INTO THE GORGE
His great-aunt had been born on this land, lived on it eight decades, and knew it as well as she knew her husband and children. That was what she’d always claimed, and could tell you to the week when the first dogwood blossom would brighten the ridge, the first blackberry darken and swell enough to harvest. Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they’d died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk.
Knowledge of the land was the one memory that refused to dissolve. During her last year, Jesse would step off the school bus and see his great-aunt hoeing a field behind her farmhouse, breaking ground for a crop she never sowed, but the rows were always straight, right-depthed. Her nephew, Jesse’s father, worked in an adjoining field. The first few times, he had taken the hoe from her hands and led her back to her house, but she’d soon be back in the field. After a while neighbors and kin just let her hoe. They brought meals and checked on her as often as they could. Jesse always walked rapidly past her field. His great-aunt never looked up, her gaze fixed on the hoe blade and the dark soil it churned, but he had always feared she’d raise her eyes and acknowledge him, though what she might want to convey Jesse could not say.
Then one March day she disappeared. The men in the community searched all afternoon and into evening as the temperature dropped, sleet crackled and hissed like static. The men rippled outward as they lit lanterns and moved into the gorge. Jesse watched from his family’s pasture as the held flames grew smaller, soon disappearing and reappearing like foxfire, crossing the creek and then on past the ginseng patch Jesse helped his father harvest, going deeper into land that had been in the family almost two hundred years, toward the original homestead, the place she’d been born.
They found his great-aunt at dawn, her back against a tree as if waiting for the searchers to arrive. But that was not the strangest thing. She’d taken off her shoes, her dress, and her underclothes. Years later Jesse read in a magazine that people dying of hypothermia did such a thing believing heat, not cold, was killing them. Back then, the woods had been communal, No Trespassing signs an affront, but after her death neighbors soon found places other than the gorge to hunt and fish, gather blackberries and galax. Her ghost was still down there, many believed, including Jesse’s own father, who never returned to harvest the ginseng he’d planted. When the park service made an offer on the homestead, Jesse’s father and aunts had sold. That was in 1959, and the government paid sixty dollars an acre. Now, five decades later, Jesse stood on his porch and looked east toward Sampson Ridge, where bulldozers razed woods and pastureland for another gated community. He wondered how much those sixty acres were worth today. Easily a million dollars.
Not that he needed that much money. His house and twenty acres were paid for, as was his truck. The tobacco allotment earned less each year but still enough for a widower with grown children. Enough as long as he didn’t have to go to the hospital or his truck throw a rod. He needed some extra money put away for that. Not a million, but some.
So two autumns ago Jesse had gone into the gorge, following the creek to the old homestead, then up the ridge’s shadowy north face where his father had seeded and harvested his ginseng patch. The crop was there, evidently untouched for half a century. Some of the plants rose above Jesse’s kneecaps, and there was more ginseng than his father could have dreamed of, a hillside spangled with bright yellow leaves, enough roots to bulge Jesse’s knapsack. Afterward, he’d carefully replanted the seeds, done it just as his father had done, then walked out of the gorge, past the iron gate that kept vehicles off the logging road. A yellow tin marker nailed to a nearby tree said U.S. Park Service.
Now another autumn had come. A wet autumn, which was good for the plants, as Jesse had verified three days ago when he’d checked them. Once again he gathered the knapsack and trowel from the woodshed. He also took the .32-20 Colt from his bedroom drawer. Late in the year for snakes, but after days of rain the afternoon was warm enough to bring a rattler or copperhead out to sun.
He followed the old logging road, the green backpack slung over his shoulder and the pistol in the outside pouch. Jesse’s arthritic knees ached as he made the descent. They would ache more that night, even after rubbing liniment on them. He wondered how many more autumns he’d be able to make this trip. Till I’m seventy, Jesse figured, giving himself two more years. The ground was slippery from all the rain and he walked slowly. A broken ankle or leg would be a serious thing this far from help, but it was more than that. He wanted to enter the gorge respectfully.
