When I pulled up in front of the vine-draped farmhouse, I noticed that the kudzu seemed to have swallowed another foot or two all around the edges. O’Conner seemed unconcerned, though. He was sitting in the same rocking chair where I’d first met him. He lifted a hand in greeting, but continued to rock in big, easy arcs.
As I mounted the sagging steps to the porch, O’Conner reached over and pushed down on the arm of the rocker beside his, setting it into motion. I synchronized my timing, then eased down into it. I found my rhythm matching his.
“Hey.” I said, “Why aren’t you in jail? The sheriff said he was gonna arrest you days ago.”
He chuckled. “They’re watching my house in town. They don’t know about this place yet.”
After a minute, he reached into his shirt pocket and took out a photo and handed it to me. Its corners were unraveling and the colors had faded with age, but there was no mistaking the pretty blonde girl smiling at the camera. It was Leena.
“She sent me that while I was overseas. Last letter I ever got from her.” I studied her face; she looked almost like I’d imagined her, but there was a trace of sadness or fear in her face that I hadn’t expected. Perhaps things had already started to unravel for her, too. Or maybe I was just imagining things in hindsight.
“Mind if I borrow this and make a copy? I’ll take good care of it.”
“ ’Course not. Anything that helps. Any headway on the case?”
“Not really. Not unless you count the break-in and the cave-ins as headway. There might be some disgruntled students who’d consider an attempt on my life to be a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t shed any light on the murder.”
“Maybe not directly. But somebody’s mighty nervous. Afraid there’s something more you’re about to find out, or about to figure out.”
“Well, I wish I were as smart as someone seems to think I am.”
“Answer’s bound to bubble up soon. You’ve just got to let it simmer for a while.” He stood up. “Speaking of simmering, how about a cup of tea?”
“Sure, if you’re having some, too.”
O’Conner disappeared through the screen door, then emerged a minute later and handed me one of two pottery mugs, handmade, imprinted with the outlines of lacy ferns. “Nice mugs,” I said, remembering some of what Kathleen had taught me about shapes and glazes. “Local potter?”
He smiled. “Local as you can get. Made ’em myself. Everything you’re holding in your hand came off this property — the clay, the ferns, the spring water, the honey, even the tea.”
“You’re a regular one-man biosphere.”
“I like being self-sufficient when I can. Meeting your own needs for food and utensils seems satisfying at some deep level, at least to me. Helps keep a man honest, somehow.”
For a reputed outlaw, O’Conner was quite the renaissance man: philosopher, potter, beekeeper, tea farmer. I took a sip of the steaming brew and swirled it in my mouth, startled — it wasn’t like any tea I had ever tasted. Underneath the honey, there was a bitter, rocky tang to it. It tasted somehow of mountains and leaves and roots and springs. “That’s interesting. I think maybe I like it, but I’m not quite sure. What is it?”
He bowed slightly, acknowledging the slight compliment. “Ginseng. ‘Sang,’ most folks around here call it. Makes you smarter, healthier, hornier, and more virile, if five millennia of Chinese and Native Americans can be believed. Those UT coeds better watch out for you tomorrow, Doc.” Visions of Sarah and Miranda flashed into my mind, and I felt myself blush. “See,” O’Conner said, “it’s working already.”
I laughed, despite the embarrassment. “Well, I don’t feel any smarter yet.”
“That doesn’t kick in till the third or fourth cup. It’s tea, Doc, not a miracle potion.”
We rocked and sipped. Across the valley, a swirl of thick mist crept up the hillside. As it met the morning sun, which was slanting over the ridge behind us, the mist grew soft and wispy around the margins, then gradually faded to nothing. “Doc, you think we humans are anything more than a passing wisp of fog ourselves?”
He wanted to talk about mortality? “All depends on how you look at it, Jim.” I pointed across the valley. “Before it evaporated, that scrap of fog drifted across that stand of hemlocks about halfway up that hillside. I’d say those trees will grow a little extra because of that. Maybe some ferns down around the base of those trees will, too. Dry as the weather’s been lately, it might be this morning’s fog that keeps those ferns alive. Next time a potter needs some fronds to press into a clay mug”—I wagged my cup for emphasis—“they’ll be right there waiting for him.”
