Ron Rash: Serena

The article was read in September of the same year by a woman in a Seattle, Washington, hospital who awaited a heart operation that might or might not save her life. The Life had been in a basket of magazines brought by a nurse so her patient might have something to read other than a tattered family Bible. The woman had carefully torn the article from the magazine and placed it in the Bible. She had visitors each day, including her husband, but it was the woman's son, who drove from Tacoma every evening after work to sit with her, that she showed the article to.

A month later a man stepped onto the train platform in Bertioga, Säo Paulo. He stayed in his hotel until midnight, then left his room to walk the town's cobbled streets. A thunderstorm had come in off the ocean earlier, and water pooled and eddied beside curbs and iron-grated gutters, but now the moon was out, giving enough light for him to make his way.Fifteen minutes later, he stepped quietly across the back lawn of Serena Pemberton's hacienda and onto the verandah. The man cut through a screen and stepped into a room bigger than any house he'd ever lived in. He pulled a flashlight from his back pocket, muting its light with his palm as he moved through the dwelling until he found the room he searched for. On the floor beside the bed, an old man snored softly on a pallet. He slept in his clothes, a pistol inches from his one hand. There had been a time when the man would have heard the slightest sound and awakened, but decades around machinery had deafened him to anything not written or shouted.

He died first, the knife slashing his windpipe and then sawing across the vertebrae to make sure. The woman in the bed was not dispatched as easily. The town's doctor was also the coroner, and he found remnants of flesh under her nails on both hands.

She did not die in bed. A guard stationed at the front gate heard the huge brazilwood door open. The porch light had been dimmed for the night, but the moon was full, so the guard could clearly see the lady of the house taking slow but unwavering steps across the veranda. She paused at the end of the verandah and raised her left hand, tugged at the huge pearl-handled knife planted hilt-deep in her stomach. She was completely naked, though at first the guard thought she wore a dark silk slip. Her clipped white hair caught the full moon's light, and the guard, a man known for his superstitious nature, claimed later that for a few moments a garland of white fire flamed around her head.

She could not free the knife. According to the guard, she had looked down at the steps and moved one foot tentatively forward and then back as if testing the temperature of bathwater. It was then the guard saw the man behind her, his large figure framed by the doorway. He was so still the guard could not say if he had been there the whole while or appeared only at that moment. Then he was gone. Later that morning the police chief would ask for a description, and the guard would point to the photograph on the wall and swear that the man in the picture was the very man he'd seen. The police chief and the doctor dismissed the guard's words as another product of his credulousness.

But they did not dismiss the guard's testimony about what happened after he'd run up the walk and ascended the hacienda's wide steps. Serena had still been standing but the guard swore that she was already dead. Those among the towns-people who'd known her, including the police chief and the doctor, had no doubts at all as to the veracity of this aspect of the guard's account.

The author wishes to thank the following for their help in researching this novel: George Frizzell, Charlotte Matthews, Phil Moore, Scott Simpson, and Ron Sullivan. Thanks also to my superb editor, Lee Boudreaux, my equally superb agent, Marly Rusoff, and Mihai Radulescu. Also Jennifer Barth, James Meader, Sam Rogers, my family, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Although some of the characters in this novel actually existed historically, they are fictional representations.

RON RASHis the author of three prizewinning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; three collections of poems; and three collections of stories, among them Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. A recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.