by Ron Rash
“I hope he finds something,” Serena said, stepping closer to take Pemberton’s hand. “It will be another beginning for us, our first real partnership.”
Pemberton smiled. “Plus Harris.”
“For now,” Serena said.
As Pemberton rode back to camp, he thought of an afternoon back in Boston when he and Serena were lying in bed, the sheets damp and tangled. The third, maybe the fourth day he’d been with her. Serena’s head had lain on his shoulder, her left hand on his chest.
“After Carolina, where to next?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” Pemberton had replied.
“’I’?” she’d said. “Why not ‘we’?”
“Well since it’s ‘we’, Pemberton had replied playfully, “I’ll defer to you.”
Serena had lifted her head and met his eyes.
“Brazil. I’ve researched it. Virgin forests of mahogany and no law but nature’s law.”
“Very well,” Pemberton had said. “Now the only decision ‘we’ have to worry about is where to have dinner. Since you’ve decided everything else for us, am I allowed to choose?”
She had not answered his question. Instead, she’d pressed her hand more firmly against his chest, let her palm stay there as she measured the beat of his blood.
“I’d heard you had a strong heart, fearless,” she’d said, “and so it is.”
“So you research men as well as potential logging sights?” Pemberton had asked.
“Of course,” Serena had said.
AT six, every worker in camp gathered in front of the office. Though most cutting crews consisted of three men, a crew that lost a man often attached to another, an arrangement that wasn’t always temporary. A man named Snipes acted as leader for such a crew since the other foreman, Stewart, was a diligent worker but of dubious intelligence. Stewart was relieved as anyone by this arrangement.
Among Snipes’ crew was an illiterate lay preacher named McIntyre, who was much given to vigorous pronouncements on the imminent apocalypse. McIntyre sought any opportunity to espouse his views, especially to Reverend Bolick, a Presbyterian cleric who held services at the camp on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. Reverend Bolick considered his fellow theologian not only obnoxious but demented and went out of his way to avoid McIntyre, as did most men at the camp. McIntyre had been absent all morning with a bout of the flux but had come to work at noon. When he saw Serena standing on the office porch in pants, he choked on the peppermint he sucked to ease his stomach.
“There she is,” McIntyre sputtered, “the whore of Babylon in the very flesh.”
Dunbar, the youngest member of the crew at nineteen, looked toward the porch incomprehensively. He turned to McIntyre, who was dressed in his black preacher’s hat and frayed black dress coat he wore even on the hottest days as a sign of his true calling.
“Where?” Dunbar asked.
“Right there on that porch, standing there brazen as Jezebel.”
Stewart, who along with McIntyre’s wife and sister comprised the whole of the lay preacher’s congregation, turned to his minister and spoke.
“Why are you of a mind to say such a thing as that, Preacher?”
“Them pants,” McIntyre proclaimed. “It’s in the Revelations. Says the whore of Babylon will come forth in the last days wearing pants.”
Ross, a dour man not kindly disposed to McIntyre’s rants, stared at the lay preacher as he might a chimpanzee that had wandered into camp and begun chattering.
“I’ve read Revelation many a time, McIntyre,” Ross said, “and somehow missed that verse.”
“It ain’t in the King James,” McIntyre said. “It’s in the original Greek.”
“Read Greek, do you?” Ross said. “That’s ever amazing for a man who can’t even read English.”
“Well, no,” McIntyre said slowly. “I don’t read Greek, but I’ve heard from them what does.”
“Them what does,” Ross said, and shook his head.
The crew foreman, Snipes, removed a briar pipe from his mouth to speak. His overalls were so worn and patched that the original denim seemed an afterthought, but there’d been no attempt to blend new colors with old. Instead, the crew foreman’s overalls were mended with a conflagration of yellow, green, red, and orange cloth. Snipes considered himself a learned man and argued that, since colors bright and various were known in nature to warn other creatures of danger, such patches would deter not only varmints both large and small but might in the same manner also deter falling limbs and lightning strikes. Snipes held the pipe out before him, contemplated it a moment, then raised his head and spoke.
