Serena

by Ron Rash

  “But you still believe it’s the Cecils behind all this?”

  “It doesn’t matter a dog’s turd who is backing them,” Harris shouted. “That son-of-a-bitch Luckadoo thinks Webb and Kephart have the money. He gave me a courtesy call.”

  “How far along with this are they?”

  “They’ve co-signed everything for the down payment. All that’s left is the transfer deed.” Harris paused. “Damn it, I knew I should have called Luckadoo last night.”

  “It’s a good tract but so is Townsend’s,” Pemberton said. “You said as much yourself yesterday.”

  “This is the tract I want.”

  Pemberton started to speak, then hesitated, unsure if he wanted to risk Harris’ wrath being turned on him, but it was a question he and Serena needed answered.

  “Are you sure you’re not just wanting to spite Webb and Kephart?”

  For a few moments Harris didn’t respond. Pemberton could hear the older man’s breath slow. When Harris spoke, his words were more measured but just as belligerent.

  “If we don’t do this deal, Pemberton, we never do one, and that includes Townsend’s acreage.”

  “But if the transaction’s gone this far…”

  “We can still get the land if we pay off Luckadoo. That’s the only reason he called me in the first place. It’s just going to cost more.”

  “How much more?”

  “Five hundred,” Harris said. “Luckadoo’s giving us an hour to make up our minds. Like I said, we do this deal or we never do another one. That’s the way of it, so make up your mind.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Serena first.”

  “Talk to her then,” Harris said, lowering his voice for a moment. “She’s smart enough to know what’s best in your long-term interest.”

  “I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

  “You do that,” Harris said. “And make damn sure soon is within an hour.”

  Pemberton hung up and walked to the stable. Serena was in the back stall with the eagle, her fingers reddened from the raw meat she fed the bird. He told her about the phone call. She fed the eagle a last piece of meat and placed the hood back over its head.

  “We need Harris’ money,” Serena said. “We’ll have to humor him, this time, but have Lawyer Covington put in the contract that Harris can’t begin any mining operations until the site’s timber is cut. Harris has found something up there besides kaolin and some copper, something he doesn’t want us to know about. We’ll hire our own geologist and find out what it is, then refuse to cut the timber until Harris gives us a percentage, a good percentage.”

  Serena stepped out of the stall. She handed Pemberton the tin plate and lifted the wooden latch, closed the stall door. A few stringy remnants remained on the plate. Many of the workers claimed that Serena fed the eagle the hearts of animals as well, to make the bird fiercer, but Pemberton had never seen her do such a thing and believed it just one more bit of the camp’s lore about Serena.

  “I’d better go call Harris.”

  “Call Covington as well,” Serena said. “I want him there when Harris talks to Luckadoo.”

  “Our having to pass on Townsend’s land will doubtless delight Albright,” Pemberton said, “but at least this will take care of Webb and Kephart on one front.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Serena said.

  WITH the purchase of a second skidder, the men now worked on two fronts. By the first Monday in April the northern crews had crossed Davidson Branch and made their way to Shanty Mountain, while the crews to the south followed Straight Creek west. Recent rains had slowed progress, not just forcing men to slog through mud but causing more accidents as well. Snipes’ crews worked the west end of Shanty. Since McIntyre hadn’t recovered from the falling snake incident, a man named Henryson had been hired as his replacement. Henryson and Ross were second cousins who’d grown up together in Bearpen Cove. Both men viewed the world and its inhabitants with a sharp and pessimistic wit. This shared dourness Snipes had duly noted, and hinted it would be the subject of some future philosophic discourse.

  A cold rain had fallen all day, and by mid-morning the workers resembled half-formed Adams dredged from the mud, not yet molded to human. When Snipes signaled for a break, the men didn’t bother to seek what shelter thicker trees might afford them. They merely dropped their tools where they stood and sat down on the boggy earth. They looked as one toward the camp and its day’s-end promise of warmth and dryness with longing and a seeming degree of skepticism, as if unsure the camp’s existence wasn’t some phasma conjured in their waterlogged heads.

