They traveled another hour before entering the gap, the mountains and woods closing around them, sunlight mere glances in the treetops. No birds sang and no deer or rabbit bolted into the undergrowth at their approach. The trees leaned over the trail as if listening.
“I didn’t know it to be this far,” the surveyor grumbled. “To be honest, Mrs. Hampton, I don’t believe six dollars is enough.”
“My son lost his life for less money,” Sarah said.
They came to the spring first, the bare, packed ground of a campsite beside it. They dismounted and let the horses drink. The skillet rusted on the big beech a few yards down the trail and in the woods behind it they found the swelling in the ground. Like it’s pregnant, Sarah thought. The drovers had done as much as could be expected. A flat creek rock no bigger than her Bible leaned at the head of the grave. No markings were on it. A few broom sedge sprigs poked through the brown leaves that covered the grave. Another winter and Sarah knew the rock would fall, the grave settle, and no one would know a man was buried here.
She wondered if she’d be alive by then. Her stomach had troubled her for months. Ginseng and yellowroot, the draft the doctor had given her, did not help. She had no appetite, and last week she’d coughed up a bright gout of blood.
The surveyor spoke first. “I’m going to get my equipment and go a ways up that ridge.” He pointed west, where a granite-faced mountain cut the sky in half. “It’s too steep for the horses, so you all stay here. It shouldn’t take me more than an hour,” he said, then walked away.
Laura kneeled beside the grave and cleared the leaves from the mound. She took a handkerchief from her dress pocket and unknotted it.
“I brung some wildflower seeds to put on his grave,” she said. “You want to help plant them, Mrs. Hampton?”
Sarah looked at Laura and realized why Elijah had been so smitten with her. The girl’s eyes were dark as July blackberries, her hair yellow as corn silk. But pretty didn’t last long in these mountains. Too soon, Sarah knew Laura would stand before a looking glass and find an old woman staring back.
“I’ll help,” Sarah said, and kneeled beside her daughter-in-law.
The ground was loose, so the planting didn’t take very long. When they finished, Sarah stood, her hands stained by the dark loamy earth. “I’ll be at the spring with the horses,” she said.
She was tired from the journey, the night without sleep. She took the blanket off Sapphire and spread it on the ground where Elijah had died. She lay down and closed her eyes, the Bible laid beside her.
She slept and soon Elijah called her again. It was dark and she could see nothing, but he was close this time, just a few yards deeper into the laurel slick. Branches slashed at her face but she kept stumbling forward. She was close now, close enough to reach out her hand and touch his face.
“Mrs. Hampton.”
The surveyor stood above her, the equipment burdening his shoulder, his face scratched and sweaty, one of his shirtsleeves torn.
“Where’s Laura?” he asked.
“At the grave,” Sarah said. Her right arm stretched out before her, open palm pressed to the rocky dirt. She raised that hand to shield her eyes, for it was now midday and sunlight fell through the trees straight as a waterfall.
“North Carolina, Watauga County,” the surveyor said as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. “Granite, yellow jackets, snakes, and briars, that’s all that mountain is. I really think it only fair that you pay me two dollars extra. Why, just look at my shirt, Mrs. Hampton.”
Sarah did not look up. She took the pen and bottle of ink from the haversack and opened the Bible. She found Elijah’s name, his dates, and place of birth. Sarah clutched the pen and wrote each letter in slow, even strokes, her hand casting a shadow over the drying ink.
Blackberries in June
On those August nights when no late-afternoon thunderstorm rinsed the heat and humidity from the air, no breeze stirred the cattails and willow oak leaves, Jamie and Matt sometimes made love surrounded by water. Tonight might be such a night, Jamie thought. She rolled down the window and let air blast away some of the cigarette smoke that clung to her uniform and hair. She was exhausted from eight hours of navigating tables with hardly a pause to stand still, much less sit down, from the effort it took to lift the sides of her mouth into an unwavering smile. Exhausted too from the work she’d done at the house before her shift at the restaurant. The radio in the decade-old Ford Escort didn’t work, so she hummed a Dixie Chicks song about chains being loosened. That’s what she wanted, to be unchained in the weightlessness of water. She wanted to feel Matt lift and hold her so close their hearts were only inches apart.
In a few minutes the road fell sharply. At the bottom of the hill she turned off the blacktop onto what was, at least for now, more red-clay washout than road. The Escort bumped and jarred as it made its way down to the lake house. Their house, hers and Matt’s. Barely a year married, hardly out of their teens, and they had a place they owned, not rented. It was a miracle Jamie still had trouble believing. And this night, like every night as she turned in to the drive, a part of her felt surprise the house was really there.
But it was, and already looking so much better than in June when she and Matt had signed the papers at the bank. What had been a tangle of kudzu and briars a yard and garden. Broken windows, rotted boards, and rust-rotten screens replaced. Now Jamie spent her mornings washing years of grime off walls and blinds. When that was done she could start caulking the cracks and gashes on the walls and ceilings. Matt reshingled the roof evenings after he got off, working until he could no longer see to nail. As he must have this night, because the ladder lay against the side of the house. In another month, when the shingles had been paid for, they would drive down to Seneca and buy paint. If things went well, in a year they’d have enough saved to replace the plumbing and wiring.
Matt waited on the screened-in porch. The light wasn’t on but Jamie knew he was there. As she came up the steps his form emerged from the dark like something summoned out of air. He sat in the porch swing, stripped to his jeans. His work boots, shirt, and socks lay in a heap near the door. The swing creaked and swayed as she curled into his lap, her head against his chest. Her lips tasted the salty sweat on his skin as his arms pulled her closer. She felt the hardness of Matt’s arms, muscled by two months of ten- to twelve-hour days cutting pulpwood. She wished of those hard muscles a kind of armor to protect him while he logged with her brother, Charlton, on the ridges where the Chauga River ran through Big Laurel Valley.
You best get a good look at your husband’s pretty face right now, Charlton had said the first morning he came to pick up Matt. Feel the smooth of his skin too, little sister, because a man who cuts pulpwood don’t stay pretty long.