Long Man

AUGUST 1, 1936

When the sun was barely up and Amos felt confident any workman or watchman left in the bunkhouse was asleep or just rising, he went out on the dam spanning the gorge where the river valley narrowed. There was a road running across the top of the mammoth structure, a two-lane highway with double yellow lines. Looking west he could see the road crooking out of sight around the humped mountainsides, blasted by the power company. When it was open it would connect this part of the valley to US 25 and Knoxville. Along the deserted highway there ran a pedestrian sidewalk. Amos trailed his fingers down its metal railing, overlaid in places with a sticky netting of cobwebs. He paused when he came to the middle of the dam where a concrete tower loomed over his head with two flags hanging limp from a pole, one American and the other blue with a white TVA emblem. Inside the tower an elevator shaft led down to the powerhouse, its locked steel door scratched and grimed with dirt. From two hundred feet high Amos could see, far in the distance, the rain-pocked water curving away between the forested hills. Leaning over with both hands on the railing he could look straight down the slant of the algae-stained spillway and see the dam doing its work, white water sluicing into the river below. He could see the tile roof of the powerhouse and its reflection rippling on the outflow, the framework of the transformer pad like a cage of prison bars on the bank. He supposed the design of the dam and the buildings was meant to be modern but they reminded him of a penitentiary.

Amos had watched the dam site all night, camped in the trees at the edge of the cliff on the west side. Up there the limestone was so sheer and wet that he had to crouch on an incline clinging to saplings. He was perched there for so long that his leaking boots had given him trench foot and his fingers had shriveled like those of the dead. A salamander had shinnied up his arm and hung by its spatulate toes to his coat shoulder. Rainwater had run off his brow to pool in the curve of his eye socket. For now the site was as vacant as the town but at dusk yesterday a watchman in a slicker had patrolled the perimeter of the chain-link fence surrounding the transformer pad and the paved path along the bank up to the powerhouse. After midnight when Amos was certain the watchman was gone he had scrambled down, showering pebbles before him, to look up close at the waters in the dark. On the downstream side of the dam there was no shore to stand on, nothing but an edging of bleached rocks crowded with poplar, cottonwood and elderberry trees. On the reservoir side peninsulas of red sand peeked from beneath the skirts of thick evergreens. The lake was much deeper and bluer than the river, rilled with waves. Looking out across the water from the bluff Amos had seen two rowboats lined up for use by the workers, painted orange with numbers stenciled on their sides, anchored by tie-off pins to a small dock.

Now that there was more light, Amos turned and walked through the misty rain down the double yellow lines of the highway. He went back across the dam and through the fog over to the east side where he stood atop a rolling hill among a sparse copse of hardwoods with power wires strung between them. From this vantage point he had a side view of the transformer pad and beyond it the low powerhouse set on the riverbed with its rows of reflective windows, its great generators connected to the turbine inside the dam. He followed the slope downward along the east abutment wall where the concrete met the grass, tar hardened in patches and rivets bleeding rust down its slanted face. At the bottom of the slope he hunkered for a while behind a crop of milkweed, studying the transformers through the chain-link fence, the chalky white metal of the framework bars. Then Amos went around the transformer pad and picked his way over the rock rubble of the shore until the river entered his boots. He craned his neck to see the dam’s tower from below, a castle turret with its drooping flags. He left his bindle and waded out, icy water riding up his legs, toward the bluff where he’d spent the night. He went farther across the foggy river, drawing closer to the dam, battling the outflow until his toes bumped the cement edge of the spillway. He stepped up onto it, the thunderous spray cascading over his boots, and inched forward to where the west abutment wall joined the cliffside. The seam was drifted with trailing scarves of scattered leaves, almost hidden by vines. Amos probed among them, parting the strands enough to see several snaking chinks. Settling like this wouldn’t affect the structure but he figured the TVA was worried about leaks anyway, wondering if their unproven dam would hold as fast as the reservoir was backing up. Whatever their concerns they’d keep them quiet. They wouldn’t draw unwelcome attention to their business in Yuneetah. In this same spot on the other side the structure would be most vulnerable, where it clung to the weak limestone. This was a gravity dam. It would have to be struck at the base to cause a breach near the bottom. Then the pressure of the water the wall held back would sweep it away, releasing the surging lake.

Amos knew as much because he understood explosives. If he had been born for anything, it was to handle dynamite. He had the steady hands it took. Once he’d worked as a powder monkey at a gravel quarry, the first job he found after leaving Yuneetah. His duty was to bring tools and explosives to the other men. Eventually they saw how fearless he was in spite of his young age and let him insert the fuses in the dynamite, punching holes in the cylindrical sticks with crimpers. Then for a time after the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1925 was passed, bringing with it rest areas and filling stations and eyesore bridges of steel, Amos had blasted tunnels in mountainsides to make room for the roads. He’d watched as motorcars caught on and blacktop reached deeper into the backwoods, cutting down whatever was in the way, sickened by what he saw. It used to be that he could walk a trail with deer grazing in open fields on both sides of him, plovers leading chicks through the bracken. These days traffic was running the plovers off and killing the deer. The bird nests Amos used to plunder gone. The gullies he once slept in fouled with roadkill. But however much he hated road building he sought the work out wherever he could find it. If he put himself in the right situations, sometimes an opportunity arose to hinder the government’s progress. It was then a matter of deciding whether or not to take it.

Yesterday before sunset after his camp was made, his guinea hen eggs boiled and eaten, the dog bite on his shin cleaned and wrapped with a strip torn from his shirt, Amos walked southeast until he saw a gap in the trees near the Whitehall County line where he knew the dam would be. Because there was still some daylight he avoided the site itself and ventured down an access road to the dormitories where the workmen used to be housed. He climbed the embankment alongside the dam into the woods where he discovered a stone wall marking the boundaries of the watershed. He followed the wall to a cinder-block hut with a padlocked door and stood contemplating it. When he pried a heavy rock from the mud and tried to smash the pendulous lock, the rock broke to pieces in his hands. But there were other ways to open it. There might be nothing inside but he was willing to wager there had been dynamite left after blasting the dam’s foundation. He wasn’t impatient to find out. He had learned to wait and see. He made decisions when the time came and not before, his actions dictated by what his instincts told him in the moment. If he discovered a shed full of explosives behind the door he might turn and walk away from them. But standing there he felt the opposition that had been inside him since his first memories of consciousness, thrusting like a fist under his breastbone, to all forms of government and hierarchy and authority. His resistance to all those who tried to keep him out with their locks.

In the Midwest where Amos had spent most of the last five years he could buy cheap plastic explosives with fuses and blasting caps at hardware stores. The farmers out there used them to clear their land of trees and stumps for pasture. He had carried a length of detonating cord across the country rolled in his bindle. Anyone who found it among his possessions would take it for a spool of rope. Amos had spent a longer time in Nebraska than he did in most places. He had a woman there. He’d seen her son first, bringing in water from a well. He remembered that day with fondness, moving between seas of pale witchgrass on an old wagon road underneath a wide blue sky. A hawk had swooped down to snatch up a blacksnake stretched basking across the road not a yard ahead of him. He had watched it rise and soar out of sight with the snake dangling from its clutches, the only witness. The only human being for miles, he’d assumed. A little farther on he’d come to a stretch where a path was mown through the grasses out to an oak tree. Beneath its shade, aged stones marked what Amos had supposed to be graves. He’d lowered himself down and sat looking ahead at the cloud shadows on the swells of the cedar hills at the end of the plains for most of an afternoon, until he saw the boy’s towhead moving above the high weeds and got up to follow. He had hung back unnoticed watching the boy lug the bucket home, sloshing water onto his legs, until he came at last into the yard of a run-down farmhouse. The woman had been on her knees bent over a washtub. She’d looked up startled when Amos asked for a drink. He’d thought then she must have been comely as a child. Her hair was something like her son’s but dulled by years of field work. She’d stared at Amos with fevered brown eyes as he drained the dipper. Then she’d asked if he wanted to come in where it was cooler. There was only her and the boy. Her husband had abandoned them and the land had gone to seed. She grew a garden and took in washing to feed her son. She made no demands of Amos. It was enough to have him sometimes in her bed. She was the one who told him about the man from the county Farmers’ Holiday Association. He had knocked on her door and invited her to a meeting.

