2. The Root Cellar Congress

The lantern light in the root cellar flickered against walls of packed earth and fieldstone, casting shadows that danced like hanged men on the low ceiling beams. The cellar lay twenty feet beneath Asa Slocum's ancestral cabin, a space carved out of the mountain by his grandfather's hands during a winter when the snow had drifted higher than a man's head and the only heat came from the slow burn of coal dug from a seam that had long since played out. The air was thick with the smell of damp clay and the sharp, medicinal bite of white lightning that Loomis Tiller had brought in a stone jug, passing it around the circle of men who had gathered in the dark.

There were eight of them, counting Slocum himself. Loomis Tiller, a rawboned man with hands like cured leather and a face that had been carved by decades of underground shifts, sat on an upturned apple crate, the jug resting between his knees. Beside him was Orville Neeley, who ran the general store and kept a double-barreled shotgun behind the counter for the collection of debts that the law, such as it was, would not enforce. The Teague brothers, Harlan and Junior, Arlen's cousins, occupied a bench made from a split log, their shoulders touching, their eyes fixed on the dirt floor as if the answers to all their troubles might be written there in the dust. Vernon Creech, who delivered the mail three days a week and read every postcard that passed through his hands, stood near the door with his arms crossed over his narrow chest. Deacon Roy Pettigrew, who preached hellfire at the leaning church every Sunday and kept a still hidden in the rhododendron thickets behind his house, sat with his Bible open on his lap, though he had not looked at it since the meeting began. And finally, there was young Mose Whitley, barely twenty-three, who had come because his father, old Jasper Whitley, was too sick to leave his bed and had sent his son in his stead with instructions to vote however Slocum voted and to keep his mouth shut unless spoken to.

Slocum stood at the center of the cellar, the lantern on a nail above his head casting his face into a mask of light and shadow. He had removed his white coat and wore now a wool hunting jacket, patched at the elbows, and a pair of mud-caked boots that had belonged to his father. In his hand, he held a sheet of paper, the formal rejection letter that Elias Croft had mailed that morning from the post office in the county seat. The envelope had never left the valley. Vernon Creech had recognized the federal seal and the return address and had delivered it directly to Slocum's cabin before the ink had fully dried.

"I read this letter three times," Slocum said, and his voice was quiet, almost conversational, the voice he used when delivering a terminal diagnosis to a patient's family. "Mr. Croft has denied Arlen's claim. He says the medical evidence is insufficient. He says there are inconsistencies." He paused, and his pale eyes moved across the faces of the men in the cellar. "He's going to recommend a full investigation. That means auditors. That means people from the capital going through every file in my clinic, every claim we've ever filed. And once they start looking at Arlen's case, they won't stop there."

A low murmur ran through the room. Loomis Tiller took a long pull from the jug and passed it to Orville Neeley, who drank without taking his eyes off Slocum.

"How many families in this holler depend on those checks?" Slocum continued. "Harlan, your wife's been getting disability for her back since the roof fall at Black Creek. Junior, your boy gets the supplemental for his lungs. Loomis, your mother's been drawing widow's benefits for twelve years. Vernon, your sister's check comes regular as the moon. And every one of those claims went through my office, with my signature on the bottom line."

"Arlen really sick?" Harlan Teague asked, and his voice was thick and slow, the voice of a man who had spent most of his life breathing rock dust and had little use for words that did not serve an immediate purpose.

Slocum turned to face him. "Arlen's got the black lung, sure enough. Maybe not as bad as the file says, but he worked thirty years in that hole. He gave them everything he had, and they threw him away like a wore-out tool. You think the federal government's gonna miss a few hundred dollars a month? You think the men in their suits and their clean offices care whether Arlen Teague can breathe or not?"

"The man's just doing his job," Vernon Creech said, but his voice was uncertain, and he would not meet Slocum's gaze.

"His job," Slocum repeated, and something in his tone made the word sound like an obscenity. He walked to a wooden trunk that sat against the far wall, a trunk bound with iron straps and covered with a patina of age and neglect. He lifted the lid and withdrew an object wrapped in oilcloth, and when he unwrapped it, the lantern light fell on the blued steel of an old Colt revolver, its grips worn smooth by the hands of a man long dead.

"My father's gun," Slocum said. "He carried it when he worked as a surveyor for the state, back before the war. He was a man who believed in the law, believed in the government, believed that if you did your job honest and true, the world would treat you fair in return." He turned the revolver over in his hands, and his face softened into something that might have been sorrow or might have been rage. "When I was nine years old, I watched him shot dead on our own land. A man named Cyrus Drummond, who claimed the boundary line my father had drawn was wrong, who said the state had no right to tell him where his property ended. He walked up to my father in broad daylight, in front of me and my mother and my little sister, and he put a rifle bullet through his chest. And when the sheriff came, when the circuit judge came, they said there wasn't enough evidence. They said it was a boundary dispute, a civil matter. They said my father had provoked it."

