Pemberton turned off the engine. The light from the office porch was not enough to see Serena's face as he spoke.

"What Harris did, I'm not so sure we wouldn't have done the same under those circumstances. And the money, we didn't lose that much."

"He made us vulnerable," Serena said. "It's like an infection, Pemberton. If you don't cauterize it, then it spreads. It won't be that way in Brazil. Our investors will be a continent away." Serena paused. "We should never have allowed it to be otherwise. Just us."

For a few moments neither spoke.

"Isn't that what we want?" Serena asked.

"Yes," Pemberton said after another pause. "You're right."

"Whether it's right wasn't my question," Serena said, her voice soft, something in it almost like sadness. "Is it what we want?"

"Yes," Pemberton said, glad the darkness concealed his face.

Pemberton opened the car door and went on inside the house while Serena talked on the porch with Galloway. He poured himself a stout dram of bourbon and sat down in the Coxwell chair that faced the hearth. Though cool weather was still months away, a thick white oak log had been placed on the andirons, newspaper and kindling set around it. Serena's voice filtered through the wall, the words muffled but the tone calm and measured as she told Galloway what she wanted done. Pemberton knew if he could see Serena's face it would be just as placid, no different than if she were sending Galloway to Waynesville to mail a letter. He also realized something else, that Serena would be able to convince Lowenstein and Calhoun to invest in her Brazil venture. Like her husband, they would believe her capable of anything.

BEFORE THE FIRST STRINGHOUSE HAD BEEN set on Bent Knob Ridge, the dining hall or train track or commissary built, an acre between Cove Creek and Noland Mountain had been set off for a graveyard. As if to acknowledge the easy transition between the quick and the dead in the timber camp, no gate led into the graveyard and no fence surrounded it. The only markers were four wooden stobs. By the time they'd rotted, enough mounds swelled the acre to make further delineation of boundaries unnecessary. Occasionally, a deceased worker would have his body taken from the valley to a family graveyard, but the majority were buried in camp. The timber that had brought them here and killed them, and now enclosed them, also marked most of the graves. These wooden crosses ranged in elaborateness from little more than two sticks tied together to finely sawn pieces of cherry and cedar with names and dates burned into the wood. On these graves, sometimes on the crosses themselves, the bereaved always placed some memento. A few evoked a fatalistic irony, the engraved axe handle that felled the tree that in turn felled the owner, an iron-spiked Kaiser's helmet worn by a man struck by lightning. But most of what adorned the graves attempted to brighten the bleak landscape, not just wildflowers and holly wreaths but something more enduring-yellow-feathered hadicaws, Christmas ornaments, military medals trailing hued ribbons, on the grave itself bits of indigo glass and gum foil and rose quartz, which sometimes were cast over the loose soil like seeds for planting, other times set in elaborate patterns to spell what might be as discernable as a name or obscure as a petrograph.

It was upon this graveyard that Ross and his fellows gazed as the crew took its afternoon break. Rain had fallen off and on all day, and the men were wet and muddy and cold, the low gray sky adding to their somberness.

"The boy killed yesterday by that skidder boom," Ross said. "There was a hell of a thing. In the ground with dirt over him before he'd worked a week. A fellow used to could count on at least a pay stub before getting killed."

"Or live long enough to shave something besides peach fuzz off his chin," Henryson added. "That boy couldn't have been no more than sixteen."

"I expect before long they'll be fittin us for coffins ahead of time," Ross said. "You'll be planted in the ground before you've got a chance to stiffen up good."

"They ever find out who his people was?" Stewart asked. "That boy, I mean."

"No," Henryson said. "Jumped off one of them boxcars coming through so there ain't no telling. Wasn't nothing in his billfold but a picture. An older woman, probably his mama."

"Nothing writ on the back of it?" Stewart asked.

Henryson shook his head.

"Nary a word."

"Your people not knowing where you're buried," Stewart said somberly. "That's a terriblesome thing. There'll be never a flower nor teardrop touch his grave."

"I heard back in the Confederate War them soldiers pinned their names and where they was from on their uniforms," Henryson said. "Leastways their folks would know what happened to them."

Snipes, who'd been trying to unfold his sodden newspaper without tearing it, nodded in affirmation.

"It's the truth," he said. "That's how they knew where my grandpappy was buried. He got killed over in Tennessee fighting for the Lincolnites. They buried him right where he fell, but leastways his mama known where he was laid."

"Anything more on Harris in your newspaper?" Ross asked.

Snipes delicately set the wide wings of the paper onto his lap.

"There is. Says here the county coroner still has the brass to claim Harris' death was an accident, and that's after Editor Webb's article about the coroner being in the Pembertons' pocket."

"Makes you wonder who's next, don't it?" Henryson said.

"I'd not be surprised if Webb's moved up a spot or two with that editorial," Ross said. "I hope his house don't have a second floor. He might take the same tumble Harris did."

The men grew silent. Stewart unfolded the oilcloth that kept his Bible dry and began reading. Ross reached into his pocket and brought out his tobacco pouch. He removed his rolling papers and found them sodden as Snipes' newspaper. Henryson, who also was anticipating a cigarette, found his papers in the same condition.

"I was at least hoping my lungs might be warm and dry a minute," Ross complained.

"You'd think there'd be one little pleasure you could have, even on a day scawmy as this one," Henryson said. "You ain't got no rolling papers, do you Stewart?"

Stewart shook his head, not raising it from his Bible.

"How about a few pages of your Bible there?" Ross asked. "That'd make a right fine rolling paper."

Stewart looked up incredulously.

"It'd be sacrilegious do such a thing as that."

"I ain't asking for pages where something important's being said," Ross entreated. "I'm just asking for two pages where there's nothing but a bunch of so and so begot so and so. There ain't nothing to be missed there."

"It still don't seem right to me," Stewart said.

"I'd say it's exactly the Christian thing to do," Henryson countered, "helping out two miserable fellows who just want a smoke."

Stewart turned to Snipes.

"What do you think?"

"Well," Snipes said. "Your leading scholars has argued for years you'll find cause to do or not do most anything in that book, so I'm of a mind you got to pluck out the verse what trumps the rest of them."

"But which one's that?" Stewart asked.

"How about love thy neighbor," Henryson quickly volunteered.

Stewart bit his lower lip, deep in thought. Almost a minute passed before he opened the Bible and turned to Genesis. Stewart perused some pages before carefully tearing out two.

ON the following Sunday afternoon, the Pembertons mounted their horses for a ride to Shanty Mountain. Pemberton hadn't especially wanted to go, but as it was something Serena expected of him, he followed her to the barn. A sawyer had been killed by a snapped cable on Saturday morning, and as Pemberton and Serena made their way out of the camp, they encountered a funeral party proceeding toward the cemetery where an unfilled grave waited amid the stumps and slash. Leading the mourners was a youth wearing a black armband on his sleeve, in his hands a three-foot-tall oak cross. Two workers carrying the coffin came next, then a woman dressed in widow's weeds. Reverend Bolick and a dozen men and women followed. Two of the men walked with shovels leaned on their right shoulders, like military men at arms. Reverend Bolick carried his Bible, its black weight held skyward as if to deflect the sun's glare. Last came the women, bright-hued wildflowers in their hands. They moved through the blighted landscape slowly, looking as much like refugees as mourners.