Beneath the Briar: The Stranger in The Pines

Fog lay thick against the porch boards, milk-colored and sour with the smell of wet pine. Vera Halsey set her mug on the railing and let her eyes travel the way her father had taught her, slow and low, from the left stand of pines to the right and back again.

The dawn had not yet broken. It would not for another hour, maybe more, given how the ridge swallowed the light. Briar Hollow sat in a bowl between two forested rises, and the mist came up off the crick every morning, sat in the hollow like something poured, and did not lift until the sun got good and ready to climb. The boards under her feet were damp. Her slippers were the wrong ones for standing outside; she could feel the cold seeping through the wool at her toes.

She had not planned to come out. The coffee had drawn her, the smell of it, and the silence of the house. Inside, Edith slept the way she always slept now, light and fitful, the way a cat sleeps at the foot of a bed. Vera had grown used to leaving the bedroom door cracked the way you leave a window cracked in summer. It let the air move.

So she had come out for the air.

What she had not come out for was the figure at the treeline.

She saw it the way you see a knot in a board, by its wrongness. A shape darker than the trunks around it, still where the pines swayed. Fifty yards out, maybe sixty. Standing at the lip of the woods where the old logging path cut through the undergrowth. Not moving. Just standing.

Vera did not breathe.

The mug steamed at her elbow. A crow called somewhere off in the timber, a long scraping sound, and the figure did not flinch. She counted her own heartbeats and tried to count the seconds between them. Her fingers found the lip of the railing and held on.

She had been watching the treeline for the better part of twenty minutes when she became sure. The shape was not a stump. It was not a hanging vine or a piece of bark curled wrong. It was a person. A person standing in the pines, watching the Halsey house.

Her throat closed around a swallow.

She knew what people said about the Halsey place. The whispering had not stopped since the funeral, since the reading of the will, since the cousin from Knoxville had driven up and taken one look at the property and driven back down again without ever stepping out of his car. Folks in Briar Hollow had a long memory and a long tongue, and when they had nothing to say they said it quieter. The Halsey name had gone sour on the wind. Vera had felt it at the post office, at the feed store, the way a woman feels eyes on her back in a room where she thought she was alone.

She had not expected the watching to come this close.

The mug rattled when her hand found it. She picked it up and set it inside the door on the hall table, moving the way her father had moved in the woods, slow and deliberate, leaving nothing where it had been. The house was dark behind her. Edith slept on.

Vera went to the long closet under the stairs.

She knew where the rifle was. She had not touched it in three years, not since the afternoon her father had laid it across her lap on this very porch and said, "This belongs to a Halsey, and so do you, and I want you to remember which one of those things is older." She had been nineteen. He had been dying for a year already, though he had not told her yet. The rifle had smelled of oil and old wool and the faintest trace of pipe tobacco, and it had been heavier than she had expected. He had laughed at her face when she lifted it.

"Same as everything worth carrying," he had said.

The stock was cool under her palm. The bolt was stiff. She worked it twice, feeling the brass of the cartridge ride up the magazine and into the chamber, and listened to the small sounds the gun made, sounds Edith could not hear through a wall and a sleep. The barrel was long, blued steel gone dull in places, and the leather sling was cracked at the loop. Her mother had carried this rifle on the back of a mule, up the north face of the ridge, in a snow so heavy the trees cracked at noon. Vera had heard the story so many times she could see her mother in it, bent forward in the stirrups, the rifle balanced across her shoulders like a yoke.

She had not been a woman to step down from a thing she had decided.

Vera stepped back onto the porch and shut the door behind her with her heel. The click of the latch was loud in the quiet. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder the way her father had shown her, the stock seated into the pocket of her shoulder, her cheek laid against the wood, her right eye finding the iron sight. The world narrowed down to a line.

The figure was still there.

She could make out more now. A dark coat, work-worn and long. Boots below it, the kind that laced up past the ankle. A cap, or hair, she could not tell which. The face was a blur. The figure stood with its weight on its back foot, the way a man stands who means to move, and did not move.

