Serena Read online

  “Tell his missus to prop him up in the cornfield on a stick,” Ross said. “He can get himself a sunny disposition whilst he’s keeping crows out of the corn.”

  Henryson stood and stretched his back, looked over at his prone foreman.

  “I see you found a patch to cover that space you had on your pants pocket, Snipes,” Henryson said. “Is it purple or red? It appears to my eye somewheres betwixt them.”

  The men turned as one and contemplated the deranged rainbow that now covered every inch of their foreman’s overalls.

  “It’s mauve,” snipes said.

  “I never heard of no such color,” Dunbar said.

  “Well,” Snipes retorted. “You’re looking right at it.”

  “No disrespect, Snipes, but I still can’t see the wearing of such a outfit,” Dunbar said. “You look like you been sewed up in a crazy quilt.”

  “I done explained the science behind it, same as I explained what darksomeness can do to a man,” Snipes said, sighing deeply. “It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.”

  Snipes folded his newspaper and rose, an unhinging brightness. He did not look at his crew but gazed eastward, as if communing with the spirits of his intellectual forbearers who, like him, had carried the lantern of enlightenment among those who wished only to snuff it. Ross struck a match on his boot heel and lit his cigarette. He held the match before him and watched it burn down to his finger and thumb, then extinguished it with a quick flick of his wrist, blew the wisp of smoke in Snipes’ direction.

  “Galloway’s back,” Dunbar said.

  “There’s some darkness for you, Snipes,” Ross said. “It’s like as if a black pall gets draped on everything he passes.”

  “That’s the God’s truth,” Dunbar agreed.

  “Or the devil’s,” Henryson said.

  “I heard when that hand of his hit the ground it kept opening and closing like it was trying to strangle somebody,” Dunbar said. “Kept on doing that for near five minutes.”

  “I’d not doubt it,” Stewart said.

  “Nobody’d touch that hand even after it quit moving,” Dunbar added. “For all I know it’s still out in them woods where it fell.”

  “I’d not have picked it up,” Henryson said, “leastways without a pair of tongs and a glove.”

  “I’d sooner pet a mad dog than touch that hand,” Dunbar said. “What Galloway’s got is a sight worse than the rabies.”

  “I’d not argue that,” Ross said, tapping ash off his cigarette. “I’m just glad he’s working on the other front, and her that thought him worth saving being over there as well.”

  Several men murmured in assent.

  “They’s some claim it wasn’t a tourniquet stopped that bleeding,” Dunbar noted. “She just commanded it to stop and not a drip flowed out after that.”

  Stewart grimaced. “I’d just as lief not heard about Galloway’s hand opening and closing, nor any of the rest of it. It’ll be fretting me the rest of the day.”

  “Well, if we work hard we’ll be out of this gap by tomorrow and we’ll all be feeling better,” Snipes said, checking his watch. “Time to get back to it.”

  Dunbar and Ross followed their foreman across the creek to a yellow poplar that was the biggest tree in the gap. Snipes notched the tree to fall opposite where the crew worked, aiming it so as not to snag on a cliff hang. Dunbar and Ross used the eight-foot cross-cut saw, and Snipes used the biggest wedge. As the poplar fell, its branches hit a neighboring sycamore and snapped free a piece of limb thick and long as a fence rail. Minutes passed as the limb dangled sixty feet up in the sycamore’s higher junctions, one end quilled with smaller branches, the other sheared to a narrowing sharpness. Then it slipped free only to be caught again a few inches farther down, the sharp end tilting earthward as the limb hung in abeyance a few moments longer, as if deciding.

  The limb fell toward Dunbar, whose back arched as his ax struck wood the same instant the sycamore limb entered between his collar bone and spine. Dunbar’s face smashed against the ground as his knees hit, the rest of his body buckling inward. The white limb had not snapped or slipped free from the flesh. It remained embedded in Dunbar’s back like a stalled lightning bolt, and as the limb’s angled weight succumbed to gravity, Dunbar’s body slowly, almost reverently, lifted to a kneeling position, as if to be given a last look at the world. Snipes knelt and laid his hand on the dying man’s shoulder. Dunbar’s eyes shifted in awareness of Snipes’s presence, but as he left the world he offered no last words or even a final sigh, only one tear that welled in the corner of his right eye before slowly rolling down his cheek. Then he was dead.

