Authors: Ron Rash
T
HE EAGLE ARRIVED IN
D
ECEMBER.
S
ERENA HAD
notified the depot master it would be coming and must be brought immediately to camp, and so it was, the six-foot wooden-slat crate and its inhabitant placed on a flat car with two youths in attendance, the train making its slow ascent from Waynesville as if bringing a visiting dignitary.
With the eagle came two small leather bags. In one was a thick gauntlet of goat skin to cover the forearm from wrist to elbow, in the other the leather hood and jesses and swivels and the leash, that and a single piece of rag paper that may have been instructions or a bill or even a warning but written in a language the depot master had never seen before but suspected was Comanche. The conductor of the train that brought the bird to Waynesville disagreed, telling of the strange man who’d accompanied the bird from Charleston to Asheville.
Hair black as a crow’s feather and wearing a dress so bright blue it hurt your eyeballs to look at it long, the conductor told the men at the depot, and a pointy fur hat. Plus a sword on his belt nigh tall as he was that give a fellow pause about making sport of the dress he wore. No sirrie, the conductor declared, that wasn’t one of
our
Indians.
The bird’s arrival was an immediate source of rumor and speculation, especially among Snipes and his crew. The men had come out of the dining hall to watch the two boys lift their charge off the flatcar, the youths solemn and ceremonious as they carried the crate to the stable. Dunbar believed the creature would be used as a messenger in the manner of a homing pigeon. McIntyre cited a verse from Revelations while Stewart suggested the Pembertons planned to fatten up the bird and eat it. Ross suggested the eagle had been brought in to peck out the eyes of any worker who closed them on the job. Snipes uncharacteristically ventured no theory about the creature’s purpose, though he did give a lengthy discourse on whether or not men could fly if they had feathers on their arms.
Serena had the youths place the eagle in the back stall where Campbell had built a block perch of wood and steel and sisal rope. Serena then dismissed the two boys, and they walked out of the stable side by side, each matching his stride to his fellow’s. They marched back to the waiting train and climbed onto the flat car and sat with legs crossed and faces shorn of expression, much in the manner of the Buddha. Several workers gathered around the car, inquiring of the eagle and its purpose. The youths ignored all imprecations. Only when the wheels turned beneath them did the two boys allow themselves condescending smiles aimed at lesser mortals who would never be entrusted as the guardians of things original and rare.
Serena and Pemberton remained in the stable, observing the eagle from outside the stall door. The bird’s head was covered with the leather hood, and its immense yellow talons gripped the block perch inside the crate, the six-foot wingspan pressed tight to the body. Motionless. But Pemberton sensed the eagle’s power as he might an unsprung coil of
wrought iron, especially in the talons, which stabbed deep into the perch block’s hemp.
“Those talons look very powerful,” Pemberton noted, “especially the longer one at the back of the foot.”
“That’s the hallux talon,” Serena said. “It’s strong enough to pierce a human skull, or, as more often occurs, the bones of a human forearm.”
Serena did not raise her eyes from the eagle as she reached out and took Pemberton’s hand, but even in the barn’s dim light he could see the intensity of her gaze. Serena’s thin eyebrows arched as if to allow her vision to take in as much of the eagle as possible.
“This is what we want,” she said, her voice deepening, the emotion so often controlled fully unbridled now. “To be like this always. No past or future, pure enough to live totally in the present.”
Serena’s shoulders shuddered, as if to cast off an unwanted cloak. Her face reassumed its look of measured placidity, the intensity not drained from her body but spread to a wider surface. They did not speak again until the Arabian shifted in the front stall and stamped its foot.
“Remind me to tell Vaughn to move the Arabian into the stall next to this one,” Serena said. “The bird needs to get used to the horse.”
“When you train the eagle,” Pemberton asked, “you starve her, then what?”
“She weakens enough to take food from my glove. But it’s when she bows and bares her neck that matters.”
“Why?” Pemberton asked, “because it shows the bird has surrendered?”
“No, that’s where she’s most vulnerable. It means she trusts me with her life.”
“How long will that take?”