Vera's mouth was dry. She tasted the coffee at the back of her tongue and swallowed it.

"Who's there," she said.

The words came out flat, the way she had been taught to speak into the woods, no rise at the end, no question mark. Her father had said a question was an invitation. A flat statement was a wall. She had practiced the words on the porch as a girl, scaring off the neighbor's hound, and they had felt silly then. They did not feel silly now.

The figure did not answer. It did not step back. It did not wave.

The fog shifted. A low tongue of mist rolled between the house and the treeline, slow as breath, and the shape behind it seemed to thicken and thin, thicken and thin, the way a coal does in a draft. Vera tracked it with the iron sight. The front post sat a little to the left of the dark mass, a little low. She corrected. The post settled where she wanted it. She held it there.

Her arms had begun to tremble. The rifle was heavier than she remembered. The cold had crept up her wrists and into her forearms, and the muscles there were not what they had been. She had taught third grade all fall and graded papers until her hand cramped. She had not held a rifle in three years. She had not needed to. The hollow had been quiet for three years. Whatever had driven folks to whisper about the Halsey place, it had stayed in the parlor of folks' mouths and not stepped out into their yards.

Until now.

Vera took one step down off the porch. The board gave under her foot, a small complaint, and she steadied the rifle on her shoulder and felt the stock press into the bruise it was making. She took a second step. The dew was on the porch stairs and her slipper slid and she caught herself on the newel post without taking her eye off the treeline.

"Don't," she said, louder. "Don't you step another foot toward this house."

The crow called again, closer now, somewhere in the pines to the left of the figure. The crow called a third time, and a fourth, and then the calls came from three different directions at once, the way crows do when they have decided something is in the woods that ought not to be. The figure turned its head. Vera was sure of it. A small motion, a quarter-turn, toward the sound.

She said, "I have seen you. I have your face."

It was not true. She had not seen the face. The mist and the half-light had kept the face for themselves. But she said it anyway, the way her father had told her to say it, because a man who believes he has been seen is a man who begins to count his reasons.

The figure did not move.

Vera took the third step and the fourth and stood at the edge of the porch on the damp ground, her slippers going dark with the wet. The rifle was steady in her hands. Her shoulders had stopped trembling. The bruise at her cheek was warm where the wood had been riding it.

She took a breath and held it and walked.

Fifteen steps from the porch. Twenty. Twenty-five. The grass was wet and high, and her slippers soaked through by the third stride. She did not look down. The iron sight stayed where she had put it, on the dark mass at the treeline. The figure had not moved. The crows had gone quiet. The whole hollow had gone quiet, the crick and the wind and the small constant sounds of a place at dawn, all of it, gone.

Thirty steps.

The fog came up around her shins. It was thicker out here than it had been on the porch, thicker than she had expected, and it carried a smell she did not recognize, something mineral and cold, the way a creek smells where it comes up out of the ground. She had not smelled that on the porch. She had not smelled that in the yard. It was a smell that belonged to the pines.

She stopped.

The figure was still there. She could feel it there, the way you feel a person in a dark room before your eyes find them, the disturbance in the air, the weight of being watched back.

She lifted the rifle and put the front post on the center of the mass and said, "I am going to count to three."

She did not get to one.

A sound came out of the pines, low and long, like a branch under a weight, and the fog rolled in over the figure in a single slow sheet, and when it thinned again there was nothing at the treeline but the trunks of the pines and the long wet grass and the path her mother had once walked with the rifle across her back.

Vera stood with the rifle up and her cheek on the wood and her eye on the iron sight, and she held it there for a count of ten, and then for a count of twenty, and then for as long as she could hold her breath.

The pines did not move. The fog did not lift. The crow called once more, far off, in a different direction, and then the hollow was quiet again the way it had been quiet before she had come outside, and the quiet had a different sound to it now, the way a room sounds different after someone has spoken in it and left.

Vera lowered the rifle. Her arms shook. The bruise at her cheek throbbed once and went cold.

She looked down at her slippers. They were soaked through. She looked back at the house. A light had come on in Edith's window.