When he got in sight of the homestead, the land leveled out, but the ground grew soggier, especially where the creek ran close to the logging road. Jesse saw boot prints from three days earlier. Then he saw another set, coming up the logging road from the other direction. Boot prints as well, but smaller. Jesse looked down the logging road but saw no hiker or fisherman. He kneeled, his joints creaking.
The prints appeared at least a day old, maybe more. They stopped on the road when they met Jesse’s, then also veered toward the homestead. Jesse got up and looked around again before walking through the withered broom sedge and joe-pye weed. He passed a cairn of stones that once had been a chimney, a dry well covered with a slab of tin so rusty it served as more warning than safeguard. The boot prints were no longer discernible but he knew where they’d end. Led the son of a bitch right to it, he told himself, and wondered how he could have been stupid enough to walk the road on a rainy morning. But when he got to the ridge, the plants were still there, the soil around them undisturbed. Probably just a hiker, or a bird watcher, Jesse figured, that or some punk kid looking to poach someone’s marijuana, not knowing the ginseng was worth even more. Either way, he’d been damn lucky.
Jesse lifted the trowel from the backpack and got on his knees. He smelled the rich dark earth that always reminded him of coffee. The plants had more color than three days ago, the berries a deeper red, the leaves bright as polished gold. It always amazed him that such radiance could grow in soil the sun rarely touched, like finding rubies and sapphires on the gloamy walls of a cave. He worked with care but also haste. The first time he’d returned here two years earlier he’d felt a sudden coolness, a slight lessening of light as if a cloud had passed over the sun. Imagination, he’d told himself then, but it had made him work faster, with no pauses to rest.
Jesse jabbed the trowel into the loamy soil, probing inward with care so as not to cut the root, slowly bringing it to light. The root was a big one, six inches long, tendrils sprouting from the core like clay renderings of human limbs. Jesse scraped away the dirt and placed the root in the backpack, just as carefully buried the seeds to ensure another harvest. As he crawled a few feet left to unearth another plant, he felt the moist dirt seeping its way through the knees of his blue jeans. He liked being this close to the earth, smelling it, feeling it on his hands and under his nails, the same as when he planted tobacco sprigs in the spring. A song he’d heard on the radio drifted into his head, a woman wanting to burn down a whole town. He let the tune play in his head and tried to fill in the refrain as he pressed the trowel into the earth.
“You can lay that trowel down,” a voice behind Jesse said. “Then raise your hands.”
Jesse turned and saw a man in a gray shirt and green khakis, a gold badge on his chest and U.S. Park Service patch on the shoulder. Short blond hair, dark eyes. A young man, probably not even thirty. A pistol was holstered on his right hip, the safety strap off.
“Don’t get up,” the younger man said again, louder this time.
Jesse did as he was told. The park ranger came closer, picked up the backpack, and stepped away. Jesse watched as he opened the compartment with the ginseng root, then the smaller pouch. The ranger took out the .32-20 and held it in his palm. The gun had belonged to Jesse’s grandfather and father before being passed on to Jesse. The ranger inspected it as he might an arrowhead or spear point he’d found.
“That’s just for the snakes,” Jesse said.
“Possession of a firearm is illegal in the park,” the ranger said. “You’ve broken two laws, federal laws. You’ll be getting some jail time for this.”
The younger man looked like he might say more, then seemed to decide against it.
“This ain’t right,” Jesse said. “My daddy planted the seeds for this patch. That ginseng wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for him. And that gun, if I was poaching I’d have a rifle or shotgun.”
What was happening didn’t seem quite real. The world, the very ground he stood on, felt like it was evaporating beneath him. Jesse almost expected somebody, though he couldn’t say who, to come out of the woods laughing about the joke just played on him. The ranger placed the pistol in the backpack. He unclipped the walkie-talkie from his belt, pressed a button, and spoke.
“He did come back and I’ve got him.”
A staticky voice responded, the words indiscernible to Jesse.
“No, he’s too old to be much trouble. We’ll be waiting on the logging road.”
The ranger pressed a button and placed the walkie-talkie back on his belt. Jesse read the name on the silver name tag. Barry Wilson.
“You any kin to the Wilsons over on Balsam Mountain?”
“No,” the younger man said. “I grew up in Charlotte.”
