The woods no longer sheltered them from the wind, and cold air worked its way through jacket tears the bear had made. Pemberton imagined Serena in her father's timber camp, rousing the workers on days colder than this one.
"What you told Galloway is the truth," Pemberton said as they entered the camp. "If the bear had attacked you instead of me, I would have done the same for you."
"I know," Serena said, clasping Pemberton's hand tighter. "I've known it since the night we met."
Seven
WHEN RACHEL WENT TO THE BARN TO GET A cabbage sack for the ginseng, she found, for the third morning in a row, that no eggs warmed under the two bantams or the Rhode Island Red. A fox or weasel or dog would have killed the chickens as well, she knew, so figured it a possum or a raccoon, maybe a black snake come to fatten up for the winter. Rachel found the cabbage sack and left the barn. She thought about going ahead and getting the fishing pole and searching out a guinea egg. The sky was jay-bird blue, the day warmer than any in a week, but the chimney smoke wasn't rising but blowing down, so a change in the weather was coming, maybe by afternoon. Another snow would make the ginseng hard to find, and she couldn't risk that, so Rachel fetched the mattock from the shed but left the fishing pole. Something else I'll have to do when I get back, Rachel thought.
She wrapped Jacob in his bundlings, and they crossed a pasture whose barbed wire now kept nothing in, empty for the first time in her life. Rachel saw the trees they walked toward had all their fall colors now, their canopy bright and various as a button jar. Before long the land slanted up the north face of Colt Ridge. They entered a stand of silver birch and hemlock, which Rachel passed through without slowing down. Far off toward Waynesville, she heard a whistle and wondered if it was the lumber company train. She thought about Bonny and Rebecca, the two girls she'd worked with in the kitchen, and how much she missed being around them. And how she missed Joel Vaughn too, who could be a smart aleck, but had always been nice to her, not just in the camp but as kids on Colt Ridge when they'd been in elementary school together. He'd even given her a valentine in the sixth grade. She remembered how, after her belly showed and other folks in the camp shunned her, Joel hadn't.
The land's angle became more severe, the light waning, streaked as if cut with scissors and braided to the ridge piece by piece. Soon poplars and hickories replaced the softwoods. Rachel saw a witch hazel shrub and paused to pull off some leaves, their pungent smell evoking memories of chest salves and days sick in bed. Moss furred the granite outcrops a dark plush green. She walked slowly, looking not just for the four-pronged yellow leaves but bloodroot and cinnamon ferns and other plants her father had taught her signaled places where ginseng grew.
Rachel found the bloodroot first, under a shaded outcrop where a spring head seeped. She tugged the plants carefully from the ground and placed them in her sack. When she accidentally broke a stem, the red juice used for a tonic stained her fingers. A squirrel began chattering in a tree farther up the ridge and was soon answered.
Rachel stepped carefully across the boggy ground. An orange salamander scuttled out from beneath a matting of soggy oak leaves. She remembered how her father once told her never to bother salamanders in a spring because they kept the water pure. On the other side of the outcrop, she found more bloodroot and a thick growth of cinnamon ferns. The ferns felt like peacock feathers as she moved through them. They made a whispery sound against her dress, and the sound seemed to soothe Jacob because his eyes closed.
She entered another stand of hardwoods and there it was, the yellow leaves shimmering against the gloamy woods. Jacob was now asleep so she laid him down, loosening the bundling so she could fold some of the cloth back to cradle his head. Rachel dug a good six inches around the ginseng plant to insure she didn't cut the root. Then she pulled her dress up above her knees and kneeled in front of the plant, held the mattock's handle inches from the blade as she raked dirt from around the stem and tugged free a pale root shaped like a veiny carrot. She separated the berries from the ginseng plants and placed them in the broken soil, covered them up and moved on to the next plant.
They stayed in the woods until dark clouds began forming above the ridge crest. By then she'd searched out all the ginseng that could be found and gathered what other plants she'd wanted as well. As she and Jacob made their way out of the woods, Rachel's back already ached, and she knew it'd be sorer come morning. But the cabbage sack was a quarter filled, at least two pounds worth of roots she'd sell to Mr. Scott after they'd dried a month in the barn. Jacob was wide awake now, worming inside of the bundling, making it harder to hold the sack and mattock with her left hand.
"It ain't far now," she said, as much to herself as the child. "We'll put the mattock in the shed and take the Widow this bloodroot."
As they entered the pasture, Rachel heard dogs barking somewhere in the far woods and wondered if they were the same ones she'd seen at the cemetery. She walked faster, remembering a story she'd heard about wild dogs carrying off a child set down at a field edge. The child had never been found, only the bloody tatters of its blanket. Rachel watched the tree line until they were out of the pasture. She leaned the mattock against the shed, and they walked on to the Widow's cabin.
"I brought you some bloodroot," Rachel said, "for keeping Jacob the other day."
"That's sweet of you," Widow Jenkins said, accepting the handful of plants and placing them in the sink.
"I've got witch hazel too if you've got need of it."
"No, I've got a gracious plenty of witch hazel," the older woman said. "Did you dig up much sang?"
Rachel opened the sack and showed her the roots.
"How much you figure it worth when it dries?"
"I'd reckon Scott to give you ten dollars," Widow Jenkins said. "Maybe twelve if his lumbago ain't acting up."
"I was thinking it would be more than that," Rachel said.
"Before that stock market busted up north it might have been, but cash money's rare these days as sang."
Rachel stared at the hearth a few moments. The Widow always put some apple wood on the fire, not because it burned good but for the rosy color it gave off. A fire with apple wood in it is pretty to look at as any painting, the Widow claimed. Rachel felt the weight of Jacob in her arms and compared it to the cabbage sack's lightness. The weariness of carrying the child across the pasture and ridge, hardly noticed before, overwhelmed her. She set Jacob on the floor.
"That'll barely get us to spring," Rachel said. "As soon as I wean Jacob, I'll have to go back to work at the camp."
"I don't think you ought to do that," Widow Jenkins said. "I don't even like it that you go down there for Sunday church."