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.
Twelve
IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS, MOST OF NOLAND Mountain had been logged and crews had worked north to Bunk Ridge before turning west, following a spur across Davidson Branch and into the wide expanse between Campbell Fork and upper Indian Creek. The men worked faster now that full summer had come, in part because there hadn't been a single rattlesnake bite since the eagle's arrival. As the crews moved forward, they left behind an ever-widening wasteland of stumps and slash, brown clogged creeks awash with dead trout. Even the more resilient knottyheads and shiners eventually succumbed, some flopping onto banks as if even the ungillable air offered greater hope of survival. As the woods fell away, sightings of the panther grew more frequent, fueled in part by hopes of earning Pemberton's gold piece. No man could show a convincing track or scrap of fur, but all had their stories, including Dunbar, who claimed during an afternoon break that something large and black had just streaked through the nearby trees.
"Where?" Stewart asked, picking up his axe as he and the rest of Snipes' crew perused the nearby woods.
"Over there," Dunbar said, pointing to his left.
Ross went to where Dunbar pointed and skeptically studied ground still damp from a morning shower. Ross came back and sat on a log beside Snipes, who'd returned to perusing his newspaper.
"Maybe it was that eagle," Ross said, "because there's nary a sign of a track. You're just hoping for that flashy hat."
"Well, I thought I saw it," Dunbar said gloomily. "I guess sometimes you've got the hope-fors so much it makes you imagine all sorts of things."
Ross turned to Snipes, expecting Dunbar's comment to provoke a philosophical treatise, but the crew foreman was immersed in his newspaper.
"What's in your paper that's got you so squinch eyed, Snipes?"
"They've got a big-to-do meeting about that park in two weeks," Snipes said from behind his veil of newsprint. "According to Editor Webb here, the Secretary of the Interior of the whole U S of A will be there. Bringing John D. Rockefeller's own personal pettifogger with him too. Says they're coming to make Boston Lumber and Harris Mineral Company sell their land or face eviction."
"Think they'll be able to do that?" Dunbar asked.
"It'll be a battle royal," Snipes said, "not a smidgen of doubt about that."
"They won't beat them," Ross said. "If it was just Buchanan and Wilkie they might, but not Harris and Pemberton, and especially not her."
"We better hope that's the way of it," Dunbar said. "If this camp gets shut down we'll be in the worst kind of fix. We'll be riding the boxcars sure enough."
"JUST Albright and Rockefeller's lawyer," Pemberton replied that evening as he and Serena prepared for bed. "Albright wanted no state politicians at the meeting. He said even with Webb and Kephart there we'll still have a five to four advantage."
"Good, we'll get this settled, once and for all," Serena said, her eyes settling on the Saratoga trunk at the foot of the bed, a trunk whose contents Pemberton had yet to see. "It jeopardizes more important matters."
Serena took off her jodphurs and placed them in the chifforobe. Overhead, a few tentative taps announced the hard rain promised all afternoon by clouds draped low across Noland Mountain. The rain steadily picked up pace, soon galloping on the tin roof. Pemberton began to undress, reminded himself to get his hunting boots from the hall closet. Don't fret none if it rains tonight, Galloway had told him that afternoon. Momma says it'll clear up by morning. She's counting on that as much as we are.
Serena turned from the chifforobe.
"What's the bard of Appalachia like, in person?"
"Stubborn and cranky as his buddy Sheriff McDowell," Pemberton said. "Kephart told me at the first meeting how it pleased him to know I'd die and eventually my coffin would rot, and how then I'd be nourishing the earth instead of destroying it."
"Which is one more thing he's wrong about," Serena said. "I'll make sure of that, for both of us. What else?"
"He's also overly fond of the bottle, not nearly the saint the newspapers and politicians make of him."
"Though they have to make him appear so," Serena said. "He's their new Muir."
"Galloway says we'll be going right past Kephart's cabin tomorrow, so you could see the great man himself."
"I'll meet him soon enough," Serena said. "Besides, Campbell and I are putting down the stobs for the new spur line."
Serena stepped out of her undergarments. As Pemberton gazed at her, he wondered if it was possible that a time would come when he'd look at her naked and not be stunned. He couldn't imagine such a moment, believed instead that Serena's beauty was like certain laws of math and physics, fixed and immutable. She walks in beauty. Words recited years ago in a voice dry as the chalk dust choking the classroom's air, part of a poem Pemberton had paid attention to only so he might laugh at its sentiment. But now he knew the truth of the words, for Serena's beauty was like that-something the world opened a guarded space around so it could go forth unsullied.
After they'd coupled, Pemberton listened to Serena's soft breaths mingle with the rain hitting the roof. She slept well now, in a deepness beyond dreams, she claimed. It had been that way since she'd stayed in the stable with the eagle, as though the nightmares had come those two sleepless nights and, with no dream to enter, gone elsewhere, the way ghosts might who find a house they've haunted suddenly vacated.
The rain stopped during the night, the sky blue and cloudless by midday. Scouting, not hunting, Galloway had called their trip, searching for tracks and scat, a fresh-killed deer carcass with its heart ripped out, but Pemberton took his rifle from the hall closet, just in case.
When Pemberton walked down to the office, he found not only Galloway on the porch but also Galloway's mother. She wore the same austere dress as last summer and a black satin bonnet that made her face recede as if peering from a cave mouth. The old woman's shoes were cobbled out of a reddish wood that looked to be cedar. Comical looking, but something else as well, Pemberton realized, a disconcerting otherness that was part of these mountains and would always be inexplicable to him.