Later that week Amos went down the old wagon road to a library basement in the nearest town where the meeting was held. He had read of the national association in the newspapers. They had formed to protest their land being auctioned off by the government. They had named themselves after the nationwide bank holiday, saying if bankers could take time off to reorder their business then farmers could do the same. Farm prices were so low they were dumping milk and burning corn for fuel. They thought if they reduced the supply by cutting off delivery of their goods the demand and the prices would rise. They had been blockading roads and highways to cut off milk deliveries, picketing cheese factories and creameries. Amos thought they were going about it wrong. Their protests had done nothing so far, their petitions had fallen on deaf ears. Thousands had marched on the capitol building in Lincoln demanding a moratorium on farm foreclosures. Chanting, “We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs, and let them eat their gold.” The legislature had halted foreclosure sales but still let district judges decide how long a foreclosure could be postponed. They could still order the proceedings to go forward anyway if they chose.

Over the year that Amos stayed with the woman and her son he made himself a presence among the farmers until they got used to him. He began speaking up, not during their meetings but before them, as they milled around with coffee gossiping and complaining. He told them it wasn’t reform they were after, not gradual change. It would take a revolt to see relief in their lifetimes and they were too hungry to wait. He whispered into their ears that they had to fight in defense of their homes and families. He made suggestions in such a subtle way that they thought his ideas were their own. In Bedford they dragged a judge out of his courtroom and put a noose around his neck, threatening to hang him if he didn’t stop approving farm foreclosures. In Brainard they burned down a milk bottling plant. In Falls City they rigged explosives on a switch track to go off when a boxcar hauling livestock crossed the state line. But the charge didn’t explode, as cheap dynamite bought over hardware store counters was harder to detonate. Then things took a turn when they tried to storm a butter creamery in Madison County. The gatekeeper called the sheriff and when he came the strikers pelted him and his deputies with rocks. A brawl broke out, blackjacks made from bars of soap in stockings knocking men down at Amos’s feet. He crossed the road and stood on a knoll in a wildflower meadow as a mob rocked the sheriff’s car until it turned over. One deputy hit a striker with his pistol butt. The sheriff sent off a tear gas canister. Most of the gas went into the crowd but some blew back on the deputies. In the confusion they started firing. Amos took up his bindle and headed east. The satisfaction he felt as he walked away had nothing to do with the farmers he’d spent the past year among. He had no real ideology. He had no set convictions. He had only his loathing for the men who ran everything. He left Nebraska without seeing the woman and her towheaded son again. But he thought about them often, and still carried in his inner coat pocket one of the boy’s toy soldiers.

Amos had brought that soldier out of the Midwest along with the length of detonating cord, reaching in sometimes to rub it with the ball of his thumb like a charm against the images that followed him. Children wearing masks to school in towns so covered with dust that he spat brown clots for days after passing through. Starving jackrabbits coming down from the hills in multitudes, fathers and their young sons herding the animals into pens and clubbing them to death. On a country road in Iowa he came upon a man changing a flat on his DeSoto. As he approached the jack slipped and the weight of the car came down on the man, whose face Amos never saw. Amos pried at the front fender but in the end he could only stand in the road and watch the man die, legs jerking as the DeSoto crushed the life out of him. When the man’s legs were still, Amos moved on. Not long after that he passed through Kansas as a dust storm was coming. It had seemed like the end of everything, a wall of swarming cloud stretched across the horizon, blotting out the sun. Amos stood still at first, rooted in place. Then the wind began to stir the roadside trees and an oppressive silence descended, every other living soul in hiding. When the first of the grit pelted his face he took off running until he came at last to an outhouse, the only shelter he could find, and shut himself in with the stink as the blackness drew down.

Now as he stood on the dam’s spillway before its chinked seam, there was not enough light to burn off the fog so it lingered. Amos thought it would be safe to head for Beulah’s cabin if he kept to the trees. He waded back across the river, took his bindle and went up the slope again, following the hillside deeper into the hardwoods until he came at last to a roadside bluff. He descended the stepped ledges then crossed the road and climbed another bank. The going was slick with waterfalls trickling down from the mountains. After gaining the top of the bank he disappeared into the hollow, copper needles muting his footfalls. It was in those woods away from the roar of the dam that he began to hear voices. At first he pushed on, thinking it might be the rush of the outflow down the spillway impressed on his eardrums. But when he grew certain that he wasn’t imagining things he stopped on the crest of a rise, the edge ragged with hanging roots, overlooking the leafy ground where it dropped off below. Amos listened. There were a number of them. They must have come from other counties, or some of the townspeople must have returned. It was plain to Amos that they were searching for someone. If they had been making less noise he would have assumed they were looking for him. It was hard to tell what direction the voices were coming from but the searchers sounded far enough away that he wouldn’t encounter them. He stood still awhile longer in the mist among the alder trunks, soaked sleek and tall like one of them. He tilted his ear until at last he made out the name they were calling. It was Gracie, the same name he had heard in the cornfield yesterday morning.

Considering the distance of the voices Amos was caught off guard when someone came weaving through the trees below him, shoes sliding through the leaf litter. A moment after the rustle of feet she came into sight, her head rising and falling with the uneven terrain. He knew before she got close enough for him to see her profile that it was Annie Clyde Dodson. She paused almost directly beneath him to rest against a poplar trunk. This time Amos didn’t make himself known to her as he had in the corn, though he could have knelt down and reached out to touch her shoulder. He wasn’t surprised to see her searching apart from the others. She was more like her aunt Silver than like her mother. Even among the people of this forgotten town, Annie Clyde Dodson and Amos were outsiders. They were not as different as she would want to believe. But she couldn’t see herself as he did now. Laid bare with her sodden dress showing the starved slats of her ribs, no more than a film on her tawny skin. It was common knowledge the Ledfords were Cherokees, the first to be run off this land. Maybe that loss, and not her father’s farm, was Annie Clyde Dodson’s inheritance. As Amos observed her from the thicket she lifted her chin. Though she hadn’t spotted him, he could see the rain beaded on her lips and on the fine hairs of her arms. He waited for her to sense his presence, to call him out or charge up to meet him, but she didn’t feel how close they were. “Gracie?” she shouted into the trees above her head. “Gracie!” Amos didn’t move, his breathing even. Then Annie Clyde’s eyes shifted. She turned back toward the way she’d come, hearing something. It was the other searchers, making a commotion somewhere near the river. Annie Clyde took off in that direction. Amos figured she would slow down once she realized she might not want to see what they had found in the water.

Amos had seen the drowned himself and chose not to picture Gracie Dodson that way. He thought of how she had looked in the cornfield instead, standing between the rows with seedpods in her curls like those he shook from his own hair after sleeping on the ground. If they found her alive they would likely take her up north, where no corn was growing. Many of the displaced were heading to the cities. Amos hated the smog, the heat shimmering off the streets. He hated the neighborhoods with neat bungalows lining the gaslit curbs, yapping dogs snapping at him through the pickets and gates of fenced yards. He liked knowing whether those inside did or not that he was trespassing where he wasn’t wanted. Sometimes he waited for them to part their window curtains and see him standing on their flagstone walks. He always left something behind for them to find in the morning, a cigarette butt floating in a birdbath or a heel print at the edge of a flower bed. He didn’t want to think of the little girl from the cornfield growing up somewhere like that. If they had her back they would just make her over in their own image, raise her up in their ways and marry her off to a man who gave orders from behind a desk. Amos thought it might be for the best if they never found her. Best if she was returned to the earth.

