The Manor

CHAPTER 8

The house threw a sunrise shadow across the backyard. Mason was tired, his face scratched from his midnight wanderings. He'd slept poorly, his brain invaded by feverish images of Anna, his mother, Ephram Korban, Lilith, a dozen others whose faces were lost in smoke. He shivered as he walked behind the manor, following the worn path that wound between two outbuildings. He climbed a row of creosote railroad ties that were terraced into the earth as steps leading into the forest.

The door on the smaller building was open. An old man in overalls emerged from the darkness within. Mason waved a greeting. The man rubbed his hands together, his breath coming out in a mist.

"Brrr," he said, creasing his wrinkled jaws. "Cold as a woman's heart in there."

"What is it?" Mason asked. He'd assumed it was a tool storage shed or something similar. The shed, like its larger counterpart, was constructed of rough-cut logs and chinked with yellowish red cement. A smell of damp age and cedar spilled from the doorway.

" 'Frigeration," the man said. When his mouth opened on the "gee" sound, Mason saw that the old man had about enough teeth left to play a quick game of jacks. His overalls threatened to swallow him, his back hunched from years of work. The man cocked his head back toward the door and went into the shed. "Take a look-see."

Mason followed. Cold air wafted over his face. A mound covered the center of the dirt floor. The old man stooped down and swept at the grainy mound with his hands, revealing streaks of shiny silver.

"Ice," said the man. "We bury it under sawdust so it will keep through summer. You wouldn't think it would last that long, would you?"

"I wondered how you kept the food cold without power," Mason said. "What about the food safety police, the health inspectors?"

"They's rules of the world and then they's rules of Korban Manor. Two different things."

The old man pointed through the door to a western rise covered by tulip poplars. Wagon tracks crossed the meadow, curving up the slope like twin red snakes. "They's a little pond up yonder," he said. "A spring pops out 'twixt two rocks. The pond's fenced off from the animals so it stays clean. Come the third or fourth long freeze in January, when the water's good and hard, we go up and cut out big blocks of it."

"Sounds like a lot of work. I understand that heavy machinery isn't allowed on the grounds."

"Oh, we got machines. A wagon is a machine. So's a horse, in its way. And, of course, they got us, too."

Mason went out into the sun and the man closed the door behind him. His gnarled hand fumbled in the front pocket of his overalls as if he were looking for a cigarette. He pulled out something that looked like a knotted rag with a tip of feather protruding from one end. He waved the rag in the sign of the cross over the front of the icehouse door. The motion was practiced and fluid, appearing natural despite its oddness.

Mason expected the man to comment on the ritual, but the knotted rag was quickly squirreled away. "What's in the other shed?" Mason asked after a moment.

"That's the larder. Keep stuff in there that doesn't need to be so cold, such as squash and cucumbers and corn. A little spring runs through there, gets piped out into the gully yonder."

Mason looked where the man had pointed and saw a trickle of water meandering through a bed of rich, black mud. Blackberry briars tangled along the creek banks, the scarlet vines bent in autumn's death. "Do you pick the berries, too?"

"Yep, and the apples. They's hells of apples around here. You gonna have something apple every meal. Pie, turnovers, stewed, fried apples with cinnamon and just a dash of brandy. We keep up a vegetable garden, too, and-"

"Ransom!"

They both turned at the sound of the shrill voice. Miss Mamie stood on the back porch, leaning over the railing.

"Yes, Miss Mamie," the man responded. The last bit of starch seemed to have gone out of him, and Mason was sure the old man was going to disappear inside his overalls.

"Now, Ransom, you know you're not to trouble the guests," Miss Mamie said in a high, artificially cheerful tone.

"I was just-" Ransom swelled momentarily, then seemed to think better of it. He studied the tips of his worn work boots. The sun lit the silver wires of hair that were combed back over his balding head. "Yes, Miss Mamie."

The hostess stood triumphantly at the porch rail and turned her attention to Mason. "Did you sleep well, Mr. Jackson?"