  Ross took out his tobacco and rolling papers but found them too wet to hold fire even in the unlikely event he could find a dry match.

  “I got enough mud daubed on my ass to grow a peck of corn,” Ross said miserably.

  “I got enough just in my hair to chink a cabin,” Henryson said.

  “Makes me wish I was a big boar hog, cause at least then I’d enjoy slopping around in it,” Stewart sighed. “There can’t be a worser job in the world.”

  Dunbar nodded toward the camp where several job seekers sat on the commissary porch steps, enduring the rain in hopes of proving their fortitude as potential hires.

  “Yet there’s folks wanting them.”

  “And more coming every day,” Henryson said. “They’s jumping off them boxcars passing through Waynesville like fleas off a hound.”

  “Coming from far and near too,” Ross said. “I used to think hard times rooted best in these hills, but this depression seems to have laid a fair crop of them most everywhere.”

  The men did not speak for a few minutes. Ross continued to stare sullenly at his drowned cigarette while Snipes scraped mud off his overalls, trying to reveal some remnants of brightness amid the muck. Stewart took out the pocket Bible he’d wrapped in a square of oilcloth, shielded the book from the rain with the cloth. He mouthed the words as he read.

  “Is McIntyre doing any better?” Dunbar asked when Stewart put the Bible back in his pocket.

  “Not a lick,” Stewart said. “His missus took him back over to the nervous hospital and for a while they was favoring electrocuting him.”

  “Electrocuting him?” Dunbar exclaimed.

  Stewart nodded. “That’s what them doctors said. Claimed it for a new thing they been talking up big in Boston and New York. They get some cables same as you’d spark a car battery off with and pinch them on his ears and run lectricity all up and down through him.”

  “Lord have mercy,” Dunbar said, “they figure McIntyre for a man or a light bulb.”

  “His missus don’t like the idea one bit neither, and I’m with her,” Stewart said. “How could you argue such a thing would do anybody good?”

  “They’s a scientific principle involved in it,” Snipes said, speaking for the first time since the men had stopped work. “Your body needs a certain amount of electricity to keep going, same as a radio or a telephone or even the universe itself. A man like McIntyre, it’s like he’s got a low battery and needs sparked back up. Electricity, like the dog, is one of man’s best friends.”

  Stewart pondered Snipes’ words a few moments.

  “Then how come they use it down there in Raleigh to kill them murderers and such?”

  Snipes looked at Stewart and shook his head, much in the manner of a teacher who knows his fate is to always have a Stewart in his class.

  “Electricity is like most everything else in nature, Stewart. They’s two kinds of humans, your good and bad, just like you got two kinds of weather, your good and bad, right?”

  “What about days it rains and that’s good for a man’s bean crop but bad because the feller was wanting to go fishing?” Ross interjected.

  “That ain’t relevant to this particular discussion,” Snipes retorted, turning back to Stewart.

  “So you understand what I’m a getting at, there being the good and the bad in all manner of things.”

  Stewart nodd
ed.

  “Well,” Snipes said. “That’s your scientific principle in action. Anyways, what they’d use on McIntyre is the good kind of electricity because it just goes into you and gets everything back to flowing good. What they use on them criminals fries your brains and innards up. Now that’s the bad kind.”

  THE rain had not lessened by afternoon, but despite Pemberton’s protests Serena mounted the Arabian and rode to check the southern front where Galloway’s crew cut on the sloping land above Straight Creek. The angled ground would have made footing tenuous on a sunny day, but in the rain the workers labored with the slipfootedness of seamen. To make matters more difficult, Galloway’s crew had a new lead chopper, a boy of seventeen stout enough but inexperienced. Galloway was showing where to make the undercut on a barrel-thick white oak when the youth’s knee buckled as the axe swung forward.