Amos knew there were ways to use this distraction to his advantage. It was bound to cause problems for the power company. But he put the notion aside for the time being. Annie Clyde Dodson was looking for her daughter. He was looking for something to break a lock. His mind turned back to the dam and the task at hand. He pushed on deeper into the hollow until he reached the clearing where Beulah’s cabin stood, approaching from the back of the lot. He would have followed the path his boots had worn to her door over the years and asked for a bite of breakfast, but he didn’t want to cause the old woman any trouble. Maybe there would be time to pay her a visit later. For now, he only needed to visit her shed. Hurrying for cover, he went past the ordered rows of the garden and the bagging wire of the goat pen. When he got to the shed he found the plank door open a crack and forced it the rest of the way. He stood in the weak light falling through the door and searched the shadows, cloying with mold and corroding tin. He and Beulah had built the shed for storing tools, seeds and grain. Over the years it had grown full and junk had accumulated out behind the cabin. Somewhere Beulah had a bolt cropper. He knew because he’d used it himself for cutting wire mesh when they built the henhouse. His eye scanned the boards of the wall where Beulah had hung her gardening shears, her mule bridles, her rusty machete. When he spied the long bolt cropper hanging from a tenpenny nail he slipped it down at his side. Then he stopped cold, still facing the wall. He could feel someone standing behind him. With sudden speed, he snatched the machete off the wall with his other hand and turned around. Beulah was there just inside the shed door, a head scarf tied under her chin against the weather. They regarded each other for a moment. She looked the same as ever, hair in a yellowed braid over her shoulder and the pouch on a string around her neck. After a while, she took off her pointed glasses to wipe the raindrops from the lenses. “Hidee, Amos,” she said.

“Hello, Beulah,” he said back.

“What are you looking for?”

Amos held up the machete. “Bluff’s too wet. I’ll have to cut through the thicket.”

Beulah put her glasses back on. “Your place might be flooded. You think of that?”

Amos smiled. “What are you doing out here?”

“Fixing to check my traps.”

He noticed the burlap sack she was holding. At first she’d seemed unchanged, but looking closer he saw a difference. Her hand was shaking, her eyes dull, her dress stained. It wasn’t just Yuneetah that had seen its last days. “Don’t look like you been catching anything,” he said.

She took a step closer, sizing him up. “You’re one to talk.”

Amos smiled again. “I’ve been eating.”

“What, pine needles? You can’t live on that. A man needs meat.”

“I get some every once in a while.”

“Well. I wish I could offer you some breakfast.”

“I know,” he said. “Another time.”

Beulah nodded. “You better clear out.”

“I will tomorrow.”

“Why not today?”

He didn’t answer.

“What do you need with them bolt croppers anyhow?”

After a pause he said, “I better not tell you.”

“Amos,” she said. “I got an awful feeling.”

He smirked. “Bones been talking to you?”

“I ain’t kidding. I believe there’s fixing to be bloodshed. I just don’t want it to be yourn.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“Huh. You wouldn’t risk your own hide for nothing.”

“Things change,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Nothing wrong with change.”

“But there’s something wrong with those that have taking away from those that don’t.”

“Well. There’s the right way to stand against something and the wrong way.”

“Who gets to decide what the right way is, Beulah?”

Her mouth folded over her gums. “I never could tell you nothing.”

He turned the machete over, inspecting the blade. “You believe in gods.”

“I believe in one God.”

“All right. What if God took that child they’re looking for as a punishment?”

Beulah’s brow creased. “Who, Gracie? That innocent little girl?”

“For messing with Him.”

“It don’t work that way. The Lord won’t take a child away from her mama over a dam.”

Amos looked up. “Yeah, well. Maybe He’ll give her back if the dam goes away.”

Beulah shook her head. They studied each other.

“If I make it out of here I won’t be back,” he said.

“Why in the world not?” she asked. “This place is your home.”

“If the government has their way, this place is about to be gone.”

“Even if it’s covered up, it’ll still be here.”

He gestured with the machete. “Look around. Nothing left here but hard times.”

“Amos,” Beulah said. “It don’t matter what’s built or tore down by a man’s hands. The Lord’s in charge. Sure as the river keeps on running, good times will come back around.”

Amos grinned. “Maybe you ought to ask your bones if you’ve got it right or not.”

She smiled back a little. “You better watch that smart lip.”

“I better get out of sight,” he said. “Fog’s burning off.”

She held out the burlap sack, bloodied by the rabbits, coons and groundhogs she had snared and carried home to the cabin. “Here,” she said. “See if there’s some meat for your breakfast.” He tucked the bolt cropper under his arm and took the sack. Their fingers touched and he felt a pang of sorrow or love for this old woman he might never lay his one eye on again. He didn’t know why she had always been kind to him. They never spoke of it. She stepped aside and let him pass through the door on his way to the clearing at the foot of the viny bluff.

At a quarter to eight, Sheriff Ellard Moody sat parked at the curb in front of the former Customs House on the corner of Clinch and Market, across from the Tennessee Theatre. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for the caseworker assigned to Yuneetah, Sam Washburn. In the other hand he pinched a cigarette, smoke curling out the window. He peered up through the windshield at the light poles, the power lines crossing over the rooftops. Much had changed since the first time Ellard came into the city with his father, gawping at the tall buildings and the motorcars lining the brick-paved streets, watching the fashionable ladies pass with their hair cut short and marcelled into waves. The Customs House still had the same facade as it did back then, gray marble with cast-iron columns, but it had changed in other ways since the power company took it over for their headquarters. Until 1933 the old building had housed the federal court, the excise offices and the post office. Now it held only the TVA offices. Ellard had made this trip too often in the last couple of years. When the townspeople complained of how they were treated he came here and demanded to see somebody in charge, determined not to let the big government machine forget they were dealing with individuals in Yuneetah. Most of the time he was put off or sent away dissatisfied. This morning at least he was seeing an official, the chief of the Reservoir Family Removal Section.

In Knoxville the morning was fair and bright, the car already heating up. The city had always seemed like a different world to Ellard. Now it had its own weather, not thirty miles north of his drowning town. Earlier when it was still darkish he had come through the fog that blanketed Yuneetah, watching as the clouds massed over the wooded hills receded in his rearview mirror, his tires slinging orange clay as they turned off the dirt byways onto blacktop. The sun had risen higher as Ellard passed under the arched girders of the steel bridge on the way into the city, crossing over a different river than what he knew, this one floating barges and steamboats on to Chattanooga. Leaving behind the pickup trucks and mule-drawn carts of the countryside and joining the faster traffic of the highway, the smells through his open window changing from wet farmland and rich manure to factory smoke and gasoline. Part of Ellard was relieved to be escaping, but he was ill with worry over what was happening in his absence.

As Ellard sat waiting for Washburn his head swam with all that had passed the night before. He and James had gone first across the road into the Hankins pasture, down to the uneven shoreline of the reservoir. They had split up, James heading left with a group of Whitehall County men toward where the field was bordered by a stand of loblolly pines. Ellard had gone to the opposite end where a dense thicket crowded against the barbwire. Before climbing over the fence he’d held his lantern across and seen light reflected on water. It was hard to say how deep it would be in some places. If Gracie had ventured in too far, the ground might have dropped from beneath her. But he would rather the lake have taken the child than Amos. Ellard had crossed the fence and spent close to an hour crashing through the overgrowth in the dark, burrs catching in his cuffs and shale wedging in his boot treads. He had pushed into the hemlocks as far as the water reached, shining his light into spidery tree holes and beating at drifts of forage with a branch, plunging his fingers into root tangles groping for the touch of hair or flesh or bone. Looking for Amos and Gracie Dodson both, his hand going to his revolver each time the brush crackled.

