In the spring of 1923, a surveyor named Wickliffe Garner was hired by a small outfit called the Cumberland Land and Timber Company. His job was to walk the perimeter of an 1,800-acre tract of forest in the far western reaches of a county in the Appalachian hills. The deed was old. The land was described as uninhabited second growth. Garner was paid in advance, in cash, which he did not like.
Garner was 36 years old, a lean man with a quiet manner. He had served at the Argonne in 1918 and carried himself with the caution of a man who had seen war. He took the train as far as it ran, hired a wagon as far as that ran, and walked the last 12 miles into the hills with his pack, his compass, and his survey chain.
On the morning of the fourth day, he found the cabin. It sat in a flat place in the curve of a creek, in a stand of old hemlock. The clearing had been cut once, and the trees had grown back only so far. The cabin itself was small, about 16 feet on a side, built of squared logs with a river stone chimney. What stopped him was the doors. The cabin had seven of them.
Four walls. Seven doors. All of them solid, with hand-forged iron strap hinges and simple wooden latches on the outside. None of them had locks.
He chose the door on the wall facing him. Inside was a single room. The plank floor was swept clean. A fireplace sat on his left with cold ash in the grate. A narrow bed stood in the corner with a quilt folded at the foot. A washbasin sat on a stand. In the center of the room was a long table, set for six. Six pewter plates. Six cups. Six knives. Six forks. Six spoons. Laid out neat.
He counted the doors from the inside. Seven. The math was not right.
He stayed in the clearing for an hour, doing the arithmetic in his field book over and over. He could not find the trick. Then, because hunger is a steadier thing than fear, he ate. Then, because he was paid to do a job, he went back inside.
That is when he found the ledger. It sat at the head of the long table, in the place where the host would sit. It was a leather-bound book, cracked but supple. The first entry was dated April 9th, 1827. The handwriting was old, with long s's and looping capitals. The entry read simply: "Arrived this morning. The way was longer than I had been told. The host has set the table. I will stay until the rain breaks."
He turned the pages. There were hundreds of entries, covering the better part of a century. They were in different hands, different inks, on paper added to the book at different times. A peddler in 1841. A circuit-riding preacher in 1860. A country doctor in 1876. A woman in 1914. A man in 1919. Every entry was an arrival. Not one of them mentioned a departure.
Then, 18 pages from the end, he found an entry dated October 1922. It read: "I was sent up here by a man in Knoxville named Pendrith. He paid me in advance, which I did not like. I have walked four days. The cabin is just as the others described it. I will stay one night and then leave at first light." It was signed Wycliffe Garner. The handwriting was his.
He had never been here. He had never written that. But the way he made his W's was particular to him. Nobody else made a W that way.
He flipped forward. There were six more entries after his. The last entry in the book was a single line in his own hand, dated two days from the day he was sitting there reading it. It read: "I have decided to stay."
He shut the book. He walked out of the door he had come in by, across the clearing, and into the trees. He walked for an hour downstream. At the end of that hour, he stepped out of the hemlocks into the same clearing. The cabin had seven doors on its four walls.
He tried again, a different direction. Two hours later, he came down off the ridge into the same clearing. He tried a third time the next morning, marking trees with his hatchet as he went. He passed 83 blazes on the way out. When he turned to check the trees, the blazes were gone. The bark was clean.
He sat on the front step of the cabin. He was no longer laughing. He thought about the entry he had written in the future. He had not decided to stay. He was going to be very careful, he decided, not to decide it.
Late in the afternoon, he went down to the creek to wash his face. When he came back up the bank, a man was sitting on the front step of the cabin. The man was small, maybe 5 feet 4 inches, in old wool trousers and a wool coat. He had a peddler's pack at his feet. His eyes were pale. His hair was the gray of pencil lead.
"Evening?" the man said.
"Evening."
The peddler's name was Mollin Vetch. He had first come to the cabin as a young peddler in 1846. He had stayed one night. He had left in the morning. The cabin had let him go that first time. He had come back, four years later, and again, eight years after that. The intervals had got shorter. Then the dates had got tangled up in his head. He said he was somewhere between 120 and 140 years old, depending on how you measured.
Wycliffe asked him about the ledger. Vetch said the ledger had been there as long as he had been coming. He had written in it himself, 11 times. He had stopped writing in it after the 11th because he had realized the entries were not records. "What are they then?" Wycliffe said. "Invitations," Vetch said. "Offers."
Vetch said the cabin did not take people. The cabin offered. The entries with no departure beneath them were not entries of people who had died. They were entries of people who had read their own future entry, the one that said they had decided to stay. And who had, in the end, decided to stay.
Wycliffe asked how the ones who left had done it. Vetch said they wrote a letter. They sat at the head of the table where the host sits and wrote a letter to somebody they loved. They put the letter on the table between the plates. Then they walked out the door they had come in by and kept walking. Most of them got out.
Wycliffe thought about who he would write a letter to. It was, of course, his sister Verna in Asheville. She was a widow with a leaking roof. She had told him when he left, "Be careful, Wick. Be the careful one, not the brave one."
