by Ron Rash
“I heard Campbell built that eagle a perch in the stable,” Dunbar said.
“I seen it,” Snipes said, shaking his head with admiration. “He made it with a lead pipe and metal soldered off an old boxcar. Used that and a big block of hickory, put some sisal rope on top for the eagle to settle its claws in. I believe Campbell could make you a flashlight out of a tin can and a lightning bug. That bird sets there on that perch like a big old rooster. Don’t blink nor nothing. It’s partial to the darksomeness of that stable. Keeps it calm like the hood she puts over its head.”
McIntyre moaned and opened his eyes briefly before closing them again. Stewart fetched more water, then seemed to think better of pouring it on the lay preacher so instead set the pail down. He took off his stricken mentor’s coat and unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt, then dipped a soiled handkerchief in the water and pressed it to McIntyre’s forehead as if a poultice. The other men watched as McIntyre’s eyes flickered a few moments and opened. This time he did not attempt to speak. Instead, McIntyre solemnly removed a kerchief that had been around his neck and tied it around his head, covering his eyes.
“He ain’t never been in such a way as this,” Stewart said worriedly, and helped McIntyre to his feet. “I’m taking him back to camp so Doctor Cheney can look at him.”
Stewart helped McIntyre down the slope, moving slow and all the while holding his mentor’s upper arm firmly, as if leading a fellow soldier newly blinded in battle.
“I reckon you’d argue the snake didn’t land on you because of that getup you’re wearing,” Ross said to Snipes.
“I don’t have to argue it,” Snipes said. “You seen well as I did where it landed.”
“Well,” Dunbar said, appraising the drabness of his own outfit. “I got me a shirt red as a mule-team tomato but I still ain’t wearing it out here. I need me one thing pretty to catch a gal’s eye.”
The men paused to watch as Stewart led McIntyre down the ridge, pausing every few steps to nervously check the sky.
“That bird, it ain’t from this country,” Snipes said, pausing to tamp some tobacco into his pipe. “It’s from Asia, a Mongoloid, and it’s worth five hundred dollars so you best not be taking no pot shots at it. It’s the same kind of eagle ole Kubla Khan used to hunt with, that’s what Campbell says.”
“That conversing you had with Campbell must have been the most he’s said at one time in his life,” Dunbar noted. “He’s ever one to keep thoughts to his own self.”
“A wise man always keeps his counsel,” Snipes said.
“We’ve noticed,” Ross said.
“One of the cooks claimed he seen Mrs. Pemberton training that bird one day,” Dunbar said. “Dragged a dead snake around on a rope and ever time that bird tore off after the snake she’d give it a piece of prime-cut beef.”
Ross had unpacked his lunch and stared dubiously at his sandwich. He slowly peeled back a soggy piece of white bread in the same manner he might a scab, revealing a gray slab of meat that appeared coated with mucus. For a few moments he simply stared at the fatback.
“I’d near about chase a dead snake around my ownself for a hunk of steak,” Ross said wistfully. “It’s been ever so long since I had a piece of prime cow meat.”
“Put it betwixt a big yallar-butter biscuit and I’d near give up the promise of heaven,” Dunbar said.
A raven flew overhead, wing shadow passing over the men like a dark thought. Dunbar flinched when he saw the bird’s shadow, looked upward.
“I believe you’re right, Ross,” Dunbar said, still staring at the sky. “It’s trouble coming from every direction now.”
The men watched the raven disappear over Balsum Mountain.
“Her putting that eagle in the stable all night,” Dunbar said. “Ain’t she afeared of some fox or other varmint getting it?”
Ross looked up from his sandwich and nodded at the dead snake.
“If it can handle a boss rattler like that one it can handle anything on four legs or even two if it come to that. I’d no more strut up and tangle with that eagle than I’d tangle with the one what can tame such a critter,” Ross concluded.
Eleven
IT WAS CAMPBELL WHO TOLD PEMBERTON THAT the Harmon girl had returned to the camp.
“She’s waiting over at the dining hall,” he said. “She wants her old job in the kitchen back.”
“Where’s she been all this time?” Pemberton asked.
