Ron Rash - Chemistry and Other Stories

Serena opened her saddlebag and removed a metal whistle and a lariat. Fastened to one end of the hemp was a piece of bloody beef. She blew the whistle and the bird’s neck whirled in her direction as Serena swung the lure overhead.

“They Lord God,” a worker said as the eagle rose, for in its talons was a three-foot-long rattlesnake. The bird flew toward the ridge crest, then arced back, drifting down toward Serena and Chaney’s crew. Except for Chaney, the men scattered as if dynamite had been lit, stumbling and tripping over stumps and slash as they fled. The eagle settled on the ground with an elegant awkwardness, the reptile still writhing but its movements only a memory of when it had been alive. Serena got off the stallion and offered the gobbet of meat. The bird released the snake and pounced on the beef. When it had finished eating, Serena placed the hood back over the eagle’s head.

“Can I have the skin and rattles?” Chaney asked.

“Yes,” Serena said, “but the meat belongs to the bird, so bring the guts back to camp.”

Chaney set his boot heel on the serpent’s head and detached the body with a quick sweep of his barlow knife. By the time the other men returned, Chaney had finished the snake’s skin folded and tucked inside his lunch box, the rattles as well.

By the following Friday the bird had killed seven rattlesnakes, including a huge satinback that panicked a crew when it slipped from the eagle’s grasp midflight and fell earthward. The men had not seen the eagle overhead, and the snake fell among them like some last remnant of Satan’s rebellion cast from heaven.

III

June came and Serena was now in her fifth month of pregnancy, though no one in camp other than Pemberton knew. Pemberton suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some natural phenomenon. Carlyle was as oblivious as the rest of the camp, reaffirming Pemberton’s belief that the doctor’s medical knowledge was mediocre at best.

It was dusk when Pemberton returned from looking at a twenty-thousand-acre tract in Jackson County. Light filtered through the office’s one window, and Pemberton found Campbell inside working on payroll. The light in the back room was off.

“Where’s Mrs. Pemberton?”

Campbell finished ratcheting a number and looked up.

“She went on up to the house.”

“Has she eaten?”

Campbell nodded.

“You want me to have somebody bring you a supper up to the house?”

“No,” Pemberton said. “I’ll tell them.”

Though it was after seven, the lights remained on in the dining room. From inside the building’s oak walls came a ragged choir of voices singing a hymn. Pemberton stepped onto the porch and opened the door that led to the kitchen. The kitchen itself was deserted, despite pots left on the Burton grange stove, soiled dishes piled beside sixty-gallon hoop barrels filled with gray water.

Pemberton stepped into the dining room, where Reverend Bolick’s sonorous voice had replaced the singing. Workers filled the benches set before the long wooden tables, women and children in front, men in the rear closest to where Pemberton stood. A number of workers glanced back but quickly returned their gazes to where Reverend Bolick stood behind two narrow, nailed-together vegetable crates, which resembled not so much a podium as an altar. Upon it lay a huge leather-bound Bible whose wide pages sprawled off both sides of the wood.

Pemberton scanned the benches looking for his cook. Most of the workers had their backs to him, so he moved to the side and found the man, motioned for him to go to the kitchen. Then he looked for a server and found one, but the woman was so rapt that Pemberton was almost beside Bolick before he got her attention. The woman left her seat, made her way slowly through a bumpy aisle of knees and rumps. But Pemberton was no longer looking at her.

The child lay in his mother’s lap, clothed in a gray sexless bundling. He held a hand-hewn toy train car in one hand, rolling the wooden wheels up and down his leg with a solemn deliberateness. Pemberton studied the child’s features intently. Reverend Bolick stopped speaking and the dining hall was suddenly silent. The child quit rolling the train and looked up at the preacher, then at the larger man who stood close by. For a few moments the child’s dark brown eyes gazed directly at Pemberton.

The congregation shifted uneasily on the benches, many of their eyes on Pemberton as Bolick turned the Bible’s pages in search of a passage. When Pemberton realized he was being watched, he made his way to the back of the hall, where the kitchen workers waited.

The cook and server went on to the kitchen, but Pemberton lingered a few more moments. Bolick found the passage he’d been searching for and looked out at his audience, settling his eyes on Pemberton. For a few seconds the only sound was a spring-back knife’s soft click as a worker prepared to pare his nails while listening.

“From the book of Obadiah,” Bolick said, and began reading. “The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the cleft of the rock, whose habitation is high, that saith in his heart, who shall bring me down.”

Bolick closed the Bible with a slow and profound delicacy, as if the ink were fresh-pressed on the onionskin and susceptible to smearing.

“The word of the Lord,” Bolick said.

Pemberton went to the house with his dinner. He set the dishes on the table and stepped into the bedroom. Serena was asleep and Pemberton did not wake her. Instead, he softly closed the bedroom door. He did not go to the kitchen and eat, instead went to the hall closet and opened his father’s trunk, rummaged through the stocks and bonds and various other legal documents until he found the cowhide-covered photograph album his aunt had insisted he pack as well. He shut the trunk softly and walked down to the office.

Campbell still worked on the payroll but left without a word when Pemberton said he wished to be alone. Embers glowed in the hearth and Pemberton set kindling and a log on the andirons and felt the heat strengthen against his back. He opened the album, the desiccated binding creaking with each turned cardboard page. When he found a photograph of himself at ten months, he stopped turning.

WITH THE PURCHASE of the second skidder, the men now worked westward on two fronts. By June the northern crews had crossed Davidson Branch and made their way to Shanty Mountain while the crews to the south followed Straight Creek west. Recent rains had slowed the progress, not just forcing the men to slog through mud but causing more accidents as well.

On Monday morning Serena mounted the Morgan and rode out to check the work on the northern front. Chaney’s crew was cutting timber on the slope after a night of heavy rain. The slanting ground made footing tenuous. To make matters more difficult, Chaney’s crew had a new lead chopper, a boy of seventeen stout enough but inexperienced. Chaney was showing where to make the undercut when the boy slipped as the ax swung forward.

The blade’s entry made a soft, fleshy sound as Chaney and his left hand parted. The hand fell first, hitting the ground palm down, fingers curling inward like the legs of a dying spider. Chaney backed up and leaned against the white oak, blood leaping from the upraised wrist onto his shirt and denim breeches. The other sawyer stared at Chaney’s wrist, then at the severed hand as if unable to reconcile the two. The boy let the ax handle slip from his hands. The two men appeared incapable of movement, even when Chaney’s legs gave way and he fell sideways into the mud.

Serena dismounted and took off her coat, revealing the condition it had concealed for over a month. She kneeled beside Chaney, quickly stripped the leather string from a boot, and tied it around the man’s wrist. The blood spout became a trickle.