# The Matches of Drownwater Gap

The old woman’s hand closed around Delia Rowan’s wrist with a grip that felt like river stone, and the cold came up her arm in a wave. It traveled past her shoulder and into her chest, where it struck the matchbook in her breast pocket and stopped, as though the small paper rectangle were a wall. The whole table of twenty-seven Marlos had gone silent, and the old woman at the head of the table said, in a voice like paper unfolding, “Well now, child, tell me a story. ”

But the story of Delia Rowan had begun long before that supper, twenty-six days earlier, when she had ridden a mule alone down into that hollow on the North Carolina side of the Balsam Mountains, into a place the survey maps of 1938 had called Drownwater Gap and the survey maps of 1952 had left unnamed entirely.

She was born on the fourteenth of July, 1903, in Irwin, Tennessee, the eldest of four children of a railroad brakeman named Chester Rowan and a woman named Ida Fay Coggins, who took in ironing and sang in the choir at the First Baptist and could not sit still for more than eleven minutes at a stretch. Delia inherited her mother’s long, quick hands and her father’s slow-to-warm temperament, and the combination made her, from about age nine, the person the family went to when a thing had to be done and nobody wanted to do it. She trained as a nurse at the Presbyterian Hospital in Asheville between 1922 and 1925, then stayed on another three years. In the winter of 1928 she met Ellis Wickham Rowan at a church supper in Weaverville, and she married him on the second of June, 1929.

Ellis Rowan mattered more than a man already dead when the story began should have. He whistled through his teeth, tunelessly and constantly, while he worked and read and shaved. He kept a paper matchbook in his shirt pocket always, though he did not smoke, because his father had once told him that a man without a match on his person is a man without a way of starting anything, and Ellis had taken the sentence more literally than most men would. He called his wife Del, the only person alive who did.

And before he said anything he considered important, he said the two words “well now,” then waited a beat, then said whatever it was. She had leaned forward at the sound of those syllables from the second month of the marriage. Ellis Wickham Rowan died on the eighteenth of March, 1931, in a coal mine collapse at the Wallins Creek operation in Harlan County, Kentucky, at twenty-nine, along with six other men on the same shift. He had gone up for eleven weeks of work that would buy them a small house in Weaverville.

He had been in the mine four days when the roof came down. When they got him out on the fourth day of the recovery, he was still holding his lunch pail in his right hand, and the paper matchbook was in his shirt pocket, dry, though the pocket was not. The company man gave her the matchbook at the funeral on the front steps of the church. She put it in the pocket of her Sunday coat, forgot about it, found it in the fall, and transferred it to her breast pocket.

It stayed there, in the breast pocket of whatever Delia Rowan was wearing, every hour of every day for the next fifty-one years. It was a small thing with a brass corner clasp and twenty unused matches, red tips, the cover reading “Wallins Creek Mercantile” in blue block letters, with a telephone exchange that had ceased to exist in 1942. She could not stay in Weaverville, and she could not stay in Irwin, which was full of her mother and her mother’s friends and the endless kind female attention of a small town that had decided a young widow needed looking after. Delia Rowan at twenty-eight had discovered something about herself: she could be worked, but she could not be tended.

So in the fall of 1932 she took a position with a new joint arrangement between the state health department and the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of eleven traveling health nurses assigned to the eastern Smokies district out of an office in Bryson City. Her territory was about four hundred square miles of ridge country on both sides of the state line. She traveled on a government mule, carried a leather satchel that weighed nineteen pounds full, and worked six days a week. She loved it.

In the winter of 1933 she wrote to her mother, in a letter that survives: “I am tired all the way through, and I am doing more good in a week than I did in a year in Asheville, and there is nobody in these hollows who thinks I am fragile. ”

She was assigned to Drownwater Gap on the fourth of June, 1934. The district supervisor, a man named Radford Sain who had run that office for eleven years, did something he had never done in all that time. He asked her, formally, with the door closed, whether she would take the assignment.

“Mrs. Rowan, there is a hollow in the northeast quadrant that has not seen a nurse in eleven years. And the school teacher we sent up there in 1928 did not come back. ”

The school teacher was a young woman named Corabel Cheek of Franklin, who had gone up on the sixth of September, 1928, and had not come out.

Her satchel was returned by mail eleven days later from a post office in Wesville, with no return address. It contained a change of clothes, a hairbrush, a Bible, and a journal. Radford Sain kept the journal in his desk. “I am asking you and not telling you because I would rather send nobody than send somebody who does not want to go.

”

She took the journal home to her boarding house. She ate supper with the borders, went upstairs at half past eight, lit the lamp, and opened the book. She read it until three in the morning. She did not cry.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the journal closed on her lap for forty minutes. At four minutes past four she returned the matchbook to her breast pocket, went downstairs, and made coffee for the whole boarding house. At seven she walked into the office and told Radford Sain she would go. She asked for four things: a mule, a letter of introduction on state health department letterhead, a sidearm, and Corabel Cheek’s hand-drawn map.

Sain gave her three of the four. He would not give her the pistol. “A woman going into that hollow with a pistol would be worse off than a woman going in without one,” he told her, “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. ”

She agreed.

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.

”

It was the first of three warnings she ever received about that hollow, and she gave it to Radford Sain before anyone had given it to her. She had gotten it out of the journal. The road to Drownwater Gap was on no map the state had printed since 1899. She met the mail carrier, Emmett Troll, at the store at Colbreth Ford on the morning of the ninth of June, 1934, at quarter to six.

He was sixty-one years old, and had carried the mail on that route for thirty-nine years. Before that his father had carried it for eighteen years, and before that his uncle for eleven. Between the three of them, a Troll had been the only person to whom the Post Office would deliver mail for anyone who lived past mile nine on the upper track. He was chewing tobacco and did not spit.

He looked at her from eleven feet away and said, “All right, come on then, and I will take you as far as the fork at Little Bear, and past the fork you are on your own, and I will not go past it. ”

They rode in silence for two hours along the west fork of the Pigeon River, then up switchbacks laid down by loggers in 1906, over the shoulder of Balsam Mountain, down through the valley of Redman Creek, and up onto the true ridge of the Balsams. She said later that the first thing she noticed was the trees. “There is virgin timber up here that the loggers never came in for,” she wrote.

She asked Troll why. He did not answer. At a spring around midday, he gave her the three things. He settled onto a flat rock with his hat in his hands and turned it.

“All right, Mrs. Rowan, here are the three things. The first is: 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.

You carry your own food and you eat your own food and you drink your own water. And when your water is gone, you drink out of the streams above their bench, not below. The second is: do not stand between the sink and the house of old Ephraim Marlo after dark. There is a path that runs from the door of that house to the water, and it is fifty-eight feet long, and it is packed hard, and nothing grows on it, and it has been there since before any Marlo was born.

