Ron Rash - Chemistry and Other Stories

“It won’t need any stitches,” Serena said. “Just a dressing and some iodine.”

Serena picked up the bowie knife and carried it over to Harmon’s daughter, who grasped her father by the shoulders as if the dead man might yet be revived. Tears flowed down the young woman’s face but she made no sound.

“Here,” Serena said, holding the knife by the blade. “By all rights it belongs to my husband. It’s a fine knife, and you can get a good price for it if you demand one. And I would,” she added. “Sell it, I mean, because that money will help when the child is born. It’s all you’ll ever get from my husband or me.”

Harmon’s daughter looked at her now, but she did not raise a hand to take the knife. Serena set it on the bench beside the younger woman and walked across the platform to stand beside her husband.

“Is my car here?” Pemberton asked Buchanan.

“Yes, but you and Mrs. Pemberton can take the train if you want to get there faster. Chaney can drive your car back.”

“No,” Pemberton said. “We’ll take the car.”

Pemberton turned to the baggage boy, who was staring at the blood pooling copiously around Harmon’s feet.

“Take that trunk and put them in my car. We’ll get the grips.”

“Don’t you think you’d better wait for Sheriff McDowell?” Buchanan asked.

“Why?” Pemberton said. “It was self-defense, a half dozen men will verify that.”

The boy followed Pemberton and his bride to the Packard, where they loaded the trunk and grips in the backseat.

Pemberton was turning the key when he saw McDowell coming up the sidewalk. The sheriff wore his Sunday finery, no badge or gun visible. Pemberton pressed the starter button on the floor, then released the hand brake and drove the Packard north into the higher mountains.

WHEN THEY GOT to the camp, a youth named Parker waited on the front steps. Beside him was a cardboard box, in it a bottle of wine, meat and bread and cheese for sandwiches. Parker retrieved the grips from the car and followed Pemberton and his bride onto the porch. Pemberton unlocked the door and nodded for the young man to enter first.

“I’d carry you over the threshold,” Pemberton said, “but for the arm.”

Serena smiled.

“Don’t worry, Pemberton. I can cross it myself.”

Serena stepped inside and Pemberton followed. She examined the light switch a moment as if doubtful electricity existed in such a place. Then she turned it on.

In the front room were two captain’s chairs set in front of the fireplace, off to the left a small kitchen with a stove and icebox. A table with four cane-bottom chairs stood in the corner by the front room’s one window. Serena nodded and walked down the hall, glanced at the bathroom before entering the back room. She turned on the bedside lamp and sat down on the wrought iron bed, tested the mattress’s firmness and seemed satisfied. Parker appeared at the doorway, a trunk that had formerly belonged to Pemberton’s father in his grasp.

“That one in the hall closet,” Pemberton said. “Put the other at the foot of the bed.”

The youth did as he was told and soon brought the second trunk, then the food and wine.

“Mr. Buchanan thought you might be needing something to eat,” Parker said.

“Put it in the icebox,” Pemberton said. “Then go get iodine and gauze from the caboose.”

The youth paused, his eyes on Pemberton’s blood-soaked sleeve.

“You wanting me to get Dr. Carlyle?”

“No,” Serena said. “I’ll dress it.”

WHEN THE BOY had delivered the iodine and the gauze, Serena sat on the bed and unbuttoned Pemberton’s shirt. She removed the knife and sheath wedged behind his belt buckle, took the knife from the sheath with her left hand, and examined the dried blood before placing it on the bed.

She opened the bottle of iodine.

“What was it like, killing someone with a knife?” she said.

“Like fencing, but more intimate.”

“You’ve never killed a man like that before?”

Serena gripped his arm harder, poured the auburn-colored liquid into the wound.

“No,” Pemberton said. “The other time was with fists and a beer stein. But they both had certain satisfactions.”

Once Serena finished wrapping the gauze around Pemberton’s wound, she picked up the knife and took it into the kitchen, wiped it clean in the basin with water, soap, and a washcloth. She dried the knife with a hand towel and returned to the back room. She set the knife and sheath on the bedside table.

“I’ll take a whetstone and sharpen the blade tomorrow,” Serena said. “Will you store it with your hunting equipment?”

“No,” Pemberton said. “I’ll keep it in the office, close at hand.”

Serena sat down in a ladder-back chair opposite the bed and pulled off her jodhpurs. She undressed, not looking at what she unfastened and let fall to the floor but directly at Pemberton. She took off her underclothing and stood before him. Her eyes had not left his the whole time. The women he’d known before Serena had been shy with their bodies, waiting for a room to darken or sheets to be pulled up, but that wasn’t Serena’s way.

She did not come to him immediately, and a sensual languor settled over Pemberton. He gazed at her body, into the eyes that had entranced him the first time he’d met her, gray irises the color of burnished pewter. Hard and dense like pewter too, the gold flecks not so much within the gray as floating motelike on the surface. Eyes that did not close when their bodies came together.

Serena opened the curtains so moonlight could fall across the bed. She turned from the window and looked around the room, as if for a moment she’d forgotten where she was.

“This will do fine for us,” she said, returning her gaze to Pemberton as she stepped toward the bed.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING Pemberton introduced his bride to the camp’s workers. Serena stood beside her husband as he spoke, wearing riding breeches and a flannel shirt. Her boots were different from the ones the day before, the leather on these scuffed and worn, the toes rimmed with tarnished silver. Serena held the reins of the Morgan she’d had freighted down from Massachusetts, the horse’s white coloration so intense as to appear nearly translucent in the day’s first light.

“Mrs. Pemberton’s father owned the Vulcan Lumber Company in Colorado,” Pemberton said. “He taught her well. She’s the equal of any man here, and you’ll soon find the truth of it. Her orders are to be followed the same way you’d follow mine.”

Among the gathered workers was a thick-bearded cutting crew foreman named Hartley. He hocked audibly and spit a gob of phlegm on the ground. At six-two and well over two hundred pounds, Hartley was one of the few men big as Pemberton in camp. Serena opened the saddlebag and removed a Waterman pen and a small spiral pad. She spoke to the horse quietly, then dropped the reins and walked over to Hartley, stood exactly where he had spit. She pointed toward the office, where a cane ash tree had been left standing for its shade.

“I will make a wager with you,” Serena said to Hartley. “We’ll estimate total board feet of that cane ash. Then we’ll write our estimates on a piece of paper and see who’s closest.”

Hartley stared at Serena a few moments, then at the tree, as if already measuring its height and width. He was not looking at her when he spoke.

“How we going to know who’s closest?”

“I’ll have it cut down and taken to the sawmill in Waynesville. Soon as we’ve made our estimates.”

By this time Buchanan and Dr. Carlyle had come out of the office and watched as well.

“How much we wagering?” Hartley asked.

“Two weeks’ pay.”