Serena Read online

  “I’ve got men checking to make sure it don’t spread,” he said. “When we get it put out, you want me to send the crews out?”

  “Keep them around camp, just in case,” Serena answered. “We’ll let them rest up and get a full day from them tomorrow.”

  “You was lucky to have got out of there,” the foreman said, looking toward the house.

  Serena and Pemberton turned and saw the truth of his statement. The back portion was still aflame, but the front was a tumble of black smoking wood but for the brick steps that now rose toward nothing but singed air. A man in silhouette sat in a ladderback chair directly in front of the steps. The man watched the flames, seemingly oblivious to the workers who rushed and shouted around him. On the ground beside the chair was an empty ten-gallon canister of kerosene. Pemberton did not have to see the man’s face to know it was McDowell.

  PART IV

  Thirty-three

  IT WAS MID-MORNING BEFORE ENOUGH LIGHT filtered through the pall of smoke to see more than a few yards. Even then the ashy air brought tears to any lingering gaze. Much of the slash and stumps in the valley had burned along with the lean-tos of wood and tin assembled by squatters. Men begrimed by smoke and soot moved to and fro across the valley’s smoldering floor, gathering sludgy buckets of water from the creek to smother what gasps of fire lingered. From a distance, they appeared not so much like men as dark creatures spawned by the ash and cinder they trod upon. Had there not been rain the day before, every building in the camp would have burned.

  Snipes’ crew sat on the commissary steps. With them was McIntyre, whose proven talent as a sawyer had gotten him rehired. The lay preacher had not spoken a single word since his return, nor did he now as the crew observed the black square that was once the Pemberton’s house. Snipes lit his pipe and took a reflective draw, let the smoke purl from his rounded lips as if some necessary precursor to what wisdom the lips were about to impart.

  “An educated man such as myself would of knowed better than try to kill them in their natural element,” Snipes mused.

  “Fire, you mean?” Henryson asked.

  “Exactly. That’s like throwing water on a fish.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “I’d of planted a wooden stake in their hearts,” Snipes said as he tamped more tobacco into his pipe. “Most all your best authorities argue for it in such situations.”

  “I seen Sheriff Bowden cuffing up McDowell earlier,” Henryson said. “He was hitting at him, but it looked like he was doing no more than swatting flies off of him. Much as he’s wanting to be, the new high sheriff ain’t in them other three’s league.”

  “I doubt there’s not a one north of hell itself that is,” Ross exclaimed.

  For a few moments the men grew silent, their eyes turning one pair at a time to look at McIntyre, who in previous times would have gleaned half a dozen impromptu sermons after hearing the other men’s comments. But McIntyre stared fixedly across the wasteland at the bleary western horizon. Since his return, McIntyre’s silence had been a matter of much speculation among the men. Snipes suggested the lay preacher’s experience had caused McIntyre to adopt a vow of silence in the manner of monks of long-ago times. Stewart retorted that in the past McIntyre had been vehemently opposed to all manner of things popish, but conceded that perhaps the flying snake had changed his view on this matter. Henryson surmised that McIntyre was waiting for some particular revelation before speaking.

  Ross said maybe McIntyre just had a sore throat.

  Yet none of the men laughed or snickered when Ross made his quip, and Ross himself seemed to regret the remark as soon as it left his mouth, for they all believed, even Ross, the most cynical of men, that the lay preacher had been truly and irrevocably transformed.

  LATE that morning after being treated by the doctor summoned from Waynesville, Serena and Pemberton dressed in denim breeches and cotton shirts gleaned from what sundries remained in the commissary. They sent a worker to town to buy clothing and toiletries the commissary could not furnish. Serena gathered some of the kitchen staff to prepare Campbell’s old house for them while Pemberton went to make sure any stray fires had been put out. As he followed the fire’s leaps and sidles, Pemberton found that though acres of slash and stumps had burned, not a single building aside from the house had been lost. After these tasks had been done, he and Serena lingered in the office.