When the search in the pasture yielded nothing James had gone with the men from Whitehall County to round up as many as they could from the coves and hollows above the taking line while Ellard stayed at the courthouse on the shortwave, calling for assistance. So far only a handful had showed up from surrounding counties and the state police were dragging their feet. He couldn’t help thinking a missing child from somewhere else might warrant more attention. Yuneetah had never been of much concern to outsiders, even before it was evacuated. Most anything Ellard asked of the higher-ups was years in coming, if it came at all. He had learned to make do with his piddling salary, his rooms at the courthouse and the use of this car, a humped-trunk Ford sedan with a black top and gold stars painted on the doors. But now Ellard cursed his lack of resources. He guessed he should be thankful anybody had come at all. He’d feared the townspeople wouldn’t return if they believed Gracie Dodson was dead, having watched enough of what they loved disappear. He had been relieved to see at least a few of his old neighbors among the other searchers gathered at the courthouse around midnight, standing in the lamplit entrance hall as Ellard gave them instructions. James Dodson had been there looking addled with his eyes roving over the pressed-tin ceiling, the fly-specked plaster walls, the high windows darted and dashed with raindrops. Ellard had told the searchers to sweep in lines through meadows and woods, to enter each vacant building and house. He’d advised them to spread out, to be slow and deliberate.

Around dawn there had still been no trace of Gracie or Amos found, but there was a commotion on the riverbank. Ellard was organizing a group of fishermen with musseling boats to drag the lake when he heard the shouting. By the time he reached the other men upriver the ruckus had settled down. He came upon them bent over something at the edge of the lapping water, a hilly form lying on its side and drifted around with debris. At first sight he thought of Gracie’s coonhound. It was about the size of a large dog and resembled Rusty from a distance. James had told Ellard last night as they searched along the reservoir that his daughter would have followed that dog anywhere. If this was the hound that had gone missing with the child, she wouldn’t be far behind. But moving closer he saw that it had golden fur and a long tail, outstretched forelegs ending in big paws. It was a panther, with one marble eye shut and one open, its tongue hanging between ivoried teeth. Even in death, it had a sinuous beauty. Ellard toed its haunches. He knelt to look for buckshot, musk rising from its soggy hide into his nose, but the panther was unmarked. He had come across all manner of drowned animal. Moles, possums, groundhogs. But nothing like this. It troubled his mind.

Then Annie Clyde Dodson came stumbling along the river as he was rolling the panther in a tarp. Ellard froze, watching as she ran down the slick bank. It was only when she fell that he and the other men rushed to her side. They tried to help her up but she shook them off, her dress front heavy with mud. She went to the tarp and dropped on her knees, pulling a flap back. She stared down for a long time. When one of the men made as if to cover the stinking corpse Ellard stopped him. They allowed Annie Clyde to look until she was satisfied, the babbling river filling their silence. When she stirred at last they all scrambled again to help her to her feet. Ellard asked if he could take her home but she turned and went off on unsteady legs into the trees without him. He started after her but didn’t know in the end what she might do if he interfered. He’d told the constable before heading for Knoxville to keep an eye on her.

Now he felt like he had been away from Yuneetah too long. He began to regret his decision to come this far from home. He pulled out his pocket watch and shoved it back in his coat. He was considering going inside without Washburn when he heard the rap of knuckles against the glass at his ear. He dropped the stub of his cigarette into his lap and then flicked it out the window crack. Washburn stood back waiting as Ellard brushed the ash from his trousers and opened the door to get out. He was a handsome but solemn young man with startling blue eyes and dark blond hair slicked under a fedora. Their paths had crossed more than once in their effort to relocate the people of Yuneetah. In two years, Ellard hadn’t seen Washburn’s tie crooked or his shoes unpolished. He always smelled of pomade and aftershave, though he didn’t look old enough to grow whiskers. When Washburn offered his hand, their last meeting came back to Ellard. A month ago they had spoken in Ellard’s office about Annie Clyde Dodson. Ellard supposed they had known then it could come to something like this.

“Are you ready to go in?” Washburn asked.

“As I’ll ever be,” Ellard said.

He followed Washburn up the steps under the columned portico and into the lobby, their heels ringing as they passed a crowd of potential hires waiting outside the employment office. They rode up in the elevator to the third floor and went down a hallway, clacking typewriters behind the closed doors. At the end of the hall they were ushered by a secretary into the office of a man named Clarence Harville. The room had a low ceiling and one window with a half-pulled shade, showing a glimpse of the Tennessee Theatre sign across the street. Under the window there was an oak desk and beside it a row of filing cabinets. Against another wall were shelves stacked with ledgers and boxes of supplies. Ellard’s eyes moved over these things without seeing them. He and Washburn sat in silence as Harville spoke to someone outside the office door, wavy shapes behind patterned glass. When he came in at last, a dour old man in a tailored suit and round spectacles, Washburn and Ellard stood. “I’ve already kept you gentlemen too long,” Harville said, taking a seat behind his desk. “So I’ll get to the point. You both know as well as I do this could have been prevented.”

Ellard held his hat in his lap. “I don’t see that it matters now. There’s a child missing.”

Harville nodded. “I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve been concerned something like this would happen.” He looked at Washburn. “I want you to work with Sheriff Moody however you can.”

“Of course,” Washburn said. “I’ve made some calls about getting dogs out there—”

“Let’s leave that to state law enforcement,” Harville interrupted.

Washburn shrugged in his stiff-looking suit coat. “So far the state police have been slow to get involved. They might be more inclined to act if we put some pressure on them.”

“I’d rather not step on any toes, if we can avoid it,” Harville said.

“With respect, sir,” Washburn said. “We can’t worry about that.”

“I want to hear from the sheriff. What’s the quickest way to solve this?”

Ellard stared at the desktop, sun from the window lighting the objects there, a wire basket, an ashtray, a stamper, a mercury glass paperweight shaped like a globe. Anything to keep from looking at Harville’s smug face. “If the water was drained, we could cover more ground.”

Harville regarded Ellard overtop his spectacles. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“We’re going to need a drawdown. That’s all there is to it.”

Harville’s bushy eyebrows lifted. “A drawdown? We can’t do that.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“It would take a week to drain the lake. They’ve got to be out in two days.”

“Two days?” Washburn broke in. “You still mean to enforce the deadline?”

“I hope it won’t take a week to find her,” Ellard said. “But I have to plan on it.”

“I don’t have the authority to order a drawdown anyway,” Harville told him.

Ellard put on his hat. “Well then, I need to see somebody that does.”

“Wait a minute,” Washburn said. “Let’s talk about what we can do, not what we can’t.”

Harville turned from Ellard to Washburn. “You can go down and be with the family.”

Washburn shifted in his chair. “I’m heading out to Yuneetah as soon as we’re finished here. I’ll talk to the public relations staff first. We should get the child’s picture in the Sentinel—”

“Public relations is not your area either,” Harville spoke up, cutting the boy off again.

“Public relations,” Ellard said, his blood heating and his voice rising. “What in the hell are we talking about?” He rounded on Washburn. “What’s wrong with you, son? I might as well have come here by myself. You’re supposed to be an advocate for these people. You know them. This man don’t. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, letting him run over you this way.”

“There’s no reason to get loud,” Harville said. “We’re all on the same page.”

“But not on the newspaper page,” Ellard said. “Ain’t that right?”

Harville pursed his lips. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what I can do for you?”

“I done told you,” Ellard said. “I need a drawdown. I need the state police. I need the word out in the newspapers. I need bloodhounds. And I need you to put yourself in James Dodson’s shoes. He’s looking for his daughter while we’re sitting here talking about what all you can’t do. Washburn don’t have any children, but I’d say you’ve got some. Grandchildren, too.”

Harville slouched behind the desk, as if wearied by the turn things had taken. “Yes.”

“Then you ought to understand. Unless you think your babies are worth more than ours.”

Harville flushed. “I won’t sit here and listen to this.”

Ellard got up with balled fists. “You ain’t hearing me noway,” he said. Washburn sat forward, knees knocking against the desk. Ellard made himself pause. He lowered his voice. “That’s all right, Harville. I see how it is. It’s my problem and you people don’t give a damn.”

