Authors: Ron Rash
T
HE LINGERING COLD DEFIED ANY CALENDAR.
From October until May, snow and ice clung to the ridges. Several men died when they slipped trying to avoid falling trees or limbs. Another tumbled off a cliff edge and one impaled himself on his own axe and still another was beheaded by a snapped cable. A cutting crew lost its way during a snowstorm in January and was found days later, their palms peeling off when searchers pried the axe handles from their frozen hands. Fingers or toes lost to frostbite were among the season’s lesser hazards.
The harshness of the winter was many-storied among the workers who survived it. One man who’d wintered in Alaska argued this one worse, took off his work boot to show five blackened nubs as proof. Owls frozen on tree limbs, the moon wrapping itself in clouds for warmth, the ground itself shivering—all manner of tall
tales were spoken and nearly believed. Several workers argued the denuded forests had allowed winter to settle deeper into the valley, so deep it had gotten trapped in the same way as an animal caught in a rabbit gum or dead-fall trap. Men searched the sky night and day for signs of the season’s end, a laying down moon, geese headed north, creasy greens on the stream banks.
The surest sign came at the end of May when Campbell killed a timber rattlesnake while surveying on Shanty Mountain. When Serena heard, she ordered every dead rattlesnake placed in an old applecart next to the stable entrance. No one knew why. One logger claimed from personal experience that rattlesnake meat was eaten in Colorado, and though it was not to his taste others had considered it a delicacy. Another worker suspected the snakes were fed to the eagle because they were a part of the bird’s natural diet back in Mongolia. When a crew foreman asked Doctor Cheney what Mrs. Pemberton would want the snakes for, the physician replied that she milked the fangs and coated her tongue with the poison.
Each dawn in the following weeks, Serena walked into the stable’s back stall and freed the eagle from the block perch. She and the bird spent an hour each morning alone below Half Acre Ridge where Boston Lumber had done its first cutting. For the first four days Serena rode out with the eagle behind her in the applecart, a blanket draped over the cage. By the fifth day the bird perched on Serena’s right forearm, its head black-hooded like an executioner, the five-foot leash tied to Serena’s upper right elbow and the leather bracelets around the raptor’s feet. Campbell constructed an armrest out of a Y-shaped white oak branch and affixed it to the saddle pommel. From a certain angle, the eagle itself appeared mounted on the saddle. At a distance, horse, eagle and human appeared to blend into one being, as though transmogrified into some winged six-legged creature from the old myths.
It was mid-July when Serena freed the eagle from the block perch and rode west to Fork Ridge where Galloway and his crew worked on the near slope. The day was hot and many of the men worked shirtless.
They did not cover themselves when Serena appeared, for they’d learned she didn’t care.
Serena loosed the leather laces and removed the eagle’s hood, then freed the leash from the bracelets. She raised her right arm. As if performing some violent salute, Serena thrust her forearm and the eagle upward. The bird ascended and began a dihedral circle over the twenty acres of stumps behind Galloway’s crew. On the third circle the eagle stopped. For a moment the bird hung poised in the sky, seemingly outside the world’s slow turning. Then it appeared not so much to fall but to slice open the air, its body vee’d like an axe head as it propelled downward. Once on the ground among the stumps and slash, the eagle opened its wings like a flourished cape. The bird wobbled forward, paused, and moved forward again, the yellow talons sparring with some creature hidden in the detritus. In another minute the eagle’s head dipped, then rose with a hank of stringy pink flesh in its beak.
Serena opened her saddlebag and removed a metal whistle and a lariat. Fastened to one end of the hemp was a piece of bloody beef. She blew the whistle and the bird’s neck whirled in her direction as Serena swung the lure overhead.
They Lord God, a worker said as the eagle rose, for in its talons was a three-foot-long rattlesnake. The bird flew toward the ridge crest then arced back, drifting down toward Serena and Galloway’s crew. Except for Galloway, the men scattered as if dynamite had been lit, stumbling and tripping over stumps and slash as they fled. The eagle settled on the ground with an elegant awkwardness, the serpent still writhing but its movements only a memory of when it had been alive. Serena dismounted and offered the gobbet of meat. The bird released the snake and pounced on the beef. When it finished eating, Serena placed the hood back over the eagle’s head.
