Serena (28 page)

“I bet if you tugged good on just one pole every one of them stringhouses would tumble off this ridge,” Henryson said. “That would be a wager near certain as betting on that eagle tonight.”

Henryson paused and glanced back at the tent.

“I wonder what notion got into Ross’s head to make him think her and that eagle could be beat.”

“It wasn’t in his head,” Snipes said.

R
ACHEL DIDN’T SLEEP WELL THE FIRST NIGHTS
in Kingsport. Every passing train waked her, and once awake she could think only of Serena and her henchman. She’d removed the pearl-handled bowie knife from the trunk and placed it under her pillow. Each time the house creaked and settled, Rachel grasped the knife’s smooth handle. The child slept beside her, closest to the wall.

It wasn’t until the fifth day that Rachel took Jacob outside. On an earlier trip to the grocery store, she’d found a rhubarb patch across the tracks from Mrs. Sloan’s house. I can at least make her a pie, Rachel figured, a little something to thank the older woman for her kindness. She and Jacob crossed the tracks, the bowie knife and an empty tote sack in her free hand. The rhubarb was near a rusty boxcar so long motionless its wheels had sunk deep in the ground. She moved through a blackberry patch,
the briars clutching at her dress. The boxcar cast a square of shade, and Rachel set the child in it. She took the sock from her dress pocket and spilled its contents before him. Now don’t be putting them near your mouth, Rachel told him. Jacob placed the marbles in small groups, then pushed them farther apart.

Rachel began cutting the rhubarb, topping the plants the same way she would early-summer tobacco. It wasn’t the sort of work she’d ever have thought you could miss, the purplish stalks so twiny it was like cutting rope, but it felt good to be doing something outdoors, something that had a rhythm you could fall into because you’d done it all your life. Next year I’ll plant me a garden, she told herself, no matter where we are.

Soon small bouquets of crinkled leaves lay scattered around her. Rachel gathered up a handful of stalks, placed them in a stack like kindling. Jacob played contentedly, appearing glad as Rachel to be outside. A train came up the track, moving slow out of the depot. As it passed, a flagman waved from the caboose’s railing. A pair of bright-red cardinals flew low across the tracks, and Jacob pointed at them before turning his gaze back to the marbles.

The sun had narrowed the boxcar’s shadow by the time she’d cut the last stalk, stuffed the pile into her tote sack. More than enough rhubarb for five pies, but Rachel figured she and Mrs. Sloan could find a use for the extra. When she and Jacob recrossed the tracks, the sheriff’s Model T was parked in front of the house.

“Looks like we got company,” she told Jacob.

McDowell sat at the kitchen table with Mrs. Sloan, his right hand gripping a sweating glass of iced tea. An envelope lay on the table before him. Rachel set the rhubarb on the kitchen counter and sat down as well, but Jacob squirmed, began to whine.

“Probably needs changing,” Rachel said, but Mrs. Sloan got up before she could and took the child into her arms.

“I’ll do it.” Mrs. Sloan said. “Then I’ll take him out on the porch. You and the sheriff need to talk.”

“Here,” Rachel said, and gave the older woman the sock filled with marbles. “For if he gets fussy.”

Mrs. Sloan jiggled the child in her arms, and Jacob laughed.

“Let’s get you changed,” she said, and disappeared with the child into the back bedroom.

McDowell took a sip of tea, set the glass before him.

“Likes the marbles, does he?”

“He plays with them every day.”

“And doesn’t try to eat them?”

“No, leastways not yet.”

Mrs. Sloan and Jacob came out of the back bedroom and went out on the porch.

“What is it?” Rachel asked when McDowell didn’t speak.

He looked out the front window where Mrs. Sloan held Jacob in her arms, the child reaching for a wind chime that dangled from the porch ceiling.

“I’m not sheriff anymore. They fired me and got them a lawman they can control.”

“So there ain’t nothing left to do but run and hide from them,” Rachel said.

“I’m not running,” McDowell said. “There’s ways to beat them that don’t need a sheriff’s badge.”

“If you do, we can go back home?”

“Yes.”

“How long before you try to do something about them?”

“I have been trying,” McDowell said bitterly. “My mistake was believing the law might help me. But I’ve come to the end of that row. If it’s to be done I’ll be doing it myself.”

The ex-sheriff paused. He still looked out the window, but his gaze seemed upon something farther away than Mrs. Sloan and the child.

“You’re going to try and kill them, ain’t you?” Rachel asked.

“I’m hoping there’ll be another way.”

“I’d kill them if I didn’t have Jacob to look after,” Rachel said. “I would.”

“I believe you,” McDowell said, meeting Rachel’s eyes.

A train hooted as it left the depot, the tea glass trembling as the train passed behind the house. McDowell reached out and held the glass still as the train clattered on south towards Knoxville. He stared at the glass as he spoke.

“If things don’t work out the way I hope, you’ll need to get you and the boy farther away than here.”

“How far?”

“Far as this can get you,” McDowell said, pushing the envelope toward her. “There’s three hundred dollars in there.”

“I wouldn’t feel right taking your money,” Rachel said.

“It’s not my money.”

