Serena Read online

  “We got to stop here a minute,” he said.

  Galloway came out of the store with a small paper bag, which he gave to his mother. The old woman clutched the folded top of the bag with both hands, as if the bag’s contents might attempt to escape.

  “She’s a fool for horehound candy,” Galloway said as Pemberton shifted the car into gear.

  “Does your mother ever speak?”

  “Only if she’s got something worth listening to,” Galloway said. “She can tell your future if you want. Tell you what your dreams mean too.”

  “No thanks,” Pemberton said.

  They drove another few miles, passing small farms, a good number inhabited only by what creatures sheltered inside the broken windows and sagging roofs, foreclosure notices nailed on doors and porch beams. In the yard or field always some remnant left behind—a rusty harrow or washtub, a child’s frayed rope swing, some last forlorn claim on the place. Pemberton turned where a leaning road sign said Deep Creek, traversing what might have been a dry river bed for all its swerves and rocks and washouts. When Pemberton got to where the road ended, he saw that a car was already parked in the small clearing.

  “Kephart’s?” Pemberton asked.

  “He ain’t got no car,” Galloway said, and nodded at a tan lawman’s hat set on the dash. “Looks to be the high sheriff’s. Him and that old man is probably out looking for pretty bugs or flowers or some such. The sheriff’s near hep on naturing as Kephart is.”

  Galloway and Pemberton got out of the car, and Galloway opened the back door. The old woman was motionless except for her cheeks creasing and uncreasing like bellows with each suck of the candy. Galloway went around and opened the other back door as well.

  “That way she can get her a nice breeze,” Galloway said. “That’s what she’s been craving. You don’t get no breeze in them stringhouses.”

  They walked down the path a hundred yards before the trees fell away to reveal a small cabin. Sheriff McDowell and Kephart sat in cane chairs on the porch. A ten-gallon hoop barrel squatted between them, on it a tattered topographical map draped over the barrel like a tablecloth. McDowell watched intently while Kephart marked the map with a carpenter’s pencil. Pemberton placed a boot on the porch step, saw that the map encompassed the surrounding mountains and eastern Tennessee. Gray and red markings covered the map, some overlapping, some partially erased, as if a palimpsest.

  “Planning a trip?” Pemberton asked.

  “No,” Kephart replied, acknowledging Pemberton for the first time since he’d stepped into the clearing. “A national park.”

  Kephart laid the pencil on the barrel. He took off his reading glasses and set them down as well.

  “What are you doing on my land?”

  “Your land?” Pemberton said. “I assumed you’d already donated it to this park you’re wanting so bad. Or is it just other people’s property that the park gets?”

  “The park will get any land I own,” Kephart said. “I’ve already taken care of that in my will, but until then you’re trespassing.”

  “We’re just passing through,” Galloway said, beside Pemberton now. “Heard a panther might be roaming around here. We’re just helping to protect you.”

  McDowell stared at the rifle in Pemberton’s hands. Pemberton motioned at the map with the gun’s barrel.

  “You for that park, too, Sheriff?”

  “Yes,” McDowell said.

  “I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me,” Pemberton said.

  “Move on, or I’ll arrest you for trespassing,” McDowell said. “And if I hear that gun go off, I’ll arrest you for hunting out of season.”

  Galloway grinned and was about to say something, but Pemberton spoke first.

  “Let’s go.”

  They walked around the cabin, then passed a woodshed, behind which a rusty window screen lay atop two sawhorses. On the screen were arrowheads and spear points, other stones various in size and hue, including some little more than pebbles. Galloway paused to inspect these, lifting one into the light to reveal its murky red color.

  “I wonder where he found you,” Galloway mused.

  “What is it?” Pemberton asked.

  “Ruby. These ain’t big enough to be worth anything, but if you was to find a bigger one, you’d have something that sure enough would get your pockets jingling.”

  “Do you think Kephart found them around here?”

  “Doubt it,” Galloway said, tossing the stone back on the screen. “Probably found them over near Franklin. Still, I’ll keep my eyes open while we’re sauntering around the creek. Might be something hiding around here besides a panther.”