Anything that is on the path after dark, or beside it, or in the yard, is being counted, and you do not want to be counted. The third is the one that will save your life if you remember it and cost you your life if you forget it. The Marlo will know things about you they should not know. They will call you by names that were not on your letter of introduction.

They will speak, some of them, in voices you have heard before. Do not turn your head. Do not turn your eyes. Do not answer to a name that is not the name your papers say you are.

If you hear a voice you have loved coming from a Marlo’s mouth or from behind a wall, you keep your face pointed straight ahead and you say loud enough for them to hear you: ‘My name is Mrs. Rowan and I am here on the business of the state of North Carolina. ‘ You say the sentence again if it comes again, and you do not under any circumstance turn your head. ”

She asked him one question.

“Why do you carry the mail into a place like that? ”

Emmett Troll, who had lost three mules, one dog, and the tip of one finger to that road over the course of his career, looked at her for a long time. “Because if I do not, the government sends somebody else, and the somebody else does not know the three things, and I am not willing to be the reason a stranger does not come back down that road, Mrs. Rowan.

And neither is my conscience. ”

They came to the fork at Little Bear at quarter past four. He pointed at the fainter left track. “That way is three miles, and you will come to a gate, and the gate will be closed, and you will get down and open it and lead your mule through and close it behind you.

And if you leave the gate open, you will not come back out of that hollow. I do not know why that is true, but it is true. And past the gate, it is another mile to the bench where the houses are. And you will smell the water before you see it.

And when you smell it, you will want to turn around. And if you are going to turn around, turn around then, before they see you. There will be no shame in it, Mrs. Rowan.

There will be no shame in it. ”

She recited the three warnings back to him in his order, in his phrasing, without stumbling. He nodded once, turned his mule, and rode back down the track without looking back. She smelled the water before she saw it.

It was not a bad smell. It was a mineral smell, cold, the smell of a rock that has been underwater a long time, with something underneath it she could not name. The gate was closed, five bars of weathered gray, no lock, no latch. She opened it, led the mule through, closed it behind her, checked the loop twice, and rode into the last mile.

The road went down. She had been climbing all day, and now past the gate it descended on a gentle grade through hemlock and older hardwood, and the light changed, and the air cooled, and the birds stopped. She could not have said at what point they stopped, only that she noticed she had been riding in silence for a while, and that the silence had a shape, and that the shape was a bowl, and she was riding down into the bottom of it. The road bent left around the shoulder of a small rise, the trees fell away, and she was looking down at Drownwater Gap.

Everyone who ever wrote about the bench from the road above it used the same word. They said it was pretty. Three accounts, seventy-two years apart, all using that word. A prettiness composed for you, arranged, knowing you were looking at it.

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 and open on the fourth toward a farther valley. Cleared ground, green and even as a bowling lawn. Eleven buildings of hewn log with woodshake roofs, all in good repair, arranged in a horseshoe around a body of black water at the center. The pond was about a hundred and forty feet across, oval, its surface not moving.

There was no wind on the bench. Above it, on the road, the wind moved the treetops. She looked down at the grass on the bench, and every blade was standing straight, and not one was moving. She sat on the mule and thought about turning around, and thought about Emmett Troll’s face when he had said the thing about the shame in it, and thought about Corabel Cheek, and thought about the boarding house room and the size of it and the light in it in the evening.

She put her heels to the mule. As she came out of the trees at the western end of the horseshoe, a man was standing in the trace ahead of her. He had not been there when she started down. He was 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 man. He said, in a voice calm and pleasant and without accent, “Mrs. Rowan, we have been expecting you.

”

The sentence should have sounded ridiculous. It did not. There had been no correspondence between the health department and the gap. There was no telephone line within a hundred miles.

She had spoken to two people that day, and both were behind her. He was standing in the road in a clean shirt, and he knew her name. She said, “Good afternoon, sir. I am Mrs.

Rowan of the North Carolina State Health Department. I am here to conduct a wellness survey of the residents of Drownwater Gap. Am I addressing Mr. Marlo?

”

He smiled, all the muscles in the correct order. The smile of someone who had been taught to smile by watching people smile through a window. He said he was Ephraim Marlo, the elder of his family. His daughter-in-law had put a supper on for her, and they had made up the room in the west end of the big house.

His son would take the mule in for her, if she would step down. She asked, first, how many souls were living in the gap. He answered “27” in less than a second. She had asked the question partly to time the answer.

In three years of mountain nursing, no man had ever answered that question inside of thirty seconds; they had to count the babies, remember whether the cousin was back from the coal fields, whether the aunt in the back room was still alive. Ephraim Marlo answered in less than one. Twenty-seven. Four households.

Nine children under twelve. One soul over sixty. Every answer at the same speed, in the same voice, like a clerk who had said the answers ten thousand times and was tired of the questions. She told him she would not stay in the west room and would not eat at his table, because she carried her own bedroll and her own food and did not take lodging from the families she served.

She invented the department rule on the mule. He said, “That is agreeable,” after a pause of two seconds. She rode past him, and he turned and walked beside her stirrup, matching the mule’s pace exactly from the first step, neither hurrying nor holding back. She looked down at the top of his gray head and thought she had never seen a person do that.

The house he walked her toward was the largest of the eleven, a two-story log house with a stone chimney at each end and a wide covered porch. Between the big house and the pond, running from the front step to the north lip of the water, was a path. It was worse than Emmett Troll had said. The dirt of it was packed hard as a threshing floor and gray, a different substance from the dark living loam around it, and the gray stopped exactly where the path stopped, and nothing was on it: no leaf, no pebble, no twig, no dropped straw.

Along both sides, at the exact edge of the gray, in a line so straight it looked drawn, ran a border of small white quartz stones the size of hen’s eggs, set edge to edge. She counted them later: four hundred and eleven on each side, eight hundred and twenty-two stones, none of them from within thirty-one miles of the gap, because the local rock was dark shale and slate. She did not look at the path as she rode past it. She had learned, in her first year of nursing, to not look at open bodies unless she had to, and she used that learning now.

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

Twenty-six, plus Ephraim Marlo at her stirrup, made twenty-seven. Every one of them was standing still, and 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.

And then, as she came fully into the yard, 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 two seconds, and straightened. Not one out of time, not one late, not one early. They bent as one thing, held as one thing, straightened as one thing. She got down off the mule and asked him to introduce her to his family, one at a time, from the eldest.