“I’ll do whatever I can to help you,” Harville said. “But there won’t be any drawdown.”

Ellard went to the door and turned back. He drew breath to speak but couldn’t think what he wanted to say. Finally he opened the door and shut it behind him. By the time he got to the elevator he’d run out of steam. He walked out of the building into the street with his head down.

When Washburn called Ellard’s name he didn’t turn around. “Sheriff!” he called again. Ellard stopped at the car and saw Washburn coming down the wide steps toward him, past others on their way inside. “You can’t just leave,” the boy said, out of breath as he reached the curb.

Standing between the bleak buildings, the sun glaring off the vehicles motoring by, Ellard felt cornered. He had to look way up to see the sky. “No use wasting more time going over it.”

“Clarence Harville’s a decent person,” Washburn said, not sounding convinced himself.

“Right now I ain’t too worried about Clarence Harville one way or the other.”

“Will you come back in with me?”

“I told you, I’m done wasting time. He don’t care if that child’s alive or dead.”

“Well, I care,” Washburn said. “I mean to help you find her.”

Ellard looked Washburn in the face. “What if we don’t find her? Are you going to help me cuff Annie Clyde Dodson and drag her off of her farm? Like that man in there wants?”

Washburn averted his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“That’s right. You don’t know nothing. What do you think will happen down yonder?”

“I think we’re going to find the child and give her back to her mother.”

“Maybe. But she might be tied up dead in a barbwire fence. Or tangled up in a brush pile.”

Washburn paled but he didn’t respond.

“I’ve found them with their eyes eat out by the catfish, and I’ve found them without a mark on them, like they’re just asleep. That might be the worst. Are you ready to see that?”

“No,” Washburn said softly. “But I’ve seen a lot of good things done in Yuneetah over these last two years. If you’ll work with me, we might get one more good thing done.”

The boy sounded so young and chastened then that Ellard felt sorry for him. “I don’t want to argue with you, son,” he said. “We ought to get along if we mean to help the Dodsons.”

Washburn nodded. “If Harville won’t see reason, I’ll go over his head.”

Ellard opened the car door. “I got to get on back.”

“I’m behind you,” Washburn said.

Ellard didn’t know if the boy meant on the way to Yuneetah or something else. He felt alone either way as he got into his car. He dreaded the long trip back home. He had too much time to wonder what was waiting for him. Too much time to think about his exchange with Washburn. He already regretted what he’d said about Gracie. He didn’t know what had come over him. Ellard supposed he wanted to knock the boy down a peg, standing there on the curb in his polished shoes, looking so hopeful and sure of himself. Washburn was an idealist. He believed progress was the answer to everything. Ellard wished he saw it like Washburn did, but in his experience the state was motivated less by altruism and more by their own selfish pursuit of power. The boy needed to believe that Harville was a decent man, that the Tennessee Valley Authority was trying to save the people of Yuneetah. But Ellard had come to the conclusion after twenty years that there was no saving his people. Sometimes he thought they didn’t want to be saved. He’d had many rows with his neighbors on the porch of Joe Dixon’s. For all their common sense they’d rather starve than take what they called handouts. They voted Republican or Democrat according to what side their grandfathers had picked before they were born. They said there had always been a Depression going on around here. It was hard to get much poorer than they had been. But to Ellard it seemed foolish for any but the wealthy to back a man like Herbert Hoover, giving aid to banks and railroads and corporations instead of workingmen with families.

Regardless of what Washburn wanted Ellard to believe, Harville was no better than the politicians in Washington claiming it wasn’t their place to provide relief, passing the responsibility off to charities and churches. Ellard thought the government that got them into this mess ought to get them out of it. But he’d do what he could for the Dodsons, as he had done what he could for his own kin when the banks began to take their farms. His mother was from a place called Caney Fork, right outside of Whitehall County, and he had a first cousin there named Bill Harrell. A few years ago he’d stopped to see Bill on his way back from Clinchfield and found an auction sign at the end of the road up to his place. Before supper was over Ellard had decided to stay and see what he could do to help Bill keep his fifteen acres. They’d gone to the neighboring farmers, worried they might lose their own property. It wasn’t hard to talk them into organizing. Come the day of the auction men from all over Caney Fork converged on Bill’s land. Ellard watched from the chaff-floating shade of the barn with his revolver showing on his hip and a noose hanging from a nail over his head, letting strangers know they were unwelcome. The auctioneer stood on a wagon bed pouring sweat under the morning sun. But when he called for bids and the other Caney Fork farmers piped up with their offers, his face flamed from more than the heat. Every starting bid was a penny, for tracts of hardwood timber and tools alike. The bidding commenced at one cent for the house and closed at a quarter. Bill’s neighbors refused to bid over a nickel for anything, until the auctioneer gave up in disgust. By the end of the day Bill had bought back all that he owned for five dollars. Ellard knew a child was not a farm but the principle was the same. The ones that loved her would have to be the ones to try and save her.

Ellard had vowed long ago to treat the people of Yuneetah the same as he would his first cousin. They all felt like kin to him, especially Annie Clyde Dodson, since he’d grown up with her mother and her aunt. Now driving farther into the foothills he hoped he hadn’t made things worse for her by turning Clarence Harville against him. Once he was across the steel bridge the first splatters of rain hit Ellard’s windshield. By the time he reached Yuneetah it was falling in curtains across the hood. His tires spun on the way down the slope into town, churning in the ruts made by other vehicles passing or getting stuck that way while he was gone. As he drove through the square he saw two uniformed men standing on the courthouse steps, one lighting a cigarette behind his cupped palm. Deputies from Sevier County, not state police. He nodded to them but didn’t slow down. He meant to put off dealing with any more outsiders as long as he could. Aside from them the town square was empty of lawmen and searchers. They were likely using the Walker farm as their base of operations. Ellard headed that way, listening to the distant cries of the men and women spread out through the pines bordering the fields along the road before cranking up his window against the weather. He would see about the Dodsons, but Amos was his priority. He didn’t need the state police. Ellard knew the drifter and his habits better than they did anyway.

He had almost reached the farm when he saw Silver Ledford at the side of the road. She was coming down the bank across from the cornfield, her pale ankle flashing in the chicory as she stepped across the gully. Silver was unmistakable as anybody else. She possessed her own wild beauty, like bark and quartz rocks and flowering weeds. As she hurried ahead of the car Ellard sped up to pull alongside her. She glanced his way but kept walking in her liver-colored dress. He cranked the window back down, chill droplets splashing in on him. “Silver Ledford,” he called. She tucked her chin, pretending not to hear. He blasted the siren mounted on his front fender once and she stopped where she was, glowering as if he had slapped her. He reached across the seat and pushed open the passenger door for her. “Get in. I won’t keep you long.” She looked at him for another second before climbing inside. He turned off the engine, the downpour battering the roof. He closed up the window, the cornfield and the weedy bank blurring out of focus. “Why didn’t you go to Annie Clyde last night?” he asked. “I sent somebody after you.”

Silver huddled against the door, leaning her head on the misted window. Water had already begun to spread on the upholstery under her legs. “I’m on my way to see her now.”

“What about Amos? You ain’t seen him, have you?”

She turned farther away. “I been looking for him myself.”

“I got every lawman that would come here tracking him, but I bet you’d beat them all.”

“Amos don’t leave no tracks,” Silver muttered. “Not even for me to find him.”

“Amos is a human being, Silver. He can be caught. He’s just quicker and quieter than the average individual. Except maybe for you. I thought you might know the best place to look.”

Silver hugged herself, shivering. “I don’t know him as well as you think I do, Ellard.”

“You two seem awful close to me.”

“Anyhow I’d say Amos is long gone.”

“I figure you’ve seen him, though.”

“What if he ain’t done nothing wrong?”

“He never does no wrong, according to you and Beulah Kesterson.”

