Serena Read online

  She was feather-legged before they’d hardly left the yard, the lantern heavy as a brimming milk pail. The lantern spread a shallow circle of light, and Rachel tried to imagine the light was a raft and she wasn’t on a road but on the river. Not even walking, just floating along as the current carried her towards town. She came to Widow Jenkins’ house, and there was no light in its windows. She wondered why, then remembered the Widow had gone to spend New Year’s week with her sister. Rachel thought about resting by Widow Jenkins’s porch steps a few minutes but was afraid if she did she’d not get up.

  For the first time since she’d left the house, Rachel looked at the sky. The stars were out, so many she’d have needed a bushel basket to gather them all. Plenty enough light to get her and Jacob to town, she decided, and set the lantern among the chicory and broom sedge bordering the Widow’s pasture. Rachel felt Jacob’s brow again and there was still no change. She shifted the child’s weight closer so his head rested as much on her neck as her shoulder and they walked on.

  The road followed the river now. A bat squeaked over the water, and Rachel remembered the shadowy barn loft, what she’d thought a rag draped over a cross beam. She’d brushed against the rag, and it had suddenly flapped alive and become tangled in her hair, a clawed flurry of wings trying to tear free, one leathery wing touching her face as it loosed itself and rose. Rachel had fallen to the loft floor, still screaming and raking at her hair even after her father had come and the creature had flown out the barn mouth.

  The road curved closer to the river. Rachel could hear the water rubbing against the bank, smell the fresh soil loosened by recent rain. Another bat squeaked, nearer this time. The road narrowed and darkened, a granite cliff pressing close on the left side. On the right, willows lined the river, their branches leaning low overhead. The road slanted downward and the stars vanished.

  Rachel stopped walking, too fevered to be sure where she was. It came to her that she’d taken a wrong turn and entered a covered wooden bridge, though she didn’t understand how there could be a wrong turn if there was only one road. She felt something brush against her hair, then again. She couldn’t see her feet, and she suddenly had a different notion, that the road had been washed out without her knowing it, the wooden bridge a detour that led back to the road. But that didn’t make sense either. Maybe I just forgot there’s always been one here, she told herself.

  The sweat poured off her even more now that she’d stopped walking, not a good sweat like she’d get from hoeing in a field, but slimy feeling, like touching a snail. Rachel wiped sweat off her brow with the back of her forearm. A wooden bridge this long and dark would have bats, she knew, not just a few but hundreds of them clinging from the walls and ceilings, and if she touched the wall she would startle one and to startle one would startle them all and bring them flapping about her and Jacob in a rush of wind and wings. Something stirred her hair again. The breeze, it’s just the breeze, she told herself. Rachel shifted Jacob lower in her arms, placed her free hand over his head.

  The thought came to her again that this was a road she’d never been on, and she knew it could lead her anywhere. I’ve got to keep going, she told herself, but she was too afraid. Think of someplace good this road could take you, she told herself, someplace where you’ve never been. Think of that place and that you’re going there, and that way maybe you won’t be so afraid. She tried to imagine the map in Miss Stephens’ classroom but all the map’s colors blurred into one another, and after a few moments Rachel realized it wouldn’t be marked on the map anyway. She imagined instead a woman standing in her front yard, who would see Rachel coming down the road and despite all the years would recognize her and call her name, come running to help her.

  Walk a straight line, Rachel told herself. She took small slow steps, the same way she’d do in a cornfield with her feet following the tight furrows. Rachel imagined her mother clad in a white dress bright as a dogwood blossom, a dress whose buttons sparkled like jewels to help guide her and Jacob through the dark.

  After a few yards the sky returned, widening overhead as the road made a sharp ascent, and Rachel saw she was on the right road after all. Rachel stopped to catch her breath and took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket to wipe the sweat off her brow, the tears flowing down her cheeks. She looked at the stars and they brightened and dimmed in accord with her breathing, as if one hard puff might blow the whole lot of them out like candles. She began walking again, and each step was like pushing through knee-high sand. Rachel told herself not to think about resting because if she did her body would take that thought and bull-rag it until she listened. Just a ways and you’ll crest this hill, she told herself. She took one step and then another and finally the road leveled.

