by Farris, John
The lightning filling the sky was too hot and close to look at for long. Whit lowered his head, unconsciously pressing back against the windfall, expecting a painful crack of thunder, like a tooth breaking in his clenched jaw, to accompany the bolt. But all he heard was the baying of the hounds. When they subsided he opened his eyes on pacified, unburnt blue and looked at Arn, who grinned tensely at him.
"Some place, huh?"
"What was that?"
Arn shrugged. "It's happened to me a couple of times before. Feels like you've took leave of your senses, don't it? But that's only the first part. There's more to come."
"What?"
"God only knows. Maybe we better get movin' now."
Within a quarter of an hour they were deep in the woods again, but the going was less rugged than Whit had anticipated. They made their way along a ridge above a deep wide ravine in which he could hear but only occasionally see, in a sear of light, the Cat Brier River pouring over ledges. The climb took them through a narrow parklike stand of butternut, oak, and rock elm; these were all nearly mature trees, at least forty years old, but smaller than many others nearby, limited in their growth by a lack of topsoil. There were large expanses of bare split rock on which nothing grew but scabby lichens. Whit saw evidence that the rock had been shaped and leveled by tools; pickax marks were everywhere, barely eroded by time.
"The spur line ran this way," he said.
Arn paused and pushed his hat back. "This is a natural grade through here. About three-quarters of a mile on up there was a nine-hundred-foot wooden trestle that carried the line across the river at Ellijay Gap. It's long gone. Dig down a couple feet anywhere beyond the tree line, you'll find roadbed and probably some rusted rails." He mopped his hot forehead with a handkerchief and stuffed it back into his hip pocket. "Let's make a little detour, want to show you somethin'."
His dogs stayed on the ridge; Arn led Whit partway down into the ravine, where it was shadier, leafier, flushed with violets; the trees were mostly beeches. In a little slanted cove crisscrossed by mossy windfalls rotting into the muggy earth and surrounded by ground cover of fern, ladyslipper, and goldenseal, Arn squatted near a patch of ground that looked recently and haphazardly dug up. Whit saw dried, dying leaves and odd-looking, immature roots. Arn smiled grimly as he picked through the ravaged plants.
"Good 'sang patch is hard to find anymore. I've been gettin' thirty-five, close to forty dollars a pound out of this patch year after year. Sold the 'sang to an old Greek who comes around in the fall. This is maybe twelve hundred bucks out of my pocket. You might say somebody's decided to take economic sanctions again' me."
"Jacob Schwarzman?"
"No. Don't believe so. He ain't good enough to spy on me in these woods. Hardly anybody is. That is, unless they got wings and roost in the tall trees."
Arn held up a knobby, twisted root with stubby appendages, pale and humanoid in appearance.
"Ginseng?" Whit asked him. He knew the powdered root was highly prized, particularly in the Orient, as a rejuvenator.
"Yeah. Used to be plenty of it growin' all over the Smokies, but the Indians dug it for trade and 'sang hunters gradually cleaned out these woods, until it got to the point where they were afraid to come here anymore. I had me this patch, and one not far from here I seeded myself. Takes about seven years for wild 'sang to grow good roots that the traders will pay top dollar for. And you can't be greedy. You got to leave the young plants alone and grub your roots only once a year, in the fall when the berries are ripe. Well—" He stood up, throwing the dead plant aside. "When I found this patch all tore up, few days ago, I made sure if anybody tried to do the same to my other patch, he'd have cause to regret it. Maybe it's time to get on over to the other side of the ridge and find out if—"
The hounds they had left behind began baying urgently, distress calls; even Whit, who hadn't been around dogs much in his life, could tell that they were frightened. Arn was already running, scrambling up the dark slope toward open ground. Whit followed.
By the time the men reached the stony ridge line the hounds had scattered. Arn took a fast look around, rifle cocked and held across his chest, but he saw and heard nothing except for an unusual number of birds flocking loudly out of the high branches of trees in their vicinity. He roared in displeasure at two of his hounds, who apparently had disappeared into the undergrowth. Only the black-and-tan, Bocephus, stood his ground nervously, sleek head aimed high, throat taut from baying. Arn walked slowly toward the dog, puzzled, talking to him. Whit stayed back to catch his breath, looking up the ridge. All the leaves were stirring, as if in a quickened breeze, the poplars flashing silver undersides, forecasting a storm. But he saw nothing threatening in the sky, which was still a calm, unclouded blue.