  They walked on past the woodshed and followed the trail into the forest. Few hardwoods rose around them, and those that did were small. After a while Pemberton heard the stream, then saw it through the trees, larger than he’d imagined, more a small river than a creek. Galloway’s eyes focused intently on the sand and mud. He pointed to a small set of tracks on a sand bar.

  “Mink. I’ll be back to trap him this winter when his fur thickens up.”

  They moved upstream, Galloway stopping to peruse tracks, sometimes kneeling to trace their indentions with his index finger. They came to a deep pool, above it a boggy swath of mud printed with tracks larger than any they’d yet seen.

  “Cat?” Pemberton asked.

  “Yeah, it’s a cat.”

  “I’d have thought there’d be claw marks.”

  “No,” Galloway said. “Them claws don’t come out until it’s time to do some killing.”

  Galloway grunted as he settled himself on one knee. He placed a finger to the side of a track, pressed into the mud so water drained from the print.

  “Bobcat,” Galloway said after a few more moments. “A damn big one, though.”

  “You’re sure it can’t be a mountain lion?”

  Galloway looked up, something of both irritation and amusement on his face.

  “I reckon you could stick a tail on it and claim it for a panther,” Galloway snorted. “There’s fools that’d not know the difference.”

  The highlander stood up and stared at the sun to gauge the time.

  “Time to go,” he said, and stepped onto the bank. “Too bad Mama’s with us or we could stay longer. If that panther’s really around, come the nightfall we might hear him.”

  “What do they sound like?” Pemberton asked.

  “Just like a baby crying,” Galloway said, “except after a few seconds it shuts off of a sudden like something that’s had its throat slashed. You’ll have need to hear it only once to know what it is. It’ll make the back of your neck bristle up like a porcupine.”

  They made their way back up the ridge, the sound of the stream’s fall and rush dimming behind them. In a few minutes, Kephart’s cabin came into view.

  “Want to find out if that sheriff has some real sand in him or is just talk?” Galloway asked.

  “Another time,” Pemberton said.

  “All right,” Galloway said, veering right and crossing a small creek. “This way then. But I’m getting some water out of that springhouse. Mamai will be thirsty after sucking on that candy.”

  When they came to the springhouse, Galloway took a tobacco tin from his back pocket and poured out what crumbs remained in it. As Galloway filled the tin, Pemberton looked through the trees at the cabin. A chess board had replaced the map, and Kephart and McDowell stared at it intently. One of Pemberton’s fencing partners at Harvard had introduced him to the game, claiming it was fencing with the mind instead of the body, but Pemberton had found the slow pace and lack of physical movement tedious.

  The match was nearing its end, fewer than a dozen pieces left on the board. McDowell placed his finger and thumb on his remaining knight and made his move, its forward-left motion angling not only toward Kephart’s king but also into the path of his rook. Pemberton thought the sheriff had made a mistake, but Kephart saw something Pemberton didn’t. The older man resignedly to
ok the knight with his rook. The sheriff moved his queen across the board, and Pemberton saw it then. Kephart made a final move and the match was over.

  “Let’s go,” Galloway said, holding the tin so as not to slosh out the water. “I got better things to do than watch grown men play tiddly-winks.”

  They walked on, finding Galloway’s mother just as they’d left her. The only sign that she’d made the slightest movement was the wadded paper bag on the floorboard.

  “Brought you some cold spring water, Mama,” Galloway said and lifted the tobacco tin to his mother’s cracked purplish lips.

  The old woman made sucking sounds as her son slowly tilted the container, pulled it back so she could swallow before pressing it to her lips again. Doing this several times until all the water had been drunk.

  As they drove back to camp, Galloway looked out the window toward the Smokies.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you a panther yet.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, following the blacktop as it made a convoluted circuit through the landscape’s see-saws and swerves. Outside Bryson City, the mountains swelled upward as if taking a last deep breath before slowly exhaling toward Cove Creek Valley.