I took another sip, and found the taste growing on me. “I’ve had students tell me, years after they graduated and went on to work for medical examiners or police departments or museums, that I had a big influence on their career path. I think we all leave an imprint on the world, and on the people we cross paths with, sometimes in ways we don’t fully understand.” I traced the imprint of a fern. “I know my wife left a hell of a mark on me. When she died, it felt like a tree got uprooted from my heart. Still does, sometimes.”
He looked away, and I guessed he was thinking of Leena. “Jim, as an anthropologist, I’m curious: what did you want to show me? Not just your pottery, I’m guessing.”
“Not just the mugs, but they’re not completely irrelevant. You ever done any research on what a premium we humans put on finding the magic elixir, Doc? The biochemical fuel additive, you might say, that’s going to fix things for us? Mind-numbing things like alcohol and pot? Octane boosters like cocaine or meth or Ecstasy?”
I nodded. “It is interesting. Not just humans, though — animals, too. Elephants gorge on fermented fruit to get drunk. So do orangutans and chimpanzees. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some pothead chimps somewhere in some California commune. I haven’t made a study of it, though.”
“I have, sort of,” he said. “Not so much scientifically as financially. People will pay a lot of money for something that makes ’em feel good, or look good, or last longer in the sack. There’s people up here in Cooke County that ain’t got a pot to piss in, as my daddy used to say. But some of ’em trade their food stamps for pot or meth. Lotta money to be made in supplying what they demand.”
I thought about the questions the FBI and DEA agents had asked about O’Conner. “Some people think you might be doing some supplying,” I said. “Hard not to wonder what goes up and down such a good gravel road that’s so carefully camouflaged.”
His eyes took on a brittle glint, and I wondered if I’d struck a nerve. “You’re right; trafficking in exotic substances is a tradition in these hills. Maybe even a birthright. My daddy tended a whiskey still for twenty years. When I was a kid, one of my chores was to split the oak he burned to cook the mash.” He shook his head. “Damned thing ended up killing him — getting him killed, anyhow, which amounts to the same thing.” He peered into his mug, swirling the liquid. “Over in ’Nam, I smoked a lot of dope; lots of guys did harder drugs. When we weren’t out on patrol — hell, sometimes even when we were — we’d be high as kites. Helped make it bearable, though I swear I don’t see how any of us made it out of there alive.” He drew a deep breath. “When I came home, I started growing marijuana. Selling it.”
He fell quiet, and I felt my opinion of him begin to sink. “Funny thing, though, Doc. Didn’t take real long to decide I didn’t like what I was doing, or who I was becoming.” My opinion stopped its freefall and hung, suspended. “Cooke County’s a tough place, Doc. Folks up here have a hard row to hoe even when they’ve got their shit together. Turn ’em into stoners and you pretty much guarantee they won’t never amount to nothing, if you’ll pardon the triple negative. Didn’t seem the neighborly thing to do.”
I smiled. “I agree. Not everybody does, though.”
“Not everybody can afford to. Some people don’t have the skills or the opportunity to do anything but raise pot and draw Social Securi
ty. I can’t run anybody else’s life; my own’s about as much as I can handle. I don’t worry much about what’s legal and what isn’t, but I don’t want to make my money off marijuana.”
“So where does that leave you? A rebel without a cause? An outlaw farmer without a cash crop?”
Just like that, a sunny grin broke across his face. “Like I said, I think you’ll find this interesting.” Taking me by the arm, he led me into the house, through a sparely furnished front room and a surprisingly modern kitchen behind, then out onto the back porch, which was shrouded in kudzu. From beneath the foliage, I saw something completely invisible from the exterior of the house: the back porch was the entrance to another tunnel of kudzu. The residential version of the camouflaged driveway.
“What’s this, your escape tunnel?” He didn’t answer; he just kept pulling me along, off the porch and through a trellised, arborlike structure that ran for maybe fifty yards. Then it opened out, and I found myself in an immense open space, the size of several football fields, that was dotted with a grid of telephone poles. The poles supported a network of cables, and the cables supported acres and acres of kudzu canopy, which filtered the light and tinted everything. It almost seemed we were in a dome beneath the sea, so green and otherworldly was the space. At our feet, stretching across what must have been half the valley’s floor, were neat rows of plants, knee-high, bearing fuzzy leaves shaped like pointed teardrops. Atop each five-leaf cluster was a knot of red berries.
