by Ron Rash
“I’ll take a whetstone to the blade tomorrow,” Serena said, setting the knife on the bedside table. “It’s a weapon worthy of a man like you, and built to last a lifetime.”
“To extend a lifetime as well,” Pemberton noted, “as it has so fortuitously shown.”
“Perhaps it shall again, so keep it close.”
“I’ll keep it in the office,” Pemberton promised.
Serena sat down in a ladderback chair opposite the bed and pulled off her jodhpurs. She undressed, not looking at what she unfastened and let fall to the floor. All the while her eyes were fixed upon Pemberton. She took off her underclothing and stood before him. The women he’d known before Serena had been shy with their bodies, waiting for a room to darken or sheets to be pulled up, but that wasn’t Serena’s way.
Except for her eyes and hair, she was not conventionally beautiful, her breasts and hips small and legs long for her torso. Serena’s narrow shoulders, thin nose and high cheekbones honed her body to a severe keenness. Her feet were small, and considering all other aspects of her features, oddly delicate, vulnerable looking. Their bodies were well matched, Serena’s lithe form fitting his larger frame and more muscular build. Sometimes at night they cleaved so fiercely the bed buckled and leaped beneath them. Pemberton would hear their quick breaths and not know which were Serena’s and which his. A kind of annihilation, that was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly.
Serena did not come to him immediately, and a sensual languor settled over Pemberton. He gazed at her body, into the eyes that had entranced him the first time he’d met her, irises the color of burnished pewter. Hard and dense like pewter too, the gold flecks not so much within the gray as floating motelike on the surface. Eyes that did not close when their flesh came together, pulling him inside her with her gaze as much as her body.
Serena opened the curtains so the moon spread its light across the bed. She turned from the window and looked around the room, as if for a few moments she’d forgotten where she was.
“This will do quite well for us,” she finally said, returning her gaze to Pemberton as she stepped toward the bed.
Two
THE FOLLOWING MORNING PEMBERTON INTRODUCED his bride to the camp’s hundred workers. As he spoke, Serena stood beside him, dressed in black riding breeches and a blue denim shirt. Her jodphurs were different from the ones the day before, European made, the leather scuffed and worn, toes rimmed with tarnished silver. Serena held the gelding’s reins, the Arabian’s whiteness so intense as to appear almost translucent in the day’s first light. The saddle weighting the horse’s back was made of German leather with wool-flocked gusseted panels, its cost more than a logger earned in a year. Several men made soft-spoken observations about the stirrups, which weren’t paired on the left side.
Wilkie and Buchanan stood on the porch, cups of coffee in their hands. Both were dressed in suits and ties, their one concession to the environment knee-high leather boots, pants cuffs tucked inside so as not to get muddied. It was clothing Pemberton, whose gray tiger cloth pants and plaid workshirts differed little from the workers’ attire, found faintly ridiculous in such an environment, now even more so in light of Serena’s attire.
“Mrs. Pemberton’s father owned the Vulcan Lumber Company in Colorado,” Pemberton said to the workers. “He taught her well. She’s the equal of any man here, and you’ll soon find the truth of it. Her orders are to be followed the same as you’d follow mine.”
Among the gathered loggers was a thick-bearded cutting crew foreman named Bilded. He hocked loudly and spit a gob of yellow phlegm on the ground. At six-two and over two hundred pounds, Bilded was one of the few men in camp big as Pemberton.
Serena opened the saddle bag and removed a Waterman pen and a leather-bound notepad. She spoke to the horse quietly, then handed the reins to Pemberton and walked over to Bilded and stood where he’d spit. She pointed beside the office at a cane ash tree, which had been left standing for its shade.
“I’ll make a wager with you,” Serena said to Bilded. “We both estimate total board feet of that cane ash. Then we’ll write our estimates on a piece of paper and see who’s closest.”
Bilded stared at Serena a few moments, then at the tree as if already measuring its height and width. He looked not at Serena but at the cane ash when he spoke.
“How we going to know who’s closest?”
