Chapter 10

Anna set out up the mountain the next morning before light, trusting her instinct to lead the way. She had not traveled this road before. Once the sun topped the ridge, leaves damp and flat from a midnight rain reflected early light and glistened like glass. She feared she would slip and fall. Logic told her she walked not on glass but on dying leaves, but fear kept her from hearing what logic said.

An icy morning wind pushed her up the mountain road. Juanita had talked to her and told her to look for a wooden cross to show the way. “Funny looking thing,” Juanita had said. “It’ll appear over the trees, leaning sideways. You take that road.”

Anna turned east when she spotted the cross. Weak and rotted over time, it pointed away from the mine and its camp. With little sunlight out, Anna hesitated. The road led straight up. Undergrowth inched its way in from both sides, fashioning impenetrable black walls. Ancient oaks spread their limbs over the road, interlacing side to side, creating a roof. She took one deep breath after another and counted her steps to force herself on.

First step one, then step two. Three and seven and twenty-eight. On she plodded, up the mountainside. From this angle, she could see why Long Hunters, the first white surveyors, or perhaps the Cherokee before them, had named the mountain Turtleback. The road rounded and ridged and rounded again as if the end hid somewhere in the hovering mist. From her vantage point, she could see nothing that might lead to flat land.

Then it appeared. Before her lay a singular geographic feature, four acres of cleared ground. The land lay so level it seemed a heavy log had rolled out any dips or rises. Anna decided she could put a glass of water down and it would not topple. Flatland consisted of four rectangles that zigzagged from north to south, each abutting and angling down from the next so that birds flying overhead would see a series of steps. The rectangles had been cleared so precisely that one did not overlap any other.

In the second rectangle stood the old church, facing the morning sun. Behind it stood a row of fir, much like a green wall. The space around the building had been broom-swept for so long no plant dared grow there. Someone had built a slant tin roof over the door and added a plank floor to resemble a porch, and a thick rock slab so heavy only God could have moved it served as a step. Across the back was a small lean-to room, its windows boarded inside.

A diminutive, un-chinked log house, a smokehouse perhaps, placed here to distance the smells and smoke from Boone Station, sat almost in front of the church. Two stripped tree trunks supported the roof overhang across the front. At the base of the threshold, lay a little carved bird. Anna bent and held the bird. It had a small hole bored into its head. The bird sat round as an egg in Anna’s left hand. She fingered its feather ridges, its wood firm yet airy, almost alive. She rolled it over. Sculpted without feet, it fit in her palm as snugly as if it had rested in its nest. Anna blew away the dust and eased it in her pocket, intending to set it on her mantel. This carving was too beautiful to waste.

Anna peered through the open door. Inside was a packed dirt floor. The ceiling was rafters with iron hooks that once held meat. Clusters of last season’s tobacco leaves, as large as full-grown bass, now hung from the hooks. In the back corner lay a corn-shuck mattress and a woolen blanket, woven in reds and blues. The room’s musky stench kept Anna from stepping inside.

Outside the squatty building sat a large, iron-footed black pot. As Anna came close, a wisp of wind picked up grey ash left from fire under the pot and blew it onto her face. She smudged a grey streak down and across her forehead with the back of her hand, much like the shape of a cross. She turned to face the church. The cleared land unnerved Anna. That and the silence. She wiped sweat from the nape of her neck. The climb had not been easy.

Anna walked toward a stand of new growth that had begun to invade two abutting rectangles. Around the corner lay a grassy patch of land. Wooden boxes, the granny’s bee yard, offered no sound of activity. Perhaps the bees were off foraging. A narrow footpath led away from the bee boxes, into the woods and disappeared down the mountain. She heard her first sound, water gurgling through the pebbles of a stream.

She returned to the church. To her right lay the graveyard, an area where weeds worked to reclaim the land. Short grasses moved in the breeze as if they welcomed this unexpected visitor. Anna lifted her hand in a half-wave toward the gravestones and walked in. Flat headstones, some on the ground, some making their way down, very few upright, marked graves dated by nail scratchings in the rock as early as 1816.

On the southern side of the slat church, a mass of green sprouted from freshly hoed ground. A garden for the new season. The church door stood ajar, but Anna, winded from the climb, did not go in. She dropped on a damp stone slab that had served as a step since Uriah Parsons had built this church for his family. Anna waited to gather her breath.

 

Sister Sun sends a cooling cloud from time to time over where Anna rests, but she doesn’t make it comfortable enough to encourage Anna to stay or so uncomfortable that she will feel she has no choice but to leave. She waits for Anna to make her decision.

 

In the quiet, Anna recognized a rustle. Among the headstones flitted a pair of early season bluebirds. They hopped from stone to stone, as if surveying the area for danger. When Anna looked closer, she saw why. Two dark blue chicks waddled about, noticeable only because their color stood out against weather-streaked headstones. On a fallen stone covered with thick moss, one chick’s tiny black eyes followed the smaller adult. The other in grass no taller than its breast hopped once and sipped dew, ignoring the adult birds.

The mother bird moved to a tombstone, its grave occupant’s name made illegible by streaks of water and time. She dropped to the ground and scuttled the two chicks together, then spread her wings and returned to her rock. The papa bird sat on a taller, upright tombstone two yards away. He twisted his head from side to side, his vigil intent. He lifted high into the breeze and circled.

The fledglings spread their hollow-boned wings and tried to boost their weight off the ground. They fluttered a bit and failed. The mother bird lit before the attentive one and flapped her wings in the little one’s face. The chick tried again and, with difficulty, lifted itself to the branch of a low bush. The second followed course, and the papa bird joined his chicks within the leaves. Dancing across branch to branch near the ground, they vanished. The mother bird remained and scratched into the grass. She drew out a dark, round bug and followed her mate and chicks into the brush.

Anna sucked her lower lip so she wouldn’t cry. Clint had no reason to think this baby was not his. One day, this child will be all she would have of Winston Rafe. She wiped the drip from her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed.

The breeze slackened, almost disappeared. Nausea popped sweat out on Anna’s face. She rubbed her hand across her forehead and noticed that she removed ash. Anna Goodman, she reprimanded herself, you dirty-faced fool. You think you belong in his world? Fancy trips to Bristol. Pearls and slinky clothes. For sure, I am no more than a miner’s wife, but I don’t have to quit because of that.

The graveyard bush rustled. The mother bluebird escaped and took flight, headed for a hemlock, black with age. Anna fingered the bird carving resting in her pocket as the bluebird disappeared in the tree.

As Anna walked back to Breakline Mining Camp, the breeze picked up again. This time Anna faced it. Her decision to keep the baby lay easy. She could keep their secret. Rafe would have to take it or he could leave her be. Nothing could ever be as it was before. He had to accept that.

The next morning when Clint returned from the hoot owl shift, Anna met him at the kitchen door in her softest cotton gown, the one with lace she had tatted around the hem.