Long Man

JULY 31, 1936

Amos followed the river south twenty miles into Yuneetah, from a train yard in Knoxville. Sleeping on sacks in boxcars and under the struts of bridges he had dreamed of this valley, a green trough carved out between two mountain ranges, made of crumbling limestone ridges plunging into steep lowlands. For most of the way he’d kept to the woods, eating berries and making pine needle tea. At ten o’clock on that morning he crossed over the Sevier County line and picked a path down the snaky bluffs to the road. He could tell by the puddles there had been rain in the night. From the looks of the sky there would be more to come. Cloud banks were moving in from the west to blot out the sun, thunder gathering in their bellies. When he saw the first scattered houses on the edge of town, some tucked in the lee of the foothills and some nearer the road, it was already clear how things had changed. No rags flapped on the clotheslines. No plow mules cropped at the fields. Even the plank shack he passed with goats wrestling in its grassless dooryard seemed empty, their bleats startling in the humid stillness. These homes at the rim of the basin would be spared by the reservoir waters as they hadn’t been by decades of punishing weather, slumped on their pilings with their porches canted and their shutters unhung.

For the past seven years, hunger had driven families out of Yuneetah looking for work. It was the same all over the country. In California Amos had picked fruit alongside migrants run off their farms by bankers. In the Midwest where they’d come from their crops were buried under veils of windblown soil and their kin were dying of dust pneumonia, choking on gobs of plowed-up earth. Camping under the arch of a viaduct in New Orleans, he had watched one man stab another in the guts over a tin of sardines. The next day he’d returned to take the gabardine suit pants from the stiffening corpse, having learned enough in these lean times to leave nothing useful behind. He had come upon other men lying frozen in culverts and ditches, children trailing cotton sacks into fields at dawn, whole towns abandoned with the smokestacks of their shut-down factories cold outlines against the skies. He’d seen thousands waiting in line outside steel mill gates where two or three jobs were being offered. Those turned away took to the rails so the boxcars he’d once had to himself were now crowded with men. He had huddled among them in hobo jungles, eaten with them from trash bins behind restaurants and been sickened by the rat poison added to the scraps to keep them out. He had seen them arrested by the dozens for burglary, stealing milk off back stoops and crackers from the shelves of general stores. He had witnessed all manner of hardship since 1929. But what disturbed him most was to see, as he descended the steep slope into Yuneetah, what had become of the place he thought of as home.

Sometimes he stayed away for a few months, sometimes a few years. This time it had been five. Under other circumstances he wouldn’t have walked through the middle of town before dusk. Out of habit, he pulled down the brim of his hat to shade his face as he moved between the low buildings. The square was deserted, the only sound a metal signpost marking Gilley’s Hotel squeaking when the wind freshened. The hotel had been standing on the same patch of sod since the 1800s. Out front a trough that the owner had kept from those days for the townspeople who still got around by horse or mule was filled with rainwater. Brocade curtains still draped the windows, but the glass was dark. Back in spring the bachelors who rented rooms there would have been perched on the steps or slouched against the trunk of the oak at the porch corner, the smoke of their home-rolled cigarettes threading into the leaves. Across the way the courthouse loomed with its shining dome roof. For once Amos didn’t hurry past. Before he would have crossed to that side only during the evening, if no lamp was burning in the sheriff’s office. Now he went to the opposite sidewalk and stopped to linger on the wide courthouse lawn. After a moment he moved on, past the boarded-up cafe with no millworkers eating dinner at the counter, past the shuttered post office with the flag missing from its pole, past the shadowed blacksmith’s shed set back from the road in a thicket, past the closed gristmill’s roof glinting over the pines. Soon anything not torn down would be swamped. He had waited almost too long.

Amos kept moving until the town square was at his back and the hills closed in on both sides. He watched his boots as he walked, their soles coming untacked, making no footprints even in the softened wheel ruts he followed. He had learned to pass without leaving a trace. He was the sort decent men and women turned their heads from. He had a missing eye and his face was scrawled with whiskers. He was tall and gaunt with long black hair, lank on the shoulders of the peacoat he wore even in the heat of summer. On the streets he wandered crowds parted around him. For the most part he was left alone wherever he went, but traveling this familiar road he felt more at ease than anywhere else. He knew before long it would be a lake bottom, minnows darting in the grass up its middle. On the left he saw acres of stumps. Across a gully a tractor was mired in the mud near a stack of nail-spiked boards and a cellar hole filled with rainwater. One winter the widower who lived there had invited Amos in and given him coffee. But that was a decade ago. He stopped and spat on the tractor’s caked tires before pushing on.

Another half mile down the road he came to a field of sedge where the foundation of the Methodist church was tumbled in a heap. He imagined the congregation hauling their river rock sanctuary to higher ground and rebuilding it stone by stone. It would have been a painstaking task but he had lived among the people of Yuneetah long enough to know what they clung to in their war against the land and the floods. They might be willing to leave behind their dried-up farms but they would take their God with them. Amos hoped at least one of them had held out against the power company. His throat was parched and there was a gnawing in his stomach. Even those who watched him with mistrust from the corners of their eyes used to offer whatever they had to eat whenever he came around, turnips and pone bread and dippers of cool water. After another stretch of woods he came at last to a derelict cabin with a chimney mortared from hog’s hair and mud, the lot choked with milkweed. A guinea hen flapped up cackling at his approach, small and ring-tailed, but there was no other sign of life. He paused to hunt out its nest and found a clutch of eggs that he pocketed to boil when he finally made camp. He rested for a spell then shouldered his bindle and walked on. Each farm he passed looked more vacant than the last. The screen door on the Shelton place was off its hinges and their hounds were gone from under the porch. The Hubbards had left a hay mower corroding in their pasture. He wasn’t much surprised. He had met few others like himself, unafraid of the men in suits who ran everything.

The townspeople had always been wary of Amos. Nobody knew where he came from. He had only fragmented memories himself, of being cast into the river when he was four or five years old. Opening his eyes in the silt-swirling murk, gulping its bitterness, being borne on its current until he fetched up on the roots of a beech tree. He’d hauled himself onto the bank and staggered into a clearing where he fell in a heap at the foot of a bluff. Shivering he turned his head and saw a crack in the earth, half hidden by ground-cover vines. He discovered a hole leading into a shallow limestone cave and crawled inside. Then he waited to die in the stagnant gloom, looking up at the sun through ropes of woodbine, earthworms coiled like wet strands of flesh between his toes. When he didn’t die and emerged at last the worms came out with him, stuck to the backs of his legs. He might have thought he dreamed it all if he hadn’t gone searching for the clearing as an older boy. He’d hacked away the ground cover with a machete and found the cave buried under years of growth, littered with detritus the floods had washed in. Whenever he returned to Yuneetah he uncovered that cave again. Each time there was something of use the river had left him. Combs with broken teeth, twists of baling wire, splinters of barn board for kindling his fires. But there were some things washed up in the floods that he didn’t claim. Since time out of mind the river had been giving with one hand and taking away with the other. The remains of what had drowned, the bones it spat back out, he left undisturbed.

It was a woman named Beulah Kesterson who took him in when he was a child. She found him one morning while she was out gathering morels. She was not old back then, her braid not yet the ivory it would turn. She looked at him in thoughtful silence, her mouth sunken over her gums. When she leaned down at last to take his hand, the pouch of fortune-telling bones she wore on a string around her neck dangled before his eyes. She led him to her cabin and scrubbed his ears, trimmed his unruly hair, boiled cornmeal mush in a kettle over the fireplace cinders and set the bowl in his hands to warm them. She called him Amos, after a twin brother that died when she was born. Though he looked old enough to talk he wouldn’t speak to her. When he finally did a few months later, the first words out of his mouth were a lie. He had stood watching a neighbor’s coonhound dig up Beulah’s cucumber seedlings and then waited for her to come out to the garden. She leaned on her hoe and said in disgust, “I wish they’d tie that blamed dog.” Amos looked up into her face and told her, “I did it.” Her eyebrows lifted some at the sound of his voice. When she recovered from the shock of hearing him speak, she asked what for. He couldn’t answer. Then she inspected his hands and saw no crumbs of dirt. When she asked why he wanted to lie on himself, he couldn’t answer that either. He’d been a liar ever since.

Amos had stayed with Beulah Kesterson for as long as he could stand it. But a roof, even one with holes, was like a coffin lid over him. At night he’d lie awake with his eyes moving over the cabin’s fissured logs, its moldy chinking, the rotting beams of the rafters showing bright coins of moon. In the daytime he’d stand in the shadows beside the hearth as Beulah cast her bones over a flowered tablecloth for the townspeople of Yuneetah, divining the paths their futures would take. Most often they were amorous young girls with chewed bottom lips, but once a wife had brought her sick husband in a horse-drawn cart and led him into the cabin leaning on her shoulder. He looked like a walking skeleton and Beulah said with her hand on the woman’s back, “You and me both know I got no reason to cast these bones.” The woman crumpled to the cabin floor and wept out loud as her husband looked on, his lips cracked and lids leaking viscous fluid. Beulah sent them away with a powder she had ground from herbs. When Amos asked if it would save him, she said, “No, it won’t.” After that he began roaming to escape Yuneetah’s troubles, through blackberry thickets and laurel hells, down cow paths and cliffside trails. By around thirteen he knew every inch of the town to its farthest reaches. He’d explored the clefts of the mountains and the creases of the valley. He had followed the riverbank into Whitehall County. One day he knew it was time to find out whatever there was beyond the hills.

While the townspeople hadn’t liked Amos, they’d tolerated him out of respect for Beulah. But when he came back several years later with a puckered web of scar tissue where his right eye used to be, his foreignness was too much for them. Meeting him on the road they might nod in greeting or even stop to ask where he’d been, but they never stood long in the shadow he cast before him, as if his return portended bad weather or death. If anyone had asked what they wanted to know, he would have told them. He had lost his right eye fighting with another man in a boxcar. All day the man had huddled in the corner sleeping or pretending to sleep on a pallet of grain sacks. As the sun lowered and a rind of moon appeared over the hilltops blurring past, Amos had let the rocking train and the smell of the trackside meadows through the open door put him to sleep. The man had crawled out of the dark and set upon him before he had a chance to pull the weapon he’d made from a rag-wrapped bottle shard out of his coat pocket. They had struggled until they both were winded, the man’s rancid breath puffing in grunts between the brown stumps of his teeth. If Amos hadn’t been caught by surprise, he wouldn’t have been overpowered. He would have thrust the glass into the grizzled wattles of the man’s neck and felt the man’s hot blood pumping over his fingers. Amos never knew what the man was after. Rather than let the man have whatever it was, he’d leapt from the train and tumbled down an embankment into a gully. When he’d lurched to his feet, there was a branch protruding from his eye socket. He wasn’t alarmed once he knew he would live. He had no particular attachment to his right eye. But he did have some attachment to Yuneetah, and to its people, whether they knew it or not.

Now Amos had walked a fair distance without seeing a single one of them, or any other living thing, as if even the squirrels and wild turkeys had cleared out. He’d come to Joe Dixon’s store ahead on the left, a weathered shack plastered with signs advertising Red Seal lye, Royal Crown cola and Clabber Girl baking powder. On the last Saturday of each month he and Beulah would leave the hollow to trade, pulling the lace she tatted and the medicines she made behind them in a wooden cart. As Amos neared he saw the door propped open and followed a worn footpath to the porch, the leaf-littered steps groaning as he climbed them, the door creaking when he pushed it the rest of the way open. He went in and stood for a while. All the familiar clutter was gone. No straw brooms hanging from the ceiling, no penny candy filling the glass bins of the counter, no shelves lined with sundries. He had never seen the place empty. There was usually someone sitting on a carbide barrel paring his fingernails. Joe Dixon leaning back in a straight chair, his big belly straining at the buttons of his shirt. Joe would sometimes offer Amos a cold drink in hopes of getting rid of him. The wind picked up, scattering leaves over the threshold and across the gritty planks of the floor. Amos glanced around. The cooler was still there against one wall. He approached it and lifted the lid. There was nothing inside but mildew. After a second he closed it back. He shifted his bindle and went out again.

Back on the road nothing stirred but him and the river, its current still rushing as it spread into a lake. Anywhere he went in the town he could hear water running. Beulah had told him Yuneetah was the white man’s corruption of an Indian word for the spirit of the river. She said the Cherokees who once lived on its shores had called it Long Man, with his head in the mountains and his feet in the lowlands. The river had surely seen and heard all that had happened in the place it flowed through. It must have noticed too those who had lived for so long on its banks moving off one by one. With the young leaving and the old getting buried, all the river was to them would be forgotten. Even the spirit the Cherokees worshipped had been defeated by the men who built dams, harnessed to run their machinery. Amos had vowed long ago not to give them the sweat of his brow. He wouldn’t submit to the ones in charge, who would have his hair shorn and his offending eye socket covered with a patch. He wouldn’t become a thing they could use, as they’d figured out how to use the river’s power. It sighed hidden behind a bank topped with shade trees, roots snarled like witch’s hair in the dampish brown dirt. That bank dirt had looked so good to him when he was a boy that he’d dug out a clot and held it in his mouth. His first impulse had been to spit out the bitterness but as it melted on his tongue other tastes had come, of lichen and peat moss and rain. He had swallowed and carried it around for a while, to see what would happen. Nothing did, he thought at the time. But maybe his insides had formed around it.

As the pines on either side of him turned to acres of farmland, he looked toward the southeast edge of town where the dam would be. He’d heard about it last winter while working alongside another drifter at a tobacco warehouse in North Carolina. Neither of them wore gloves and it had been so cold that when they put down the steel hooks they were using to unload tobacco baskets the hide was ripped from their hands. At the end of a week the other man had said he was moving on. There’s a dam going up in Tennessee, he’d said, a place called Yuneetah. Amos’s head had risen from his work. His chest had constricted around his heart. He had dropped the steel hook to the warehouse floor and walked out into the spitting snow in search of a newspaper. In the warmth of a brick library outside of Asheville he had read all about the Tennessee Valley Authority and their plans to inundate his hometown while the librarian watched him with fearful eyes from her circulation desk. He had ruminated on this knowledge for a while, days becoming weeks as he moved through alleys and dumps with home on his mind, avoiding whatever light there was, electric or lantern or carbide, not letting even the flames of the barrel he warmed himself over play on his face. He’d decided to wait until most of the town was evacuated before returning. Soon enough he would find the dam. He would stand before it and take its measure.

Amos rounded a bend and the Walker farmhouse appeared as if out of nowhere. Behind the house there was an apple tree that he used to visit as a child. In springtime when the leaves were full he liked to hide under the tree until the farmer caught him, lying on a bed of white blossoms with more drifts floating down on top of him. In late summer he would sit among the fallen apples as yellow jackets bored holes in them, eating until his stomach ached. Now he was heading toward fifty with threads of white in his hair, still craving sour juice down his chin. He was old considering the miles he had wandered for the most part on foot, across the country from one shore to the other. Then up into Canada and down into Mexico. Most of the men he had traveled and labored and grifted with were dead. Shot, stabbed, beaten and hung. One he had known since he hopped his first train was stoned to death in Boston during the trolley strike of 1910. Lately Amos’s days felt loaned out to him. He had begun to wonder if he was meant to have lived this long. He’d begun to ask himself what to do with this cheated time, even before he learned about the dam. Yuneetah’s passing only made him more certain that his own was coming.

But he predicted the woman who’d raised him would remain in the hollow for many years after he and the town were gone. Beside the farm Beulah’s cabin was tucked high in the woods, above the taking line. He could get to her by crossing a weedy track dividing the farm from the mountain. It was a long climb between tall, slender tree trunks to reach her place. When he closed his eye he could see it, having leaned there so long, through the bitter winters with snow piled to its windowsills and the warm months with rainstorms curling back its rusted roof tin. Saplings and bushes had mostly claimed back the gap where it stood, thatches of ironweed trailing up to the door. Amos thought how many times he had come and gone from that place, the ground still bald in patches from his passing feet, even though he hadn’t slept there in ages. Some nights he would stand listening to the thump of walnuts falling in the dark outside the circle of shine made by Beulah’s oil lamp. When morning came he would collect them for her, lumpy and specked and pale velvet green. He would bring them to her as payment for something he couldn’t name.

Beulah would welcome him back with a meal if he climbed up the hollow. She always did whenever he returned to Yuneetah. But behind the split-rail fence marking the boundaries of the Walker farm rows of corn rustled in the hot wind. He put his boot on the bottom rail and looked into the stalks, already tasting roasting ears. It was unfortunate for them that they hadn’t got their crop sold before they were relocated, but their loss was his gain. He knew something of the ones who had lived here before the town was evacuated. The last he heard, the daughter of the white-haired farmer who gave him apples had married a Dodson from Whitehall County and they had struggled to live off the rocky soil she inherited. But it looked as though their corn had fared well this season, lush from all the rain. Amos paused as he straddled the fence, thinking he might hear something. Maybe the call of a bobwhite or the yowl of a roving tomcat. He tried to see the farmhouse over the tasseled stalks but only its upper story was visible. After listening a moment more he climbed down into the dappled shade of the rows where it was somewhat cooler, water seeping up from the soaked loam around the edges of his boots. Looking down the row he took off his hat to smooth back his hair, the blades of the stalks drooping over his head. Then he heard another high noise coming from the direction of the house. This time it was unmistakable, the shriek of a child. But in fear or delight, it was hard to tell which.

Amos liked children. He admired their wildness. Even in the low places he kept to they could be found. The sons of junkmen scrambling over humps of refuse and around the hulls of wrecked cars. The daughters of tar-paper shack dwellers dragging naked baby dolls along backwoods railroad tracks. In a Cleveland switchyard he had come upon an old hobo beating a young boy senseless even after he fell limp. Amos had twisted the hobo’s fingers out of joint until they could no longer close into fists. The last child Amos had seen was on his way out of Oklahoma. For days all that he’d passed was coated with soot blown off the plains. When he came to the first stretch of green grass the ditch in front of it was lined with dust-streaked jalopies. In the field below the road there had been a caravan in a circle of tents and a rickety carousel, its circus colors turned dusky. He’d stepped across the ditch and walked down among the migrant families looking for some reminder of happiness. He saw the little girl outside one of the tents holding a sign with a painted white hand, advertising palm readings for twenty-five cents. He went on, lifting anything useful from the tables of wares, but on his way back to the road he came across the seer’s tent again. This time he found the little girl spinning a tin top in a patch of dirt. She looked up at him with trusting eyes. Nobody cared enough to be watching.

Now the corn was parting at the end of the row and he waited for whoever was coming. While his hearing was keen, his eyesight was poor. He couldn’t make out what rushed toward him from a distance, until it began to bark. It was a redbone hound, young and gangling, drawn to his stench of rotten wool and wind-scoured stone, the dewy earth he slept on. Like every drifter, Amos hated dogs. He retreated backward between the stalks, their leaves brushing his shoulders. The big hound advanced on him growling, hunkered down with its hackles raised. He had nearly reached the rail fence and was prepared to vault over it when a child came running after the dog. She was small, no more than three or four, wearing a flour sack dress with tousled curls in her eyes. Once she saw what her dog had cornered, not a rabbit or a groundhog but a man, she stopped in her tracks. The redbone hound went on growling. Her mouth opened but nothing came out of it. The last child left in Yuneetah. As they studied one another the clouds that had been gathering all forenoon moved over the cornfield. She seemed more curious than afraid, so he took a step forward. Ignoring the dog, Amos reached into his coat. He pulled out the tin top, a starburst of faded kaleidoscope colors radiating from its knob, gold dulled to brass, blue gone grayish, red aged to flesh, and held it out to her. Without much hesitation she crossed the short distance separating them as the dog barked harder to warn her off. Amos passed the top down into her hands as if performing a sacred rite. She accepted it with the same graveness.

