We parked by the derelict cotton gin and came up the line of humps and hollows that form the mountain's side, an easier but much longer ascent. By the time we reached the cabin, it was going on four o'clock. The owner didn't take too much to yard work. Every couple of years he'd clear a space around the cabin. The rest of the time pine trees, shrubs, and bushes, along with a variety of grasses and wildflowers, had their way. We were well along into the rest of the time.
Nathan stepped out from behind an oak, twelve-gauge in the crook of an elbow. His dog came out from beneath the cabin growling, then, at Nathan's almost silent whistle, went back under.
"Defending the realm?" I asked.
"Been out."
"Hunting?"
"After a fashion."
Meeting J. T.'s eye, he said, "Miss." I introduced them. "Found the camp," he went on, "maybe three miles in, 'bout forty degrees off north-northeast. Ain't much to it, mostly the hind end of a cabin they done put some lean-tos up against."
"How many are there?"
"If you mean lean-tos, there's three. If you're asking after people, which I expect you are, then my guess'd be close on to a dozen. Youngsters was all I saw. You headin' up that way?"
I nodded. "Talk you into coming along?"
"Figured to."
Instinctively tilting the shotgun barrel maybe ten degrees to clear a low branch, Nathan stepped back into the trees.
It took us almost two hours to get there. By the time we did, the sun had put in its papers and was marking time. The lean-tos were saplings lashed together with heavy twine, a spool of which I later saw inside what was left of the original cabin. The cabin hadn't been much to start with. Now it came down to half a room, five-sixths of a chimney, and a smatter of roof. A smatter of people sat on a bench out front-more saplings, these set into notches in two sections of log.
One of the homesteaders, a woman like all of them in her early to late twenties, sat beside a pile of sassafras root, cleaning with a damp cloth what was to be a new addition to the pile. Another was picking through field greens. They watched us silently as we approached. A man emerging from one of the lean-tos paused, then straightened and stepped towards us. Another, that I'd not seen and damn well should have, swung down off the low branch of a maple at the edge of the clearing. Scraps of plank from the cabin were nailed to the trunk at intervals to make a ladder.
Boards had also been nailed up over the cabin's gaping front, three of them, bridging the void. Crude block letters in white paint: "All the Whys Are Here."
"Tell me you're not the trouble you look to be," the man from the lean-to said, holding out his hand, which I shook. Older than the rest, pushing thirty from the far side, dark eyes, beetle brow, bad skin.
"Deputy sheriff," I said, "but not trouble. Not the kind you're thinking, at any rate."
"Always good to hear. Isaiah Stillman." Nodding towards Nathan, who stood apart at clearing's edge, he said, "Your friend's welcome, too."
"My friend's not much for company."
"Um-hmm. He the one lives down the mountain?"
"The same."
"So what can we do for you, Deputy? If we're-" He stopped, eyes meeting mine. "Our understanding is that this is free land."
"Close as it gets these days, anyhow."
I described the young man who'd died by the lake last night, told Stillman how it happened.
"I'm truly sorry to hear that."
"You knew him, then?"
"Of course. Kevin. We wondered where he'd got off to this time. Never could stay in place too long. He'd go off, be gone a day or two, a week. But he'd always come back."
The woman cleaning sassafras had put rag and roots down and walked up behind Stillman, touching him on the shoulder. When he turned, her mouth moved, but no sound came. Taking her hand and placing it against his throat, he said: "It's Kevin, Martha. Kevin's dead." Her mouth opened and went round in a silent no. After a moment she returned to the bench and her work. The other woman there put a hand briefly to her cheek.
"We'll be having our dinner soon," Stillman said. "Will you join us?"
We did, settling into a meal of lukewarm sassafras tea, greens, rice cooked with black-eyed peas- "Our take on hopping John," Stillman said.
"Interesting."
"Flavored with roots instead of salt pork or bacon, since we're vegetarians."
– and something that must have been hoecake, which, like hopping John, I'd read and heard about but never seen.
"Delicious."
J. T. cocked eyebrows at me at that. Nathan, having got over his standoffishness, was busy sopping up juice from the greens with crumbly bits of hoecake.
"We plan to grind our own cornmeal eventually," Stillman said.
Of course they did.
"I should notify your friend's family," I said. Helped myself to another spoonful of the hopping John. Stuff kind of grew on you.
"We are his family, Mr. Turner."
"No direct relatives?"
"His father threw him out of the house when he was fourteen. The old man was an engineer,' Kevin always said. ' He knew how things were supposed to work.' For a year or two he stayed around town. His mother would meet him, give him money.
When she died, Kevin left for good."
"What about the rest of you?"
"Have family, you mean."
"Yes."
"Some of us do, some don't. For us, family is-"
Leaning over the makeshift table, the young woman I assumed to be deaf and dumb moved her hands in dismissive, sweep-it-away gestures.
"Moira's right," Stillman said.
"You always think she is," one of the others said.
He ignored that. "This isn't the time to be talking about such. Besides, night's closing in. I imagine you'll be wanting to get back."
"We should, yes." "You and your friends are always welcome here.. .. Can you see to Kevin's burial, or should we?"
"We can do that."
"We'd expect to pay for it, of course."
"The county-"
"It's our responsibility. We do have money."
We both looked about the camp, then realized what we were doing, looked at one another, and smiled.
"Really," he said. "It's not a problem-despite appearances. So we'll be expecting an invoice. Meanwhile, you have our gratitude."
Moira raised a hand in farewell. Nathan, J. T., and I stepped out to the accompaniment of a half moon and the calls of whippoorwills, down hills and across them, right and left legs lengthening alternately like those of cartoon figures to meet the challenge, or so it seemed, returning to a world gone strange in our absence.