He brought each Marlo forward in order of age, and she wrote every name in the health department register in her own hand. It took forty minutes. Doing her job methodically in front of them, in the ordinary handwriting of an ordinary state employee, was the only weapon she had, and she held it in front of her like a lantern. Ephraim Marlo, born 1869, aged sixty-five.

His three brothers still living: Reuben, born 1872; Jesse, born 1875; Absalom the Younger, born 1878. Two sisters, never married: Varity, born 1880, and Naomi, born 1883. She had already noticed something she had been trying not to notice, and the two unmarried sisters made her write it down that night: there were no wives in the family who were not born in it. No married-in women at all.

Sisters, daughters, cousins, nieces, one grandmother. Not a single new name in the family in a hundred years. Last of all, in a chair on the porch, wrapped in a shawl on a day that did not need one, sat a very small, very old woman. Ephraim said, “And this is my mother.

She was born Sabra Rowan in 1840 in Buncombe County. She came into this hollow in 1860 as the wife of my father Absalom Marlo the Elder. She is ninety-four years old. ”

Delia bent and took the old woman’s hand.

It was cool, not cold, cool the way a river stone is cool, with a weight to it a hand did not usually have. Mother Marlo held her hand in both of hers and pulled Delia a fraction of an inch closer and said, in a voice like paper unfolding, “Well now, child, have you brought your matches with you? ”

The phrase was a country phrase. Anyone might say it.

But the rhythm of it, the cadence of the pause after “well now,” belonged to one man, and that man had been dead for three years and three months. Mother Marlo of Drownwater Gap had said the phrase in his cadence, and the sentence had contained the word “matches,” and Delia Rowan had in her breast pocket at that moment exactly one matchbook. She did not turn her head. She smiled her small, careful nurse’s smile.

“I always carry a match, ma’am, in case a lantern is needed. ” Mother Marlo held her hand another half second, let go, and looked away. That night she slept in the barn, in a swept corner with fresh straw, a lantern hanging, a nail for a coat. She barred the door from the inside—a strange piece of hardware for a working barn.

She ate her own bread and cheese and an apple from Emmett Troll. She listened to the big house across the yard at supper: the sound of eating, of things being passed, of chairs, and no voices. Not one word was said by twenty-seven people at supper. At eleven she heard the door of the big house open.

Footsteps crossed the yard, one slow circuit, then out onto the path. She knew they were on the path by the sound—packed dirt made one sound; something walking on that swept gray made another, a dry rustling like walking on paper. She counted the footsteps. Fifty-eight.

The person was taking one step per foot of length, a stride a normal person could not take because a normal person’s stride was closer to two feet. Then the footsteps stopped. For eleven minutes, nothing. Then something began to hum.

It was not a hum out of a mouth. It came up through the floor of the barn, low and steady, into her teeth and the soles of her feet, and it went on for about four minutes, and it stopped. Then the footsteps came back, fifty-eight of them, in the same slow stride, across the yard, up the step, and the door of the big house closed quietly. She lay awake all night with her hand on the matchbook.

At first light she went out and looked at the path. It had been raked, in long, even strokes from the doorstep to the water, and there was not a footprint on it, not a mark of a rake tine, only the pattern of narrow parallel lines. She had heard nothing being raked in the night. She went back into the barn and wrote one line in her journal: “Cannot say what I am seeing.

Count one. ”

She did her job. That is what she did for the first week. She conducted the wellness survey, all twenty-seven exams, one per day for the eldest four, then two a day, then three.

She filled in the state forms, eleven columns per patient. The forms came back normal. That was the terrible thing. Twenty-seven members of an isolated, inbred mountain family in the depths of the Depression, and every form was unremarkable.

Height, weight, blood pressure, pulse, teeth, reflexes, vision, hearing—all within normal ranges. No rickets in the children, no pellagra in the adults, no pneumonia scars on any of the lungs she listened to. On Ephraim Marlo’s form, she wrote: “Patient is a 65-year-old white male. Presentation is that of a well-nourished man in early middle age.

” She wrote nearly identical remarks on the forms for the three brothers. On the two sisters. She noted the impossible age of them, and she wrote it down. On Mother Marlo’s form she wrote something different: “Patient is a 94-year-old white female.

Presentation is that of a woman of extreme age. Patient’s pulse is 39 beats per minute resting. Patient’s respiration is 6 per minute resting. Patient’s body temperature is 93.

4 degrees Fahrenheit. Patient reports being comfortable. Findings do not correspond to any physiological state I am familiar with in a living patient. Recommend evaluation by physician.

” She took the readings three times, checked her own instruments, checked Ephraim’s pulse (seventy-two), and checked Mother Marlo again. Same numbers. Mother Marlo looked at her while she took the last set of readings and smiled a small, dry smile. “Do not be frightened, child.

The old or cold. It is how we keep. ”

At the bottom of every one of the twenty-six adult forms, in the space where she was expected to note observations about the household or environment, Delia wrote the same three-word sentence: “See attached memorandum. ” There was no attached memorandum in the file.

There never was. In the fall of 1937, Radford Sain asked her about it in his office, and she told him what she had meant by it: she had wanted to leave a mark on the record that said, “This is not enough. There is more to say. Ask me.

” He asked her. She said, “Mr. Sain, if I write the memorandum I will not sleep for the rest of my life. Leave the sentence in.

” He left it in all twenty-six forms. The phrase was, she said when she was old, the sound of a woman leaving a locked room and dropping the key in a well. The small wrongnesses of that first week: six of them, and she wrote down all six. The first was the birds.

There were no birds on the bench. They stopped at the exact edge of the cleared ground all the way around the horseshoe, and no bird ever flew across the middle. She sat on a log and watched for a full hour: eleven crossings along the perimeter, none over the pond. The second was the dogs.

Four of them, friendly enough—Nell, Sam, Old Ben, and a puppy named Nothing, because the Marlo did not name a puppy until it was a year old. But at sundown every day, all four dogs went into the big house through the front door, which Ephraim held open for them. Dogs do not sleep in houses in that country in that decade. She asked him about it offhandedly.

He smiled. “They are afraid of the dark, Mrs. Rowan. We are kind to them.

”

The third was the shoes. Twenty-seven pairs of real store shoes, fitted, all about a year old, evenly worn, and no other shoes anywhere—no worn-out pairs on the porches, no older pairs set aside. Every Marlo had exactly one pair. “A stranger has been bringing them shoes,” she wrote.

The fourth was the water. The Marlo had a well behind the big house, clean, maintained, and nobody drew from it. They carried water from the spring at the west end of the bench in a wooden pail and boiled it before they used it. She asked Prudence, the daughter-in-law, why the well was there if nobody used it.

Prudence smiled the same smile. “Oh, we use the well, Mrs. Rowan. Not for drinking.