“I ain’t like the rest of you,” she said. “Blaming everything on him.” Even with her expression hidden behind her hair, Ellard could see the set of her jaw. “You been looking for an excuse to hang Amos going on forty years. All you been waiting for is a good enough reason.”

“That’s your sister’s grandbaby,” Ellard said. “You ought to be handing me the rope.”

Silver whipped her head around. “Don’t talk to me about my people.”

“I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt,” he went on. “Far back as we go. But if you ain’t telling me something, I’ll throw you and Amos both in jail. See how you like him then.”

She turned back to the window. “Amos is a lot of things, but he don’t bother children.”

“How do you know that?”

She didn’t answer.

“He’s up to something, or he wouldn’t be here. He needs to be put away.”

“I wouldn’t want to keep nothing from you that might help you find Gracie,” Silver said finally. “But I wouldn’t want to get Amos hung for something he didn’t do either.”

Ellard sighed. “It’s as bad to let a guilty man go as it is to hang an innocent one.”

She bowed her face, hiding it again. “I ain’t saying I’d let him go. I’d just have to look him in the eye before I made up my mind if he did anything wrong. Yours is done made up.”

Ellard studied the blurry windshield. “Surely you wouldn’t protect him over your kin.”

Silver shut her mouth tight, no sound but rain. Then Ellard was shocked when she opened the door and sprang from the car. He lunged across the empty seat where she had been. “Hold it.”

“I’m going to see Annie Clyde,” she shouted without looking back.

“I ain’t done with you,” he called after her. “Don’t stray too far.”

Ellard knew he shouldn’t let Silver get away but his temples were throbbing. He needed to collect himself. He shut the passenger door and leaned back in the seat, her woodsy smell still in the car with him. Most of the time he was careful not to think about Silver. About that day he’d found her under the shade trees along the river without her dress on, painted from head to toe in mud, hair plastered down with it. She’d seemed like part of the bank, as if she was growing up out of it. Back then she wasn’t a liar but Amos might have turned her into one. He had some kind of hold over her. She saw some appeal to him that nobody else in Yuneetah did. When Ellard, Silver and Mary had played together as children they would turn around and find Amos spying on them from the thicket. Or they might be catching minnows and tadpoles in a coffee can when Amos would come out of nowhere and kneel on the bank beside them. He would splash his hands in the water to scare away the fish and pull the claws off the crawdads they had been baiting with worms. After a while his eyes would meet Silver’s and she would walk off into the trees with him, leaving Ellard and Mary alone. It gnawed at Ellard how they seemed to belong together, both tall and lanky with hair the color of the shadows they passed through. Ellard would have liked to bloody Amos’s nose, to fight him as he sometimes did other boys in the school yard, but Amos had never raised his fists first. It wasn’t in Ellard’s nature to start a fight, so he stood back and watched as Amos stole Silver away from him again and again.

Both Ledford sisters were lovely to look at, but Silver was the loveliest to Ellard. In those days most girls wore their hair in plaits, but Silver kept hers unbound. It poured like mountain water down her back, into her eyes, over her shoulders. She was hard to catch when they played tag, hard to find when they played hide-and-seek. She could fit herself into any crevice or hole. Once she’d hidden from Ellard in a junked stovepipe. She didn’t talk much and when she did her words were gruff, but he recognized her bluster for what it was. She might have fooled Amos and Mary but Ellard saw tender skin underneath the shell she had grown over years of mistreatment. Sometimes he heard Silver mimicking the birds, blowing through her thumbs to answer a bobwhite. He had come upon her peeping in at a praying mantis she’d caught in the trap of her fingers. Sometimes she hummed or whistled if she thought nobody was paying attention.

It was only after Mary got married that Ellard had Silver to himself. Amos had been gone for three years by then. Silver seemed lost without her sister, wandering around with bewildered eyes. At that time her grandfather had already drunk himself to death and she lived alone with her grandmother. Ellard didn’t care what made Silver turn to him. For one summer when he was seventeen and she was fifteen they walked the back roads and ridges of Yuneetah alone. Crossing meadows on the way to the river with their cane poles he would pluck the frilled petals off a daisy and give her the yolk at the center. He would find red cardinal feathers in the grass and tuck them behind her ears. He wanted her to have the color she was missing in her drab shack on the mountaintop. Whatever was bright in a landscape of putty gray, faded green, smoky blue.

One hazy afternoon at the end of June, Ellard left his chores and went up the mountain to see if Silver wanted to go swimming. When he found that she wasn’t at home he headed to the shoals alone, undressing on his way to a part of the river where the water was broad and the current was tame, where willows bowed shedding yellowy leaves. Entering the deep shade naked he saw a flash of motion before he reached the edge of the shore. Silver was hunkered on the bank several feet downriver, camouflaged by the silt she had slathered on against the mosquitoes and the burning sun. She looked at him, eyes glittering coals in her smeared face. When she rose up Ellard couldn’t keep from rushing to her. He took in her clotted hair, her pointed breasts, the fork of her legs. As she stood on the bank bare as the day she was born Ellard saw the last plates of her shell fall away. Nothing could have stopped him then from pulling her slippery into his arms, kissing her so hard that their teeth clashed together. He was trembling as he lifted her up, as her thighs closed around his hips. Though Ellard felt everything it was almost like watching himself.

Once they’d turned themselves loose, they couldn’t get enough of each other. Silver would find Ellard in the henhouse gathering eggs and they’d lie down in the patterns the chickens had scratched. They would roll in spruce needles under the trees until their sweating flesh was pasted with them, motes dancing around Silver’s head as the sun sank behind the mountains. But that whole summer, some part of Ellard was miserable waiting for it to end. Looking back he understood. All those warm months he felt like he’d just been borrowing Silver. When Amos showed up that September, back for the first time in three years, it was almost like Ellard had been expecting him. He’d been nailing down a piece of roof tin that had come loose in a storm for his mother when he spotted a figure heading up the hollow footpath with a bedroll under one arm, bending to drink from the trickling spring. He had grown taller, his hair longer, but he moved with the same stealth. When he lifted his face dripping from the spring Ellard could tell there was something altered about it, could see the void where his hat shaded an empty eye socket. But Ellard never doubted it was Amos. He didn’t come down the ladder. He watched Amos disappear up the path, his own eyes watering. Maybe Ellard wouldn’t have wanted Silver as much if she hadn’t preferred his enemy. Maybe his hatred for Amos had made his love for her burn hotter. Whatever the reason, the fire took ages to go out. It was years before Ellard could think of Silver without longing and only as something that had once happened to him.

Now Ellard wondered if Amos still had a hold over Silver. He looked at the damp she’d left on the seat, the same shape her hair used to make when she lay on the ground underneath him. He put his hand on the upholstery and pressed but nothing seeped up. She knew something she wasn’t saying. He would talk to her again if he hadn’t found Gracie or Amos by this afternoon. The constable had gone to see Beulah Kesterson last night and gotten nowhere with her either. It was time for Ellard to pay Beulah a visit himself. He pulled his revolver from its holster, popped out the cylinder, emptied the bullets into his hand then reloaded them. As he sat behind the wheel of the sheriff’s car the lake broadened and deepened across the bank in the Hankins pasture, overtaking the tasseled weeds in uneven ponds, touching the lowest wires of the fence still tufted with hanks of bovine hair. Rising over any scrap of sacking snagged from a child’s home-sewn dress hem. Swirling up any pattered bead of red. Drifting off any wisp of hair. Washing away every remaining shred of anyone’s child, not just the one he was searching for. Erasing the footprints of those living along with those dead, those moved on to inhabit other towns along with those lost forever. Too soon no sign would remain of any child ever torn from its mother.

