The old woman on the ridge. Go to her. Redbird. Those nine words came through the crack under the barn door at two in the morning, whispered in a rush, as though the woman on the other side had rehearsed them all day and had one breath to get them out.

Delphia Rowan lay on her stomach on the barn floor of Drownwater Gap, her ear pressed to the gap, and heard the quick feet go back across the yard and heard the door of the big house open and close. She lay still for a long moment, and then she got up, lit the lantern low, and wrote the words down. Beneath them she wrote one line in her own hand: Prudence Marlo risked her life to say this to me. I will not waste it.

She did not know who Redbird was. She had never heard the name. She had ridden into the gap on one road, and there were no other roads. But if there was an old woman on the ridge, and if her name was Redbird, and if Prudence Marlo was willing to put her mouth to the crack under a barn door to send a stranger to her, then the old woman on the ridge was someone who could help.

The question was how to reach her without being seen. She had been in Drownwater Gap for ten days. She had come up the road on the ninth of June, 1934, at the request of her district supervisor, a man named Radford Sain, who had asked her formally, with the door of his office closed, to take an assignment that had not seen a nurse in eleven years. He had told her that the schoolteacher sent up there in 1928 had not come back.

He had given her the teacher’s journal, a small book bound in brown pebble-grain leather, and told her to read it and come back in the morning and tell him. She had read it between nine at night and three in the morning, sitting on the edge of her bed in a boarding house in Bryson City. She had not cried. She had not shaken.

She had sat with the closed journal on her lap for another forty minutes, and at four minutes past four she had put her husband’s matchbook back in her breast pocket and gone downstairs to make coffee for the whole boarding house because the cook did not come in until five. In the morning she told Radford Sain yes. She had asked him for four things: a mule, a letter of introduction, a sidearm, and the map of the hollow that Corbel Cheek had drawn on the inside back cover of the journal. He gave her three of them.

He would not give her the pistol. A woman going into that hollow with a gun, he told her, would be worse off than a woman going in without one, because the Marlo would take the pistol off her inside of an hour, and then they would know two things about her instead of one, and the one they did not know yet was that she could be frightened. She agreed. She said, “All right, no gun.

” And then she said, “Mister Sain, my husband has been dead for three years and four months and I have not been afraid of a single thing in that whole time and I do not expect to start today. I will send you a letter every Friday. If a letter does not come, wait one more Friday and then send somebody after me and tell them to bring the sheriff and tell them not to eat what the Marlo give them. Do not eat what the Marlo give you.

” That was the first of the three warnings she was ever given about that hollow, and she gave it to Radford Sain before anybody had given it to her. She got it out of the journal. The rider who took her to the fork at Little Bear was a mail carrier named Emmett Troll, sixty-one years old, who had carried the route for thirty-nine years, and before him his father for eighteen, and before that his uncle for eleven. He gave her the three things at a spring about midday, sitting on a flat rock with his hat in his hands.

The first was do not eat what the Marlo give you, not one bite, not one sip, not water out of their well, not milk out of their cow, not honey off their comb. Carry your own food and eat your own food. When your food is gone, turn around and come out. The second was do not stand between the sink and the house of old Ephraim Marlo after dark.

There is a path from that house to the water, fifty-eight feet long, packed hard, nothing grows on it, and anything on it after dark is being counted, and you do not want to be counted. The third was the one that would save her life if she remembered it and cost it if she forgot. The Marlo will know things about you they should not know. They will call you by names not on your letter of introduction.

They will ask about people not in your life to ask about. They will speak, some of them, in voices you have heard before. Do not turn your head. Do not turn your eyes.

If you hear a voice you have loved coming from a Marlo’s mouth or from behind a wall or from the woods after dark, you keep your face pointed straight ahead and you say loud enough for them to hear: my name is Mrs. Rowan and I am here on the business of the state of North Carolina. He told her the warnings once and would not speak of them again. When she asked why he carried the mail into a place like that, he said that if he did not, the government would send somebody else, and the somebody else would not know the three things, and he was not willing to be the reason a stranger did not come back down that road.

Then they rode until four in the afternoon. The fork at Little Bear was not much of a fork. The main track continued to the right along a smaller creek, and a fainter track branched off to the left, and that was the way to Drownwater Gap. He told her it was three miles to a gate, and the gate would be closed.

She was to get down and open it and lead the mule through and close it behind her. If she left the gate open, she would not come back out of that hollow. Past the gate, another mile to the bench. She would smell the water before she saw it.