“They’s differences in every language in the world,” Snipes said sagely, and appeared ready to expound on this point when Ross raised an open palm.
“Here comes the tally,” Ross said. “Get ready to have your pockets lightened, Dunbar.”
Campbell stood on the ash tree’s stump and took a pad from his coat pocket. The men grew silent. Campbell looked at neither the men nor the owners. His gaze remained on the pad as he spoke, as if to belie any favoritism even as he rendered the verdict.
“Mrs. Pemberton the winner by thirty board feet,” Campbell said, and he stepped down without further comment.
The men began to disperse, those who had bet and won, such as Ross, stepping more lightly than the losers. Soon only those who’d watched from the porch remained.
“Cause for a celebratory drink of our best scotch,” Buchanan announced.
He and Wilkie followed Doctor Cheney and the Pembertons into the office. They passed through the front room and entered a smaller room with a bar on one wall and a fourteen-foot dining table in the center, around it a dozen well-padded captain’s chairs. The room had a creek-stone fireplace and a single window. Buchanan stepped behind the bar and set a bottle of Glenlivet and soda water on the lacquered wood. He lifted five Steuben tumblers from under the bar and filled a silver canister with chips from the ice box.
“I call this the Recovery Room,” Doctor Cheney said to Serena. “You see it is well stocked with all manner of alcohol. I find it quite sufficient for my own medicinal needs.”
“Doctor Cheney has no need for a recovery room elsewhere, because the good doctor’s patients rarely recover,” Buchanan said from behind the bar. “I know these rogues’ preferences, but what is yours, Mrs. Pemberton?”
“The same.”
Everyone sat except Buchanan. Serena studied the table, let the fingers of her left hand trail across its surface.
“A single piece of chestnut,” Serena said appreciatively. “Was the tree cut nearby?”
“In this very valley,” Buchanan said. “It measured one-hundred-and-twelve feet. We’ve yet to find a bigger one.”
Serena raised her eyes from the table and looked around the room.
“I’m afraid this room is quite austere, Mrs. Pemberton,” Wilkie said, “but comfortable, even cozy in its way, especially during winter. We hope you’ll take your evening meals here, as the four of us have done before the pleasure of your arrival.”
Still apprising the room, Serena nodded.
“Excellent,” Doctor Cheney said. “A woman’s beauty would do much to brighten these drab surroundings.”
Buchanan spoke as he handed Serena her drink.
“Pemberton has told me of your parents’ unfortunate demise in the 1918 flu epidemic, but do you have siblings?”
“I had a brother and two sisters. They died as well.”
“All in the epidemic?” Wilkie asked.
“Yes.”
Wilkie’s moustache quivered slightly, and his rheumy eyes saddened.
“How old were you, my dear?”
“Sixteen.”
“I lost a sibling as well in that epidemic, my youngest sister,” Wilkie said to Serena, “but to lose your whole family, and at such a young age. I just can’t imagine.”
“I too am sorry for your losses, but your good fortune is now our good fortun
e,” Doctor Cheney quipped.
“It was more than good fortune,” Serena replied. “The doctor said so himself.”
“What then did my fellow healer ascribe your survival to?”
Serena looked steadily at Cheney, her eyes as inexpressive as her tone.
“He said I simply refused to die.”
Doctor Cheney slowly tilted his head, as if peering around a corner. The physician stared at Serena curiously, his thick eyebrows raised a few moments, then relaxed. Buchanan brought the other drinks to the table and sat down. Pemberton raised his drink, offered a smile as well to lighten the moment.
“A toast to another victory for management over labor,” he said.
“I toast you as well, Mrs. Pemberton,” Doctor Cheney said. “The nature of the fairer sex is to lack the male’s analytical skills, but, at least in this instance, you have somehow compensated for that weakness.”
Serena’s features tightened, but the irritation vanished as quickly as it had appeared, swept clear from her face like a lock of unruly hair.
“My husband tells me that you are from these very mountains, a place called Wild Hog Gap,” Serena said to Cheney. “Obviously, your views on my sex were formed by the slatterns you grew up with, but I assure you the natures of women are more various than your limited experience allows.”