“Two, perhaps three days.”
“When will you start?” Pemberton asked.
“This evening.”
Serena slept all afternoon, and at dinner she ate until her stomach swelled visibly. Afterward, she sent Vaughn to the commissary, and he
returned with a chamber pot and a gallon bucket filled with water. When Pemberton asked about food or quilts, Serena told him she’d not eat or sleep again until the eagle did.
For two nights and a day Serena did not leave the stall. It was late morning of the second day when she came to the office. Dark half-moons lined the underside of Serena’s eyes, her hair matted and straw-strewn.
“Come and see,” she told Pemberton, and they walked out to the stable, Serena’s gray eyes set in a heavy-lidded wince against the unaccustomed light. A heavy snow had fallen the day before and Serena slipped, would have fallen if Pemberton had not grabbed her arm and righted her.
“We should go on to the house,” Pemberton said. “You’re exhausted.”
“No,” Serena answered. “I need to show you.”
To the west, gray clouds thickened, but the sun held sway in the center sky, the snow so bright-dazzling that as Serena and Pemberton entered the barn the day’s light broke off as if cleaved. Pemberton still held Serena’s elbow, but it was her eyes more than his that led them across the barn’s earthen floor to the back stall. As Serena unhinged the stall door, the eagle’s form slowly separated itself from less substantial darkness. The bird did not seem even to be breathing until it heard Serena’s voice. Then its hooded head swiveled in her direction. Serena stepped inside the stall and removed the hood, placed a piece of red meat on her gauntlet and held out her arm. The eagle stepped onto Serena’s forearm, gripping the goatskin as the head bowed to tear and swallow the meat between its talons. As the bird ate, Serena stroked the raptor’s neck with her index finger.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said, gazing at the eagle. “It’s no wonder it takes not just the earth but the sky to contain it.”
Serena’s tone of dreamy wonder was as disturbing to Pemberton as her feebleness. He told her again they should go to the house, but she didn’t seem to hear him. Serena gave the bird the last hank of meat and settled it back on the block perch. Her hands trembled as they placed the hood back on. She turned and stared directly at Pemberton, her gray eyes glassy as marbles.
“I’ve never told you about going to our house after it burned down,” Serena said. “I’d only been out of the hospital three days. My father’s foreman, the man I was staying with, I’d told him to burn the house with everything left inside, everything. He hadn’t wanted to do that, and even after saying he had I needed to make sure. He’d figured on that so he hid my boots and clothes, but I took one of his horses while he was gone, wearing just a robe and overcoat. The house had been burned, burned to the ground. The ashes were still warm when I stepped on them. When I got on the horse, I looked down at my footprints. They were black at first and then gray and then white, growing lighter, less visible with each step. It looked like something had moved through the snow before slowly rising. For a few seconds, I felt that I wasn’t on the horse but actually…”
“We’re going to the house,” Pemberton said, taking a step into the stall.
“I didn’t sleep when I was with the eagle,” Serena said, as much to herself as to Pemberton. “I didn’t dream.”
Pemberton took her hand in his. He felt a limpness as if its last strength had been used to feed the eagle.
“All we’ll ever need is within each other,” Serena said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Even when we have our child, it will only be an image of what we already are.”
“You need to eat.” Pemberton said.
“I’m not hungry anymore. The second day I was, but after that…”
Serena lost her train of thought. She looked around as if the thought might have drifted into one of the stall’s corners.
“Come with me,” Pemberton said, and led her by the hand.
Vaughn was outside the dining hall, and Pemberton motioned him over. He told the youth to get food and coffee from the kitchen. They walked slowly up to the house. Vaughn soon came with a silver platter normally used to hold a ham or turkey. Heaped on it were thick slabs of beef and venison, green beans and squash and sweet potatoes drenched in butter. Buttermilk biscuits and a bowl of honey. A coffee pot and two
cups. Pemberton helped Serena to the kitchen table, placed the platter and silverware before her. Serena stared at the food as if unsure what to do with it. Pemberton took the knife and fork and cut a small piece of beef. He molded his hand around hers.