“I’ll have it cut down and taken to the saw mill,” Pemberton said. “We’ll know who won by this evening.”
Doctor Cheney had now come on the porch to watch as well. He raked a match head across the railing to light his after-breakfast cigar, the sound audible enough that several workers turned to find its source. Pemberton looked also, and noted how morning accentuated the doctor’s unhealthy pallor, making the corpulent face appear gray and malleable, like dirty bread dough. An effect the wattled neck and pouchy cheeks further emphasized.
“How much we wagering?” Bilded asked.
“Two weeks’ pay.”
The amount gave Bilded pause.
“There ain’t no trick to it? I win I get two weeks’ extra pay.”
“Yes,” Serena said, “and if you lose you work two weeks free.”
She offered the pad and pen to Bilded, but he didn’t raise a hand to take it. A worker behind him snickered.
“Perhaps you want me to go first then?” Serena said.
“Yeah,” Bilded said after a few moments.
Serena turned toward the tree and studied it a full minute before she raised the pen in her left hand and wrote a number. She tore the page from the pad and folded it.
“Your turn,” she said and handed the pen and notepad to Bilded.
Bilded walked up to the cane ash to better judge its girth, then came back and examined the tree a while longer before writing his own number. Serena turned to Pemberton.
“Who’s a man we and the workers both trust to hold our estimates?”
“Campbell,” Pemberton said, nodding toward the overseer, who watched from the office doorway. “You all right with that, Bilded?”
“Yeah,” Bilded said.
Serena rode out behind the cutting crews as they followed the train tracks toward the south face of Noland Mountain, passing through acres of stumps that, from a distance, resembled grave markers in a recently vacated battlefield. The loggers soon left the main train line that went over the right side of the mountain and instead followed the spur, their lunches in tote sacks and paper bags, metal milk pails and metal boxes shaped like bread loaves. Some of the men wore bib overalls, others flannel shirts and pants. Most wore Chippawah boots and a few wore shoes of canvas or leather. The signal boys went barefoot. The loggers passed the Shay train engine they called a sidewinder and the two coach cars that brought and returned workers who lived in Waynesville, then the six flat cars for timber and the McGiffert loader and finally at the spur’s end the hi-lead skidder already hissing and smoking, the boom’s long steel cables spooling off the drums and stretching a half mile upward to where the tail block looped around a massive hickory stump. From a distance, the boom resembled a huge rod and reel, the cables like cast lines. The boom angled toward the mountain, and the cables were so taut it looked as if the whole mountain was hooked and ready to be dragged down the tracks to Waynesville. Logs cut late on Saturday yet dangled from the cables, and men passed heedfully under them as they might clouds packed with dynamite. All the while, the air grew thinner as the workers made their way up the steep incline toward tools hidden under leaves, hung on tree branches like the harps of the old Hebrews. Not just axes but eight-foot cross-cut saws and steel wedges and blocks and pike poles, the nine-pound hammers called go-devils and the six-pound hammers called grab skips. Some of these implements had initials burned in their handles, and some were given names as might be allowed a horse or rifle. All but the newest had their handles worn slick by fl
esh much in the manner of stones smoothed by water.
As the men made their way through the stumps and brush they called slash, their eyes considered where they stepped, for though snakes rarely stirred until the sun fell full on the slopes, the yellow jackets and hornets offered no such respite. Nor did the mountain itself, which could send a man tumbling, especially on a day such as this when recent rains made the ground slick and yielding to feet and grasping hands. Most of the loggers were still exhausted from last week’s six eleven-hour shifts. Some were hung over and some were injured. As they made their way up the mountain, the men had already drunk four or five cups of coffee, and all carried with them cigarettes and chewing tobacco. Some used cocaine to keep going and stay alert, because once the cutting began a man had to watch for axe blades glancing off trees and saw teeth grabbing a knee and the tongs on the cable swinging free or the cable snapping. Most of all the sharded limbs called widow makers that waited minutes or hours or even days before falling earthward like javelins.