Edith's light had come on in the window. The square of yellow on the dark second story looked like a card held up against a wall. Vera watched it for three breaths. The light did not move. Edith had not drawn the curtain back. She had only switched the lamp on.

The fog lay against Vera's ankles now, cold and slow, and somewhere up the hollow a dog started barking, then stopped, then started again. The pines at the edge of the yard were only shapes. The figure that had stood there, the one she had put her front sight on, was gone into them, or had been gone into them the moment the fog had passed over it, or had never been there at all, which was the third possibility and the one she could not afford to entertain.

She thought of Edith in the upstairs room with her schoolbooks and her candle and her bad ankle. Edith would not come down. Edith, when she was frightened, did not come down. She made herself smaller. She pulled the quilt up over her shoulders and lay like a stone in a creek and waited for the water to pass.

Vera did not want to be the water. Vera wanted to be the thing Edith waited out.

She turned back toward the house. Took one step. Stopped.

The grass between her and the pines was bent down in a path. Not the path her mother had walked, the one she had been thinking about a moment ago. That path was east, toward the spring. This path was north, straight in from where the figure had stood, and it cut through the wet grass in a line as clean as a hoe stroke.

Boot prints.

She saw them.

Three of them. Then a scuff. Then two more, the last one deeper than the others, the heel dug in as if whoever had made it had stumbled or turned quick. The prints ran toward the pines and stopped at the first trunk, and beyond the first trunk the ground was pine straw and she could not read it.

She stood with the rifle down at her side and looked at the prints. The fog was moving across them like a hand drawn slowly over a page. She had not seen prints in this part of the yard since last winter, when the timber crew had come through cutting the dead chestnut off the upper ridge. There had been men then. There had been a foreman she had not liked. There had been a boy with a red bandana who had eaten his lunch on the Halsey porch without being invited and then later had tried to kiss her behind the corn crib. She had hit him with the flat of her palm and he had bled from the mouth and she had not felt sorry.

Those prints had been heavy. The ones in front of her were light. Whoever had stood at the woodline had weighed less than a man, or had stood so still the ground had not taken the mark of him.

She did not want to go look.

She went.

The grass wet her stockings to the knee. The cold came up through the slippers and into the bones of her feet and she remembered the cellar stairs and the dirt there and the smell of her father's work boots, the leather gone gray at the toe, and she walked faster.

The first print was at the edge of the grass. She crouched over it. The welt was clean. The toe was narrow. She put her hand over it without thinking, the way you cover a mouth to muffle a sound, and the print was almost the size of her own hand.

She did not look up at the pines. She looked at the ground.

Two steps in, at the base of the first pine, she saw the pack.

It had been crushed. Not stepped on, exactly. Pressed. The way you press a thing between your thumb and the side of your finger to feel if it is full. The cellophane was torn down the middle. The cigarettes inside were bent. The brand was one she did not know, and the writing on the white paper was in a script she could not read, the letters curving back on themselves like vines on a fence.

She picked it up. The tobacco smell came to her at once, sweet and sharp, and not at all like the tobacco her father had rolled in his papers. Her father had smoked a coarser leaf. This was something else. This was something brought in from somewhere else. The word on the front of the pack was in French, or what she took to be French, two words she could not parse. There was a small gold crest. There was a number in the corner she could not read in the fog.

She turned the pack over in her palm. There was no dust on it. It had not been on the ground long. It had been dropped, or placed there, or had fallen from a pocket when whoever had been standing at the woodline had turned at the sound of her voice and gone into the pines.

She put it in her apron pocket. She did not want to leave it where Edith might find it. Edith collected things. Edith collected things the way other girls collected ribbons, and she would want to know where this had come from, and Vera did not want to answer that question yet.

Two steps farther in, she found the swatch.

It was caught on a knot of pine bark about two feet off the ground, the corner of it lifting in the small wind that moved through the trees. She reached for it and her sleeve caught on the bark and she had to work it loose, and when she had it in her hand she saw what it was.