“Can I have the skin and rattles?” Galloway asked.
“Yes,” Serena said, “but the meat belongs to the bird.”
Galloway set his boot heel on the serpent’s head and detached the body with a quick sweep of his barlow knife. By the time the other men
returned, Galloway had eviscerated the snake, its skin and rattles tucked inside his lunch pail.
By month’s end the eagle had killed seven rattlesnakes, including a huge satinback that panicked Snipes’ crew when it slipped from the bird’s grasp mid-flight and fell earthward. The men hadn’t seen the eagle overhead, and the serpent fell among them like some last remnant of Satan’s rebellion cast from heaven. The snake landed closest to McIntyre and had just enough life left to slither a few inches and rest its head on the lay preacher’s boot toe, causing McIntyre to fall backward in a dead faint.
Dunbar quickly finished off the snake with an axe while Stewart brought his spiritual mentor to consciousness by filling McIntyre’s wide-brimmed preacher’s hat with creek water, then dousing the unconscious man. Several wagers were made and then settled when Snipes’ tape measure reached sixty-three inches from the triangle-shaped head to the last of the snake’s twelve buttons.
“That eagle won’t likely fetch her one bigger,” Ross, the bet’s winner, argued.
“Not less it flaps off to them jungles in South America and totes back a anaconder,” Snipes interjected before pocketing the tape measure and wire-rimmed glasses that, though lacking lenses, the crew foreman nevertheless insisted worked because the oval frames better focused his vision.
“I’m wondering if she’s of a mind to train up a whole flock of them?” Dunbar asked.
“If she done it them snakes would be clearing out like Saint Patrick himself was after them,” Snipes said.
“It would sure enough be a blessing,” Dunbar said, “not to have to hold your breath every time you picked up a log or limb.”
Ross stashed the handful of coins he collected into his pocket.
“If I had my rathers I’d take them rattlesnakes where the Good Lord put them,” he said. “At least then you’d not have the worry of them dripping out of the sky onto you.”
Stewart and Dunbar looked uneasily upward.
“You’re disturbing the natural order of things is what you’re doing,” Snipes added. “Same as Pemberton offering his gold doubloon for the feller who flushes that panther out. If that thing really is around, all it’s done up to now is put the skeer in a few folks, but you start bothering a critter like that it’s untelling the trouble you’re stirring up.”
“Still,” Dunbar said wistfully as his gaze lowered to take in the mountains of east Tennessee. “If I was to be the one to find that panther, a twenty-dollar gold piece would buy me a new hat, a sure enough spiffy one with a bright-yallar hatband and feather to boot. Money left over to get me a good sparking outfit too.”
“If you was still around to wear it,” Ross noted. “It might end up being your burying clothes.”
McIntyre, now conscious but still sprawled on the ground, looked up as well. Some frightening new thought appeared to come to him. He attempted to speak but only a few inarticulate sounds came from his throat before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he passed out again.
“I heard Campbell built that eagle a perch in the stable,” Dunbar said.
“I seen it,” Snipes said, shaking his head with admiration. “He made it with a lead pipe and metal soldered off an old boxcar. Used that and a big block of hickory, put some sisal rope on top for the eagle to settle its claws in. I believe Campbell could make you a flashlight out of a tin can and a lightning bug. That bird sets there on that perch like a big old rooster. Don’t blink nor nothing. It’s partial to the darksomeness of that stable. Keeps it calm like the hood she puts over its head.”
McIntyre moaned and opened his eyes briefly before closing them again. Stewart fetched more water, then seemed to think better of pouring it on the lay preacher so instead set the pail down. He took off his stricken mentor’s coat and unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt, then dipped a soiled handkerchief in the water and pressed it to McIntyre’s forehead as if a poultice. The other men watched as McIntyre’s eyes
flickered a few moments and opened. This time he did not attempt to speak. Instead, McIntyre solemnly removed a kerchief that had been around his neck and tied it around his head, covering his eyes.
“He ain’t never been in such a way as this,” Stewart said worriedly, and helped McIntyre to his feet. “I’m taking him back to camp so Doctor Cheney can look at him.”