“Here,” he said, and raised the fork and meat to her mouth.
She chewed methodically while Pemberton poured the coffee. He cut more pieces of beef for her and lifted the tin cup to her mouth so she could sip, allow the coffee’s dense warmth to settle inside her. Serena did not try to talk, as if it took all her concentration to chew and swallow.
Afterwards, Pemberton drew her bath and helped Serena undress. As he helped her into the tub, he felt the terraced ribs and pinched stomach. Pemberton sat on the bathtub’s rim and used soap and a washcloth to cleanse the reek of manure and livestock off Serena’s skin. The thick tips of his fingers kneaded soap into her matted hair and quickly raised a lather so thick it gloved his hands white. A sterling silver pitcher and basin sat on the washstand, a wedding gift from the Buchanans. He rinsed Serena’s hair with water poured from the pitcher. Yellow splinters of straw floated on the water’s dingy surface. Outside, the sun had vanished and sleet had begun to fall. Pemberton helped Serena from the porcelain tub, dried her with a towel and helped her into her peignoir. She walked by herself to the back room, lay down and quickly fell asleep. Pemberton sat in the chair opposite the bed and watched her. He listened to the tapping of the sleet on the tin roof, soft but insistent, like something wanting in.
W
HEN THE SICKNESS CAME UPON THEM
R
ACHEL
thought it was something picked up at the camp’s church service, because it was a Tuesday when Jacob first glowed with fever. He fussed and his brow slickened with sweat. Rachel was no better off herself, fever sopping her dress and hair, the world off plumb and whirling like a spin-top. She laid cold poultices on the child’s forehead and fed him clabber. She wet a paper and placed it around an onion and set it in the embers to bake, took the juice and mixed it with sugar and fed it to Jacob with a spoon. She used the witch hazel as well, hoping at least to clear his lungs. Rachel remembered how her father claimed a fever always broke on the third evening. Just wait it out, she told herself. But by late afternoon of the third day they both shivered as if palsied. She placed another log on the fire and made a pallet before the hearth, lay down
with Jacob and waited for evening. They slept as dusk ambered the day’s last light.
It was full dark when Rachel awoke, shivering though her calico dress was sweat-soaked. She changed Jacob’s swaddlings and warmed a bottle of milk, but his appetite was so puny he did little more than gum the rubber nipple. Rachel pressed her hand to his brow, and it was just as hot as before. If it don’t break soon I’ll have to get him to the doctor, she said, talking aloud. The fire was almost out, and she laid a thick white oak log on the andirons, nestled kindling around it to make sure the log caught. She stirred the embers beneath with the poker, and sparks flew up the chimney like swarming fireflies.
The kindling finally caught and the room slowly emerged. Shadows scattered and reformed on the cabin walls. Rachel discerned shapes in them, first cornstalks and trees and then scarecrows and finally swaying human forms that steadily became more corporal. She lay back down on the pallet with Jacob, shivered and sweated and slept some more.
When Rachel woke, the fire had dimmed to a few pink embers. She pressed her palm to Jacob’s brow, felt the heat against her skin. She lifted the barn lantern off the fireboard and lit it. We got to go to town, she told the child, and lifted him into the crook of her arm as her free hand clutched the lantern’s tin handle.
She was feather-legged before they’d hardly left the yard, the lantern heavy as a brimming milk pail. The lantern spread a shallow circle of light, and Rachel tried to imagine the light was a raft and she wasn’t on a road but on the river. Not even walking, just floating along as the current carried her towards town. She came to Widow Jenkins’ house, and there was no light in its windows. She wondered why, then remembered the Widow had gone to spend New Year’s week with her sister. Rachel thought about resting by Widow Jenkins’s porch steps a few minutes but was afraid if she did she’d not get up.
For the first time since she’d left the house, Rachel looked at the sky. The stars were out, so many she’d have needed a bushel basket to gather them all. Plenty enough light to get her and Jacob to town, she decided,
and set the lantern among the chicory and broom sedge bordering the Widow’s pasture. Rachel felt Jacob’s brow again and there was still no change. She shifted the child’s weight closer so his head rested as much on her neck as her shoulder and they walked on.