When she smelled it, she would want to turn around. If she was going to turn around, turn around then, before they saw her, and there would be no shame in it. She made him listen to her recite the three warnings back in his order, in his phrasing, without stumbling. Then he turned his mule and rode back down the track, and he did not look back.

She smelled the water before she saw it. It was not a bad smell exactly. Not sulfur, not rot. A mineral smell, cold, the smell of a rock that has been underwater a long time.

And under it, something she could not name. The gate was a wooden gate on a rope hinge, five bars, weathered gray, no lock and no latch. She opened it and led the mule through and closed it behind her and checked the loop twice. The last mile was downhill, a gentle grade through hemlock and older hardwood, and the light changed as she descended, and then the birds stopped.

She could not have said at what point, only that she noticed she had been riding in silence for a while and that the silence had the shape of a bowl, and she was riding down into the bottom of it. Then the road bent left, and the trees fell away, and she was looking down at Drownwater Gap. It was pretty. That is the word everybody who ever saw it from the road above used, and there are only three of them who wrote it down.

Pretty the way a lithograph on a boarding house wall is pretty. The bench sat about four hundred feet below the road, a level piece of ground of maybe eleven acres, cut off on three sides by wooded slope, open on the fourth. Eleven buildings of hewn log with wood-shake roofs, all in good repair, arranged in a horseshoe around a body of black water at the center. There was wind on the road above.

It moved the tops of the trees along the ridge. She looked down at the bench, and the grass was standing up straight, every blade of it, and it was not moving at all. She sat on the mule and thought about turning around. She thought about riding down out of these mountains and going back to Irwin, and she thought about the size of the room in the boarding house and about the light in it in the evening.

She put her heels to the mule. A man was standing in the trace ahead of her when she came out of the trees. He had not been there when she started down. He was about forty feet from her, hands folded in front of him, waiting.

Tall, thin, dressed in a clean linen shirt without a collar, dark trousers, boots that had been polished. His hair was iron-gray and pulled back at the nape with a leather thong. His face was the face of a man of about sixty, but the skin around his eyes was the skin of a much older man, and the skin of the rest of his face was the skin of a much younger one. He said, in a voice that was calm and pleasant and had no accent she could place, “Mrs.

Rowan, we have been expecting you. ”

There had been no correspondence between the state health department and Drownwater Gap. There was no telephone line in a hundred miles. She had spoken to two people that day, and both were behind her.

The man in the trace was expecting her. He was standing in the road in a clean shirt. He smiled, all the muscles in the correct order. He was Ephraim Marlo, the elder of his family.

He welcomed her. His daughter-in-law had put a supper on for her. They had made up the room in the west end of the big house. His son would take her mule.

She sat on the mule and did not step down. She asked how many souls were living in the gap. He said twenty-seven. He did not have to think about it.

She had asked the question in part to see how long the answer took, because she knew from three years of nursing that if you asked a man how many people lived in his hollow, he took at least thirty seconds to count the babies and remember whether his cousin was back from the coal fields. Ephraim Marlo answered in less than one. She asked how many households. Four.

Children under twelve. Nine. Souls over sixty. One.

Every answer came at the same speed, in the same voice. She told him she would not stay in the west room and would not eat at his table. She had her own bedroll and her own food, and it was a rule of the department that she did not take lodging from the families she served. There was no such rule.

She made it up on the mule. He said that was agreeable. Would she take a cup of water on her arrival? His well was deep and cold.

No, thank you. She had her own. She rode past him, and he walked beside her stirrup at exactly the speed of the mule, and she looked down at the top of his gray head and thought that he had judged the pace inside of one step. She had never seen a person do that.

The rest of the clan was arranged in a semicircle in the yard, three deep, a soft arc that opened toward the trace she was riding in on. In the front row, five small children. Behind them, eight older children and young women. Behind them, thirteen men and older women.

Twenty-six, plus Ephraim at her stirrup, twenty-seven. Every one of them was standing still, every one of them was looking at her, and not one of them was smiling. Ephraim had smiled the whole way down. Nobody else in the yard was smiling.

Then all twenty-six of them, at exactly the same instant, without a signal she could see, bent forward at the waist in a small, polite bow, held it for perhaps two seconds, and straightened. Not one was out of time. Delphia Rowan sat on the mule in the middle of the yard and understood that Emmett Troll had told her the truth, and that the truth was worse than the words he had used to tell it, and that if she was going to live, she was going to have to be smarter than she had ever been in her life. The introductions took forty minutes, brought forward in order of age, and every one of the surnames was Marlo, and every one of the first names was drawn from a pool of about eleven.