  “IT seems the men are getting killed at a rather pro digious rate these last few weeks,” Doctor Cheney said that evening at dinner. “When Wilkie and Buchanan were here, there seemed to be fewer deaths.”

  “The men are working steeper inclines now,” Serena said, “and the heavy rains make the footing tenuous.”

  “Much more rain than the previous years,” Pemberton added.

  Doctor Cheney raised his fork and knife and cut a rind of fat from his piece of ham.

  “Ah, so that’s the difference. Anyway, this continuing depression assures ready replacements. Men will ride a boxcar two hundred miles just on the rumor of work. I saw twenty or so at the train depot just yesterday. They were ragged as scarecrows and nearly as gaunt.”

  There was a knock on the door, and two young women came in with cups and a coffee pot. As the servers left, Doctor Cheney saw Galloway standing beside the office window. The light was not on, and Galloway stood so motionless as to appear a thicker shadow among other shadows.

  “This latest addition to your menagerie, Mrs. Pemberton, he seems more dog than man the way he follows you about,” Doctor Cheney said, lifting a piece of ham with his fingers and holding it as if he might fling it onto the office floor. “Do you allow Galloway to eat table scraps?”

  Serena raised the coffee cup to her mouth and tipped it lightly. Pemberton watched as the gold flecks in Serena’s irises sparked. She set the cup down, only then turned to acknowledge Cheney had spoken to her.

  “First an eagle, now a two-legged dog,” Doctor Cheney continued. “You acquire the strangest pets, Mrs. Pemberton, and yet you train them so well. Do you think you could teach one of those comely maidens who just retrieved our dishes to follow me to bed each night?”

  “To what purpose, Doctor?”

  “A remedy for their maidenhood.”

  Serena closed her eyes for a moment and then reopened them, as if to focus better on Cheney before she spoke. Her gaze became placid, the irises revealing only a gray muted disdain.

  “But such a cure is beyond any nostrum you possess,” Serena said.

  “My lady, your jests are rather unjust.” Cheney said, adopting a mockingly archaic tone. “And they lack humor.”

  “The lack of humour is yours, Doctor, not mine. Yours is choleric while mine’s phlegmatic.”

  “A rather antiquated form of diagnosis,” Cheney said.

  “In some ways,” Serena answered, “but I believe it still applies to the essence of our natures. Fire found fire when Pemberton and I met, and that will be the humour of our child.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Cheney asked. “Your own parents misconstrued your nature.”

  “How so?”

  “Your Christian name.”

  “Another jape your lack of humor missed,” Serena said. “My parents named me before I left the womb, because I kicked so fiercely to get out.”

  “But how did they know you’d be a female?”

  “The midwife told them.”

  “A midwife told them,” Doctor Cheney mused. “Colorado sounds even more medieval than western Carolina.”

  Cheney dabbed his mouth with a napkin and stood. He glanced out the window.

  “There’s light enough to search a creek for lee
ches,” he commented dryly. “Perhaps after that I’ll read up on my phrenology. Then early to bed. No doubt more casualties will come Monday.”

  Doctor Cheney stood and took a last swallow of coffee and left the room. Good dog, Cheney said to Galloway as he passed through the office. Pemberton looked at Serena’s waxing belly. Fire finding fire, he thought, repeating Serena’s words to himself.

  “What news today, Pemberton?” Serena said.

  “Nothing much, other than Harris calling,” Pemberton replied. “It turns out that the Cecils weren’t the ones backing Webb and Kephart on the Jackson County tract.”

  “How did Harris find that out?”

  “He wheedled it out of the Cecils’ banker in Asheville. But Harris still swears he’ll find out who did back them.”

  “I don’t think anyone was backing them,” Serena said. “I think that it was all a ruse to get Harris interested in that tract instead of Townsend’s. And it worked.”

