Serena

by Ron Rash

  “You may be right, Mrs. Pemberton,” Webb said, “yet someone obviously counted on the fact that Harris would betray a partnership for his own self-interest.”

  “I think betrayal is a bit strong for what he did,” Pemberton said.

  “I don’t,” Serena said.

  Webb waved his hand dismissively.

  “Regardless, Colonel Townsend has accepted Albright’s offer, and all the documents have been signed. That land was the lynchpin, you know. The whole project could have easily fallen through without it, but now all the parkland on the Tennessee side has been bought.”

  “Then that should be enough,” Pemberton said. “You and your fellows can have the park in Tennessee and leave North Carolina alone.”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way, Mr. Pemberton,” Webb said. “This frees us to turn all our attention to North Carolina. With two-thirds of the proposed park land secured, eminent domain will be even easier to enact, maybe as soon as next fall from what Secretary Albright’s told me.”

  “We’ll have every tree in the tract cut down by then,” Serena said.

  “Perhaps,” Webb admitted, “and it may take forty or fifty years before that forest will grow back. But when it does, it will be part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.”

  “Pemberton and I will have logged a whole country by then,” Serena said.

  For a few moments no one spoke. Pemberton looked for Harris and found him five seats away, laughing at some remark a young lady had made.

  “But not this land,” Webb replied. “As Cicero noted, ut sementem feceris ita metes.”

  “Do you know how Cicero died?” Serena said. “It’s certainly something a scribbler such as yourself should be familiar with.”

  “I’ve heard the story,” Webb said. “I’m not easily intimidated, Mrs. Pemberton, if that’s your intent.”

  “I don’t know the story,” Mrs. Webb said to Serena. “I’d prefer your threats be explained.”

  “Cicero made himself an enemy of Antony and Fulvia,” Serena replied. “He could have left Rome before they came to power, but he believed his golden words could protect him. As your husband is aware, they didn’t. Cicero’s head was displayed on the Rostra in the Roman Forum, where Fulvia took golden pins from her hair and pierced his tongue. She left them there until the head was tossed out to the dogs.”

  “A history lesson worth heeding,” Pemberton said to Webb.

  “No more so than how Antony himself died, Mr. Pemberton,” Webb replied.

  THE Pembertons did not get back to camp until one A.M., but Galloway was waiting on the front steps.

  “We won’t need to wake him after all,” Serena said when she saw Galloway.

  Pemberton turned off the engine. The light from the office porch was not enough to see Serena’s face as he spoke.

  “What Harris did, I’m not so sure we wouldn’t have done the same under those circumstances. And the money, we didn’t lose that much.”

  “He made us vulnerable,” Serena said. “It’s like an infection, Pemberton. If you don’t cauterize it, then it spreads. It won’t be that way in Brazil. Our investors will be a continent away.” Serena paused. “We should never have allowed it to be otherwise. Just us.”

  For a few moments neither spoke.

  “Isn’t that what we want?” Serena asked.

  “Yes,” Pemberton said after another pause. “You’re right.”

  “Whether it’s right wasn’t my question,” Serena said, her voice soft, something in it almost like sadness. “Is it what we want?”

  “Yes,” Pemberton said, glad the darkness concealed his face.

  Pemberton opened the car door and went on inside the house while Serena talked on the porch with Galloway. He poured himself a stout dram of bourbon and sat down in the Coxwell chair that faced the hearth. Though cool weather was still months away, a thick white oak log had been placed on the andirons, newspaper and kindling set around it. Serena’s voice filtered through the wall, the words muffled but the tone calm and measured as she told Galloway what she wanted done. Pemberton knew if he could see Serena’s face it would be just as placid, no different than if she were sending Galloway to Waynesville to mail a letter. He also realized something else, that Serena would be able to convince Lowenstein and Calhoun to invest in her Brazil venture. Like her husband, they would believe her capable of anything.