“Living up at her daddy’s place on Colt Ridge.”
“Does she have the child with her?”
“No.”
“Who’s going to care for the child while she’s working?”
“A widow-woman who lives near her. She said she’d still live up there and take the train to camp.” Campbell paused. “She was a good worker before she left last summer.”
“You think I owe her a job, don’t you?” Pemberton said, meeting Campbell’s eyes.
“All I’m saying is she’s a good worker. Even if we don’t need her right now, one of our dishwashers is leaving end of the month.”
Pemberton looked down at his desk. The note to himself to call Harris, which he’d done earlier, lay crumpled on the foolscap showing Serena’s plans for a new spur line. Pemberton stared at the charcoal etching’s precise rendering of topography, the carefully calibrated degrees of ascent, all done by Serena’s hand.
“I’ll have to talk with Mrs. Pemberton first,” he told Campbell. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
Pemberton got his horse and left camp. He crossed Rough Fork Creek and wove his way up the ridge through the stumps and slash. He found Serena on a down slope giving instructions to a cutting crew. The men slumped in various attitudes of repose, but all were attentive. After the foreman asked a final question, the lead chopper began notching a looming tulip poplar, the only uncut hardwood left on the ridge. Serena watched until the sawyers began their work, then rode over to where Pemberton waited.
“What brings you out this morning, Pemberton?”
“I talked with Harris. Secretary Albright called over the weekend and wants to set up a meeting. Harris says he’s willing to come here.”
“When?”
“Albright’s willing to accommodate us on that as well. He said anytime between now and September.”
“September then,” Serena said. “However this turns out, the more time we have to keep logging the better.”
Serena nodded, her eyes rising beyond the tulip poplar to the ridge where crews had gained a first foothold above Henley Creek.
“We’ve made good progress in the last six months, even with the bad weather.”
“Yes we have,” Pemberton agreed. “We could be finished here in eighteen months.”
“I think less than that,” Serena said.
The gelding snorted and stamped its foot. Serena leaned slightly forward, her left hand stroking the Arabian’s neck.
“I’d better go and check the other crews.”
“There’s one more thing,” Pemberton said. “Campbell says the Harmon girl’s in camp. She wants her old job in the kitchen back.”
“Does Campbell think we should hire her?”
“Yes.”
Serena continued to stroke the Arabian’s neck, but she looked at Pemberton now.
“What I said at the depot, about her getting nothing else from us.”
“Her wages will be the same as before,” Pemberton said, “and like before she won’t be living in camp.”
“While she’s at work, who cares for the child?”
“A neighbor will keep him.”
“’Him,’” Serena said. “So it’s a male.”
The sawing paused for a few moments as the lead chopper placed another wedge behind the blade. Serena raised her left hand and settled it over the saddle pommel. Her right hand, which held the reins, settled over the pommel as well.
“You be the one to tell her that she’s hired,” Serena said. “Just make it clear she has no claim on us.
Her child either.”
The cross-cut saw resumed, the blade’s rapid back-and-forth like inhalations and exhalations, a sound as if the tree itself were panting. The Arabian stamped the ground again and Serena tightened her fist around the reins, preparing to turn the gelding’s head in the direction of the cutting crew.
“One other thing,” Serena said. “Make sure she’s not allowed around our food.”
Horse and rider made their way back through drifts of snow toward the deeper woods. Serena upright, her posture impeccable, the gelding’s hooves set down almost disdainfully on the whitened earth. Cut proud, Pemberton thought.
When Pemberton returned to camp, he went into the dining hall where Rachel Harmon waited alone at a table. She wore a pair of polished but well-worn black oxford shoes and a faded blue and white calico dress Pemberton suspected was the nicest clothing she owned. When he’d had his say, Pemberton asked if she understood.
“Yes sir,” she said.
“And what happened with your father. You saw it yourself, so you know I was defending myself.”
A few moments of silence passed between them. She finally nodded, not meeting his eyes. Pemberton tried to remember what had attracted him to her in the first place. Perhaps her blue eyes and blonde hair. Perhaps that she’d been almost the only female at the camp who wasn’t already haggard. Aging in these mountains, especially among the women, happened early. Pemberton had seen women of twenty-five here who would pass for fifty in Boston.
