidden beneath a black veil, a bloody knife in her hand. Rachel had told her father about the dream the next morning, but it had gone unheeded. Later that same morning, Serena Pemberton would hand Rachel the bloody knife that had killed her father.

  Last night she’d dreamed that her and Jacob were looking at the ocean when a wooden ship appeared, far out but coming toward shore. It had only a single sail and that sail was black. A man stood on the wooden bow, a silver cross dangling from the necklace he wore. But as the ship came closer, Rachel saw it was not a cross. Grinning, the man raised his stumped forearm and waved. As the ship entered the harbor, Rachel looked up and down the shore and saw that she and Jacob were alone.

  7

  The next morning the bell awakened them from their dreams. The men dressed quickly and left the bunkhouse, some rubbing their eyes as they moved through the dark toward the
mess hall’s lights. The shay engine was already parked uptrack of the skidder, so Snipes retrieved his newspaper from Noah Holt before joining his crew. As he entered the mess hall, Snipes saw the wall clock above the kitchen was gone. Servers bustled around the wooden tables and benches with a seldom-seen haste. Coffee mugs were refilled before raised overhead, extra creamers and sugar bowls brought. As quickly as one huge yellowware bowl emptied, another brimming with grits or eggs or sawmill gravy replaced it. Bread baskets and meat platters were whisked away and returned, the biscuits so hot men burned their fingers.

  “She’s got them stepping lively, that’s for sure,” Snipes said as a server exchanged another bowl.

  Quince yawned.

  “It seems a might bit early to be up.”

  “It is,” Henryson said. “If that bell clanged at half past five, we’d have seen at least a smudge of dawn. But there’s no watch or clock to argue it.”

  “I wonder where Mr. Meeks is at?” Quince asked.

  “I’d narrow it to heaven or to hell,” Snipes said.

  “Dead, you figure,” Ross said grimly.

  “Look at Galloway and argue not,” Snipes said.

  At the back table Galloway sat between his mother and Serena. He wore his usual chambray shirt and denim pants, but purple suspenders had replaced his belt.

  “Galloway used to give them a good day’s start,” Henryson said.

  “He’s making up for lost time, same as us,” Snipes said.

  “Lord God,” Quince said. “What sort of hell pit am I in?”

  “Now Galloway’s got some bright protecting too,” Henryson told Snipes.

  “What’s looking after him ain’t got no brightness,” Ross answered, shifting his gaze to Galloway’s mother.

  Quince also stared at the old woman. The table’s bench was bolted to the planked wall, and the tiny woman appeared not so much seated as propped like a doll on a store shelf. Above the thin stalk of neck, inside the black bonnet, receded a face as wrinkled as a walnut. In her mouth no teeth, only deeper darkness. But it was the eyes that Quince was most attentive to. They were cauled with cataracts but he knew those eyes saw plenty. Quince watched longer and realized that what he’d assumed one more tall tale was true. The woman never appeared to blink.

  “You best not gander at her very long,” Henryson warned Quince.

  Quince looked down at his plate.

  “Please God, tell me I got the malaria and fever’s making all of this seem real,” he muttered. “Tell me I ain’t here but home in Georgia.”

  The Pinkertons came through the door and made their way to the back table. They spoke briefly to Serena and Galloway, then went outside.

  “Holt talked to them two fellows yesterday,” Snipes said. “They was down there in Brazil awhile. Said that jungle’s full of awful critters. If it swims or flies or crawls it’s out to kill you.”

  “Sounds like all they’d lacked was a Galloway,” Henryson said.

  “They got one now,” Snipes said, “and I wish they’d kept him.”

  The bell clanged and the men gulped down their coffee and gathered in the still-dark yard. The Pinkertons handed each of the dozen foremen a box of matches and a thick three-foot branch of hickory swabbed in pitch.

  “This ain’t light enough for us to work by,” a foreman named Wells complained.

  “But you’ll be up there ready when there is light enough,” a Pinkerton answered.

  “Without our watches when will we know it’s time to break or eat?” another foreman asked.

  “The bell will tell you all you need to know,” the other Pinkerton answered.

  Matches flared and the pitch caught. First light smudged the eastern sky as the torches made a widening constellation across the valley floor. When the crews arrived where yesterday’s work had ceased, the trees began emerging from the dark.

  “Damn if she didn’t cipher it to the minute,” Snipes said, snuffing out the torch.