But then the sharp voice of a woman called out from somewhere close. Amos froze and stood listening with his ear tilted. He could hear someone coming toward them through the field, shaking the corn. “Gracie!” she shouted, and whatever spell Amos had managed to cast over the child was broken. She shied away from him, widening the space between them again, her toes printing the furrowed earth in her wake. The hound’s barking would lead the woman straight to them. Amos had time to make himself scarce but he decided to stay and have a look at her. When she finally burst out of the stalks into the row she was too concerned with the child at first to see him standing there. “Gracie,” she panted. “Don’t you scare me like that.” Then she followed the growling dog’s gaze, still fixed on Amos, and snatched the child back by the arm. After she’d taken an instant to collect herself, her face hardened. She glared at Amos with recognition. Everyone in Yuneetah had seen him at least once. “What are you doing out here?” she demanded.

He reached up to break off an ear of corn. “Helping myself to some dinner.”

The woman clutched the child against her legs. “You’re trespassing.”

He slipped the corn into his pocket and took her in, the thin smock hanging at her knees, the white feather clinging to her shoulder, the flour on her hands. She must have been frying chicken. He knew her, even as long as it had been since he’d seen her. She was the daughter of the farmer and his second wife, a woman from the hollow that Amos had played with as a boy. The last time he visited the apple tree the farmer’s daughter was an awkward girl wandering among the haystacks behind the barn, chewing on straws, letting ladybugs crawl over her knuckles. He remembered asking her to fetch him a drink but she had run off and not come back with it. “I believe I knew your mama,” he said. “We used to swim in the river together.”

She went on glaring at him. “You didn’t know my mama.”

“You look like her.” He glanced at the child. “You and your little girl both.”

“Get off my property,” she said.

He tipped back his hat to see her better. “Why are you still here? The water will be at your doorstep before you know it.”

Her face flushed. “You got yourself some dinner. Now go on.”

Amos kept still. “If you’re waiting on a fair price for your land, you might as well move. They don’t have to give you one.”

She backed away with the child. “My husband’s at the barn. If I holler, he’ll come with his gun.” Amos could tell that she was lying. Her husband was nowhere around.

“Your land is worthless to them,” he went on. “So are you and your little girl.”

The woman had begun to tremble, unable to bluff any longer. In that moment he felt kin to both of them, standing close as the storm moved in, their bodies patterned by the same shade. He glanced again at the child, still holding the kaleidoscope top. Thunder rolled, cornstalks bent and shuffled as if waiting to see what would happen. At last Amos stepped forward until he was close enough to count the beats of the young woman’s pulse in her neck. When he reached out to pluck the feather from her shoulder, she flinched as if he had struck her. He closed his fingers around it and took up his bindle. That’s when the dog lunged snapping at his shins. Amos felt the bite of the hound’s teeth but he didn’t let on. He backed down the row without a sound, keeping his eye on the woman’s face. When he reached the fence he raised himself up on the bottom rail, pausing as if he might change his mind. Then he turned and climbed over into the road, leaving the woman and her child alone, in a field that would soon lie hundreds of feet underwater.

At half past eleven o’clock on that morning, three days before Annie Clyde Dodson was to be forced off her land, she ran through the corn with her daughter on her hip. Gracie clung tight with her legs locked around Annie Clyde’s waist, the dog rushing ahead of them toward the house. Above, the sky looked like a bruised skin barely holding back the rain. The wind blew Annie Clyde’s dress up and whirled through the trees, shaking the cornstalks like something chasing her. As if Amos had only fooled her into thinking he was gone. She didn’t let herself look back until they emerged from the corn. When she saw nothing besides the green field behind her she stopped running but still hurried around the side of the house with Gracie jostling in her arms. Standing at the bottom of the stoop she threw open the kitchen door with a bang, letting in the stormy gloom, and set Gracie inside on the linoleum. “You stand still while I tend to Rusty,” she said, smoothing the tangled curls out of her daughter’s face. “I’ll be right back.” She turned around to catch the dog by the scruff of his neck and led him to the elm tree shading the barn lot. She meant to tether him by the chain wrapped around the base of the trunk. She hated to do it, but she would feel better with him tied close to the house in case the drifter came into the yard.

She was fumbling with the chain when the blackbirds flocked down on the hayfield behind the barn. They came in the hundreds, rustling through the weeds and roosting in the apple tree, milling over the winey fruit underneath. It was the wind that brought them. Her father used to say storms bothered birds’ ears and made them fly close to the ground. The rain hadn’t started, but it soon would. Water stood ankle deep in the grass, mist hanging over the valley and ringing the crests of the mountains. It had been raining all spring and summer. Now she had something else to worry about. As soon as she saw the blackbirds she knew that she couldn’t hold Rusty. He was still strung up from what had happened in the corn, hackles raised and tail high. He gave a sudden lurch and Annie Clyde lost her grip on him. She snatched after him but he was too quick. She watched helpless, a hand to her forehead, as he dashed off barking. Then she glanced over her shoulder at the house. There was a plucked chicken in the basin and apples to be peeled for the last pie she would make Gracie. The last one from their tree. She’d meant to bring in a few roasting ears as well before Gracie took off. She was always running away like that, tagging after the dog. “I swear,” Annie Clyde would tell her. “You’ll be the death of me.” But at night she smiled to reach in Gracie’s pockets and find the treasures she’d wandered off to collect. Forked twigs, buttercups, crawdad claws, rocks of all kinds. Annie Clyde cursed Rusty under her breath. Any other time she would have let him alone. But her husband James was gone off to Sevierville and there was no telling when he’d get home. The dog was the only protector she and Gracie had.

She headed back to the kitchen door, tripping up the stoop. Gracie was still holding the tin top the drifter had given her. Annie Clyde’s stomach turned at the sight of it, but there was no time to throw it away. She swung Gracie onto her hip again and went running with her, out past the elm and the charred trash barrels standing amid puddles floating with cinders, inside them heaps of ash wetted to gray lumps from the storms. As she cut through the blowing hayfield weeds the blackbirds lifted off together in a train the way they had landed. Rusty gave chase, tracking the rash they made across the overcast sky. By the time Annie Clyde and Gracie reached the apple tree Rusty had disappeared into the woods at the end of the field. She put Gracie down among the fallen fruits, pecked and streaked with droppings. She whistled and Gracie shouted for Rusty but he wouldn’t come, not even to the one he loved most.

Annie Clyde didn’t like the thought of taking Gracie back to the house without the dog around to bark. She couldn’t stop seeing Amos’s one dead eye. He used to come into the yard when she was a girl, asking for water and apples. Over the last decade many had knocked on their door looking for work or food. When Annie Clyde’s mother was alive she gave what she could spare, even to Amos, but she had mistrusted him. Annie Clyde didn’t trust him either. But she couldn’t deny what he’d said in the cornfield. The power company didn’t care about her or Gracie. Her neighbors didn’t understand why she wouldn’t move. She wanted to tell them, but she was too used to keeping to herself. The farm was part of her. She knew the lay of its land like her tongue knew the back of her teeth. On the east side of the house was the field her father had planted with alfalfa and the slope at the verge of the hollow where he’d grown tobacco. On the west was another field where he’d sown wheat and beyond that a stand of pine timber. Below the house were several roadside acres of corn and behind it this hayfield at the foot of the mountain with this apple tree rooted in the weeds. As a child she’d walked among the stobs of the tobacco field after the harvest, touching the teepees the bundled stalks made. She’d stood in the shed under curing leaves, hiding in shadows the same brownish color the wrinkled tobacco was turning. She would pry up flat limestone rocks that her father said were made from the beds of evaporated seas, marked with the fossils of ancient mollusks, and bang them together to hear their echoes. Her father was called Clyde and after three stillborn babies, his wife vowed to give the next one his name whether it was a son or not. Losing the farm would be like losing him all over again.

Now her father’s forty acres were quiet aside from the wind stirring the ropes of the swing hanging from one of the apple tree’s crooked branches. Gracie stood with yellow and green leaves fluttering down around her. She lifted her toe to scratch her ankle and Annie Clyde wondered if she would be able to tell her child someday. About the farm and the swing and how she looked in this moment, wearing the light blue dress with pink rosebuds that Annie Clyde had sewed for her. How she looked out from under her matted eyelashes with her nose running some. She seldom cried and Annie Clyde wondered if she might have bitten her tongue on their way through the hayfield. She knelt and wiped at Gracie’s upper lip. “Where does it hurt?” she asked.

After thinking for a second Gracie pointed to her knee. “Right here.”

Annie Clyde tried to smile. “That’s a scab. You got shook up, is all.” She paused to wave the gnats out of Gracie’s face, to make sure her voice wouldn’t break. “Did that man scare you?”

Gracie brought her thumb toward her mouth and Annie Clyde tugged it away. Gracie raised the top to show it without answering, the tarnished knob glinting. “Look,” she said.

“Can I have it?” Annie Clyde asked. When she reached for it, Gracie drew it closer.

They studied each other’s faces. “Rusty bit him,” Gracie said.

“Yes,” Annie Clyde said. “But he’s gone now.”

“Where did he go?”

Annie Clyde looked away, down at the fruit on the ground. “You want an apple?”

Gracie nodded, eyes wet.

“Let’s find you a good one.”

Annie Clyde pretended to sort through the fruit but she was rattled. Gracie squatted with her dress hem soaking up puddles, holding the top aloft in one hand. Annie Clyde was still trying to calm herself when she heard a loud crack from the woods at the end of the hayfield. She jumped up and turned in that direction, listening. Her first thought was not of the dog out there stalking blackbirds, but of Amos out there somehow spying on them. Within seconds another crack came, like a lightning strike. She waited with her eyes fixed on the trees for thunder. Then there was a pop and another, a string of them picking up speed. After that came a whoosh and a roaring crash. The treetops shivered, disturbed as though something monstrous had passed among them. In the wake of that sound there was nothing but the buffeting wind, even Gracie awed to silence. As Annie Clyde stared at the woods, she felt Gracie’s warm fingers creeping into her own. Annie Clyde looked down into her daughter’s upturned face. “We’re all right,” she said. “It was just another tree falling.” Gracie didn’t say anything back but Annie Clyde knew. They both needed the dog around to ease their minds. She decided it wouldn’t hurt to walk a piece into the woods. Sometimes the sky brooded all day before it opened up on Yuneetah. Sometimes the wind blew like this for hours before the first drops fell like slugs. Her father would have said the dam had disturbed the natural order of things. After listening another moment for thunder Annie Clyde and Gracie started across the hayfield, parting the coarse weeds with their legs.

At the end of the field they entered the shade, Annie Clyde watching the ferny ground for copperheads. In this dampness everything was growing. Liverwort sprouted on wet rocks, jewelweed poked up through brushwood, lichens wreathed south-facing trunks like chains of greenish ears. They called Rusty’s name as they went, the blackbirds he had been chasing settled in the branches overhead. Farther in they came to the thicket where Annie Clyde and James chopped wood, the standing rainwater around the stumps swirling with chips of sawdust. The trees there were so tall it made her dizzy to look up at their swaying tips. At the edge of the thicket, where freshets drained down from the ledges making gullies between the bases of the trunks, they discovered what had fallen. There was an old beech lying at the foot of the mountain.

Annie Clyde had seen more than one tree uprooted in all this foul weather. She had heard the rain every way that it fell, hard like drumming fingers, in sheets like a long sigh, in spates like pebbles tossed at the windows. When she crossed the road and went up the bank, she could see water glinting between the tree stumps. The river had already become a lake. As she watched it seemed to lie stagnant, but maybe it was biding its time until dark. Then it would move again. She could almost hear it seeking whatever there was outside its banks, searching fingers moving over gnarled root and scaly stump bark. Leaking between trunks and lapping at grasses, mussels clicking against each other and the scoured rocks of the shoals. She dreamed of it coming for her, black and rippling. She woke afraid it would be pooled around the porch steps, the rains bringing it closer and closer. Since spring a scent had been lingering in the eastern part of town where the woods and pastures were halved by the river. She smelled it in the house sometimes, algae and carp and decayed wood from long-ago boats run aground. When she opened her door it slipped in as if to scout her home before the lake came to fill her chimney flue with the opposite of fire.

It was the biggest trees that fell in all the wind and rain, the oaks and beeches and hickories, because of their shallow roots. It was harder for them to find purchase in Yuneetah’s soil, thin clay with limestone caves underneath. She guessed it was over four years ago that James had buried his horse in a deep cave back here and filled in the hole. A Tennessee walker named Ranger. Now the beech trunk lay over the horse’s grave as if to mark it. Just when she was about to whistle for the dog again, Annie Clyde heard the snap of a twig beneath the wind. She froze in her tracks, squeezing Gracie’s sweaty hand. “Rusty?” she called into the thicket across the fallen tree. There was a thrashing in the underbrush and she shouted again. “Rusty! Here, boy!” When a low shape shot out of the shadows around the beech’s root ball Annie Clyde stopped breathing, although she knew it was only the dog minding her at last. Rusty loped to Gracie’s side with his tail wagging, snout caked with clay the color of his coat. “Bad dog,” Gracie told him as he licked her chin. Annie Clyde remembered Gracie crouched in the dirt of Dale Hankins’s barn after his hound had whelped, the pup with a white patch on its chest tottering over to sniff her fingers. From the day Gracie started walking Rusty followed her everywhere, though James was the one who wanted him for a hunting dog and gave him his name. Annie Clyde didn’t know how to tell Gracie they’d have to leave him behind for a while if they moved.

Rusty must have lost interest in the blackbirds after the beech tree came crashing down. Annie Clyde could see where he had already dug around its trunk. Ferns crushed in the fall were disarranged, red clay turned. Annie Clyde could see, too, a white bone in the rich humus. Much like the trees, bones were being dislodged across the valley by weather and water, swept along as the lake moved toward the roads. Most of the dead had been exhumed and reinterred elsewhere, their surnames chalked on the lids of pine boxes as they rode in hearses to strange churchyards. But some had been left alone, those whose kin chose not to disturb them or victims whose grave sites were unknown. Those she imagined the overflow released from secret vaults of mud and crag and riverside root. Femurs sailing on eddies, skulls rising toward the surface seeking light after centuries buried, the unleashed river rushing in to fill burrows and trenches like mouths open to drink its alluvial silt. But this bone unearthed by the rain or uprooted by the fallen tree wasn’t human. It belonged to James’s horse. She used to ride double with her husband on Ranger’s back, his arms loose around her waist and holding the reins in her lap. He would rest his chin on her shoulder or she would lean her head against his chest as they ducked under bowers of twilit leaves in the cool of the evenings, forgetting whatever work they’d left undone.

As Annie Clyde approached the horse’s grave for a closer look the beech’s limbs creaked. Its leaves twitched and shifted. Gracie let go of Annie Clyde’s hand to feel the silvered scabs of the bark, the scars and bumps. Annie Clyde opened her mouth to say they’d better get on to the house but the words stuck in her throat. She found that she was shaking. Her legs were weak. This long morning had been too much for her. She had to get her breath. The rain wouldn’t harm them if it came. Some hot afternoons they ran out of the house and played in the chilly showers. “Let me see that,” she said, reaching for the tin top again. Gracie resisted for only a second this time before giving it over. Annie Clyde slipped it into her dress pocket like something poisonous. Then she tucked her hands under Gracie’s arms and lifted her onto the beech’s back. As Gracie sat swinging her feet Annie Clyde rested against the end of the trunk. Rusty sniffed at the root ball, mounded with orange mud and green sod like a thatched roof for the hut the bowing roots made. They looked almost alive, a tortured mass of petrified legs, twined arms and hooked fingers, overhung with a finer layer of filaments like the stringy hair of a woman caught out in the rain.

If they were staying, James would have come with his saw when he got home and cut the fallen beech into logs. Last year he’d worked with the reservoir clearance gangs stripping the banks of timber to make navigation channels for boats and to keep the penstock in the dam from getting clogged with brush. The power company said the people could take home the good logs but most had no means of carrying them so they ended up being burned. For weeks the smoke was everywhere, Gracie’s eyes tearing as she played in the yard. James said it would be crazy to turn down any kind of work and she couldn’t dispute him. But it had felt like a betrayal to her.

There were many things she and James had done and said to hurt one another since the power company came to town, but the worst for her had been about a month ago. He had walked up to the porch where she was snapping beans and told her, “The Hankinses’ back pasture’s flooded. That’s right across the hill. Gracie’s liable to take off and be in that lake before you know it.” He was always finding ways to tell her they should leave without saying it outright. Most of the time he was careful with her, perhaps feeling guilty for not standing with his wife against the government, in spite of his own convictions. Not wanting to argue, she’d gone back to her beans. When she didn’t respond he’d shaken his head. “I don’t know,” he’d said. “Sometimes I believe you love this place more than you do me or her either one.” She was stunned by how little he understood her. She loved the farm, but that wasn’t why she fought the power company. From the time she realized she was expecting, she had dreamed of her child roaming the fields in summer. She knew the trees she wanted her child to climb, the flowers she wanted her child to name, the fruits she wanted her child to taste. But her husband had still been talking, and she’d lifted her eyes to meet his as he told her about the job in Michigan. He’d said their nearest neighbor Dale Hankins’s brother was a foreman at a steel mill. He had offered to hire Dale and James both.

Since then she had watched James making plans to settle them up north, too wounded to talk to him about it much. She had let him rent a house in Detroit and take off their furniture without stopping him, not knowing what she wanted herself. She had thought in the beginning she would never give up the farm. She had watched the power company mapping the reservoir area and waited for them to send her one of the field appraisers. When he came in his suit and striped vest, wingtip shoes and a tack gleaming in his tie, she sent him right back to them. The man said he was offering her fair market price but she asked how much more he was going to give her for the appreciation of the land and the trouble it would cause her to move. She told him to figure out how much all of that was worth and come back. The last time he returned, she listened in silence as he explained how things worked. He said his report went before a committee of county agents that knew the value of land in Yuneetah. He hadn’t come up with the price and she ought not to blame him if she didn’t like it. When she suggested he should tell his committee that she wasn’t going anywhere until the water floated her out, he threatened her with condemnation proceedings. After the appraiser left she told James she was going to make them send a marshal with a court order. She was going to appeal her case to the district court and the circuit court of appeals if it came to that. She had seen how fed up her husband was then, how ready to move on, maybe with or without her. James said, “You can’t stand against a flood, Annie Clyde.” He was right, but she’d wanted at least to put the power company out some.

In the end, she had worn down like the rest of the town. There was a dead tiredness that sometimes a person had to obey and lately it had come over her. She went to bed some nights without washing her feet. She knew the land would be taken. Her labors were useless. She’d seen the homes of her neighbors knocked down and burned. She had seen the burial mounds on the riverbank, made by Indians that had lived in caves along the water longer ago than the Cherokees, destroyed by archeologists from Knoxville and the workers they’d hired to do the digging. The largest had been over thirty feet tall with trees growing up its sides, their hoary branches like a covering of cobwebs in winter. They had found among the tools and pottery shards counters used for a game like checkers. She heard the diggers weren’t careful enough and some of the bones were broken, splintered to pieces. Flakes so fine they had returned to dust, particles whirling among the water bugs. Washed away with all those other lost remains.