  Twenty-five

  BEFORE THE FIRST STRINGHOUSE HAD BEEN set on Bent Knob Ridge, the dining hall or train track or commissary built, an acre between Cove Creek and Noland Mountain had been set off for a graveyard. As if to acknowledge the easy transition between the quick and the dead in the timber camp, no gate led into the graveyard and no fence surrounded it. The only markers were four wooden stobs. By the time they’d rotted, enough mounds swelled the acre to make further delineation of boundaries unnecessary. Occasionally, a deceased worker would have his body taken from the valley to a family graveyard, but the majority were buried in camp. The timber that had brought them here and killed them, and now enclosed them, also marked most of the graves. These wooden crosses ranged in elaborateness from little more than two sticks tied together to finely sawn pieces of cherry and cedar with names and dates burned into the wood. On these graves, sometimes on the crosses themselves, the bereaved always placed some memento. A few evoked a fatalistic irony, the engraved axe handle that felled the tree that in turn felled the owner, an iron-spiked Kaiser’s helmet worn by a man struck by lightning. But most of what adorned the graves attempted to brighten the bleak landscape, not just wildflowers and holly wreaths but something more enduring—yellow-feathered hadicaws, Christmas ornaments, military medals trailing hued ribbons, on the grave itself bits of indigo glass and gum foil and rose quartz, which sometimes were cast over the loose soil like seeds for planting, other times set in elaborate patterns to spell what might be as discernable as a name or obscure as a petrograph.

  It was upon this graveyard that Ross and his fellows gazed as the crew took its afternoon break. Rain had fallen off and on all day, and the men were wet and muddy and cold, the low gray sky adding to their somberness.

  “The boy killed yesterday by that skidder boom,” Ross said. “There was a hell of a thing. In the ground with dirt over him before he’d worked a week. A fellow used to could count on at least a pay stub before getting killed.”

  “Or live long enough to shave something besides peach fuzz off his chin,” Henryson added. “That boy couldn’t have been no more than sixteen.”

  “I expect before long they’ll be fittin us for coffins ahead of time,” Ross said. “You’ll be planted in the ground before you’ve got a chance to stiffen up good.”

  “They ever find out who his people was?” Stewart asked. “That boy, I mean.”

  “No,” Henryson said. “Jumped off one of them boxcars coming through so there ain’t no telling. Wasn’t nothing in his billfold but a picture. An older woman, probably his mama.”

  “Nothing writ on the back of it?” Stewart asked.

  Henryson shook his head.

  “Nary a word.”

  “Your people not knowing where you’re buried,” Stewart said somberly. “That’s a terriblesome thing. There’ll be never a flower nor teardrop touch his grave.”

  “I heard back in the Confederate War them soldiers pinned their names and where they was from on their uniforms,” Henryson said. “Leastways their folks would know what happened to them.”

  Snipes, who’d been trying to unfold his sodden newspaper without tearing it, nodded in affirmation.

  “It’s the truth,” he said. “That’s how they knew where my grandpappy was buried. He got killed over in Tennessee fighting for the Lincolnites. They buried him right where he fell, but leastways his mama known where he was laid.”

  “Anything more on Harris in your newspaper?” Ross asked.

  Snipes delicately set the wide wings of the paper onto his lap.

  “There is. Says
here the county coroner still has the brass to claim Harris’ death was an accident, and that’s after Editor Webb’s article about the coroner being in the Pembertons’ pocket.”

  “Makes you wonder who’s next, don’t it?” Henryson said.

  “I’d not be surprised if Webb’s moved up a spot or two with that editorial,” Ross said. “I hope his house don’t have a second floor. He might take the same tumble Harris did.”

  The men grew silent. Stewart unfolded the oilcloth that kept his Bible dry and began reading. Ross reached into his pocket and brought out his tobacco pouch. He removed his rolling papers and found them sodden as Snipes’ newspaper. Henryson, who also was anticipating a cigarette, found his papers in the same condition.

  “I was at least hoping my lungs might be warm and dry a minute,” Ross complained.

  “You’d think there’d be one little pleasure you could have, even on a day scawmy as this one,” Henryson said. “You ain’t got no rolling papers, do you Stewart?”

