Airtight Case (11 page)

The Smokies were tall in their beginning, as tall as the brand-new Rocky Mountains are today. But the effects of wind, rain, ice, heat, and cold worked like a sculptor’s chisel, carving deep ravines and leaving tall peaks. Where the artist’s chisel sculpted through older, harder Precambrian rock of the high ground, it exposed younger, softer Paleozoic limestones and shales that had been overridden by the thrust fault.

Over time, the erosive effects became more like the fingers of an artist, smoothing the sharp edges and working down the mountains into gentler hills and valleys. The Paleozoic layers became the coves—valleys surrounded by higher and older Precambrian rock formations. The ceaseless weathering of the limestone in the coves created deep, fertile soils, making perfect homesteads for farmers like the Gallowses to settle.

* * *

Lindsay reached for a Dr Pepper in her ice chest and popped the tab, sending a tiny mist of fizz over her bed. She took a long drink before continuing to peruse the results of the Gallows farmstead survey by Eco Analysts.

Eco Analysts had not skimped on their work at the site. Before the company went under they had produced maps of the topography, the current vegetation, the distribution of surface artifacts, and a map based on their survey with metal detectors. They also had taken an aerial photograph and produced ground-penetrating radar profiles. The results of the survey with the metal detectors were particularly impressive, producing a prodigious number of hits around the area identified as the barn. A large version of their artifact map on the living room wall downstairs had the excavation units marked as black squares.

Lindsay pulled out the Cultural Resource Management report. CRM reports are often dry, and sometimes only a cursory exercise to fulfill the legal obligation that they be produced. This report, however, was a detailed description of the method and discoveries made in the initial culture survey. Lindsay looked to see who had written it and noted several of the current crew among the authors—including Claire.

She spotted another interesting name in the acknowledgments. The late Mary Susan Tidwell had been one of the informants who supplied the survey team with anecdotal information and led them to documents archived by the local historical society. Copies of those documents also were in the folder—Josh Gallows’s will, his deed to the farmstead, a church membership role, pages from a diary written by Hope Foute, wife of the local physician, and a copy of the record page from the Gallows family Bible. The CRM contained enough information to produce a reasonable history of the area, the family, and their farm, even without the data the archaeologists were currently recovering from the ground.

Knave’s Seat Cove, location of the Gallows farmstead, was a smaller version of the popular Cade’s Cove located in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The valley, lush in the summer, harsh and often inaccessible in the winter, was, for a period of time, home to several self-sufficient families. Josh Gallows bought his three-hundred-acre parcel from Clarence Foute in 1836 and moved to the property with his wife, Rosellen, and Elisha, his eight-year-old son from a previous marriage. Together, with the help of their neighbors, they built a house and barn.

According to information contained in his will, by the time Josh Gallows died in 1857, he also had built a smokehouse, a springhouse, and two other unnamed outbuildings. Listed among his property were eight cows, two horses, seven pigs, a loom and tackle, flax wheels, a hunting rifle, and several kinds of animal traps, all of which he left to his only surviving offspring, Elisha Gallows. Those possessions suggested that Josh Gallows had grown flax, from which he had made linen, that he raised farm animals, and that an important part of his livelihood came from hunting. He had not been a slaveholder, but kept from two to three hired hands at any one time.

“He grew flax,” Lindsay whispered to herself. “Where were the fields?”

The research questions underlying the Gallows farmstead archaeological excavation concerned site habitation and techniques used in the construction of buildings. The excavation site proper was small—about three acres—but Lindsay was curious about where the entire three-hundred-acre farmstead had extended. The original farmstead was cleared in 1838. Now, trees grew over it in abundance. How long had it remained in cultivation? Perhaps there was a clue in the trees.

The vegetation maps showed that except for the side bordering on the national park, the woods immediately surrounding the excavation site were mostly immature pines mixed with hardwoods of no more than twenty or thirty years of age. These fields could have been in cultivation until relatively recently. Or, they could have grown to mature forests and been cut several times since the last habitation of the farm.
How long is forest succession in this area?
she wondered to herself. She didn’t really know.