The cellar was silent now, silent as a grave. The men watched Slocum with the fixed, unblinking attention of animals who had caught a scent on the wind.

"I learned something that day," Slocum said, and his voice had dropped to a whisper. "The law isn't what's written in books. The law isn't what comes down from the capital in fancy envelopes with federal seals. The law is what men agree to enforce. The law is what a community decides is right, and what it has the will to protect. When outsiders come into our valley, when they put their signatures on papers that take food from our children's mouths, they are no different from Cyrus Drummond. They are invaders, and we have the right to defend ourselves."

He laid the revolver on a rough-hewn table in the center of the cellar, the same table where his grandfather had butchered hogs and where his own mother had rolled out dough for biscuits that had fed three generations. The gun lay there like a sacrament, dark and final.

"I'm proposing that we hold court," Slocum said. "Our court. The only court that matters in this valley. I'm proposing that we try Elias Croft for what he's done and what he intends to do, and if we find him guilty, we pass sentence."

"You're talking about killing a federal man," Loomis Tiller said, and his voice was flat, matter-of-fact, as if he were discussing the price of feed corn.

"I'm talking about protecting our families."

"There'll be others," Vernon Creech said. "They'll send more. They'll send marshals, maybe. They'll tear this valley apart."

"Not if they don't find anything," Slocum said. "Not if Croft simply disappears. Men get lost in these mountains all the time. The roads wash out. The fog comes down thick as cotton. A man from the flatlands, driving on roads he doesn't know, in weather he doesn't understand... accidents happen. They'll search for a while, and then they'll stop. They always stop. The world has forgotten we exist, Vernon. That's our curse and our blessing."

Deacon Roy Pettigrew cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. His voice was deep and resonant, the voice of a man who had spent decades projecting damnation from pulpits, and it filled the cellar like smoke. "The Good Book says thou shalt not kill," he said slowly. "But it also says that a man who does not provide for his own household is worse than an infidel. These checks feed the widows and the orphans. These checks keep the lamps burning and the stoves lit. If this man Croft takes that away, he's condemning the innocent to suffer. Is that not a kind of killing in itself?"

"There's a difference," Vernon said, but his voice was very small now.

"Is there?" Slocum asked. "Tell that to old Mrs. Gentry, who's been bedridden for five years and depends on her son's disability to pay for the medicine that keeps her heart beating. Tell that to the children in this valley who go to bed with empty bellies on the nights when the checks don't come. You tell me where the greater sin lies, Vernon. In protecting our own, or in standing by while an outsider destroys us with his ink and his seals and his cold, righteous heart?"

He let the question hang in the air. The men shifted on their seats, and the lantern flame guttered in a draft that came from somewhere deep in the mountain, as if the earth itself were breathing.

"I'll vote," Harlan Teague said finally. "But I want to know one thing first. What about the boy?"

Slocum's eyes narrowed. "What boy?"

"Gideon. Arlen's boy. He was down by the creek when Croft first come into the valley. Talked to him. I seen it from the ridge."

A muscle in Slocum's jaw tightened, but his voice remained steady. "Gideon's just a child. He doesn't understand what's happening."

"Children see things," Harlan said. "They remember."

"The boy will be dealt with," Slocum said. "He'll be told what he needs to be told. He'll learn, the way we all learned, that some things are done for the good of the family, and they're not to be spoken of outside the holler."

He picked up the jug from where it sat at Loomis Tiller's feet and took a long drink. The whiskey burned down his throat and settled in his stomach like a coal. When he spoke again, his voice had taken on a different quality, softer and more intimate, the voice of a doctor explaining a necessary procedure.

"We'll meet at the church tomorrow night, after dark. We'll send word to Croft that I've agreed to provide the X-ray films he requested, that I want to settle the matter peaceably. He'll come, because he believes in the machinery of negotiation, because he believes that reasonable men can reach reasonable accommodations. And when he arrives, we'll be waiting."

"What if he don't come alone?" Orville Neeley asked.

"He's alone now. He doesn't trust anyone in this valley enough to bring them with him, and he's too far from the county seat to call for backup without driving three hours on roads that a mule would balk at. He's isolated. He's vulnerable. He just doesn't know it yet."

Slocum looked around the circle, meeting each man's eyes in turn. Loomis Tiller nodded once, a sharp, decisive jerk of his chin. Orville Neeley followed, then Harlan Teague, then Junior, their faces identical masks of grim resignation. Vernon Creech hesitated longest, his hands trembling slightly at his sides, but when Deacon Roy placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and murmured something too low for the others to hear, he, too, nodded.

Mose Whitley, the youngest, spoke for the first time. His voice cracked on the words, but he pushed them out anyway, as if he had been holding them in for hours and could contain them no longer. "My daddy said to vote how you vote, Dr. Slocum. But I got to ask... what if we're wrong? What if this man ain't the enemy we think he is? What if he's just a man doing a job he believes is right?"