” She did not say for what. The fifth was the tobacco. Four patches of it, each about a quarter acre, healthy beyond reason—not a wormhole, not a spot of blight, perfect uniform leaves in perfect rows—and no one was ever in them, not for ten minutes, in five days of watching. Tobacco does not grow itself.

The sixth was Ephraim’s shadow. On the afternoon of the sixth day she was standing in the yard with him, and she looked down at the ground, and his shadow was about two inches north of where a shadow of a man his height at that hour should have fallen. Her own shadow and the child’s shadow were exactly where they should have been. Ephraim’s was not.

It did not move when he shifted his weight. It did not adjust when he turned his head. As though there were a second Ephraim, a fraction of a step behind the first, casting a fraction of a difference. She finished her writing, said, “Thank you, Mr.

Marlo. That is all for today,” walked to the barn, barred the door, and wrote in her journal, a second time: “Cannot say what I am seeing. Count two. ”

That night she did not sleep at all, and she heard the footsteps go out on the path, and the humming, and the footsteps come back.

In the morning she made a decision. There were eleven buildings on the bench, and only four households, and the three houses along the south arm of the horseshoe stood empty, and she was going to go into one of them alone. The door made no sound. A door on a house shut for years should have made every sound a door can make.

This one moved as if oiled that morning. Inside was one room, sixteen by twenty feet, swept clean, no dust on the sills, no cobwebs in the corners. A table with three chairs. A bed with a folded quilt.

A shelf with three tin cups and a plate. It looked like the room of a household that had gone out to work that morning and would be back at supper. The room smelled of nothing at all. A room people live in smells of them.

This smelled the way distilled water tastes. She lifted the quilt. The mattress was filled with hair. Human hair, pale brown, packed tight, in a mass.

She let the ticking down and put the quilt back exactly as it had been. The second room had no windows. Along the back wall was a rack. Twenty-one pairs of shoes in three rows of seven, men’s and women’s and children’s, all sizes, all in good condition, all about a year old, worn evenly, toes pointing out.

Behind each pair, on the shelf below, a set of folded clothing, the size to match the shoes above it. She backed out of the room. She went back to the barn, barred the door, and shook for about eleven minutes. In her journal that night she wrote: “I shook for a long time and I could not stop.

And I put my hand on the matchbook in my pocket and I held it there and I said Ellis’s name out loud to myself quietly because I needed to hear his name in this room. And I said it and I felt the shape of him in my mouth and I stopped shaking. ”

Twenty-one pairs of shoes. She went out and found Ephraim Marlo in the tobacco patch and asked, “Do you have visitors up here often?

” He did not turn around. “We have from time to time, Mrs. Rowan. Now and then.

” She said she had been thinking about the empty houses; it was a pity to see them stand empty. “They are not empty, Mrs. Rowan. They are ready.

”

In the county records: between 1929 and 1934, in the six counties bordering the Cataloochee and Pigeon River drainages, seventeen unsolved missing persons cases involving adults last seen traveling alone toward the mountain interior. Peddlers. Traveling preachers. A geologist.

Two young women walking to a school for the deaf in Morganton and not arriving. A pair of loggers. A revenue agent. A photographer.

A man collecting for a mail-order Bible catalog. All reported missing. None ever found. She plotted all seventeen last known locations on a map.

All seventeen had been on a course that would have brought them within a day or two of Colbreth Ford, the store at the foot of the road up to Drownwater Gap. Seventeen missing. Twenty-one pairs of shoes in the first empty house. She would find, in the second and third houses, fourteen more pairs, and nine more.

Forty-four pairs in all. Her food was running low. She had come with eleven days of provisions and had four left, and it would be three weeks before any help came if she even survived to send for it. She sat with the arithmetic for a long time.

Then she did the thing she later called the smartest thing she did in her life: she went out into the yard in the evening, when Prudence was shelling peas on the porch, and asked whether, when she left, she might take a small jar of preserves home to remember the family’s kindness by. Prudence Marlo stopped shelling peas and looked at her for the first time in seven days as though she were seeing her. “Mrs. Rowan, do not do that.

Do not take a jar of anything out of this hollow, not one. If a Marlo gives you anything—food or cloth or a stone from the yard or a lock of hair or a piece of bread—and you take it out of this hollow, then you have taken us with you. And where you go, we will come. And where you sleep, we will sleep.

And we will not stop coming until you have brought it back or eaten it or given it to another. And I will not do that to you, Mrs. Rowan. And I would not do it to my own child.

And the reason I would not do it to my own child is that I have. ”

She went back to shelling peas. Delia wrote one sentence that night: “Prudence Marlo is a prisoner. Prudence Marlo wants out.

” And she added: “I think if I am careful, I can get her to tell me one more thing before this is over. ”

On the eighth day, she opened Corabel Cheek’s journal for the second time, in the barn, alone. The journal ran from the sixth of September, 1928, to the twenty-first—sixteen days, about sixty pages, the writing stopping in the middle of an entry. Corabel Cheek was twenty-three, from Franklin, engaged to a young pharmacist named Whitfield Rush.

She had taken the position because it paid twenty-one dollars a month and included board. Her first entry: “Arrived Drownwater Gap this afternoon after long ride from Colbreth Ford in the company of a Mr. Troll who is the mail rider and who spoke very little but was kind… The family met me in the yard, 23 of them, and were welcoming though quiet…

Mrs. Prudence Marlo has cooked a supper of chicken and dumplings and I have eaten well and I am tired and I will start lessons in the morning. ” It ended: “Wrote to W. Please forward when Mr.

Troll comes again. I have eaten well. ”

The entries for the first three days were bright and ordinary. The school lessons.

The children’s reading levels. A note that Prudence said the trick to her biscuits was in the water. And on the third day: the old grandmother had smiled from the porch and said “Good evening” in a voice that sounded a little like Corabel’s own grandmother’s. Corabel noted the coincidence and was comforted by it.

She used the word “coincidence” herself. On the fourth day: “Woke early with headache. Went down for breakfast at 7 and Prudence had put out grits with butter and I ate two helpings. Grandmother Marlo on the porch as I came out and she said, ‘Good morning, Corabel.

‘ I stopped on the step because she had not called me by my given name before, only Miss Cheek. ” Mother Marlo asked whether she had slept well, and whether she dreamed. She told her, without thinking, that she had dreamed of her mother’s kitchen, of the green wallpaper with small yellow flowers, of standing at the table rolling out dough. Mother Marlo closed her eyes and smiled.

“Thank you, dear. That will do. ”

Every entry after that began with a note about sleep and food. “Slept without dreaming, woke tired, ate three biscuits.