I gave a low whistle. “Gives new meaning to the word ‘greenhouse,’” I said. “Whatcha growing under all this kudzu? Doesn’t look much like Cousin Vern’s pot plants.”
“Sang,” he said. “Ten acres of ginseng. Street value of about three million dollars, if I harvest it right now. Four million if I wait a year. Five, the year after that.”
I wasn’t following him. “Street value? You talk like it’s illegal. Is it?”
He laughed. “Sorry; old habits die hard. It’s perfectly legal to cultivate ginseng, but this is unlike any other cultivated sang on the planet.”
“How so?”
“Ginseng 101,” he said. “All ginseng is not created equal. There’s a huge market for sang, mostly in China. They’ve been cultivating it there for centuries. But your true Chinese connoisseur turns his nose up at their domestic crop. American ginseng—wild American ginseng, mind you, what’s known as black ginseng — that’s the cream of the crop. Early Jesuit missionaries made a fortune shipping black sang to China; so did the Astors of New York. Even Daniel Boone sold it by the boatload.” Clearly he had done his homework.
“Ginseng grows great up in the Smokies,” he went on. “Likes a north-facing hillside with lots of shade, soil with just the right pH, a particular blend of trace minerals. Some of the best patches actually have names—‘the sugar bowl’ and ‘the gold mine,’ for instance. High-grade patches, even ones inside the national park, are considered heirlooms, a family’s patrimony. The locations of those patches are closely held secrets, and some old-timers wouldn’t hesitate to shoot somebody they caught raiding ‘their’ patch. Couple park rangers got ambushed and killed a few years ago over near Fontana Lake, on the North Carolina side of the park, during a crackdown on poachers.”
“I remember reading about that. I hadn’t realized park rangering was such a risky occupation.”
“Lotta mountain families still hate the government for taking their land to make the national park. And they’re by-God gonna keep digging sang.” He shook his head. “Thing is, over the long haul, it’s not sustainable. Takes ten or fifteen years for a wild ginseng root to reach its peak; takes only a couple hours, with a forked stick or a screwdriver, to dig up hundreds of ’em. Whole hillsides in the park look like they’ve been ravaged by root hogs.”
“But if it can be cultivated,” I said, waving at the proof stretching out before us, “why don’t people just grow it instead of poaching it?”
“Several pretty good reasons, actually. First, ginseng is pretty damned finicky. I’ve been trying to grow it for a dozen years now, with help from some pretty good botanists, and I’m just starting to get the hang of it. Second, it’s not like marijuana, which can give you a huge profit in just one growing season. You have to leave ginseng in the ground for four years, minimum, before you can harvest it, and during that time, it’s not generating a dime of income. The main reason, though, is the price differential.”
O’Conner reached into a deep side pocket of his gray cargo pants and pulled out a root, which he handed me. “Ginseng, I presume?” He nodded. The root had four branches, which corresponded remarkably well to the placement and proportions of the arms and legs of the human form. It looked, quite literally, like a stick figure.
“You can see why the Chinese and the Indians both named it ‘man-herb,’ can’t you?”
“I can. Only thing missing is the head.”
“Look at the texture.” I studied the root; it was smooth and fleshy, rather like a carrot or sweet potato. “That’s from Wisconsin, which produces most of the cultivated ginseng exported to China.”
“Wisconsin? The ‘Eat cheese or die’ state?”
He laughed. “That Wisconsin root there weighs about a quarter-pound; it’s worth about five bucks.” He fished around in another pocket, and handed me another root. This one was slimmer, darker, and nubbier, with rings or constrictions encircling it from its neck down to the tips of its four branches. “That’s wild black sang. Waylon dug that; we probably don’t want to know where.”
I hefted it; it weighed about the same as the other, maybe a hair less.