  Yesterday, Snipes and Henryson had felled a sugar maple and a white oak, clearing space to begin sawing one of the largest trees in the valley, a chestnut so wide three men could not have linked arms around it. Henryson stared at the tree and shook his head.

  “I get blisters just looking at that thing.”

  “It is right sizable, but it’s dying of the blight,” Snipes said, pointing to an orange fungus on the bark, “which makes me feel a bit less bad to cut it. There was some winters chestnuts was near all that kept me and my family’s bellies filled.”

  As the men began to saw and chop, gray clouds settled over the valley. Serena loosed the eagle again and men paused to watch it circle the valley twice before bolting downward to scuffle briefly, then arise with another rattlesnake.

  “That’s the fearsomest bird I ever seen,” Quince said.

  The men resumed work. Trees began to fall. Some could hardly be heard, the sound little more than the thrash and scrape of sheared limbs. But the bigger trees, the oaks and poplars and hickories, made the whole ridge shake. After what seemed three hours, the loggers listened in vain for the bell to signal the midmorning break. Ross notched a few more trees, then chopped down a stand of smaller blackjack oaks as Quince continued to limb.

  Close by, Henryson and Snipes kept sawing the chestnut. Sawdust sifted the two men’s clothing and skin like pollen. Ross helped too, placing the blocks and steel wedges each time the crosscut saw pinched. They were now in the trunk’s heart and the saw’s rasps slowed. The men paused and wiped their brows and, still on their knees, placed hands on their backs and stretched.

  “I used to wonder why old-timers called that thing a misery whip,” Henryson said, nodding at the saw, “but I know now.”

  Once through the core, the sawing was easier. The gap widened and more wedges were needed. The great tree began to tremble, its branches grasping at the sky as if seeking purchase. Snipes yelled “timber” and the men scattered. The upper branches crackled and snapped against other trees. Brown leaves gusted as a squirrel’s nest burst. The ground quaked as the chestnut hit, causing every crew on the ridge to pause.

  As the men rested, Snipes looked at the sky and nodded to himself in grim satisfaction. The other men waited for some pronouncement but none came. The men gazed longingly up the ridge where their lunch buckets awaited them. Gray clouds thickened over the valley, yet no rain fell.

  “I figured she might cut our morning break,” Quince said, “but ain’t she gonna give us time to eat?”

  Henryson had a finger on the chestnut’s stump, his lips moving as he counted aloud.

  “I count two hundred and thirty-seven rings,” he said. “I doubt there’s one older in this valley.”

  “If you’re talking about trees and not that hag,” Snipes said.

  He and Henryson began sawing a white ash as Ross helped Quince limb the chestnut. As the crews around them worked on, mishaps occurred. The injured loggers had to be helped across the valley floor to the blue boxcar. One was carried straight to the graveyard. The crew next to Snipes’s stumbled off the ridge, swatting and swearing as hornets swarmed around them. One man rolled on the ground as if on fire, while another wallowed facedown in the silt-clogged creek.

  When the bell finally rang, the crew stuffed food into their mouths so quickly that they barely chewed. Beef jerky usually saved for the midafternoon break was devoured too.

  “Lord, I wish that chestnut was alive,” Henryson said when they’d finished. “I’d eat them nuts, green shells and all.”

  “Me too,” Quince said, taking out his tobacco pouch and rolling papers.

  Snipes lit his pipe and paused to study the sky again.

  “I think they’ve went and done it,” he said.

  “Done what?” Henryson asked.

  “What that Einstein fellow in Switzerland’s argued,” Snipes said.<
br />
  “Which is?”

  “He claims you can stretch time out like it was taffy.”

  “Where’d you hear such bullshit as that, Snipes?” Henryson asked.

  “He’s even got the formula to prove it.”

  Henryson looked over at his cousin.

  “You ever hear a thing like that at college?”

  Ross shook his head.

  “It did seem near forever before the lunch bell rang,” Quince said uneasily.

  “I never even heard it being tried,” Henryson said.

  Snipes took a long draw on his briar pipe, slowly let the smoke purl out.

  “If you was to try and didn’t want for anyone excepting you to know,” Snipes said, “what’d be the first thing you would do?”

  “Get rid of all the clocks and watches,” Quince said, his voice draining to a whisper.

  “But there’s one other way to tell the time,” Snipes said.

  Henryson looked heavenward, but no sun shone through the clouds.

  “Them clouds will move on soon enough,” Henryson said.

  “We’ll see about that,” Snipes said.

  Henryson turned to Ross.