She guessed part of her hadn’t believed August would ever come, but now it was upon her. She couldn’t fathom what it would be like in Michigan. She pictured a house on a square of balding grass near a curb, the dirty color of winter slush. James going off in the early mornings to a factory where he would work behind a welder’s mask, sucking in and blowing out the suffocating heat of his own breath, leaving her and Gracie alone. She hadn’t even told Gracie they were leaving. She didn’t know how to explain it to a three-year-old. But these last few days she’d been thinking, wondering if she could make it farming on her own. Forty acres was too much, but ten she might be able to manage. Maybe she should have taken the house in Whitehall County the relocation man had offered to show her, less than twelve miles away. She’d felt it didn’t matter how close she lived to her farm. It would still be underwater. James had accused her of being stubborn and selfish but she listened to him more than he thought. He said change was coming whether she wanted it or not. Neither of them had grown up with much, but these past several years were the leanest they’d ever known. He said she ought to be thankful that Gracie might have it easier someday. He said farming killed their parents. But at least the years Mary and Clyde Walker had were spent where they belonged, on their own land. Annie Clyde couldn’t bear to think of Gracie not knowing the closeness to God she had found in this valley. For the first time since Gracie’s birth, Annie Clyde wasn’t sure what was best for her child.

There wasn’t much time to decide one way or another. She and Gracie were supposed to go north with James tomorrow. Two weeks ago he had come driving up in a Model A Ford, the radiator hissing steam. He’d sold their mules to buy it. When he stepped off the running board his eyes were lit up. He grabbed Annie Clyde and kissed her. But his excitement had worn off fast. So far the old stake-bed truck had given him nothing but trouble. He was gone now to see a man in Sevier County about fixing the radiator. Annie Clyde would just as soon he took it to the junkyard. He claimed they needed it to haul their belongings but there wasn’t much left to move. In the front room there were curtains and a rocking chair. In the kitchen there was the pine table her father made before she was born, before his first wife died of rheumatic fever. Like the maple bed upstairs that he’d built for her mother when they got married. Mary Walker had passed away in February of 1933 from a cancer of the womb. She died in that bed, during a winter so cold Annie Clyde saw her mother’s last breath. Nothing else remained but stray wisps of cobweb.

James had wanted to leave Yuneetah long before the dam gave him a way out. Annie Clyde knew how hard the farming had been on him. She knew how much he hated the river after he lost his father to a flood. She knew how reserved she was and that her silence must have been lonesome for him. It was possible she hadn’t told him often enough how much she loved him. In the beginning of their marriage, Annie Clyde’s need for James would sometimes smother her. She would watch the front window for him to come in from the fields and rush out to meet him. But after she saw that handbill during their first autumn together, things were different for her. It was an advertisement for factory work up north. She was sewing a tear in his shirtsleeve and noticed it in his breast pocket. She thought it was a matchbook but found a square of paper instead. She unfolded and read it as he sat across the fireplace from her, drowsing in his chair. She would rather have found a love letter from a woman. “What’s this?” she asked. James opened his eyes and what she saw in them tightened her chest. He looked like he had been caught. “I never asked you to change your plans for me,” she said, holding the handbill out to him. “You made your own choice.” He swore to her then that it meant nothing, that he wouldn’t dream of leaving her to take care of her mother and the farm alone. “I don’t even know why I picked that up,” he said. But Annie Clyde knew, whether he did or not. She wouldn’t let herself watch for James out the window anymore, though her longing was as smothering as ever.

She had seen him for the first time one summer when he worked pulling tobacco for her father. He was eating his dinner under a tree, cutting off pieces of pear and feeding himself with the blade of his knife. He still insisted he saw her first, being baptized in the river. Annie Clyde was raised in the Free Will Baptist Church and James’s uncle was a Methodist minister, but sometimes the congregations joined for special services. He claimed to have worshipped her from the minute he laid eyes on her, standing on the bank with her dress molded to her skin and strands of hair plastered to her face like drawings of vines. But they had met a year before the baptism, when she was sixteen and he eighteen. He had a ruddy look about him, like clay. He smelled of it when he came in from the field. She remembered his auburn hair rumpled and his long legs crossed in front of him. Later he came into the yard for a drink and she brought him the dipper. He thanked her and went on. By the time he came looking for her after the baptism, she had forgotten about him. Her thoughts were scattered then. After decades of farming, Clyde Walker was giving out. Most mornings he couldn’t get up. Annie Clyde had prayed on her knees at the revival for her father to get better, but he only weakened. After he died the neighbors brought casseroles, cakes and pies. When the food was gone, Annie Clyde’s mother sent her to return the dishes. James found her breaking them against a tree with blood running down her fingers. He took her by the shoulders and led her to the river to wash her gashes. “My daddy’s dead, too,” he said, lowering himself down on the bank beside her. His hands were calming on her shoulders. He left them there until she was ready to stand. Before getting up she looked into his face and finally remembered him sitting under a tree, eating a pear with the blade of his knife.

James had begun to visit once a week. She felt obliged to offer him food they didn’t have, to sit with him on the porch and make small talk. When he asked to help with the chores, she was too beaten to protest. Annie Clyde and her mother had struggled to run the farm by themselves. Getting up before dawn to make a fire and heading out with the milk pails. Feeding the chickens, gathering the eggs, weeding the garden. Hauling water in from the springhouse and ashes out from the stove. Hoeing corn, digging potatoes and chopping wood. By then Annie Clyde had dropped out of school to work in the fields. Sometimes she leaned on the plow handles, tears dripping off her face to salt the cracked ground. She learned to be relieved on Saturdays when James came riding to the farm on his horse with his sleeves rolled up. Then one morning James tied Ranger, letting him crop the roadside clover, and loitered at the fence rather than going straight to work. Annie Clyde went down the path to see what he wanted, hair and shoulders dusted with pollen from the bottom weeds she’d spent all morning hacking down. When she reached the fence, James opened his mouth but closed it again, whatever he meant to say forgotten. He stood there by the road in silence, studying her face. Then he asked if she would like to go for a ride with him. She was about to say she didn’t have time to fool around, but found herself looking into his earnest eyes, the delicate blue of bird eggs. He leaned in close, arms folded on the fence post, and kissed her. It was out of weariness that she finally surrendered to James. But there was a sweetness in it. When he pulled back she hadn’t wanted him to stop.

Annie Clyde’s mother never asked her to marry James, but she spoke of what a dependable husband he would make. It was plain to Annie Clyde what her mother wanted. Mary was growing thin, her flesh stretched like onionskin over her bones. She hardly resembled the beauty Annie Clyde had seen in pictures, dressed up in gloves and a hat with her lips painted red, coiffed head lowered against the sun. Annie Clyde couldn’t run the farm on her own, and Mary wanted someone to take care of her daughter when she was gone. By the summer of 1932, Annie Clyde knew her mother wouldn’t last much longer. When James proposed one day as she stood over the kitchen woodstove, using the last of their cornmeal to make a bite to eat for him, she couldn’t resist leaning against his strong arms. A few months later, on her wedding day, she tried not to show her doubts. Mary had become too feeble to leave the house. She watched from the bed as Annie Clyde pinned a pillbox hat to her hair. She offered to button Annie Clyde’s gloves for her at the wrists. Somehow Annie Clyde had managed to keep her hands steady as she held them out. But she was helpless to still them when James’s uncle the Methodist minister came to drive her to the church in his black Packard. It was August and the fields were turning golden, the sky cloudless over the spire. Across a pasture was the white parsonage where James had lived with his aunt and uncle after his parents died. Soon they would both be orphans. It was the one thing they would always have in common. Standing outside the double doors of the church holding a bunch of wildflowers, Annie Clyde felt light-headed. Just before entering the vestibule she looked up to see a grackle on the peak of the roof and it heartened her some. She took off the pillbox hat and tossed it into the rhododendrons beside the steps. She shook her hair down and went inside. As the pianist played the wedding march, she fixed her eyes on James at the end of the aisle in an ill-fitting suit, his hair slicked down and combed back. He looked like a little boy. She released a breath and went to him, making up her mind to love him however she could.

Annie Clyde had come to feel closer to her husband. If she found him bent washing his face at the basin and pressed her cheek against the flesh of his back, it seemed that any worry she had would be erased. In their bed at night, under quilts in winter or naked on top of the sheets in summer, he explored even the inside of her mouth with his fingers. She tasted the bitterness of his shaving soap. His caught breath filled the cup of her ear. Once when she was big with Gracie, he pushed her dress up over her thighs and stomach, over the mounds of her breasts. She raised her arms for him to take it off and they looked together, James propped on his elbow. They took in her taut navel, her darkened nipples, her swollen ankles. He placed his hand on the round of her womb and the baby’s foot or fist rose to meet it. But Annie Clyde wasn’t the only one whose body had changed. During her pregnancy she cared for her mother while James ran the farm alone. He would leave the house before dawn with a bucket of cold dinner and stay gone until suppertime. He butchered the hog, chopped down trees for wood, spent whole days in the corncrib shelling or carrying boxes of kernels to the mill to be ground. While she had gained weight, he had lost some. There were new shadows under his eyes, new skinned places across his knuckles, a spider bite on his forearm from a black widow hiding in the woodpile. She thought how it must have hurt him and tears rolled from her eye corners toward her ears. James asked, “Why are you crying?” She said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Look at you. How beautiful you are.” She had held on to him, unable to tell his warmth from her own, not wanting the night to be over.

Then morning lit the curtains again, and the silence between them came back. It stretched out long at the breakfast table, with the kitchen still and Mary dying upstairs. In the evenings before Annie Clyde put out the lamps to save oil, she’d catch him drowsing again in his chair by the fire as she sewed buttons back on his shirts and feel as separate from him as she did from the dark outside. She’d think of the mountains brooding over the farm, the wind sweeping its forty acres. She wanted to talk to James, but they seldom knew what to say to each other. Annie Clyde saw her fault in it. She had always been one to keep to herself. Even as a baby she had wriggled out of Mary’s confining arms. When she started school she had made no friends. At first the girls and boys were drawn to her prettiness. Lined up in the mornings at the schoolhouse door, the boys had pulled her hair and the other girls had given her gifts of ribbons and peppermint. But her sullenness had finally driven them away. Annie Clyde didn’t know why she acted like she did. The others were the same as her in their flour sack dresses with nothing but pone bread for their dinner. All of them had toes poking out of holes in their shoes. There were no outcasts among them. Annie Clyde had made an outcast of herself. She would sit on the schoolhouse bench stiff and straight, too conscious of her sleeve touching the arm of another child.

Gracie had changed things when she came along. Annie Clyde couldn’t have kept all to herself if she wanted to anymore. Gracie followed her everywhere, always talking and singing and romping with the dog. Always wanting Annie Clyde’s attention, showing her buckeyes and seedpods and bugs. Whatever Annie Clyde’s neighbors thought of her sullenness, they’d been drawn to Gracie. She never felt like part of the town, but her daughter was somehow. They would stand at their mailboxes and wave as she walked Gracie down the road to Joe Dixon’s, where the old men bought her sticks of horehound candy. At church the old women took her onto their laps. Gracie looked like Annie Clyde, but she was more like James on the inside. She had her father’s friendliness about her, his kind nature. Last year when Gracie was two they took her to a molasses-making at the Hankins farm across the road. Dale Hankins grew sorghum cane, his back field high with thin stalks, their ends tasseled umber with seeds. Before dark he would feed the stalks into a cane mill between steel rollers, the juice pouring into vats to be boiled. It took ten gallons of cane juice to make one of molasses. All the neighbors for miles gathered to gossip and tell stories, the little ones playing and the teenagers courting, the men leaning under the shade trees with their hats stacked on a post of the hog pen and their overalls still dusted with the work of the day. Once the moon rose and the cane juice was ready for boiling, Dale would bring out his guitar. It was tradition for some of the children to dance on the cane fodder scattering the ground. That night Gracie had thrown off her shoes and whirled barefoot to the strumming, dress flared out like a bell. She’d stomped and shook her curls as the whole town laughed and clapped. Annie Clyde had felt close to her neighbors. But then she’d noticed Beulah Kesterson with the pouch of bones around her neck, wrinkled face lurid in the firelight, watching Gracie without smiling. After that, the night was ruined for Annie Clyde. The old woman gave her an ill feeling.

Now she looked at Gracie sitting on the back of the fallen beech and felt overcome with such loss that she had to shut her eyes. She had managed not to cry for two years and wouldn’t let herself break down now. This was like dreams she’d had as a child of her parents dying, without the relief of waking and knowing it wasn’t true. The wind rose again, blowing strands of hair across her face and fluttering the sleeves of her dress. She opened her eyes, too aware of a weight in her pocket. It was the tin top the drifter had given Gracie. It seemed to Annie Clyde in that moment like a threat or a curse. On impulse she pulled it out with disgust and tossed it while Gracie wasn’t looking into the shadows under the beech tree’s tortured roots. She felt somewhat better when she couldn’t see it anymore. She wiped her palms on the front of her dress then went to lift her daughter off the beech’s back, swung her up and held her close. Gracie’s slender arms came around Annie Clyde’s neck and they studied each other, their noses inches apart. Gracie’s eyes were the same as her grandmother Mary’s had been, wide brown with an amber shine to them. Gracie took a lock of Annie Clyde’s hair and twisted it up in her fingers, like she used to do when she was nursing. “Come on,” Annie Clyde said, pushing her nose against Gracie’s. “We better get Rusty to the house before he runs off and leaves us again.”

Silver Ledford heard the Model A Ford that belonged to James Dodson rounding the bend before she saw it. She knew it was her niece’s husband because the only other vehicle left in Yuneetah belonged to the sheriff and he had no purpose out this way. The Dodsons had been on her mind all morning. Now here came the truck that would drive the last of her people off to a city she couldn’t picture. Some man taking her niece away, as a man had taken away her sister. She stepped over into the ditch and stood in the marsh of it, tall and rail thin with black hair that had dulled to smoky gray over the forty-four years she’d spent for the most part alone. She kept still as though James wouldn’t see her if she didn’t move. But he did see her. He slowed the puttering truck and ducked his head to look at her through the cranked-down window. She feared he would offer her a ride because of the wind and the lowering sky. He seemed to consider it, but raised a hand to her instead and went on. She nodded to him once he was past. Then she climbed out of the ditch, the cotton sack strapped to her shoulder getting snagged on pricker bushes. She watched until the Model A swerved out of sight between the banks, high with spires of purple monkshood. For a while she lingered in the middle of the road, giving James time to get home, not wanting to catch up with him no matter how the weather threatened. Silver supposed all the years alone had made her this way. She’d forgotten how to do anything but hide from people.

Last week Annie Clyde had come up the mountain to ask Silver a favor and brought the child with her. They found Silver picking cucumbers in the garden, a long plot out behind her shack crowded with cornstalks and ruffled with tomato vines. She saw their hound first, trotting along ahead of them. She turned her head to watch him go sniffing around the back lot. She liked animals but not the kind that begged for scraps. When she turned back Annie Clyde and Gracie were standing at the edge of the garden holding hands, the ancient firs that grew so towering up where Silver lived dark green behind them. Above them clouds scudded across the blue sky. Silver would remember them that way for as long as she lived. She had marked every detail. The loose threads at the hem of Gracie’s dress and the apples bulging its pockets, the residue of flour rubbed into the grain of its sacking. Annie Clyde’s hip bones poking at the thin cotton of her grayed shift, the briar scratches scabbing on her shins. By the time those scabs fell off the girl would be in some other place, this one growing more and more distant in her mind. Silver couldn’t stop staring at Annie Clyde’s legs. She kept her eyes fixed on them as the girl said her piece. It was easier than looking at her face. Though Silver wasn’t listening, she knew what her niece was talking about. The time had come. Annie Clyde and Gracie were leaving Yuneetah.

Silver couldn’t see much of herself in either of them. Their bones were fine and she was rawboned. Their hair soft and hers bushy, their skin touched with Cherokee blood and hers with the hoarfrost of the winters she had survived up near the mountaintop. It was Mary they both resembled. She had been the town beauty up until she died. Annie Clyde had Mary’s same ripe lips and the same freckle on her collarbone. It was clear when Gracie came along that she too would inherit Mary’s looks. But there were other ways to be related. Silver hadn’t heard her niece’s voice until she was nearly grown. She was still unsure about the girl’s eye color, hard to tell through lowered lashes. Annie Clyde had stared off into the woods as she talked, at the top of Silver’s head or down at her toes digging into the loam. She didn’t like asking favors. She didn’t like talking at all. Silver could see that it took something out of her. “We’re leaving for Michigan next Saturday morning,” Annie Clyde had said, glancing in an uncertain way at the dog as he lapped from a puddle. “I was wondering if you’d take Rusty for a while. Just until we get settled. I reckon James’s uncle will sell his corn for him. He’ll be back down to get his money then.” Silver’s hands stilled in the cucumber vines. “You don’t have to take him now,” Annie Clyde rushed on. “You can wait until Saturday, before we head out. Or I’ll bring him up here to you.” Silver couldn’t answer at first, afraid if she opened her mouth her heart might spill out.

Silver knew she had been no kind of aunt to Annie Clyde. She called on the Dodsons only to pick their apples or knock on their kitchen door and offer a jar of the chartered moonshine she made as medicine before winter set in. Most of the time she could put down her head and work through her days. But sometimes the child’s voice drifting up from the farm filled her with regret. She wanted to offer the Dodsons more than moonshine. She thought of asking forgiveness for her absence but didn’t trust herself to say the words right. She spoke to Annie Clyde no more than a few times a year. Sometimes Annie Clyde came up the mountain out of obligation, knowing if Silver stood on a rickety chair to string peppers and the legs gave out she could strike her head on the hearthstone. She could catch a fever and not recover, or break her leg out hunting and lie unfound until the crows picked her bones clean and the possums dragged them off. But all of those Silver loved most had left her alone in the end. Annie Clyde would be no different. Silver would watch her niece ride off down the road. When the truck was out of sight she’d go back through the hayfield and past the apple tree still laden with fruit, up the mountain moving over the stones and roots and ridges of a path her feet could have followed in the dead of night, back to the shack her grandfather built that she had always lived in. She would sit in front of her cold fireplace while down below the lake crept over the Walker farm until it disappeared.

As Silver pondered these things, Gracie came to kneel beside her in the garden dirt. While Gracie played in the loam, flies buzzing around them, Silver remembered the one time she had held the child. She’d seen Annie Clyde behind the house hanging sheets on the first warm day of spring, the farm smelling of turned earth and mown hay, on her way down the track to the road. Annie Clyde had waved Silver over. Gracie was crying in a basket at Annie Clyde’s feet and she asked Silver with pins in her mouth to take the baby for a minute. Silver was trying to recall what Gracie had felt like in her arms when the child lifted a woolly worm on the bridge of her finger and showed it to Silver. Silver tensed but held out her hand to let the worm pass from Gracie’s flesh to her own. They looked at each other as Annie Clyde looked down on their heads. Now Silver wanted that moment to be the last one she spent with her kin. She didn’t know if she could face the loss ahead of her even without seeing it happen before her eyes. She didn’t want to remember them riding off in James Dodson’s Model A Ford, its bed piled high with chattel. Their going no different than any of those other departures she had witnessed from her perch on the ridge.

Kneeling there with Gracie in the garden loam last week, Silver had agreed to take the dog. She couldn’t refuse. But even as they walked away from her, Annie Clyde leading Gracie by the hand and their coonhound loping after them, she didn’t want him. Not for any length of time. The only dogs she’d known were those her grandfather used to keep to guard his moonshine still. The last had been the meanest, a shepherd bitch that bit Silver if she got too close. She’d left a tin feed pan and some mildewed bedding up at the still for ages, in the shed where the bitch was put when she went into heat. Silver hadn’t had the heart to throw them out because they reminded her of her grandfather’s affection for dogs. She had none herself, but she owed her niece something. She felt bound to do the favor Annie Clyde had asked of her, as much as she dreaded it. If Silver could write she might have slipped off with the dog in the night and left a note under a rock on the stoop. She wasn’t supposed to take him until tomorrow. But if she did it now, she wouldn’t have to say good-bye to her people. She wouldn’t have to watch them leaving without her.