The walkie-talkie crackled and the ranger picked it up, said okay, and clipped it back on his belt.
“Call Sheriff Arrowood,” Jesse said. “He’ll tell you I’ve never been in any trouble before. Never, not even a speeding ticket.”
“Let’s go.”
“Can’t you just forget this,” Jesse said. “It ain’t like I was growing marijuana. There’s plenty that do in this park. I know that for a fact. That’s worse than what I done.”
The ranger smiled.
“We’ll get them eventually, old fellow, but their bulbs burn brighter than yours. They’re not big enough fools to leave us footprints to follow.”
The ranger slung the backpack over his shoulder.
“You’ve got no right to talk to me like that,” Jesse said.
There was still plenty of distance between them, but the ranger looked like he contemplated another step back.
“If you’re going to give me trouble, I’ll just go ahead and cuff you now.”
Jesse almost told the younger man to come on and try, but he made himself look at the ground, get himself under control before he spoke.
“No, I ain’t going to give you any trouble,” he finally said, raising his eyes.
The ranger nodded toward the logging road.
“After you, then.”
Jesse moved past the ranger, stepping through the broom sedge and past the ruined chimney, the ranger to his right, two steps behind. Jesse veered slightly to his left, moving so he’d pass close to the old well. He paused and glanced back at the ranger.
“That trowel of mine, I ought to get it.”
The ranger paused too and was about to reply when Jesse took a quick step and shoved the ranger with two hands toward the well. The ranger didn’t fall until one foot went through the rotten tin, then the other. As he did, the backpack dropped from his hand. He didn’t go all the way through, just up to his arms, his fingernails scraping the tin for leverage, looking like a man caught in muddy ice. The ranger’s hands found purchase, one on a hank of broom sedge, the other on the metal’s firmer edging. He began pulling himself out, wincing as the rusty tin tore cloth and skin. He looked at Jesse, who stood above him.
“You’ve really screwed up now,” the ranger gasped.
Jesse bent down and reached not for the younger man’s hand but his shoulder. He pushed hard, the ranger’s hands clutching only air as he fell through the rotten metal, a thump and simultaneous snap of bone as he hit the well’s dry floor. Seconds passed but no other sound rose from the darkness.
The backpack lay at the edge and Jesse snatched it up. He ran, not toward his farmhouse but into the woods. He didn’t look back again but bear-crawled through the ginseng patch and up the ridge, his breaths loud pants. Trees thickened around him, oaks and poplars, some hemlocks. The soil was thin and moist, and he slipped several times. Halfway up the ridge he paused, his heart battering his chest. When it finally calmed, Jesse heard a vehicle coming up the logging road and saw a pale-green forest service jeep. A man and a woman got out.
Jesse went on, passing through another patch of ginseng, probable descendants from his father’s original seedlings. The sooner he got to the ridge crest, the sooner he could make his way across it toward the gorge head. His legs were leaden now and he couldn’t catch his breath. The extra pounds he’d put on the last few years draped over his belt, gave him more to haul. His mind went dizzy and he slipped and skidded a few yards downhill. For a while he lay still, his body sprawled on the slanted earth, arms and legs flung outward. Jesse felt the leaves cushioning the back of his head, an acorn nudged against a shoulder blade. Above him, oak branches pierced a darkening sky. He remembered the fairy tale about a giant beanstalk and imagined how convenient it would be to simply climb off into the clouds.
Jesse shifted his body so his face turned downhill, one ear to the ground as if listening for the faintest footfall. It seemed so wrong to be sixty-eight years old and running from someone. Old age was supposed to give a person dignity, respect. He remembered the night the searchers brought his great-aunt out of the gorge. The men stripped off their heavy coats to cover her body and had taken turns carrying her. They had been silent and somber as they came into the yard. Even after the women had taken the corpse into the farmhouse to be washed and dressed, the men had stayed on his great-aunt’s porch. Some had smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, others had bulged their jaws with tobacco. Jesse had sat on the lowest porch step and listened, knowing the men quickly forgot he was there. They did not talk of how they’d found his great-aunt or the times she’d wandered from her house to the garden. Instead, the men spoke of a woman who could tell you tomorrow’s weather by looking at the evening sky, a godly woman who’d taught Sunday school into her seventies. They told stories about her and every story was spoken in a reverent way, as if now that his great-aunt was dead she’d once more been transformed back to her true self.
