Long Man

JUNE 30, 1936

Sam Washburn had driven for miles without seeing a house, the gravel road turning to dirt as it snaked around the rugged bluffs. There had been rain in the night and freshets poured off the rock ledges. The nearness of the woods made him nervous. It was midmorning but dark pooled under the lowest boughs of the pines. Shadows fell across the passenger seat and shifted on the arm of his suit coat. Sometimes the sun showed in darts through holes in the leaves, but otherwise the gloom was impenetrable. When he caught a glimpse of movement through the dense trunks, he nearly veered into a ditch. Leaning closer to the windshield he saw a line of wild turkeys, running as if away from something. Washburn lived in Knoxville, in a tall brick building on a street grooved with trolley tracks, above a busy coffeehouse with pigeons roosting in the letters of its sign. He wasn’t born in the city, but he had grown used to it. In Knoxville, there had been electricity for over fifty years. Out here, privies leaned under dogwoods. Preserves lined root cellars dug into banks. Jars of milk cooled in springs. He’d been sent to Yuneetah before but not down this twisting back road, little more than a wagon trail, so narrow that branches of laurel and rhododendron scraped the roof and sides of his car. Washburn’s stomach was sour. He wasn’t looking forward to his task. He had come to talk a dangerous woman into giving up her land.

Washburn had read the reports. Her name was Annie Clyde Dodson. Last fall she’d ordered the appraiser to get off her farm and not come back until he was ready to give her what it was worth. He’d returned several times but she wouldn’t be satisfied. She seemed unconcerned about the rising waters, even with a child in the house. Washburn had grown up near the river, on the outskirts of Knoxville. His father raised cattle. Each spring the floods raged through, ripping trees from the banks by the roots and gashing welts in the earth. Many seasons his father’s calves were swept away. Once as a ten-year-old boy Washburn was walking back across the pasture from the barn when a storm came up out of nowhere, rain and hail beating down on his head. As he ran he saw the river rushing out of its banks toward him like something seeking vengeance. He fled from it with his arms pumping and his breath screaming in his throat, hail leaving red slashes across his cheeks. One stone had glanced off the bone under his eye and blacked it. He flung the feed bucket he was carrying aside and headed for the only tree he had a prayer of reaching, a tulip poplar with sturdy limbs. He dangled by one of them over the flood for an instant before finding purchase with his feet and lodging himself in the fork of the tree. He stayed there until evening waiting for the churning waters to recede, his house close enough that he could see the oil lamp burning in a front window as the sun lowered. Once the rain stopped his father came out with a lantern to find him. Surely Annie Clyde Dodson knew the river like he did. Washburn couldn’t see how anything she owned was worth the risk she was taking.

Her husband was said to be more reasonable, but it seemed he could do nothing with his wife. Before the dam gates closed she’d gone around knocking on doors, asking her neighbors to sign a petition to send their congressman. Most declined to write their names. They were glad to get out of debt and move on. Yuneetah had been drying up for decades. The timber was overcut, the rail beds washed out. After the Great War, crop prices dropped and never recovered. It wasn’t the dam that would kill the town. Yuneetah was already dead. Farmers had clung too long to the old ways. Planting on hillsides and letting fields lie fallow through winter, watching spring rains scour the topsoil away until nothing was left but a handful of limestone. As the woods thinned and pastures unrolled on both sides of the road, Washburn saw stretches of once grassy countryside furrowed with gullies of clay. Only as he drove closer to the riverbed did the land turn greener, where the floods had washed down rich settlings. The Dodson woman was the only holdout, a stubborn figure standing by the side of a grave, Washburn thought. He hadn’t met his predecessor, the caseworker she ran off with a gun. All Washburn knew of the man was that he’d been born in Yuneetah, but it must have made no difference to her. According to the report, she wouldn’t speak with him even on the porch. She kept a Winchester rifle propped within reach by the front door. The last time the other caseworker tried to visit she didn’t wait for him to leave his car. She came down the steps with the rifle pointed. She didn’t fire at him, but he wrote in his notes that he thought her capable of it. He refused to have any more dealings with her.