Slocum walked over to the young man and placed both hands on his shoulders. The gesture was almost paternal, almost kind. "Mose, your daddy is a good man, and he raised a good son. I delivered you myself, twenty-three years ago, in the back room of this very cabin. I held you in my hands when you were no bigger than a loaf of bread, and I promised your mother, God rest her soul, that I would look after you. So I'm going to tell you something true, something I've learned in sixty-eight years of living in this valley and watching the world outside grind its heel into the faces of people who never did nothing to deserve it." His grip tightened on Mose's shoulders. "There are no innocent men. Not out there, and not in here. Every man carries his own burden of sin, and Elias Croft carries his the same as the rest of us. The only difference is that his sin is about to fall on our heads, and we have the chance to stop it. That's not wrong, Mose. That's survival."

Mose Whitley looked into Slocum's pale eyes and saw there something that he could not name, something ancient and cold and utterly without mercy. He nodded, and his nod was the last vote needed.

The meeting ended as it had begun, in near silence. The men filed out of the root cellar one by one, climbing the narrow wooden stairs into a night that had grown deep and starless, the clouds pressing down on the valley like a lid on a pot. The rain had stopped, but the air was heavy with the promise of more, and the creek could be heard roaring in the darkness, swollen and hungry.

Slocum was the last to leave. He stood alone in the cellar for a long moment, looking at the revolver on the table and the jug of whiskey and the chair where Vernon Creech had sat and trembled. He thought about his father, about the sound the rifle shot had made, a flat, percussive crack that had echoed off the mountain and sent birds wheeling into a sky the color of a fresh bruise. He thought about the way his father had fallen, not dramatically, not like in the moving pictures, but simply, the way a tree falls when its roots have rotted out from under it. He thought about the look on Cyrus Drummond's face, a look not of triumph but of mild annoyance, as if the murder of a state surveyor were no more consequential than the swatting of a fly.

That was the moment when Asa Slocum had understood, with a clarity that had never left him, that the world was divided into two kinds of people: those who wielded power and those who suffered it. And he had sworn, at nine years old, standing over his father's body in the mud of their own yard, that he would never again be among the sufferers.

He extinguished the lantern and climbed the stairs into the dark.

Up at the cabin, behind a door that was supposed to have been locked, a girl of fourteen pressed her ear to the crack between the planks and listened to the footsteps ascending from the earth. Her name was Lorna Slocum, and she was Asa's granddaughter, the only child of his dead son, and she had followed her grandfather to the root cellar an hour earlier, drawn by some instinct she could not have named, some premonition that had settled in her stomach like a stone.

She had heard everything.

When the footsteps reached the top of the stairs, she fled on bare feet down the back hallway to her room, where she crawled into her narrow bed and pulled the quilt over her head and lay trembling in the darkness. Her mind was a whirl of images: the federal man with his kind, tired face, the gun on the table, her grandfather's voice speaking words that sounded like scripture but carried the weight of a death sentence.

She thought about the porcelain doll that sat on her dresser, the one her mother had given her before she died, its painted face frozen in a smile that had always seemed to Lorna to be hiding something. She slipped out of bed and took the doll in her hands, and then she walked to the window and looked out at the valley, at the dark shapes of the trees and the distant glimmer of the creek and the single light burning in the window of the Mountain View Motel, where a man who did not know he was already condemned was writing a report that would never be read.

Lorna Slocum held the doll against her chest, and then, very carefully, very deliberately, she began to dig a small hole in the flower bed beneath her window, using only her fingers, the cold earth packing beneath her nails. When the hole was deep enough, she laid the doll inside it and covered it with soil, patting the ground smooth with the palm of her hand.

It was the first grave she would ever dig, though it would not be the last.

And in the valley below, Gideon Teague lay awake in the rusted shell of an abandoned truck that had become his refuge when his father was drinking and his mother was crying and the walls of the trailer pressed in on him like the sides of a coffin. He held the black stone in his hand, the one he had not given to the federal man, a twin to the one he had pressed into Elias Croft's palm hours before. He had found them both in the creek years ago, two stones polished smooth by the same current, and he had always believed, in the wordless way that children believe, that as long as he held one and gave the other to someone he trusted, that person would be protected. That they would be bound together, and nothing bad could happen to either of them.

He had given the stone to Croft because he had seen something in the man's face, a weariness that he recognized, a loneliness that mirrored his own. And because the man had offered him a dollar, not out of pity, but out of a courtesy that Gideon had never been shown by any adult in his life.

He closed his fist around the stone and listened to the creek and the wind and the distant, rhythmic sound of his father's coughing, a wet, rattling hack that seemed to go on forever. And he wondered, with a child's desperate hope, whether the stone was strong enough to save a man from whatever was coming down the mountain.