  Twenty

  REPAIRS ON THE CABIN WERE NEEDED, THINGS that should have been done during the first warm days of spring, but Rachel had been so worn down by her camp work and caring for Jacob that she’d put it off for months. When she’d flipped the Black Draught calendar in the kitchen to June, Rachel knew the repairs could wait no longer, so the following Sunday she and Jacob didn’t walk down to Waynesville and take the train to the camp. Instead, she put Jacob in the smock Widow Jenkins had sewn from overalls Rachel had taken from her father’s chest of drawers. Then she dressed herself in her raggiest gingham dress.

  Rachel set Jacob on the grass with the toy train engine Joel had given him for a Christmas present. She leaned the Indian ladder against the cabin. Cowhide knotted the rungs to the two locust poles, and the dried leather lashing creaked with each upward step. Once on the roof, Rachel searched for what her father had taught her to look for. On the gable end, where last winter’s afternoon sun had melted the nighttime freeze, the sill showed signs of early rot. She took up the broad axe and balanced its weight in her hands.

  Rachel carefully lifted the axe to hew the wide new sill, setting her feet as solidly as she could. The axe was heavy and became heavier with each stroke. Her muscles would ache come morning. After ten minutes she knelt to rest and caught sight of the gable’s half-dovetail notching, the precision of it. Her father had made this cabin with care, even where he’d placed it, searching until he’d found a lean slab of granite for a hearthstone and a pasture spring that wouldn’t go dry, what older folks called lasting water. Building the cabin itself with white oak logs and cedar shingles. What she’d liked best was that her father chose the west slope, the sun late arriving but holding its light longer into the day and early evening.

  Rachel picked up the axe again. Her arms were leaden and watery blisters ridged her palms. She thought of how nice it would be if she was at church, not only because of the fellowship and how Preacher Bolick’s words were a comfort but just the easefulness of sitting there, not having to do anything but hold Jacob, sometimes not even that because Widow Jenkins would always set him on her lap part of the service. Seven more days before I get that again, she thought.

  Rachel did not stop until the hewing was done, then climbed down the ladder and sat beside Jacob. She studied the cabin as the sun finally made its way above the eastern ridgeline, sipping up the morning’s last shadows. The chinking was fractured in places, slivers of light passing through a few. Which was no surprise but just part of a cabin settling and a long winter of freezing and thawing. Rachel went to the woodshed and found the trowels and a feed bucket. She gathered old horse droppings and then mud from a boggy seep below the spring, mixed it to the consistency of cornbread batter, the same lumps and heaviness. She handed one of the trowels to Jacob.

  “There may come a time you need to know how to do this,” she told the child. “So watch me.”

  Rachel dipped the trowel in the bucket and plopped several scoops onto a plank of wood. Holding the plank in her left hand, Rachel smoothed a gob of the chinking between the logs as she might apply a salve.

  “Let’s let you do it now.”

  She molded her hand around Jacob’s, helped him dip the trowel into the bucket and balance a clump on the blade’s flat end.

  “Daub it on good,” Rachel said, and led his hand to a gap between two logs.

  After a while it was noon-dinner time, so Rachel stopped and went inside. She made Jacob a mush out of milk and cornbread. She ate a piece of cornbread but drank water herself. Milk always made cornbread taste better, and Rachel hoped by next spring she’d have money enough to buy a calf and have all the milk she and Jacob could drink. It seemed possible, because the coffee can on the pantry’s upper shelf was slowly filling, mainly with quarters and dimes and nickels but a few dollar bills. Eight Mason jars of honey now stocked the pantry shelves as well, half of which she’d sell to Mr. Scott.

  When Jacob finished eating, they went back outside. Rachel placed Jacob in the thin shadow next to the cabin and mounted the ladder to chink the highest logs. She checked occasionally to the west for rain clouds, because changes in humidity would mottle the work. All the while Jacob below her, contentedly daubing logs more than gaps. A woodcock burbled in the woods behind the cabin, and a flock of goldfinches passed overhead soon after, confirmation that full summer had almost come.