Whit turned to Arn, who was standing in front of his rigid dog, trying to understand what was bothering him. Bocephus, quivering from effort, looked apologetically at him but wouldn't stop his tight-throated hoarse baying.
"What do you think is—"
Arn couldn't have heard him; Whit's voice was covered by the screaming of a train whistle, the bellow of exhausts.
The ridge of granite on which they were standing trembled like a rickety boardwalk above heavy surf. Whit looked up and into the heart of the woods and saw a spouted tree of black smoke thick as lamb's wool at the top of its plume, saw a locomotive that hadn't been there two seconds ago, plunging at breakaway speed downhill, smashing large trees in its path, easily uprooting others with a cow-catcher like an outthrust angry iron jaw. It was a black Mikado locomotive with tender, one of the old coal-hauling behemoths, weighing well over one hundred tons. It had polished brass trim, a red-and-gold emblem of the Shenandoah and Texas Railroad mounted on the rivet-studded, circular boiler jacket beneath the headlamp. The cylinder cocks were open and jetting steam hot enough to melt flesh from bone. Trackless but carving a path through time, the Mikado, more than eighteen feet from the ground to the rim of its stack, remained upright but dragged its pilot, or cowcatcher, as it broke through the treeline. The big spoked driver wheels, eight of them, were locked and now luridly screeching on bedrock, throwing up the sparks of a volcano. It headed for certain destruction in the deep ravine. Whit stood squarely in its path, with the passivity of an awed child, of the fatally thunderstruck. His head cleaned out, brainless to the undercurve of naked skull. His blood had leapt once and frozen, his flesh was dumb as a mummy's. In wartime he had survived by virtue of his instinct for the unexpected. But he had no ingrained defense against the utterly absurd, the meaninglessly horrific.
Arn, who was better-conditioned emotionally to the surprises Wildwood had to offer, dropped his rifle and leapt up the ridge toward Whit, hitting him from behind and driving them both out of the way of the locomotive—which by then loomed in his line of sight as big as a house—and over the ridge's edge, horizontal steam surging at his thinly clad heels as he fell, an uncomfortably long way, through space.
Arn got his breath back and collected his scattered wits in a thicket, not in a hurry to move, attentive to his body as feeling returned, alert for steadily worsening, throbbing pain that would mean big trouble. He knew right away that he had not been scalded. He'd spilled and sprawled down the slope of the ravine, Whit falling away in a different direction, lying silently somewhere out of sight now. About all that Arn heard was the death wheezing of the huge locomotive, the slowing expiration of boiler steam. There was a stench of engine oil in the air, of brake-shoe and coal smoke that still hovered. If the firebox had ruptured, sowing the underbrush with glowing anthracite, a fire was probable; but he couldn't distinguish wood smoke, or hear the crackle of flames eating through the ravine in his direction. The locomotive undoubtedly had chewed a broad path into the ravine to the river's edge. The birds had returned, squirrels chattered and scolded. No danger in that. He realized he must have lain stunned, legs tangled in briers, for two or three minutes.
He lifted bloodied hands (the blood welling slowly if at al
l, not pumping scarlet from a wrist broken and bone-slit) and felt himself as if he were a lover (no stab through the groin or gut, rib cage whole). His head pivoted grittily, he flexed the muscles of his back. Soreness, but not binding pain. That encouraged him to sit up, legs in a pinching and prick of branches, blackberry bramble. Could've been far worse luck, he might have gone in headfirst to have an eye extracted on a needle-tipped green thorn. He freed himself, trying not to rip his pants. More blood on his bare ankles, just scratches. He was still wearing both of his moccasins.
He began to feel almost cheerful about the narrow escape, and was further cheered to see lank-eared Bocephus poke his head over a windfall, whining at him.