"Yes, ma'am," he lied. He sneaked a glance at Ransom. The man looked as if he'd been beaten with a hickory rod. "Um… thanks for setting me up in the master bedroom. It's very comfortable."

"Lovely." She clasped her hands together. Her pearls shifted over her bosom. "Ephram Korban would be so pleased. You know our motto: 'The splendid isolation of Korban Manor will fire the imagination and kindle the creative spirit.'"

"I read the brochure," Mason said. "And I've already got a few ideas. I might need a little help getting started, though. Is it okay if Ransom helps me collect some good sculpting wood?"

Miss Mamie frowned and her thin eyebrows flattened. Her face wore the same expression that glared from the portraits of Korban. Mason realized he had challenged her authority, if only mildly. He was suddenly sorry he had dragged Ransom into the spotlight of her stare. She folded her arms like a schoolmarm debating the punishment of unruly students.

After a moment, she said, "Of course it's okay. As long as his chores are finished. Are your chores finished, Ransom?"

Ransom kept his eyes down. "Yes, ma'am. I'm done till dinner. Then I got to curry the horses and see to the produce."

Miss Mamie smiled and adopted her cheerful voice again. "Lovely. And that sculpture better be perfect, Mr. Jackson. We're counting on you."

"I'm kindled and fired up," Mason said. "By the way, is there a space where I can work without bothering anybody? Sometimes I work late, and there's no way to beat up wood without making enough noise to wake the dead."

"There's a studio space in the basement. I'll have Lilith show you after lunch."

"No need to bother her. I'm sure she'll be busy with the other guests. Why not let Ransom show me?"

A shadow passed across Miss Mamie's face and her voice grew cold. "Ransom doesn't go down there."

Mason peeked at Ransom and saw the corner of the man's mouth twitch. My God. He's scared to death of her.

Miss Mamie turned back toward the manor, her heels clattering across the wooden porch. Door chimes jingled as she went inside. Ransom exhaled as if he had been holding his breath for the last few minutes.

"What a wonderful boss," Mason said when Ransom finally looked him in the eye.

"Careful," he said out of the side of his mouth. "She's probably watching from one of the windows."

"You're kidding."

"Just follow me," he whispered, then said, more loudly, "Toolshed's right through them trees."

After they had gone down a side trail far enough that the house was out of sight, Mason asked, "Is she always like that?"

Ransom's confidence grew as they moved farther from the house. "Oh, she don't mean nothing. That's just her way, is all. Everything's got to be just so. And she got worries of her own."

"How long have you worked here, Ransom? You don't mind if I call you 'Ransom,' do you?"

"Respect for elders. I like that, Mr. Jackson."

"Call me Mason, because I hope we're going to be friends."

Ransom looked back down the trail. "Only outside the house, son. Only outside."

"Got you."

"Anyways, you was asking how long I've been working here, and the answer to that is 'Always.' I was born here, in a little cabin just over the orchards. Place called Beechy Gap. Same cabin my grandpaw was born in, and my daddy, too. Cabin's still standing."

"They all worked here?"

"Yep. Grandpaw held deed to the north part, way back when Korban started buying up property around here. Grandpaw sold out and got a job thrown in as part of the deal. I guess us Streaters always been tied to the land, one way or another. Family history has it that my great-back-to-however-many-greats-grandpaw Jeremiah Streater was one of the first settlers in this part of the country. Came up with Daniel Boone, they say."

"Did Boone live here, too?"

"Well, he tried to. Kept a hunting cabin down around the foot of the mountain. But they took his land. They always take your land, see?"

Ransom didn't sound bitter. He said it as if it were a universal truth, something you could count on no matter what. The sun comes up, the rooster crows, the dew dries, they take your land.

"Toolshed's over yonder," Ransom said, heading for a clearing in a stand of poplars. He continued with his storytelling, the rhythm of his words matching the stride of his thin legs.

"Grandpaw went to work right away for Korban, clearing orchard land and cutting the roads. Him and two of my uncles. They leveled with shovels and stumped with iron bars and a team of mules. Korban was crazy about firewood right from the start. Had them saw up the trees with big old cross-saws and pile the logs up beside the road.