  Stewart shook his head, not raising it from his Bible.

  “How about a few pages of your Bible there?” Ross asked. “That’d make a right fine rolling paper.”

  Stewart looked up incredulously.

  “It’d be sacrilegious do such a thing as that.”

  “I ain’t asking for pages where something important’s being said,” Ross entreated. “I’m just asking for two pages where there’s nothing but a bunch of so and so begot so and so. There ain’t nothing to be missed there.”

  “It still don’t seem right to me,” Stewart said.

  “I’d say it’s exactly the Christian thing to do,” Henryson countered, “helping out two miserable fellows who just want a smoke.”

  Stewart turned to Snipes.

  “What do you think?”

  “Well,” Snipes said. “Your leading scholars has argued for years you’ll find cause to do or not do most anything in that book, so I’m of a mind you got to pluck out the verse what trumps the rest of them.”

  “But which one’s that?” Stewart asked.

  “How about love thy neighbor,” Henryson quickly volunteered.

  Stewart bit his lower lip, deep in thought. Almost a minute passed before he opened the Bible and turned to Genesis. Stewart perused some pages before carefully tearing out two.

  ON the following Sunday afternoon, the Pembertons mounted their horses for a ride to Shanty Mountain. Pemberton hadn’t especially wanted to go, but as it was something Serena expected of him, he followed her to the barn. A sawyer had been killed by a snapped cable on Saturday morning, and as Pemberton and Serena made their way out of the camp, they encountered a funeral party proceeding toward the cemetery where an unfilled grave waited amid the stumps and slash. Leading the mourners was a youth wearing a black armband on his sleeve, in his hands a three-foot-tall oak cross. Two workers carrying the coffin came next, then a woman dressed in widow’s weeds. Reverend Bolick and a dozen men and women followed. Two of the men walked with shovels leaned on their right shoulders, like military men at arms. Reverend Bolick carried his Bible, its black weight held skyward as if to deflect the sun’s glare. Last came the women, bright-hued wildflowers in their hands. They moved through the blighted landscape slowly, looking as much like refugees as mourners.

  Pemberton and Serena traveled west, the land rising quickly, the air stingier. An hour later the Pembertons made the last switchback in the trail and stood atop Shanty Mountain. They had not spoken the whole way. Serena and Pemberton looked over the valley and ridges and surveyed what timber remained.

  “What Harris did, it was a needed reminder,” Serena said, breaking their silence.

  “A reminder of what?” Pemberton asked, still staring out at the valley.

  “That others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better.”

  Pemberton met her eyes, and saw within Serena’s gaze a stark unflinching certainty, as though to think otherwise was not just erroneous but unimaginable. She patted the Arabian’s flank and moved off a few paces to check the depth a steel cable had bitten into a hickory stump. Pemberton looked down at the camp. The sun shone full on the train tracks, and the linked metal gleamed. Soon it would be time to pull up the rails, starting with the spurs and moving backward to undo what they’d bolted to the land.

  Just remember you were warned, Mrs. Lowell had said that first night in Boston. Serena told him later she’d come only because she’d heard a timber man named Pemberton would be present at the party. She’d made a few inquiries to people in the business and decided it worth her time to meet him. After Mrs. Lowell had introduced them, Pemberton and Serena quickly left the others and talked on the verandah until midnight. Then she’d taken him to her apartment on Revere Street and he’d stayed until morning. Weren’t you afraid that first evening I’d think you a strumpet with such boldness, he’d teased her later. No, she’d replied. I had more faith in us than that. Pemberton remembered how Serena had not spoken as she unlocked the apartment’s door. She’d just stepped inside, leaving the door open. Serena had turned and fixed her eyes on him. Then, as now, they’d contained the utter certainty that Pemberton would follow her.

  AS they rode back, the sun’s last light embered on the western ridge tops. A breeze had cooled the air on Shanty, but as Pemberton and Serena made their descent the air became stagnant, humid. In the graveyard only one worker remained, methodically shoveling the last clods of dirt over the coffin.

