by Ron Rash
For a few moments the doctor stared at the infant intently. Then he turned and handed what filled his hands to the attendant.
“Put it over there,” the doctor said, and motioned to a table in the corner.
The doctor turned back to Serena but not before asking the nurse how much blood Pemberton had given.
“Over 500 cc’s. Should I try and stop him?”
The doctor looked at Pemberton, who shook his head.
“I guess not. He’ll be too weak before long to squeeze it anyway, or he’ll pass out.”
As the doctor wove dark thread through Serena’s skin, Pemberton turned his head toward her. Pemberton listened to her soft inhalations and matched his breathing precisely to hers. He became lightheaded, no longer able to focus enough to read the clock or follow the words passing between the doctor and nurse. Another group of children ran out onto the grammar school’s playground, but their shouts soon evaporated into silence. Pemberton squeezed the pump, his hand unable to close completely around it. He listened to his and Serena’s one breath, even as he felt the needle being pulled from his forearm, heard the wheels of Serena’s gurney as it rolled away.
PEMBERTON still lay on the gurney when he awoke. The doctor loomed above, an orderly beside him.
“Let us help you up,” the doctor said, and the two men raised Pemberton to a sitting position.
He felt the room darken briefly, then lighten.
“Where’s Serena?”
The words came out halting and raspy, as if he’d not spoken in days. Pemberton looked at the clock, its hands gradually coming into focus. Had one been on the wall, he would have checked a calendar to discern the day and month. Pemberton closed his eyes a few moments and raised his forefinger and thumb to the bridge of his nose. He opened his eyes and things seemed clearer.
“Where’s Serena?” he asked again.
“In the other wing.”
Pemberton gripped the gurney’s edge and prepared to stand, but the orderly placed a firm hand on his knee.
“Is she alive?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Your wife’s constitution is quite remarkable, so unless something unforeseen occurs, she’ll recover.”
“But the child is dead,” Pemberton said.
“Yes, and there’s another matter I’ll need to discuss with you and your wife later.”
“Tell me now,” Pemberton said.
“Your wife’s uterus. It’s lacerated through the cervix.”
“And that means what?”
“That she can have no more children.”
Pemberton did not speak for a few moments.
“What was the child’s sex?”
“A boy.”
“Had we gotten here earlier, would the child have survived?”
“That doesn’t matter now,” the doctor said.
“It matters,” Pemberton said.
“Yes, the child probably would have survived.”
The orderly and doctor helped Pemberton off the gurney. The room wavered a few moments, then steadied.
“You gave a lot of blood,” the doctor said. “Too much. You’ll pass out if you’re not careful.”
“Which room?”
“Forty-one,” the doctor said. “The orderly can go with you.”
“I can find it,” Pemberton said, and walked slowly toward the door, past the corner table where nothing now lay.
He stepped out of the emergency room and into the corridor. The hospital’s two wings were connected by the main lobby, and as Pemberton passed through he saw Campbell sitting by the doorway. Campbell rose from his chair as Pemberton approached.
“Leave the car here for me and take the train back to camp,” Pemberton said. “Make sure the crews are working and then go by the saw mill to make sure there are no problems there.”
Campbell took the Packard’s keys from his pocket and gave them to Pemberton. As Pemberton turned to leave, Campbell spoke.
“If there’s someone asks how Mrs. Pemberton and the young one are doing, what do you want me to say?”
“That Mrs. Pemberton is going to be fine.”
Campbell nodded but did not move.
“What else?” Pemberton asked.
“Doctor Cheney, he rode into town with me.”
“Where is he now?” Pemberton asked, trying to keep his voice level.
“I don’t know. He said he was going to get Mrs. Pemberton some flowers, but he ain’t come back.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Almost two hours.”
“I’ve got some business with him I’ll settle later,” Pemberton said.
“You’re not the only one,” Campbell said as he reached to open the door.
Pemberton stopped him with a firm hand on the shoulder.
“Who else?”
“Galloway. He come by an hour ago asking where Doctor Cheney was.”
Pemberton took his hand off Campbell’s shoulder, and the overseer went out the door. Pemberton walked across the lobby and up the opposite corridor, reading the black door numbers until he found Serena’s room.
She was still unconscious when he came in, so Pemberton pulled a chair beside her bed and waited. As late morning and the afternoon passed, he listened to her breath, watched the gradual return of color to her face. The drugs kept Serena in a drifting stupor, her eyes occasionally opening but unfocused. A nurse brought Pemberton lunch and then supper. Only when the last sunlight had drained from the room’s one window did Serena’s eyes open and find Pemberton’s. She appeared cognizant, which surprised the nurse because the morphine drip was still in Serena’s arm. The nurse checked the drip to make sure it was operating and then left. Pemberton turned in his chair to face her. He slid his right hand under Serena’s wrist and let his fingers clasp around it like a bracelet.
She turned her head to see him better, her words a whisper.
“The child is dead?”
“Yes.”
Serena studied Pemberton’s face a few moments.
“What else?”
“We won’t be able to have another.”