She had seen the old growth stands in dense wilderness areas of the Smokies where the toppling of a giant tree can open as much as a quarter of an acre to the sun. There was none of that old growth here. Two-thirds of the Smokies have been logged, some as recently as seventy years ago. Those areas have grown back a succession of pines and softwoods to dense forests of tall hardwoods of a hundred feet or more in height. None of the trees around the Gallows site came close to that.

Lindsay got up to look out the window. Although her room didn’t have a door, it did have intact pane glass windows. Most of the other windows in the house had succumbed to the rocks and bullets of vandals and were now covered with clear plastic and duct tape, or completely boarded up. The round shape of her bedroom with its three windows allowed her a panoramic view of the woods, about the only perk the place served up.

In the fading light, the mountain laurel, rhododendron, and groves of devil’s walking stick were deep green against the dark hardwoods looming behind them. She noticed Mr. and Mrs. Laurens lingering in the parking lot, talking to Erin. Before Mrs. Laurens got in her car, she shook a finger at Erin. She shut the door and Erin walked away with her head low and her arms folded under her breasts. Odd, thought Lindsay, what an intimate personal gesture a scolding is. She wondered if Erin and Mrs. Laurens knew each other before meeting at the site.

Lindsay shifted her gaze to the view of the site. In her mind’s eye, she rebuilt the house, the barn, the outbuildings. It looked like there were two springhouses, one completely excavated, and the newly discovered one. She could barely see anything of the woods except a dark tree line; however, she would bet that the flax fields were across the Little Branch Creek. Soil samples would reveal if there were flax pollen there. Perhaps she’d take soil samples from the woods, just to satisfy her curiosity.

She stretched back down on her mattress, turned on the brass lamp sitting on the floor beside her bed, and took up the CRM report again. The legal documents indicated that the Gallowses were a reasonably prosperous farming family. The entries from Hope Foute’s diary and the page from the Gallows Bible revealed a more personal story. Josh Gallows’s wife, Rosellen, had confided in the doctor’s wife who, fortunately for interested historians, kept council with her journal.

Hope Foute described Rosellen Gallows as a big-boned, doe-eyed girl, scared of her own shadow, who hated moving from their home in Maryland to the mountains of Tennessee. She was afraid of Indians and dreaded the harsh existence as a farmer’s wife. Her husband’s assurances that the government was “taking care of the Indian problem” did not allay her fears. Nor did her temperament improve as seven of eight children born to her died within their first year. Following the birth of the eighth child, Mrs. Gallows was in such an exhausted state that her husband worried she couldn’t care for the new baby boy, and the child was taken in and nursed by Mrs. Foute’s daughter. Indeed, Rosellen’s ill health must have lasted a while, for the child wasn’t returned until the age of two. He died six months later. Hope Foute wrote that Rosellen Gallows had two more pregnancies that ended in miscarriages. Afterward, Rosellen fell into deep melancholia and died of heart failure.

Lindsay touched the photocopied page from the Gallows family Bible with the tips of her fingers. The name of each child born to Rosellen Gallows was written in a neat, flowing hand. Rosellen had signed the bottom of the page. It was a sad little page and pitiful to think about Rosellen herself, sitting down and recording the birth and death of each of her children. Infant mortality was high during that time and in that place, as a cursory inspection of the old cemeteries eloquently reveals.

Josh Gallows’s health and fortunes took a downward turn after the death of his wife. Due to the onset of gout, he was unable to hunt or to run his farm successfully, even with the help of hired hands and his son, Elisha. He died in 1857 of heart failure. Elisha sold the property and moved away.

The cove community was almost decimated during the Civil War. Only a few of the old families still remained when Elisha Gallows returned in 1882 with a wife and two children. He bought back a portion of his family’s original homestead and built Gallows House near his former home—the house that was now temporary accommodations for the archaeology crew.

There was a separate page in the folder on the topic of ghosts. Mary Susan Tidwell reported that her great-great-stepgrandmother, Rosellen Gallows, had reported several instances of seeing apparitions in the woods and hearing voices.