"Bo, you good-lookin' bastard! Hie yourself over here."
With his dog he searched the area into which he'd fallen. He found his hat but did not see Whit Bowers anywhere. Was it possible he'd rebounded from a limber sapling or the ground itself into the path of the locomotive as it rolled over and over downhill? If that had been his fate, there might be so little left to find, even Bocephus would overlook the remains. There was a slashed trail broad as a highway from the top of the ridge, steamed and rolled so flat and slick he couldn't keep his footing while crossing it. He looked for a bit of clothing, a scatter of mincemeat and bone drawing telltale flies. But there was no sign of Whit, even in this reduced state. So he followed the trail downhill, around heaps of glittering coal spilled from the overturned tender; a good deal of scrap had been ripped loose from the locomotive, mostly piping and pumps. Leaves overhanging the path of destruction were gritty from soot or thickly dripped oil onto his hat and shirt.
The locomotive was lying on its side in a channel of the river, nearly damming the cold flow. Two saplings caught in the grate of the twisted cow-catcher waved gently in the breeze that had dissipated most of the steam from the exploded boiler. Water poured through the cab and a body bobbed inside: he saw a head, hairless, so well cooked and softened by steam, everything but the skullbone had turned to the consistency of calf's-foot jelly. Bright red handkerchief, trainman's brass-buttoned overalls, a shirt unstitched at the shoulder, sleeve and arm both gone, washed, he assumed, downstream. The dead man had been the hogger or maybe the fireman; but if there was another body sunk in the watery cab, Arn didn't care to see it now. He cleaned the blood off his hands in the river, made his way back uphill with Bocephus on the scent of somebody or something and forging ahead in scrabbling strides. Up on the ridge line he barked sharply, once, and Arn, hurrying, saw that Bo had located Colonel Bowers. Who, apparently, had crawled out of whatever cushioning thicket he'd fallen into and made his way up the slope, collapsing in the sun just where the wheels of the locomotive had deeply etched the granite.
Whit was conscious but slow in his movements. He reached for the hound's collar and tried to hold on. There was a gash on his forehead near the left temple, a bit of leaf stuck to the coagulating blood. His eyes, when Arn rolled him over on his back, were like milky agate.
"Hey, Colonel. Whit."
"What . . . happened?"
"Nearly got ourselves run over by a damned ole train."
Whit made a face of pain.
"By . . . what?"
Am said sharply, "Where you at, Colonel? Normandy? Holland?"
"No. Wildwood."
"What year is it?"
"Nineteen . . . fifty-eight."
"Did you get drunk last night with yours truly?"
"Damned if I . . . didn't."
"Good so far. You remember stoppin' for lunch little while ago?"
"Uh-huh. Then the sky—Jesus! Billowing like a sail . . . and the lightning . . . that just came out of nowhere."
"Which it is apt to do, up close to the Tormentor. Reckon everythin's ducky. But let's get you on your feet, too hot lyin' here."
Whit tried, but he couldn't stand unaided. Arn let him slump to a sitting position.
"Let me have a look at your head." Arn carefully explored the area around the cut, but there wasn't much swelling, and the bone seemed intact underneath. Concussion, he thought. Maybe only a mild one, but there was no use asking the colonel to go anywhere under his own power for the time being. Give him a little water (his lips were dry to cracking), prop him in the shade. If blood was slowly leaking in Whit's brain, Arn would see signs of it before long. Maybe he should just try to pack him out now, better safe than sorry; but Am knew he wasn't up to carrying a man for more than eight hours, retracing the difficult way they had come; and if Whit had a brain hemorrhage going, he'd be delivering a dead man to the hospital anyway.
"How're you feelin'?"
"Not too bad. A little woozy." His eyes seemed clearer; Arn was encouraged.
"You'll be okay by and by. Let's go sit in some shade now, just get your arm around my shoulder here, raise on up."
"Where are the rest of your dogs, Arn?"
"Aw, turned tail and run just before the locomotive came crashin' through here. They could be halfway home by now."
"There was a . . . locomotive . . . here."
"You remember?"
"I can smell it."
"Yeah, well, it's still here, down in the river. I'll show it to you later."