As if tugged upward by fishhooks, the sides of Doctor Cheney’s mouth creased into a mirthless smile.
“By God you married a saucy one,” Wilkie chortled, raising his tumbler to Pemberton. “This camp is going to be lively now.”
Buchanan retrieved the bottle of scotch and placed it on the table.
“Have you ever been to these parts before, Mrs. Pemberton?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t.”
“As you’ve seen, we are somewhat isolated here.”
“Somewhat?” Wilkie exclaimed. “At times I feel I’ve been banished to the moon.”
“Asheville is only fifty miles away,” Buchanan said. “It has its village charms.”
“Indeed,” Doctor Cheney interjected, “including several T.B. sanatoriums.”
“Yet you’ve no doubt heard of George Vanderbilt’s estate,” Buchanan continued, “which is there as well.”
“Biltmore is indeed impressive,” Wilkie conceded, “an actual French castle, Mrs. Pemberton. Olmsted himself came down from Brookline to design the grounds. Vanderbilt’s daughter Cornelia lives there now, with her husband, a Brit named Cecil. I’ve been their guest on occasion. Very gracious people.”
Wilkie paused to empty his tumbler and set it on the table. His cheeks were rosy from the alcohol, but Pemberton knew it was Serena’s presence that made him even more loquacious than usual.
“I heard a phrase today worthy of your journal, Buchanan,” Wilkie continued. “Two workers at the splash pond were discussing a fight and spoke of how one combatant ‘feathered into’ the other. It apparently means to inflict great damage.”
Buchanan retrieved a fountain pen and black leather notebook from his coat’s inner pocket. Buchanan placed the pen on the notebook’s rag paper and wrote feathered into, behind it a question mark. He blew on the ink and closed the notebook.
“I doubt that it goes back to the British Isles,” Buchanan said. “Perhaps instead a colloquialism to do with cockfighting.”
“Kephart would no doubt know,” Wilkie said. “Have you heard of him, Mrs. Pemberton, our local Thoreau? Buchanan here is quite an admirer of his work, despite Kephart’s being behind this national park nonsense.”
“I’ve seen his books in the window at Grolier’s,” Serena said. “As you may imagine, they were quite taken with a Harvard man turned Natty Bumpo.”
“As well as being a former librarian in Saint Louis,” Wilkie noted.
“A librarian and an author,” Serena said, “yet he’d stop us from harvesting the very thing books are made of.”
Pemberton drained his second dram of scotch, felt the alcohol’s smooth slide down his throat, its warm glow deepening his contentment. He felt an overwhelming wonder that this woman, whom he’d not even known existed when he’d left this valley three months earlier, was now his wife. Pemberton settled his right hand on Serena’s knee, unsurprised when her left hand settled on his knee as well. She leaned toward him and for a few seconds let her head nestle in the space between his neck and shoulder. Pemberton tried to imagine how this moment could be better. He could think of nothing other than that he and Serena were alone.
At seven o’clock, two kitchen workers set the table with Spode bone china and silver cutlery and linen napkins. They left and returned pushing a cart laden with wicker baskets of buttered biscuits and a silver platter draping with beef, large bowls of Steuben crystal brimmed with potatoes and carrots and squash, various jams and relishes.
They were midway through their meal when Campbell, who’d been bent over the adding machine in the front room, appeared at the door.
“I need to know if you and Mrs. Pemberton are holding Bilded to the bet,” Campbell said. “For the payroll.”
“Is there a reason we shouldn’t?” Pemberton asked.
“He has a wife and three children.”
The words were delivered with no inflection, and Campbell’s face was an absolute blank. Pemberton wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to play poker against this man.
“All for the better,” Serena said. “It will make a more effective lesson for the other workers.”
“Will he still be a foreman?” Campbell asked.
“Yes, for the next two weeks,” Serena said, looking not at Campbell but Pemberton.
“And then?”
“He’ll be fired,” Pemberton told the overseer. “Another lesson for the men.”