She wrote every name in the health department register in her own hand. There were Ephraim’s brothers, Ruben, Jesse, and Absalom the Younger, all well past fifty. Two sisters, Varity and Naomi, never married. Ephraim’s own sons, Malachi, Absalom III, and Jonas.

Reuben’s sons, Zebulon and Ephraim the Younger. Jesse’s daughters, Prudence and Varity and Charity. Absalom the Younger’s twin sons, Cain and Abel. Then the third generation, seven of them, aged three to eighteen.

And last of all, in a chair on the porch, wrapped in a shawl on a day that did not need one, a very small, very old woman. Ephraim brought her to Delphia last. This was his mother. Born Sabra Ruhr in 1840 in Bunkham County.

She came into this hollow in 1860 as the wife of his father, Absalom Marlo the Elder. She was ninety-four years old. Delphia bent down and took the old woman’s hand. It was cool the way a river stone is cool, and it had a weight to it that a hand did not usually have.

Mother Marlo looked at her, and focused very hard indeed, and held Delphia’s hand in both of hers, and pulled her a fraction of an inch closer, and said in a voice like paper unfolding: “Well now, child, have you brought your matches with you? ”

Delphia’s whole body went cold. Not the phrase itself, which was a country phrase anybody might say. It was the rhythm of it, the cadence of the pause after “well now” that had belonged in the whole of the earth to one man.

Every room she entered on that bench for the next days, she set down one thing of her own and left it there. By the time she left, she had marked seventeen rooms with seventeen matches. On the fourteenth day, Ephraim Marlo invited her to supper. It was not an invitation.

It was a summons from Mother Marlo herself, who had decided what to do with a woman who could not be eaten. She would have Delphia at the table where she could reach across and put her hand on Delphia’s hand and try to take a memory out of her by force. Delphia understood this before she sat down. She slid one match into the crack between the boards of the tabletop under where Mother Marlo would sit, and one under where her own chair would be.

She had eleven matches left. Supper was at half past five. The table was a single slab of chestnut, sixteen feet long, made from a tree that grew in that hollow before the first Marlo was born. At her place sat her own tin cup filled with her own water, and her own bread and cheese wrapped in a clean napkin.

Grace was said. Everyone said amen. And Mother Marlo reached across the corner of the table and put her hand on Delphia’s wrist and said, “Well now, child, tell me a story. ”

Delphia’s whole arm went cold.

The cold traveled up her arm and into her chest and stopped at her breast pocket where the matchbook lay, as though the matchbook were a wall. Mother Marlo asked for the story of a kitchen she had loved. Delphia said she had none. A garden.

She had never kept one. The fingers on her wrist pressed slightly harder. Then Mother Marlo said, in a slightly different voice, “Tell me then, child, the story of the last morning you spent with your husband. ” The whole table drew a breath, all twenty-six of them, in the same small breath, and held it.

Delphia kept her face still. She said that her husband had been dead for three years and three months, and she had made it a policy not to speak of him at strangers’ tables. She kept her hand under Mother Marlo’s hand and did not pull it away, because pulling it away would have been to acknowledge that the hand was doing something to her. The fingers pressed harder, and the cold in her chest pushed against the matchbook, and the matchbook pushed back, and it was as though two hands were pressing against each other through her ribs, and neither one was winning.

She thought his name in her own mind loudly and clearly. You cannot have him. You cannot have him. Then Mother Marlo took her hand back and set it in her own lap and said, in her paper voice, “That was rude of me, child.

I forget my manners some evenings. Ephraim, tell the guest about the table. ” He did, a plain story about a tree struck by lightning in 1890 and made into a table in 1901, and Delphia listened and nodded, and the moment was over. Back in the barn, she took out the matchbook and counted.

There were nineteen matches. She had used one on the barn on the eleventh day, and two under the chairs at supper. That should have left seventeen. She went to the shelf above the manger where she had put the first match.

It was there. She counted again. Nineteen. She sat with the matchbook in her hand for a long time and thought about Ellis, and about her mother, and about the small, terrible arithmetic she had learned in that hollow.

And she understood, sitting on the bedroll on the fourteenth night, that the matchbook was going to have exactly as many matches in it as she needed to have until the last one, and that the last one would be for the dark, and she would know it when it was that one. She wrote in her journal one sentence: The matches are Ellis, and I do not know how many I have. At three in the morning she woke to a knock at the barn door. Firm, once, twice, three times.

Then a voice said on the other side of the door, in Ellis’s voice, in his ordinary voice, in the voice she had known for two years and four months and had not heard since the day he died: “Well now, Delph, open the door. ” She lay on her bedroll with her hand on the matchbook. The voice waited and said it again. “It is cold out here.