“Where’d it come from then?”

“That doesn’t matter. It’s yours and the boy’s now, and it may be all that keeps them from catching the both of you.”

Rachel took the envelope and placed it in her dress pocket.

“You think they’re still looking for us, right now I mean?”

“I know they are. If it’s safe to come back, I’ll come get you.” McDowell said, pushing back his chair and standing up. “But until then don’t take that child outside any more. I don’t think they can track you here, but these folks ain’t the kind you want to underestimate.”

Rachel walked out on the porch with him and watched as he got back in the Model T and drove away. Then Rachel went back inside, fixed some oatmeal for Jacob. She set him on the floor and began cutting the stalks into inch-long pieces. Rachel raised a piece to her mouth, tasted its sourness and knew she’d need plenty of sugar. A freight train rattled the house, and she felt the boards beneath her shudder. Crockery shook in the cabinet.

Rachel wondered where the train was headed and remembered something from her last year of school. Where would you most want to go, Miss Stephens had asked, if you could choose anywhere on this map?
One student raised a hand and said Washington, D.C., and another New York and another said Raleigh. Bobby Orr said Louisiana because he’d heard folks there ate crawdads and he’d like to see such a thing as that. Joel Vaughn, taking a notion to be a smart-aleck, said as far away from the school as possible. Now where would that be, Joel, Miss Stephens had asked, and made him come up to the front of the room. She’d taken a ruler from her drawer and made Joel go to the map and measure until he found the farthest dot, which was Seattle, Washington. I went there once, Miss Stephens had said. It’s a pretty place. There’s a river and a pretty blue harbor and mountains so high they have snow on them all year long.

B
Y EARLY
O
CTOBER, THE RAILROAD TRACK TO
the new camp in Jackson County had been laid down and connected to the Waynesville line. Spurs sprouted into the surrounding forests, and the site itself had been cleared by workers who’d been in the Cove Creek camp just weeks before, their stringhouses set on flat cars and sent east with them. The farmhouse had been converted into a dining hall, and work had begun on houses for Meeks and the Pembertons. Little would change other than the locale.

Snipes’ crew was among the ones left in the Cove Creek camp. On those last mornings they ascended the far western slopes of Shanty Mountain and Big Fork Ridge, the few acres yet unlogged. They were still one worker short due to Dunbar’s death in the gap. A replacement had been brought in, but on the second morning a sapling under a felled hickory sprang free and fractured his skull,
making Snipes both lead cutter and sawyer. By the time the men stopped midday to eat, Snipes was so exhausted he lay on the ground, his eyes closed.

Henryson took a bite from his sandwich. His nose wrinkled as he chewed the soggy bread and fatback, swallowed it with the relish he might a mouthful of tacks. He set the sandwich aside.

“I heard your preacher was out in his cabbage patch the other evening,” Henryson said to Stewart. “He must be doing some better.”

“He is, but he still ain’t of a mind to say much. My sister got him a funeral to preach over there at Cullowhee, figured it would cheer him up a considerable bit, but he just shook his head at her.”

“Well, there ain’t nothing like seeing somebody laid in the ground to cheer a fellow up,” Ross said.

“It used to done him that way,” Stewart said. “He told me once the only thing he hated about dying was he wouldn’t be around to do his own funeral.”

Snipes eyes were still closed as he spoke.

“That’s another example of the duality of man you’re speaking of, Stewart. We want what’s in this world but we also want what ain’t.”

“I don’t quite get your meaning,” Henryson said to Snipes.

Snipes turned his head a few inches to address Henryson, the foreman’s eyelashes fluttering a few moments like insect wings vainly attempting to take flight.

“Well, I’m too tuckered to explain it right now.”

The crew foreman resettled the back of his head on the ground. He placed a piece of the cap and bells’ pennant-shaped cloth over each eye to blunt the sun and was soon snoring.

“If we don’t get another worker soon, Snipes is going to be worn to a frazzle,” Henryson said.

“Maybe they’ll hire McIntyre back,” Ross said. “It ain’t like a man’s got to wag his tongue to be a good sawyer.”

“What do you think, Stewart?” Henryson asked. “Think McIntyre might come back?”

“Maybe.”

“If funerals perk him up, he couldn’t do better than here,” Ross noted. “There’s men falling dead near about fast as the trees.”

A breeze stirred a white oak’s high limbs. It was the last hardwood on the ridge, and a few scarlet leaves fell like an early surrendering. One drifted toward Ross, who picked it up and examined it carefully, turning the leaf to and fro as though something never seen before.

“I reckon there’ll be a couple of new graves over in Tennessee in a day or two,” Henryson said. “Galloway or his mama finally figured out that it wasn’t so much the crown as what it stood for.”

“Meaning?” Stewart asked.

“Meaning what wears one. There’s a Kingston and a Kingsport, and they’re both in the mountains.”

“And they both got rail lines,” Ross said, still studying the leaf as he spoke.

“Was that the places you figured?” Stewart asked, “when you said you knowed where they was the other day?”

Ross nodded.

“Yes it was. I knew it’d come to them sooner or later.”

“Which one is Galloway going to first?” Stewart asked Henryson.

