Carved in Bone

’em trade their food stamps for pot or meth. Lotta money to be made in supplying what they demand.”
    I thought about the questions the FBI and DEA agents had asked about O’Conner. “Some people think you might be doing some supplying,” I said. “Hard not to wonder what goes up and down such a good gravel road that’s so carefully camouflaged.”
    His eyes took on a brittle glint, and I wondered if I’d struck a nerve. “You’re right; trafficking in exotic substances is a tradition in these hills. Maybe even a birthright. My daddy tended a whiskey still for twenty years. When I was a kid, one of my chores was to split the oak he burned to cook the mash.” He shook his head. “Damned thing ended up killing him—getting him killed, anyhow, which amounts to the same thing.” He peered into his mug, swirling the liquid. “Over in ’Nam, I smoked a lot of dope; lots of guys did harder drugs. When we weren’t out on patrol—hell, sometimes even when we were—we’d be high as kites. Helped make it bearable, though I swear I don’t see how any of us made it out of there alive.” He drew a deep breath. “When I came home, I started growing marijuana. Selling it.”
    He fell quiet, and I felt my opinion of him begin to sink. “Funny thing, though, Doc. Didn’t take real long to decide I didn’t like what I was doing, or who I was becoming.” My opinion stopped its freefall and hung, suspended. “Cooke County’s a tough place, Doc. Folks up here have a hard row to hoe even when they’ve got their shit together. Turn ’em into stoners and you pretty much guarantee they won’t never amount to nothing, if you’ll pardon the triple negative. Didn’t seem the neighborly thing to do.”
    I smiled. “I agree. Not everybody does, though.”
    “Not everybody can afford to. Some people don’t have the skills or the opportunity to do anything but raise pot and draw Social Security. I can’t run anybody else’s life; my own’s about as much as I can handle. I don’t worry much about what’s legal and what isn’t, but I don’t want to make my money off marijuana.”
    “So where does that leave you? A rebel without a cause? An outlaw farmer without a cash crop?”
    Just like that, a sunny grin broke across his face. “Like I said, I think you’ll find this interesting.” Taking me by the arm, he led me into the house, through a sparely furnished front room and a surprisingly modern kitchen behind, then out onto the back porch, which was shrouded in kudzu. From beneath the foliage, I saw something completely invisible from the exterior of the house: the back porch was the entrance to another tunnel of kudzu. The residential version of the camouflaged driveway.
    “What’s this, your escape tunnel?” He didn’t answer; he just kept pulling me along, off the porch and through a trellised, arborlike structure that ran for maybe fifty yards. Then it opened out, and I found myself in an immense open space, the size of several football fields, that was dotted with a grid of telephone poles. The poles supported a network of cables, and the cables supported acres and acres of kudzu canopy, which filtered the light and tinted everything. It almost seemed we were in a dome beneath the sea, so green and otherworldly was the space. At our feet, stretching across what must have been half the valley’s floor, were neat rows of plants, knee-high, bearing fuzzy leaves shaped like pointed teardrops. Atop each five-leaf cluster was a knot of red berries.
    I gave a low whistle. “Gives new meaning to the word ‘greenhouse,’” I said. “Whatcha growing under all this kudzu? Doesn’t look much like Cousin Vern’s pot plants.”
    “Sang,” he said. “Ten acres of ginseng. Street value of about three million dollars, if I harvest it right now. Four million if I wait a year. Five, the year after that.”
    I wasn’t following him. “Street value? You talk like it’s illegal. Is it?”
    He laughed. “Sorry; old habits die hard. It’s perfectly legal to cultivate ginseng, but this is unlike any other cultivated sang on the planet.”
    “How so?”
    “Ginseng 101,” he said. “All ginseng is not created equal. There’s a huge market for sang, mostly in China. They’ve been cultivating it there for centuries. But your true Chinese connoisseur turns his nose up at their domestic crop. American ginseng— wild American ginseng, mind you, what’s known as black ginseng—that’s the cream of the