Serena remained silent for almost a minute, and Pemberton wondered if the drugs were taking hold again. Then Serena took a breath, her mouth kept open as though about to speak as well, but she did not speak, not at that moment. Instead, Serena closed her eyes and slowly exhaled, and as she did her body seemed to settle deeper into the mattress. Her eyes opened.
“It’s like my body knew all along,” she said.
Pemberton did not ask what she meant. Serena closed her eyes a few moments, opened them slowly.
“And yet…”
Pemberton nodded and squeezed Serena’s wrist, felt again the pulse of their blood. Serena’s eyes shifted to Pemberton’s bruised inner elbow, the square of gauze taped to it.
“Your blood merged with mine,” Serena said. “That’s all we ever hoped for anyway.”
PART III
Twenty-two
SHE LEFT THE HOSPITAL SOONER THAN THE doctors or Pemberton wished. I need to be back at the camp, she told them. Serena was carried out of the hospital the same way she’d been carried in. Campbell and Pemberton lifted her into the train’s coach car, the gurney settled on a foot-thick pallet of blankets to cushion her against the train’s jarring. When the train got to camp, they carried her to the house. It was supper time and the workers dropped their forks and knives and gathered on the porch. Most watched from a distance, but some, mainly crew bosses she’d worked with, ventured closer, their hats off as the gurney passed before them. Serena was pale but her gray eyes were open and staring at a sky she’d not seen in seven days. The workers watched in silence as Campbell and Pemberton carried her through the camp to the house. They watched in wonder as well, especially men whose mothers and sisters and wives had died from what Serena survived.
Vaughn opened the door to the house, and Galloway and Pemberton carried her into the bedroom. They eased Serena into the bed, and Pemberton shut
the curtains in hopes it would help her sleep. Early evening was the time the workers played and sang their music, or, even tired as they were, sometimes arranged baseball games and wrestling matches, gathered around an outbreak of fisticuffs. But this evening the camp was hushed, oddly vigilant, like the afterward of a violent storm.
Pemberton checked the cotton gauze over her wound for any drainage of blood or jaundiced fluid, gave Serena water and the Feosol the doctor prescribed for her anemia. As the days passed, Pemberton fed her a soft diet of eggs and pureed meat until she could lift the fork and spoon herself. He emptied the bedpan and tried, vainly, to get Serena to take the codeine for her soreness. She grew stronger each day, soon leaving the bed to use the bathroom and to make short walks around the house while Pemberton held her arm. Serena insisted he continue working, especially in pursuing investors, but Pemberton did so only after moving his office into the front room. While Serena lay in the darkened bedroom, Campbell ran the day-to-day business from the office with his usual efficiency, Vaughn taking over lesser duties.
All the while Galloway remained on the porch, allowing no trespass, taking inside himself what food or medicine or well wishes were brought. Come evening, he made a pallet in front of the door. One night Pemberton looked out the window and saw Galloway asleep on the pallet, wearing the same clothes he’d worn since the day Serena had come home. Galloway’s knees were tucked tight to his stomach, head bowed inward, the nubbed wrist pressed childlike to his mouth while his hand gripped the handle of a sprung switchblade knife.
As she strengthened, Serena talked about Brazil, about going there as soon as they finished in Jackson County. Obsessed with it, Pemberton believed, especially after Pemberton had found potential investors in Asheville. Men who would be interested only in local investments, Pemberton told her, but Serena believed otherwise. I can convince them, she said. As Pemberton sat in the darkened bedroom, his chair pulled close to the bed, Serena spoke of Brazil’s untapped resources, its laissez-faire attitude toward businesses, how she and Pemberton should go there and scout tracts as soon as the Jackson County camp was up and running. Not even an empire, Pemberton, a world, she told him, and spoke with such fervor Pemberton at first feared an infection might have set in and raised her temperature. What reservations Pemberton had, he kept to himself. They did not speak of the dead child.
By the second week Serena was out of bed and sitting in a chair, sending Vaughn out on horseback to monitor the work crews’ progress and relay messages back and forth from the foremen. Documents and statistics and reports about Brazil, which Pemberton had not even known existed, were exhumed from Serena’s Saratoga trunk. Also, a wax-engraved map of South America, which, once unfolded, consumed half the front room. The map covered the floor for days, a cane back chair set upon it so Serena could peruse its expanse more diligently, the chair occasionally lifted like a chess piece and set back down on a different square of the map.
Something planned for years, Pemberton now realized. Serena sent telegrams and letters to sources and contacts in Washington and South America. Possible investors as far away as Chicago and Quebec were contacted as well. Serena did all this with a frenetic alacrity, as if her mind had to make up for her body’s inactivity. Minutes and hours seemed to move quicker, as if Serena had wrenched time itself into a higher gear. At the end of the second week, Serena insisted Pemberton return to the office where, as efficient as Campbell was, invoices and work orders and payrolls piled up.
With the help of the mild spring, they were on schedule to finish in Cove Creek Valley by October, so an increasing number of workers were being sent east to Jackson County to set down rail lines and raise buildings for the new camp. Harris had his men in Jackson County as well, teams led by geologists making exploratory sorties into cliffs and creek banks. Harris was tight-lipped about what these men searched for, but he’d also bought an adjacent hundred acres that enclosed the upper watershed. These mountains are like the finest ladies, Harris told Pemberton. They won’t give you want you want until you spend a lot of time and money on them.