Canvas. The color of mill workwear. A green-gray, the green gone out of it by sun and washing, and a weave she knew because her father had worn the same weave every day of his working life until he had stopped working. She had a pair of his trousers folded on the top shelf of the closet that she could not bring herself to mend or to give away. The cloth of those trousers was the same as the cloth in her hand.

The swatch was torn. Not cut. Torn, the threads at the edges pulled long and uneven, and one corner of it had a dark stain on it that she could not see the color of in the fog. She held it closer to her face. The smell of it came to her: oil, and the faint sweet rot of old sweat, and something else, something metallic she did not want to name.

She folded the swatch once and then again and put it in her apron pocket with the cigarettes.

The pines were very quiet around her. The crow had stopped. The dog up the hollow had stopped. The fog lay between the trunks in slow drifts and the air smelled of wet bark and the last of the imported tobacco on her fingers and something under it, something older, that she had smelled once in the schoolroom when the Halsey history books had been opened to the page about the first settlement and the photograph of the original cabin had been pressed between the leaves. The smell of a place where a fire had been.

She did not want to go any farther into the pines. She did not want to stand where she was standing any longer. She wanted to be inside the house with the lamp on and Edith asleep in the next room and the door bolted and the rifle across her knees. She wanted to not have come out here. She wanted the night to be the night she had thought it was when she had lain down, which was a night like any other, with the fog coming in and the crow calling and nothing in the world changed.

She turned back toward the house.

The light was still on in Edith's window.

She walked back through the grass the way she had come, her slippers making the same soft sound on the bent blades, and when she reached the porch she did not go in through the front door. She went in through the kitchen door and set the rifle in the corner and took off her wet slippers and stood on the rug in her stockings and listened.

The house was quiet. The clock in the hall ticked. The pipes knocked once in the wall behind the stove. From upstairs there was no sound at all.

She took the cigarettes out of her apron pocket and put them on the table. She took the swatch out and put it beside them. She stood looking at them. The swatch was the size of her palm. The pack of cigarettes was the size of her palm. They sat on the bare wood of the kitchen table in the yellow light of the hanging lamp and they did not look like anything she had ever seen in this house before.

She thought of Reid Calloway. She did not want to think of Reid Calloway. She thought of Reid Calloway anyway.

He had come back to the hollow two weeks ago. He had come back to take the sawmill his uncle had left him in the will, the will that had been read in the courthouse in town with only his name on it and no other names on it and a long silence after the reading while the men in the front row had looked at the floor and the women in the back had looked at each other. He had come back the way he had left, in an old Ford truck with the windows rolled down, and he had driven up the north road without stopping at the store or the church or the schoolhouse, and he had gone into the mill, and the mill had started up that same afternoon, the first time in eleven months anyone in the hollow had heard the sound of the saw.

She had seen him once. She had been walking down from the schoolhouse with her satchel over her shoulder and he had been standing at the gate of the mill lot with his back to her and his hat in his hand and his shirt sleeves turned up, and she had walked past him without speaking and he had not spoken either, and the distance between them had been the width of the road, and that had been enough.

He smoked. She knew that about him from before, from the years when they had been children and he had come down to the Halsey place to help her father with the fence, and he had rolled his own cigarettes from a tin his mother had given him, and he had held them between his index and middle finger and the smoke had come up the side of his face. He had not smoked imported cigarettes. She did not know anyone in the hollow who smoked imported cigarettes. She did not know anyone who could afford imported cigarettes.

She looked at the pack on the table. The script on the front of it. The gold crest. The two words she could not read.

She thought of the sawmill. She thought of what was supposed to be under the sawmill. She thought of her father telling her once, when she was a girl and he had been sitting on the porch after a long day and his hands had been still on his knees, that the Calloways had always been a family that put things where they would not be found, and that he had meant nothing by it, or had meant everything by it, and she had not known which, and she had not asked.

She put her hand flat on the table beside the swatch and the cigarettes and she did not pick them up again.

From upstairs, a floorboard creaked. Then silence. Then Edith's voice, small and even, the way it got when she was afraid and was trying to make it sound as though she were not.

