Free Serena by Ron Rash

onto the train rails he’d help lay and followed them toward the last stringhouse where Galloway lived with his mother. She was granted great deference by all in the camp, and Pemberton had assumed it was because Galloway was her son. He’d noted as much to Campbell one afternoon as they watched the old woman, whose eyes were misted by cataracts, being helped up the commissary steps by two large bearded workers.
    “It’s more than that,” Campbell said. “She can see things other folks can’t.”
    Pemberton had snorted. “That old crone’s so blind she couldn’t even see herself in a mirror.”
    For the only time they’d worked together, Campbell had spoken to Pemberton without deference, his reply acerbic and condescending.
    “It ain’t that kind of seeing,” Campbell had said, “and it ain’t nothing to be made light of either.”
    Galloway met him at the door. The older man wore no shirt, revealing a span of pale skin stretched taut over shoulders and ribs, paired knots of stomach muscle. Veins on his neck and arms rippled blue and varicose, as if Galloway’s flesh could not fully contain the surge of blood within it. A body seemingly incapable of repose.
    “I’ve come to tell you I’ve fired Bilded. You’re the new crew foreman.”
    “I figured as much,” Galloway replied.
    Pemberton wondered if Campbell had come by and mentioned the promotion. He looked past Galloway into a room completely dark except for the glow of a coal-oil lamp on the table. The thick lamp glass made the light appear not just encased but fluid, as though submerged in water. Galloway’s mother sat before the lamp, eyes only inches from the flame. Her white hair was clinched in a tight bun, and she wore a black front-buttoned dress Pemberton suspected had been sewn in the previous century. Galloway’s mother raised her eyes and stared directly at him. Looking at the direction of my voice , Pemberton told himself, but it was somehow more than that.
    “Anyway,” Pemberton said, taking a step back, “I wanted you to know before morning.”
    As Pemberton walked back to the house, he passed a group of kitchen workers gathered on the dining hall steps. Most still wore their aprons. A cook named Beason strummed a battered Gibson guitar, beside him a woman nestling a steel-stringed wooden instrument in her lap. She bent over the instrument, long tangled hair obscuring her face. While her right hand strummed, the middle and index fingers on her left hand made rapid presses around the narrow neck as if probing for some obscure pulse, all the while singing of murder and retribution on the shoresof a Scottish loch. Border ballads were what Buchanan called such songs, and claimed the mountaineers had brought them from Albion.
    The Harmon girl had once sat out on these steps after supper as well, but he’d not paid her much attention until the evening Pemberton helped haul a maimed logger off Half Acre Ridge. It was full dark by the time they’d gotten the man to camp, and he’d been so tired and dirty he’d told Campbell to have his meal brought to the house. The Harmon girl had brought the food, and something had caught Pemberton’s attention. Perhaps a glimpse of bosom when she laid the tray on the table, or a shapely ankle exposed as she turned to leave. Something he could no longer remember.
    Pemberton walked on, the music fading behind him as he mused on the chain of events that had led to noon trysts, later a gutted man dying on a train depot bench, a child that surely had been born by now. How far back could you trace the links in such a chain, he wondered—past the Harmon girl being chosen that night to bring his food, past the tree shattering a man’s backbone due to a badly notched trunk, past that to an axe unsharpened because a man drank too much the night before, past that to why the man had gotten drunk in the first place? Was it something you never found the end to? Or was there no chain at all, just a moment when