” It was the two words and the pause. It was the name Del. It was his voice exactly, the small catch in the vowel, the small warmth in the second syllable. It hit her in the chest, and she took a breath in, and she did not let it out, and she pressed her hand flat against the matchbook.

Then the voice said, “Delph, will you not even look? If you look and you say it is not me, I will go away and I will not come back. ” She lay on her bedroll, and she did not turn her head, and she did not open the little window in the barn door, and she said out loud in her ordinary voice, calm and loud enough to be heard through the wood, “My name is Mrs. Rowan, and I am here on the business of the state of North Carolina, and I do not receive visitors after dark, and you will please go, sir.

” The voice was silent for a long time. Then, in a slightly different tone, with a small dry laugh in it, it said, “All right, Mrs. Rowan. But you are going to have to open the door in the morning, and I will be on the porch when you do.

” There were footsteps going back across the yard, and they sounded like nothing she had ever heard walk on a yard before. Then the door of the big house opened and closed. The matchbook held nineteen matches in the morning. She had not needed to use one.

She had one thing left to do, and she was going to do it that day: get Varity Marlo, the nine-year-old girl, up the ridge to the old woman, and then leave the same afternoon. At breakfast she asked Prudence, quietly, in the kitchen, if Varity might come with her for an afternoon nature lesson. Prudence stirred the porridge and did not turn around. She said, in her ordinary voice, that would be fine.

Varity would enjoy the lesson. Her hand on the wooden spoon stopped moving for one beat and then started again, and Delphia understood that Prudence had understood, and had agreed, and had known what she was agreeing to. At noon, Varity came out to the barn with her hair braided and a small pinafore and a lunch pail in her hand. They walked out of the yard.

Ephraim was on the porch. Mother Marlo was in her chair. Prudence was at the kitchen window, not looking. They walked up the trace and around the first bend, and then Delphia said they were going up a different path today.

Varity, without a word, without a question, said, “Yes, ma’am. I know the way. ” Her mother had told her two weeks ago that if the nurse ever asked her for a walk, she was to say yes, and she was to know the path. She had known it since she was seven.

She had never walked it alone. They doubled back to the footpath behind the smokehouse and went up. Varity walked ahead, fast and nimble. After about an hour they came out on the shoulder of the ridge, and Varity did not look down at the bench.

After another hour they came out into a clearing with a small cabin, a garden, a goat, and a woman sitting on the doorstep breaking beans. Mother Pru stood up when they came in and said, “Come here, child. I have known your mother and your grandmother and your great grandmother, and you have a home here for as long as you want one. ” Varity Marlo sat down on the step and put her lunch pail on the ground and began quietly to cry.

Mother Pru looked over the child’s head at Delphia and said, “You have done well, Mrs. Rowan. Now go. Go east along the ridge to the fallen chestnut.

Go down the game trail. Do not stop. Do not turn back. ” Varity said, through her tears, that there was one more thing her mother had said to tell her: if Delphia could tell the outside people to come with axes and burn the empty houses first, not the pond, the houses.

The houses are where he keeps the shoes, and the shoes are where he keeps the counting. If you burn the shoes, the counting stops. Delphia said, “I will tell them. ” She turned and walked east along the ridge.

She reached the fallen chestnut in about forty minutes and found the game trail on the north side and started down. It went down for four hours, a hard, unmaintained trail, laurel-choked in places, and the light thinned around her. About halfway down, in the blue shadow before real dark, she stopped because she thought she heard something behind her. She looked back up the trail.

There was nothing on it, but at the very top, silhouetted against the last of the light, a figure stood where the fallen chestnut lay across the path. It was not moving, not coming down. It was watching her go. It was not Mother Marlo or Ephraim.

It was thinner, taller, and it was standing about a foot above the ground, as though the ground were still there for it, but was not the ground she was on. She understood on the game trail in the blue hour on the fourteenth of June 1934 that the thing under the pond had come up out of the pond to see her go and had come as far as the top of the ridge and could not come further. She took the matchbook out of her pocket. She took out one match and struck it on the buckle of her satchel.

It flared. She held it up in the dusk and turned so that her face was in the light, and she looked back up the trail at the figure, and she let it see her seeing it. She held the match up until it burned out, maybe eight seconds. Then she said, out loud in the dusk, “My name is Mrs.