  Rachel could see town lights now. For a moment the lights from the town and the lights from the stars merged, and Rachel had the sensation she and Jacob had come untethered from the earth. She clutched the child harder and closed her eyes. When Rachel opened them, she stared at her feet. She was barefoot, something she hadn’t realized until that moment, but glad of it, because she could feel the pebbly dust sifted over the packed dirt, feel how it anchored her to the world.

  Rachel let her eyes rise slowly, taking in the road ahead a few yards at a time, as if her gaze were a lever lifting the road and world back into proper alignment. She began walking again. The stars bobbed back up into the sky, and the town lights drifted down and reattached themselves to the earth. The bridge’s shadowy outline became visible. Jacob woke and started fussing, though he was so puny as to sound like no more than a mewling kitten. We got to keep going, she told him, just one more hill and we’ll be there.

  Rachel moved downward toward the bridge, one that, unlike the covered bridge, she recognized. The trees crowding the bottomland grew taller, their branches narrowing the horizon, dimming the weathered planks and railing. They were only yards from the river when Rachel saw movement on the bridge, swirls like wisps of fog only more solid. Rachel took another step closer and saw it was three wild dogs snapping and snarling as they fought over a bloody white shirt. Two of the dogs each grabbed a sleeve and the cloth unfurled, and Rachel saw the shirt was her father’s.

  Rachel took two slow steps backward, then did not move. Jacob whined and she leaned to his ear and tried to shush him with soft words. When Rachel looked up, the dogs had quit fighting over the shirt. They watched her and Jacob, shoulder to shoulder, necks hackled and teeth bared. They ain’t real, she said, and waited for her words to make it so. But the dogs didn’t disappear.

  Rachel edged over to the roadside, wondering if she might be able to wade across the river. Larger pieces of quartz and granite shoaled on the road’s edge, made her wince as she looked for a breech in the trees. But there was no path down to the water, only more trees and a deeper dark where she’d be unable to find her way. She remembered the lantern, but it was too far back to fetch. The arm that held Jacob began to cramp, so she switched sides. Rachel felt the rocks underfoot and that gave her an idea. She stepped off the road edge and let her foot probe the thistles and broom sedge, finally find a fist-sized rock. She leaned and picked it up, then walked back toward the bridge.

  “Git on now,” she said and threw the rock, but the dogs still did not move.

  She felt Jacob’s forehead and the fever burned unabated. They ain’t real, and even if they was I got no choice but to get past them, she told herself. Just watch your feet and don’t look up and don’t be afraid because a dog can smell the fear on you. Rachel took a step and paused, then took another, the pebbles and dirt sifting under her feet. Four more steps and her right foot landed on a plank. Feel how solid this bridge is, she told herself. Them dogs ain’t real but this is, and it will get me and this young one to town.

  Rachel took another step and both feet were on the grainy wood. She did not lift her eyes. The dogs remained silent, the only sound the river rushing beneath the planks. She closed her eyes a few moments, imagined not her and Jacob o
n a raft as she had before but the dogs adrift, the river carrying them farther and farther away. She opened her eyes and took more steps, and then she was back on a dirt surface and the road rose.

  Rachel did not look up until she’d crested the last hill and was on Waynesville’s main street. She stopped at the first house to ask where Doctor Harbin lived. The man who answered the door took one look at her and Jacob and helped them inside. The man’s wife took Jacob into her arms while her husband telephoned the doctor. Lay down here on the couch, the woman told her, and Rachel was too weary to do otherwise. The room swayed and then blurred. Rachel closed her eyes. The dark behind her eyelids lightened a second, then darkened again, as if something had been unveiled but only for a moment.

  WHEN Rachel came to it was morning. She did not know where she was at first, only that she’d never been tireder even after hoeing a field all day. A man sat in a chair beside the couch, the face slowly unblurring to become Doctor Harbin’s.

  “Where’s Jacob?” Rachel asked.

