Serena

by Ron Rash

  “I’m beginning to think us Harmons don’t do very well when it comes to love,” Rachel said. “It didn’t for Daddy and Mama, and it didn’t for me.”

  “Young as you are you could yet be surprised,” Widow Jenkins said, “and I expect someday you probably will be.”

  For a few moments neither of them spoke.

  “Do you know where my mother went when she left? Daddy never told me, even when I asked.”

  “No,” Widow Jenkins said. “Your daddy met her in Alabama when he was in the army. Maybe she went there, but I don’t know for sure. The one time your daddy talked about it, he said your mama never said where she was going. All she told him was that life up here was too hard.”

  “Hard how?”

  “The farm land being so rocky and hilly, the long winters and the loneliness. But she told him the hardest thing was the way the mountains shut out the sun. She said living in this cove was like living in a coal mine.”

  “Did she want to take me with her?”

  “She tried. She told your daddy if he really loved you that he’d let you go, because you’d have a better life if you left here. A lot of folks argued against him for not letting you. They claimed what she said, that if he really loved you he’d have let you go. They thought he did it to spite your mother.”

  Widow Jenkins paused and took off her glasses, rubbed them on her black skirt. It was the first time Rachel had seen the old woman without them. Eyes that had appeared pop-eyed now receded into her face. Widow Jenkins had never looked younger than at this moment—the eyes usually fogged by the thick spectacles a bright blue, the lashes long, the high-boned cheeks smoother than when the gold rims creased them. She was my age once, Rachel thought with a kind of wonder.

  “Why do you think he wanted me to stay with him?” Rachel asked.

  “I don’t like to speak any ill about the dead,” the old woman said after a few moments. “All I’ll say is that he had a temper and he could hold a grudge, like every Harmon I’ve ever known. Your granddaddy was the same way. But your father loved you. I never doubted that and you shouldn’t either. I’ll tell you something else I think. It would have been wrong to take you away from these mountains, because if you’re born here they’re a part of you. No other place will ever feel right.”

  Widow Jenkins put her glasses back on. She turned to Rachel and smiled.

  “Maybe that’s just an old woman’s silly notion, about the mountains I mean. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. How can I if I’ve never been away from them?”

  “Well, I never have either, but you’re young and young folks these days get restless,” Widow Jenkins said, slowly lifting herself from the steps, “so if you ever do find out you’ll have to let me know.”

  Widow Jenkins bent down and tousled Jacob’s hair.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, buster.”

  After Widow Jenkins left, Rachel lingered a few more moments on the porch. The sun had fallen behind the mountains now, and the cove seemed to settle deeper into the earth, the way an animal might burrow into leaves to make a nest before it slept. All the while, the thickening shadows made the mountains appear to fold inward. Rachel tried to imagine what living here had been like for her mother, but it was impossible, because what had felt like being shut in to her mother felt like a sheltering to Rachel, as if the mountains were huge hands, hard but gentle hands that cupped around you, protecting and comforting, the way she imagined God’s hands would be. She supposed Widow Jenkins was right, that you had to be born here.

  Rachel lifted Jacob into her arms.

  “Time for us to eat some supper,” she told the child.

  Twenty-one

  MEN SEEKING WORK CAME TO THE CAMP IN A steady procession now. Some camped out in the stumps and slash, waiting days for a maimed or killed worker to be brought from the woods in hopes of being his replacement. These and others more transient gathered six mornings a week on the commissary porch, each in his way trying to distinguish himself from the others when Campbell walked among them. Some went shirtless to show off powerful physiques while others held axes brought from farms or other timber camps, ready at a moment’s notice to begin chopping. Still others carried Bibles and read them with great attentiveness to show they were not blackguards or reds but Godly men. Some bore tattered pieces of paper testifying to their talent and reliability as loggers or discharge papers for military service, and all brought with them stories of hungry children and siblings, sick parents and sick wives that Campbell listened to with sympathy, though how much such stories influenced his choices none of the workers could discern.