  Serena and Pemberton ate their supper in the back room and alone, as they always did now, then returned to the house. At eleven Pemberton went into the back room to prepare for bed. Serena followed him but did not begin to undress. Instead, she sat in a chair across the room, watching him intently.

  “Why aren’t you undressing?” Pemberton asked.

  “I have one more thing to do tonight.”

  “It can’t wait till morning?”

  “No, I’d rather get it done tonight.”

  Serena rose from the ladderback chair, came over and kissed Pemberton full on the mouth.

  “Just us,” she whispered, her lips still touching his.

  Pemberton followed her to the door. As Serena stepped onto the porch, Galloway, seemingly unbidden, emerged from the shadows.

  Pemberton watched as they walked to the office. Vaughn came out a few moments later and brought Galloway’s car from behind the stable. When Galloway and Serena stepped onto the office porch, Pemberton saw something was in Serena’s hand. As she passed directly under the porch’s yellow light bulb, it gave off a silvery wink.

  Galloway handed Vaughn a pen and notepad, and the youth wrote on it, pausing a moment to make movements with his index finger when Galloway asked something further. Pemberton watched Serena and Galloway drive off, his gaze following the headlights as the automobile moved across the valley floor, then disappeared. Vaughn, who’d watched the car beams diminish as well, went inside the office and closed the door. In a few minutes, Vaughn came out. He turned off the porch light and walked rapidly toward his stringhouse.

  Pemberton went back into the house but did not go to bed. He set invoices before him on the kitchen table, attempting to lose himself in calculations of board feet and freight costs. Since the moment Serena and Galloway had driven off, he’d tried to block his mind from imagining where they were going. If he didn’t know, he couldn’t do anything about it.

  But his mind worked in that direction anyway, wondering if what Serena had whispered was not “just us” but instead a single word. He figured the only way to stop the flow of thoughts was with the half-filled bottle of Canadian bourbon in the cabinet. Pemberton didn’t bother with a glass. Instead, he tipped the bottle and drank until he gasped for breath, the bourbon scalding his throat. He drank again and finished off the bottle. He sat in one of the Coxwell chairs and closed his eyes, waited for the whiskey to take hold. Pemberton hoped the half-quart was enough and tried to help it along. He imagined the thoughts seeking co
nnection in his head were like dozens of wires plugged into a switchboard, wires the whiskey would begin pulling free until not a single connection was possible.

  In a few minutes, Pemberton felt the alcohol expanding in his skull, the wires pulling free, one at a time, the chatter lessening until there was no chatter at all, just a glowing hum. He closed his eyes and let himself sink deeper into the chair.

  When the clock on the fireboard chimed midnight, Pemberton stepped back out on the porch. The whiskey made his gait unsteady, and he held onto the porch railing as he looked down at the camp. No light glowed through the office window, and Galloway’s car was still gone. A dog barked near the commissary, then quit. Someone in a stringhouse played a guitar, not strumming but plucking each string slowly, letting the note fade completely before offering another. In a few minutes the guitar stopped, and the camp was completely silent. Pemberton raised his head, felt a moment of vertigo as he did so. Soon the last coal-oil lamp in the stringhouses was snuffed. To the west, a few mute spasms of heat lightning. Dark thickened but offered no stars, only a moon pale as bone.

  Twenty-six

  SHERIFF MCDOWELL DROVE INTO CAMP AT MID-MORNING. He didn’t knock before entering the office. Pemberton found the sheriff’s manner typically insolent and remembered it was Wilkie who’d advocated McDowell remain in office when the timber camp first opened. It will mollify the locals to have one of their own in the position, Wilkie had argued. Pemberton did not offer McDowell a seat, nor did the sheriff ask for one. Pemberton still felt the effects of the whiskey, not just the hangover but a residue of drunkenness as well.

  “What brings you here that a telephone call couldn’t convey?” Pemberton asked, looking at the invoices on his desk. “I’ve got too much work to deal with uninvited guests.”

  McDowell did not speak until Pemberton’s gaze again focused on him.

  “There was a murder up on Colt Ridge last night.”