Stewart helped McIntyre down the slope, moving slow and all the while holding his mentor’s upper arm firmly, as if leading a fellow soldier newly blinded in battle.
“I reckon you’d argue the snake didn’t land on you because of that getup you’re wearing,” Ross said to Snipes.
“I don’t have to argue it,” Snipes said. “You seen well as I did where it landed.”
“Well,” Dunbar said, appraising the drabness of his own outfit. “I got me a shirt red as a mule-team tomato but I still ain’t wearing it out here. I need me one thing pretty to catch a gal’s eye.”
The men paused to watch as Stewart led McIntyre down the ridge, pausing every few steps to nervously check the sky.
“That bird, it ain’t from this country,” Snipes said, pausing to tamp some tobacco into his pipe. “It’s from Asia, a Mongoloid, and it’s worth five hundred dollars so you best not be taking no pot shots at it. It’s the same kind of eagle ole Kubla Khan used to hunt with, that’s what Campbell says.”
“That conversing you had with Campbell must have been the most he’s said at one time in his life,” Dunbar noted. “He’s ever one to keep thoughts to his own self.”
“A wise man always keeps his counsel,” Snipes said.
“We’ve noticed,” Ross said.
“One of the cooks claimed he seen Mrs. Pemberton training that bird one day,” Dunbar said. “Dragged a dead snake around on a rope and ever time that bird tore off after the snake she’d give it a piece of prime-cut beef.”
Ross had unpacked his lunch and stared dubiously at his sandwich.
He slowly peeled back a soggy piece of white bread in the same manner he might a scab, revealing a gray slab of meat that appeared coated with mucus. For a few moments he simply stared at the fatback.
“I’d near about chase a dead snake around my ownself for a hunk of steak,” Ross said wistfully. “It’s been ever so long since I had a piece of prime cow meat.”
“Put it betwixt a big yallar-butter biscuit and I’d near give up the promise of heaven,” Dunbar said.
A raven flew overhead, wing shadow passing over the men like a dark thought. Dunbar flinched when he saw the bird’s shadow, looked upward.
“I believe you’re right, Ross,” Dunbar said, still staring at the sky. “It’s trouble coming from every direction now.”
The men watched the raven disappear over Balsum Mountain.
“Her putting that eagle in the stable all night,” Dunbar said. “Ain’t she afeared of some fox or other varmint getting it?”
Ross looked up from his sandwich and nodded at the dead snake.
“If it can handle a boss rattler like that one it can handle anything on four legs or even two if it come to that. I’d no more strut up and tangle with that eagle than I’d tangle with the one what can tame such a critter,” Ross concluded.
I
T WAS
C
AMPBELL WHO TOLD
P
EMBERTON THAT
the Harmon girl had returned to the camp.
“She’s waiting over at the dining hall,” he said. “She wants her old job in the kitchen back.”
“Where’s she been all this time?” Pemberton asked.
“Living up at her daddy’s place on Colt Ridge.”
“Does she have the child with her?”
“No.”
“Who’s going to care for the child while she’s working?”
“A widow-woman who lives near her. She said she’d still live up there and take the train to camp.” Campbell paused. “She was a good worker before she left last summer.”
“You think I owe her a job, don’t you?” Pemberton said, meeting Campbell’s eyes.
“All I’m saying is she’s a good worker. Even if we
don’t need her right now, one of our dishwashers is leaving end of the month.”
Pemberton looked down at his desk. The note to himself to call Harris, which he’d done earlier, lay crumpled on the foolscap showing Serena’s plans for a new spur line. Pemberton stared at the charcoal etching’s precise rendering of topography, the carefully calibrated degrees of ascent, all done by Serena’s hand.
“I’ll have to talk with Mrs. Pemberton first,” he told Campbell. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
Pemberton got his horse and left camp. He crossed Rough Fork Creek and wove his way up the ridge through the stumps and slash. He found Serena on a down slope giving instructions to a cutting crew. The men slumped in various attitudes of repose, but all were attentive. After the foreman asked a final question, the lead chopper began notching a looming tulip poplar, the only uncut hardwood left on the ridge. Serena watched until the sawyers began their work, then rode over to where Pemberton waited.