  “I probably should go and ride the ridge,” Serena said, “just to make sure the cables are undamaged.”

  Pemberton looked at the bills and invoices on the desk, then got up.

  “I’ll go with you. The paperwork can wait.”

  Serena came around the desk and placed her bandaged hand on the back of Pemberton’s neck. She leaned and kissed him deeply.

  “I want you with me,” Serena said, “not just this morning but all day.”

  They went to the stable and saddled their horses. Serena freed the eagle from its roost and they rode out of the stable. The noon sun shone on the train tracks, and even in the dingy light the linked metal gave off a muted gleam. Soon it would be time to pull up the rails, Pemberton knew, starting with the spurs and moving backward. He looked forward to taking off his shirt and working with the men again, asserting his strength. It seemed so long since he’d done that, spending all his days in the office, poring over numbers like some drudge in a bank. With Meeks settled in, he’d be able to get out more, especially at the new camp.

  Warm ash blackened the horses’ hooves and forelegs as Pemberton and Serena rode across the valley floor. They passed exhausted workers washing soot off their faces and arms, the men looking not so much like loggers as minstrels unmasking after a performance. The men did not speak, the only sound their hacking coughs. The last flames doused were where the cemetery had been, and smoke wisps rose there as if even the souls of the dead were abandoning the charred valley for some more hospitable realm.

  Pemberton and Serena followed Rough Fork Creek to Shanty Mountain, halfway up when they heard a shout behind them and saw Meeks coming their way. The accountant had never ridden a horse before coming to the camp, and he kept his back bowed and head close to the mare’s neck. When he caught up with the Pembertons, Meeks lifted his head and spoke softly, no doubt fearful a raised voice might cause the horse to bolt.

  “Galloway called,” he said to Serena.

  Serena turned to Pemberton.

  “I’ll catch up with you in just a minute.”

  “No,” Pemberton said. “I’ll wait.”

  Serena looked at Pemberton’s face a few moments, as if searching for some feature in it that might counter his words. Satisfied, she nodded.

  “Tell us,” she said to Meeks.

  “Galloway’s traced ‘them,’ whoever ‘them’ are, to Knoxville and they didn’t buy a ticket,” Meeks said with some exasperation. “He also said to tell you no freight train left before he arrived, so ‘they’ are evidently still there.”

  Meeks slowly lifted himself higher in the saddle to retrieve a piece of paper from his pocket.

  “He told me a telephone number and said you needed to tell him what to do next.”

  “Go call him,” Serena said, ignoring the proffered paper. “Tell him I said they’ve probably got no one there to stay with and no money, so he should start looking around Knoxville.”

  “I didn’t realize I was also a receptionist,” Meeks grumbled, then began his halting descent back to camp.

  Pemberton and Serena did not stop again until they were on the mountain top. Smoke dimmed the sun to the color of tarnished copper, the light around them transformed as well, tinted like a daguerreotype. Serena untethered the eagle, raised her arm and lifted it skyward. The bird rose, its great wings beating as if pushing away not only air but the very earth itself. It veered left, caught an updraft for a moment, then continued the ascent.

  Pemberton looked back at the camp, the blackened absence where the house had been. The chimney had crumbled but the steps
remained intact, looking not so much like the last remnant of a house but instead steps constructed for a gallows. The ladderback chair where McDowell had sat still faced the steps.

  Serena reined her horse closer to Pemberton, her leg brushing against his. He reached out his hand and caressed Serena’s upper leg. Serena placed her hand on his and pressed firmly, as if wishing Pemberton’s hand to leave its impression on her flesh.

  “What shall we do about our former sheriff?” she asked.

  “Kill him,” Pemberton said. “I can do it if you want me to.”

  “No, Galloway can do it,” Serena said, “as soon as he gets back from Tennessee.”

  Pemberton looked up and saw the eagle’s circle had tightened. It had spotted something.

  “What will it hunt in South America?”

  “A snake the natives call a fer de lance,” Serena said. “It’s far more deadly than a rattlesnake.”