” “Slept badly, ate two eggs. ” “Dreamed of my father. Told it to Mrs. Marlo.

Ate stew. ” Twelve dreams recorded, all of them memories, all of them hers, all told to Mrs. Marlo on the porch in the morning, and after being told, never dreamed again. The wallpaper.

The father. A dog named Bailey. A tree she had climbed. Her mother singing.

A boy she had known. Whitfield. Her grandmother’s brooch. The smell of a cellar.

By the twelfth day she wrote that she was tired all the time. Her ring finger had lost sensation in the tip; she could not feel her engagement ring on it, though she could feel the metal with her other fingers. She had begun to forget the color of Whitfield’s eyes. When she tried to picture him, she saw a face with all the correct features that was not moving right.

Prudence had made her a tea in the evening, and it was very good, and she had drunk two cups. The entry ends: “I think I am going to ask Mr. Marlo if I might go home for a week to see W because I do not feel like myself. ”

The thirteenth entry begins: “I did not go home.

I am not sure why. When I went down this morning to speak to Mr. Marlo, I could not remember what I had wanted to say to him. ”

The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth entries are very short, the entries of a person who has stopped thinking in complete thoughts.

“Lessons today. Prudence has made a pie. Slept and did not dream. Cannot recall the last thing I wrote to W.

”

And then the last entry, the one Radford Sain put the journal in his drawer for. The twenty-first of September, 1928:

“I am going to write clearly today because I have made myself remember for one hour and I do not know how long I will have. I have been going out to the spring at the west of the bench and putting my face in the water as long as I could stand, and by the third time my head cleared. And I understood that the water on the bench is what does it, and that the water above the bench is clean, and that the water in the well is not water, and I do not know what it is.

“Here is what I understand. There is a thing that lives under the pond in the middle of the bench, and the Marlo have been feeding it for four generations, and in return it keeps them. It keeps their crops, it keeps their children, it keeps their bodies from wearing out at the ordinary rate. It eats memory.

It eats dreams. It eats the particular small human details of a person. And the person being eaten does not know they are being eaten until there is not enough of them left to know it. It is not a monster in the way that a bear is a monster.

It is a stomach. It has a shape only where it needs one. It comes up through the water at night, and it walks the path, and it takes what has been put out for it. And what has been put out for it is dreams poured out of a person the day before by Mother Marlo on the porch with a smile.

The Marlo do this to their own. That is the terrible thing. But it is not enough. It cannot be only Marlos, because a family that only ate itself would go blind and mad and end.

So they take travelers. They bring them in, and they feed them until there is nothing left to feed. And then they put the last of them into the pond, and the shoes and the clothes go into the empty houses, and a new set of pretty dishes waits on the shelves for the next one. “I am the next one.

I have been being eaten for 16 days. If I try to walk out, they will know before I have gone two miles, because the thing under the pond can smell me now, and it knows I am one of it. Whitfield Rush, I love the way you laughed with your whole shoulders. I love the way you called me Kora and not Corabel when we were alone.

I loved that you kept the mortar and pestle on the shelf your mother had used, and that you would not let anyone else touch them. I loved—”

That is where it ends. Mid-sentence. The penstroke goes down at the end of the word and curls, as though the pen had continued to move for a moment after the writer stopped attending to it.

Delia closed the journal and said out loud, in the barn with the door barred, “I loved him too, Corbel, and I am going to walk out of here for both of us. ”

She did not run. She had four days of her own food left and a mule and a road, and she did not run. She had two reasons.

The first was arithmetic: Corabel had written that the thing under the pond could smell a person who had been fed on. Delia had not eaten their food or drunk their water, but she had slept eight nights on the bench, in the same air, with her feet on the same ground, and a person did not have to eat the food to be counted. If she tried to leave and was counted, she would find out too late. She had to know first, and knowing required a test.

The second reason was Corabel herself. Whoever wrote a last sentence like that deserved to be found, in the strict old sense, as a person whose ending was known and could be written down, so that Whitfield Rush, who was still alive in Franklin and had never remarried and was still waiting, could stop waiting. On the ninth day, Mother Marlo spoke to her on the porch. “Well now, child, did you dream last night?

” Delia said, without turning her head, “No, ma’am, I do not dream. I have not dreamed since my husband died. ” It was true; she had not dreamed since Ellis died. She had thought it was grief.

She understood now that whatever it was, it was going to keep her alive, because there was nothing in her for Mother Marlo to pull out. That day she wrote three letters. The first, to her mother, was ordinary. The second, to Radford Sain, said the survey was progressing and the forms would follow.

The third was to no one, two pages long, setting out everything she had understood from Corabel’s journal and everything she had seen for herself. It named names. It gave the location of the empty house and the forty-four pairs of shoes. It said what she believed lay under the pond, and what it was fed.

It said that if she did not come out of Drownwater Gap by the first of September, 1934, someone should bring the state militia up the road, and the sheriff, and a man with a stick of dynamite, and someone should not go home until the pond was empty. At the bottom, a line by itself: “I am writing this in daylight in a barn on a Tuesday and I know how it sounds. It is not madness. Read the journal of Corabel Cheek.

” She addressed it to herself, care of her mother in Irwin, and wrote across the outside in pencil: “Open only if I have not come home. ”

At two in the morning on the tenth night, after the fifty-eight footsteps, after the humming, after the forty-nine footsteps back, after the door of the big house had closed for the second time, she heard a fingernail scratching wood at the bottom of the barn door. Once. Twice.

Three times. A voice came under the door, so quiet she almost did not hear it, in Prudence’s voice. “Awake. Awake.

Awake. ”

She rolled onto her stomach so her ear was near the ground. “Yes. ”

Prudence whispered nine words in a rush, as though she had rehearsed them all day and had one breath to get them out.

“The old woman on the ridge, go to her, Redbird. ”

Then her feet, quick, going back across the yard. The door of the big house opened and closed. Delia wrote the nine words down at the top of a fresh page, underlined twice, and below them: “Prudence Marlo risked her life to say this to me.

I will not waste it. ”

On the eleventh day she asked Ephraim’s leave to go up on the ridge and gather medicinal plants. He offered to send his son Malachi as a guide. She declined, politely.

He said, “Please be back by dark. It is not wise to be on the ridge after dark. ” As she stepped off the porch, Mother Marlo opened her eyes and said, “Give her my regards, child. ” Delia did not turn her head.

She kept walking, processing the sentence as she went, understanding that Mother Marlo had known where she was going before she went. She found the footpath behind the smokehouse, overgrown but well-worn, and climbed for about an hour. Partway up she came out onto an open shoulder and looked back down at Drownwater Gap for the first time from above. The horseshoe of buildings was not a horseshoe.

