Serena by Ron Rash Page B

sack so it could dry. The crows had settled into the trees and the squirrels tucked deep in their nests. The woods were hushed and attentive, the trees seeming to huddle themselves closer together, as if awaiting not just the rain but some story about to be told.
    “We best find that guinea egg before the rain comes,” she told Jacob. “We can check on the bees too.”
    They went into the woods behind the house, pausing first at the white bee box set at the wood’s edge. Unlike during warm weather, Rachel had to lean close to hear them, their shifting huddle soft as a drowsy wind. The bee box’s paint was chipped and fading, and she’d have to fix that by spring because white soothed the bees almost as much as smoke.
    You have to tell the bees he died. They’ll leave if you don’t, Widow Jenkins had told Rachel the day of her father’s funeral. It was something the old folks believed, and though Rachel wasn’t sure if it was true or not she’d done it. She’d taken off her dark mourning clothes and put on a worn linen dress, then walked out to the shed to find the cheesecloth veil. It was white as well, made of muslin. By then almost all of the bees had returned for the night, only a few coming and going as she’d approached the box. Rachel remembered how she’d slowly opened the super, especially how clear and clean the smell had been, like moss on a creek bank. She’d spoken to the bees calmly, her voice merging with their own slurry voices. Afterward, as she’d walked back to the house in that late-June twilight, it had struck Rachel that someone at a distance might see her and easily mistake her for a bride. She’d also thought how, if that distance had been one of months instead of furlongs, taking her back to those winter middays she’d spent in Pemberton’s bed, she could have imagined the same herself.
    Jacob whined and Rachel felt the first drops of a cold drizzle.
    “We better get that egg,” she told the child.
    It took a few minutes, because the guinea was good at hiding them, but Rachel finally found an egg in a wither of honeysuckle vines. Rachel pulled the bundling over Jacob’s head, because the drizzle had quickened, tinged with ice that stung her face. She walked into the barn and set Jacob on a bed of gathered straw. The whispery sound of the drizzle hitting the tin roof made the barn feel snug, as if its broad-beamed shoulders had shrugged closer together.
    Rachel went to the shed and unwound the hook and line from the fishing pole and returned to the barn. With the fish hook’s barb, she chipped a small hole in the egg, then guided the hook’s barb and shank into the yolk until no metal showed. Rachel delicately placed the egg back on the straw and tied the six feet of fishing line to a nail head. All this trouble because she was living so close to the bone a few pennies mattered, Rachel told herself bitterly. She and her father had had hard times before. When Rachel was seven they’d lost a milk cow that hadeaten cherry leaves, and when she was twelve a hail storm had destroyed the corn crop. But even in the leanest times there’d always been a few dollars left in the coffee can stowed on the pantry’s top shelf, a cow or horse in the pasture yet to be sold.
    Sell it, it’ll fetch a good price, Mrs. Pemberton had said when she’d handed Rachel the bowie knife. And it probably would, perhaps even as much as the ginseng, but Rachel couldn’t abide doing what Mrs. Pemberton had commanded her to do. She’d sell the shoes off her feet before taking the knife out of the box trunk and selling it. Widow Jenkins would say Rachel was just being prideful, and maybe Preacher Bolick would agree, but she’d had enough proud shucked off her the last few months to believe God wouldn’t begrudge her keeping just a little.
     
    T HE next morning Rachel found a raccoon crouched in the stall’s corner, the fishing line tugging one side of the creature’s mouth. Its pink tongue was panting.