Copyright
POISONED SOIL. Copyright ® 2012 by Tim Young. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a published review.
POISONED SOIL is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request
ISBN-10: 0-9832717-1-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-9832717-1-0
Publisher Contact Information
Harmony Publishing
www.harmonypub.com
Acknowledgements
It’s one thing to write a novel; to conceive a story, discover the characters and let the words flow unfiltered and, at times, in disarray. It’s another thing to polish those words into a gripping, high quality novel. One in which readers can get happily lost without stumbling over mistakes in grammar, spelling and logic. My goal was to not only share a story with you, but to ensure the work was of the highest quality. To achieve that end, several kind and competent people poured over the manuscript and helped shape the final outcome of this novel. I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude.
Sharon Landress Hasting edited the final manuscript, corrected punctuation, pointed out inconsistencies and offered valuable developmental insights. She was generous with her time, accurate in her work and a real pleasure to work with.
After the editing round, I solicited a group of volunteer beta readers to assess the quality of the story, and to look closely for holes and inconsistencies. Amanda Higginbotham, Amelia McCain, Jill Perez, Eric Wagoner and my good friend, “Kupcake,” read the story with interest, suggested phrasings to improve the flow, corrected spelling errors and pointed out areas where a reader might be confused. Their generous feedback allowed me to make those subtle but important tweaks, like adding the final handful of spices to the sauce that, I hope, will allow readers to become absorbed by the story. So to my editor and beta readers, please accept my most sincere thanks.
Finally, I owe the largest debt to my wife and ideal reader, Liz. She’s the one I hope to impress the most, and she’s the one I listen to most closely. Before sharing the manuscript with beta readers, Liz labored through the first draft and pointed out, shall we say...opportunities for improvement. On all points, she was right, and helped the story come to life. I love you, Liz!
Prologue
Baldev knelt on the damp, forest floor and wept with the knowledge that his remaining breaths were few. With tears in his eyes and rage in his heart, the Cherokee priest looked to the sky in disbelief. A flood of sorrow streamed down the crevices of his cheeks, weathered and red as the Georgia clay. He wiped his final tears, kissed the beads that hung from his neck, and prayed for the strength to do what he must. As he inhaled the sweet scent of pine that perfumed the forest, he rose to his feet.
There, in the midst of a vast wilderness, he stood among the sickly beasts—all that remained of his people’s way of life. He surveyed the grief in the animals’ faces, mirror images of his own suffering, as he shook his head with fury and utter disillusionment that he alone was the last of the seventeen thousand Georgian Cherokees. The tribe’s livestock accepted their fates, just as the last of the Cherokee had, and stood prepared to surrender their flesh. Baldev vowed not to let their lives go to waste. Rather, he would sacrifice them in an enduring act of retribution against greed and oppression.
Summoning the strength of a nation, he raised his walking stick; its razor-sharp root spikes protruding like gnarly hair over the deranged face he had carved for its head. Pointing it toward the summit, he commanded the animals to the top of Rabun Bald, a mountain possessed by fire-breathing demons, according to his tribe’s beliefs.
Atop the mountain, Baldev summoned a witch, the Raven Mocker, to torment and shorten the animals’ lives. The Cherokee angel of death—most feared of all evil witches—appeared in the form of a shrieking raven and claimed the heart of each animal, adding their unused lifetimes to its own. As the witch tormented, Baldev mercifully sliced the throat of each animal and watched the blood pour out and stain a huge granite boulder, forever poisoning the soil. He murmured a prayer in reverence of the animals’ sacrifice as the putrid blackish fluid seeped into the Appalachian mountainside. There, it would wait with eternal patience to punish greed and oppression. To punish, any soul not of pure Cherokee heart, who dared cohabit the soil.
For sixty years, no one occupied the mountainside and the evil lingered in the pitch-black soil.
Then, in the spring of 1898, a hardscrabble family of six in search of a plot to call home, veered north off Warwoman Creek and claimed a clearing on Rabun Bald. The father, Samuel Dixon, had come to Rabun County in 1867 at the age of two when his own father, a wool sorter from Bradford, England, came to southern Appalachia for its warmer weather and land to farm. It pleased Samuel to find a homesite just as peaceful as the one his brother Joshua had settled on nearby Rainey Mountain. He knelt and dug into the richest, blackest soil his lily-white hands had ever touched.
While Samuel harvested lumber to construct a small cabin, his wife, Sarah, and their four children tended to the small flock of sheep that Samuel’s father had bequeathed him, as they planted the few herb and vegetable seeds they had.
They never got the chance to harvest a crop.
The first ominous sign appeared within days on three-year-old Rachel’s hands. As Sarah examined the first few itchy bumps, she attributed them to poison ivy while she soothed her daughter’s skin with the marshmallow root she carried for such ailments. Later that evening, a solitary, black bead of blood ran from Rachel’s left nostril. Her mother wiped it away with her apron, only to unleash a river of blood from Rachel’s nose. As she mirrored her mother’s panic, Rachel’s mouth opened wide to reveal a pool of blackish blood. Sarah’s concern turned into panic as, one by one, each family member was afflicted with the same symptoms. By then, pus-spewing black ulcers covered Rachel’s body—all but her head—and converged like summer freckles, cloaking the child in a suffocating suit of death. As the full moon crept over the evening horizon, Rachel lay dead in her mother’s arms and black ulcers smothered everyone.
Distraught and hysterical, Sarah huddled the dying children under the roof of the cabin as the wind whipped through the unfinished walls. Nausea and fever took grip and enveloped the family in a nightmarish state. The woods seemed to come alive as frigid winds howled from the top of Rabun Bald, as if an angry God demanded repentant sacrifice. Samuel stood wide-eyed, his double-barreled shotgun in hand as he searched the darkness for a demon he could extinguish. A demon he could understand.
As the forest soil exhaled its deadly breath, Samuel’s fever escalated to a state of panicked desperation. He gathered his stricken family and demanded they leave the cursed ground and follow the moon’s light to refuge. They left Rachel’s body behind and blindly stumbled through the mountain’s dark shadows, all the while saying prayers aloud for salvation. Samuel came to a sudden halt and held out the palm of his hand to silence the others. He tilted his head as he began to hear the hushed whispers that taunted him from mere feet away, yet hidden in the darkness out of sight.