Campbell nodded and stepped back into the office, closing the door behind him. The clacking, ratchet and pause of the adding machine resumed.
Buchanan appeared about to speak, but didn’t.
“A problem, Buchanan?” Pemberton asked.
“No,” Buchanan said after a few moments. “The wager did not involve me.”
“Did you note how Campbell attempted to sway you, Pemberton,” Doctor Cheney said, “yet without doing so outright. He’s quite intelligent that way, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Pemberton agreed. “Had his circumstances been such, he could have matriculated at Harvard. Perhaps, unlike me, he would have graduated.”
“Yet without your experiences in the taverns of Boston,” Wilkie said, “you might have fallen prey to Abe Harmon and his bowie knife.
“True enough,” said Pemberton, “but my year of fencing at Harvard contributed to that education as well.”
Serena raised her hand to Pemberton’s face and let her index finger trace the thin white scar on his cheek.
“A Fechtwunde is more impressive than a piece of sheepskin,” she said.
The kitchen workers came in with raspberries and cream. Beside Wilkie’s bowl, one of the women placed a water glass and bottles containing bitters and iron tonics, a tin of sulpher lozenges, potions for Wilkie’s contrary stomach and tired blood. The workers poured the cups of coffee and departed.
“Yet you are a woman of obvious learning, Mrs. Pemberton,” Wilkie said. “Your husband says you are exceedingly well read in the arts and philosophy.”
“My father brought tutors to the camp. They were all British, Oxford educated.”
“Which explains the British inflection and cadence of your speech,” Wilkie noted approvingly.
“And no doubt also explains a certain coldness in the tone,” Doctor Cheney added as he stirred cream in his coffee, “which only the unenlightened would view as a lack of feeling towards others, even your own family.”
Wilkie’s nose twitched in annoyance.
“Worse than unenlightened to think such a thing,” Wilkie said, “cruel as well.”
“Surely,” Doctor Cheney said, his plump lips rounding contemplatively. “I speak only as one who h
asn’t had the advantages of British tutors.”
“Your father sounds like a most remarkable man,” Wilkie said, returning his gaze to Serena. “I would enjoy hearing more about him.”
“Why?” Serena said, as if puzzled. “He’s dead now and of no use to any of us.”
Three
DEW DARKENED THE HEM OF HER GINGHAM dress as Rachel Harmon walked out of the yard, the grass cool and slick against her bare feet and ankles. Jacob nestled in the crook of her left arm, in her right hand the tote sack. He’d grown so much in only six weeks. His features transformed as well, the hair not just thicker but darker, the eyes that had been blue at birth now brown as chestnuts. She’d not known an infant’s eyes could do such a thing and it unsettled her, a reminder of eyes last seen at the train depot. Rachel looked down the road to where Widow Jenkins’ farmhouse stood, found the purl of smoke rising from the chimney that confirmed the old woman was up and about. The child squirmed inside the blanket she’d covered him in against the morning chill.
“You’ve got a full belly and fresh swaddlings,” she whispered, “so you’ve no cause to be fussy.”
Rachel tucked the blanket tighter. She ran her index finger across the ridge of his gums, Jacob’s mouth closing around the finger to suckle. She wondered when his teeth would come in, something else to ask the widow.
Rachel followed the road as it began its long curve toward the river. On the edges, Queen Anne’s lace still held beaded blossoms of dew. A big yellow and black writing spider hung in its web’s center, and Rachel remembered how her father had claimed seeing your initial sewn into the web meant you’d soon die. She did not look closely at the web, instead glanced at the sky to make sure no clouds gathered in the west over Clingman’s Dome. She stepped onto the Widow’s porch and knocked.
“It ain’t bolted,” the old woman said, and Rachel stepped inside. The greasy odor of fry pan lard filled the cabin, a scrim of smoke eddying around the room’s borders. Widow Jenkins rose slowly from a caneback chair pulled close to the hearth.
“Let me hold that chap.”
Rachel bent her knees and laid down her tote sack. She shifted the child in her arms and handed him over.