Pemberton stood on the porch as Serena followed the crews into the woods. Even at a distance he could see the sway of her hips and arched back. Though they’d coupled that morning as well as last night, Pemberton felt desire quicken his pulse, summon the image of the first time he’d watched her ride at the New England Hunt Club. That morning he’d sat on the clubhouse veranda and watched Serena and her horse leap the hedges and railings. He’d never been a man easily awed, but that was the only word for what he’d felt as Serena and the horse lifted and then hung aloft for what seemed seconds before falling on the barriers’ far sides. He’d felt incredibly lucky they’d found one another, though Serena had already told him their meeting wasn’t mere good fortune but inevitability.
That morning at the club two women had come out on the veranda and sat nearby, dressed, unlike Serena, in red swallowtail hunting blazers and black derbies, hot tea set before them to ward against the morning’s chill. I suppose she imagines riding without a coat and cap de rigueur, the younger of the women had said, to which the other replied that it probably was in Colorado. My brother’s wife attended Miss Porter’s with her, the older woman said. She just showed up one day, an orphan from the western hinterlands. A wealthy orphan albeit, better educated than you’d imagine, but even Sarah Porter had no luck teaching her any social graces. Rather too proud, my sister-in-law claims, even for that haughty bunch. A couple of the girls pitied her enough to invite her home with them for the holidays and she not only refused but in a very ungracious manner. She stayed there with those old school marms instead. The younger woman had noticed Pemberton listening and had turned to him. Do you know her? she’d asked. Yes, he’d replied. She’s my fiancée. The younger woman had blushed, but her companion had turned to Pemberton with a smile. Well, she’d said frostily, she at least deems you worthy of her company.
Except for Mrs. Lowell’s brief comment about previous suitors, that morning had been the only time he’d heard Serena’s past spoken of by anyone besides Serena. She’d volunteered little herself. When Pemberton asked about her time in Colorado or New England, Serena’s answers were almost always cursory, telling him that she and Pemberton needed the past no more than it needed them.
Yet Serena’s bad dreams continued. She never spoke of them, even when Pemberton asked, even in those moments he pulled her thrashing body out of them as if pulling her from a treacherous surf. Something to do with what had happened to her family back in Colorado, he was sure of that. Sure also that others who knew her would have been astonished at how childlike Serena appeared in those moments, the way she clung so fiercely to him until she whimpered back into sleep.
The kitchen door slammed as a worker came out and hurled a washtub of gray dishwater into a ditch reeking of grease and food scraps. The last logger had disappeared into the woods. Soon Pemberton heard the axes as the lead choppers began notching trees, a sound like rifle shots ricocheting across the valley as workers sawed and chopped another few acres of wilderness out of Haywood County.
By this time the crew chosen to fell the cane ash had returned to camp with their tools. The three men squatted before the tree as they would a campfire, talking among themselves about how best to commence. Campbell joined them, answering the loggers’ questions with words arranged to sound more like suggestions than orders. After a few minutes Campbell rose. He turned toward the porch, giving Pemberton a nod, allowing his gaze to linger long enough to confirm nothing more was required of him. Campbell’s hazel eyes were almond-shaped, like a cat’s. Pemberton had found their wideness appropriate for a man so aware of things on the periphery, aware and also cautious, reasons Campbell had lasted into his late thirties in an occupation where inattentiveness was rarely forgiven. Pemberton nodded and Campbell walked up the track to talk to the train’s engineer. Pemberton watched him go, noting that even a man cautious as Campbell had a missing ring finger. If you could gather up all the severed body parts and sew them together, you’d gain an extra worker every month, Doctor Cheney had once joked.
The cutting crew quickly showed why Campbell picked them. The lead chopper took up his ax and with two expert strokes made an undercut a foot from the ground. The two sawyers got down on one knee and gripped the hickory handles with both hands and began, wedges of bark crackling and breaking against the steel teeth. The men gained their rhythm, and soon sawdust mounded at their feet like time sieving through an hourglass. Pemberton knew the workers who used them called the cross-cut saws “misery whips” because of the effort demanded, but watching these men it appeared effortless, as if they slid the blade between two smooth-sanded planks. When the saw began to pinch, the lead chopper used the go devil to drive in a wedge. In fifteen minutes the tree lay on the ground.