  Serena continued to go out with the lead crews each morning. Galloway trailed behind her, the nubbed arm dangling like rotten fruit clinging to a branch. As Serena moved from crew to crew, no man spoke to her of the coming child, and none let his gaze settle on her stomach. Yet all in their way acknowledged her waxing belly, some offering dipperfuls of spring water, hats holding raspberries and blackberries, ferns twined around chewy combs of sourwood honey. Others gave Galloway pint mason jars filled with spring tonics made of milkweed and sassafras, mandrake and valerian root. One logger offered a double-beveled broad axe to place under Serena’s birth bed to cut the pain, still another a bloodstone to prevent hemorrhaging. Foremen came running when Serena appeared so she wouldn’t have time or need to dismount. On warm days, the crew bosses led the Arabian into uncut trees so Serena would be shaded.

  She often drank the spring water, occasionally ate some of the proffered berries and honey. Galloway placed the tonics in his tote sack. Whether Serena drank them none knew. As Galloway followed Serena from crew to crew, the jars clinked against each other softly, like wind chimes.

  Snipes’ crew worked alone, having ascended to the summit of Shanty Ridge. As they took a morning break, the men watched Serena moving among the crews to the south. Stewart shook his head in dismay.

  “If Preacher McIntyre was here he’d say them carrying on like that is nothing short of idolatry.”

  “He surely would,” Snipes agreed. “He any better, McIntyre I mean?”

  “A tad,” Stewart said. “Enough that his wife ain’t let them doctors electrocute him.”

  “That’s too bad,” Ross said. “I was hoping we could fling him in the river and he’d shock us up a mess of catfish. Bring them up the same way you do cranking a telephone.”

  Snipes unfolded his newspaper and perused the front page.

  “What’s the scuttlebutt, Snipes?” Henryson asked.

  “Well, them park folks seem to be honing in on Colonial Townsend’s land over in Tennessee. Says here they’ve about reached an agreement.”

  “That tract’s big as the one they got Champion to sell them, ain’t it?” Henryson asked.

  “Says here it is.”

  “I figured the Pembertons to have bought it,” Henryson said. “They was hot after it for a while there till Harris steered them over to Jackson County.”

  “I heard Harris has got him some geologists over there in Jackson trying to root up a big copper vein,” Stewart said.

  “Copper?” Henryson said. “I heard it was coal he was looking for.”

  “I been hearing near everything from silver and gold to Noah’s ark to the Big Rock Candy Mountain,” Ross said.

  “What do you think it is?” Stewart asked Snipes.

  “Well,” Snipes said reflectively. “It could be a quest for one of the world’s immortal treasures, as many a rich man would wish to have his name recorded in the anus of history, but knowing Harris I’m not of a mind to think he’d care much about that.”

  Snipes paused and picked up a pebble, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger as he might a coin he was unsure he wanted to spend.

  “What I’m thinking is that, at least as the crow flies, Franklin ain’t but thirty miles away,” Snipes concluded. “I’d say that ought to fill in enough of the puzzle pieces for you to figure the rest.”

  The men
were silent for a few moments. Snipes returned to his newspaper as the others continued to look southward. They watched as Serena followed the new spur line into the woods.

  “I heard she’s just eating bloody beef for her breakfast and supper,” Stewart said. “To make that young one of hers all the fiercer. And that ain’t the half of it. Come the night she bares her belly to the moon, soaking in all its power.”

  “I’d say somebody’s bull-ragging you, Stewart,” Henryson said.

  “Maybe so,” Ross interjected, “but if somebody told you a year ago she’d train a eagle to go flitting around picking up timber rattlers long as your arm you’d have thought that a rusty too.”

  “That’s true,” Henryson said. “We’ve not seen the like of her in these hills before.”

  IT was in the eighth month of her pregnancy that Serena awoke with pain in her lower abdomen. Pemberton found Doctor Cheney in the caboose ministering to a worker who had a three-inch splinter embedded in the sclera of his eye. The doctor used a pair of tweezers to work the splinter free, washed the wound with disinfectant and sent the man back to his crew.

  “Probably something has not lain well on her stomach,” Doctor Cheney said as they walked to the house.

  Galloway waited on the porch, Serena’s horse tacked and tethered to the lower banister.

  “Mrs. Pemberton will be staying in today,” Pemberton told him.