  The blade’s entry made a soft fleshy sound as Galloway and his left hand parted. The hand fell first, hitting the ground palm down, fingers curling inward like the legs of a dying spider. Galloway backed up and leaned against the white oak, blood leaping from the upraised wrist onto his shirt and denim breeches. The other sawyer stared at Galloway’s wrist, then at the severed hand as if unable to reconcile that one had once been part of the other. The youth let the axe handle slip from his hands. The two workers appeared incapable of movement, even when Galloway’s legs folded. His back was still against the tree, and the bark scraped audibly against Galloway’s flannel shirt as he slid into a sitting position.

  Serena dismounted and took off her coat, revealing the condition it had concealed for months. She lifted a pocketknife from her saddle pack and slashed free the Arabian’s rein and tied it around the stricken man’s forearm. She tightened the leather, and blood ceased pouring from Galloway’s wrist. The men lifted their wounded foreman and held him upright on the horse until Serena mounted behind him. She rode back to camp, one arm around Galloway’s waist, pressing the worker against her swollen belly.

  Once at camp, Campbell and another man lifted Galloway off the gelding and carried him into Doctor Cheney’s caboose. Pemberton came in a few moments later and believed he looked at a dead man. Galloway’s face was pale as chalk, and his eyes rolled as if unmoored, his breathing sharp pants. Cheney emptied a bottle of iodine on the wound. He wiped blood off the forearm to check the tourniquet.

  “Damn good job whoever tied this,” Doctor Cheney said, and turned to Pemberton.

  “You’ll have to get him to the hospital if he’s to have a chance,” the doctor said. “Do you want the bother of that or not?”

  “We need the train here,” Pemberton said.

  “I’ll take him in my car,” Campbell said.

  Pemberton turned to Serena, who watched from the caboose door. She nodded. Campbell motioned to the worker who’d helped bring Galloway in. Together they lifted the injured man off the table. They placed his arms around their shoulders and dragged him to Campbell’s Dodge, Galloway’s boot toes plowing two small furrows in the soaked earth. Only when they got to the car did Galloway rouse himself enough to speak, turning his head toward the caboose door where Pemberton and Doctor Cheney watched.

  “I’ll live,” Galloway gasped. “It’s done been prophesied.”

  As Campbell’s car sped off, Pemberton looked for Serena and saw her on the Arabian, already on her way back to Straight Creek. Serena’s coat had been left in the woods, and Pemberton noticed several men stared at her stomach in amazement. He suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning. Doctor Cheney had been as oblivious to her pregnancy as the rest of the camp, reaffirming Pemberton’s belief that the physician’s medical knowledge was pedestrian at best.

  Pemberton was about to return to his office when he glanced toward the stringhouses and saw Galloway’s mother on the porch, her clouded eyes turned in the direction of all that had just transpired.

  A week later Galloway walked back into camp. He’d witnessed enough men hurt to know Pemberton Lumber Company took no charity cases, especially when every day men arrived begging for work. Pemberton assumed Galloway had come to get his mother and take her back to their old home on Cove Creek. But when Galloway came to his stringhouse, he did not pause but kept walking, his body listing slightly rightward as if unwilling to acknowledge the lost hand. He left the valley and crossed the ridge to where the timber crews worked. For a few moments Pemberton contemplated the possibility that Galloway planned to avenge the loss of his left hand, not necessarily a bad thing since it might make other workers more careful in the future.

  Pemberton was in the back room with Doctor Cheney when Galloway returned, walking beside Serena and the stallion. It was almost full dark, and Pemberton had been watching out the window for her arrival. Serena and Galloway passed the office and went on to the stable, Galloway adjusting his gait so he stayed beside the Arabian’s hindquarters. They came out a few minutes later, Galloway still lagging behind Serena in the manner of a dog taught to heel. She spoke to him briefly. Then Galloway walked toward the stringhouse where his mother was.

  “We need to keep Galloway on the payroll,” Serena said as she sat down and filled her plate.

  “What good is he to us with just one hand?” Pemberton asked.

  “Anything I bid him do. Anything.”

  “A right-hand man with only a right hand,” Doctor Cheney said, looking up from his supper. “And for a left-handed woman, no less.”