"Vera."

"Yes."

"Are you coming up."

"In a minute."

"All right."

The floorboard did not creak again. The house settled. The clock ticked.

Vera stood at the table with her hand on the wood and the fog pressing at the window and the smell of the imported tobacco in her hair and the swatch in her apron pocket with the dark stain she had not yet made herself look at, and she knew she would have to go and see Reid Calloway in the morning, and she knew she would have to make herself walk up the north road and through the mill gate and knock on the door of the office, and she knew that when she knocked he would not answer right away, and that when he did answer he would not invite her in, and that the conversation they would have would be the first one they had had in twelve years and would not be the one she had imagined, on the porch in the dark, on the nights when she let herself imagine.

She turned out the lamp in the kitchen. She left the cigarettes and the swatch on the table. She went up the stairs with her wet stockings leaving prints on the wood and she did not turn on the hall light and she did not knock on Edith's door and she went into her own room and closed it and stood there in the dark with her hand on the knob and her face to the wall and her breath coming and going in the small cold room.

Vera did not sleep that night. She lay on her back with her eyes open and her hands folded on her stomach and she listened to Edith breathe through the wall, the small wet sound of it, the catch at the end of each exhale that the doctor in town had not heard and the doctor at the clinic forty miles east had heard and had not yet explained. The shoulder came again at four in the morning when the fog pressed hardest against the glass. Vera rose. She dressed in the dark. She went down and found the cigarettes still on the table and the swatch still in her apron pocket and she put water on the stove and let it warm and did not drink any of it.

At half past seven she walked Edith down to the road and waited with her for the school bus and watched the yellow doors fold open and watched her sister climb the steps and did not wave when Edith turned at the window to look back. She watched the bus pull away and stand for a long time in the road with the fog dissolving around her ankles and the imported tobacco still faintly in her hair.

Then she turned north.

The mill gate stood open when she reached it. She had not expected that. She had expected it locked, or chained, or at least shut, and the fact of it standing open, the iron hinges still carrying the rust she remembered, made something in her chest turn over that she did not have a name for. She walked through. The yard was empty. The sawdust had the gray look of sawdust that has been rained on and dried and rained on again. A single plank stood leaning against the office door as though set there on purpose, and as though the person who set it had not yet come back for it, or had come back and decided to leave it.

She knocked.

Nothing.

She knocked again.

Footsteps on the other side. The sound of a chair pushed back. The sound of a body rising in a room that smelled of machine oil and old paper.

The door opened and Reid Calloway stood in it with his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and his face unshaven and a pencil tucked behind one ear. He looked at her for a long moment without speaking. He had looked at her like that once before, on the porch of this same building, twelve years ago, the summer he left, the morning she had come to say what she had come to say and had not been able to say.

Vera. Good morning.

Morning, Reid.

He did not step aside.

You got my message.

I got a message. I did not know it was from you until I read it twice. You have not changed your handwriting much.

He had the grace, or the memory, to look faintly ashamed.

Come in, he said.

She stepped past him into the office and the room was colder than she had expected and smelled of turpentine and lamp oil and the faint sharp tang of pine resin that never quite left a place where lumber had been cut. There was a desk with three drawers closed and a chair behind it and two chairs in front of it and a map of the hollow on the wall with pins in it that meant nothing to her. Reid closed the door. He did not lock it. He walked to the desk and did not sit.

I asked you to come, he said, because I have something to say to you that I would rather say to your face.

All right.

Say it because I have carried it around since yesterday and the carrying of it is worse than the saying of it will be.

He looked at her. He looked away. He looked at the map. He put his hand on the back of the chair behind the desk and did not pull it out.

The medical examiner in Charleston, he said, has been working since Sunday on a chart that came down from him the other day. A chart I should not have asked for and he should not have sent and you are going to be angry with me for asking and I am going to be angry with myself for the rest of the week for sending it.

Which chart.

Your sister.

Vera did not sit down either. She stood with her hand on the back of one of the front chairs and her fingers curled around the wood and the wood felt cold and smooth and gave under her grip the way wood gives.