  Galloway made no reply but gazed intently at Cheney’s heavy black physician’s bag as Pemberton led the doctor into the house.

  Serena sat on the bed edge. Her face was pale, gray eyes seemingly focused on something far away, her shallow breaths such as one might use while holding something fragile or dangerous. Serena’s peignoir lay open, the dark-blue silk rippling back to reveal her rounded belly.

  “Lie down on your side,” Doctor Cheney said, and took a stethoscope from his bag. The doctor pressed the instrument to Serena’s stomach, listening attentively a few moments. He nodded to himself and lifted the bright-steel bell from Serena’s skin, freed the stethoscope’s prongs so the instrument hung around his neck.

  “All is well, madam,” Doctor Cheney said. “It’s normal for women to be susceptible to minor, sometimes even nonexistent pains, especially when with child. What you’re feeling is probably a mild gastrointestinal upset, or to put it less delicately, excessive gas.”

  “Mrs. Pemberton is no malingerer,” Pemberton said as Serena slowly raised herself to a sitting position.

  Doctor Cheney placed the stethoscope back in his physician’s bag, pinched its metal snap closed.

  “I don’t mean to imply such. The mind is its own place, as the poet tells us, and has its own peculiar reality. What one feels one feels.”

  Pemberton watched Cheney flatten his hand as if preparing to pat his patient on the shoulder, but the physican wisely reconsidered and let the hand remain by his side.

  “I assure you that she will be better by tomorrow,” Doctor Cheney said when they stepped back out on the porch.

  “Is there anything that will help until then?” Pemberton asked, nodding at Galloway sitting on the steps. “Galloway can go to the commissary, to town if necessary.”

  “Yes,” Doctor Cheney said, addressing Galloway. “Go to the commissary and fetch your mistress a bag of peppermints. I find they do wonders when my stomach is sour.”

  Serena stayed in bed all day. She insisted Pemberton go to the office, but he did so only when she agreed to have Galloway stay in the front room. When Pemberton returned to check on her at noon and then later in the evening, Serena told him she felt better. But she remained pale. They went to bed early, and as they settled into sleep Serena pressed her back and hips into Pemberton’s chest and groin, took his right hand and placed it on the undercurve of her stomach as if to help hold the baby in place. Music filtered up from the dining hall porch. Pemberton drifted to sleep as a worker sang of a woman named Mary who walked the wild moors.

  The next morning Pemberton was awakened by Serena sitting up in the bed, the covers pushed back to her feet, left hand pressed between her legs. When Pemberton asked what was wrong, Serena did not speak. Instead, she raised the hand to him as if making a vow, her fingers and palm slick with blood. Pemberton jerked on pants and boots, a shirt he didn’t bother to button. He wrapped Serena in the peignoir and lifted her into his arms, snatching a towel from the rack as he passed the bathroom. The train was about to make an early run to the saw mill and men had collected around the tracks. Pemberton yelled at several loitering workers to uncouple all the cars from the Shay except for the coach. Mud holes pocked the ground, but Pemberton stumbled right through them as men scurried to separate the cars and the fireman frantically shoveled coal into the tender. Campbell rushed from the office and helped get Serena into the coach and lain lengthways on a seat. Pemberton told Campbell to call the hospital and have a doctor and ambulance waiting at the depot, then to drive Pemberton’s Packard there. Campbell left the coach car and Pemberton and Serena were alone amidst the shouts of workers and the Shay engine’s gathering racket.

  Pemberton sat on the seat edge and pressed a towel against Serena’s groin to try and stanch the bleeding. Serena’s eyes were closed, her face fading to the pallor of marble as the engineer placed his hand on the reverser, knocked off the brakes and opened the throttle. Pemberton listened to the train make what seemed its endless gradations toward motion, steam entering the throttle valve into the admission pipes and into the cylinders before the push of the pistons against the rod, and the rod turning the crankshaft and then the line shaft turning through the universal joints and the pinion gears meshing with the bull gears. Only then the wheels ever so slowly coming alive.