It was a circle. There was a low bank of earth across the south end, planted with brush, connecting the two arms. From the ground it looked like a natural growth of laurel. From above it was clearly a low earthwork.

The whole compound was a closed ring, and the pond at the center was the eye in the middle of the ring. She had ridden into a corral, not a cabin yard. She climbed for another hour and came out into a small clearing with a one-room cabin, a garden, a goat in a pen, and a woman sitting on the doorstep breaking beans. She was small, thin, in her seventies, dressed in a plain gray dress with a red kerchief on her head.

Her skin was dark and weathered. Her eyes were black. She was Cherokee, or partly. The woman said, in ordinary English with no accent Delia could place, “Come and sit down, Mrs.

Rowan. I have been expecting you for four days. ”

Her name was Prudence Redbird. Her mother’s name was Prudence, and her daughter’s name was Prudence.

“Everybody around here calls me Mother P. You may too. ” The promise was that so long as a Marlo woman was named Prudence and given to hold the door of that hollow open a crack, there would be a Redbird woman named Prudence up on the ridge holding a door open, too, in case the Marlo woman ever needed to send somebody through it. “Which she has now done.

Which she does every fifteen or twenty years, when a nurse or a school teacher or a preacher goes down that trace and does not eat what they are given. ”

She gave Delia water—”My water is my water. You may drink it”—and then she told her what she needed to know, and told her she might ask three questions, and then she must go back down before dark. The thin ground.

That was her phrase. Most ground is ordinary ground. Some ground is thick. But there is thin ground, where the earth has worn through, where there is not much between the top of the world and what is under the world.

Thin ground is not evil. It is where the two sides of a thing can hear each other, and where the thing on the other side can, if it wants, come through, and where a person on this side can, if they are foolish enough, invite it, and where the two of them can, if both are willing, make an arrangement. The bench of Drownwater Gap is thin ground. It has been thin ground since before Mother P’s mother’s mother remembered.

The first Cherokee would not go on that bench, would not drink out of that pond, would not put their feet on that path, and left it alone, and the thing under the pond was hungry for a long time and did not eat and went to sleep. “And then in 1839 or 40, a white man named Absalom Marlo came into that hollow with an axe on his shoulder and a wife on his arm and no god on his back. Inside of a year both his cows had died and his wife had lost a baby and his crop had failed. And one night in the winter of 1840 he went out to the edge of the pond and stood there and said, ‘Whatever you are, if you are anything, take my second cow and give me a good crop next year and I will feed you what you want if you keep me.

‘ And in the morning his second cow was dead in the barn, and in the spring his crop was the best that ever came out of that county, and the next winter his wife had a healthy son. And he understood that he had made an arrangement, and he began to feed it, and it kept him, and it kept his boys, and his boys’ boys, and now they cannot stop, because the thing under the pond has grown around them. ”

Mother P told her she had a problem. “Your problem is not the thing under the pond.

Your problem is that you have not been eaten yet. And it is not because you are strong. It is because you have nothing in you for Mother Marlo to take out. Your husband was killed underground three years ago, and you have not dreamed since.

The thing needs a dream to have a mouthful, and it cannot get one out of you, and it is now trying to figure out what to do with you, and it will not decide for long. And when it decides, it will not be gentle. ”

Three things. The first: in every room she entered on that bench, she was to set down one thing of hers, a thing that had been with her.

She must leave it and not take it back. “That is how a room knows who is in it. If you do not leave a piece of yourself in every room, the room forgets you. And if the room forgets you, the thing under the pond can walk into the room and put another person there in your place.

Do you have a thing you can spare? ” Delia put her hand over her breast pocket. “I have twenty matches. ” Mother P said that was enough for a good many rooms, and to use them well, and not to use two in one room.

The second: when she was ready to leave, she must not go out the way she came in. The trace had a mouth, and the mouth belonged to the pond. She would come up the ridge and follow it east for a mile to a fallen chestnut across the path, and past it find a game trail going down the north side, four hours down to a place called Cataloochee where there was a park ranger station, and the ranger would let her use his radio. She was not to go back to Colbreth Ford, not to go back to Bryson City for at least a week, not to sleep in the same bed twice for at least a month, not to go home to Irwin for at least a year, because the thing under the pond could follow, and it did follow for a while, and then it stopped, and she had to outlast the following.

The third was the hard one. “When you go, you go with what you came with. Nothing more. Not a jar of preserves, not a stone from the yard, not a lock of the baby’s hair, not a piece of paper, not a message from Prudence, not a promise to send a letter to a lover left behind.

Not even Corabel Cheek’s journal. You leave the journal in the barn. If you carry it out, the pond will follow the journal, and it will follow it forever. Whatever you owe the dead, you can pay in some other coin, but not with a book.

”

Delia asked her three questions. What was the humming? “The humming is the thing under the pond eating. Do not go outside when you hear it.

Do not open a door. Do not go to a window. It cannot see you if you cannot see it. But if you can see it, it can see you, and once it has seen you, it does not stop seeing.

” What was on the path at night? “The thing itself, coming up to be fed. That is the shape it wears when it is eating. It is not much of a shape.

Do not look at the path at night. Do not stand in a window that looks on the path. ”

Her third question: “Why are you letting me go back down there? Why not tell me to walk east from here right now?

”

Mother P looked at her for a long time. “Because you are the first one who has gone in there in eleven years who might be able to walk back out. And because Prudence Marlo has a girl of nine named Varity who is being groomed to be the next Mother Marlo. If you can, before you leave, get that child up this ridge to me, I will keep her, and she will not be the next one.

And if you cannot get her out, I will not blame you, because it is not your child. But if you can, I am asking. ”

As Delia stood at the mouth of the path, she turned and asked, “My husband’s matchbook. It was his.

It has twenty matches. Is that enough for the rooms? ”

“Child, twenty matches will get you through nineteen rooms and one dark. Use the last one for the dark.

When the dark comes for you, strike the last one and hold it up and let it see your face, and let it see you seeing it, and it will not eat what has looked back. ”

She went down. She placed the matches, a single one in each room, hidden: under a corner of the manger shelf in the barn, into the crack between the porch boards, looped into the ribbon she left tied around the back of a chair in the big house, under a corner of a rug, between the pages of a Bible, behind a picture frame, in the seam of a window sill, in the folds of a curtain. Eleven houses on the bench; she marked them room by room, counting.

In the second and third empty houses she found the additional shoe racks, fourteen pairs and nine pairs, forty-four in all. In each house, she set a match down. She counted the rooms she still had to enter, the follow-up exams she still had to make, and the number came to exactly thirteen matches, and she had thirteen left in the book. It was going to be exactly enough.