"Where did it come from?"
"Nineteen sixteen," Arn said. And he half-carried Whit into the woods, where it was pleasantly shadowed if no cooler, and softer to sit. He made Whit comfortable, with his back against a smoothly barked tree. Whit stared off into the distance, his body relaxed but his mind, behind his eyes, a block of granite. He accepted a drink from Arn's water jar. He licked his lips, moistening them.
"Nineteen sixteen?" he said with an uncomprehending grimace.
"I don't have no better explanation," Arn said reasonably. He hunkered down to look over his rifle, which he was afraid he'd damaged when he dropped it. He unloaded the Winchester, dry-snapped the hammer, and found the action to be in good working order. He sighted along the barrel to make sure it was straight. Then he loaded the rifle again.
"I'm gonna leave Bo here with you for company, go check on somethin' since we've got time to spare. I don't aim to be gone long, an hour at the most. You take it easy. Sip that water just a little bit at a time."
"Yeah," Whit said, still staring, puzzled, down the ridge. "I'll be all right. Let me get my bearings, try to . . . think about this."
Arn nodded. He left his pack but took his sheath knife and Winchester with him.
For fifteen minutes he walked steadily in a northwesterly direction, uphill, following an easy line of ascent where once there had been a wagon road from the spur line. The ridge he climbed was rounded and segmented, like a turtle's shell, into sparsely wooded middens. He came to a bluff where approximately a third of the ridge (limestone, a type of rock rare in the Smokies) had been quarried, leaving a pit partly filled with water sixty feet straight down. Nothing remained of the machinery that had lifted massive blocks to wagons drawn by a triple hitch of mules except a single big cogwheel, its rusted imprint on a vertical white slab just above the pool.
The quarry, with a shadowless squared emerald at its heart, looked pretty enough, and peaceful, but he knew it to be a hellhole of rattlers and, sometimes, an unidentifiable miasma that rose at night like the poisoned spirits of the betrayed and fitful dead, potent enough to knock night fliers out of the sky overhead.
From the top of the bluff he heard the first weak, intermittent cries for help coming from a hidden vale north of the quarry.
There was fear in her voice. She sounded as if she had been strung up for a long time: maybe overnight. Arn took a deep breath and, unsmiling, his pulse rapid with anticipation, he continued on, rifle cocked in his right hand, left hand near the knife on his belt. The fact that it was a woman gave him no pleasure or sense of superiority in this matter. He walked down the other side of the ridge in golden light and abruptly entered into a ravine dark as a cellar, made his way cautiously tree to tree for several hundred yards, through deep shade of basswood and beech to the ginseng p
atch he'd booby-trapped.
Moving in this manner, it was more than a quarter of an hour before he could get a good look at her.
Better to be very very slow than quickly dead.
She was crying helplessly, pitying herself, probably in pain from having been hung head down by one ankle: he wondered if this inversion had resulted in damaging stress on her lightweight butterfly's wings.
It had been easy for him to rig several snares, lengths of tough but supple vine snaking invisibly beneath the lush ground cover around his ginseng patch, the snares triggered like mousetraps. The thin long branches of the beech trees overhead looked much alike; there were hundreds of them, but only four had been carefully shaped to the maximum tension required to snatch a full-grown man several feet off the ground once he stepped into a noose and released the trigger. —Or, in this case, the butterfly girl, who (he had recently estimated) couldn't weigh more than ninety pounds. Little bitty thing, but womanly: her body, revealed in a spangled pattern of trembling mote-filled light and leaf-toothed shadow, glistening from perspiration, the beautiful wings, inky at the edges but thinning to a hot transparency like gauze about to blaze, drooping, useless to her now, a burden.
He felt a trifle sorry for her, but native caution held him back.
He watched her twist slowly beneath the noose, sobbing, moaning miserably, her hair, frazzled from humidity (it was rooster-comb red hair, with plaits of strawberry blond), falling straight down and half the length of her body, like a fiery wick dipped in a well of incendiary sunlight. The bull's-eye nipples of her breasts glowed, as if from the heat of her exertions. Her throat and brow were deeply flushed.