  An hour passed and Jacob’s swaddlings were surely wet, but he wasn’t fussing, so Rachel decided to go ahead and repair the chimney. Blustery winter winds had displaced four of the flat field stones. One lay shattered near the fence edge. Rachel fetched a cabbage sack from the woodshed and placed it beside the three good stones before walking down the creek to get a fourth. She found one that suited beside a shady pool, the stone’s roughness softened by green lichens that peeled away like old paint. Beard-tongue brightened the bank, and Rachel smelled the wintergreen odor of the blooms, the best kind of smell on a warm day because breathing it in seemed to cool you off from the inside out. For a few moments Rachel lingered. She gazed into the pool, seeing first her own reflection, below it tadpoles flowing across the creek’s sandy bottom like black tears. The kind of thing you could see as an omen, Rachel knew, but chose instead to see an omen in the blooming beard-tongue that had, like her, survived a hard winter. She picked up the rock and walked back.

  Swinging the cabbage sack over her shoulder, Rachel climbed the ladder one handed, leaning her body as she crossed the pitched roof to the chimney. Placing the stones was like solving a wobbly puzzle, finding the one that fit most snug in each of the chimney’s cavities. The last stone finally locked into place, and the chimney was again as it once had been.

  Rachel did not leave the roof immediately, instead looked westward. She let her eyes cross the horizon toward the higher mountains that rose where North Carolina became Tennessee. She thought of the map in Miss Stephens’ classroom, not the time in the fifth grade when Joel had been such a smart aleck but a morning in first grade, just months after her mother had left, when Miss Stephens had stood by the map whose different colors were like patches on a quilt. The first state they’d learned was North Carolina, long and narrow like an anvil, everything within its lines green. And that had made sense to Rachel at six, because come winter there were still holly bushes and firs and rhododendron, even in the gray trees bright-green clumps of mistletoe. But when Miss Stephens showed them Tennessee, the red hadn’t seemed right. When her father pointed out mountains that were in Tennessee, they’d always been blue. Except at sunset, when the mountains were tinged with red. Maybe that was why, she’d thought as Miss Stephens began pointing out other states.

  Rachel gave the chimney a last inspection, then eased down the ladder. Once back on the ground, she picked up Jacob and studied the cabin a few moments.

  “That’ll get us through another winter,” she said, and was about to go inside when she saw Widow Jenkins coming up the road, still dressed in her Sunday finery, a peach basket covered with a dish towel in her gnarled hand.
r />   Rachel went to meet her, Jacob already waving at the older woman.

  “I figured hard as you had to work on your day off, I’d fix you a supper,” Widow Jenkins said, nodding at the basket. “There’s fried okra and bacon in there, some hominy too.”

  “That was awful kind of you,” Rachel said. “It has been some work.”

  Widow Jenkins looked at the roof and chimney and studied it a few moments.

  “You done a good job,” she said. “Your own daddy couldn’t have done better.”

  They walked over to the porch. Rachel sat on the steps, but when the older woman set the basket down she did not sit herself.

  “That cloth ought to keep those victuals warm long enough for me to hold that rascal a minute,” Widow Jenkins said, taking Jacob and jostling him until he laughed. “The way he’s growing these old arms won’t be able to do that much longer.”

  She gave Jacob a final nuzzling before handing the child back to Rachel.

  “I better be on my way so you can eat and get some rest.”

  “Sit with us a few minutes,” Rachel said. “I’d like the company.”

  “All right, but just a few minutes.”

  The sun had fallen enough now that the air was cooling, the day’s first breeze combing the white oak’s highest branches. The bullfrog that lived above the springhouse made its first tentative grunts. Rachel knew the katydids and field crickets would soon join in. All soothing dependable sounds that always helped her fall asleep, not that she’d need them tonight.

  “Joel Vaughn asked about you at the service today,” Widow Jenkins said. “He was worried you or the young one was feeling puny. I told him you had some chores needing done.”

  Widow Jenkins paused and looked straight ahead, as if observing something in the woods beyond the barn.

  “He’s turned into a right handsome young man, don’t you think?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Rachel said. “I suppose so.”

  “I think he’d make you a good sweetheart,” Widow Jenkins said.

  It was the kind of comment that would normally make her blush bright, but Rachel didn’t. She shifted Jacob on her lap, let her fingers smooth the down on the back of his neck.