No mystery there
, thought Lindsay. Between probable postpartum depression and the trauma produced by the loss of her children, the poor woman’s already fragile mental state was primed for hallucinations. The apparition was likely the white tail of a deer, or perhaps a hunter, or simply her own grief manifested in some ethereal shape.

Hope Foute, the doctor’s wife, reported seeing a woman in white fleeing through the woods when she was a child.
Rather clichéd
, thought Lindsay. Mary Susan Tidwell herself said she saw something white on the stairs on several occasions as a little girl while visiting her grandmother in the house built by Elisha Gallows. Miss Tidwell was related to the Gallowses. Interesting.

Many of the area’s older residents were quoted in the report as saying that Knave’s Seat Cove had a reputation as a bad place. Some said the gate to hell was in the cove, though no particular incident was cited that might have been responsible for attracting malevolence, and the area had no more murders or premature deaths than any other place. One informant told a sketchy story of a young girl drowning herself in one of the cove’s ponds, her body never found. A woman from the historical society writing an article for the local paper one Halloween blamed the manifestations on Rosellen, not so much because she lost so many babies, but because the last one had lived for two years with another family and then died when returned to Rosellen’s care. She suggested that perhaps Rosellen couldn’t leave the earth because of a guilty conscience.

Lindsay wondered why the writer of the article hadn’t mentioned the ghosts seen by Hope Foute or Rosellen Gallows herself. It didn’t escape Lindsay’s notice, either, that the only people to have seen the ghosts were children and a woman of questionable mental stability. Mary Susan Tidwell, when asked about the ghosts, said they were simply souls who had left things undone. Lindsay imagined that everyone who died must leave things undone. When in life do you have everything finished? Had she died in the woods after the attack on her, she’d have left a surfeit of things undone.

Lindsay rose and stretched. If it weren’t for Claire, this would be a great site. Nothing to beat a good ghost story. She finished her drink, dropped the can in the brown grocery bag she used for recycling, and stepped over to the window. The sound of someone coming through the curtain behind her startled her.

“Lindsay? It’s me, Drew. Can I come in?”

“Sure. What can I do for you?”

“We really need to do something about a door for you, don’t we?”

“A door would be nice.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Cal Strickland said we can make only minimal changes.”

“It seems to me that refitting a door wouldn’t constitute a change.”

“I believe he’s the one who removed it. Anyway, I came to apologize. I know that sometimes Claire is difficult to take. But you have to understand what a difficult time she’s had.”

Lindsay had paragraphs of responses to Drew’s particular defense of Claire, but she said nothing. Drew looked around the room.

“You need some chairs, too, don’t you? There are some extras in the living room. Why don’t you take one?”

I will
, thought Lindsay,
but it’s only a problem when I have company.

“Claire could be a good archaeologist. She only needs self-confidence. That’s why I gave her the job as site director.”

“The needs of Claire came before the requirements of the site?”

Lindsay hadn’t meant to say that out loud. A confrontation with Drew was the last thing she wanted. And, as many of her friends would remind her, it wasn’t really any of her business.

Drew smiled thinly. “No. I’m still principal investigator, and Claire isn’t incompetent. You know how some faculty are. They consider themselves to be gatekeepers more than teachers. At South Carolina I wasn’t on the graduate faculty, so I couldn’t do much more than give Claire moral support. She froze up during her prelims, and the committee was very sarcastic about her abilities.”

“Drew, this is none of my business. If you’re satisfied with Claire’s work, then that’s all that matters.”

“There’s a rumor that you’re here to evaluate our work on the site.”

Drew stood with her back against the wall. She slid down the wall and sat on the floor. Lindsay sat down cross-legged in front of her.

“It’s not true. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would this site more than any other need some archaeologist from Georgia to pass on it?”

“You weren’t sent here to spy on us?”

Lindsay thought for a moment on how to answer that. The moment lasted too long to deny, and Drew narrowed her dark eyes. Lindsay opted for the truth, rather than some clumsy attempt at avoiding the question.