“You’re disturbing the ghosts,” Gib said behind me, and I pivoted sharply. The floor creaked and sent goosebumps down my spine. Gib staggered to a stack of rotten boards and put down the bourbon bottle. He lifted a plank and carried it to me like a baby held gently in his arms. Beneath a pallor of age and dust the wood was golden. The plank was at least two feet wide. “My brother never threw anything away. He was even going to save these. Build cabinets with the pieces. I was going to help him. That’s what I promised him, anyway. I was never home much. Always traveling. Lived in Washington. Busy. Important man. That was me. Simon kept telling me he needed more help around here. I never took him seriously.”
“I expect Simon was very proud of you—”
“Always busy. That was me. World traveler. Make an appointment to get me home. Give me a list of family chores. Be efficient. But Simon”—Gib patted the board—“he took time. He knew the wood. He loved every board and every stone of this chapel and the Hall and he remembered every person who ever set foot here.”
He pointed to the exposed beams of the roof and walls. “Chestnut. Tough as iron. Last forever.” He nodded at the section of plank in his arms. “Pine. Softer wood. Easier to work with. But it doesn’t last like chestnut.”
“Well, when was the last time the floor was replaced?”
“Never.”
“What?”
“This was the original. Floor was … the only thing not built to last. Termites got it last year.”
I stared at him. The chapel was built before 1750. But apparently a floor that only lasted a quarter of a millennium wasn’t good enough by Cameron standards. I smiled uneasily. “You’re going to put in a new floor and by gum, this time it better last at least four hundred years, right?”
He didn’t blink. “That’s my plan.” He paused. “That was Simon’s plan.”
“I see.”
“Replace the pine with chestnut boards. Hard wood. Toughest wood around. Termites—no way. Guarantee—Simon’s floor will be here a thousand years from now.”
“Chestnut? I thought all the chestnut trees were gone.”
“No more like ’em. Gone. Giants of the earth. Extinct. The blight got ’em in the thirties. Disease.” He wavered, then steadied himself. “It’s a waste of your time to listen to this. No reason you should give a damn. Right?”
“I don’t waste my time. You’re mistaken if you think I listen just to be polite. I’m rarely polite for any reason. Surely you’ve noticed. But let’s talk about wood. Where are you getting the chestnut boards from?”
“Logs my granddad put aside, sixty years ago, when the blight hit. In a storage barn.”
“Camerons really plan ahead, don’t they?”
Gib abruptly walked to the center of the chapel. He dropped the board he was carrying. It clattered on the plywood floor. He raised his fists and looked around angrily. “Termites. It’s always the little hidden bastards. The little mistakes you think you’ll catch before everything falls apart. You turn your back on the smallest detail and it’s the one that ruins you. You watch everything you believed in die right in front of your eyes.” His voice rose. “No place is safe. And there’s nothing you can do about it.” He faced me, breathing hard, his fists clenched. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he asked hoarsely.
I shook my head. “But I don’t think termites qualify as the wrath of God.”
“You’re right. The wrath of God came later. Do you believe in accidents?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t. Accidents are the consequence of deliberate choices.”
“Oh, I see. You choose to get out of bed every morning and one morning you slip on the rug and sprain your ankle. But it’s no accident because it wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed in bed for the rest of your life? No—sometimes accidents just happen. We just have to deal with that fact. All right?”
“How do we deal with it? You tell me how you’ve gotten through what happened to your family. That’s what I want to know from you.”
“My sister needed me. I had a purpose.”
“Good. All right. But there had to be more to it than that. No one wants to feel useless.” He hesitated. “I speak from experience.”
“Oh? I didn’t come all the way here to visit a useless man. I have better judgment than that. Tell me about your brother. Tell me what happened to him—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He pointed to the organ. “Play something.”
