Gordon changed all that. He was presenting at a conference in the same hotel where Katy's company had scheduled a seminar. Her bank had eschewed frugality and scheduled the event at a resort in Asheville, a vibrant community billed as a "gateway to the North Carolina mountains." In the tradition of such seminars, it combined networking with leisure, the kind of professional vacation that most employees endured for the good of their careers while cramming in as much recreation as possible. She'd skipped out of the session entitled "Tax Considerations of Mortgage Points in Refinancing" and was browsing the vending machines by the check-in desk when she saw the schedule for the hotel's other conference. Written in red marker on the dry-erase board were the words European Mythology in Appalachian Religion, with a room number and time listed. To Katy, bored nearly to tears and nursing a run high on one thigh of her stockings, the topic evoked images of snake-handling hillbilly preachers crossed with sacrificial burnings like the one in the old Christopher Lee film The Wicker Man. She knocked down a quick martini at the hotel's bar and slipped into the small room where she first saw Gordon Smith, who was keynote speaker.
Gordon resembled a slimmer Orson Welles, tall and broad-chested, projecting a vulnerable arrogance. He told the crowd of about twenty, mostly professors who were nursing tenure-track hangovers, about the Scots-Irish influence on Southern Appalachian culture, as well as contributions by the Germans and Dutch. Katy wasn't that interested in the Druids, and religious politics always seemed like an oxymoron to her, so she tuned out most of the speech and planned the evening ahead. The bank had paid for her room, the seminar officially ended before dinner, and she had hours looming with no responsibilities. Jett was staying with her dad, and she'd left her cell phone in her hotel room. She was about as close to free as a single mom could be.
Gordon pulled her from her reverie with a rant on Demeter and Diane, harvest goddesses who had to be appeased before they would prove generous with their human subjects.
"Human sacrifice was common among many primitive religions," Gordon said, his voice assuming an evangelical thunder as if to wake the drowsing audience. "Blood was not only a gift for Diane in the forests of Nemi. Central America, Scandinavia, the South Sea Islands, Africa, India, virtually every continent had bloodthirsty gods, and those gods often demanded the ultimate tribute. Certain Germanic tribes combined human sacrifice with nature worship. If someone was found guilty of scarring the bark of an oak tree, that person's belly button was nailed to the tree trunk, and then the body was circled around the tree until the offender's bowels served to patch the tree's wound."
Gordon had the audience riveted by then, and Katy found herself admiring the man's strong cheekbones, thick eyebrows, and dark, penetrating eyes. He went on to suggest that vestiges of the old worship still lived on in the form of scarecrows, horseshoes, jack-o'-lanterns, and Yuletide mistletoe. By the time he'd finished, she'd thought of a question to ask him derived from her own lapsed Catholic beliefs. She waited while he shook the hands of balding, tweed-encased academics, and gave him a smile when her turn came. He nodded impatient, as if he'd earned his honorarium and the show was over.
"Professor Smith, could you tell me how Jesus Christ fits into your theories of human sacrifice?"
Gordon first looked startled and then he threw back his head and laughed from deep within his belly. "My dear, entire books have been written on the subject. Do you have an hour to spare?"
His question had not exactly been a come-on, but she didn't want to eat in the hotel dining room alone, or worse, with colleagues from the bank. So she said, "Yes, I do. How about dinner?"
She wasn't physically attracted to him, at least not in the rip-off-clothes-and-let's-wallow fashion. Even after their marriage, she questioned her original motivation in seeking him out. But somewhere between the oysters and the strawberry cheesecake, he'd become interesting for more than just his obvious intelligence. Gordon didn't flinch when she told him she was a divorced mother of one. If anything, he'd become more deferential and inquisitive. By the end of dinner, they agreed to a nightcap at the bar, Katy fully expecting the drinks to lead to an invitation to his room. She didn't have to decide whether she would have accepted the offer, because he never asked. Instead he made her promise to join him for breakfast.
A flurry of communication ensued over the following weeks, phone calls at night, e-mails throughout the day, and even old-fashioned, handwritten letters showing up about once a week. It was the letters that eventually won her over. In person, Gordon was a little cool and distant, but his sentences burned with passion and a playful humor that belied his professorial persona. He invited her to visit Solom, and she drove up with Jett one Saturday, her daughter grumbling all the while, dropping into defensive mode over Dad. But Jett had frolicked on the Smith farm, exploring the barn, traipsing through the woods, playing in the creek, and by sundown Jett wanted to stay for another day. By then Katy was prepared to bed the evasive Dr. Smith, but he seemed old-fashioned about courting, reluctant to do more than kiss her cheek.
Katy's decision to accept his proposal came after a few sleepless weeks of soul-searching. She didn't want a replacement for Mark, especially in Jett's life, but as Mrs. Smith she would be a stay-at-home mother, something she had never desired until Jett's drug problems surfaced. Katy blamed herself for being so absorbed in her career that she let her marriage to Mark fail (though intellectually she knew they'd waltzed together over the cliff edge) and then compounded the error by neglecting Jett. Gordon and Solom offered a fresh start, a chance for her to rebuild her relationship with her daughter with a supportive man in her life.
Gordon had never explained Christ's position as the world's most famous sacrificial lamb, but it didn't matter now. The honeymoon was over.
The Blackburn River was old.
Geologists said it was the second-oldest river in the world, after the Amazon.
The people in Solom didn't care about history books. All they saw was the slim ribbon of silver that cut into the brown banks of the hilltops. The water brought sustenance in the spring, kept their stock alive in the summer, and in September it shot its narrow currents among the yellow and white stones. It slowed to a trickle in January, only to bust out white again during the March melt. Maybe the water, like the humans who clustered around its shores, had an instinctive understanding of ebb and flow.
Solom took its name from bad grammar. Some say the place used to be called Solomon Branch, after the Old Testament king. Others said it was Solomn, a misspelling of the word solemn, which meant everything from formal and serious in a liturgical sense to grave and somber, as in a funeral ceremony. The permanent valley settlers had eventually trimmed off the silent letter at the end. If it sounded like Solom, then it was Solom.
The original residents were the buffalo that trampled ruts across the hilltops as they made their way from Kentucky in the summer to the Piedmont flatlands of Carolina in the winter. The herds numbered in the thousands, and the ground shook as their hooves bit into the earth. The Cherokee and Catawba visited the region only in the fall, when meat was available. Otherwise, the natives had the good sense to stay off those cold and forlorn mountaintops. Then the whites came along and poured across the slopes like albino fire ants.
Daniel Boone and the early European trappers and hunters were cold-blooded enough to hang out on the trails and slaughter their quarry across the seasons, with no sense of a circular food chain. In a few short decades, the buffalo and elk that had sustained the natives for centuries were gone, remembered only in the occasional place name or flea-ridden floor skin. The Cherokee had their own problems, driven at gunpoint to Oklahoma, where the landscape was as alien to them as if they had been dropped onto the surface of Mars. The federal government later felt guilty enough to grant them control of gambling casinos, but by then their heritage and souls had been all but lost. They dreamed of spiritual journeys where they met up with buffalo, but they woke up to an artificially inflated Britney Spears, an artificially inflated Barry Bonds, and a cynical, media-inflated Republican leadership that encouraged fear in every sector of society, especially among the outcast.