The road followed the river now. A bat squeaked over the water, and Rachel remembered the shadowy barn loft, what she’d thought a rag draped over a cross beam. She’d brushed against the rag, and it had suddenly flapped alive and become tangled in her hair, a clawed flurry of wings trying to tear free, one leathery wing touching her face as it loosed itself and rose. Rachel had fallen to the loft floor, still screaming and raking at her hair even after her father had come and the creature had flown out the barn mouth.
The road curved closer to the river. Rachel could hear the water rubbing against the bank, smell the fresh soil loosened by recent rain. Another bat squeaked, nearer this time. The road narrowed and darkened, a granite cliff pressing close on the left side. On the right, willows lined the river, their branches leaning low overhead. The road slanted downward and the stars vanished.
Rachel stopped walking, too fevered to be sure where she was. It came to her that she’d taken a wrong turn and entered a covered wooden bridge, though she didn’t understand how there could be a wrong turn if there was only one road. She felt something brush against her hair, then again. She couldn’t see her feet, and she suddenly had a different notion, that the road had been washed out without her knowing it, the wooden bridge a detour that led back to the road. But that didn’t make sense either. Maybe I just forgot there’s always been one here, she told herself.
The sweat poured off her even more now that she’d stopped walking, not a good sweat like she’d get from hoeing in a field, but slimy feeling, like touching a snail. Rachel wiped sweat off her brow with the back of her forearm. A wooden bridge this long and dark would have bats, she knew, not just a few but hundreds of them clinging from the walls and ceilings, and if she touched the wall she would startle one and to startle one would startle them all and bring them flapping about her and Jacob
in a rush of wind and wings. Something stirred her hair again. The breeze, it’s just the breeze, she told herself. Rachel shifted Jacob lower in her arms, placed her free hand over his head.
The thought came to her again that this was a road she’d never been on, and she knew it could lead her anywhere. I’ve got to keep going, she told herself, but she was too afraid. Think of someplace good this road could take you, she told herself, someplace where you’ve never been. Think of that place and that you’re going there, and that way maybe you won’t be so afraid. She tried to imagine the map in Miss Stephens’ classroom but all the map’s colors blurred into one another, and after a few moments Rachel realized it wouldn’t be marked on the map anyway. She imagined instead a woman standing in her front yard, who would see Rachel coming down the road and despite all the years would recognize her and call her name, come running to help her.
Walk a straight line, Rachel told herself. She took small slow steps, the same way she’d do in a cornfield with her feet following the tight furrows. Rachel imagined her mother clad in a white dress bright as a dogwood blossom, a dress whose buttons sparkled like jewels to help guide her and Jacob through the dark.
After a few yards the sky returned, widening overhead as the road made a sharp ascent, and Rachel saw she was on the right road after all. Rachel stopped to catch her breath and took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket to wipe the sweat off her brow, the tears flowing down her cheeks. She looked at the stars and they brightened and dimmed in accord with her breathing, as if one hard puff might blow the whole lot of them out like candles. She began walking again, and each step was like pushing through knee-high sand. Rachel told herself not to think about resting because if she did her body would take that thought and bull-rag it until she listened. Just a ways and you’ll crest this hill, she told herself. She took one step and then another and finally the road leveled.
Rachel could see town lights now. For a moment the lights from the town and the lights from the stars merged, and Rachel had the sensation she and Jacob had come untethered from the earth. She clutched the
child harder and closed her eyes. When Rachel opened them, she stared at her feet. She was barefoot, something she hadn’t realized until that moment, but glad of it, because she could feel the pebbly dust sifted over the packed dirt, feel how it anchored her to the world.
Rachel let her eyes rise slowly, taking in the road ahead a few yards at a time, as if her gaze were a lever lifting the road and world back into proper alignment. She began walking again. The stars bobbed back up into the sky, and the town lights drifted down and reattached themselves to the earth. The bridge’s shadowy outline became visible. Jacob woke and started fussing, though he was so puny as to sound like no more than a mewling kitten. We got to keep going, she told him, just one more hill and we’ll be there.