Silver’s mind had been burdened this way since she woke at dawn. She took a long time lighting a fire and boiling her oats. At last she decided to go down the mountain and figure out what to do about her niece’s dog later. She had other business to attend to in the valley. She’d been meaning for weeks to gather the last of the trumpet weed growing on the west end of the Hankinses’ pasture before it was drowned. She used the long, hollow stems like straws for reaching into the charred oaken barrels she’d buried underground at the beginning of spring. She would draw out the aged whiskey deep inside and swirl it on her tongue. Then she would spit a mouthful onto the mink-scratched clay of the bank to keep from swallowing it. Whiskey was made for selling and not drinking. That’s where her grandfather Plummerman Ledford had gone wrong. He drank about as much moonshine as he ran off until it killed him. When he died Silver watched as her grandmother Mildred placed coins on his eyes and washed his face, pitted and scarred under his whiskers. Then Silver went to the still and plucked a pink clover for his breast pocket. There was no funeral but she had said her own prayers. Before Plum died, he’d showed Silver everywhere trumpet weed flourished. In past seasons she’d hurried to beat the browsing deer and not the coming lake to her straws. These days most of the weed was eaten off, but when she was a girl the meadows of Yuneetah had been thick with it in late summer on into fall, the drooping lances of its leaves and the pale lavender umbels of its flowers rising ten feet over the goldenrod and thistles along the fencerows. Back then she and Plum had been in no danger of running out.

Silver’s grandfather had taught her everything about bootlegging, starting with how moonshine got its name, made at night so the law wouldn’t see the smoke. She had liked being with him up at the still, set into a stream bank high on the mountain since before she was born. The round metal still pot packed in glistening mud beneath the barrel cap. The stack of the furnace, a fifty-five-gallon drum cut in half, jutting out full of kindling. When the still was running flames wrapped around the pot and shot out the flue at the back, vapors collecting in the barrel cap then moving down into the thumper keg and the condenser. Silver would wash out jars in the trickling stream or whatever her grandfather let her help with. He’d taught her to make whiskey without store-bought yeast or sugar or grain, using corn from their garden and home-sprouted malt. They put half a bushel of meal in each barrel, the other half to be heated for mush in the still pot, and left it a couple of days before coming back to stir it with a stick. Then they added a gallon of ground corn malt and one of meal with a cap of rye sprinkled on top to keep the mash warm. A week or so later when the cap fell off and the top was clear, the whiskey was ready to run off. It was only in the years since Plum died that Silver had taken to chartering moonshine, experimenting with the brew she’d been taught to make. Sometimes she mixed in ginger and orange peel for taste. Sometimes herbs and roots to make the medicine she gave to her niece for Gracie, consulting with Beulah Kesterson on what was wisest to use. She’d found that tulip tree bark worked best for fever. She had sold some of her medicine to Beulah before the old woman gave up peddling, but she made it more for pleasure than for anything else. It was the work she needed, the ritual of following the stream upward each morning until the air turned cooler and purer, to where the still was set in the bank beneath a stand of red buckeye trees.

It wasn’t long past ten o’clock this morning when Silver had strapped on the cotton sack she used for picking and climbed down the winding trail that came out at the foot of the mountain behind the Walker farm. Though she had put a rope in her sack for the dog just in case, she’d kept her face turned away as she went through the hayfield, past the house and on down the track. At the end of the track she had crossed the road and ducked under the fence into the Hankins pasture. She’d gone downhill to where the reservoir was visible, fingers of water pointing farther landward, watching her feet. The cattle were gone but the dried pucks of their manure had come back to life. Soaking up the rain they looked fresh again, sprouting frail clusters of nodding toadstools. She’d stopped when she reached where the lake spilled over, wavering with strands of foxtail and crabgrass. She was surprised at the foothold the reservoir had gained within a few months, how much it had overtaken. Most of the trees and barn sides the power company had slashed with paint to mark how far the water would come had already been wetted. Gulls and herons had already begun to nest. After another night of rain, some of the roads would surely be washed out. Like the rest of the town, Silver was used to the floods and their damage. It was the lake’s stealthiness that bothered her. She had felt it behind her as she sawed at the hollow stems with her corn knife until her arm grew tired, gathering as much this one last time as she could carry home.

Now it was past noon and Silver had remained in the middle of the road for too long looking after James Dodson’s truck, the cotton sack full but light on her shoulder. Even with the day overcast she could feel August breathing on her. It had another look, its own kind of heat. On the way out of the pasture she’d seen the first henbit stalks tipped with clusters of the seed that would spread them. The end of summer was near and then autumn. But this season the stinkbugs and crickets wouldn’t come into the houses for warmth. No leaves would blow down the road on the fall winds, no apples would harden under the frost. Pawpaws would go to ruin at the bottom of the lake with nobody around to taste the sweet mash of their middles. Silver used to think she wanted nothing more than to be left alone like this. Nothing more than room to breathe. Until she was twelve, six Ledfords had lived in the shack near the mountaintop. Silver and her sister Mary. Her parents, Esther and Jeremiah. Her grandparents Plum and Mildred. Before Plum moved his family to Tennessee from Kentucky he and Mildred had eight boys, but Silver never knew her uncles. The Ledford sons had taken off as soon as they came of age. Only Silver’s father returned home with his fortune unfound. He’d brought Silver’s mother with him, already big with Mary.

As close as the Ledfords had lived in their shack, they’d seldom touched. Silver wasn’t beaten or cared for either one. She learned not to seek attention after she woke with the croup and tried to climb onto her hateful grandmother’s lap, slopping the old woman’s coffee over the rim of her cup. Mildred had called Silver a clumsy ox with more contempt in her voice than any grandchild deserved. Not long after that Silver had lost a front tooth and tried to show her father while he was skinning a squirrel. She held out her palm wanting him to take it or at least to look at it, a piece of her fallen off, but without glancing up he just told her to get along. So she closed her fingers into a fist and ran into the woods to throw the tooth down, kicking pine duff over it. Her father had been silent and morose and she’d been somewhat afraid of him. But she’d liked peeking out at him through the front window as he came back from hunting in the dark. His skin polished by the lantern shine, black hair running over his shoulders. Plum used to say Jeremiah took after his Cherokee grandmother that had lived on the reservation in North Carolina. Mildred had called Jeremiah trifling because he would sit in the tree stand with his rifle for hours letting deer pass beneath him, staring off at the distant hills. Silver was too young then to understand her father’s discontent, but now she felt for him. Even though he’d seemed to feel nothing for her.

Silver didn’t miss her father much when he was gone. Not like her mother. Her best memory was of sitting beside Esther Ledford on the edge of the doorsill looking up at the sky, Esther reaching into her pocket and giving Silver a chunk of fool’s gold. “It might be good luck,” she said, pressing it into Silver’s palm. From what Silver recalled her mother was slim with straw-colored braids wound at her nape. She kept a valise brought from wherever Silver’s father had found her, full of fancy dresses. Sometimes Esther put them on, though she had nowhere to wear them. She’d strap her heeled shoes onto Silver’s feet and laugh as her daughter stumbled around in them. Back then Silver believed what her mother told her when they went seining in the river at night, dragging the fishing net along between them as they waded out toward the deeper reaches. “Look at that reflection the moon makes on the water. Prettiest thing I ever seen, until you was born. That’s how come I named you Silver. You was the most precious thing in the world to me.”

But Silver’s worst memory was of her mother as well, Esther drinking down a cup of pennyroyal tea with Mildred standing by to make sure she took every drop. At the time Silver didn’t know what Mildred meant when she said, “We don’t need no more mouths to feed around here.” That afternoon Silver had found her mother lying abed and clutching her belly. When Silver asked what was wrong Esther wept in pain, tears soaking her dress collar. Knowing now what pennyroyal tea was for, Silver guessed she and Mary would have had more siblings if Mildred had allowed them to live. A few months after drinking down that cup Esther woke Silver and Mary with the brush of her lips on their foreheads. “Me and your daddy’s got to go away,” she told them. “See about a job of work. We’ll be back after you soon as we can.” But they never came back to Yuneetah, or wrote to say where they went. Silver knew it was Mildred they were leaving behind, but neither she nor Mary had been reason enough for her parents to stay.

Once Silver’s mother was gone, she clung to her sister. Silver was younger by two years and followed Mary everywhere. They played together from morning until evening, chasing each other through the woods, scuffing up leaves to hear the brittle stir of them. They spent whole days on the riverbank, hiding from each other in the rushes and skipping stones, making cane poles to fish with. They walked the dirt road to the schoolhouse holding hands in the cool of the mornings, a strip of grass up its middle like the brush of a mane. The other children looked sidelong at Silver’s burlap sack dresses, the snags of hair down her back. They would play with Mary but not with her. She quit after the third grade, but Mary went on until the eighth. Silver couldn’t say when she and Mary first turned over and slept with their backs to each other. They grew farther apart as their legs grew longer. Then when Mary turned fifteen she went to work for Clyde Walker. His wife had died in the winter from rheumatic fever and he needed a girl to help with the household chores. Silver noticed how much time her sister was spending on the Walker farm, not coming home until after dark, but she didn’t want to believe it when Mary announced she was getting married. She asked Mary what she wanted with a man thirty years her senior and Mary said there was nobody kinder alive than Clyde Walker. Once Mary left the mountain she didn’t come back, even to visit. Just like their parents. Mildred claimed she had got above her raising, thought she was too good for them. But Mary hadn’t got above. She had got away.

After Plum passed on and Mary took up with Clyde Walker, Silver was alone with her grandmother. She couldn’t see how her lighthearted grandfather had ended up married to such a shrewish woman. Before Plum died Mildred was always harping on him about the farm the Ledfords had in Kentucky before he went to jail for bootlegging, a two-story house with a stocked pond and strawberry fields. Silver figured that farm was what Mildred had wanted with Plum in the first place, but when he was caught by the revenuers he’d mortgaged it to pay his legal bills. After he was convicted he lost his land. Mildred claimed she would have left him then if not for the baby she was carrying. She hadn’t uttered a kind word to him within Silver’s hearing, but he’d always seemed more amused by her than anything. Silver vowed that she wouldn’t be cowed by the old woman either. They went weeks without speaking, Silver spending most of her time making moonshine. When the still was frozen into the stream bed under clumps of snow-drifted laurel she ignored Mildred as best she could. She stared into the fire until shadows crept across the floor and up the room corners, drafts sending dervishes of dust like whisking tails across the floorboards. She’d watch the flames dwindle to glowing coals until the sound of her own clacking teeth brought her around. Then she’d get up with blued toes and gather enough wood to burn through the night. Those winters Silver slept under buckskins, the only covering that held in her heat once the fire died. It seemed the memories of deer transferred into her dreams as she moved through the woods with no voice in them, as she swam across the river at sunset parting the water with herself. She slept and dreamed the hours away, waiting for the thaw when she could go back up to the still. Until finally one spring the old woman died and Silver buried her in the hollow graveyard where the ground was darkened by the maples pushing against the fence. She stood under the leaves tossing dirt on her grandmother’s casket until someone took the shovel from her. Then she went back to making moonshine and had been at it ever since. Her business hadn’t waned until the dam gates closed. Customers kept coming to her back door, trading hanks of salt pork, cured hides and strings of squirrel for something to make their heads feel lighter. But even if nobody bought her moonshine, Silver would go on making it.

She would have stood there longer with her thoughts if the wind hadn’t picked up and pushed her from behind, blowing her hair in knots and fetters before her, shuffling the trumpet weed in her sack. She glanced up at the skies and got moving, following the grooves James Dodson’s truck had made in the road, her feet marring the rankled print of his tires. Still deciding what to do when she reached the Walker farm, she almost walked into the back of the Model A Ford pulled over to the shoulder. When she saw it parked there she stopped short. Then she took a hesitant step forward, trying to see through the back window into the boxy cab. She had never been this close to the vehicle that would take her people away. The rusted hubcaps and running boards, the arched fenders and the round headlamps on either side of the grille. Through the stakes she could see there was nothing inside. But she pictured it loaded with furniture that once belonged to her sister. It crossed her mind that if she raised the hood and yanked out a cable the Dodsons would be going nowhere tomorrow. She might have done it if she hadn’t been distracted by a bustling behind the barbwire fence. She thought at first it must be James coming back to the truck, though she couldn’t think why he’d be in the Hankins pasture. Then a blackbird burst out of the hedge and disappeared in the trees above. The roadside bank was astir with them, foraging for seed, grub and cricket before the rain. She could sense the beads of their eyes watching her, as if they knew what she’d considered. She bowed her face and hurried to the other side of the road, dragging her sack through puddles floating with canoes of willow leaf.

Silver didn’t slow down until she came to her niece’s split-rail fence. There she paused and looked into the cornstalks, the shucks holding the roasting ears swaddled. After decades the Walker farm still reminded Silver of how her sister chose a man and his land over her own flesh and blood. But as far as they’d drifted from one another, Silver had felt like she was dying herself when she learned Mary had a cancer of the womb. On the winter night Mary died Annie Clyde sent James up the mountain to fetch Silver. He knocked on her door holding a lantern. She followed him back down with a quilt bundled around her shoulders. Mary was talking out of her head by the time Silver got there. Silver sat all night with Annie Clyde in Mary’s freezing bedroom shivering as the fire burned out. But she left before it was over, refusing to watch Mary take her last breath. She didn’t attend the funeral at the Free Will Baptist church either. She went back up the mountain and stayed indoors the rest of that winter, skitters of ice ticking at the windowpanes. She spent those months grieving and trying to keep warm. She forgot her own birthday that year because Mary would grow no older. Now standing this close to where Mary died was like reliving it all. She couldn’t fathom going up to the house and knocking on the door.

She was lingering at the fence, putting off the long walk up the track, when something dropped from above and landed at her feet. Her first confused thought was of the blackbirds. She half expected to find a pile of feathers in the damp grass. But when she crouched with the cotton sack trailing and her dress around her thighs what she discovered was an ear of sweet corn. Gnawed down to a few yellow-white kernels, fat to bursting and shining like pearls in the dimness. Silver rose and whirled around. When she saw the man across the road her backbone straightened. He was hunkered on one knee atop the bank overlooking the cornfield picking his teeth with a matchstick, staring across the tassels at the roof of Annie Clyde’s house. After a second he pitched the matchstick and shifted his stare onto Silver. She was overcome with a feeling like spiders crawling up her arms. He stood then, trampling wildflowers underneath his boots, the wind lifting the heavy tail of his peacoat. At the same time, some heaviness lifted from Silver. She hadn’t thought of Amos in years, but a part of her must have been waiting for him all along. She stayed put as he strode down the bank and stopped before her, his bindle on his shoulder. Up close, he smelled like moss and fungus. “How are you making it, Silver?” he asked.

She opened her mouth but could find no fitting answer. She studied him in silence, too moved to speak. She realized she’d given him up for dead years ago. It was a feat that he had managed to live this long. But she shouldn’t have doubted him. Amos was the only one who always came back. He was a force as sure and dangerous as the river. She took him in, her eyes starting at his worn boot toes, moving up the ragged legs of his gabardine trousers, resting at last on his lean face. Something came over Silver then. Maybe it was the day she’d spent out of sorts. Or the months spent feeling alone like never before. She reached out to lay her palm against his black-whiskered cheek. “You still look like yourself,” she told him. With her thumb she grazed over the scarring of his eye socket, a pocket of fever-hot flesh. “How come you don’t change?”

Amos didn’t flinch, but his fingers raised between them and closed around her wrist. He guided her hand back to her side and it hung there, burning. “I never saw the use in change.”

Silver swallowed a catch in her throat. “I guess you saw things are different around here.”

“But not you.” His attention turned to the cotton sack strapped on her shoulder, the wooden handle of her corn knife poking out among the trumpet weed umbels. “Still an outlaw.”

Silver felt herself smiling, her dry lips splitting in places. She touched the cuts as if to take her smile back, but Amos returned it. She glanced down again at the cuffs of his trousers, laden with muck from the ditch. He must have eaten his dinner in the gully, as she had hidden herself less than an hour earlier. But Amos was probably avoiding the sheriff and not James Dodson. She could have told him Ellard Moody was occupied with the power company, but she figured it would be better not to mention the sheriff’s name given her history with both men. “We got the place to ourselves now,” she said. “Ain’t that what we wanted when we was little?”

Amos’s smile vanished. “Seems so. They couldn’t get rid of us so they left it to us.”

Silver didn’t like the shadow that crossed his brow, the gleam that had come into his eye. She decided to change the subject. “Beulah’s still around, though. You headed up the holler?”

“And your niece,” Amos said, ignoring her question. “She’s still here.”

She thought of him up on the bank, staring across the corn. “You’ve seen Annie Clyde?”

“Not much of her,” he said. “She ran me off.”

“What are you doing out here, Amos?”

“Wondering if I can beat the rain up to Beulah’s.”

“I doubt it. You better find someplace to get in.”

“You better, too.”

“I don’t mind the rain,” she said.

“No,” he said, his one eye meeting hers. “You never did.”

Silver felt the burn in her palm spreading. “You can come up the mountain with me.”

He looked over his shoulder, toward the weedy bank. “I ought to be getting along.”

“Will you come directly? I got a lard can full of blackberries going to waste up yonder.”

Amos paused, gazing at her in a way that would later trouble her dreams. “I don’t know this time, Silver,” he said. Then he tipped his hat and walked off. She watched him go with loose-limbed grace up the bank, his lithe back moving away from her. Once he was out of sight she turned and braced herself on the fence rail. Since childhood Amos had had a way of shaking Silver up, muddling her senses. She suspected he had the same effect on other women in the far-off places he passed through, at least those unafraid to look at him for long. Silver had never feared Amos as most others did. From the time he was a foundling the townspeople of Yuneetah had turned their heads when Beulah Kesterson brought him along on her peddling rounds. He wasn’t an ugly boy. His face was almost too perfect. Like a mask, white and smooth as porcelain. Unlike the rest of Yuneetah, Silver couldn’t get her fill of Amos’s looks, even after his eye was lost. When they were children playing in the hollow he used to smile at her like they had a secret, as though she was complicit in his mischief. Ellard Moody was a sweeter boy, braiding willow crowns for Silver’s head and giving her his best marbles. But she had wanted Amos.

When Mary started leaving Silver behind, Amos was her friend. He sought her company, tossing chips of shale at her window to call her out. She would go with him collecting rocks and periwinkles along the river, standing still together when fawns came out of the bluff oaks to drink. One night during a meteor shower they climbed to the mountaintop, stars streaking close enough to catch them on fire. He showed her all of the town’s hiding places. The caves where men escaped from the Home Guard during the Civil War. The foundation stones of a burned-down tavern where there had been a battle with many soldiers killed inside. One summer he led her across the Whitehall County line to an abandoned iron mine up in the hills. They went several miles down a cart trail used by mules to pull the ore then followed an old railbed until the woods thinned enough for them to see the tipple. They stood inside the shaft’s lower entrance, fifty feet high with chalked arrows marking the ore veins. Outside the upper shaft they watched the cool air of the mine turn to steam as it met the heat outside. They ventured a long way down the deep tunnels, curving out of sight into nothingness. They peered into the broken windows of the superintendent’s house, once painted white with cheerful blue trim, and Silver had wished to live there with Amos until she died. Never to go back to Yuneetah and her hateful grandmother.