  “As for my hunting, it doesn’t seem I’ll get my mountain lion,” Pemberton mused, “but a jaguar will surely be an equal challenge.”

  “One even more worthy of you,” Serena said.

  Pemberton gazed into Serena’s pewter-gray irises, the specks of gold within them, then the pupils themselves. How long, Pemberton wondered, since he’d looked there, had the courage to accept such clarity.

  “You’re more the man I married than you’ve been for quite a while,” Serena said.

  “The fire reminded me about what matters.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Only you,” Pemberton said.

  The eagle’s shadow passed over them, then the bird flung itself earthward, landing fifty yards below. The bird jousted with its prey, the snake’s rattles buzzing furiously at first but soon intermittent.

  “That’s forty-two it’s killed since early April,” Serena said. “I should take it over to Jackson County, let it kill some there before cold weather drives the snakes into their dens.”

  Serena took the metal whistle from the saddle pocket and blew, then swung the lure overhead. The bird ascended and with two great wing flaps glided up the ridge to land next to the horses, the dust-colored rattlesnake set down like a piece of slash. Pemberton’s horse neighed and cantered backward and he had to jerk the reins, but the Arabian was so used to the bird and its prey that it did not even turn its head. The snake twisted onto its belly, and Pemberton saw where the bird’s beak had opened the snake’s midsection, tugged free strands of purple guts. The snake’s tail rattled feebly a few moments more, then was still.

  IT was two afternoons later when Pemberton heard the sound of Galloway’s car as it bumped and rattled into camp. He went to the office window and watched Galloway rise stiffly from the car, a plum-colored stain darkening the left side of his face. The left eye socket was blackened, the eye just a slit. Galloway walked into the slash and stumps and searched with his good eye until he saw Serena. She was riding toward camp, the day over. Galloway hobbled up the ridge to meet her. With his gone hand and damaged face, he appeared a man who’d fallen sideways into some dangerous machine.

  Pemberton sat back down. He told himself not to think about what Galloway’s face might betoken of the child’s fate. He made himself think instead about the fire, those moments flames had enclosed him and Serena, and how he did not know if they would live or die, but nothing else mattered except they’d live or die together. In a few minutes Galloway’s car started up and drove off out of the valley. Serena came into the office.

  “Galloway’s going to visit our ex-sheriff,” she said, but offered no explanation of Galloway’s injuries, nor did Pemberton ask.

  Serena paused and looked at the boxes of files stacked in the corner for the coming move.

  “We’ve done well here,” Serena said.

  Thirty-four

  AT LEAST THERE ARE MOUNTAINS. THAT WAS what Rachel told herself as she and Jacob left the boarding house and walked up Madison Street. She stepped around a puddle. The rain that had fallen all day continued to fall as evening settled over the city. A gap in the buildings allowed Rachel a glimpse at the snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier. She lingered a few moments, took in the vista as she might a mouthful of cold spring water on a hot day.

  She remembered the flat vastness of the midwest, particularly a depot in Kearney, Nebraska, where they’d waited two hours to change trains. She had taken Jacob for a walk down the town’s one street. The houses quickly thinned out, then only fields of harvested wheat and corn beneath a wide sky. A landscape where no mountains rose to harbor you, give you shelter. She’d wondered how people could live in such a place. How could you not feel that everything, even your own heart, was laid bare?

  Rachel walked toward the café where from five to midnight she was paid twenty cents an hour to wash dishes and clean off tables. Mr. and Mrs. Bjorkland let her lay Jacob on a quilt in the kitchen corner, and each night Mrs. Bjorkland gave Rachel big helpings of food to take home. Rachel passed enough destitute men and women on the streets every day to know how lucky she was to have a job, not to be hungry and in rags, especially after being in Seattle less than a month.

  A car horn startled her, and she knew if she lived here the rest of her life she’d never get used to the busyness of town life, how something was always coming and going and whatever that something was always had a noise. Not soothing like the sound of a creek or rain on a tin roof or a mourning dove’s call, but harsh and grating, no pattern to it, nothing to settle the mind upon. Except in the early morning, those moments before the city waked with all its grime and noise. She could look out the window at the mountains, and their stillness settled inside her like a healing balm.