"And Korban had a landscape scheme all laid out. People thought he was a little touched in the head, wanting to turn this scrubby old mountain into some kind of king's place. But the money was green enough. Korban paid a dollar a day, which was unheard of at the time. He was big in textiles."

"I've worked in textiles myself," Mason said. "Can't say I ever got too big in it, though. I mostly just swapped out spindles for minimum wage."

"No need to be ashamed of honest work." Ransom paused and looked in the direction of a crow's call. The smell of moist leaves and forest rot filled Mason's nostrils. He noticed himself breathing harder than the old man, who was nearly three times his age. Ransom began walking again and continued with his story.

"When they got the road gouged out, they set to work on the bridge. In the old days, the only way to get up here was a trail that wound up the south face of those cliffs. You seen that drop-off driving up here."

"Yeah. Down to the bottom of the world." Mason's stomach fluttered at the remembered majesty and terror of the view. He was embarrassed by his shortness of breath and tried to hide it.

"That trail was how the early pioneers, Boone and Jeremiah and a handful of others, made it up in the first place. They say the Cherokee and Catawba used it before that, communal hunting grounds. The whites brought livestock up here, fighting and pushing the animals along the cliffs. But Korban wanted a bridge. And what Korban wanted, Korban always got."

"Kind of what I figured." A duck-planked building stood ahead of mem, tucked under the branches of a jack pine. Its shake roof was littered with brown pine needles. Ransom led Mason toward it.

"They was about eight families mat owned this piece of mountaintop. Korban bought mem all out and put mem to work building the house and garnering field stones for me foundation. He hired me womenfolk to set out apple seedlings and weed me gardens. Even me kids helped out, at a quarter a day plus keep."

"Didn't anybody notice that they were doing the same work, only now they had a master?"

The trail had widened out and wagon ruts led into the heart of the forest from the other side of the clearing. Ransom stepped onto the warped stairs leading into the shed and paused. Mason was glad that the uphill walk had finally tapped the old man's stamina.

"You ain't from money, are you?" Ransom asked, raising a white eyebrow.

"Well, not really. Both my parents had to work all week to get by." Mason didn't mention that his dad worked only two days a week and drank four and a half. Dad faithfully took off every Sunday morning to give thanks for the evening's pint. No other prayers ever passed his lips that didn't reek of bourbon. Except maybe from his hospital bed, when cirrhosis escorted him to the self-destruction he'd spent a lifetime toasting.

"People around here, they fell all over themselves to get Korban's money. They was scrub poor, these people. The only cash they ever saw was once or twice a year when they loaded some handmade quilts or goods on the back of a mule and took down to Black Rock to trade. So when Korban come in with his offers, nobody blamed them for selling out."

"I guess I would sell out, too, if I got the chance," Mason said. He was thinking of Diluvium, his first commissioned piece and the worst thing he'd ever fabricated. Also the most successful.

Ransom fumbled in his overalls pocket and again pulled out the feathery rag ball. He waved it in the strange genuflection before lifting the cast-iron latch on the shed door.

"Um-what's that feather for?" Mason asked.

"Warding off," Ransom said, as if everybody carried such a charm. He pushed the door open. Before entering, he kicked the doorjamb so hard that his overalls quivered around his bony frame. "Yep, still sturdy."

Mason wanted to ask what Ransom thought he was warding off, but didn't know what words to use. He chalked it up as one more of the manor's oddities. Compared with ghost stories, Korban's ever-watchful portraits, the jittery maid, and hearth fires burning in the heat of day, what was one old man's eccentricities? Next to Anna, Ransom was practically a model of sanity and reason.

They went into the small shed, Ransom peering up at the rafters. Light spilled from the two single-paned windows set in the south wall. Workbenches lined the back room, piled high with broken harness and rusting plows, millwork and buckets of cut nails. Worn-handled shovels, picks, and axes leaned near the door. A long cross-saw dangled from wooden pegs, a few of its jagged teeth missing. The corner was a mess of wooden planes, hammers, and block-and-tackle tangled in yellowed hemp rope. The room smelled of iron and old leather.