As much as Silver loved her sister she felt kin to Amos in a way that went deeper than blood. Every few years since he left on a train he had come back to visit her. She might get home from picking blackberries and find him leaning against her door with his hat brim shading his eye socket. He would greet her as though days and not years had passed. Then he’d ask for a bite to eat and she’d bring him whatever she had. When he was full he would get up without a word to see what needed fixing around her place. In winter he chopped firewood. In summer he hacked down the honeysuckle burying the side of her shack. When the work was done he might camp for a night in her woods. He would build his fire and she’d sit with him awhile. She would look at him through the rolling smoke and he would look back, mouth corners lifting. She’d remember other fires they built together as children in the caves where they hunted for mica, feldspar and quartz. Where they drew in the ash with their fingers and wrote their names on the craggy walls. She would meet his eye as she seldom did anyone else’s and a heat that had nothing to do with the fire would rise up from her belly. She tried to contain such feelings. It was hard on her, though. With his hat off and his hair black as oil tucked behind his ears he looked naked. She always went to him first, sometimes crawling, getting her hands and knees sooty. He wouldn’t touch her otherwise. She’d slip her dress off her shoulders, reach for his hand and put it where she wanted it. Then he would lay her down so close to the flames that cinders lit on her forehead, that the ends of her hair were singed. She might feel ashamed of herself once he was gone, and even more unwanted, but for some reason she had no pride when it came to Amos.

Though Silver had a kind of love for Amos she’d seen the other side of him. He hadn’t turned his cruelty on her, but she’d been witness to it. There was a thoughtful anger he harbored, patient like all else about him. The summer before he first left Yuneetah, Buck Shelton had accused him of stopping up his well with rocks. Shelton was a gambler and a drunkard with more than one enemy, but somehow he was convinced that Amos was the culprit. He probably figured he could thrash a young boy easier than he could a grown man. When Shelton came up the mountain to buy whiskey Silver had heard him cussing Amos, swearing to Plum that he was going to stripe the boy with a switch. After he sobered up he’d gone to the sheriff, but Beulah had slipped Amos out the side door when they came up the hollow looking for him. Silver had forgotten all about the incident until twenty-five years later, when Shelton’s back field caught fire. She had watched it burn from her ridge near the mountaintop, able to see miles of the valley when the trees were bare in autumn. As she stood there on the cool limestone ledge Amos appeared beside her, the only creature that could sneak up on her. She hadn’t seen him in months but he made no greeting. Just lingered at her side smoking a cigarette. “I never stopped up any well,” he said at last. He was a liar but Silver believed he was mostly honest with her. She looked at the ember of his cigarette tip and then back at the other smoke below, knowing without having to ask that he’d used the blazing sedge like a match as he walked out of the field.

Silver had taught herself not to think of Amos while he was away but when she was younger she used to wonder as she drifted to sleep what other fires he had set elsewhere. What other, worse trouble he might have caused. She supposed he should have been locked up long ago. But she couldn’t imagine him caged. Now she looked into the corn tossing behind the split-rail fence, unable to see the house with Annie Clyde and Gracie alone inside. She had known Amos for almost forty years but that didn’t mean she fully trusted him. This would be the time for him to settle any business left unfinished in Yuneetah. She couldn’t think of anything he might hold against the Dodsons but she wasn’t fool enough to believe he would leave her family alone on her account either. She rubbed a knuckle across her split lips, tasting blood and dirt. Then she heard the racket of James Dodson’s truck coming again and felt far more burdened than she had started out this morning. Before James appeared around the curve Silver hoisted herself over the fence into the field, pulling the sack across the top rail behind her. She receded into the corn as the Model A Ford approached, the plants shaking in the wind and the blackbirds scolding each other in the fencerow. She didn’t want to ever come out. She might stand there among the living stalks until she became one of them. Until the lake came at last to drown her with them.

Near one o’clock James Dodson had parked his truck alongside the road, less than a mile from home. He had set out early to Sevierville and been gone for hours. His back ached and his head pounded. What stopped him was the absence of Dale Hankins’s house from the field where it had stood for at least a century. As Dale told it, the Hankins patriarch had built the house himself. He dragged from the river on a sledge the same kind of rocks that could be found in cemeteries all over the valley marking graves of men, women and children the floods had swept away. Each time James ate Sunday dinner there it seemed he could smell brackish water in the walls. It wasn’t unusual to come upon houses torn down in Yuneetah these days, but Dale’s wasn’t being demolished. James thought he was seeing things. He rubbed his eyes and got out of the truck, knowing that he risked never getting it started again. He climbed stiff-legged up the bank and paused at the fence, seeing in his mind what used to be there. Dale’s homeplace standing alone in the flat pasture looking stranded, cattle grazing near the porch with nothing to keep them out of the yard. Dale had farmed this plot since he was a boy, a hundred acres of bottomland on the river. Now the livestock had gone to slaughter and the house had disappeared.

James ducked between the barbed strands of the fence and swished through the weeds, knee high without cows to crop them. He hadn’t gone far when he saw it. A rugged gash at least sixty feet wide and almost as deep cleaved the pasture in two. A chasm had opened up in Dale’s field. It must have swallowed the house whole. James stood still. He could almost hear the groan as he pictured it listing and then heaving into the abyss, joists splitting and floorboards popping, sending up a column of sand. He guessed the ground had sunk under the weight of standing rainwater. All over Yuneetah the land was eroding, groundwater causing depressions like bowls, soil over cavernous bedrock collapsing. The same caves underlay the Walker farm. James had noticed some of the fence posts slumping. They were lucky to be getting out of town unscathed. Everybody else was already gone. James hadn’t passed a soul on the way in, save for Annie Clyde’s aunt with a sack full of trumpet weed along the ditch, and Silver lived above the taking line. They were cutting it too close for James’s comfort, leaving just before the August 3 deadline the power company had given them, but he was thankful they were finally going. He moved as near to the edge as he dared and looked into the red clay pit piled with rubble. On top of the busted rock, warped tin collected rain. Glass shards reflected the sun behind a knot of clouds. At least Dale and his family were safe in Detroit. They had left Yuneetah months ago.

James had known since he was a child that the valley belonged to the river and the weather, no matter what a man did to tame it. Dale had once confided to James that he felt the same way. It could beat a man down, trying to farm land not fit for row crops, each season losing some of what little he was able to grow to the floods. “I’m ready to get out of here,” Dale told James when the TVA came to town. “Everybody’s squalling, but I ain’t sorry. I’ll take what I can get and run. All I care about is my people. That’s all that’s worth anything, when it comes down to it.” They both knew that working in a steel mill would be no easier than farming. They would trade hot sun for a furnace, cracked earth for molten metal, a cloud of grit for a film of black soot. Neither of them knew exactly what to expect, moving off to live in a northern city. But at least there would be a paycheck at the end of each week. Now finally Dale had escaped Yuneetah and tomorrow James would follow him out. They would be neighbors again in Michigan.

Dale and James were often mistaken for brothers, with their same reddish hair, but they hadn’t met until James married Annie Clyde. Dale was the kind of man who offered his help before a neighbor had to ask for it. Like after what happened to James’s horse. His uncle Wallace had given him Ranger, already old, a Tennessee walker with a sorrel coat. In the months after James’s father died and he went to live at the parsonage beside the Methodist church, being with the horse had eased his mind as nothing else could. A tap of his booted heels would send Ranger trotting across creeks and pastureland, wind lifting James’s sweaty hair from his forehead. Some nights he slept in the barn under a blanket matted with hairs, lulled by the sound of the horse and the two plow mules snorting and pawing at their stalls. He’d dreamed back then of moving to Texas and working on a ranch breaking wild mustangs. He imagined how it would be to stand in a corral among their jostling necks, their muscled flanks, their high tails, the plumes of dust they kicked up settling over him. But as he grew into a man he saw how that couldn’t happen.

After James and Annie Clyde got married Ranger was the only thing he brought with him to her farm, the only thing worth having from his former life. When they were courting, each Saturday he’d ridden over the hills and down the back roads to visit her. One morning he galloped to the garden as she drudged in the loam on her knees. He dismounted and stood over her. She looked up but didn’t smile, as if he was bothering her in the middle of something important. He saw the lines around her hazel eyes that hours of toil in the sun had already hatched. “Get up,” he ordered and she frowned. “Come on, just for a little while.” She came to him at last, seeming doubtful even as he took hold of her hips and hoisted her up into the saddle. He climbed on behind her and walked Ranger up the hill where tobacco used to grow, past the pond yellowed with pollen and dimpled by the mouths of walleyed bass. They rode into the pines where there was only the clop of the horse’s hooves, the salty tang of Annie Clyde’s sweat. When she said, “I ought to be getting back,” James dug his heels into Ranger’s sides, urging him into a gallop again. Annie Clyde laughed then, carefree in a way that James seldom saw her.

Not long after Annie Clyde and James were married, Ranger stumbled in the rocky furrows of the farm’s lower field and broke his leg. On the morning it happened, Dale had come driving up to the fence to see if James and Annie Clyde wanted a ride to the market in Knoxville. He found James kneeling with his back to the field, unable to look at the horse. Ranger lay where he’d gone down, bloodshot eyes rolling. Dale asked what was wrong and James was ashamed to tell him. Dale looked toward the field, eyes squinted. He squirted tobacco juice between his teeth and said, “I lost mine the same way. The horse doctor put him down for me. I couldn’t do it myself.” He glanced at James. “I got my rifle in the truck.” James nodded once then dropped his eyes. When the shot came, he jumped as if the bullet had hit him instead. They hitched Ranger to Dale’s team and dragged him into the trees across the hayfield to a cave something like the sinkhole gaping now in Dale’s pasture, fifteen feet deep with roots coiling down its walls. James and Dale heaved the corpse into the hole then filled it up with a load of dirt. Afterward they drove the mules out of the woods and had a snort of moonshine. Ever since, they’d felt like kin.

It was the mutter of thunder that roused James to attention. If it started raining the truck might get stuck. He backed away from the edge of the sinkhole and headed for the road again, keeping an eye on the clouds as he crossed the pasture. The weeks of foul weather had unsettled him. It felt like Yuneetah’s last attempt to hold him back, to swallow him up as it had Dale’s house. But it might suit his wife, if it meant they could put off leaving. He dreaded now the coldness waiting at home. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t seen Annie Clyde being baptized that morning down at the river. He would have left Yuneetah before they met but obligation had kept him bound. He worked to support his sister Dora until she eloped and moved across the mountain, walking each morning to the rayon plant in Whitehall County, working twelve hours a day operating a spinning machine and coming home at dark reeking of the chemicals used to make the fiber. By then he was old compared to the boys he grew up with who settled down before they had whiskers. He didn’t intend to be tied down himself. Then he laid eyes on Annie Clyde Walker.

It wasn’t her looks. He’d seen prettier girls. His first love was a beauty with wheat-colored hair hanging to her waist, bottle green eyes and freckles sprinkling her tanned skin. He’d met her picking strawberries for a farmer near the river. They had kissed each other in a potting shed rich with the smell of river bottom soil. When she pulled him close her hair was sun-warm and dusty like the fur of barn kittens he’d nuzzled. Sometimes he thought he would have been better off marrying her. Annie Clyde was nothing like that guileless strawberry-picking girl. That’s why he’d wanted her. She had a mysteriousness that made him need to unravel her. He admired her smarts and her toughness. But he hated how weak she could make him. His uncle Wallace had tried to warn him before he proposed to Annie Clyde. “It’s hard to live with a quiet woman, James,” he had said. That was all, but they both knew what he meant. James’s aunt Verna had devoted most of her time to keeping a hushed and uncluttered household. She was a handsome woman who never raised her voice and laughed behind her hand. She wasn’t unkind but the silence of the parsonage became unnerving. James had kept busy outdoors, bringing in coal and digging potatoes, cutting the churchyard grass. Wallace wasn’t much of a talker himself. He’d seldom spoken to James or Dora, patting their heads once in a while and telling them they were fine children before going back to his theology books. Dora was too much younger than James to make a good companion, so he’d spent most of his boyhood craving conversation. Maybe it hadn’t been the wisest choice to pursue Annie Clyde, but wisdom had nothing to do with it. He had taken one look at her and known in his gut she was what he wanted.

The day James asked Annie Clyde to marry him, he had found her splitting wood behind the farmhouse. She lodged the axe in a stump and asked if she could fix him a cup of coffee. He sat in the front room waiting as she went into the kitchen to make it. Her mother was already sick by then, asleep in the upstairs bedroom, and the house was too still. It was taking Annie Clyde a long time and when he went into the kitchen to check on her, she was standing in the middle of the floor wringing her hands. “I thought we had coffee,” she said, her cheeks on fire with embarrassment. James went to the larder and saw little there besides a few shriveled potatoes and a sack of meal. “If you can wait a minute,” she said, reaching past him for the sack, “I’ll make you a bite to eat.” There were worms in the cornmeal but she picked them out and stood at the woodstove frying mush. He understood how it would have shamed her to offer him nothing.

For a while he watched her cook, mustering his courage. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something a long time,” he said, his voice loud in the still house. She didn’t turn around, bent over the iron skillet, but he saw her back stiffen. “I think you and me ought to get married.”

His heart didn’t beat until she spoke.

“Why is that?” she asked.

“Why is what?”

“Why should we get married?”

James thought for a second. “Well,” he said, “because I love you.”

Annie Clyde kept her eyes on the skillet. “I guess me and Mama are in a bind.”

James crossed the kitchen and took her around the waist. He felt the strength of her, the firmness under her dress from months of wielding the axe and driving the plow and working the hoe. Her hands were rough, flecked with splinters, her face windburned and chapped by the sun, but she was still the loveliest thing in the world to him. He thought with sorrow how much living she had done at eighteen. Girls got married her age and younger, but in spite of the sheath of field muscle she’d put on like armor he could tell that she was afraid. She didn’t know if she was ready to be his wife. “That’s got nothing to do with it,” he said, putting his face in the back of her hair. “I’ve been crazy about you ever since I seen you. I can’t get along without you no more.”

Annie Clyde softened some against him. “You don’t need us to take care of.”

“I can do it. We could go up north. We’ll make out better up there.”

“You know I can’t leave Mama.”

“She can come with us.”

“She’s sick. And even if she wasn’t, she’d never leave here and neither would I.”

“Then we’ll make it farming, like our daddies did. But you’ll have to marry me.”

“You’ll hate me for keeping you here,” she said.

“Never,” he said. “I’d hate myself for letting you go.”

She turned around to look in his eyes, still seeming unsure. In the pause before she gave her answer, James’s breath came short. Sweat broke on his brow. “All right then,” she said at last.

Most things were disappointing when a man got them after wanting them for a long time, but Annie Clyde had not been. When he saw her nakedness on the day they were married by his uncle at the Methodist church, she was more perfect than he had ever pictured in his mind. She pulled off her powder blue dress in the daylight of their bedroom and stood before him in her slip. The window was open so that he could hear the chickens fussing in the barn lot, but the sound was distant enough not to matter. He took her in, hair piled in dark curls on her shoulders, the shape of her breasts under the thin satin fabric of her slip. Something happened to him then, a feeling of deliriousness sitting there on the end of the bed, like he was rising up out of his body. He had never loved anything as he did Annie Clyde. He had made his choice and tried to remember that when he imagined hacking his way through the endless corn to the road leading out of Yuneetah. He swallowed the gall that rose in his throat, choked down the rocks that broke his plow tines. He looked at his wife whose grace had once knocked the wind out of him on the riverbank and told himself he had no regrets. He thought back to the spring days when Gracie was newborn, going down at dawn to hear Annie Clyde humming over the squeak of the rocker, making a fire while she opened the curtains. She would stand swaying with Gracie at the window, talking about how the ground was thawing for the plow, how the shoots were pushing up through the winter bracken. That season out working James would look toward the house and see Annie Clyde watching him from the porch with Gracie in her arms. He was still desperate to have and keep her. Even with the tension between them since the power company came to town.

Annie Clyde was against the dam from the start. Not long after the first meeting the TVA held at Hardin Bluff School, a few locals were sent around with surveys. The man who knocked on the door said he had to know each family’s needs in order to prepare for relocating them. James looked at the questions, about where they got water and what their source of heat was, whether they had a phonograph or a sewing machine. The man was Annie Clyde’s old schoolteacher and when she came out he said how nice it was to see her. She snatched the papers from James’s hands and ordered the man off her porch. His ears turned red and he hurried away, too confounded to say anything back. After that, James knew she didn’t want him attending the town meetings the power company held, but somehow he couldn’t stay at home. He hadn’t felt that kind of hope since his father died. At the first meeting, a man in a necktie stood before the crowd gathered in the schoolroom to explain how electricity would bring the valley into modern times. He talked about how newspapers were a day late by the time they got to Yuneetah and their radios were battery-powered and most of them had no education past the eighth grade. He insulted the people and they left the schoolhouse angry. But James wasn’t deterred. He saw the opportunities. Electric power might attract factories to compete with the low-paying mills, and there would be plenty of work in Yuneetah once the dam building got under way.

Later, when there was a meeting at the Methodist church about moving the dead, he went without telling his wife. The man who spoke was a mechanical engineer from the college in Knoxville. There were hundreds of graves in churchyards and family cemeteries, some over a century old. He said they would need to identify the graves of their loved ones and sign removal permits, unless they wanted to leave them where they were undisturbed. The remains would be reburied at a place of the next of kin’s choosing. He and his men would have to supervise, but someone from the family could witness the removal unless there was risk of infection from contagious diseases. The undertaker, a man who had been a friend of James’s uncle, volunteered to preside over removals and graveside ceremonies for those who wanted him. After the meeting, James pulled him aside and offered to assist any way that he could. He remembered his father helping dig graves in the fall of 1918, when James was five and the influenza epidemic had reached the valley. James’s mother, who was expecting then the stillborn child that would kill her, had fretted that he would bring the sickness back to his family. But James’s father had told her, “I can’t stand to set here on my hands, Grace.” She had let him go, as scared as she was of the influenza. James only wished that Annie Clyde could understand him the same way. That she would consider what the dam must mean to him, especially after how he had lost his father.

Annie Clyde didn’t seem to care what it was like for James being so near the river, rising out of its banks across the road each time it rained. As hard as he had labored to wrest a living from the ground of Yuneetah, there had been an enmity between him and the river since he was twelve years old. In flooding season, people watched their homes rush away from the tops of the trees they had climbed to survive. When the water receded they went along the banks hunting up their dead. Sometimes it seemed James could hear his drowned father’s voice in the water, as if it had kept Earl Dodson’s spirit. He had never told Annie Clyde as much, but she held his hand tighter whenever there was a baptizing or a church picnic on the shore. He’d thought that his wife knew him better than anybody. After centuries of houses, livestock and bodies swept off in the floods, there had been a wall built to end them. James couldn’t be against such a thing, not even for her sake. Annie Clyde of all people should have understood how it was to lose family.

He had tried to make her see. Staying in the valley to farm would take years off their lives, and probably Gracie’s. People lived longer up north, where the workdays were shorter and the pay was better, where there were hospitals minutes and not hours away. Gracie could go to school and become a nurse herself if she chose. Annie Clyde might get homesick but it would be worth the adjustment. Even with the dam, there were fewer opportunities here than there were in the cities. He and Annie Clyde were still young. In Detroit they could figure out what path they wanted to take. In Tennessee, every path led to the graveyard. But he guessed he’d been losing his wife before the power company ever came along and opened up the rift that was already between them. Annie Clyde still had some notion that he resented her. James couldn’t seem to convince her otherwise. All because of a handbill advertising factory work. He would have given anything to go back to the beginning of their marriage and leave it tacked to the post office wall. Annie Clyde was distant by nature but he had been winning her over until she found that paper. He had picked it up without thinking, so used to planning his escape before he saw her. He had tucked it into his pocket and forgotten about it. No matter what she believed, he wouldn’t have abandoned her. He had only hoped she could be persuaded to leave Tennessee after her mother died. Then she saw the handbill and a distance crept back into her eyes that had widened in the last two years. James didn’t want to lose Annie Clyde like his parents, like the sister he hadn’t seen in ages. He worried that he had already, even if he got his way and she left for Michigan with him tomorrow. But more than anything, he worried that she might not come with him at all.

