Ron Rash - Serena

"Which room?"

"Forty-one," the doctor said. "The orderly can go with you."

"I can find it," Pemberton said, and walked slowly toward the door, past the corner table where nothing now lay.

He stepped out of the emergency room and into the corridor. The hospital's two wings were connected by the main lobby, and as Pemberton passed through he saw Campbell sitting by the doorway. Campbell rose from his chair as Pemberton approached.

"Leave the car here for me and take the train back to camp," Pemberton said. "Make sure the crews are working and then go by the saw mill to make sure there are no problems there."

Campbell took the Packard's keys from his pocket and gave them to Pemberton. As Pemberton turned to leave, Campbell spoke.

"If there's someone asks how Mrs. Pemberton and the young one are doing, what do you want me to say?"

"That Mrs. Pemberton is going to be fine."

Campbell nodded but did not move.

"What else?" Pemberton asked.

"Doctor Cheney, he rode into town with me."

"Where is he now?" Pemberton asked, trying to keep his voice level.

"I don't know. He said he was going to get Mrs. Pemberton some flowers, but he ain't come back."

"How long ago was that?"

"Almost two hours."

"I've got some business with him I'll settle later," Pemberton said.

"You're not the only one," Campbell said as he reached to open the door.

Pemberton stopped him with a firm hand on the shoulder.

"Who else?"

"Galloway. He come by an hour ago asking where Doctor Cheney was."

Pemberton took his hand off Campbell's shoulder, and the overseer went out the door. Pemberton walked across the lobby and up the opposite corridor, reading the black door numbers until he found Serena's room.

She was still unconscious when he came in, so Pemberton pulled a chair beside her bed and waited. As late morning and the afternoon passed, he listened to her breath, watched the gradual return of color to her face. The drugs kept Serena in a drifting stupor, her eyes occasionally opening but unfocused. A nurse brought Pemberton lunch and then supper. Only when the last sunlight had drained from the room's one window did Serena's eyes open and find Pemberton's. She appeared cognizant, which surprised the nurse because the morphine drip was still in Serena's arm. The nurse checked the drip to make sure it was operating and then left. Pemberton turned in his chair to face her. He slid his right hand under Serena's wrist and let his fingers clasp around it like a bracelet.

She turned her head to see him better, her words a whisper.

"The child is dead?"

"Yes."

Serena studied Pemberton's face a few moments.

"What else?"

"We won't be able to have another."

Serena remained silent for almost a minute, and Pemberton wondered if the drugs were taking hold again. Then Serena took a breath, her mouth kept open as though about to speak as well, but she did not speak, not at that moment. Instead, Serena closed her eyes and slowly exhaled, and as she did her body seemed to settle deeper into the mattress. Her eyes opened.

"It's like my body knew all along," she said.

Pemberton did not ask what she meant. Serena closed her eyes a few moments, opened them slowly.

"And yet…"

Pemberton nodded and squeezed Serena's wrist, felt again the pulse of their blood. Serena's eyes shifted to Pemberton's bruised inner elbow, the square of gauze taped to it.

"Your blood merged with mine," Serena said. "That's all we ever hoped for anyway."

SHE LEFT THE HOSPITAL SOONER THAN THE doctors or Pemberton wished. I need to be back at the camp, she told them. Serena was carried out of the hospital the same way she'd been carried in. Campbell and Pemberton lifted her into the train's coach car, the gurney settled on a foot-thick pallet of blankets to cushion her against the train's jarring. When the train got to camp, they carried her to the house. It was supper time and the workers dropped their forks and knives and gathered on the porch. Most watched from a distance, but some, mainly crew bosses she'd worked with, ventured closer, their hats off as the gurney passed before them. Serena was pale but her gray eyes were open and staring at a sky she'd not seen in seven days. The workers watched in silence as Campbell and Pemberton carried her through the camp to the house. They watched in wonder as well, especially men whose mothers and sisters and wives had died from what Serena survived.

Vaughn opened the door to the house, and Galloway and Pemberton carried her into the bedroom. They eased Serena into the bed, and Pemberton shut the curtains in hopes it would help her sleep. Early evening was the time the workers played and sang their music, or, even tired as they were, sometimes arranged baseball games and wrestling matches, gathered around an outbreak of fisticuffs. But this evening the camp was hushed, oddly vigilant, like the afterward of a violent storm.

Pemberton checked the cotton gauze over her wound for any drainage of blood or jaundiced fluid, gave Serena water and the Feosol the doctor prescribed for her anemia. As the days passed, Pemberton fed her a soft diet of eggs and pureed meat until she could lift the fork and spoon herself. He emptied the bedpan and tried, vainly, to get Serena to take the codeine for her soreness. She grew stronger each day, soon leaving the bed to use the bathroom and to make short walks around the house while Pemberton held her arm. Serena insisted he continue working, especially in pursuing investors, but Pemberton did so only after moving his office into the front room. While Serena lay in the darkened bedroom, Campbell ran the day-to-day business from the office with his usual efficiency, Vaughn taking over lesser duties.

All the while Galloway remained on the porch, allowing no trespass, taking inside himself what food or medicine or well wishes were brought. Come evening, he made a pallet in front of the door. One night Pemberton looked out the window and saw Galloway asleep on the pallet, wearing the same clothes he'd worn since the day Serena had come home. Galloway's knees were tucked tight to his stomach, head bowed inward, the nubbed wrist pressed childlike to his mouth while his hand gripped the handle of a sprung switchblade knife.

As she strengthened, Serena talked about Brazil, about going there as soon as they finished in Jackson County. Obsessed with it, Pemberton believed, especially after Pemberton had found potential investors in Asheville. Men who would be interested only in local investments, Pemberton told her, but Serena believed otherwise. I can convince them, she said. As Pemberton sat in the darkened bedroom, his chair pulled close to the bed, Serena spoke of Brazil's untapped resources, its laissez-faire attitude toward businesses, how she and Pemberton should go there and scout tracts as soon as the Jackson County camp was up and running. Not even an empire, Pemberton, a world, she told him, and spoke with such fervor Pemberton at first feared an infection might have set in and raised her temperature. What reservations Pemberton had, he kept to himself. They did not speak of the dead child.

By the second week Serena was out of bed and sitting in a chair, sending Vaughn out on horseback to monitor the work crews' progress and relay messages back and forth from the foremen. Documents and statistics and reports about Brazil, which Pemberton had not even known existed, were exhumed from Serena's Saratoga trunk. Also, a wax-engraved map of South America, which, once unfolded, consumed half the front room. The map covered the floor for days, a cane back chair set upon it so Serena could peruse its expanse more diligently, the chair occasionally lifted like a chess piece and set back down on a different square of the map.