“What brings you out this morning, Pemberton?”
“I talked with Harris. Secretary Albright called over the weekend and wants to set up a meeting. Harris says he’s willing to come here.”
“When?”
“Albright’s willing to accommodate us on that as well. He said anytime between now and September.”
“September then,” Serena said. “However this turns out, the more time we have to keep logging the better.”
Serena nodded, her eyes rising beyond the tulip poplar to the ridge where crews had gained a first foothold above Henley Creek.
“We’ve made good progress in the last six months, even with the bad weather.”
“Yes we have,” Pemberton agreed. “We could be finished here in eighteen months.”
“I think less than that,” Serena said.
The gelding snorted and stamped its foot. Serena leaned slightly forward, her left hand stroking the Arabian’s neck.
“I’d better go and check the other crews.”
“There’s one more thing,” Pemberton said. “Campbell says the Harmon girl’s in camp. She wants her old job in the kitchen back.”
“Does Campbell think we should hire her?”
“Yes.”
Serena continued to stroke the Arabian’s neck, but she looked at Pemberton now.
“What I said at the depot, about her getting nothing else from us.”
“Her wages will be the same as before,” Pemberton said, “and like before she won’t be living in camp.”
“While she’s at work, who cares for the child?”
“A neighbor will keep him.”
“’Him,’” Serena said. “So it’s a male.”
The sawing paused for a few moments as the lead chopper placed another wedge behind the blade. Serena raised her left hand and settled it over the saddle pommel. Her right hand, which held the reins, settled over the pommel as well.
“You be the one to tell her that she’s hired,” Serena said. “Just make it clear she has no claim on us. Her child either.”
The cross-cut saw resumed, the blade’s rapid back-and-forth like inhalations and exhalations, a sound as if the tree itself were panting. The Arabian stamped the ground again and Serena tightened her fist around the reins, preparing to turn the gelding’s head in the direction of the cutting crew.
“One other thing,” Serena said. “Make sure she’s not allowed around our food.”
Horse and rider made their way back through drifts of snow toward the deeper woods. Serena upright, her posture impeccable, the gelding’s hooves set down almost disdainfully on the whitened earth. Cut proud, Pemberton thought.
When Pemberton returned to camp, he went into the dining hall where Rachel Harmon waited alone at a table. She wore a pair of polished but well-worn black oxford shoes and a faded blue and white calico dress Pemberton suspected was the nicest clothing she owned. When he’d had his say, Pemberton asked if she understood.
“Yes sir,” she said.
“And what happened with your father. You saw it yourself, so you know I was defending myself.”
A few moments of silence passed between them. She finally nodded, not meeting his eyes. Pemberton tried to remember what had attracted him to her in the first place. Perhaps her blue eyes and blonde hair. Perhaps that she’d been almost the only female at the camp who wasn’t already haggard. Aging in these mountains, especially among the women, happened early. Pemberton had seen women of twenty-five here who would pass for fifty in Boston.
She kept her head slightly bowed as Pemberton surveyed her mouth and chin, her bosom and waist and the white length of ankle showing below her threadbare dress. Whatever had attracted him was now gone. Attraction to any woman besides Serena, he realized, unable to remember the last time he’d thought of a past consort, or watched a young beauty in Waynesville and imagined what her body would be like joined to his. He knew such constancy was rare, and before meeting Serena would have believed it impossible for a man such as himself. Now it seemed inevitable, wondrous but also disconcerting in its finality.
“You can start the first of December,” Pemberton said.
She got up to leave and was almost to the door when he stopped her.
“The child, what’s his name?”
“Jacob. It comes from the Bible.”
The name’s Old Testament derivation did not surprise him. Campbell’s first name was Ezra, and there was an Absalom and a Solomon in the camp. But no Lukes or Matthews, which Buchanan had once noted, telling Pemberton that from his research the highlanders tended to live more by the Old Testament than the New.
“Does he have a middle name?”
“Magill, it’s a family name.”
The girl let her eyes glance his a moment.
“If you was to want to see him…”
Her voice trailed off. A kitchen worker came into the hall, a mop and bucket in her hands.
“You can start first of next month,” Pemberton said, and went into the kitchen to have the cook make him a late lunch.