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  “I will take this though,” he said, placing it in his pocket. “I figured I earned it.”

  “Is there a panther?” Pemberton asked.

  “You’ll know the truth of that in a few hours,” Galloway said, and nodded toward the park. “That cat will come across the ridge there and to the left of that cliff hang. It’ll smell your blood and soon enough come on down and have a visit.”

  Galloway lifted the tote sack and swung it over his shoulder. He headed across the meadow, moving in the same shambling manner as before. I’ll remember that slow saunter, Pemberton told himself, I’ll remember it the very moment I kill him. Galloway stopped and turned.

  “One other thing she wanted me to tell you. Your coffin, she said to tell you she’s going to order it special from Birmingham. Your missus said she owed you that.”

  In a few minutes Galloway entered the woods. Pemberton caught glimpses of him through the trees and then a short while later as Galloway followed the trail over the rise. Then he was gone.

  Pemberton reached for the gold chain on his pocket watch. He tugged until the watch emerged. When the gold shell opened, two half-moons of glass fell to the ground, but the watch still worked. The hands were on the three and six. Pemberton followed the almost imperceptible drag of the minute hand moving across the watch face toward the seven. He watched the minute hand as intently as possible, thinking if he could see time pass it would somehow make a difference.

  But the pain was too much to concentrate more than a few seconds. His whole leg was now swollen, the pain constant all the way to the hip. The leg muscles began to spasm, as if the limb were frantically trying to shake out the venom. Pemberton’s stomach heaved and he was glad since that might expel some of the poison, but when he looked at the ground he saw what had come forth was blood. His ribs and ankle hurt as well, but they were afterthoughts, as was his thirst. He’d have to wait the poison out a few hours, let it ease enough to limp out of the gorge.

  Pemberton turned so he could face west. He tried to think of something besides the pain. He studied the Smokies as they unfolded into Tennessee. How many millions of board feet of timber were in those mountains, Pemberton wondered. The nausea returned, and more blood brightened the ground when he vomited. His mouth tasted of copper, and he thought of veins of copper and stream beds of jewels inside the Smokies. He thought especially of Cade’s Cove, where old-growth yellow poplars yet remained. The tune the workers sang about the big rock candy mountain came into his head and lingered a few moments before dissipating.

  Pemberton passed out, and when the pain woke him the day waned. The sun leaned its shoulder into the ridge, and shadows sortied out from the woods into the meadow. Pemberton could smell the leg, its skin now fiery red from kneecap to toes. The limb was dying, would soon enough be black and festering. Pemberton knew he’d lose it, but that would be all right. He could spend his working day on horseback, as Serena did.

  His vision blurred and each breath came harder. Pemberton decided he had to start making his way across the meadow. He’d get as far up the trail as he could before full dark and then rest until dawn. They’d crossed a creek halfway down. He’d drink enough water there to get him the rest of the way.

  Pemberton pressed both hands to the earth and dragged himself forward a few feet. The broken ankle announced itself anew, and he had to lay his head against the earth a minute. He tried to move again, and when he did the world gave way beneath him, as if trying to pull away. Pemberton clutched a hank of broom sedge and held tight. He remembered the afternoon he’d followed McDowell’s police car out to the Deep Creek turnoff. How he’d sat there in the Packard with his hand on the hard rubber ball, and how, for a few moments, it had been like having the world in his grasp.

  In half an hour, Pemberton was in the meadow’s center. He rested and tried to gain up some strength. It was the only way, he told himself, not so much to survive as prove to Serena he was strong enough after all, worthy of her. If he could just make it back to camp, then everything could be again as it once was.

  Shadows fell over him. The festering leg was like dragging a log, and Pemberton imagined the leg gone, how unburdened and free he’d be. If I had the knife I’d cut it off right now, Pemberton told himself, leave it and go on my way. Pemberton retched, but nothing rose into his throat. The world shuddered, tried again to tear free. He grabbed another fistful of broom sedge and held on.

  When he regained consciousness, it was twilight. A cry like that of an infant came from the meadow’s edge. Jacob, he thought, still safe, still alive. Pemberton raised his head toward the sound, but his vision had receded into some part of himself so deep no light could enter. A few minutes later he heard something brushing the broom sedge, moving resolutely toward him, and Pemberton suddenly knew, knew more surely than he’d ever known anything, that Serena had come for him. He remembered the evening in Boston when Mrs. Lowell had introduced them, and Serena had smiled and reached out her hand to take his. A new beginning, now as well as then. Pemberton could not see or speak, but he opened his hand and let go of the broom sedge, let go of the earth itself as he waited to feel Serena’s firm calloused hand embrace his.

