Wilkie turned his attention back to Serena, and smiled widely, smitten as Harris had been when he'd met her. Unlike the swains in Boston, these older men seemed unintimidated by Serena. Their withered genitals made her charms less daunting, Pemberton suspected, kept at an untouchable distance.

"I'm sure you feel the same, Buchanan," Doctor Cheney said, "in regard to the Pembertons' possible partnership with Harris."

Buchanan nodded, his eyes not on the physician or the Pembertons but the table's center.

"Yes, as long as our own present partnership is not neglected."

Except for the clink of silverware, the rest of the main course was eaten in silence. Pemberton did not wait for dessert and coffee but set his napkin on the table and stood up.

" Campbell 's left for the night so I'll go tell Galloway of his promotion. That way he'll be ready come morning," Pemberton said, and turned to Serena. "I'll meet you back at the house. I won't be long."

As he came into the office, Pemberton saw Campbell had left two letters on the desk, a Boston postmark on each.

Pemberton stepped off the porch into the summer evening. Fireflies winked as the sun settled behind Balsam Mountain. In the distance a whippoorwill called. Next to the dining hall a rusty fifty-gallon drum smoldered with supper's detritus. Pemberton dropped the unopened letters into its fire and walked on. He stepped 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 shores of 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 you did or didn't step close to a young woman and let your fingers brush a fall of blonde hair behind her ears, did or didn't lean to that uncovered ear and tell her that you found her quite fetching.

Pemberton smiled at himself. Dwelling on the past, the very thing Serena had shown him he, and they, had no need of. And yet, the child. As he mounted the porch steps, Pemberton forced his mind to a Baltimore furniture factory's delinquent account.

THE following afternoon a worker on Noland Mountain was struck on the thigh by a timber rattlesnake. His leg swelled so rapidly that a crew foreman had to first cut free the denim pant with a hawkbill, then slash an X into each puncture. By the time the crew got the man to camp, his pulse was no more than a felt whisper. The leg below the knee swelled black and big around as a hearth log, and the man's gums bled profusely. Doctor Cheney didn't bother to take him into his office. He told the workers to set him in a chair on the commissary porch, where the man soon gave a last violent shudder and died.

"How many men have been bitten since the camp opened?" Serena said that evening as they ate supper.

"Five before today," Wilkie replied. "Only one of them died, but the other four had to be let go."

"A timber rattlesnake's venom destroys blood vessels and tissue," Doctor Cheney said to Serena. "Even if the victim is fortunate enough to survive the initial bite, lasting damage is incurred."

"I'm aware of what happens when someone is bitten by a rattlesnake, Doctor," Serena replied. "Out west we have diamondbacks, which reach six feet in length."

Cheney gave a brief half bow in Serena's direction.

"Pardon me," he said. "I should never have doubted your knowledge of venom."

"Their coloration varies here," Buchanan said. "Sometimes they are the yellowish complexion of copperheads, but they can also be much darker. Those called satinbacks are a purplish black, and believed much deadlier. I've seen one, a surprisingly graceful creature, in its own way quite beautiful."

Doctor Cheney smiled. "Another of nature's paradoxes, the most beautiful creatures are so often the most injurious. The tiger, for instance, or black widow spider."

"I would argue that's part of their beauty," Serena said.

"The rattlesnakes cost us money," Wilkie complained, "and not just when a crew is halted by a bite. The men get overcautious so progress is slowed."