All the way down the road from Knoxville, Washburn had tried to think how he might handle Annie Clyde Dodson. What he might do if she pointed a rifle at him. He could picture her, like the other farmwives he’d met during his time in Yuneetah. Their skin toughened by field work, hands raw from the lye soap they made and washed with, hair the color of the dishwater they dumped out their kitchen doors. They had watched with hard eyes as Washburn appealed to the patriotism of their husbands, as he talked about the benefits of flood control and electric power. They had made their disapproval known without speaking it. If they hadn’t been taught since childhood to submit to their men, more of them might have taken up guns.

For months he’d sat with these people in their front rooms and drunk coffee at their kitchen tables. He had eaten with them at McCormick’s Cafe and smoked with them on the porch of Joe Dixon’s store. He was twenty-three and most of these men were younger with wives and broods of children to feed. He knew how his shaved face and neat hands must seem to them. His chief had told him to take off his class ring before his first trip to Yuneetah but there was no use in trying to hide his softness. No use in pretending he was anything like them. He still didn’t understand them, but he had found they appreciated forthrightness. Most of the time, all it took was respect to win them over. After a worker was killed by falling rock when the mountain was blasted for an access road, he saw how they looked with their brows knitted toward the southeast where the dam was going up. Whatever it was to them, a blessing or a curse, it represented the unknown. By then they had come to trust Washburn as much as they could. He was able to reassure them. It was a death. But it was the kind of death that had to come before a resurrection.

Before the power company hired Washburn, he was studying to be a social worker at the University of Tennessee. He had missed the Great War but there were other ways to serve. When he heard the federal government was recruiting for the Reservoir Family Removal Section, he went down to their offices in the Old Customs House on the corner of Clinch Avenue and Market Street. The chief liked Washburn well enough but had reservations about his age. He thought the job might be too big for a man straight out of college. In the end, Washburn was enthusiastic and the chief was shorthanded. The removal process was breaking down in Yuneetah, he said, and there were too many families the Relocation Service couldn’t help for one reason or another. With the dam going up faster than expected they were in danger of floodwaters from the rains. Some families were dragging their feet. Some were willing but lacked the resources, and a few were refusing to cooperate. What they needed was personal attention. Washburn was hired to convince them of the power company’s good intentions and to solve any problems that might keep them from selling. Those who still refused to move would be turned over to the Legal Division. He would help them find work, make sure their children were registered in new schools, establish relief cases on the county rolls wherever they ended up. Though Washburn had only two weeks of training before being sent into the field, until this day he’d encountered no real trouble.

Now he saw the lichen-blotched ladder of a board stile on a fence and glanced down to consult a scrap of paper scrawled with directions, knowing he was getting close. Beneath his suit coat, his white dress shirt was plastered to his skin. He was pouring sweat, as much from the prospect of staring down the barrel of the Dodson woman’s rifle as from the stifling heat. When he raised his head the house had come into view across rows of corn. Most of the farmers in Yuneetah had harvested what crops they could early and taken them to market before leaving town, but not the ones living here. The place looked as the other caseworker had described in his report, a two-story clapboard with a covered porch and a fieldstone chimney. There was a smokehouse and a corncrib out back, a barn on the verge of a hayfield with one crooked tree. Past the hayfield, pines marched uphill into the mountains. On the other side of the house were more thick woods. He turned off the road onto a track alongside the cornfield dividing the farm from the looming mountainside. Weeds slapped at his car doors and grasshoppers sprang across the hood. His wheels jarred and bumped over shelves of rough limestone, rocking the car on its springs. Once he was past the shade of the cornfield the sun shone bright on the overgrown lot that fronted the house, the piney swelling of the hills dark in contrast. Washburn had still formed no definite plan for facing the Dodson woman. He couldn’t concentrate for the chirr of cicadas. The humidity had brought them early. When he stopped the car and got out, the sound hurt his ears.

Washburn started for the porch but paused when he saw her already standing there with a dog at her side, as if she’d been waiting. As if she had watched him come. He didn’t know how he had failed to notice her there on his way up the track. She seemed to have materialized. What startled him even more than her waiting presence was how little she resembled the farmwife he’d been picturing. She was around his age, in her early twenties. It was her bearing that struck him most, how straight she stood, unlike most of the women in Yuneetah with their backs curved over their sunken bellies. He shaded his eyes against the sun and looked up at her. She towered over him. His first instinct was to turn and go back to the car. There was no way to do what was asked of him. She would not be moved. He glanced around, hoping her husband was at home. He had read the reports, but nothing prepared him. Something about her fierceness made her beautiful.

