An air presser and air hammer lay next to the entrance, in the room's center a work bench, on it mallets and chisels, a compass saw and a slate board chalked with words and numbers. Some of the stones lining the four walls had names and dates. Others were blank but for lambs and crosses and volutes. The air smelled chalky, the room's earthen floor whitened as if with a fine snow. Surratt sat in a low wooden chair, a stone leaning against the work bench before him. He wore a hat and an apron, and as he worked he leaned close to the marble, the hammer and chisel inches from his face.

Rachel knocked and he turned, his clothes and hands and eyelashes whitened by the marble dust. He laid the hammer and chisel on the bench and without a word went to the back of the shop. He lifted the sixteen-by fourteen-inch marble tablet Rachel had commissioned the week after her father had died. Before she could say anything, he'd set it beside the doorway. Surratt stepped back and stood beside her. They looked at the tablet, the name Abraham Harmon etched in the marble, above it the fylfot Rachel had chosen from the sketch pad.

"I think it come out all right," the stone mason said. "You satisfied?"

"Yes sir. It looks fine," Rachel said, then hesitated. "The rest of your money. I thought I'd have it, but I don't."

Surratt did not look especially surprised at this news, and Rachel supposed there were others who had come to him with similar stories.

"That saddle," Rachel said, nodding toward the horse. "You could have it for what I owe."

"I knew your daddy. Some found him too bristly but I liked him," Surratt said. "We'll work something else out. You'll need that saddle."

"No sir, I won't. I sold my horse to Mr. Donaldson. After this weekend I'll not need it."

"This weekend?"

"Yes sir," Rachel said. "That's when he's coming to pick up the horse and cow both."

The stone mason mulled this information over.

"I'll take the saddle then, and we'll call it square between us. Have Donaldson bring it back with him," Surratt said, pausing as another Model T sputtered past. "Who have you hired to haul the stone up there?"

Rachel lifted the burlap cabbage sack from the saddle pack.

"I figured to do it."

"That stone weighs more than it looks, near fifty pounds," Surratt said. "It'll bust right through a sack that thin. Besides, once you get up there you still got to plant it."

"I got a mattock with me," Rachel said. "If you help me tie the stone to the saddle horn I can manage."

Surratt took a red handkerchief from his back pocket, winced and rubbed the cloth across his forehead. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket as his eyes resettled on Rachel.

"How old are you?"

"Almost seventeen."

"Almost."

"Yes sir."

Rachel expected the stone mason to tell her what Widow Jenkins had said, how she was just a girl and knew nothing. He'd be right to tell her so, Rachel supposed. How could she argue otherwise when all morning she'd figured wrong on everything from a baby's teething time to what things cost.

Surratt leaned over the tombstone and blew a limn of white dust from one of the chiseled letters. He let his hand linger on the stone a moment, as if to verify its solidity a final time. He stood and untied his leather apron.

"I ain't that busy," he said. "I'll put the stone in my truck and take it on up there right now. I'll plant it for you too."

"Thank you," Rachel said. "That's a considerable kindness."

She rode back through Waynesville and north on the old toll road, but quickly left it for a different trail than the one she'd come on. The land soon turned steeper, rockier, the mattock's steel head clanking against the stirrup. The horse breathed harder as the air thinned, its soft nostrils rising with each pull of air. They sloshed through a creek, the water low and clear. Leathery rhododendron leaves rubbed against Rachel's dress.

She traveled another half hour, moving up the highest ridge. The woods drew back briefly and revealed an abandoned homestead. The front door yawned open, on the porch a spill of pans and plates and moldering quilts that bespoke a hasty exodus. Above the farmhouse's front door a rusty horseshoe upturned to catch what good luck might fall the occupant's way. Clearly not enough, Rachel thought, knowing before too long her place might look the same if she didn't have a good harvest of ginseng.

The mountains and woods quickly reclosed around her. The trees were all hardwoods now. Light seeped through their foliage as through layers of gauze. No birds sang and no deer or rabbit bolted in front of her. The only things growing along the trail were mushrooms and toad-stools, the only sound acorns crackling and popping beneath Dan's iron hooves. The woods smelled like it had just rained.

The trail rose a last time and ended at the road. On the other side stood a deserted white clapboard church. The wide front door had a padlock on it, and the white paint had grayed and begun peeling. So many people lived in the timber camp now that Reverend Bolick held his services in the camp's dining hall instead of the church. Mr. Surratt's truck was not parked by the cemetery gate, but Rachel saw the stone was set in the ground. She tied Dan to the gate and walked inside. She moved through the grave markers, some just creek rocks with no names or dates, others soapstone and granite, a few marble. What names there were were familiar-Jenkins and Candler and McDowell and Pressley, Harmon. She was almost to her father's grave when she heard howling down the ridge below the cemetery, a lonesome sound like a whippoorwill or a far-off train. A pack of wild dogs made their way across a clearing, the one who'd raised his throat to the sky now running to catch up with the others. Rachel remembered the mattock strapped to the saddle and thought about getting it in case the dogs veered up the ridge, but they soon disappeared into the woods. Then there was only silence.

She stood by the tombstone, dirt the stone mason had displaced darkening the grave. Her father had been a hard man to live with, awkward in his affection, never saying much. His temper like a kitchen match waiting to be struck, especially if he'd been drinking. One of Rachel's clearest memories of her mother was lying on her parents' bed on a hot day. She'd told her mother that the blue bedspread felt cool and smooth despite the summer heat, like it'd feel if you could sleep on top of a creek pool. Because it's satin, her mother said, and Rachel had thought even the word was cool and smooth, whispery like the sound of a creek. She remembered the day her father took the bedspread and threw it into the hearth. It was the morning after her mother left, and as her father stuffed the satin bedspread deeper into the flames, he'd told Rachel to never mention her mother again, if Rachel did he'd slap her mouth. Whether he would have or not, she had never risked finding out. Rachel heard an older woman at the funeral claim her father had been a different man before her mother left, less prone to anger and bitterness. Never bad to drink. Rachel couldn't remember that man.

Yet he'd raised a child by himself, a girl child, and Rachel figured he'd done it as well as any man could have alone. She'd never gone wanting for food and clothing. There were plenty of things he hadn't taught her, maybe couldn't teach her, but she'd learned about crops and plants and animals, how to mend a fence and chink a cabin. He'd had her do these things herself while he watched. Making sure she knew how, Rachel now realized, when he'd not be around to do it for her. What was that, if not a kind of love.

She touched the tombstone and felt its sturdiness and solidity. It made her think of the cradle her father had built two weeks before he died. He'd brought it in and set it by her bed, not speaking a single word acknowledging he'd made it for the child. But she could see the care in the making of it, how he'd built it out of hickory, the hardest and most lasting wood there was. Made not just to last but to look pretty, for he'd sanded the cradle and then varnished it with linseed oil.