  “In the back bedroom,” Doctor Harbin said as he stood. “His fever’s broken.”

  “So he’ll be ok?”

  “Yes.”

  Doctor Harbin came over and laid his hand on her brow a few moments.

  “But you still have a fever. Mr. and Mrs. Suttles said you can stay here today. I’ll check on you again this afternoon. If you’re better, Mr. Suttles will take you back home.”

  “I don’t have the money to pay you,” Rachel said, “at least not right now.”

  “I’m not worried about that. We’ll settle up later.”

  The doctor nodded at Rachel’s feet, and she saw they had been bandaged.

  “You cut up your feet pretty good, but nothing deep enough to need stitches. That was almost a mile walk and you sick as him, and barefoot to boot. I don’t know how you did it. You must love that child dear as life.”

  “I tried not to,” Rachel said. “I just couldn’t find a way to stop myself.”

  PART II

  Ten

  THE LINGERING COLD DEFIED ANY CALENDAR. From October until May, snow and ice clung to the ridges. Several men died when they slipped trying to avoid falling trees or limbs. Another tumbled off a cliff edge and one impaled himself on his own axe and still another was beheaded by a snapped cable. A cutting crew lost its way during a snowstorm in January and was found days later, their palms peeling off when searchers pried the axe handles from their frozen hands. Fingers or toes lost to frostbite were among the season’s lesser hazards.

  The harshness of the winter was many-storied among the workers who survived it. One man who’d wintered in Alaska argued this one worse, took off his work boot to show five blackened nubs as proof. Owls frozen on tree limbs, the moon wrapping itself in clouds for warmth, the ground itself shivering—all manner of tall tales were spoken and nearly believed. Several workers argued the denuded forests had allowed winter to settle deeper into the valley, so deep it had gotten trapped in the same way as an animal caught in a rabbit gum or dead-fall trap. Men searched the sky night and day for signs of the season’s end, a laying down moon, geese headed north, creasy greens on the stream banks.

  The surest sign came at the end of May when Campbell killed a timber rattlesnake while surveying on Shanty Mountain. When Serena heard, she ordered every dead rattlesnake placed in an old applecart next to the stable entrance. No one knew why. One logger claimed from personal experience that rattlesnake meat was eaten in Colorado, and though it was not to his taste others had considered it a delicacy. Another worker suspected the snakes were fed to the eagle because they were a part of the bird’s natural diet back in Mongolia. When a crew foreman asked Doctor Cheney what Mrs. Pemberton would want the snakes for, the physician replied that she milked the fangs and coated her tongue with the poison.

  Each dawn in the following weeks, Serena walked into the stable’s back stall and freed the eagle from the block perch. She and the bird spent an hour each morning alone below Half Acre Ridge where Boston Lumber had done its first cutting. For the first four days Serena rode out with the eagle behind her in the applecart, a blanket draped over the cage. By the fifth day the bird perched on Serena’s right forearm, its head black-hooded like an executioner, the five-foot leash tied to Serena’s upper right elbow and the leather bracelets around the raptor’s feet. Campbell constructed an armrest out of a Y-shaped white oak branch and affixed it to the saddle pommel. From a certain angle, the eagle itself appeared mounted on the saddle. At a distance, horse, eagle and human appeared to blend into one being, as though transmogrified into some winged six-legged creature from the old myths.

  It was mid-July when Serena freed the eagle from the block perch and rode west to Fork Ridge where Galloway and his crew worked on the near slope. The day was hot and many of the men worked shirtless. They did not cover themselves when Serena appeared, for they’d learned she didn’t care.

  Serena loosed the leather laces and removed the eagle’s hood, then freed the leash from the bracelets. She raised her right arm. As if performing some violent salute, Serena thrust her forearm and the eagle upward. The bird ascended and began a dihedral circle over the twenty acres of stumps behind Galloway’s crew. On the third circle the eagle stopped. For a moment the bird hung poised in the sky, seemingly outside the world’s slow turning. Then it appeared not so much to fall but to slice open the air, its body vee’d like an axe head as it propelled downward. Once on the ground among the stumps and slash, the eagle opened its wings like a flourished cape. The bird wobbled forward, paused, and moved forward again, the yellow talons sparring with some creature hidden in the detritus. In another minute the eagle’s head dipped, then rose with a hank of stringy pink flesh in its beak.