Rachel moved downward toward the bridge, one that, unlike the covered bridge, she recognized. The trees crowding the bottomland grew taller, their branches narrowing the horizon, dimming the weathered planks and railing. They were only yards from the river when Rachel saw movement on the bridge, swirls like wisps of fog only more solid. Rachel took another step closer and saw it was three wild dogs snapping and snarling as they fought over a bloody white shirt. Two of the dogs each grabbed a sleeve and the cloth unfurled, and Rachel saw the shirt was her father’s.
Rachel took two slow steps backward, then did not move. Jacob whined and she leaned to his ear and tried to shush him with soft words. When Rachel looked up, the dogs had quit fighting over the shirt. They watched her and Jacob, shoulder to shoulder, necks hackled and teeth bared. They ain’t real, she said, and waited for her words to make it so. But the dogs didn’t disappear.
Rachel edged over to the roadside, wondering if she might be able to wade across the river. Larger pieces of quartz and granite shoaled on the road’s edge, made her wince as she looked for a breech in the trees. But there was no path down to the water, only more trees and a deeper dark where she’d be unable to find her way. She remembered the lantern, but it was too far back to fetch. The arm that held Jacob began to cramp, so
she switched sides. Rachel felt the rocks underfoot and that gave her an idea. She stepped off the road edge and let her foot probe the thistles and broom sedge, finally find a fist-sized rock. She leaned and picked it up, then walked back toward the bridge.
“Git on now,” she said and threw the rock, but the dogs still did not move.
She felt Jacob’s forehead and the fever burned unabated. They ain’t real, and even if they was I got no choice but to get past them, she told herself. Just watch your feet and don’t look up and don’t be afraid because a dog can smell the fear on you. Rachel took a step and paused, then took another, the pebbles and dirt sifting under her feet. Four more steps and her right foot landed on a plank. Feel how solid this bridge is, she told herself. Them dogs ain’t real but this is, and it will get me and this young one to town.
Rachel took another step and both feet were on the grainy wood. She did not lift her eyes. The dogs remained silent, the only sound the river rushing beneath the planks. She closed her eyes a few moments, imagined not her and Jacob on a raft as she had before but the dogs adrift, the river carrying them farther and farther away. She opened her eyes and took more steps, and then she was back on a dirt surface and the road rose.
Rachel did not look up until she’d crested the last hill and was on Waynesville’s main street. She stopped at the first house to ask where Doctor Harbin lived. The man who answered the door took one look at her and Jacob and helped them inside. The man’s wife took Jacob into her arms while her husband telephoned the doctor. Lay down here on the couch, the woman told her, and Rachel was too weary to do otherwise. The room swayed and then blurred. Rachel closed her eyes. The dark behind her eyelids lightened a second, then darkened again, as if something had been unveiled but only for a moment.
W
HEN
Rachel came to it was morning. She did not know where she was at first, only that she’d never been tireder even after hoeing a field all day.
A man sat in a chair beside the couch, the face slowly unblurring to become Doctor Harbin’s.
“Where’s Jacob?” Rachel asked.
“In the back bedroom,” Doctor Harbin said as he stood. “His fever’s broken.”
“So he’ll be ok?”
“Yes.”
Doctor Harbin came over and laid his hand on her brow a few moments.
“But you still have a fever. Mr. and Mrs. Suttles said you can stay here today. I’ll check on you again this afternoon. If you’re better, Mr. Suttles will take you back home.”
“I don’t have the money to pay you,” Rachel said, “at least not right now.”
“I’m not worried about that. We’ll settle up later.”
The doctor nodded at Rachel’s feet, and she saw they had been bandaged.
“You cut up your feet pretty good, but nothing deep enough to need stitches. That was almost a mile walk and you sick as him, and barefoot to boot. I don’t know how you did it. You must love that child dear as life.”
“I tried not to,” Rachel said. “I just couldn’t find a way to stop myself.”