I sighed, but he had asked me to do the one thing I secretly wanted to do. I walked to the front of the chapel and sat down on a claw-footed organ stool. I fiddled experimentally with the pull stops on the antique organ’s enameled backboard. I pumped the foot pedals and played a chord. Dust wheezed from the pipes, but the sound was pure.
I played a simple recital warmup I’d learned as a child. Gib pulled his hat off and tossed it atop a stack of pews. Then he sat down unsteadily beside the organ and propped his arms on his updrawn knees. He bent his head and shut his eyes. I glanced furtively at the rigid slant of his cheekbones, the gaunt slopes beneath his eyes—his hair was mink-brown with that fleck of gray at the top of his forehead.
When I finished I pulled my hands into my lap primly. “I don’t usually play requests.” He continued to sit with his eyes closed. For all I knew he’d fallen asleep. “But I’ll make an exception if there’s anything you want to hear. Or if I’m just babbling out loud to myself while you’re taking a nap, I guess I’ll play whatever I want. Are you asleep?”
He pushed himself up to his feet with effort. “Good God, you’re talented. You can’t go on throwing yourself away on the jobs you take.” I bristled with humiliation—the truth always hurts. Before I could do more than stare at him open-mouthed, he turned and walked outside.
I hurried after him. “Where are you going?” He lifted a hand, let it fall, then eased down the steps at the front of the chapel mound, placing each booted foot carefully.
He’s out of his mind. He’s drunk.
I followed him but kept several yards behind. He can’t walk far in his condition. “Are any of your family home yet? Back from Knoxville?”
He halted at the base of the steps and faced me. He towered over me, large hazel eyes scowling under dark brows frosted with wood dust. The dogs gathered around him, licking his pants legs and his hands, which hung loosely by his sides. “Are you planning to walk to the house?” I persisted.
His left hand lashed out. In an instant that showed how quick he was despite the bourbon, he folded his fingers under the cusp of my chin, and smoothed his thumb across my cheek. “You have green eyes like a cat,” he said. Appreciation softened his face for a second. “Cocked up at the outside corners. The sharpest cat eyes. What do you see when you look at me?”
“A man who needs to sit down somewhere shady and let the bourbon wear off. A man who might be worth talking to if he’d just sit the hell down.”
He turned and walked down the footpath toward the main dirt road. He walked with the tired, lazy grace that liquor endows on some hard-assed men. I followed him to the road and around a curve. A long flatbed truck was parked there. Tall, thick stanchions jutted from its scarred wooden bed. The truck was obviously meant for rugged hauling. Gib swung a door open and climbed into the cab.
“Where are you going?” I called. He didn’t answer or even seem to notice. The man needed someone, something; he needed help. I felt frightened and exhilarated, conscious of the light again—moonlight lingering in the sunlight—a certain thinning of the fabric between choice and fate. I owed him for our childhood whimsies. I owed him for caring enough to find me, and for the undercover cop he’d sent in Chicago. I told myself I couldn’t let him drive off a ledge or wrap this ancient truck around a tree. And certainly not until I’d gotten my money from him.
I went to the back of the truck, latched both hands around a post, and climbed onto the bed. I faced forward so I could watch him through the cab’s dusty rear window. Most of
the dogs jumped up beside me, eager to go for a ride.
The truck was old and the engine made noises like a dyspeptic elephant when Gib cranked it. Smoke belched from the exhaust pipe. We began to roll up the road. I held on tightly. I was ready to jump out if his driving got too wild. One of the blue-eyed dogs sat down beside me and whined.
I put my arm around him. We both turned around and watched Gib. “This is more than I bargained for,” I muttered.
Eight
The first time a boy caused trouble for me I was only eight. While the nuns were drilling us for our confirmation, Barret Walker III kept whispering inanely, “The Lard cooks in mysterious ways,” and because I had a small crush on him, with his cocky attitude and smart-guy stance when the sisters punished him, which was often, I was too attentive to his jokes.