As he worked to spark the truck’s engine, stomping the starter and pulling the choke until it finally sputtered to life, he thought of the way she looked at him lately without much feeling. But he remembered being loved by her. How in hot weather she would carry water out to him in an earthen jug. He’d stop plowing long enough to drink, runnels trickling into his dusty shirt collar. Once during a drought the earth was so dry that it boiled up to cover him, clogging his throat and blinding his eyes. She led him by the hand to a redbud tree and as he lay stretched out in the shade beside her she took his bandana from the bib of his overalls. She dipped it in the jug to bathe away the dirt then tied it dripping around his sunburnt neck. As she pressed her lips against his she took his face into her hands, holding him still as if there was anything he would rather be doing than kissing her. He was counting on her to remember that day. He was praying that when the time came to go in the morning she would love him enough to choose him.

Steering the Ford past the cornfield and up the track, he felt lonelier than he’d ever been. Not even Rusty greeted him when he pulled up to the house. He heard the dog barking, tied out by the barn. He went up the porch steps and leaned against the door to pull off his muddy boots, resting with his eyes closed before turning the knob. When he stepped into the dim front room it was so quiet that he thought for a second Annie Clyde was gone. She had taken Gracie and left him. Then he heard Gracie’s chirping voice in the kitchen and followed the sound to the table. “We meant to wait on you but she got too hungry,” Annie Clyde said, glancing up from her plate. Her food looked untouched. Corn bread and soup beans, sliced tomato, fried chicken.

Gracie climbed out of her chair and ran to James. He lifted and turned her upside down to make her laugh. “You’re getting heavy,” he teased as he set her feet back on the floor. Then he went to Annie Clyde and touched her shoulder. He noticed how she tensed but he was grateful when she covered his hand with her own. “What about the truck?” she asked, not looking at him.

He pulled out a chair across from her. “It’s running, that’s about all I can say for it.”

“Sit down and let me fix you a plate,” she said, getting up and going to the stove where the beans still simmered. She brought back his dinner and slid an apple pie onto the tabletop. Gracie sat on her knees and poked at the steaming crust, licking off the stickiness. James thought of the day she was born. He was so struck by the blood on the sheets, in the shape of a bird with widespread wings, that he didn’t look at the baby. But once he was sure Annie Clyde was all right, he went to see what she held in her arms. The room was filled with light. Like that day he saw Annie Clyde standing there, a new creature on the riverbank. Gracie had a dark head of hair and little fists curled under her chin. She seemed at first like another part of Annie Clyde, but later he saw that she was her own self. She had a temper and was too stubborn to cry even when she got hurt. She liked being carried and rode everywhere on his hip. When James forked hay, mice would fall down from the bundles and scurry off, making her laugh and clap her hands. In summer she hunkered down in the loam to look for sow bugs under the rocks while James weeded the garden and Annie Clyde picked beans squatted on her haunches, deft fingers shaking the leaves and sweat making patches of damp on her summer dress. In autumn when they burned brush Gracie watched the glowing embers shoot up, the heat lulling her still long enough for James to see how much she resembled Annie Clyde. He tried to picture her in Detroit. In the tract house he had rented with one naked lightbulb in the center of the front room. Instead of mountains she would see tall buildings there. Instead of burning brush she would smell hot tar. “This is some good corn bread,” he said, to ward off his sadness.

“Gracie stirred the batter,” Annie Clyde told him.

“Did you? What else did you do?”

“I got some apples,” she said.

He pointed his fork at her pie. “Ain’t you going to share?”

She shook her head, eyes shining.

“Give your daddy a bite,” Annie Clyde said.

Gracie scooped up a sticky clump and held it out for James to gobble off her fingers.

“I swear, it’s like having two younguns,” Annie Clyde said, but she was smiling. “If you’re done playing with that, Gracie, go wash your hands. Your face, too, while you’re at it.”

Gracie climbed down from her chair and went out. James listened as she padded to the end of the hall where the washstand stood and scraped back the wooden stool she used to reach the enamel bowl. He felt a sinking. Without her the kitchen was closer and darker. After a spell of silence Annie Clyde got up and headed for the door to rake her scraps to the dog. James tried to go on eating but found that his appetite was gone. He couldn’t bear the strain anymore. He made up his mind to have it out with Annie Clyde at last. To say all that had gone unsaid for the past two years. They had to if they meant to start over in Michigan. But when Annie Clyde came inside and cleared the dishes from the table, he couldn’t bring himself to say anything at all. He stared at her, bent over the basin. He wished Gracie would come back but she had quit splashing at the washstand and gone off most likely to play with her dolls. James was alone with his wife. When the dishes were done he would have to say something. He watched her taking time with each cup and utensil, washing some of them twice. Scrubbing the bread pan after it was clean. Drying the plates one by one until they squeaked, putting him off. She seemed to know what was coming. He glanced up at the wall clock. It was almost three. His tailbone was sore on the cane seat. Finally she turned around with the dishrag in her fist, pale and drawn. James blinked. Nothing he’d planned to say came out. What did was the truth he guessed he had known.

“Annie Clyde,” he said. “You don’t mean to come with me. Do you?”

She didn’t answer, but her face told him enough.

His shoulders sagged. “I was wrong the other night.”

“James,” she said.

“You love Gracie better than life.”

“Please hush.”

“Why don’t you love me, though?”

She looked pained. “I do.”

“Where do you aim to go?”

“I’m staying here.”

“There ain’t no staying here.”

“We’ll live in Whitehall County.”

“And do what?”

“I could farm a few acres.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes. We’ll be all right.”

His hands clenched on the table. “You and Gracie.”

She looked at him again without speaking.

“You can’t have my little girl, Annie Clyde.”

She shook her head. “No. That’s not what I meant.”

“She’s as much mine as she is yours.”

Annie Clyde paused, twisting the dishrag. “Then stay with us.”

James fell silent. He rubbed his forehead. “You know I’d do anything for you and Gracie. But I can’t—” Before he could go on the storm that had been brewing all day broke loose, barraging the tin roof with rain. They both looked up, startled. Annie Clyde had dropped the dishrag. As she stooped to grab it her eyes settled on a fallen lump of Gracie’s apple pie.

“Just come with me,” James was saying. “I ain’t never begged you for nothing before.”

Annie Clyde glanced around the kitchen, not seeming to see him anymore. She started for the doorway but James blocked her path. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Don’t ignore me, Annie Clyde. I’ve had enough of that.” He saw the color rising in her cheeks. She pushed past him and he followed her into the hall. She looked toward the washstand, at the spilled water on the floor before it. She turned and went to the front room, rivulets pouring down the windows.

“Where’s Gracie?” she asked, almost to herself, lifting the curtains that Gracie liked to hide behind sometimes. She stood in the middle of the shadowed room, seeming to forget James was there. She went to the bottom of the stairs and called Gracie’s name, her voice ringing in the emptiness. When she started up James took her arm. She whirled on him. “Let me go,” she said.

He went up to the bedroom close on her heels. “I ain’t done talking to you,” he said. She knelt to look under the maple bed as if she hadn’t heard him, tossing the hem of their quilt out of her way. He had thought he knew what she was doing, avoiding the argument they should have had a long time ago. But then she raised up and looked him in the eye. Stormy light from the window shone on her face and the cabbage roses of the wallpaper. She was white, now, with fear.

“Lord, Annie Clyde,” James said. “What’s got into you?” She pushed past him again and stumbled down the stairs. “Slow down,” he hollered after her. “Before you break your neck. She can’t be too far.” But he felt the first inkling of worry himself. If Gracie had gone outside, she was caught in the storm. He followed Annie Clyde back through the front room and out the door. He paused on the porch to shove his feet into his boots, not bothering to tie them, then hurried to catch up with her. Together they moved through the yard, through the sheeting rain that was plastering their hair to their skulls, running into their mouths and filling their ears. When there was no sign of Gracie they ran around the side of the house, puddles splashing up their legs. As they reached the elm shading the barn lot Annie Clyde staggered to a stop. The chain was still wrapped around the base of the trunk but Rusty was gone. She turned to James with wide eyes. He knew what she was thinking. Someone had let the dog loose. Gracie couldn’t unfasten the hasp on the chain by herself. They ran on to the barn where Gracie liked to play sometimes and stood panting in the opening, water pouring from the eaves. James was certain she would be there. There had been moments of panic before when she was only hiding from them in the box wagon or the corncrib. But there was nothing in the barn besides the smell of old saddle leather.

After that, without even having to speak, Annie Clyde and James split up. She headed across the hayfield while he went back around the side of the house. He whistled for Rusty under the porch, checked the privy and the hog pen. Everywhere he looked, he expected to find Gracie. He couldn’t grasp what was happening. Only minutes ago he had been in the kitchen pleading with his wife. He was thinking how foolish he would feel later, after Gracie came out of her hiding place, when Annie Clyde called his name. It was a strangled scream, loud enough to be heard over the downpour. James ran out to the hayfield, his breath coming in wheezing huffs. Through the weeds he saw the dark top of Annie Clyde’s hair. She was on her knees under the apple tree. He was sure then that Gracie had fallen out of the swing and hit her head. He was sure that he would find Annie Clyde kneeling over their little girl. He was prepared to gather Gracie into his arms and run with her to the truck, praying the road to the doctor’s office in Whitehall County would be passable. But when he reached the tree Annie Clyde hovered over nothing it seemed, on her hands and knees among the puddles under the lowest boughs, where there wasn’t enough light for grass to grow. “What?” James shouted at her. “What is it?” She turned her face up to him, drenched hair in strings, shuddering in the cold rain. “Amos,” she said. “What are you talking about?” he asked, sinking down beside her. Then he saw it. There in the mud, surrounded by leaves and filled with water, was a single long footprint.

At four o’clock on the afternoon Gracie Dodson went missing, Beulah Kesterson was eating a biscuit smeared with apple butter, whitish light falling across the flowered tablecloth under the window. She dreaded getting up to wash her dinner dishes. There had been enough rain that toadstools sprouted between the floorboards. The dampness pained her joints. In recent years her fingers had grown too crooked to tat the lace she used to sell. Few bought the medicines she made either, since the druggist had come to town and a doctor had set up an office right across the county line. With no neighbors left she didn’t have the offerings they brought her in return for reading the bones. She was growing too feeble to hunt and trap, even to gather morels. The savings once pinned to the lining of her nightgown had dwindled to nothing. She didn’t know how she was going to survive whatever days she had left, especially if she lived to see another winter. This high in the mountains she was snowbound for months at a time, icicles hanging from the eaves like prison bars. Her days seemed endless then in the one room of her cabin, walls papered with pages of newsprint to keep out the cold. Often her fingers would travel to the bones hung around her neck and trace their familiar shapes inside the soft brown pouch, worn thin but somehow not worn through. They called on her to convene with them, to hear out the sorrows they had to tell.

Beulah had come to depend on the weight of the bones, in spite of the bothersome things they showed her. Worse than what formed in them was what she had seen with her first sight and not her second. The stillborn babies she had caught, the dead and dying she had been begged to save. One winter after the banks closed in 1929 a woman had brought her child bowlegged and bloat-bellied seeking some elixir to cure him. She was the wife of a tenant farmer and had seven more children in similar shape but the youngest was the worst off, too listless to play anymore. Beulah told the woman that the only cure for the child was food. She gave him a cup of goat’s milk and gave the woman some of her savings to see about buying a shoat. After the first thaw she went down to the woman’s tar-paper shack in the valley. The woman showed her the child’s grave under a chokecherry tree, the only thing growing green on their plot of rented land.

It had been given to Beulah to know and she had done her duty. When she died, she wanted the Lord to say well done. But she hoped for a little more time. As many burdensome things as she had witnessed, there had been many more things of beauty. She would like to sit again in her yard watching the leaves turn colors. She would like to raise a few more goats. She would like to eat more apple butter. She would like to see another Easter flower pushing up from the early springtime ground. She would like to wipe the afterbirth from one more living baby.

It was the rain and lack of sleep that turned her thoughts woeful. When her aching joints wouldn’t let her lie still she sometimes went wandering in the dark. Last night she’d walked under the dripping limbs of the hollow woods all the way to Hardin Bluff School, moldering now with its benches overturned, its blackboard coming unanchored from the wall. The schoolhouse was built high out of reach after the first one washed down the river in the flood of 1904. Before it was closed, students came up from their houses in the valley or walked from the narrow hillsides their fathers farmed until they got tired of hauling their corn down the ridges to market and moved off to work at the rayon plant in Whitehall County. Some who graduated from Hardin Bluff School had left town and gone on to make names for themselves. In Nashville there was a state senator growing old in a mansion grander than anything he must have imagined while staring out the schoolhouse window. There was a well-known baseball player who was said to have carved his initials into one of the schoolroom benches. Most of the rest settled in Yuneetah but others died in wars and bar fights and logging accidents. Since this past spring when the last class was dismissed, the schoolhouse had stood empty. Much like seven years ago, when half the town headed north. Back then Beulah could have walked down the road and seen near as many deserted homesteads as she did today. But when the factories started closing up there they came back, and the land had deteriorated even more after those who couldn’t make it in the cities returned to their hillsides to farm again. Yuneetah had been declining for a long time. These days Beulah wondered what would finish it off first, the power company or the weather.

According to Beulah’s mother, Yuneetah had gone downhill farther back. She claimed this part of the country never recovered from the Civil War. The men of these mountains were as likely to fight on the Union side as the Confederate since they couldn’t afford to own slaves. When the war was over they were even poorer. She said that’s why there were so many believers around here. God was all they had left in the end. But before the Civil War, a clan of Beulah’s kin descended from those who came across the ocean had lodged between the wooded ridges of the mountains surrounding the farmland below, a wedge-shaped notch barely flat enough to build on, isolated from the rest of Yuneetah by two sheer rock walls. The bottomland had been claimed by the English, leaving the latecomers and the poor to settle the highlands. They trapped for hides and shot deer for venison and raised cabins smelling of raw timber. Sometimes when Beulah sat in her yard it seemed she could scent the smoke of their hearth fires, could hear the notes of their ballads about lovers left on distant shores. After the war, the first of them had gone down to the valley as a child bride and married a farmer. Soon others had moved closer to the road, a dirt trail weaving its way between the hills. Over the decades their abandoned barns and shacks had fallen in and lay decomposing under piles of mossy shingles. Beulah often came upon the ruins on her walks, the creeper-hung chimneys of their forgotten homesteads. They had gone and built sturdier houses below, living as close to the road as they could get. Before they blamed all their hardship on the mountain’s rockiness, until they came down to the valley and saw the floods. That’s when they first started moving out of town, into the big cities and up into the north.

By the time Beulah was born, most of her kin were gone from the hollow, besides a handful of distant cousins. Beulah and her mother had lived alone in the cabin. Her mother was a midwife and Beulah’s first memory was of being strapped to her back on the way to a birthing, rocked to sleep by the gait of their white jenny mule. After the mule died of old age Beulah and her mother walked everywhere. They had the blacksmith to build them a cart for peddling the medicines they made. When Beulah’s feet got sore, she rode in the cart. Sometimes they slept in open fields under the moon. When they got tired of traveling they put the cart away for a while and took up lace tatting, connecting knots and loops into doilies, dress collars and curtains. Beulah still had her mother’s shuttle, an oval piece of ivory with a hook on one end. They spent many peaceful years together gardening, canning and doing the wash. Then one morning without warning, Beulah found her mother lying under the sassafras tree near the cabin. She must have been gathering the bark and leaves she used to soothe laboring women. Her eyes were not closed but Beulah could tell they saw nothing, at least in this world. She knelt to touch the tasseled end of her mother’s long braid to her lips. Then she bent to kiss her mother’s toes, remembering them sunk in garden soil and spread in riverbank silt as she cast her seining net.

Now Beulah was alone in the hollow besides Silver Ledford who seldom came down from her shack near the mountaintop and Sheriff Ellard Moody who sometimes came back home to sleep in the loft of the frame house where he grew up. As the town emptied little by little, she had seen more and more of the power company men. Last summer she had walked down the hollow to bring the Willets a bottle of the liniment she made for arthritis and met one of the men headed back to his car dressed in a pin-striped suit. His eyes had passed over Beulah like she was nothing. When she got to the porch the Willets had been sitting there crying. She’d asked what was wrong and Bud couldn’t talk, looking bewildered with his swollen hands hanging between his knees. “I tried to tell him we can’t go yet,” Fay had said. “I keep dreaming about crossing the river, Beulah. You know as well as I do what that means. If one of us is fixing to pass on, I want it to be in our own house.” Fay had dabbed at her eyes, struggling to get the rest of it out. “He said that ain’t nothing but superstition. Said it’s unchristian.” Beulah had been holding her temper, but when she heard that word she tried to catch up with the power company man. She had gone halfway down the track waving her walking stick. She’d wanted to ask him who he thought he was, talking to the Willets that way. She’d wanted to ask him what he knew about the state of their souls. He had a job to do but passing judgment wasn’t part of his business in Yuneetah. Unchristian was the worst thing he could have called Bud and Fay. “I’ll guarantee they know the Lord a whole lot better than you do, feller!” she had shouted toward the road, even though the man was gone.

Beulah had tried to be tolerant of these outsiders, reasoning that they had different ideas about religion in the cities some of them came from. They didn’t understand what faith meant in Yuneetah. Without something bigger than themselves to lean on, the people might not survive their losses. Bud and Fay Willet turned to the land rather than books to decipher the Lord’s plans for them. They couldn’t read the Bible but they could read signs and omens. They knew how to take the burn out of fire and plant by the phases of the moon. They ate black-eyed peas on New Year’s Eve and carried buckeyes in their pockets to ward off evil. Their ancestors had brought such teachings across the water alongside the Scriptures. It was how they were raised and they’d never been called on to defend themselves or their ways before the dam was built. If Beulah was fifty years younger she might have tried to comfort Bud and Fay, but being their age she knew there was nothing she could say. It was the old she felt for most. The river had formed them, as sure as it had the land. The young might be able to take other shapes but not her or the Willets. They were already mapped and carved out. There was no more give to them, worn stiff as hanks of rawhide. It might be hard to love a place that had used them up, but it was what they knew. They set even greater store by signs and omens with everything familiar to them falling away.

Beulah figured the power company man would have called her the same thing as he did the Willets. But she considered her gift of discernment divine and herself as Christian as anybody else, although she was born at a time when Yuneetah was still mostly unchurched. The first to settle here wanted nothing more to do with formal rites or cathedrals. They adhered to the Gospel but worshipped on the bank with their feet steeped in the river. When the Free Will Baptists put up a church house it was small and plain besides an oaken pulpit that had come across from Ireland on a boat, ornately carved with scrolls and garlands. Most Sundays the congregants kept the church doors propped open with rocks and the windows propped open with branches fallen from the close trees. The pianist played by ear and they knew the hymns by rote. Wasps would drift in sometimes. Butterflies would flutter through the sanctuary, mourning doves would coo in the rafters. The church was near enough to the river that Beulah could hear it flowing underneath the preacher’s sermon. She sat on the back row for years with the sun warming her face. Then the congregation decided they needed a roomier place to meet with a spire and stained-glass windows. Beulah knew that times and people changed, even in Yuneetah. She didn’t protest but she hated to see the old building torn down. She wished they had saved at least a few relics, like the pulpit she used to admire during preaching, thinking about the hands that had carved it and the land it had come from. But anything scarred and worm-eaten the congregation cast out.