That midmorning Annie Clyde Dodson wound up back in the cornfield where she’d started, as if she might find Gracie and Rusty waiting again at the end of a row. She didn’t know what hour it was but when she looked up the sun was higher behind rafts of cloud. After all night without sleep she felt lost on her own land. As she wandered between the stalks calling her daughter’s name she dreamed on her feet, remembering how she’d sat yesterday on the bottom porch step plucking chicken feathers and looking out at this field, corn swaying in the uneasiness before the windstorm. Earlier going into the musty gloom of the coop, singing to soothe the rooster. He had perched on an empty nesting box, manure hardened on the rotting straw, waiting for her. Once the rooster was plucked she had meant to ride Gracie among these rows in the wheelbarrow, collecting roasting ears for their dinner. She had told Gracie to stay on the porch, left the front door propped open with an iron long enough to put the carcass in the basin and get the flour. From the kitchen she had heard Rusty barking and gone through the dim hall toward the lit doorway. She had watched the dog running into the field with Gracie behind him. Then the corn had swallowed Gracie up and she couldn’t see her anymore. That was where everything had gone wrong. Now she slapped aside the stalks spraying drops, shouting for her daughter. There was no answer. Not even Rusty barking to say there was someone in the field who didn’t belong. This time there was only water standing at the end of the row. Instead of Gracie, a formless puddle.

But Annie Clyde felt in her bones that Gracie was somewhere close. The reservoir was filling, the floodwaters spreading. If they didn’t find her quick she might be drowned with the rest of the town. Annie Clyde couldn’t stop imagining Gracie wrapped in algae, sinking into a darkness with no bottom. Last night after James left with the sheriff she had waited in the house until she could take it no longer. She had gone back out and searched the roadside pines alone while the others were down at the water. She’d known even as she ran to the river at dawn when she heard clamoring voices that it wasn’t Gracie. No matter what the men believed, or what her husband believed. It made her wonder how much James loved Gracie if he could give up on her. Then she thought of the day Gracie was born, when he bent over the swaddled bundle of her to kiss the tips of her matchstick fingers. She thought of him carrying Gracie on his shoulders to church, handsome in suspenders and a hat with a striped band. But a man’s love, a father’s love, must be different than a mother’s. She’d seen his eyes before he went to the water last night. He was mourning already. She remembered the remark he made weeks ago about Gracie running off into the lake. She’d wanted to kill him when he said that. Now she wanted to kill herself. She might have done it already, if she didn’t believe Gracie was still alive.

It seemed James couldn’t admit that Gracie may have been taken by Amos. It seemed he would rather accept that anything else had happened to her. Amos had been passing in and out of town since before Annie Clyde was born. It was frightening to find Gracie in the cornfield with him, but she didn’t believe he was a child murderer, however certain she felt that he was keeping her daughter from her. Whatever Amos did to Gracie, as long as Annie Clyde got her back alive, it could be fixed. Annie Clyde could wash away any mark he left. As long as Gracie was found and returned with life still in her body, the one Annie Clyde knew every inch of as well as or better than she did her own, they’d be all right. Annie Clyde could love her child back from anything but death. If James was here beside her now she would have reminded him there was no coming out of that lake. Whatever it spread over was gone. Whatever the water took, it kept. But she could make Amos give Gracie back to them. All she had to do was get to him before the law did. Thus far she had managed to remain in motion, even with guilt crushing the breath out of her. It was her fault for not watching Gracie. There was no one else to blame. If she hadn’t been planning to leave her husband, she wouldn’t have been distracted. She had to be the one to make it right.

Annie Clyde was trying to get her bearings in the field when she heard a vehicle fishtailing down the track to the road, another band of men going off to look for her daughter. Around sunup a truckload had left with the only picture of Gracie she owned, taken last summer by a man who traveled around the countryside with his camera making family portraits. Annie Clyde had used money set aside for coffee and salt to pay him with, but it was worth the sacrifice. She hadn’t wanted to forget what Gracie looked like at two years old. Now she wanted her picture back. Her instincts told her it was as useless looking outside of Yuneetah as it was looking into the lake. It was the same waste of time. She thrashed her way between the rows and out of the field to see more cars and trucks parked in the knee-high grass of the lot fronting the house. One belonged to James’s uncle, the Packard she rode in on her wedding day. Wallace and his wife Verna had come from Sevier County, where the Methodist church was relocated. They’d been there after James lost his father in the flood of 1925 and now they were back to see their nephew through again. Annie Clyde didn’t know how they got word, or any of the others. She’d returned home sometime in the night to find Verna with the wives of men who came down from the mountains and from other counties making coffee in her kitchen. Her mouth grew dry thinking about it. She needed to have a drink of water and a bite of bread in her stomach. Maybe to sit and warm herself beside the stove for a minute, change into a clean dress and put on a hat. She had to get her head on straight if she meant to outwit the drifter and find his hiding place.

Emerging from the corn to cross the yard she nearly slipped again as she had at the riverside, the ground a leaching mouth that sucked at her shoes, patterned by treads from all those that had come and gone. There were footprints under the elm and the apple tree of every shape and size, the whole farm tracked over. If the one print she believed had belonged to the drifter remained it was mixed up among the rest. Walking with her eyes lowered to watch her own feet, she didn’t see the government man standing on the porch until she started up the steps. Right away she recognized him, from a month ago when their positions were reversed. He stood above her now under the pouring eave, his umbrella propped beside the front door instead of James’s gun. As if he had already taken possession of the place. He looked wrong with the unpainted door and the peeling clapboard of the house behind him. He seemed untouched by the weather, the slicker he wore over his charcoal suit the only evidence he’d come through it. He took off his fedora to reveal a head of dark golden hair. They looked at each other, his eyes very blue. “How long have you been here?” she asked, glancing over to see his black Dodge coupe near the end of the track as if he’d made it no farther, its wheels sunk into the marshy grass.

“Not long. I hoped you’d be back.”

“Who sent you?”

“Pardon?”

“Who made you come?”

“Oh. My chief sent me.”

“Why didn’t he come himself?”

“Well,” Washburn said, fidgeting with his shirt collar. “I volunteered. I was sorry to hear about your daughter. I came out here to see what I could do for you and your husband.”

“No, you didn’t,” Annie Clyde said.

Washburn stared at her. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“You came out here to run me off. Same as you did before.”

“Not at all, Mrs. Dodson. That’s not so. I came out here to let you know we’re doing everything we can to aid the law in finding your daughter. You can rest assured of that.”

“So I ought to go on and leave it up to you. Is that it?”

“No, ma’am. I didn’t say that.”

Annie Clyde forgot her chilled and aching bones, her shaky legs. She came up the steps onto the porch until they stood toe-to-toe. “I’m not going anywhere without my child. I don’t care if I have to row out of here in a boat. If Ellard tries to arrest me, I’ll shoot him. He’s a nice man, but I’m not above it. You go back and tell the bastards that sent you the same thing.”

“Please, Mrs. Dodson,” Washburn said. A lock of hair had fallen out of place on his forehead. He held his hat between them and she felt its crown against her belly. He seemed more human then, too much like her husband. She wished that he didn’t. “I want to be of service.”

“You mean to help me look for my little girl?”

“Yes,” he said. “I intend to help with the search.”

“You might as well not.”

He gaped at her dumbfounded.

“If you’re looking for a dead body floating in the water, you’re not going to find one. I’m telling you, she didn’t wander off and drown. She was taken. But nobody will listen to me.”

“I’ll listen to you. I’m on your side.”

“What do you think you can do for me?”

“I’ve spoken to Sheriff Moody. I’ll make sure he has whatever resources he needs at his disposal, and I’ll do what I can to get your little girl’s picture in the Knoxville newspapers.”

“You haven’t said her name. Do you even know it?”

Washburn glanced down at his fedora, sullied by her dress front. “Yes. I know it.”

“We named her Mary Grace, after both of our mothers. We call her Gracie.”

“I know her name—”

“What if her last name was Lindbergh?”

He blinked at her, speechless again.

“What would you do for her then?”

