His age surprised her, the smooth brow, the full set of teeth. Like the unweathered sign outside his door, the youth made Sarah wonder how experienced he was. The surveyor must have realized clients would wish him older, for he wore a mangy red beard and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses he did not put on until Sarah appeared at his door. Sarah told him what she wanted and he listened, first with incredulity and then with resignation. He’d been in Boone less than a month and needed any client he could get.
When Sarah finished, the surveyor spread a map across his desk. He took off the glasses and studied the map intently before he spoke.
“My fee will be six dollars. It’ll be a full day to get there, do the surveying, and get back. I don’t work Sundays, so I’ll go first thing Monday morning.”
Sarah took a leather purse from the haversack, unsnapped it, and removed two silver dollars and four quarters.
“Here. I’ll pay you the rest when you’re done.”
She poured the silver into his hand. “What time do we leave on Monday, Mr. Ash?”
“We?” he asked.
SUNDAY NIGHT SARAH had trouble falling asleep. She lay in bed thinking about how Laura had come to church that morning dressed in a blue cotton dress, her dark widow’s weeds now packed away.
“You’d think she’d have worn them a year,” Anna Miller whispered as they watched Laura enter the church with Clay Triplett.
“She has to get on with her life,” Sarah replied without conviction. She watched Laura lean close to Clay Triplett as the singing began, their hands touching beneath the shared hymnal. Sarah tried to be charitable toward her daughter-in-law, reminding herself that Laura was barely nineteen, that she had been married to Elijah less than a year. The young could believe bad times would be balanced out by good. They could believe the past was something you could box up and forget.
After the service Sarah asked Laura if she wanted to make the journey with the surveyor and her. Sarah wasn’t sure if it pleased or disappointed her when Laura said yes. Sarah asked to borrow one of the horses, offered to pay.
“You know I wouldn’t charge you, Mrs. Hampton,” Laura said. “I’ll bring the horse over this afternoon on my way to Boone. I’ll spend the night with my aunt in town.”
Then Laura had walked over to where Clay Triplett waited in the shade of a live oak tree. He’d tipped his hat to Sarah, then helped Laura into his wagon to take her home.
It had been almost suppertime when Laura brought the horse.
“I reckoned you’d want Sapphire,” Laura said. “Elijah always said she was your favorite.”
Laura opened her grip and removed a photograph of Elijah taken when he was twelve years old. She handed the photograph to Sarah.
“I think it best if you keep this now. Something else to remember him by.”
“Why are you giving me this?” Sarah asked.
Laura blushed. “Me and Clay, we’re going to get married.”
“I figured as much,” Sarah said, her voice colder than she intended.
“I’d hoped you’d understand, Mrs. Hampton,” Laura said.
Sarah looked at the photograph, Elijah dressed in his Sunday church clothes though it had been a Saturday morning in a photographer’s studio in Boone. Elijah stared at her from a decade away, his eyes dark and serious.
“You keep it,” Sarah finally said, handing the photograph back. “I won’t forget what he looked like. You probably will.”
Laura let the photograph lie on her open palms. She gazed intently, as though seeing something in it she had not noticed before.
“I loved Elijah,” Laura said, not looking up.
“I still do,” Sarah had replied.
Sapphire whinnied out in the barn, the same barn she had been foaled in seven springs ago. Will had died the previous winter, Sarah and Elijah had delivered the colt. Sarah wondered if Sapphire remembered the barn, remembered she had been born there.
In the darkness Sarah finally fell asleep and dreamed that Elijah was calling her. He was not the man he’d grown up to be. It was a child’s voice Sarah heard in the laurel slick she stumbled and shoved through, branches welting her face and arms and legs as she thrashed deeper in the slick, her legs growing wearier with each blind step, the voice that called her never closer or farther away. Sarah woke with the quilt thrown off the bed, her brow damp as if fevered. She lay in the dark and waited for first light, remembering what was not dream but memory.
It had been August and Elijah was five. She and Will were hoeing the cornfield by the creek. She left Elijah at the end of a row, the whirligig Will had carved for him clasped in his hand. When she reached the end of the row, Elijah was gone. They searched all afternoon, working their way back to the farmhouse and then above the pasture where the woods thickened, the same woods where they had heard a panther that spring. She shouted his name until her throat was raw and her voice no more than a harsh whisper.
As night came on Will took the horse to get more help. Sarah lit the lantern and followed the creek, calling her son’s name with what voice she had left. A half mile downstream he answered, his trembling voice rising out of a laurel slick that bordered the creek. She pushed and tripped through the laurel, making wrong guesses, losing her sense of direction in the tangle of leaves and branches. She found him lying on a matting of laurel leaves, the whirligig still clutched in his hand. That was just like him, Sarah thought. Even as a child he’d been careful not to lose things. Careful in other ways too, so that even at eight or nine he could be trusted with an ax or rifle.
SARAH AND LAURA met the surveyor Monday morning in front of his office. He had not bothered to wear the glasses, but an owls head pistol bulged from the holster on his hip.
“That three dollars,” he said to Sarah. “I can take it now and lock it in my office.”
“I’d just as lief wait till you earned it,” Sarah replied.
They rode west out of Boone, she on Sapphire, Laura on the gray stallion Will had named Traveler, the surveyor on his roan. The land soon became steeper, rockier. Sarvis and beardtongue bloomed on the road’s edge while dogwoods brightened the woods. The horses breathed harder as the air thinned. Sarah felt light-headed, but it was more than the altitude. She had been unable to eat any supper or breakfast.
They passed Oak Grove and Villas, then turned north, through Silverstone. Sarah wondered what people thought of this strange procession, of the armed young man wearing denim pants and a long-sleeved cotton shirt, the clanking surveying equipment draped on the roan’s flanks like armor, the nineteen-year-old girl dressed in widow’s weeds behind him, and Sarah last, also in black, holding the reins and a family Bible, forty-two but already an old woman. Sarah stared down at her hands and noted how coarse and wrinkled they were, how the purple veins stretched across their backs as if worms had burrowed under her skin.
Outside of Silverstone the wagon road narrowed until it was no longer a road but a trail. The Stone Mountains loomed like thunderheads. The surveyor carefully scanned the woods that pressed close to the trail and the stone outcrops they passed under, his free hand resting on his holster. Sarah felt Sapphire strain as the grade steepened and the thin air grew even thinner. A rattlesnake slithered across the path and she patted Sapphire’s flank and spoke gently until the animal calmed. Sapphire remembered her, though the horse had been gone from the farm for nineteen months.
She had given Sapphire and the other two horses to Elijah the last morning he awoke under her roof. Sarah had fixed him breakfast but he was too excited to do anything except push the eggs and grits around his plate. Elijah talked of the house he was building at the foot of Dismal Mountain, the house where he and Laura would spend their first night together under an unshingled roof. Sarah called the horses a wedding gift though to her way of thinking they were already more his than hers. He had been the one who looked after them after Will died. Elijah had been only fourteen, but there had not been a morning or evening he forgot to feed or groom the horses. He’d treated the animals with care, like everything else in his life. Which was why he’d not ridden Sapphire to Mountain City. Elijah feared the mare might break a leg on the rocky backslope of the mountain. Always careful, Sarah thought, but somehow not careful enough with what was most precious of all.