It was an effort to cross the neglected grass and approach the porch, its whitewashed posts drifted over with soot. He had already made it farther than the other caseworker without being shot at and forced himself to keep going. Then he saw the gun propped by the front door and his confidence faltered. It took gumption to set his foot on the bottom step. When the dog began to bark the woman laid her hand on its broad reddish head to hush it. Washburn’s mouth was dry as he climbed the steps. Standing across from Annie Clyde Dodson, he realized she wasn’t as tall as she’d seemed, but she was no less intimidating. She didn’t reach for the rifle. She only looked at him. He’d thought her eyes were brown, but now closer up he saw they were hazel. She wore men’s shoes and a faded shift. She had dark hair pulled back from her face and high cheekbones. Her skin was the color of coffee with milk. He was about to speak when a sound came from the open window behind her, like a child crying out in its sleep. The woman glanced over her shoulder. When the cry didn’t come again, her eyes settled back on Washburn.

“Annie Clyde Dodson?”

“Yes.”

He extended his hand. “My name is Sam Washburn. How do you do?”

“I’m tired,” she said.

He dropped his hand.

“I know you’re just doing your job, but you’re not welcome here.”

“I came a long way to talk to you.”

She studied him, down to his polished shoes. “Well. You wasted a trip.”

He hesitated, choosing his words. He decided to be direct with her. “If you’re not gone by the third of August, you’ll be evicted. I’m asking you to hear me out, before it comes to that.”

“You all say the same things,” she said. “I don’t need to hear it again.”

He lifted his hat and scratched beneath it. He didn’t know what else to do with himself. “The problem is all the rain we’ve had. It’s dangerous to stay here with the reservoir rising.”

“Then I guess you better get on back to Knoxville.”

Washburn’s cheeks colored. “You know you’re going to lose your land, Mrs. Dodson.”

“Yes.”

“Why are you making this harder on yourself?”

“You’re the one I’m making it harder on, Mr. Washburn.”

He hesitated again. “I understand your feelings. I grew up on a farm like yours.”

“This is not my farm,” she said.

Washburn opened his mouth and closed it.

“I have a little girl. It belongs to her.”

He cleared his throat. “Yes. Well. Do you want her to see you dragged off in handcuffs?”

The Dodson woman’s eyes caught fire. “That’s exactly what I want.”

“Mrs. Dodson—”

“I want her to see it and never forget it.”

“Will you just sit down with me for a minute?”

“I want her to know I fought for what was hers.”

They fell silent, facing each other. There was no sound but the chirring cicadas and the panting dog. Washburn wondered if she would reach for the Winchester beside the door but she kept still. He groped for more to say. She had confused him, made him doubt his reason for being there. Then the noise came again from the house, a child’s sleepy crying. Some of the fierceness went out of Annie Clyde Dodson. There was a sag in her posture. He stared, unable to help himself at the freckle on her collarbone, the tendril tucked behind her ear. He saw how thin she was, her cheeks hollow and the neck of her shift bagging. He could almost feel the weight of her weariness on his own chest. He took a pace backward and then wavered. After two years he still felt like he was proving himself. He didn’t want the chief to doubt his competence. More than that, it was humbling to have his authority undermined by a woman of his own age. But she had the soul of one much older. It was clear that he wouldn’t be able to sway her. She was right. He had wasted a trip. When he got to the office he would start the eviction paperwork. The thought made him uncomfortable, as if he had spoken it out loud. He found himself leaving without being told. She didn’t have to point her rifle. But as he backed down the steps, the child’s cries drifting after him, his eyes played a trick. Somehow the glare of the sun and the shade of the porch made him think he saw water running down the Dodson woman’s face. Not pouring on her, but pouring from her. Seeping between the fullness of her lips, spouting from her lids to mat her lashes, flowing from the roots of her hair and soaking her dress. The image lasted only until he blinked, but it stayed with him all the way back to Knoxville. Driving away he was glad to be done with her and the town of Yuneetah. He didn’t know then how soon he would see her again.