"Don't have to lock up tools," Ransom said. "What would a thief want with a tool? Then he'd have to work."

Mason began picking out the equipment they might need. If he was lucky, they would find a chunk of walnut or maybe a maple stump. More likely, they would have to hack a piece out of a fallen tree. He was checking the heft of a hatchet when he noticed Ransom studying the dark ceiling again. "Sky's not about to fall, is it?"

"Never know."

"What are we, about four thousand feet above sea level? A lot less sky to fall on us up here."

Ransom didn't even smile, just scratched at one weathered cheek. Maybe Mason had misjudged the old man. Those sparkling and tireless eyes suggested Ransom was no stranger to humor. But maybe the man had his own reasons for becoming solemn.

"Found what you need?" Ransom asked, waiting near the door.

"Sure. You mind grabbing that maul over to your left? We might need to do some heavy hitting."

When they were back outside, they stood in the clearing and arranged the tools for easier carrying. Ransom wore an expression that Mason could only call "relieved."

"What's the matter?" Mason asked.

"Man's got a right to be scared, ain't he?"

What was there to be scared of out here? Did wild predators still stalk these woods? "Scared of what?"

"Miss Mamie said not to tell." Ransom sounded almost like a child. Mason wondered what kind of hold the woman had over Ransom. The man even said her name with a kind of frightened reverence, his hand moving up his overalls bib toward the pocket that held the rag-ball charm.

"Look, if there's some kind of danger, you owe it to your guests to warn them. Plus, I thought we were friends."

Ransom looked off toward the trees at the sun that was starting its downward slide to the west. "I reckon. Don't ever let on to Miss Mamie, though."

"Of course not."

Ransom exhaled slowly. "You know we have four gatherings of guests each year. We take a month between each batch to get things fixed up, 'cause we're too busy when the guests are here to do repairs. Somebody has to go around and check on all the little outbuildings and cabins, original homesteads that can't be torn down. Korban set it in his will that everything stay like it was.

"Three of us was keeping up the grounds. We always switched off, one keeping up the livestock, one tending to the flowers and gardens and firewood, and the last playing handyman. Miss Lilith, the maid, and the cook see to the kitchen and the house."

"I've met Lilith. Pretty girl."

Ransom wobbled his knot of a head. "Not hard on the eyes. Anyways, last night, one of the men, George Lawson, was up Beechy Gap checking on the old Easley place. That was another of the original settler families. The last Easley girl worked at the house until she married off down to Charlotte with one of them artists a few years back.

"Well, my friend George, he went into that old Easley shack. I don't know what happened, I didn't find no tools or nothing, so I can't say he was doing carpentry work. But the whole blamed shack fell on him." Ransom's jaw clenched. "Died real slow."

"I'm sorry, Ransom. What did the investigators say?"

"Like I said, they's rules of the world and they's rules of Korban Manor."

Mason didn't understand. This place was remote, but an accidental death ought to require some kind of inquiry.

"George was a good man. And he wasn't stupid. Made it through Vietnam, so he must have had some kind of sense. He just crossed the wrong threshold, is all." Ransom looked like he was about to add something to that last sentence, then changed his mind.

"Which way's Beechy Gap?"

Ransom jerked his head toward the north. "Over the ridge yonder."

"I wouldn't mind having a look sometime."

"Nope. Guests ain't allowed up there."

"Rough terrain?"

Ransom looked him full in the eyes for the first time since they'd left the tool shed. "Some things just ain't part of the deal. You'll find a lot of places are off-limits at Korban Manor."

Ransom pulled the charm from his pocket and motioned at the shed with it. "Now, about that wood of yours. I got to be getting back soon."

They gathered the tools and veered off the trail into the forest.