“That one’ll fetch two hundred dollars,” he said. I looked from one to the other, trying to see how one could be worth forty times more than the other. O’Conner took them from me. “The wild’s more potent, or at least it’s perceived to be by the people who buy it.”
“Ah, the magic of the free market,” I said.
He nodded. “Doesn’t take an MBA to figure out that poaching this root in the wild gives a damn good return on an investment of zero. Of course, the poachers aren’t counting the environmental costs, or the occasional fine or murder.”
I pointed to the cultivated root. “But you’ve figured out a way to get rich on these at five bucks apiece?”
O’Conner bent down and plucked up one of his own plants. He brushed off the dirt, which seemed an odd mixture of black loam, white Styrofoam granules, and mucilaginous goo—“hydrophilic gel,” he said as he wiped the root and his hands on the leg of his pants. “Slimy as snot, but it cuts my irrigation costs thirty percent.” He handed the plant to me. It was nubby with constrictions.
I blinked in confusion. “What — you’re transplanting wild seedlings?” He laughed and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” I said. “You grew this here?” He nodded. “But it looks just like the wild one.”
“Bingo. I’m not cultivating twenty-dollar-a-pound ginseng here, Doc; I’m growing thousand-dollar-a-pound wild sang. If it looks like wild sang and quacks like wild sang, it’ll sell like wild sang.”
If his entire ten acres looked this authentic, the audacity and the brilliance of his plan were breathtaking. “How come you can grow roots like this, but the cheeseheads up in Wisconsin can’t?”
“I’ll tell you, Doc, but then I’ll have to kill you.” Seeing my expression, he snorted and gave me a reassuring pat on the back. “Like I said, I’ve had some help from some good botanists. We found a way to shock the plants, chemically and thermally, at regular intervals during the growing season — not enough to really hurt ’em, just enough to make ’em pucker up in those constriction bands. Sort of like subjecting new wood to bleach and buckshot for that weathered, wormy look. Adds a year to the time required to get a mature, man-shaped root, but that extra year will pay for itself ten times over when we harvest.”
“You tested this on buyers yet?”
He grinned. “That’s where I was part of last week. Product testing. Not just buyers, but chemi
sts, too. The chemists say it’s every bit the equal of wild black ginseng. The exporters say they’ll take all I can bring ’em.”
Suddenly all the secrecy made sense. “So the kudzu camouflage and the hidden road — you’re keeping the operation hidden so nobody knows it’s cultivated?”
He nodded. “Plus the kudzu creates the shade the ginseng needs. I figure my cover’s gonna get blown within a few years, but by then, I’ll be millions of dollars ahead. Besides, even if I have to come down some on the price eventually, I’ll still be way ahead of the cheeseheads. I mean, look at what they’re producing.” He pointed scornfully at the smooth root in my hand. “It’s like a supermarket tomato — the right size and color, but a sorry substitute for the vine-ripened real deal. Eventually, Cooke County Black Ginseng — I’ve trademarked the name already — will become the Vidalia onion of ginseng. People will always pay a premium for it, because it’ll be the best there is. If the marketing and business plan work like they’re supposed to, we’ll create a hundred jobs within two years. Maybe help reduce the poaching in the Smokies, too, which would be something to feel proud of.”
“You do defy expectations, Jim,” I said. “The hillbilly stereotype may never be the same.”
But O’Conner wasn’t listening to me. He’d suddenly taken a step to one side, cocking his head toward the house, then he cupped both hands behind his ears to catch more of whatever sound he was seeking. “Well, damn,” he said to himself, and ran for the kudzu tunnel.
By the time he disappeared through his back door, I could hear it myself. “Damn,” I echoed, and began running, too.
By the time I reached the front porch, the faint sound had become the distinctive, rhythmic, and ominous beat of a helicopter rotor. Unless I missed my guess, the helicopter would be piloted by Chief Deputy Orbin Kitchings.
O’Conner, one hand shading his eyes, stared toward the mouth of his hanging valley. Judging by the way the sound ricocheted off the ridges, the helicopter was flying low and closing fast. Suddenly it rose into view, climbing up out of the gorge at the lower end of the valley, almost as if emerging from the earth itself. Black with gold trim, it was unmistakably the sheriff’s JetRanger, and it was headed straight for us.
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