Pemberton went inside and worked on invoices, occasionally looking out the window toward Noland Mountain. He and Serena hadn’t been apart for more than a few minutes since the marriage ceremony. Her absence made the paperwork more tedious, the room emptier. Pemberton remembered how she’d waked him that morning with a kiss on his eyelids, a hand settled lightly on his shoulder. Serena had been drowsy as well, and when she’d brought Pemberton ever so languidly into her arms, it was as if he’d left his own dream and together they’d entered a better richer one.
Serena was gone all morning, getting familiar with the landscape, learning the names of workers, ridges and creeks.
The Franklin clock on the credenza chimed noon when Harris’ Studebaker pulled up beside the office. Pemberton set the in voices on the desk and walked out to meet him. Like Pemberton, Harris dressed little better than his workers, the only sign of his wealth a thick gold ring on his right hand, in the setting a sapphire sharp and bright-blue as its owner’s eyes. Seventy years old, Pemberton knew, but the vigorous silver hair and shiny gold tooth fillings were congruent for a man anything but rusty.
“So where is she?” Harris asked as he stepped onto the office porch. “A woman as impressive as you claim shouldn’t be hidden away.”
Harris paused and smiled as he turned his head slightly, his right eye focused on Pemberton as if to better sight a target.
“Though on second thought, maybe you should hide her away. If she is all you say.”
“You’ll see,” Pemberton said. “She’s over on Noland. We can get horses and ride up there.”
“I don’t have time for that,” Harris said. “Much as I’d enjoy meeting your bride, this park nonsense takes precedent. Our esteemed Secretary of the Interior got Rockefeller to donate five million. Now Albright is sure he can buy out Champion.”
“Do you think they’ll sell?”
“I don’t know,” Harris said, “but just the fact that Champion’s listening to offers encourages not only Secretary Albright but the rest of them, here and in Washington. They’re already starting to run farmers off their land in Tennessee.”
“This needs to be settled once and for all,” Pemberton said.
“Goddamn right it needs to be settled. I’m tir
ed as you are of lining the pockets of those Raleigh pettifoggers.”
Harris pulled a watch from his pocket and checked the time.
“Later than I thought,” he said.
“Have you had a chance to look at the Glencoe Ridge tract?” Pemberton asked.
“Come by the office Saturday morning and we’ll go see it together. Bring your bride along too,” Harris said, and paused to nod approvingly at the valley’s stumps and slash. “You’ve done well here, even with those two fops you have for partners.”
Pemberton did not go back into the office after Harris left but instead rode out to Noland Mountain. He found Serena eating lunch with two foremen. Between bites of sandwiches, they discussed whether buying a second hi-lead skidder would be worth the extra cost. Pemberton got off his horse and joined them.
“The cane ash is at the saw mill,” Pemberton said as he sat down beside her, “so Campbell will have the board feet by five-thirty.”
“Any of the other men make side bets with you?”
“No.”
“Would either of you care to wager?” Serena said to the foremen.
“No ma’am,” the older worker replied. “I don’t have a hankering to bet against you on anything concerning lumber. I might have before this morning, but not now, especially after you showed us that trick with the choker.”
The younger worker merely shook his head.
The two men finished eating and gathered their crews. Soon the sounds of axes and cross-cut saws filled the nearby woods. The Arabian snorted and Serena walked over and placed her hand on the horse’s mane. She spoke to the horse softly and the gelding calmed.
“Harris came by,” Pemberton said. “He wants the three of us to go look at the Glencoe Ridge tract Saturday.”
“Will he be looking for anything other than kaolin and copper?”
“I doubt it,” Pemberton said, “though some gold has been panned from creeks in the county. There are ruby and sapphire mines near Franklin, but that’s forty miles from here.”