Once the grander church was built Beulah kept at home on Sundays. It was too suffocating without the doors and windows open. Stained glass couldn’t be raised to let in butterflies. Beulah had a fine time talking to Jesus standing in front of her cabin looking into the woods anyway. She didn’t have to sit in a hot church house to be a Christian, and she could read enough to interpret the Scriptures for herself. Not that she was against the churches. They brought people together, gave them somewhere to go for fellowship on Sunday mornings away from the fields and factories. The people of Yuneetah were losing more than their property. They relied on each other. If a house was taken by a flood they rebuilt it. If a man got sick they worked his crops. If he died they rang the death bell and the whole town came to see what needed doing. It hurt them to part not knowing when or if they’d meet again. But grieved as they were, most had no bitterness about leaving. They believed they were doing it for their country, the same reason they signed up to fight in wars. It pained Beulah to see them going but she understood. She was eighty-five years old. Through the generations she had witnessed it again and again. What remained in the end was the rocks and the trees, the water running its course. To watch from her lonesome cabin made an ache in her chest, but there was just as much hope in it. Yuneetah might be dying out but those leaving on the road would surely take some of it along to the new places they settled. Even the river would go with them in the jars of water they took to pour in their radiators and dampen their parched throats. All the electric lights in the world couldn’t blind them enough to forget what they brought out and passed along to the babies she wouldn’t birth. Wherever they ended up, they’d still hear Long Man rushing in their sleep.

Beulah realized she’d been dozing only when she started awake again. She decided to allow herself a nap before clearing the dishes. Last night when she returned from her walk, her rest had been uneasy. She had dreamed all night of crossing the river. She hoped Fay Willet was wrong about what such dreaming meant. She hoped too as she got up from the table that the weather and her full stomach would lull her into an easier sleep this afternoon. But she halted halfway out of her chair. As much as she wanted to go to bed, she found herself unable to rise. That’s how it came over her sometimes, the knowing her mother claimed she was born with. It might be nothing more than a feeling that she shouldn’t lie down. Somehow she knew to be still and wait. She sat for several minutes looking at the door, half drowsing. When the sound came at last it was so faint that she wouldn’t have heard it if she hadn’t been listening. There were voices approaching the cabin and her fingers went to the pouch of bones around her neck. She tilted her head as the cries came closer and closer, trying to make out whose name they were calling. When a hammering finally came at the door her urge was to pretend she wasn’t home. She wanted nothing more than to climb into her bed and burrow under the blanket, but she brushed the biscuit crumbs from her dress front and went to open it. Annie Clyde Dodson was standing on the steps. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks and forehead, her face blanched white. Her husband James stood behind her looking shell-shocked, both of them huddled under the eave.

“Where is he?” Annie Clyde blurted out, her eyes glowing lamps in their sockets.

Beulah blinked behind her glasses. “Who do you mean?”

“Your boy, Amos,” James answered for his wife.

Beulah gaped at them, trying to think. She should have invited them to come inside but somehow she was afraid for them to cross her threshold, bringing the smell of the rain with them, tracking in leaves, slopping their trouble on her floor. She looked down at Annie Clyde’s mucky feet on the limestone slabs of the steps and felt ashamed of herself, but she still didn’t open the door wide enough for them to pass through. “Well, he’s not here—” she began.

Annie Clyde cut her off. “He was in my cornfield this morning.”

Beulah’s fingers went to the bones again. “What’s happened?”

For a moment she thought Annie Clyde might faint, leaning ashen against the doorframe. “He took her,” she said, and Beulah felt the color draining from her own face.

James put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “We can’t find Gracie. Have you seen her?”

“Where’s Amos?” Annie Clyde shouted over him, moving as if to push her way inside.

Beulah licked her lips. They were numb, but her words came out even. “I ain’t seen her, Annie Clyde. And Amos ain’t here.” She paused. “I know he ain’t been up to nothing, though. He’s been with me. He came straight up the holler from your place. Brought me some corn.”

James let out a breath. He seemed relieved, but Annie Clyde was still trying to see around Beulah into the cabin. “He’s been here with you?”

“Yes,” Beulah said. “About all day, but you know how Amos comes and goes. He took off again an hour or so ago.” She glanced away. “I might not see him for another five years.”

“You sure you ain’t seen Gracie?” James asked.

“No, honey,” Beulah told him, still watching his wife. “But I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“He’s here,” Annie Clyde said, looking at Beulah hard enough to make her fidget.

“Let’s go,” James said, taking his wife by the elbow. “We’re wasting time.”

Then they were gone from her steps as quick as they’d come. Beulah went to the front window and peeled back the lace curtain. She watched through the blurring rain as they searched the clearing. When they disappeared around the cabin she went to the window over the table and peered out but couldn’t see them anymore. She went back to her chair, lowering herself with a grunt, letting out the breath she’d held while they were at her door. She stared at the soiled dishes on the tabletop, her old heart laboring. If Annie Clyde had come in she might have noticed one plate, one cup. Beulah hadn’t seen Amos in five years. But she still loved him like a son.

Her mind went to Gracie Dodson and the day the little girl was born. She remembered it well because she had woke feeling puny. She used to be a stout woman but that morning she’d noticed herself shrinking. She had outlived the age at which her mother died but she wasn’t ready yet to lie down under the sassafras tree. She still feared death like a child. She supposed it was foolish to be so old and want so much to keep on living, but that’s how it was. So she’d rolled out of bed like it was any other day and carried on, wiping her handkerchief across her clammy brow again and again as she went about her chores. Around dinnertime she went behind the cabin to pick greens, all she could think of eating. The best place to find them in early March was along the spring, its edges brittle with ice left over from winter. She was looking on the bank when she came upon a crack in the ground. As she watched a nest of granddaddy longlegs boiled up from it, thousands upon thousands, and her own legs nearly gave out. She stumbled away without picking any greens, sure she’d seen an ill omen. On her way back to the cabin snow began to flurry in whorls, whitening the grass. Coming into the yard she could make out the shape of a man sitting on the steps and her dread deepened. But once she got closer she saw that it was James Dodson. He was a different man then than the one she had seen minutes ago, with clear blue eyes and high color in his cheeks, dots of snow in his auburn hair. She smiled because she knew what he wanted. Annie Clyde’s time had come. Just the sight of James perked Beulah up. If the child hadn’t been born on that particular day, she might have laid down and died like her mother. In a way, birthing Gracie Dodson had given her new life.

Beulah had been the first to look upon Gracie’s face, red and crumpled. She had been the one to sever the cord binding mother and child. She couldn’t bear to think of Gracie harmed. But wherever Gracie was, Amos had nothing to do with her absence. She was sure of that. It was true that he was a hard man to figure out. All the years he lived with Beulah there was a sort of fog rising off him, swirling up his legs and around his shoulders, issuing from his mouth. She didn’t lie to herself about Amos. She only tried not to think about the wrong he was doing out in the world. She didn’t want to know of his other sins. But he wouldn’t take an innocent child. He’d been one himself. Beulah couldn’t forget the condition he was in when she found him. There was a clearing by the river that only Yuneetah’s elders knew about. Any habitable dwelling ever built there was crept over with thornbushes and ground-cover vines, a shaggy overgrowth that draped down a bluff into a shaded glade. Beulah doubted even Dale Hankins knew of the spot and it was on his property. She hadn’t told anyone in town about it either. Mushroom hunters like her kept their secrets. Morels grew from early April to the beginning of May, and they usually didn’t come up in the same places each year. But in that clearing on Hankins’s land there was a dead chestnut tree with fat clusters of the spongy cones always sprouting from its base. It was hidden behind a laurel thicket but Beulah knew another way to get there. When she was more nimble, she used to climb down the bluff using tough strands of woodbine and creeper like rope. The day she found Amos, she was on her knees at the base of the chestnut with a burlap sack when she heard a sound that raised the hairs on her arms. It was a kind of keening, so mournful that she thought it was coming from a spirit. She followed the sound to a hole at the foot of the bluff and when she pulled back the vines there was a small boy in a cave, lying in a gruel of stagnant water. He turned his face to look up at her, his eyes wide blanks, his mouth open and that high-pitched noise coming out as if some other boy trapped inside him was making it. Beulah was frightened before her vision cleared and she saw him for what he was, an abandoned child.

She told the sheriff at the time about finding Amos but nobody claimed him. She was thankful because as strange as he was, he already felt like her son. He was as close to a child of her own as she’d ever have and she loved him like a mother would, even after he started vexing her. The tidiness of the house she kept seemed to provoke him somehow. The crockery stacked on the sideboard, the ladle hanging on a nail within reach of her hand, the preserves put away in the pie safe. Often he would take a jar of apple butter and dash it against the limestone slabs up to the cabin door, would hide her skinning knife or her iron skillet. At first she had encouraged Amos to play with the other children in the hollow, figuring a little boy like him shouldn’t spend all of his time with an old woman. She had hoped too that he might learn how to act from them. But often Ellard Moody or Mary Ledford would come running to tell on Amos for tossing their marbles into the weeds or kicking down the forts they built. As he grew up the neighbors began to complain that he slept in their barns, plundered their gardens or left the remains of his campfires smoldering in their fields. Rambling through town he would stomp down the tulips farmwives planted near the road. Beulah hadn’t known what to do about him.

She would turn to the bones, trying to understand. But on the subject of Amos the bones were silent. It took much thinking on her part, and much watching. It was the boy’s lies that baffled Beulah most. Every man, woman and child alive had lied at some time or another. Most lied because they wished to be something else than what they were, or because they had something to gain. Amos’s reasoning didn’t make sense to Beulah. More than once he owned up to something he couldn’t have done. Like the time Lee Hubbard came up the hollow looking for the muddy work boots he’d left on his stoop, swearing Amos stole them. Beulah said Amos was helping her in the garden and hadn’t left her side long enough to steal anything. But Amos stepped forward and said, “I took them. I took them and threw them off the bluff.” Beulah stared at her boy flabbergasted. Then she saw Lee Hubbard’s face turning plum, spittle gathering in his mouth corners. She had to stave Lee off with a hoe to keep him from whipping Amos. Once Lee Hubbard lost his wits, Amos got the upper hand. He took charge for a minute or two of the world he passed through nearly invisible. The people of Yuneetah noticed Amos only when he lied or got into meanness. They looked at him directly instead of turning their heads from his unsettling face, his glittering eyes that seldom blinked. It seemed to Beulah a child like Amos, left for dead by his mother and treated like a cur dog by his neighbors, might want to make a mark just to prove that he was alive. She almost couldn’t blame him. Beulah didn’t deny that Amos was a troublemaker. But she believed there was more goodness in him than ire.

There had been many times with Amos that rewarded her belief, peaceful days that reminded her of those spent with her mother. Even as a small boy he would rather work than play. He couldn’t stand to be idle and Beulah was the same way. When they ran out of chores they made up more for themselves. They kept busy stacking cordwood in the winter months, shucking corn and breaking beans in the summers, canning and making jam in the fall. At night he helped her darn stockings, patch their clothes and tat lace to trade at the general store. They kept bees and Beulah sold the honey to their neighbors, floating with pieces of comb. She and Amos had built the hives together one year out of scrap wood. Amos robbed the bees as if he belonged among them. They stung Beulah but never him, crawling sluggish over his face and arms. He had the steadiest hands she’d ever seen. She didn’t have to rely on the smithy to fix her tools or her cart when a wheel came off. Once during a chestnut blight Amos sawed down the diseased trees in danger of falling on her roof and then mixed batches of homemade dynamite to blast the rotten stumps. He wouldn’t say how he learned to make it, pouring nitric acid and glycerin in a bowl of oats to soak up the liquid. Only one as still and patient as he was could have kept from losing a finger. Beulah knew there would be trouble when she saw how Amos took to the dynamite, how his usually blank eyes kindled up with sparks when he handled it.

One night not long before Amos left on a boxcar Beulah noticed that he was gone from his pallet on the floor. She wasn’t alarmed because he had taken to sleeping outdoors. Even in winter he lay in the woods under a strand of hanging chimney smoke, covered with a mound of frost-etched leaves. When she called him to breakfast in the mornings he would bolt upright, the makings of his bed fluttering around him and catching in his hair. She got into her own bed that night and about the time her eyes slipped shut there came a bang that clattered her dishes. She sat up fast in the dark. At that hour sound carried for miles. When she went out the cabin door she could hear dogs barking all over Yuneetah. She turned and saw smoke above the treetops, but not from her chimney. She knew it was Amos. She only prayed that he hadn’t hurt himself or anybody else. She followed the smoke up the hollow, half certain she would find her son in pieces. The closer she got to the source of the smoke the stronger the night smelled of blasted earth. She walked under the scorched trees, over the showered-down bark, to a clearing where branches were burnt away. By the moon she saw a patch of seared ground. She knew that part of the woods, where one of the old homesteaders had left behind a root cellar dug into the mountainside, stacked limestone with a plank door. In its place was a mound of rubble, splintered boards still smoking. She stood at a distance and called Amos’s name, convinced he was buried under the pile. After a pause she heard a rustle in the thicket. He stepped out from behind a sapling to show himself. Beulah understood then why others were disturbed by the mask of his face. His eyes made her feel as if he knew her better than she did herself. Nobody had been harmed. For once she turned away like the rest of the town and went back down the hollow.

Now, as they often did in times of trouble, Beulah’s fingers crept to the pouch her mother had given her. An inheritance passed down through generations of the women in her family, come across the ocean with the first of them to settle in the hollow. Her mother had given her the bones when she started dreaming. Before each flood she would dream of a fish, the same middling-sized bass, washed up and gasping for air. She would wet the bed she shared with her mother and they would get up to change both their nightgowns. They would sit by the lamp together and wait for the rain to start, wait to see how many would drown. It was around the same time that Beulah began to bleed. The night the blood came her mother showed her how to catch it in rags pinned to her bloomers. Then she reached under the bed, the same one Beulah still slept in, and pulled out a tarnished snuff tin. She opened the tin and took from it the brown pouch. Everything they had was old, tattered and frayed, but the pouch was older. Beulah’s mother stroked her unbound hair as she told Beulah how it was with Kesterson women. There was something in their makeup, or something ordained by God, that they would have daughters. If a son was born, like the twin that had come with Beulah, he seldom drew breath. Once in a while one of these daughters saw things most others couldn’t. She led Beulah back then to this same table but with a different cloth and told her what to do. For the first time Beulah upended the pouch and spilled out the bones. When she could make nothing of them she was abashed, for herself and for her mother who might have felt like a fool. She said, “I can’t see anything.” Her mother said, “You will.” Beulah asked, “How do you know?” Her mother said, “I just do.” Not because she had second sight herself, but because a mother has faith in her child.

Beulah guessed there was no use in repenting what she’d done for Amos. She had lied for him, as her mother would have for her, as Annie Clyde would for Gracie. She meant to stand behind him. She was afraid for him and the little girl both. She didn’t like what she’d seen in Annie Clyde’s eyes. The cabin was dim and she raised up to light the wick of the lamp, casting her shadow across the table and the ceiling. Then she lifted the pouch from her bosom, loosened the neck and spilled what was inside. The bones were stained with age and worn shiny from handling, their scattering muffled by the flowered cloth. It was hard to tell what kind of living thing they’d come from. If Beulah’s mother knew, she never said. Beulah moved her fingers across them. After puzzling over the pattern they made, she grew discouraged. For a while she saw nothing, like that first time. But after staring longer it seemed they had knitted themselves into a ring. As she studied the circle, a shining bead formed in the center on the tablecloth. Then another and another, drops drawing together. She thought it was blood, like that long-ago blossom on the dingy cotton of her underclothes. It had been ages since she bled that way, at least thirty years, but she remembered what it looked like. It took only a second to realize that she was wrong. It was water. More and more of it. Clear and gleaming, the faded tablecloth flowers magnified under the beads before they soaked in. For a choking instant Beulah’s mouth and nose filled with its mineral coldness. Then the water was gone and she could breathe. She stared until her eyes blurred out of focus. When she blinked the bones went back to being scattered, the tablecloth dry again. She gathered them into the pouch and went to her bed in the corner. She lay on her side listening to the rain, looking at the gray light pressing against the window glass and falling on the floor, at the showers driven by the wind under the door. Annie Clyde and James were out searching in this storm and she hadn’t asked them inside. Sometimes she felt like in eighty-five years she had learned nothing. Had grown no wiser than that child who bled and was given the bones. She was tireder than ever, but no sleep came to her.

At dusk of the same day Sheriff Ellard Moody drove toward the ink-stained sky glimpsed between rashes of wet leaves. He gripped the wheel and leaned close to the windshield, squinting through the flood down the glass, the weak shine of the headlamps doing little to light the curves ahead. So far he had been able to skirt the sloughs in the road winding deeper into Yuneetah but he didn’t know how much longer he could. From the corner of his eye he watched the man huddled against the car door, his face a pallid smear above the collar of the slicker Ellard had given him back at the courthouse. James Dodson’s truck had gotten stuck somewhere along the ditch. After he gave up trying to push it out of the mire he’d walked the rest of the way to the town square. When he came banging on the locked courthouse doors, Ellard had taken one look at him and seen the direness of the situation. James had refused at first to come inside but his teeth were chattering so that Ellard couldn’t understand a word he was saying until he’d warmed up some by the coal grate. Once Ellard heard a child was missing he’d got on the shortwave and roused the constable over in Whitehall County. Before this evening he’d been glad that most of Yuneetah had moved on without giving him trouble, but now he wished for the townspeople back. He would have to count on outside help to round up a search party, if they could make it across the county line at all in such foul weather without becoming mired as James had done.

Now as they were on their way to the Walker farm, James seemed unwilling or unable to speak anymore. Ellard was acquainted with him through Dale Hankins. They had once spent a winter night in Dale’s barn with their breath smoking, helping him turn a calf. After hours of labor, it had come out of the heifer steaming and fallen in a bundle on the hay with sealed-shut eyes and the umbilicus stringing from its underside. James was the kind of young man others respected, friendly and hardworking, raised right by his aunt and uncle. Ellard used to watch James walking down the road with Annie Clyde on their way to church, riding the little girl on his shoulders. Whatever struggles the Dodsons had farming, come Sunday it didn’t show on their faces. He hated to see that same smiling man in such miserable shape tonight. Ellard left James alone for the moment. There would be time for questioning later, after he took a look around.

More than anything, Ellard dreaded seeing Annie Clyde Dodson. He figured she would be even worse off than her husband. As a child he’d roamed the hollow with her aunt and her mother. He’d watched Annie Clyde grow up and had a fondness for her, though their relations had been complicated of late with her holding out against the power company. She had treated Ellard with reserve as the deadline for her removal drew closer, not knowing she would have been evicted weeks ago if he hadn’t held up the process. He’d done everything he could to keep the government from taking action, determined to avoid driving out to the farm with handcuffs in his back pocket. When the eviction paperwork came to him, he claimed it was shoddy and sent it back to the offices in Knoxville. He told the ones in charge that he couldn’t enforce evictions in good conscience until they proved their documents were in proper and legal order. Ellard had made enemies for Annie Clyde’s sake, but in his experience those with power often abused it.

When the first men in dark suits and late-model sedans showed up in Yuneetah, Ellard had vowed to keep a close eye on how the Tennessee Valley Authority conducted their business. He was on Annie Clyde’s side. He still thought of her as a bashful child with her head down and her eyes on the ground. She had always been different than her mother, Mary Ledford Walker, a well-liked and outspoken woman. Annie Clyde was unsociable in a way that put her neighbors off. She was polite to them but nothing more. Ellard heard some of them wondering out loud where Annie Clyde came from, as cordial as both her parents had been. They weren’t thinking, as Ellard often did, about her aunt Silver Ledford who lived like a hermit on top of the mountain, coming down so seldom that he caught sight of her only once or twice a year. He knew what Annie Clyde’s neighbors would say about her now if they were around. She was warned about the water getting up. If she’d moved months ago she wouldn’t be in this fix. But Ellard was sorry for Annie Clyde, whether or not she’d brought this on herself. He was sorry for the whole town.