“He didn’t say,” Henryson replied. “All I know is he’s headed out tonight.”

“I reckon we’ll know soon enough if Galloway picked right,” Ross said.

“You figure?” Henryson asked. “He could leave them in the woods for the varmints to eat or stuff them down a dry well and none would be the wiser.”

“He could but he won’t. These folks ain’t about you having any doubts concerning their meanness. They want it right out there in the open.”

“I reckon you’re right,” Henryson agreed. “You heard about them finding young Vaughn’s cap on the bridge with that note pinned to it. His mama claimed it for his handwriting.”

“What’d it say?” Stewart asked.

“Just that he was sorry.”

“I reckon he figured to save Galloway the bother of tracking him down,” Ross said.

“I can understand him getting it over with,” Henryson said. “That’d be a terriblesome thing to take nary a breath for the rest of your life without worrying Galloway was sneaking up behind you. I’d be tempted to get it over with too.”

“But they ain’t found his body yet,” Stewart noted. “There’s some hope in that.”

“He was always a clever lad,” Henryson said. “He might have been trying to throw them off his trail.”

“No,” Ross said, a discernable weariness in his voice. “What’s left after the crawdadders and mudcats have their way with that boy will bob up somewheres downriver. Just give it a few days.”

“M
EEKS
told me Albright called,” Serena said that night as she and Pemberton prepared for bed.

“He’s starting eminent domain proceedings next week,” Pemberton said, “unless we take his offer.”

“Is his offer what it was before?”

Pemberton nodded as he leaned to take off his boots, but did not raise his eyes..

“We’ll take it then,” Serena said. “Thirty-four thousand acres of stumps and slash will buy a hundred thousand acres of mahogany in Brazil.”

Serena removed the last of her clothing. Pemberton noted that the scar across her stomach had not changed Serena’s lack of self-consciousness. She stepped toward the chifforobe with the same feline grace and suppleness as she’d done that first night in Boston. Pemberton remembered the evening she’d returned from the hospital, how she’d stood naked in front of the mirror, studying the scar carefully, letting her finger glide across it as she stared into the mirror. My Fechtwunde, she’d told
Pemberton. She’d taken his hand and had him trace the scar’s length as well.

“So the Chicagoans are ready to sign?” Serena said as she placed her shirt and pants inside the chifforobe.

“Yes,” Pemberton said.

“I’m assuming Garvey won’t venture this far south.”

“No, he’s sending his lawyer to sign the contract.”

“Even in the North I’m sure it’s hard for him to find investments,” Serena said. “He may become our best long-term partner. What about our investors from Quebec?”

“They have more questions before they sign.”

“They’ll sign,” Serena said. “You told them of your birthday party?”

“Yes,” he said tersely.

“Don’t be so grim about it, Pemberton. This may well be the last time that we see any of them. Once we’re in Brazil, they’ll be nothing more than names on checks.”

Serena stepped to the window and opened the curtains, looked toward the ridge.

“I talked with Mrs. Galloway today. I never had before but she was at the commissary. I must say I find her augury deficient,” Serena said, her voice becoming more reflective. “Which may explain why the lamp in her stringhouse is still off.”

Serena opened the curtains wider. She angled her head close to one of the higher panes, as if to frame it inside the mullion.

“The lunar eclipse is tonight,” she said. “I’ve always found it stunning, not just the brightness but how the hues change. Galloway calls it a hunter’s moon. He says there’s not a better night to hunt.”

Serena didn’t turn around as she spoke. Her eyes peered beyond the stringhouses and the ridge, into a sky that had yet to usher forth its moon and stars. Pemberton’s fingers paused on a shirt button as he let his gaze settle on the crescent line where the paleness of Serena’s upper back and shoulders darkened at the neck. His fingers and lips had often traced that demarcation between the part of herself Serena allowed
others to see and what was seen only by Pemberton. He allowed his gaze to follow the curved flex of Serena’s back as she twisted to look out the windowpane, then down the tapering waist and on to the hips and the muscled calves and the ankles and finally the feet themselves, heels uplifted as Serena’s weight balanced on the balls of her feet. She did not move from the window, as if holding a pose for him. A pose that that even in its stasis embodied motion as well, like a stream current beneath a calm surface.

Pemberton knew Serena was waiting for him to come and press his chest against her back, cup her breasts in his hands, feel her nipples harden against his palms as her hips pushed into his groin, her mouth turning to meet his. He did not go to her. After a while Serena turned from the window, leaving the curtains open. She got into bed and lifted the covers as Pemberton finished unbuttoning his shirt.

“Come on to bed,” Serena said softly. “Let me finish undressing you.”

Pemberton lay down and felt the bed’s feather mattress and springs give under his back. Serena placed her knees athwart his hips and leaned over him, her hands pulling the shirt off his shoulders, freeing his arms one at a time from the cloth. Serena’s hands traced a path up his ribcage as she leaned closer, pressed her lips to his as her body settled over him. He did not respond.

Serena finally eased herself off Pemberton and lay beside him, her hand resting lightly on his chest.

“What’s wrong, Pemberton?” Serena said. “Is your mind elsewhere?”