Adam walked along the fence, his head full of the wilderness smells. He felt sure that Manhattan's pollutants had permanently clogged his sinuses, but maybe the fresh mountain air would add a year back to the six the city had stolen from his life. The near-perfect silence was eerie, and he had almost gone through a physical withdrawal in the night as his sleeping self yearned for those constant sirens, car horns, and burglar alarms. And all this wide-open space was unnatural. No wonder hillbillies were stereotyped as crazed and grizzled outcasts. There was nothing to impose the insanity of civilization upon them, so they had to make up their own rules of order.

Paul was off somewhere shooting video, no doubt wrapped up in the latest project, the world reduced to the narrow scope of his viewfinder. That was for the best. Though solitude was kind of creepy in itself, especially in the sprawling expanse of the manor, he needed a break from Paul's company. He'd talked briefly with the weird photographer Roth on the porch, and had recognized the same artistic self-absorption that plagued Paul.

Adam saw a man by the barn dressed in worn work clothes. It wasn't one of the handymen who'd helped unload the van. Probably someone in charge of the stables, or else the tender of the long garden that stretched in stubbled rows in the low valley. The man waved Adam over. Adam stole a glance back at the manor a hundred yards away, then approached the barn.

"Morning, there," the man said. His hands were tucked deep into the pockets of his loose-fitting jeans. A shovel leaned against the wall beside him.

"Hi," Adam said.

"You're one of the guests, I reckon."

"We just got in yesterday."

"What do you think of the place so far?"

"It's… different from what I'm used to. But that's part of the adventure."

"Yep, the unknown is always scary at first. But once you get used to it, you start to like it."

Adam looked down at a set of wire-enclosed pens beyond the garden. A grunting sound rolled across the hills.

"Hogs," the man said. "About time of year to get out the boiling kettle and have us a slaughter."

Adam's face must have shown his revulsion.

The man laughed. "Don't worry, son. You won't get no blood on your hands. But meat don't get on the table by itself."

"I prefer my meat boneless," Adam said.

"Miss Mamie serves it up however you like. Careful, though, she's been known to take a shine to the guests. Especially them that's young and male. I reckon even an old crow like that needs a play-pretty once in a while."

"Thanks for the warning, but she's not my type," he said.

The man leaned forward like a conspirator, his face emerging from the shadows of the barn's overhang. "Say, can you do me a favor?"

"What's that?" Adam looked back at the manor again. Smoke rose from its four chimneys, but other than that, it appeared devoid of life. Even the breeze seemed to have died.

"Dig me a hole. I'll pay you."

"I don't want to get you in any trouble. Miss Mamie seems to have this thing about the guests being kept apart from the staff."

The man licked his lips. "Let me worry about Miss Mamie. But I got a sore arm and I'm a little down in the back. Pain's hellfire blue this morning."

"Okay, then," Adam said. He took the shovel and tested its balance.

The man took his right hand out of his pocket and pointed to the base of a dying gray apple tree that stood alone in a slight clearing. "Right there between the roots," he said. "About big enough to hold a hatbox."

The man followed Adam to the spot, and Adam slid the bright blade into the earth, turned the dark soil. In a couple of minutes he'd shaped the hole to the man's satisfaction.

"That's fine and dandy," the man said. "I can handle the rest. Appreciate it."

"What are you burying?"

"Covering up for old Ransom. He's no-account, but he's been around so long he gets away with murder. I got to finish a job for him."

"Well, have a good morning. I need to get back to my room."

"Here," he said, his right hand dipping into his pocket again. "A little something for your trouble."

"No, really," Adam said, holding up his hands in protest. The shovel handle had heated up the flesh surrounding his palms, a hint of possible blisters to come.

"You don't want to hurt my feelings, do you?" the man said. "Us mountaineers can get mighty prideful about such things."

"Sure, then."

The man held his fist out, then opened it over Adam's palm. A small green thing dropped into it.

"Four-leaf clover," the man said.

Adam smiled. "I'm going to need all the luck I can get."

Adam started back toward the barn, then turned and said, "I'm Adam, by the way."

"Lawson," the man said, now hunched over the hole as if his bad back had undergone a miracle cure. "George Lawson."