  As they drove into camp, Pemberton saw a green pickup parked beside the commissary. Shakily affixed to its flatbed was a wooden building, steep-pitched and wide-doored, resembling a very large doghouse or very small church. On the sides in black letters R.L. FRIZZELL—PHOTOGRAPHER. Pemberton watched as the vehicle’s owner lifted his tripod and camera from the truck’s work shed, set up the equipment with the swift deftness of one long practiced in his trade. The photographer looked to be in his sixties, and he wore a wrinkled black suit and wide somber tie. A loupe dangled from the silver chain around his neck, the instrument worn with the same authority a doctor might wear a stethoscope.

  “What’s going on over there?” Pemberton asked.

  “Ledbetter, the sawyer that got killed yesterday,” Galloway said. “They’re taking his picture for a remembering.”

  Pemberton understood then. Another local custom that fascinated Buchanan—taking a picture of the deceased, the photograph a keepsake for the bereaved to place on a wall or fireboard. Campbell stood behind the photographer, though for what reason, if any, Pemberton could not discern.

  “Put this in the office,” Pemberton said, and handed Galloway the rifle before walking toward the commissary to stand with Campbell.

  An unlidded pine coffin leaned against the commissary’s back wall, the deceased propped up inside. A placard bearing the words REST IN PEACE had been placed on the coffin’s squared head, but the corpse’s tight-shouldered rigidity belied the notion, as if even in death Ledbetter anticipated another falling tree. Frizzell squeezed the shutter release. On one side of the coffin was a haggard woman Pemberton assumed was Ledbetter’s wife, beside her a boy of six or seven. As soon as a click confirmed the picture taken, two sawyers came forward and placed the lid on the coffin, entombing Ledbetter in the very thing that had killed him.

  “Where’s my wife?” Pemberton asked Campbell.

  Campbell nodded toward Noland Mountain.

  “She’s up there with the eagle.”

  The photographer emerged from beneath the cloth, eyes blinking in the mid-afternoon light. He slid the negative into its protective metal sleeve, then went to his truck and took out a wicker fishing creel he slung over his shoulder before procuring another plate. Frizzell inserted the new plate before lifting the camera and tripod into his arms and making awkward sidling movements toward the dining hall where Reverend Bolick’s congregation had taken advantage of the warm day and brought tables from the dining hall for an after-service meal. The food had been eaten and the tables cleared, but many of the congregants lingered. The women wore cheap cotton-print dresses, the men rumpled white dress shirts and trousers, a few in threadbare coats. The children were arrayed in everything from cheap bright dresses to jumpers fashioned out of burlap potato sacks.

  Frizzell set up his camera, aiming at a child wearing a blue gingham smock. The photographer disappeared under the black cloth, attempting to hold the child’s attention with all manner of gee-gaws brought forth from the wicker creel. After a toy bluebird, rattle and whirligig had failed, Frizzell rose from beneath the cloth and demanded the child be made to sit still. Rachel Harmon emerged from behind the other churchgoers. Pemberton had not seen her until that moment. She spoke to the boy quietly. Still hunched over, she backed slowly away as if afraid any sudden movement might startle the child back into activity. Pemberton stared at the child, searching for a feeling, a thought, that could encompass what lay before him.

  When Campbell made a motion to leave, Pemberton grabbed him by the arm.

  “Stay here a minute.”

  The photographer disappeared under the cloth again. The child did not move. Nor did Pemberton. He tried to make out the boy’s features, but the distance was too great even to tell eye color. A flash of light and the picture was done. Rachel Harmon lifted the child in her arms. Turning and seeing Pemberton, she did not avert her eyes. She shifted the child so it gazed in Pemberton’s direction. Her free hand brushed the child’s hair behind its ears. Then an older woman came and the child turned away, the three of them heading toward the train that would take them to Waynesville.

  “Pemberton took out his billfold and handed Campbell a five-dollar bill, then told him what he wanted.