So during confirmation, when the bishop asked me to name the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, I named every gift perfectly until the very last one, when I glanced at Barret Walker III, who mouthed lard, and without thinking I told the bishop solemnly that the seventh gift of the Holy Ghost was “fear of the Lard.”
Afterward, Sister Mary Catherine insisted the faux pas indicated a rebellious nature and was no accident, no matter how much I protested my innocence. Maybe she was right. As I rode into the forest with Gib that day I thought of Barret Walker III and wondered if there was any way I could really excuse my own choices.
Maybe Gib was right, too. There are no accidents. Only consequences. I had no idea where we were headed or what might happen next. Gib drove through the woods for several minutes, turned off on another dirt road, and drove through more woods, to a clearing by the river.
I climbed out and looked at the building that stretched along the river’s bank; it was long, wide, and low, with a rust-streaked tin roof. Sections of its sturdy plank walls could be unlatched to prop up—like awnings—in hot weather. They were all closed and fastened with iron clasps. At first inspection I assumed the building was a chicken house, but it was too tall for that, and massively constructed, and besides, no one would put a single chicken house in the woods by itself.
Around it were lopsided piles of old sawdust sinking into the field grass like soft gray islands in a sea of green, already decomposing to form weak mulch that hosted briars and other hardy weeds. Several open-sided sheds were full of stacked lumber, and in others I saw small mountains of uncut logs peeking from thick plastic tarps. The rusted hulks of two dozen old vehicles had been lined up outside one wall of the building.
This spot was also the Camerons’ personal junkyard, or someone’s joke of an automotive museum. In addition to vintage pickup trucks and the rusted frame of a Mercedes touring car that would break any car collector’s heart, I recognized a couple of 1950-ish Fords and an old English roadster. But there were also skeletal frames from buggies, and the iron rims of wagon wheels, and in one shed, several pieces of antique farm equipment—large, spidery, horse-drawn devices for baling or cutting or whatever, I couldn’t fathom.
The clearing was beautiful in its own morbid way, with the small river gurgling on the other side of the building and wide old beech trees on either side, nodding in the warm breeze. I could imagine blacksmiths shoeing horses under the trees, and farmhands guiding mule-drawn combines up the same road we’d taken.
Gib finally staggered from the truck, left the door open, and stood with his feet braced apart, his hands hanging by his sides, as he faced the building. I climbed down from the truck’s bed, watching the harsh movement of his shoulders as he took deep, uneven breaths; his fists clenched, then unfurled, then tightened again. He stood like a half-beaten but stubborn fighter.
Before I could think of anything to say he strode to the building’s wide industrial door, jerked a heavy iron bolt from its latch, then slid the door on its squealing metal tracks. Gib went to the center of the open door and stood, braced as he had been before, silhouetted by the inky shadows. Then he disappeared into the darkness.
The dogs milled uneasily outside. Even the stately blue-eyed dogs were reluctant to follow him. But someone had to go in there with him.
I moved slowly, aware of every degree of bright sunshine falling off my shoulders as I stepped inside, squinting. I smelled fragrant wood, dust, and clay earth. I smelled stale gasoline, like a service station on a broiling summer day.
As my eyes adjusted I looked around, then spotted Gib—a tall, dark shape—moving by the wall to my right. I heard a click. Lights came on, bright pinpoints of bare bulbs hanging under dusty metal hoods in a line down the center of the rafters.
In the middle of the floor stood a waist-high contraption, about fifty feet long, of steel rollers and sidearm levers designed to feed logs from a storage platform at one end of the building.
I looked from Gib to where the feeder met its goal: a steel table beside a maze of gears and wide beltdrives. Berthed in the center of the table, a savagely effective sawblade gleamed in the light. The blade was at least four feet in diameter, with teeth that looked as if they could rip a house in two.
Or a man.
A sawmill. Oh, my God.
Gib took slow, leaden steps, scuffing dust motes into the air. He stopped by the feeder trolley. His jaw clenched, he slowly held his damaged hand over the rollers as if the device might burn him when he touched it. When he finally rested his hand on the metal track, his shoulders slumped and he bent his head.