She kept her head slightly bowed as Pemberton surveyed her mouth and chin, her bosom and waist and the white length of ankle showing below her threadbare dress. Whatever had attracted him was now gone. Attraction to any woman besides Serena, he realized, unable to remember the last time he’d thought of a past consort, or watched a young beauty in Waynesville and imagined what her body would be like joined to his. He knew such constancy was rare, and before meeting Serena would have believed it impossible for a man such as himself. Now it seemed inevitable, wondrous but also disconcerting in its finality.
“You can start the first of December,” Pemberton said.
She got up to leave and was almost to the door when he stopped her.
“The child, what’s his name?”
“Jacob. It comes from the Bible.”
The name’s Old Testament derivation did not surprise him. Campbell’s first name was Ezra, and there was an Absalom and a Solomon in the camp. But no Lukes or Matthews, which Buchanan had once noted, telling Pemberton that from his research the highlanders tended to live more by the Old Testament than the New.
“Does he have a middle name?”
“Magill, it’s a family name.”
The girl let her eyes glance his a moment.
“If you was to want to see him…”
Her voice trailed off. A kitchen worker came into the hall, a mop and bucket in her hands.
“You can start first of next month,” Pemberton said, and went into the kitchen to have the cook make him a late lunch.
Twelve
IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS, MOST OF NOLAND Mountain had been logged and crews had worked north to Bunk Ridge before turning west, following a spur across Davidson Branch and into the wide expanse between Campbell Fork and upper Indian Creek. The men worked faster now that full summer had come, in part because there hadn’t been a single rattlesnake bite since the eagle’s arrival. As the crews moved forward, they left behind an ever-widening wasteland of stumps and slash, brown clogged creeks awash with dead trout. Even the more resilient knottyheads and shiners eventually succumbed, some flopping onto banks as if even the ungillable air offered greater hope of survival. As the woods fell away, sightings of the panther grew more frequent, fueled in part by hopes of earning Pemberton’s gold piece. No man could show a convincing track or scrap of fur, but all had their stories, including Dunbar, who claimed during an afternoon break that something large and black had just streaked through the nearby trees.
“Where?” Stewart asked, picking up his axe as he and the rest of Snipes’ crew perused the nearby woods.
“Over there,” Dunbar said, pointing to his left.
Ross went to where Dunbar pointed and skeptically studied ground still damp from a morning shower. Ross came back and sat on a log beside Snipes, who’d returned to perusing his newspaper.
“Maybe it was that eagle,” Ross said, “because there’s nary a sign of a track. You’re just hoping for that flashy hat.”
“Well, I thought I saw it,” Dunbar said gloomily. “I guess sometimes you’ve got the hope-fors so much it makes you imagine all sorts of things.”
Ross turned to Snipes, expecting Dunbar’s comment to provoke a philosophical treatise, but the crew foreman was immersed in his newspaper.
“What’s in your paper that’s got you so squinch eyed, Snipes?”
“They’ve got a big-to-do meeting about that park in two weeks,” Snipes said from behind his veil of newsprint. “According to Editor Webb here, the Secretary of the Interior of the whole U S of A will be there. Bringing John D. Rockefeller’s own personal pettifogger with him too. Says they’re coming to make Boston Lumber and Harris Mineral Company sell their land or face eviction.”
“Think they’ll be able to do that?” Dunbar asked.
“It’ll be a battle royal,” Snipes said, “not a smidgen of doubt about that.”
“They won’t beat them,” Ross said. “If it was just Buchanan and Wilkie they might, but not Harris and Pemberton, and especially not her.”
“We better hope that’s the way of it,” Dunbar said. “If this camp gets shut down we’ll be in the worst kind of fix. We’ll be riding the boxcars sure enough.”
“JUST Albright and Rockefeller’s lawyer,” Pemberton replied that evening as he and Serena prepared for bed. “Albright wanted no state politicians at the meeting. He said even with Webb and Kephart there we’ll still have a five to four advantage.”