  CODA

  In the spring of 1975, an article appeared in Life magazine about Serena Pemberton, describing her long career as a timber baroness in Brazil. Because of her age, the article had an elegiac tone, which the subject did not altogether discourage. She even volunteered that her lawyer had already been given specific plans for her burial (no funeral was mentioned), including internment in a lead coffin built in Birmingham, Alabama. Because it won’t rot or rust, Mrs. Pemberton had answered when asked to explain such a choice.

  When the reporter wondered if there was anything she’d done in her life that she now regretted, Mrs. Pemberton said absolutely not, then turned the conversation to a tract of brazilwood in Pernambuco, which she hoped to purchase with the help of a West German tractor company. The magazine article’s photographs were in color and contemporary except for one, a black-and-white picture that hung in the hacienda’s living room. A nostalgic indulgence, she told her interviewer, quite out of character, but there it is. The photograph was of a young Serena Pemberton astride a huge white horse, an eagle on her right arm. Standing beside her was a tall powerfully built man. In the background lay a wasteland of stumps and downed limbs whose limits the frame could not encompass. The photograph’s one flaw was Serena Pemberton’s face, caught in motion and thus blurred to a gray featurelessness.

  The article was read in September of the same year by a woman in a Seattle, Washington, hospital who awaited a heart operation that might or might not save her life. The Life had been in a basket of magazines brought by a nurse so her patient might have something to read other than a tattered family Bible. The woman had carefully torn the article from the magazine and placed it in the Bible. She had visitors each day, including her husband, but it was the woman’s son, who drove from Tacoma every evening after work to sit with her, that she showed the article to.

  A month later a man stepped onto the train platform in Bertioga, Säo Paulo. He stayed in his hotel until midnight, then left his room to walk the town’s cobbled streets. A thunderstorm had come in off the ocean earlier, and water pooled and eddied beside curbs and iron-grated gutters, but now the moon was out, giving enough light for him to make his way. Fifteen minutes later, he stepped quietly across the back lawn of Serena Pemberton’s hacienda and onto the verandah. The man cut through a screen and stepped into a room bigger than any house he’d ever lived in. He pulled a flashlight from his back pocket, muting its light with his palm as he moved through the dwelling until he found the room he searched for. On the floor beside the bed, an old man snored softly on a pallet. He slept in his clothes, a pistol inches from his one hand. There had been a time when the man would have heard the slightest sound and awakened, but decades around machinery had deafened him to anything not written or shouted.

  He died first, the knife slashing
his windpipe and then sawing across the vertebrae to make sure. The woman in the bed was not dispatched as easily. The town’s doctor was also the coroner, and he found remnants of flesh under her nails on both hands.

  She did not die in bed. A guard stationed at the front gate heard the huge brazilwood door open. The porch light had been dimmed for the night, but the moon was full, so the guard could clearly see the lady of the house taking slow but unwavering steps across the veranda. She paused at the end of the verandah and raised her left hand, tugged at the huge pearl-handled knife planted hilt-deep in her stomach. She was completely naked, though at first the guard thought she wore a dark silk slip. Her clipped white hair caught the full moon’s light, and the guard, a man known for his superstitious nature, claimed later that for a few moments a garland of white fire flamed around her head.

  She could not free the knife. According to the guard, she had looked down at the steps and moved one foot tentatively forward and then back as if testing the temperature of bathwater. It was then the guard saw the man behind her, his large figure framed by the doorway. He was so still the guard could not say if he had been there the whole while or appeared only at that moment. Then he was gone. Later that morning the police chief would ask for a description, and the guard would point to the photograph on the wall and swear that the man in the picture was the very man he’d seen. The police chief and the doctor dismissed the guard’s words as another product of his credulousness.

  But they did not dismiss the guard’s testimony about what happened after he’d run up the walk and ascended the hacienda’s wide steps. Serena had still been standing but the guard swore that she was already dead. Those among the towns-people who’d known her, including the police chief and the doctor, had no doubts at all as to the veracity of this aspect of the guard’s account.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank the following for their help in researching this novel: George Frizzell, Charlotte Matthews, Phil Moore, Scott Simpson, and Ron Sullivan. Thanks also to my superb editor, Lee Boudreaux, my equally superb agent, Marly Rusoff, and Mihai Radulescu. Also Jennifer Barth, James Meader, Sam Rogers, my family, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Although some of the characters in this novel actually existed historically, they are fictional representations.

  About the Author

  RON RASH is the author of three prizewinning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; three collections of poems; and three collections of stories, among them Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. A recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  ALSO BY RON RASH

  NOVELS

  One Foot in Eden

  Saints at the River

  The World Made Straight

  SHORT STORIES

  The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth

  Casualties

  Chemistry and Other Stories

  POETRY

  Eureka Mill

  Among the Believers

  Raising the Dead

  Copyright

  SERENA. Copyright © 2008 by Ron Rash. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub © Edition AUGUST 2008 ISBN: 9780061981982

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