Next he shuffled to the end of the feeder path, then laid his good hand on the long slabs of wood, already milled into rough sections two feet wide and a foot thick, and arranged neatly on the storage platform. He stroked one of the massive pieces. It was as if he had to touch each element of this place, to bless it or curse it.
I felt dazed, even more as I noticed details like the pristine layer of sawdust on the floor, still bearing grid lines in places, where it had been neatly raked. There was a lingering chemical smell from walls coated in perfectly unsmudged white paint. I looked at the steel gleam of the giant sawblade and the cloudy smudges that looked like gray spray paint on the sawdust around the base of the gray-hued metal posts beneath the feeder track. The building had been cleaned, scrubbed, repainted, and then closed up.
Gib fumbled with an old engine that had been mounted off the ground on a concrete pedestal. He opened a wide wooden window on the opposite side of the building, squinted in the added sunlight, took something small from his trouser pocket, and bent over the engine unsteadily. It roared to life. Its thumping noise filled the building, and pungent exhaust smoke wafted out the window through a pipe.
But the sawblade sat motionless, as if waiting for him to pull a switch or press a button somewhere. He contemplated the blade with eerie fascination, walking around it slowly, riveted to a single line of sight that linked him to the gleaming, dangerous blade. He never seemed to notice me, standing a few feet away. I debated both of our next moves as if action were an improvised duet I didn’t want to play.
I sidled past him then hurried to the engine, studying it. The key. The key in an ignition switch was easy to reach. A small, smooth chunk of wood dangled from it by a thin chain. The words “Sawmill Engine” were painted in fading black on the wood.
Gib curled his ruined hand into a fist and slammed it against a control panel on a post beside the sawblade gears. The blade shivered, then accelerated, soon spinning at full speed with a sinister whirring sound I could hear even above the earsplitting beat of the tractor engine.
Gib sank his hands into his dark hair and staggered toward the log platform. He jerked a large, pronged hook off a wall and jabbed its sharp tip into the end of a log atop the platform. He wrestled the log onto the feeder track. It shimmied precariously on the track’s edge, nearly rolling off before he lifted a booted foot and shoved it. The log settled into place. He sprawled on his back.
I yelled, but he couldn’t hear me over the engine and the blade. He struggled to his elbows, sat up, then rolled onto his hands and knees and wavered to his feet. He had a she
ll-shocked look of determination. Shuffling, wiping sweat from his forehead, he went back to the log, which was inching down the track toward the blade.
I grabbed the engine’s ignition key by its homemade wooden key chain and jerked it from the switch.
Silence. Everything stopped—the engine, the sawblade, the log creeping along the rollers. Gib frowned at the sawblade and the halted log. Slowly, blinking, he raised his bewildered scowl in the general direction of the engine. When he saw me he scrubbed his good hand over his sweating face, and looked again.
He started my way, swaying, holding on to posts, walls, beltdrives—whatever helped him move quickly without falling down. “Give me the key,” he ordered in a tone that could have sliced logs as sharply as any blade.
He bore down on me with his good hand thrust out and his momentum warning that this was no time for rational arguments. I bolted to the window, which was just a crude opening with no screen. The bottom ledge was waist-high. The key still clutched in my grip, I latched on to the ledge with both hands and threw one leg over it.
But he caught me from behind, wrapping both sweaty, dirty arms around my waist, pinning one arm but not the other one. I yelled but held on to the window ledge with my right hand and right leg still hooked over it.
He pried me off with a hard tug that sent him to the floor with me splayed on my back on top of him. I rolled off and crouched on my knees, furious. “Get your hands off me! Are you too drunk to realize I’m trying to save your life?”
He sat up wearily, then thrust out his good hand. “I’m milling those logs today. It took all my willpower to walk in here. I’m not walking out without doing the job. Give me that engine key.”