He said, the readings on the cardiac portion of her exam were flagged by the examining physician as atypical. Not abnormal. Not diagnostic. Not yet. The word the man used, when I pressed him, was unusual. He said the readings were unusual in a way that warranted a follow-up at the clinic, and that the clinic had been informed, and that the clinic had not yet informed you.

Why would the clinic not inform me.

I do not know. I am not the clinic. I am not your sister's physician. I am the man who made a phone call yesterday afternoon that I had no business making, and the man who is standing here now telling you what he learned because I would not be able to live with myself if I did not.

Vera let go of the chair. She did not know she had been holding it.

Reid.

Yes.

I need you to say it plain.

He looked at her. He put the pencil he had been holding on the desk and he put his hands flat on either side of it and he leaned forward and the wood of the desk creaked under his weight.

Edith's heart is not working the way the examiner thinks it should be working. The readings he saw on Monday, when he did the work-up at the school, were not the readings he saw on the follow-up he did yesterday at the clinic. They were different in a way he cannot yet account for. He asked me, when I called, whether your sister had ever been diagnosed with anything cardiac, and I told him I did not know, and he said that was the answer he had expected, and that the next step was a proper work-up at the university hospital, and that until that work-up was done he could not say what was happening and he could not say what was not happening.

Vera.

Yes.

What I am telling you is that something on that chart is wrong. What I am not telling you is what. What I am asking you is to hear me say that and to hear me say that I do not have an answer and that I am sorry I do not have an answer.

She stood very still.

The clock on the wall of the office had stopped. She had not noticed when. It had been stopped for some time, perhaps since before she came in, perhaps for years. The only sound in the room was the sound of her own breath and the faint sound of the mill yard outside, the wind moving a piece of loose tin against the side of a building, a small flat rhythmic tapping.

Reid.

Yes.

If what you are telling you is true, and I am not yet in a position to know whether it is true, then I need to ask you something.

Ask.

Did anyone else see this chart before you did.

No.

Did anyone else know you were calling.

No.

Did the examiner tell you to tell me, or did you decide on your own.

He told me to talk to you. He did not tell me to do it here. I asked him if I could come to the house and he said no, he said not at the house, he said at the station, he said the office at the mill, he said I would know why.

Why.

Because the house has been watched. Because the clinic has been watched. Because someone, and he did not say who, has been asking about your sister's chart since Monday afternoon.

Vera was quiet for a long time. The tapping outside stopped. The wind changed. A board somewhere in the mill settled and then was very still.

Reid.

Yes.

I want this conversation off the record.

He looked at her. He put his hand on the pencil again and then took it off.

It already is, he said.

Then I want it to stay off.

It will.

I want your word.

You have my word.

I want your word, Reid, the way you used to give your word when we were young and you meant it and did not leave.

He did not flinch. He had earned the right not to flinch and he knew it and she knew it and the knowing of it stood between them in the room and did not move.

You have my word, he said.

Vera nodded. She did not thank him. She picked up her bag from the chair where she had set it when she came in. She walked to the door. She did not look back at the map on the wall or at the pins in it.

She opened the door. The morning light fell across the threshold in a long pale bar and the fog had lifted from the yard but had not lifted from the hills behind and the air smelled of pine and of the smoke from someone's stove a mile or two down the hollow.

Reid, she said, without turning.

Yes.

When you say atypical, what do you mean by that, in a word a schoolteacher would understand.

He was quiet for a moment.

Unsettled, he said.

She let the word settle in her. She closed the door behind her and walked out into the yard and the sawdust gave under her boots and the imported tobacco smell was still faintly in her hair and the imported tobacco had still crept into the house and into her bag and into the swatch in her apron pocket, and somewhere on a chart in a clinic forty miles east her sister's heart was doing something it had not done before, and someone had been asking about that chart since Monday afternoon, and the man who had told her so had given her his word in a room that smelled of turpentine and pine resin that he would keep her secret, and she did not yet know if she believed him.

She walked out through the gate and did not close it behind her.