Jesse rose slowly. He hadn’t twisted an ankle or broken an arm and that seemed his first bit of luck since walking into the gorge. When Jesse reached the crest, his legs were so weak he clutched a maple sapling to ease himself to the ground. He looked down through the cascading trees. An orange and white rescue squad van had now arrived. Workers huddled around the well, and Jesse couldn’t see much of what they were doing but before long a stretcher was carried to the van. He was too far away to tell the ranger’s condition, even if the man was alive.
At the least a broken arm or leg, Jesse knew, and tried to think of an injury that would make things all right, like a concussion to make the ranger forget what had happened, or the ranger hurting bad enough that shock made him forget. Jesse tried not to think about the snapped bone being in the back or neck.
The van’s back doors closed from within, and the vehicle turned onto the logging road. The siren was off but the beacon drenched the woods red. The woman ranger scoured the hillside with binoculars, sweeping without pause over where Jesse sat. Another green forest service truck drove up, two more rangers spilling out. Then Sheriff Arrowood’s car, silent as the ambulance.
The sun lay behind Clingman’s Dome now, and Jesse knew waiting any longer would only make it harder. He moved in a stupor of exhaustion, feet stumbling over roots and rocks, swaying like a drunk. When he got far enough, he’d be able to come down the ridge, ascend the narrow gorge mouth. But Jesse was so tired he didn’t know how he could go any farther without resting. His knees grated bone on bone, popping and crackling each time they bent or twisted. He panted and wheezed and imagined his lungs an accordion that never unfolded enough.
Old and a fool. That’s what the ranger had called Jesse. An old man no doubt. His body told him so every morning when he awoke. The liniment he applied to his joints and muscles each morning and night made him think of himself as a creaky rust-corroded machine that must be oiled and warmed up before it could sputter to life. Maybe a fool as well, he acknowledged, for who other than a fool could have gotten into such a fix.
Jesse found a felled oak and sat down, a mistake because he couldn’t imagine summoning the energy to rise. He looked through the trees. Sheriff Arrowood’s car was gone, but the truck and jeep were still there. He didn’t see but one person and knew the others searched the woods for him. A crow cawed once farther up the ridge. Then no other sound, not even the wind. Jesse took the backpack and pitched it into the thick woods below, watched it tumble out of sight. A waste, but he couldn’t risk their searching his house. He thought about tossing the pistol as well but the gun had belonged to his father, his father’s father before that. Besides, if they found it in his house that was no proof it was the pistol the ranger had seen. They had no proof of anything really. Even his being in the gorge was just the ranger’s word against his. If he could get back to the house.
Night fell fast now, darkness webbing the gaps between tree trunks and branches. Below, high-beam flashlights flickered on. Jesse remembered two weeks after his great-aunt’s burial. Graham Sutherland had come out of the gorge shaking and chalk-faced, not able to tell what had happened until Jesse’s father gave him a draught of whiskey. Graham had been fishing near the old homestead and glimpsed something on the far bank, there for just a moment. Though a sunny spring afternoon, the weather in the gorge had suddenly turned cold and damp. Graham had seen her then, moving through the trees toward him, her arms outstretched. Beseeching me to come to her, Graham had told them. Not speaking, but letting that cold and damp touch my very bones so I’d feel what she felt. She didn’t say it out loud, maybe couldn’t, but she wanted me to stay down there with her. She didn’t want to be alone.
Jesse walked on, not stopping until he found a place where he could make his descent. A flashlight moved below him, its holder merged with the dark. The light bobbed as if on a river’s current, a river running uphill all the way to the iron gate that marked the end of forest service land. Then the light swung around, made its swaying way back down the logging road. Someone shouted and the disparate lights gathered like sparks returning to their source. Headlights and engines came to life, and two sets of red taillights dimmed and soon disappeared.