On Pemberton’s first Saturday back in the office, a foreman drove over from the saw mill with his payroll ledger. Pemberton set a fountain pen and box of envelopes on his desk, opened the safe and pulled out a tray of one-and five-dollar bills, a cloth bag holding rolls of quarters and dimes and nickels. When Pemberton opened the ledger, he saw a new name printed on the last line. Jacob Ballard Age fifteen. After a few moments, Pemberton raised his eyes to the top of the ledger. He wrote a name on an envelope, placed two fives and two ones inside. But even as he sealed the envelope, Pemberton’s eyes drifted to the bottom of the page, unable to shake the sensation of seeing the child’s first name in print. He studied the five letters, the way the raised J and b shaped the word to look like a bowl waiting to be filled. Minutes passed until, for the first time since Serena’s miscarriage, Pemberton took the photograph album from the bottom drawer. He set it beside the ledger and opened it to the last two pages. The photograph of himself as a two-year-old was on the left, but it was the photograph on the opposite page that held his attention. Pemberton eased the ledger closer so Jacob and the child’s photograph lay side by side.
THAT afternoon Snipes’ crew was cutting on Big Fork Ridge when the main cable’s tail block broke free from a stump. Snipes believed that if the skidder crew got a break his men should as well, so they sat on the logs they’d just cut. A large woodpecker glided low overhead, a white lining on the black underwings, its round head tufted a brilliant red. The bird flapped its wide wings once and vanished into the uncut trees.
Henryson looked wistfully toward the woods where the bird had disappeared.
“Wish he’d have dropped off one of them head feathers,” he said.
Snipes’ crew was a bright-spangled assemblage now, for after Dunbar’s death all to varying degrees had adopted the heraldry of their foreman. Henryson stuffed his hatband with goldfinch and jay and cardinal feathers to create a variegated winged halo around his head while Stewart wore green patches on his shoulders like chevrons and a white handkerchief sewn onto his bib, crayoned in its center a smudgy red cross. Ross bore a single patch of orange across his crotch, though an act of derision or belief no one but he knew. Snipes himself had further brightened his wardrobe by replacing his leather bootlaces with orange dynamite wire.
Most of the men rolled cigarettes and smoked while they waited. Snipes took his pipe and glasses from his bib before pulling a section of the Asheville Citizen from his overalls’ back pocket. Snipes set the newspaper on his lap and took off his glasses, wiped the inner rims carefully with his handkerchief before perusing the page.
“Says here they still ain’t got no suspects in the recent demise of Doctor Cheney,” Snipes said. “The high sheriff in Asheville argues that some hobo hanging around the train station done it and then hopped the next freight out of town. He figures they’ll likely never catch the perpetrator.”
“Didn’t the high sheriff find it kindly curious that hobo didn’t take the train ticket to Kansas City they found in Doctor Cheney’s pocket, nor his billfold for that matter?” Henryson asked. “Or why a hobo would sit the good doctor in a bathroom stall with his tongue cut out and a peppermint in each hand.”
“Or figure the fellow who’s driving the very car the late doctor used to drive might be the least bit involved?” Ross added.
“No sir,” Snipes said. “That’s what the law calls immaterial evidence.”
Ross raised his head and looked upward at the blue sky, let a slow drift of smoke rise from his pursed mouth before speaking.
“I doubt they’ll be looking for any other kind of evidence since the sheriff’s on the Pemberton Lumber Company payroll.”
“You mean the high sheriff in Asheville, not Sheriff McDowell?” Stewart asked.
“That’s right,” Ross said.
“I don’t think Sheriff McDowell can be bought,” Stewart said.
“We’ll find out so
on enough,” Ross replied. “These folks seem to be picking up steam far as their killings. Didn’t bother to make this one look like no accident neither, the way they done with Buchanan. They’ll be needing every lawman in this state on their payroll at the rate they’re going.”
“They ain’t never got to McDowell before, and we all know they’ve tried. I don’t think they will now,” Henryson said with uncharacteristic optimism.
The men paused to listen to a staccato tapping coming from the deeper woods. Henryson cocked his head slightly to better gauge the bird’s location, but the tapping ceased and the woods grew silent.
“Got anything new about that park in your paper?” Ross asked Snipes.
“Just that Colonial Townsend did sell his land to the guvment,” Snipes said. “The paper gives Townsend and the park folks both a big huzzah for that.”
“That’s bad news for my brother-in-law,” Henryson said, shaking his head and looking west toward Tennessee. “He’s been a sawyer for Townsend for nigh on ten years. Him and my sister got four young ones to feed.”
“Is he a good worker?” Snipes asked.
“He can handle a axe good as any man I know.”
“I’ll put in a word for him with Campbell,” Snipes said, “but so many folks is perched on them commissary steps now you about have to draw lots for a seat. They’s workers already herding at the new camp and it not even open yet.”
“Who told you that?” Henryson asked.