Serena and Pemberton remained in the stable, standing outside the stall door.
“You starve the bird, then what?” Pemberton said.
“She takes food from my glove,” Serena replied. “But only when she’s bowed and bared her neck is she truly mine. That’s when I’ll know she trusts me with her life.”
For the next three days Serena spent all day and much of the night inside the stall with the bird. On the third afternoon Serena came to the office.
“Come and see,” she told Pemberton, and they walked out to the stable. The eagle stood on its perch, hooded and still until it heard Serena’s voice. Then the bird’s head swiveled in her direction. Serena stepped inside the stall and removed the hood, then placed a piece of red meat on her gauntlet and held out her arm. The eagle stepped onto Serena’s forearm, gripping the goatskin as the head bowed to tear and swallow the meat between its talons.
Each morning in the following two weeks, Serena walked into the stable’s back stall and freed the eagle from the block perch. She and the bird spent their mornings alone below Half Acre Ridge, where Boston Lumber had done its first cutting. For the first four days she would ride out at dawn with the eagle traveling behind her in an old applecart, a blanket draped over the cage. By the fifth day the bird perched on Serena’s right forearm, its head black-hooded like an executioner, the five-foot leash tied to Serena’s upper right elbow and the leather bracelets around the raptor’s feet. Campbell constructed an armrest out of a Y-shaped white oak branch and affixed it to the saddle pommel. From a certain angle, the eagle itself appeared mounted on the saddle, from a distance as if horse, eagle, and human had transmogrified into some winged six-legged creature from the old primal myths.
In mid-April Campbell killed a timber rattlesnake while surveying on Shanty Mountain. The next afternoon Serena freed the eagle from the block perch and rode west to Fork Ridge, where Chaney and his crew ascended the near slope. The day was warm and many of the men worked shirtless. They did not cover themselves when Serena appeared, for they had learned she didn’t care.
Serena loosed the leather laces and removed the eagle’s hood, then freed the leash from the bracelets. She raised her right arm slightly. As if performing some violent salute, Serena thrust her forearm and the eagle upward. The bird ascended and began a dihedral circle over the twenty acres of stumps behind Chaney’s crew. On the third circle the eagle stopped. For a moment the bird hung poised in the sky, seemingly outside the world’s slow turning. Then it appeared not so much to fall but to slice open the air as if bound to some greater thing that propelled it downward. Once on the ground among the stumps and slash, the eagle opened its wings like a flourished cape. The bird wobbled forward, paused, and moved forward again, the yellow talons sparring with some creature hidden in the detritus. In another minute the eagle’s head dipped, then rose with a piece of stringy pink flesh in its beak.
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.