  That night Pemberton dreamed he and Serena had been hunting in the same meadow where they’d killed the bear. Something hidden in the far woods made a crying sound. Pemberton thought it was a panther, but Serena said no, that it was a baby. When Pemberton asked if they should go get it, Serena had smiled at him. That’s Galloway’s baby, not ours, she had said.

  Thirteen

  SHE HAD FORGOTTEN HOW MUCH LOGGERS COULD eat, how it was like stoking a huge fire that burned wood faster than you could throw it on. Rachel worked the early shift, the hardest because breakfast was the camp’s biggest meal. She lit the lantern and took Jacob to Widow Jenkins each morning and then walked down to the depot and rode the train to camp, arriving at 5:30 to help fill the long tables, setting out first the tin forks and spoons and coffee cups, thick kaolin plates and bowls soon to be heaped with food. All the while the fire boxes roared, their mouths opened and stuffed with hickory, their heat passing through the thin pig-iron partitions into the twin thousand-pound Burton grange stoves. Inside the oven doors, puddles of bread dough rose and browned while on the stove eyes pots rattled and steamed like overheated engines. The kitchen thickened with smoke and heat, soon hotter and more humid than the worst July afternoon. Sweat beaded the workers’ skin with an oily sheen as they came and went. Then the food itself was brought forth from the yard-wide oven racks, ladled and poured from the five-and ten-gallon pots, slid and peeled off black skillets big around as harrow discs. Gallon bowls were filled with stewed apples and fried potatoes and grits and oatmeal, straw bread baskets stuffed with cat-head biscuits, heaped platters of hotcakes and fatback, thick wedges of butter and quart mason jars of blackberry jam. Last the coffee, the steaming pots set on plates, cups of cream and sugar as well though nearly all the men drank it black.

  For a few moments everything waited—the kitchen workers, the long wooden benches, the plates and forks and cups. Then the head cook took his gut-hammer and clanged the three-foot length of train track hung outside the main door. The timber crews came in, and for fifteen minutes the men hardly spoke to one another, much less to Rachel and the other kitchen workers. They raised their hands and pointed to empty bowls and platters, their mouths still working as they did so. After fifteen minutes passed, the work bell rang. The men left so quickly their cast-down forks and spoons seemed to retain a slight vibration, like pond water rippling after a splash.

  The tables were cleared immediately, but the dishwashing and preparation for the next meal were put off until after the kitchen staff themselves ate. Rachel had a
lways found these moments the best in the workday. The chance to catch a breath after the rush of feeding the men, to talk to some of the folks who worked with her, it was something she’d looked forward to after months hardly speaking to an adult besides Widow Jenkins. But Bonny had gotten married and moved to South Carolina, and Rebecca had been fired. The older women hadn’t had much to do with her before and even less so now. Rebecca’s replacement, a woman named Cora Pinson from Grassy Bald, hadn’t been especially friendly either, but she was younger than the other women and a new hire. After three weeks of eating alone, Rachel set her plate down where Cora and Mabel Sorrels had a table to themselves.

  “Would you mind if I was to sit with you?” Rachel asked.

  Mrs. Sorrels just stared at her as if she wasn’t worth the bother of replying to. It was Cora Pinson who spoke.

  “I don’t sit with whores.”

  The two women lifted up their plates and turned their backs to Rachel as they moved to another table.

  Rachel sat down and looked at her plate. She could hear several of the other women talking about her, not bothering to whisper. Go ahead and eat like it don’t bother you, she told herself. She took a bite of biscuit, chewed and swallowed it though it went down like sawdust. Rachel set her fork in a piece of stewed apple, but she didn’t raise it to her mouth, merely stared at it. She didn’t even see Joel Vaughn until he set his plate opposite her. He took off his blue and black mackinaw and draped it on an empty seat.

  “Don’t pay no mind to them old snuff mouths,” Joel said as he pulled back a chair and sat down. “I see them every morning out back sneaking them a dip. Don’t want Preacher Bolick to see that nasty tobacco juice dripping down their chins like brown slobber.”