She thought that Mother P had counted every match in her matchbook before she told her the number, and that this was not luck. On the thirteenth day, the thing showed itself for the first time in a shape she could see. She was in the yard taking a follow-up temperature on Varity, the nine-year-old. She looked up over the child’s head to the path, in full sun at three in the afternoon.

Along the length of the path, going from the doorstep of the big house to the water, there was a line of shadow. A shadow with no thing casting it, about the width of a person, moving slowly along the path at walking pace, in the direction of the water. She watched it for six seconds. It had the shape of an absence, a place where the light was thinner.

At the end of the path it stepped off into the water, and the water did not ripple, and the shadow did not come back out. She read the thermometer, made her notation, and thought, in the small back part of her mind: It comes out in the day now. It comes out in the day for me. It is deciding.

From the middle of that day onward, she saw things at the edge of her vision that did not resolve when she turned to look. A movement in the doorway of an empty house that was nothing when she looked. A face at the window of a third floor of the big house, though the big house had only two floors. A hand at the corner of the barn that was gone when she came around it.

Varity, from behind at the woodpile, whom she called to, and who did not turn, and who, when she caught up, was a stack of firewood and not a child at all. The bench had begun to translate itself for her, showing her in glimpses what was actually there under the surface, and the pond had begun to peel back the top of it for her. She did not use extra matches on the seeing. She held to the count.

On the fourteenth day, Ephraim invited her to supper. He did it with all the correct courtesy, and the reason was not courtesy: his mother, he said, had expressed a wish to have her sit at her right hand. The table in the big house was a single slab of chestnut, sixteen feet long, set with twenty-seven chairs. Every place had a plate, and every plate had food.

In front of Delia’s place was her own tin cup, filled with her own water, and beside it her own bread and cheese from her own pack, wrapped in a clean napkin, arranged as neatly as the Marlo china. She had made it easy for them to accommodate her, and it made no difference, because the point of the supper was not the food. Grace was said. “Amen.

” And Mother Marlo reached across the corner of the table and put her hand on Delia Rowan’s hand where it rested beside the plate, and said in her paper voice, “Well now, child, tell me a story. ”

The cold came up her arm from the point where Mother Marlo’s fingers touched her wrist, into her shoulder, into her chest, and stopped at her breast pocket where the matchbook lay. Not through it. At it.

As though the matchbook were a wall. Mother Marlo asked for a kitchen she had loved. Delia declined, politely. A garden.

Declined. And then: “Tell me then, child, the story of the last morning you spent with your husband. ”

The whole table drew a breath, not audibly. She felt it.

Twenty-six people inhaling at once and holding it. Delia looked at her and kept her face still. “Ma’am, my husband has been dead for three years and three months, and I have made it a policy not to speak of him at strangers’ tables. Won’t you tell me the story of this table that Mr.

Marlo mentioned before grace? I would love to hear it. ”

She kept her hand under Mother Marlo’s hand. She did not pull it away, because pulling it away would have been to acknowledge that the hand was doing something to her.

For ten seconds, Mother Marlo’s fingers pressed harder, and Delia felt the cold in her chest push against the matchbook, and the matchbook pushed back. It was as though two hands were pressing against each other through her ribs, and neither one was winning. She kept her smile in place and thought, “You cannot have him. You cannot have him.

You cannot have him. ”

Mother Marlo took her hand back and set it in her own lap and opened her eyes. “That was rude of me, child. I forget my manners some evenings.

Ephraim, tell the guest about the table. ”

He told a plain story about a tree struck by lightning in 1890, cut into a slab, dried in the barn for eleven years, made into the table in 1901. She listened and nodded and ate her own bread and cheese, and drank her own water, and the moment was over, and she had held the door. Barely.

That night in the barn she counted the matches. There were nineteen. She had used one in the barn and two under the chairs at supper. That should have left seventeen.

There were nineteen. She went to the shelf above the manger where she had put the first match, and it was there. She counted again. Nineteen.

The matches were coming back. The book was replenishing them. Or the book had never had twenty matches to begin with; it had had one match, and it had been giving her the same one over and over, and she had been laying it down in rooms, and it had been coming back to her breast pocket in the night. Or the book was itself the thing, and the matches were only a number, and the number was whatever she needed it to be, so long as she believed it.

She sat with the matchbook in her hand for a long time and understood, on the fourteenth night in Drownwater Gap, that the matchbook was Ellis’s, and it was hers, and it was going to keep being hers as long as she loved him, and it was going to have exactly as many matches in it as she needed to have, until the last one. And the last one would be for the dark. She wrote in her journal: “The matches are Ellis, and I do not know how many I have. ”

At three in the morning, somebody knocked on the door of the barn.

Firm. Three times. Then again. And then a voice, 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 eighteenth of March, 1931, said, “Well now, Del, open the door.

It is cold out here. ”

She did not move. She did not answer. The voice waited half a minute and said it again, with the small catch in the vowel he had always put in her name, the small warmth in the second syllable.

It hit her in the chest, and she took a breath and did not let it out, and pressed her hand flat against the matchbook, and she said in her mind, without moving her lips: Ellis Wickham Rowan died on the eighteenth of March, 1931, at the age of twenty-nine, in the Wallins Creek Mine in Harlan County, and I buried him myself, and he is not on the other side of this door, and I will not open it. “Delf, will you not even look? Come to the door and open the little window and look. If you look and you say it is not me, I will go away and I will not come back.

Only look. ”

That was the offer. The reasonable dead husband asking only to be seen once. It was exactly the offer that had gotten Corabel Cheek eaten in sixteen days, because it was the offer that made you turn your head.

Delia Rowan lay on her bedroll and did not turn her head. 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 it said, in a slightly different tone, with a small dry laugh in it, not Ellis’s tone anymore: “All right, Mrs. Rowan. All right. But you are going to have to open the door in the morning, and I will be on the porch when you do.

” The footsteps went back across the yard, and they did not sound like anything she had ever heard walk on a yard before. In the morning she counted the matches. Nineteen. She had spent nothing on the visitor but her breath.

That day she did the thing she had come to do. At breakfast she told Prudence, quietly, in the kitchen, that she was leaving that afternoon and wanted to take Varity up on the ridge for a nature lesson, and that she would not be back. Prudence stirred the porridge. “That would be fine, Mrs.

Rowan. Varity would enjoy the lesson. ” Her hand on the wooden spoon stopped for one beat, and started again. Delia understood that Prudence had understood, and had agreed, and had known what she was agreeing to.