On his last birthday Ellard had turned forty-six but he looked older. His face was carved with furrows. His eyelids drooped, his hair was powdered with ash. For twenty years he had kept his vigil over Yuneetah. In 1929 he’d heard of men jumping off the tall buildings in New York City and seen things come to pass here at home that he would rather not have. Women pawned their wedding bands for a few dollars and men turned in their shoes for the price of a meal, until the pawnshop business dried up when there was nothing left to trade. Some had even begun to steal watermelons from gardens, laundry from clotheslines, eggs from henhouses. One night sitting in his apartment at the back of the courthouse Ellard had heard President Roosevelt talking on the radio about a social experiment involving the future lives and welfare of millions. Talking about an uneducated man living on a mountainside with his ten children, making twenty-five dollars in cash a year, who had been forgotten by the American people. Roosevelt spoke of giving that man a chance on better land, bringing him schools and industries and electric lights, stopping erosion and growing trees. But as an incident to all of that, he said, it was necessary to build some dams. It seemed to Ellard the president sounded too far away to know what he was talking about, but he hoped it was true. The people of Yuneetah needed help beyond what Ellard could give them.

For the most part Ellard believed he had done right by his hometown. Outsiders might have judged him for looking the other way when the moonshine runners came through from Kentucky and packed whiskey out by the carloads, but the next day he would see the bootleggers paying their druggist bills and settling up with Joe Dixon. Ellard had always put the well-being of his neighbors above any stranger’s idea of morality or justice. When the TVA showed up he decided it might be better for the town if he worked with the federal government rather than against them, regardless of his disdain. He only hoped the losses his people suffered were in their best interests, as Roosevelt had claimed on the radio. But whoever was responsible for the dam, God or the devil, it was out of Ellard’s hands. He meant to keep his badge on until the last soul was gone from Yuneetah. Then he would unpin it and head back up to his childhood house in the hollow. He would stand under the shade trees until it felt like he’d never left. He would clear away the leaves drifted against the door. He would sit on the unswept floorboards letting home sink back into him, listening to the crows cawing in the locusts and the bleat of Beulah Kesterson’s goats carried downhill. He would go squirrel hunting. He would see if he could make corn bread to taste like his mother’s or at least somewhat close, as hers was the best he’d ever put in his mouth. He would try to remember what he must have known once, what he guessed all of Yuneetah had forgot. How a fresh crewelwork of snow dressed even the dustiest of their farmyards. How leaves shaped like the hands of their babies sailed and turned on the eddies of the river. How an open meadow sounded when they stood still. How ripe plums tasted when they closed their eyes. How cucumbers smelled like summer. How lightning bugs made lanterns of their cupped palms. How it felt to come in from the cold to where a fire was built. These things they hadn’t lost. But, like Ellard, they had grown too weary to see them anymore.

Now the little Dodson girl was missing and there would be no rest for him after all, at least not tonight. He tried to remember when he last saw her. It must have been back in March, at Joe Dixon’s. It was chilly but warm enough for the door to be propped open. She was standing against it, her head not high as the handle, leaning there under a sign advertising the Hadacol Goodwill show. She was wearing a sweater buttoned over her belly and a gingham dress that showed her dimpled knees, grubby socks rolled down and scuffed shoes chalky from the gravel outside. Somebody had given her a bottle of orange drink and as she waited for her mother to pay at the counter she kept her mouth on the rim of it, looking at Ellard from under her lashes as if he might try to steal it from her, staring at his tall lankiness and his long mustache and the silver star on his lapel. “Hey, Fred,” he had teased, trying to look stern. After a while she had smiled at him around the soda pop bottle. “Is your name Fred?” he had asked, and she had shaken her mop of messy curls from side to side. When they left he watched them go down the steps, Annie Clyde carrying a parcel in one hand and Gracie swinging the other back and forth, prattling on about something only her mother could have understood. Just like Ellard, everybody in town got a kick out of Gracie Dodson. He thought of her at that last molasses making, dancing in the firelight. Nobody could take their eyes off her because she was hope right there in the middle of them. It was probably the last night they’d spend together in one place, but if they could believe it was all for her sake, they could bear it. If they could think about it like that. They were leaving behind their homes so things might be easier on Gracie someday than they had ever been on them. It was more than amusement that made them whoop and clap their hands. She was making everything all right, at least for the time being. They might have to start packing up their things in the morning, but in that moment they felt like it would all work out for the best.

Ellard intended to look for Gracie alive, but if she didn’t turn up by first light he could assume what had happened. She’d wandered off and drowned in the spreading lake, less than half a mile from the front door of her house and growing closer with each passing minute. He didn’t like to draw such a conclusion before he’d even reached the Walker farm or spoken to Annie Clyde, but it was where his mind went after the bleak decade he had lived through. After all he had seen. Just three months ago he’d gone out to talk with a man named Clabe Randall who was slow about moving. Clabe was a widower and lived in a brick house on a hill with musket balls embedded in its walls from the Revolutionary War. After his wife died he had stopped growing tobacco and sold off several acres of the pine timber on his farm. The timber had fetched a fair price and he was able to retire. Ellard had spent many afternoons listening to Clabe’s stories, sitting under the shade of the red oak in his yard. Clabe had spoken at length of his great-great-grandfather who built the house and of his grandmother who shot several Yankees to defend it. One afternoon Clabe had looked up at the red oak’s limbs and told Ellard, “This is a fine old tree. I had a swing here when I was a boy.” On the first of May, Ellard had parked at the road and gone up the hill into the clearing where Clabe’s brick house stood in the shade of the red oak. When he entered the lot he saw the grass cut and the flower beds tended, as if Clabe didn’t plan on going anywhere. The house was silent but he figured Clabe was tinkering in the barn. Then the breeze picked up and shivered the leaves and the hollyhocks in the garden. Ellard heard the creak of the rope before he saw Clabe Randall hanging from one of the red oak’s limbs. Perhaps the same one he’d swung from as a boy. Ellard approached and stood for a spell looking up at the swaying body before cutting it down, at the dried earth of Clabe’s land edging his boot heels. Ellard had seen the dead before. But he had never felt such sorrow as he did right then, not only for his friend but for the graveyard all of Yuneetah was soon to become.

Before the TVA came along, flooding caused Ellard’s neighbors as much or more grief as being run off their land by the government would. He couldn’t help thinking back to the flood of 1925 on his way out to the Walker farm to search for Gracie Dodson, especially since James’s father Earl Dodson had been among the many lost that season. It was the worst flood Yuneetah had ever seen, the whole valley devastated. He heard when it was over there was a steamboat in the middle of the street in Chattanooga. After the waters receded he went out in rubber waders to see what he could do for the town and came upon Wayne Deering stumbling around with one brogan on, the other sucked off by the sump. Not much remained of Wayne’s hog farm by the river. His two eldest sons were with him but his wife and three other children were missing, swept away when the porch they stood on was rent from the house. It didn’t take Ellard long to find the body of Wayne’s daughter slathered in clay on the riverbank. Farther down shore he spotted a mattress lodged in the branches of a sweet gum. He waded out and shinnied up the tree high enough to look down on the mattress, soaked and matted with vines. Lying in the middle was the smallest Deering, a baby in a nightshirt waving its arms and legs, its jaw trembling and its lips blue. As Ellard shifted his weight shavings of bark fell into its eyes. When it turned red in the face and began to wail, Ellard knew that it would live. He clung to the sweet gum branches for longer than he should have, too stunned to reach for the baby. Wayne’s wife washed up dead the next morning with the wreckage on a raft of barn board. But the third Deering child had seemed to vanish. No body was ever found. Ten years later Ellard was still looking for him, beating the bushes for his bones. Not finding him numbered among the regrets he counted alone in his apartment at night. Ellard had been a younger and more hopeful man back in 1925. Now, after twenty years as sheriff, he thought a second missing child might be more than he could stand.

With his mind wandering, Ellard was startled when James’s Model A Ford loomed out of the rain ahead. By then they were within sight of the Walker farm, which meant James had walked over five miles to town. Ellard guessed without looking at his pocket watch that it was sometime around eight o’clock. He guided the car through the slough and around the truck as well as he could, his wheels spinning but not getting stuck. James didn’t look at the mired Ford as they passed. He kept his eyes on the rills streaming down the window until Ellard turned beside the cornfield, headlamps cutting through the downpour and sweeping the stalks. But partway up the track Ellard slammed on his brakes. Something else had appeared like a ghost in the glow of his headlamps. It took an instant for him to recognize Annie Clyde Dodson. He’d come close to running her down. She came around to his side of the car and took his arm as soon as he stepped out, her fingers biting in deep. “Come,” she panted, water dripping off her chin.

Ellard stood in the rain trying to light the lantern he’d brought. “Hold up, Annie Clyde—”

“That old woman’s lying,” she said.

“If you’ll just be still for a minute—”

“Beulah Kesterson claims he was with her.”

Ellard’s eyes flicked to James. “Can you fetch us another lantern?” he asked. After James disappeared in the dark he turned back to Annie Clyde. “I need you to talk sense.”

“What did James tell you?”

“That your little one slipped off from the house.”

Annie Clyde shook her head. “No.”

“Well, what did happen then?”

“Somebody took her.”

“You seen somebody take her?”

“I saw him with her.”

“Who did you see?”

“Amos.”

Ellard covered her hand with his own. “Amos was here?”

“He was down there in the corn.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Come on,” she repeated. “We don’t have time.”

“Wait, now,” Ellard said. “Let’s figure this out.”

She snatched her hand away. “I’m trying to tell you. There’s a footprint.”

“All right,” he said, stepping back some. “Here comes your husband with the light.”

When James reached them, the lantern he carried haloed in mist, the three of them headed out to the hayfield together. Ellard’s thoughts were racing. There were few people he disliked, but Amos was one of them. Ellard’s father had been kind to Amos because he was an orphan. He had taught Ellard and Amos both to shoot. Ellard thought back to the night that, for the first time, his father allowed the boys to carry rifles. They were around ten years old. It was November and cold on the mountainside where they turned loose the hounds. While they trudged over the crackling leaves Amos’s eyes were fixed on Ellard and not the path before them. As Ellard’s father went on with the neighbors in their mackinaws and caps, Ellard lagged behind. Amos matched his stride, holding back even though he was nimble enough to move faster. Then the dogs took off baying and the men ran after them. Ellard hustled to keep up, but their lanterns grew farther off. Soon the high yelping of the dogs faded and the men were out of sight over a ridge. There was silence except for the sound of his feet on the trail. He could barely make out the faint glow of light through the woods ahead. Clumsy in the oversized boots he was wearing, Ellard tripped forward and lay in the powdery snow. He was about to get up when he heard the cock of a rifle. He turned himself over on the frozen ground and saw Amos standing above him with the gun pointed at his heart. He gaped up at the other boy’s soulless face, unable to breathe. At the age of ten, Ellard already had a sense of his fate being decided. He covered his eyes. There was nothing but the cold and the yelping dogs. In his mind he saw the hounds gathered around the tree, leaping over each other to get at the coon as it clung to the tip of a branch. He waited for the gunshot, but nothing happened. “Blam,” Amos said. Ellard uncovered his face. Amos lowered the rifle. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “I was just funning you.”

There was no way of knowing why Amos did such things or when he would do them. He was unpredictable. Ellard had learned back then to stay away from him. He had felt from the time they were children together in the hollow that darkness seeping out of Amos. In later years he’d had clearer reasons, but as a boy Ellard couldn’t have explained his loathing. It seemed they were born enemies. Of course, it was hard to tell if Amos had enough human feeling in his breast to love or hate Ellard either one. At the least, he was a troublemaker. As sheriff, Ellard had kept the town as ordered as his rooms at the courthouse. He had seen himself to Yuneetah’s upkeep, appointing crews to repair any storm damage done to the roofs each spring and to dig drainage ditches along the roads. The town was for the most part peaceful, until Amos would arrive. He always brought disorder. There were more fights for Ellard to break up, more farming accidents. There seemed even to be more deaths of natural causes when Amos passed through. He never left Yuneetah without making some manner of mess, if it was only a shattered storefront window. One autumn he had failed to smother a campfire he’d lit in Buck Shelton’s back field and burned down the pole barn. Ellard was sure Amos had left that fire going on purpose.

But to accuse Amos of taking a child, that was something else. Amos hadn’t done serious harm in Yuneetah that Ellard knew of, although he got a feeling the man might be capable of murder just from the deadness in his one eye. Amos was dangerous aside from any threat he posed to the Dodsons. It had been so long since Ellard last saw Amos he’d begun to hope the drifter had finally landed himself in the penitentiary somewhere. There must be a reason he was in Yuneetah during its last days that had nothing to do with Gracie Dodson, but Amos being seen hours before she disappeared seemed like too much of a coincidence. Whether she’d drowned or not, he might well have had a hand in whatever happened to her.

If Ellard had known before leaving the courthouse that Amos was around he could have radioed the other counties to be on the lookout for the drifter as well as for Gracie. He wished James had said more about the situation up front. Amos was a worse menace than the lake. He moved faster and with more cunning. He would be hard to track and Ellard needed backup if he meant to catch him, maybe more than the boys from Whitehall County. He would have to get the state police involved if Gracie didn’t turn up by morning. Now he moved around the house behind Annie Clyde with rain pouring off his hat brim. Nearly half an hour had passed from the time he turned up the track by the cornfield until they stopped at the elm beside the barn. “We can’t find the dog either,” James spoke up, his voice hoarse. “He was tied here. Gracie must have turned him loose.” Ellard bent with his lantern, drops falling from the leaves onto his back. He plucked the chain out of the bog at the base of the trunk. The links and hasp were unbroken. The slurry was marred with prints from both feet and paws, too mottled to tell Ellard anything useful. He stood and held the lantern aloft, lighting the tree’s skinned bark and the ropy twist of its roots. His brow knitted. Every second evidence was washing away and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. When he was ready to go on, they crossed the hayfield under the starless sky. Weeds whisked over Ellard’s slicker, water bounced off his shoulders. It had become nighttime. Looking up he saw that the clouds were dark shapes against a darker backdrop. The weather was dulling his senses, muffling his hearing, blurring his vision. It seemed to Ellard that everything was working against him and the Dodsons. The hour, the empty town, nature.

When they reached the second tree it shook like something alive, pelted leaves whirling, apples thudding. Ellard lowered himself to one knee and inspected the ground where Annie Clyde pointed. What might have been a footprint was now a misshapen trough. “It was there,” Annie Clyde said, begging with her eyes for him to believe her. He got to his feet and she took his arm again, jogging the lantern. “We ought to be out finding Amos,” she said. He looked at James standing hatless beside his wife, as if he didn’t feel the rain down the planes of his face. Their eyes met long enough for Ellard to see that what little hope James had had in the first place was waning. When Ellard plunged back into the weeds they followed like lost children themselves.

For another half hour they canvassed the farm. Ellard walked through the cornrows but Amos had left no trace behind. In the barn, the smokehouse, the corncrib, Ellard cast his light into corners looking for tracks in the dirt, blood drips on the plank walls, strands of hair or cloth snagged on nails. After the three of them had inspected the outbuildings they went back through the slapping hayfield weeds to where the trees started, the storm and the deep shade making the woods pitch black. Even with their lanterns it was near impossible to see under the dense canopy of leaves, fog seeping between the close trunks. Ellard could hardly hear himself shouting for Gracie over the storm. They climbed a ways up the mountain, calling to the child and whistling for the dog. But if she was calling back they couldn’t hear it. Or if Amos was in the trees laughing at them. All Ellard could do was keep his eyes open for signs of movement. Finally he led them out of the woods to convene in the hayfield. “I’ve done radioed Whitehall County,” he said. “They’ll be along anytime. We can talk back at the house until they get here.”

“We need our own people to look,” Annie Clyde rasped. “But everybody’s gone now.”

“There’s still some around,” Ellard said.

Annie Clyde leaned against James. “Where are your men? They’re taking too long.”

“Me and James’ll go on if they don’t make it before much longer,” Ellard said. “Best thing for you to do is stay and light the lamps so she can see to get home if she’s out here lost.”

“No. I’m going with you.”

James looked down. “Gracie can’t come back to an empty house.”

Ellard nodded. “I’d say she’ll be wanting her mama.”

It got quiet besides the rain tapping on the slickers of the men. Annie Clyde looked from James to Ellard, as if trying to believe it was possible that Gracie might come home on her own. Then she wilted, her shoulders caving. When her knees weakened James put his arm around her waist and helped her back across the field behind Ellard. They went in the kitchen door. James led Annie Clyde to the pine table where she sat staring at the stove as he made a fire in it. Ellard took a seat across from her while James lit the lamps. He removed his hat and set it aside on the table, hung his slicker from the back of the chair. He wondered if Annie Clyde or James wanted to change their clothes but they only waited for him to go on. He brought a notebook from his breast pocket and asked them to talk him through the details of the day. James began with coming home from Sevierville. Annie Clyde began with Gracie chasing the dog into the corn. Their voices flat, their eyes glazed. When they had both fallen silent he replaced the notebook in his pocket. “All right then,” he said. “You all sit and rest yourselves while I take a look around.”

Ellard stood and shrugged back into his slicker. Annie Clyde asked, as if out of nowhere, “Will you get my aunt Silver? I didn’t make it that far up the mountain. She don’t know yet.”

At the mention of Silver Ledford’s name Ellard felt his mouth corner twitching. He didn’t know if he could take her on top of everything else. She was a nerve-racking woman, and as far as Ellard knew not much of a doting aunt either. But he supposed Annie Clyde needed her mother right now and Silver was the closest thing she had. “I’ll send somebody up yonder to get your aunt before me and James leave,” he said. “You ought not to be here by yourself.”

Annie Clyde dropped her head, her hands lying limp in her lap. Ellard put on his hat and left her at the table with James to investigate the rest of the house, his shadow moving on the wallpaper. There was nothing out of place, no print they hadn’t tracked in themselves.

He thought as he climbed the stairs about what came next, once the Whitehall County constable made it to the farm. Beulah Kesterson would have to be questioned, but Ellard didn’t know how far he would get with her, in spite of the soft spot she had for him. Beulah had been something like a grandmother to Ellard growing up in the hollow. He’d spent many afternoons shooting marbles under the shade trees around her cabin. In the summers after Amos hopped a train he’d helped Beulah tend her goats and her bees. But he didn’t doubt where her loyalties lay. It might be better to send the constable up to see her, considering she knew Ellard and Amos to be enemies. She might be more willing to give Amos up to somebody else. Ellard needed to put most of his efforts tonight into rounding up a search party. Standing alone in the Dodsons’ bedroom, his lantern casting a shine on Gracie’s empty crib in the corner, he feared it would be a difficult task. He was relieved when he heard at last the sound of slamming vehicle doors and the faint but clear voices of men in the yard below. Ellard hoped for a competent tracker in the bunch, or that someone had brought along a dog. Though as far as Ellard knew there was one man in these parts that raised bloodhounds and he was in Clinchfield, an hour out of reach.

When Ellard went back downstairs James was waiting for him at the front door. “Let’s go,” he said. Ellard didn’t have to ask where he meant. But before they left Annie Clyde spoke up from behind them, her voice a husk. “James.” They turned around and she was standing there in her still-soaked dress. In one hand she held James’s hat, in the other a Winchester rifle. James took the hat and put it on his head. He hesitated before reaching for the gun. Annie Clyde thrust it into his hands. “If he’s got her, I want you to kill him.” Ellard studied Annie Clyde’s haggard face. Without a word James took the rifle and went out the door. Ellard followed, boots thumping across the porch planks and down the steps toward whatever waited.