Jesse made his way down the slope, his body slantways, one hand close to the ground in case he slipped. Low branches slapped his face. Once on level land he let minutes pass, listening for footsteps or a cough on the logging road, someone left behind to trick him into coming out. No moon shone but a few stars had settled overhead, enough light for him to make out a human form.
Jesse moved quietly up the logging road. Get back in the house and you’ll be all right, he told himself. He came to the iron gate and slipped under. It struck him only then that someone might be waiting at his house. He went to the left and stopped where a barbed-wire fence marked the pasture edge. The house lights were still off, like he’d left them. Jesse’s hand touched a strand of sagging barbed wire and he felt a vague reassurance in its being there, its familiarity. He was about to move closer when he heard a truck, soon saw its yellow beams crossing Sampson Ridge. As soon as the pickup pulled into the driveway, the porch light came on. Sheriff Arrowood appeared on the porch, one of Jesse’s shirts in his hand. Two men got out of the pickup and opened the tailgate. Bloodhounds leaped and tumbled from the truck bed, whining as the men gathered their leashes. He had to get back into the gorge, and quick, but his legs were suddenly stiff and unyielding as iron stobs. It’s just the fear, Jesse told himself. He clasped one of the fence’s rusty barbs and squeezed until pain reconnected his mind and body.
Jesse followed the land’s downward tilt, crossed back under the gate. The logging road leveled out and Jesse saw the outline of the homestead’s ruined chimney. As he came closer, the chimney solidified, grew darker than the dark around it, as if an unlit passageway into some greater darkness.
Jesse took the .32-20 from his pocket and let the pistol’s weight settle in his hand. If they caught him with it, that was just more trouble. Throw it so far they won’t find it, he told himself, because there’s prints on it. He turned toward the woods and heaved the pistol, almost falling with the effort. The gun went only a few feet before thunking solidly against a tree, landing close to the logging road if not on it. There was no time to find the pistol, because the hounds were at the gorge head now, flashlights dipping and rising behind them. He could tell by the hounds’ cries that they were already on his trail.
Jesse stepped into the creek, hoping that doing so might cause the dogs to lose his scent. If it worked, he could circle back and find the gun. What sparse light the stars had offered was snuffed out as the creek left the road and entered the woods. Jesse bumped against the banks, stumbled into deeper pockets of water that drenched his pants as well as his boots and socks. He fell and something tore in his shoulder.
But it worked. There was soon a confusion of barks and howls, the flashlights no longer following him but instead sweeping the woods from one still point.
Jesse stepped out of the creek and sat down. He was shivering, his mind off plumb, every thought tilting toward panic. As he poured water from the boots, Jesse remembered his boot prints led directly from his house to the ginseng patch. They had ways of matching boots and their prints, and not just a certain foot size and make. He’d seen on a TV show how they could even match the worn part of the sole to a print. Jesse stuffed the socks inside the boots and threw them at the dark. Like the pistol they didn’t go far before hitting something solid.
It took him a long time to find the old logging road, and even when he was finally on it he was so disoriented that he wasn’t sure which direction to go. Jesse walked a while and came to a park campground, which meant he’d guessed wrong. He turned around and walked the other way. It felt like years had passed before he finally made it back to the homestead. A campfire now glowed and sparked between the homestead and the iron gate, the men hunting Jesse huddled around it. The pistol lay somewhere near the men, perhaps found already. Several of the hounds barked, impatient to get back onto the trail, but the searchers had evidently decided to wait till morning to continue. Though Jesse was too far away to hear them, he knew they talked to help pass the time. They probably had food with them, perhaps coffee as well. Jesse realized he was thirsty and thought about going back to the creek for some water, but he was too tired.
Dew wet his bare feet as he passed the far edge of the homestead and then to the woods’ edge where the ginseng was. He sat down, and in a few minutes felt the night’s chill envelop him. A frost warning, the radio had said. He thought of how his great-aunt had taken off her clothes and how, despite the scientific explanation, it seemed to Jesse a final abdication of everything she had once been.
He looked toward the eastern sky. It seemed he’d been running a week’s worth of nights, but he saw the stars hadn’t begun to pale. The first pink smudges on the far ridgeline were a while away, perhaps hours. The night would linger long enough for what would or would not come. He waited.