  Serena opened her saddlebag and removed a metal whistle and a lariat. Fastened to one end of the hemp was a piece of bloody beef. She blew the whistle and the bird’s neck whirled in her direction as Serena swung the lure overhead.

  They Lord God, a worker said as the eagle rose, for in its talons was a three-foot-long rattlesnake. The bird flew toward the ridge crest then arced back, drifting down toward Serena and Galloway’s crew. Except for Galloway, the men scattered as if dynamite had been lit, stumbling and tripping over stumps and slash as they fled. The eagle settled on the ground with an elegant awkwardness, the serpent still writhing but its movements only a memory of when it had been alive. Serena dismounted and offered the gobbet of meat. The bird released the snake and pounced on the beef. When it finished eating, Serena placed the hood back over the eagle’s head.

  “Can I have the skin and rattles?” Galloway asked.

  “Yes,” Serena said, “but the meat belongs to the bird.”

  Galloway set his boot heel on the serpent’s head and detached the body with a quick sweep of his barlow knife. By the time the other men returned, Galloway had eviscerated the snake, its skin and rattles tucked inside his lunch pail.

  By month’s end the eagle had killed seven rattlesnakes, including a huge satinback that panicked Snipes’ crew when it slipped from the bird’s grasp mid-flight and fell earthward. The men hadn’t seen the eagle overhead, and the serpent fell among them like some last remnant of Satan’s rebellion cast from heaven. The snake landed closest to McIntyre and had just enough life left to slither a few inches and rest its head on the lay preacher’s boot toe, causing McIntyre to fall backward in a dead faint.

  Dunbar quickly finished off the snake with an axe while Stewart brought his spiritual mentor to consciousness by filling McIntyre’s wide-brimmed preacher’s hat with creek water, then dousing the unconscious man. Several wagers were made and then settled when Snipes’ tape measure reached sixty-three inches from the triangle-shaped head to the last of the snake’s twelve buttons.

  “That eagle won’t likely fetch her one bigger,” Ross, the bet’s winner, argued.

  “Not less it flaps off to them jungles in South America and totes back a anaconder,” Snipes interjected before pocketing the tape
measure and wire-rimmed glasses that, though lacking lenses, the crew foreman nevertheless insisted worked because the oval frames better focused his vision.

  “I’m wondering if she’s of a mind to train up a whole flock of them?” Dunbar asked.

  “If she done it them snakes would be clearing out like Saint Patrick himself was after them,” Snipes said.

  “It would sure enough be a blessing,” Dunbar said, “not to have to hold your breath every time you picked up a log or limb.”

  Ross stashed the handful of coins he collected into his pocket.

  “If I had my rathers I’d take them rattlesnakes where the Good Lord put them,” he said. “At least then you’d not have the worry of them dripping out of the sky onto you.”

  Stewart and Dunbar looked uneasily upward.

  “You’re disturbing the natural order of things is what you’re doing,” Snipes added. “Same as Pemberton offering his gold doubloon for the feller who flushes that panther out. If that thing really is around, all it’s done up to now is put the skeer in a few folks, but you start bothering a critter like that it’s untelling the trouble you’re stirring up.”

  “Still,” Dunbar said wistfully as his gaze lowered to take in the mountains of east Tennessee. “If I was to be the one to find that panther, a twenty-dollar gold piece would buy me a new hat, a sure enough spiffy one with a bright-yallar hatband and feather to boot. Money left over to get me a good sparking outfit too.”

  “If you was still around to wear it,” Ross noted. “It might end up being your burying clothes.”

  McIntyre, now conscious but still sprawled on the ground, looked up as well. Some frightening new thought appeared to come to him. He attempted to speak but only a few inarticulate sounds came from his throat before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he passed out again.