  Pemberton closed his eyes and imagined the engine’s meshing metal akin to the inner workings of a clock, bringing back time that had been suspended since he’d seen the blood on Serena’s hand. When the train gained a steady rhythm, Pemberton opened his eyes and looked out the window, and it was as if the train crossed the bottom of a deep clear lake. Everything behind appeared slowed by the density of water—Campbell entering the office to call the hospital, workers coming out of the dining hall to watch the engine and coach car pull away, Galloway emerging from the stable, his stubbed arm flopping uselessly as he ran after the train.

  The Shay began its ascent up McClure Ridge, the valley falling away behind them. Once over the summit, the train gained speed, dense woods now surrounding the tracks. Pemberton remembered what Serena had once said about only the present being real. Nothing is but what is now, he told himself as he held Serena’s wrist, felt her pulse fluttering weakly beneath the skin. As the train crossed the declining mountains toward Waynesville, Pemberton pressed his lips against the limp wrist. Stay alive, he whispered, as though speaking to what blood remained in her veins.

  By the time the train pulled into the depot, the towel was saturated. Serena hadn’t made a sound the whole way. Saving her strength to stay alive, Pemberton believed, but now she’d lapsed into unconsciousness. Two attendants in white carried Serena off the train and into the waiting ambulance. Pemberton and the hospital doctor got in as well. The doctor, a man in his early eighties, lifted the soggy towel and cursed.

  “Why in God’s name wasn’t she brought sooner,” the doctor said, and pressed the towel back between Serena’s legs. “She’s going to need blood, a lot of it and fast. What’s her blood type?”

  Pemberton did not know and Serena was past telling anyone.

  “Same as mine,” Pemberton said.

  Once in the hospital emergency room, Pemberton and Serena lay side by side on metal gurneys, thin feather pillows cushioning their heads. The doctor rolled up Pemberton’s sleeve and shunted his forearm with the needle, then did the same to Serena. They were connected by three feet of rubber hose, the olive-shaped pump blooming in the tubing’s center. The doctor squeezed the pump. Satisfied, he motioned for the nurse to take it and stand in the narrow space between the gurneys.

 
“Every thirty seconds,” the doctor told her, “any faster and the vein can collapse.”

  The doctor stepped around the gurney to minister to Serena as the nurse squeezed the rubber pump, checked the wall clock until half a minute passed, and squeezed again.

  Pemberton raised his shunted arm and gripped the nurse’s wrist with his hand.

  “I’ll pump the blood.”

  “I don’t think…”

  Pemberton tightened his grip, enough that the nurse gasped. She opened her hand and let him take the pump.

  Pemberton watched the clock, and when fifteen seconds passed he squeezed the rubber. He did so again, listening for the hiss and suck of his blood passing through the tube. But there was no sound, just as there was no way to see his blood coursing through the dark-gray tubing. Each time he squeezed, Pemberton closed his eyes so he could imagine the blood pulsing from his arm into Serena’s, from there up through the vein and into the right and left atria of her heart. Pemberton imagined the heart itself, a shriveled thing slowly expanding as it refilled with blood.

  A grammar school was across the road, and through the emergency room’s open window Pemberton heard the shouts of children at recess. An attendant entered the room and helped lift Serena’s legs and hold them apart as the doctor performed his pelvic exam. Pemberton closed his eyes again and squeezed the pump. He no longer checked the clock but tightened his hand as soon as he felt the rubber fill with blood. A bell rang and the sounds of the children dimmed as they reentered the school. The doctor stepped away from Serena and nodded at the attendant to lower Serena’s legs.

  “Get the mayo stand and a lap pack,” the doctor told the attendant.

  The nurse fitted a mask over Serena’s face and dripped chloroform onto the cloth and wire. The attendant rolled the stand beside Serena’s bed, opened the white cotton sheeting to reveal the sterilized steel. Pemberton watched the doctor lift the scalpel and open Serena’s body from pubis to navel. Pemberton squeezed the pump again as the doctor’s right hand disappeared into the incision, lifted up the purplish blue umbilical cord for a moment before resettling it. Then the doctor dipped both hands into Serena’s belly, raised something so gray and phlegmy it appeared to be made not of flesh but moist clay. Blood daubing the body was the only indication to Pemberton it could have ever held life. The umbilical cord lay coiled on the baby’s chest. Pemberton did not know if it was still connected to Serena.