That night he slept in the cabin on the bench by the open door. In the morning, he sat down at the host's chair at the head of the table. He opened the drawer. The pen was a steel-nibbed pen. The ink was in a small glass bottle. The paper was good paper.
He wrote to Verna. He told her he was well. He told her he loved her, a thing he had not said to her since their mother had died 19 years before. He told her the money behind the stone in her garden was hers, all of it. He told her he had met a man named Mollin Vetch in the hills, and that if a peddler ever came to her door with pale eyes and hair the color of pencil lead, she should buy something from him out of kindness. He did not tell her about the cabin. He could not write the words.
He signed the letter. He folded it once. He set it on the table between the pewter plates. He stood up. He walked to the door he had come in by.
"Good luck, son," Vetch said.
"Thank you, Mr. Vetch."
"Don't look back."
"I won't."
He opened the door. He walked across the clearing to the creek. He waded the creek in his boots. He walked up the far bank. He walked into the trees. He did not look back.
He walked for an hour. He kept the rising sun to his right. He did not look back when he heard something behind him that might have been a footstep. He did not look back when he felt someone walking just behind his left shoulder. He did not look back when he saw in the mist the faint glow of a window and smelled the smoke of a stove. He walked through it.
He walked until midday. His right hip began to ache. His left boot began to rub through his sock. His mouth went dry. The dryness in his mouth was the most ordinary, the most human thing he had felt in three days. He clung to it.
In the height of the afternoon, he came down off a slope into a graded logging road. There were fresh wagon tracks in it. He put his weight down. The road took his weight. He walked north.
Three miles up the road, he came up on a logging camp. A camp boss looked up at him and squinted. "Mister, you all right? You look like you've been to a funeral."
Wycliffe Garner said, "I've been surveying."
The camp boss looked past him at the ridge he had come over. "Ain't nothing back that way. All burnt ground. Hasn't been a man passed here in 12 years."
Wycliffe rode out of the camp the next morning on the back of a supply wagon. He took the train to Knoxville. He went to the office of Cumberland Land and Timber. There was no office of Cumberland Land and Timber. The building was there. The brass plate had been changed. The new tenant was a dentist who had been in the building for 9 years. He said no land and timber company had ever rented from him. He did not know anyone named Pendrith.
The county clerk had no record of an Edward Pendrith. He had no record of an 1,800-acre tract being sold to a Cumberland Land and Timber Company. He did have a record of an old 1,800-acre tract in the right county. The deed had last been recorded in 1824. The owner was listed as Pannell. No first name. The deed had never been transferred. The land was effectively no one's.
Wycliffe went home to Asheville. He gave his sister Verna the money. He fixed the roof himself. He took a job with the city surveying lots for new houses. He never again took a contract in the back country.
Some years later, in the late 1920s, a peddler came to Verna's door. He was a small man with pale eyes. His hair was the color of pencil lead. He sold her a tin of needles and a length of blue ribbon. As he was packing up, she asked on a whim, "Did you ever know a Wickliffe Garner?"
The peddler looked at her for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then he smiled a small, kind smile. "Once, ma'am. We shared a tea."
She brought him into the kitchen and poured him a coffee. He stayed an hour. He said that Wickliffe Garner had been a careful man and a good one. He thanked her for the coffee. He left.
She told Wickliffe that evening about the peddler. Wickliffe did not say anything for a long time. Then he asked her to describe his eyes again. She described them. He nodded. He went out onto the back porch and stood there in the dark smoking. Verna, watching him through the kitchen window, thought her brother looked just then like a man saying goodbye to someone she could not see.
He lived to be 73. He died in his bed in 1960. Among his papers, Verna found a small leather-bound book in his hand. He had written in it every year on the 9th of April a single line. The first line, dated 1924, read: "Did not look back." The second, dated 1925, read: "Did not look back." There were 37 lines. The last one was dated April 9th, 1960. He had died on the 12th. The last line read: "Did not look back. Will not look back."
The land is still there. It still belongs to no one. The logging road has long since grown over. The creek the deed called Panels Branch still runs.
The man who told this story said he had walked the back of that county once in the late summer of 1979. He had crossed a ridge he did not recognize. He had come down into a clearing in the curve of a creek. He had stopped at the edge of the trees and counted, on a building he did not enter, seven doors. He turned around. He climbed the ridge. He did not look back.
He said he does not go into the back country anymore. He said he buys his deer at the meat counter at the IGA and pretends he hunted it. He said he does not mind being teased.
If you ever go walking in those old hills in the spring of a year, in country that has gone back to wild, and the birds go quiet, and you come down off a ridge into a flat place in the curve of a creek, and you see a small squared log cabin with a chimney of river stone and a stovepipe straight up through the roof, count the doors. If there are seven, leave. Walk back the way you came. Do not go in.
And if you should find that you have already gone in, and the kettle is on, and a small man with pale eyes has poured you a tea, and the ledger is open on the table, and a pen is in your hand, then write the letter. Write it to whoever it is you love. Walk out the door you came in by. And do not look back.