“Good, we’ll get this settled, once and for all,” Serena said, her eyes settling on the Saratoga trunk at the foot of the bed, a trunk whose contents Pemberton had yet to see. “It jeopardizes more important matters.”
Serena took off her jodphurs and placed them in the chifforobe. Overhead, a few tentative taps announced the hard rain promised all afternoon by clouds draped low across Noland Mountain. The rain steadily picked up pace, soon galloping on the tin roof. Pemberton began to undress, reminded himself to get his hunting boots from the hall closet. Don’t fret none if it rains tonight, Galloway had told him that afternoon. Momma says it’ll clear up by morning. She’s counting on that as much as we are.
Serena turned from the chifforobe.
“What’s the bard of Appalachia like, in person?”
“Stubborn and cranky as his buddy Sheriff McDowell,” Pemberton said. “Kephart told me at the first meeting how it pleased him to know I’d die and eventually my coffin would rot, and how then I’d be nourishing the earth instead of destroying it.”
“Which is one more thing he’s wrong about,” Serena said. “I’ll make sure of that, for both of us. What else?”
“He’s also overly fond of the bottle, not nearly the saint the newspapers and politicians make of him.”
“Though they have to make him appear so,” Serena said. “He’s their new Muir.”
“Galloway says we’ll be going right past Kephart’s cabin tomorrow, so you could see the great man himself.”
“I’ll meet him soon enough,” Serena said. “Besides, Campbell and I are putting down the stobs for the new spur line.”
Serena stepped out of her undergarments. As Pemberton gazed at her, he wondered if it was possible that a time would come when he’d look at her naked and not be stunned. He couldn’t imagine such a moment, believed instead that Serena’s beauty was like certain laws of math and physics, fixed and immutable. She walks in beauty. Words recited years ago in a voice dry as the chalk dust choking the classroom’s air, part of a poem Pemberton had paid attention to
only so he might laugh at its sentiment. But now he knew the truth of the words, for Serena’s beauty was like that—something the world opened a guarded space around so it could go forth unsullied.
After they’d coupled, Pemberton listened to Serena’s soft breaths mingle with the rain hitting the roof. She slept well now, in a deepness beyond dreams, she claimed. It had been that way since she’d stayed in the stable with the eagle, as though the nightmares had come those two sleepless nights and, with no dream to enter, gone elsewhere, the way ghosts might who find a house they’ve haunted suddenly vacated.
The rain stopped during the night, the sky blue and cloudless by midday. Scouting, not hunting, Galloway had called their trip, searching for tracks and scat, a fresh-killed deer carcass with its heart ripped out, but Pemberton took his rifle from the hall closet, just in case.
When Pemberton walked down to the office, he found not only Galloway on the porch but also Galloway’s mother. She wore the same austere dress as last summer and a black satin bonnet that made her face recede as if peering from a cave mouth. The old woman’s shoes were cobbled out of a reddish wood that looked to be cedar. Comical looking, but something else as well, Pemberton realized, a disconcerting otherness that was part of these mountains and would always be inexplicable to him.
“She likes to get out on a pretty day like this,” Galloway explained. “Says it warms her bones and gets her blood to flowing good.”
Pemberton assumed getting out meant the office porch, but when he walked over to the Packard, the old woman shuffled toward the car as well.
“Surely she’s not going with us?”
“Not on the traipsing part,” Galloway said, “just the riding.”
Galloway did not give Pemberton a chance to argue with the arrangement. He opened the Packard’s back passenger door and helped his mother in before seating himself beside Pemberton.
They drove toward Waynesville a few miles before turning west. The old woman pressed her face close to the window, but Pemberton couldn’t imagine what her blighted eyes could possibly see. They shared the road with families returning from church, most walking, some in wagons. As Pemberton passed these highlanders, they characteristically lowered their eyes so as not to meet his, a seeming act of deference belied by their refusal to sidle to the road’s shoulder so he might get around them easier. When they drove into Bryson City, Galloway pointed at a storefront, SHULER DRUGSTORE AND APOTHECARY lettered red on the window.