She packed her satchel. She took Corabel Cheek’s journal out and wrapped it in her spare blouse and put the bundle up in the rafters above the manger. She said to it, in her mind, “This is Corbel’s book, and she stays with the bench, and I am the one who leaves, and Whitfield Rush will hear from me by letter in four years, and that will have to be enough. ”

At noon, Varity came out to the barn with her hair braided and a small pinafore and a lunch pail.

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 Delia said, “Varity, we are going up a different path today. ”

Varity said, without hesitation, “Yes, ma’am. I know the way. My mother told me, two weeks ago, she said if the nurse ever asked me to go for a walk, I was to say yes, and I was to know the path.

I have known it since I was seven. I have never walked it because I was told never to walk it alone. But I can go up it now with you, and I will not look back. ”

They doubled back to the footpath and climbed.

Varity walked fast, nimble, and Delia was hard-pressed to keep up. She listened behind her for sounds on the path, and there were none. After about two hours they came out into Mother P’s clearing, and Mother P stood up from the doorstep and said, “Come here, child. Come and sit down, Varity Marlo.

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 walked across the clearing and sat down on the step and put her lunch pail on the ground and began quietly to cry. Mother P looked over the child’s head at Delia. “You have done well, Mrs.

Rowan. Now go. It is one o’clock. Go east along the ridge to the fallen chestnut.

Go down the game trail. Do not stop. Do not turn back. Do not think about what you might have done for the others.

Now go. ”

Varity looked up. “Mrs. Rowan, there is one more thing my mother said to tell you.

She said, if you can 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. And if the counting stops, he does not know how many of us to keep, and he lets us go one at a time.

My mother said she is not asking for herself. She is asking for the little ones. ”

Delia said, “I will tell them. ”

She walked east along the ridge, a mile of open shoulder in easy light, and reached the fallen chestnut in forty minutes.

The game trail went down for four hours, hard, laurel-choked in places, and about halfway down, when the sun had gone behind the ridge and the north slope lay in blue shadow, she stopped because she thought she heard something following her. She looked back up the trail. There was nothing on the trail. But at the very top, at the fallen chestnut, small in the distance, silhouetted against the last of the light, stood a figure.

Not moving. Not coming down. Looking down the trail after her. It was thinner, taller, than Ephraim or Mother Marlo, and it was not standing on the ground.

It was standing about a foot above it, as though the ground were still there for it, but was not the ground she was on. She understood. 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, and was watching her leave the way a hungry dog watches a rider ride past its fence. She took out the matchbook.

She took out one match. She struck it on the buckle of her satchel. It flared, and she held it up in the dusk, and she turned so that her face was in its light, and she looked back up the trail at the figure, and let it see her seeing it. The match burned for maybe eight seconds.

The figure did not move. The match went out. 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.

” Then 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, and followed it a mile east to a log building with a light in the window and a radio antenna on the ridge pole: 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 and one shoe half off her foot. He gave her water.

She raised the state highway patrol at Wesville on his radio and reported a case of suspected multiple homicide at a hollow called Drownwater Gap in the northeast corner of Haywood County, that the perpetrators were a family called Marlo, that there were physical remains in the form of unclaimed clothing and personal effects in three of the buildings, 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. The dispatcher said they would send a car at first light. She sat by the radio for the rest of the 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 in a truck accident on the Blue Ridge Parkway, she paid for his headstone. The state highway patrol arrived at five in the morning. They picked up the sheriff at Colbreth Ford, and Emmett Troll, who happened to be at the store on his route and would not let them go up the road without him. Six armed men and Delia Rowan and Emmett Troll went up to Drownwater Gap on the morning of the fifteenth of June, 1934.

Emmett opened and closed the gate. They came around the last bend into the horseshoe, 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 black and unmoving.

The path was clean and raked and gray. There were no bodies, and there were no shoes. Every pair of the forty-four she had counted was gone. The racks stood empty.

The mattresses were gone from the beds. The dishes were still on the shelves. The coffee in the pot on the stove was still warm. They searched for three days.

They dragged the pond with grapples for two more. The pond did not cloud. The grapples came up empty and dry. One of the state men refused to go into the water and would not say why.

Varity Marlo was safe on the ridge with Mother P. When the sheriff interviewed her, she said, “My family has gone home, sir. 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. And it did.

I am sorry, sir. I do not know where home is. I only know it is under the water. ”

The sheriff wrote it down.

His report, thirty-one pages, concluded that the Marlo clan, twenty-six persons, abandoned the property of Drownwater Gap on or about the fifteenth of June, 1934, for reasons unknown, leaving the youngest daughter, Varity Marlo, in the custody of a Cherokee woman on the ridge. There was no mention of the shoes. There was no mention of the seventeen missing persons. There was no mention of the pond.

It was a document of what a sheriff could file and keep his job. They burned the three empty houses on the seventeenth of June. Delia insisted. The buildings were on state condemned land and had to come down anyway.

The houses burned for six hours, and when they were gone, the ground where they had stood was scorched black, and Delia Rowan 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 on the eighteenth of June, 1934, in a state patrol car. She did not look back. She was in Bryson City by evening.

She sat down in Radford Sain’s office the next morning, gave him her survey forms and her private journal and her three letters, and gave her notice. When he asked her what had happened up there, she said, “No, Mr. Sain, I will not. It is 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 done with the mountains. ”

She lived forty-eight more years.

She went home to Irwin. She took 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 the unsigned letter to Whitfield Rush in the summer of 1938: “Kora died on the 21st of September, 1928 in Drownwater Gap. She loved you.

She was thinking of you at the end. She would not want you to wait. Please stop waiting. ” Whitfield Rush died in 1968 at the age of ninety-three.

His stone reads “Whitfield Rush, pharmacist, husband of none, friend of many. ” He never married. He never got over her. Nobody knew the letter was Delia’s until a graphology expert confirmed it decades later.

She wrote to Mother P Redbird every spring. Varity grew up on that ridge, married, and had four children, and Delia held them all at their christenings with the matchbook still in her breast pocket. It still had, whenever she opened it, twenty matches, or nineteen, or however many she needed to count that day. She could not sit with her back to a door.

Her granddaughter said it was the one thing everyone noticed about her. In restaurants, she moved chairs. In waiting rooms, she stood. She kept a bar on the inside of her bedroom door and barred it every night, and she never explained.

She died on the fourth of December, 1982, in the nursing home in Johnson City, at seventy-nine, of pneumonia, in the ordinary way. Her granddaughter was with her at the end. In the last hour she was awake, and she reached for something on the nightstand, and the granddaughter handed her the matchbook, and Delia 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 matchbook is in her breast pocket in the ground.

The granddaughter put it there. She said, when asked about it, that she had opened it before closing the coffin, and it had been empty but for two words on the inside cover, in a hand she did not know. “Thank you.

“