  “You’ll be surprised, Doctor, what a man such as Galloway can do with just one hand. He’s very resourceful, and very willing.”

  “Because you saved his life?” Cheney asked. “As one who has saved numerous lives, dear lady, I can assure you such gratitude is fleeting.”

  “Not in this instance. His mother prophesied a time when he would lose much but be saved.”

  Doctor Cheney smiled. “No doubt a reference to some brush arbor meeting where his soul would be saved for the contents of his billfold.”

  “Saved by a woman,” Serena added, “and thus honor bound to protect that woman and do her bidding the rest of his life.”

  “And you believe you are that woman,” Doctor Cheney said, mock disappointment in his voice. “I would have assumed a woman as enlightened as you would deny belief in augury.”

  “What I believe doesn’t matter,” Serena said. “Galloway believes it.”

  Nineteen

  TWO MORE ACCIDENTS OCCURRED THE FOLLOWING week on Shanty Mountain. A log slipped free of the main cable line and killed a worker, and two days later the skidder’s boom swung a fifty-pound metal tong into a man’s skull. Some workers began wearing hand-whittled wooden crosses around their necks while others carried rabbit’s foots and loadstones, salt and buckeyes and arrowheads and even half-pound iron horseshoes. Still others carried talismans for specific dangers—mad-stones to stop bleeding, mistletoe to avoid lightning strikes, agates to prevent falls, all manner of lucky coins, playing cards from deuce to ace set rakishly in their hat-bands. Several men were Cherokee and brought their own charms, fairy crosses and feathers, certain plants. A few believed the best response to the rash of accidents was a stashed whiskey bottle. Some adopted the bright and various coloration of Snipes and could be seen from great distances as they ascended the slopes, resembling not so much loggers as a tribe of deposed harlequins en route to a more hospitable court. Several men threatened to quit. Most grew more careful but still others grew less cautious, resigned to a violent end.

  Snipes’ crew worked a gap in Big Fork Ridge that looked as though a monolithic block wedge had parted the escarpment into two sections. A small creek ran through the gap and trees lined it, a few yellow poplars but mainly sycamore and birch and hemlock. Snipes and Campbell hadn’t believed the trees worth the bother to harvest. To do so would be slow going, and particularly dangerous since they’d be working in close proximity to one another. But Pemberton insisted.

  After another
close call when a log slipped free of its tongs, Snipes gave his men a break. It wasn’t time for one, but the foreman figured the fifteen minutes would cost Pemberton Lumber Company less than the time it’d take to haul an injured man back to camp. The workers gathered beside the creek.

  Though it was early afternoon, little light fell into the gap. The sparse-leaved trees rose around them bleak and skeletal, particularly sycamores that the winter had bleached white. The men had been in the gap since noon yesterday, and Snipes believed the unrelenting gloaming put the workers in a darker more fatalistic state of mind, less careful than they otherwise might be. He felt it provident to make the crews aware of this.

  “They’s a philosophical reason the positive outlook is called a sunny disposition,” Snipes said, his face tented by the newspaper he perused. “Anybody that’s out in a place where the sun lays on you all day ain’t got a care in the world.”

  Ross finished sifting tobacco onto his rolling papers and looked up.

  “So if I was out in the middle of the desert and had no water and there wasn’t any for miles I’d not have a care in the world,” Ross said, then returned his attention to the construction of his cigarette.

  “That ain’t exactly what my notion is,” Snipes replied, lowering his newspaper and looking at Henryson as well. “I’m saying the amount of sun you get can affect how you feel. You get down in a gloomy place like this and it’s like what’s outside gets inside you.”

  “Maybe that’s what wrong with Preacher McIntyre,” Stewart said. “He growed up in the most way-back holler in this county. He told me once it was so darksome in there they had to use a crowbar to get any light in.”

  “How’s McIntyre doing?” Dunbar asked.

  “Well,” Stewart said. “They let him out of the nervous hospital over in Morganton last Friday. Now he’s home under the bed covers most all the time, and he don’t let ever a word come out of his mouth.”