Rowan and I have seen you and you have seen me and we are done. ” She turned and went on down the trail, and she did not look back. About an hour after full dark she came out onto a dirt track with truck ruts in it, followed it a mile east, and came to the ranger station of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at Cataloochee. The ranger, a young man named Cletus Yoder, opened the door to a woman with a satchel and a wild face.

He sat her down and gave her water, and she told him her name and that she needed to use his radio. She raised the state highway patrol at Waynesville and reported a case of suspected multiple homicide at a hollow called Drownwater Gap. She told them there were physical remains in the form of unclaimed clothing in three buildings on the property, that a child had been evacuated to the custody of a woman named Prudence Redbird on the ridge above, and that they should burn the three empty houses on the south arm of the horseshoe before anything else. She stayed by the radio all night.

Cletus Yoder made her coffee and did not ask questions. She wrote to him every Christmas for thirty-one years, and when he died in 1965, she paid for his headstone. The patrol arrived at five in the morning. They rode up the road with the sheriff and with Emmett Troll, who would not let them go up without him.

They got to the gate at Little Bear at ten in the morning and rode the last mile down onto the bench, and there was nobody there. Not one Marlo, not one dog, not one animal. The eleven buildings stood empty. The tobacco stood in the patches.

The sink lay in the middle, black and unmoving. Every one of the forty-four pairs of shoes she had counted in the three empty houses was gone. The racks stood empty. The dishes were still on the shelves.

The coffee in the pot on the stove was still warm. They searched for three days and found nothing. They dragged the pond with grapples for two more. The pond did not cloud.

The grapples came up empty and dry, and one of the state men refused to go into the water and would not say why. Varity Marlo was safe on the ridge. She told the sheriff that her family had gone home. “My mother told me they would go home when the nurse left because there would not be anybody left to feed the thing under the pond and it would take them all back at once.

” She said she did not know where home was. Only that it was under the water. The sheriff filed a report, thirty-one pages, concluding that the Marlo clan, twenty-six persons, abandoned the property on or about the fifteenth of June 1934 for reasons unknown, leaving the youngest daughter in the custody of a Cherokee woman on the ridge. There is no mention of the shoes.

No mention of the seventeen missing persons whose last known locations, she later plotted on a map for herself, all lay on courses that would have brought them within a day or two of the store at the foot of the road that goes up to the gap. No mention of the pond. They burned the three empty houses on the seventeenth of June. They burned for six hours, and when they were gone, the ground where they had stood was scorched black.

Delphia stood at the edge of the burn and watched, and Emmett Troll stood beside her, and neither of them spoke. She left Drownwater Gap for the last time the next day in a state patrol car. She did not look back. She gave Radford Sain her notice the following morning.

She would not tell him what happened. She told him it was in the journal. “Do not read it if you can help it. And if you must read it, do not read it after dark.

I am going home to Irwin. Please do not write to me. Please do not call for me. I am done with the mountains.

”

She lived forty-eight more years. She got a job at the county hospital in Johnson City as a floor nurse and worked it for thirty-seven years, steady and competent, and she never went into a hollow again. She sent one letter to Whitfield Rush in the summer of 1938, unsigned, in a woman’s handwriting. It said that Cora died on the twenty-first of September 1928 in Drownwater Gap, that she loved him, that she was thinking of him at the end, that she would not want him to wait.

The letter is in his effects at the County Historical Society in Franklin. It is in Delphia Rowan’s handwriting. She waited four years, until she was sure she could not be traced. Whitfield Rush never married.

He died in 1968 at the age of ninety-three. His stone reads: Whitfield Rush, pharmacist, husband of none, friend of many. The word none is set in the stone as a word he chose. She wrote to Mother Pru Redbird every spring.

Varity Marlo grew up on that ridge and married a good man and had four children. Delphia held them all at their christenings with the matchbook still in her breast pocket. She could not sit with her back to a door. In restaurants she moved chairs.

In waiting rooms she stood. She kept a bar on the inside of her bedroom door, and she barred it every night, and she did not explain. She died on the fourth of December 1982 in the nursing home in Johnson City, at seventy-nine years old, of pneumonia in the ordinary way. Her granddaughter was with her at the end.

In the last hour she was awake and reached for something on the nightstand, and the granddaughter handed her the matchbook, and Delphia Rowan opened it and looked into it and closed it and said in a small, clear voice, “One match. ” Then she said, “Well now. ” And then she died. They buried her in Irwin.

Her stone reads: Delphia Amanda Rowan, nurse who went where others would not go. The granddaughter put the matchbook in her breast pocket before they closed the coffin. She said that when she opened it, it had been empty but for two words on the inside cover, in a hand she did not know.

Thank you.