  Rachel crossed the street. On the other side, a policeman with a nightstick walked his beat. Farther down the block, a group of dispirited men lined up outside the Salvation Army building, waiting to go inside for a meal of beans and white bread, a soiled tick mattress to lay on the building’s basement floor. A shock of curly red hair caught her eye at the front of the line. Rachel looked closer and saw the tall gangly body, no gray golf cap but the blue and black mackinaw coat. She hoisted Jacob in her arms and walked quickly down the street, but by the time she got there he was already inside. If it was him, because Rachel was already beginning to doubt what her eyes had seen, or thought they’d seen. She considered trying to get inside, but as she stepped closer to the entrance several of the men in line stared hard at her.

  “The women’s mission is over on Pike Street,” a man with his front teeth missing said gruffly.

  Rachel looked across the street at the theatre and checked the big clock at the center of the movie marquee, saw she had to leave or be late for work. As she walked back up the sidewalk toward the café, Rachel told herself she was just imagining things. Passing in front of the Esso station, she stepped over a puddle where gas and water swirled together to make an oily rainbow. The rain began to fall harder, and she quickened her pace, made it to the café door just as the bottom of the sky fell out and the rain came so hard she couldn’t see the other side of the street.

  “Let me hold Jacob for you so you can get your coat off,” Mr. Bjorkland said as she came inside.

  Mr. Bjorkland and his wife pronounced the child’s name with an extra emphasis on the first syllable, as they did Rachel’s own name. The names sounded gentler that way, and it seemed right to Rachel for the Bjorklands to speak in such a way, because it fit the kind of people they were.

  “Here, to dry off with,” Mrs. Bjorkland said, placing a towel on Rachel’s shoulder.

  Rachel went on into the kitchen and laid Jacob on the quilt. She opened her pocketbook and set the toy train engine beside the child. As she was about to snap shut her pocketbook, Rachel saw the folded piece of paper with a phone number and address. She opened the note and looked at the small precise handwriting you’d not expect from such a man. How much could you feel for someone you’d only spent six or seven hours with, she wondered. You couldn’t call it love, but Rachel knew she fe
lt something more than just gratitude. Rachel remembered the week she’d called the number night after night with no answer until, finally, the operator picked up and told Rachel the party she was trying to get in touch with was deceased. She held the note a moment longer and then placed it in a trashcan. She looked at Jacob. After I’m dead, she told herself, at least there’ll be one other in the world who knows what Sheriff McDowell done for us.

  She changed Jacob and gave him the warm bottle of milk she knew would soon slip from his mouth. Rachel took the cloth apron off the nail on the wall, tied it around her waist. For a moment she paused, feeling the kitchen’s warmth, understanding something placid in it. A dry warm place on a cold rainy day and the smell of food and the slow soft breaths of a child drifting toward sleep. A safe harbor, Rachel told herself, and as she spoke those words to herself she remembered Miss Stephens describing Seattle while pointing to the far right side of the classroom’s wide bright map.

  Mr. Bjorkland came through the swinging doors.

  “Get your dishwater ready,” he said. “Saturday nights are the worst, so you’ll earn your money this evening.”

  There was a clatter of pots and pans as Mr. Bjorkland readied the kitchen for the first order. Rachel glanced over at Jacob, his eyes already closed. He’d sleep soon, despite the din of pots and pans, the shouted orders and and all the other commotion.

  Thirty-five

  IT WAS SNIPES’ CREW WHO CUT THE LAST TREE. When a thirty-foot hickory succumbed to Ross and Henryson’s cross-cut saw, the valley and ridges resembled the skinned hide of some huge animal. The men gathered their saws and wedges, the blocks and axes and go-devils. They paused a moment, then walked a winding path down Shanty Mountain. It was late October, and the workers’ multi-hued overalls appeared woven from the valley’s last leaves.