“Mrs. Dodson—”

“We read the newspapers. They come to us late, but we get them. Even way out here, we’ve heard about that Lindbergh baby. You think the Lindberghs have heard of Gracie?”

Washburn was losing his composure. “I sympathize with your situation, Mrs. Dodson. I’m asking you to cooperate with me, for your daughter’s sake. You need my help.”

“You’re not helping me,” Annie Clyde said. “You’re holding me up.”

“Please,” he said, and moved as if to touch her. She shrank from his hand, backing out of his reach. She felt weak. One finger laid on her shoulder might break her down. She stepped around him and made for the door. When she yanked it open she could smell coffee and bread. Her stomach seized with hunger. She was about to shut the door in the government man’s face when she saw the Winchester leaned against the wallpaper in the shadows at the foot of the stairs. James must have figured he wouldn’t be using it. Without hesitation she reached out to grab it, all thought of food and rest driven from her mind. Holding on to the rifle, she felt renewed somewhat. She felt like she could walk a piece farther. She took up the lightweight gun and turned to face Washburn again. “Gracie’s not dead,” she told him. “I’m going to find her.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

“You’ll go home, Mr. Washburn. If your vehicle’s stuck somebody will push you out.”

“If you’ll just give me a chance—”

“If you don’t get out of my way,” she said, “I’ll have to point my husband’s gun at you.”

Washburn held her gaze as long as he could. “I’ll be here when you get back,” he said.

“Get out of my way,” she ordered, and he stepped aside. She felt his blue eyes on her as she went down the steps and out of the yard, across the track toward the slope leading into the hollow. He called after her as she climbed over the split-rail fence marking the boundary of her property and she almost turned around. If she went back he would come with her and she wouldn’t be alone in this, even if he was only pretending to believe her. At least she wouldn’t be heading off to shoot a man and bring Gracie home by herself. At the last second though she came to her senses, pulled herself upright and squared her shoulders so Washburn could see her resolve. She kept moving ahead with only her husband’s Winchester rifle for company.

Halfway up the hillside weariness overtook her. She panted as she tripped on roots and rocks, skinning her knees and palms. By the time she reached the graveyard, a shady plot of grass bordered with white pickets, she was winded and had to lean on the gate. The cemetery was within a hair of the taking line. A few weeks ago James had offered to help move these graves for the power company. He would have dug her parents up and had them shipped by train to Michigan, but Annie Clyde was leaving her people to lie in peace. From where she stood she could see her father’s headstone. Sometimes she came to sit against it, comforted by the granite at her back, as firm and rough as his hands had been. It was easier there to remember how she took off her shoes to walk behind him as he plowed. To remember the rattle of the harness as he drove the mules, his soft voice urging them. Annie Clyde’s mother had saved for months to pay a stonecutter to carve Clyde Walker’s name on his marker. Now Mary’s grave was there beside her husband’s, too meager a headstone to cover the person she’d been. Annie Clyde would have given anything to talk to her parents. But they were gone and she was on her own.

She thought then for the first time that day of her aunt Silver. From the hollow there was a shortcut to Silver’s house, a path twisting around and along the ridges. She still felt a need to see her aunt, the only blood kin she had left besides Gracie. She pictured Silver’s hands, the part that resembled her mother most. If Annie Clyde could see them, the delicate fingers with chapped knuckles, she might breathe easier. But Silver hadn’t come and Annie Clyde didn’t know if she could make it much farther on her wobbling legs. It was a long climb. Silver used to visit the farm on occasion but Mary never went to her sister’s high shack. She told Annie Clyde it was lonesome up there, and scary at night. In the winter if Clyde took a sled up the mountain to haul in firewood Mary would ask him to see about Silver. “She’s liable to freeze to death and we’d never know it,” she’d say. Annie Clyde had gathered that Mary and Silver were close as children, strange as it was to think of her aunt being close to anyone. Silver would stay away from the farm for months then reappear out of nowhere to help Mary with the chores, both silent as they scrubbed laundry or did the canning or made lye soap. When Mary died Silver hadn’t attended the funeral at the Free Will Baptist church, but Annie Clyde understood. Silver didn’t seem to belong there among the townspeople. She belonged on the mountaintop by herself. Annie Clyde wasn’t offended by Silver’s absence now either. She empathized with her aunt in a way that others couldn’t. If she got a second wind she’d head up the mountain later. She knew Silver and Amos once played together in the hollow. But Annie Clyde couldn’t dwell on that. She concentrated on making it to Beulah Kesterson’s first. There was a chance it would all end there.

Annie Clyde pushed herself away from the cemetery gate and continued up the slope with weeds brushing her shins, the rifle on her shoulder. She would have come this way last night if the Whitehall County constable hadn’t been roaming around. She had wanted to see Beulah alone, and now these woods were empty. The ground roughened the higher she climbed, shale hidden in the thinning grasses. It made her feel sick to follow the same footpath she and James had taken yesterday afternoon looking for Gracie but she kept going. When Beulah’s place came into view she paused once more at the edge of the lot to rest against a locust tree. She was struck by the cabin’s stillness. In fair weather the old woman usually sat outside in a lattice chair, the bareness around it splotched with the snuff she dipped. Annie Clyde’s mother used to send her after medicine. Mary and Beulah were friends. Some winters when Annie Clyde was a child Beulah helped the Walkers butcher hogs in exchange for meat. Clyde would shoot the sow and stick its throat. Mary and Beulah would tie ropes around its legs and drag it to the scalding boards. They would take turns scraping its hide then hang the carcass up, warm blood seeping into the frozen ground as snow dusted their mackinaws. They would work into the night, packing hams and shoulders in salt in the smokehouse. Then Mary and Beulah would cook a late supper of pork. Annie Clyde liked the meal but for days afterward she had nightmares about the slaughter. Someway she associated that bloodletting with Beulah and the pouch around her neck.

To this day, Annie Clyde was afraid of the old woman’s fortune-telling bones. She’d seen them once, when she was eleven and went up the hollow after a poultice for hornet stings. She had knocked down the hornets’ nest under the barn eave with a rock and stirred them up. Her whole face had been swollen tight and red when the wasps were through with her. On that sunny morning the plank door of Beulah’s cabin was propped open and Annie Clyde had mounted the rock steps to rap on it. When there was no answer she’d peered inside and discovered Beulah stooped over a table studying the aged bones scattered across it, stained and configured into odd shapes. Beulah had looked up, startled by Annie Clyde’s knocking. Whatever she had seen in the bones must have been harrowing because her face was the color of parchment. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated behind her pointed glasses. Annie Clyde had turned and run off. When Mary asked why she was back without a poultice for her stings, she had refused to speak of what happened.

Annie Clyde hadn’t wanted Beulah to birth Gracie. She would have sent James after the doctor in Whitehall County if not for her mother. Not long before Mary breathed her last, she’d put a hand on Annie Clyde’s rounded belly and said, “Go to Miss Beulah when your time comes. If it wasn’t for her, you wouldn’t be in this world.” It was only then that Mary told Annie Clyde how before she was born there had been three other babies lost. Beulah had seen how Mary was suffering and come down the hollow one morning with a tea made from partridgeberry to strengthen her womb. Within a few weeks Mary was expecting, and for the first time the baby had thrived. She had trusted Beulah over any doctor ever since, and even gone to the old woman first when the cancer began to make her ill. But Beulah had said to Mary with sorrowful eyes, “Honey, there ain’t much I can do for you this time.” After her mother’s burial Annie Clyde had explored the graveyard to see if she could find her older siblings. There were no names carved on the markers Clyde had fashioned from rocks turned up by the tines of his plow. She pictured him coming with a spade and the babies wrapped in rags or tiny enough to fit in shoe boxes, digging in the shadiest corner where the flowering arms of a dogwood tree shed its blooms. Annie Clyde had brushed the leaves from the flat limestone tablets and lowered herself to sit among them, heavy with Gracie by then. She’d thought how if not for Beulah Kesterson her tiny bones might be under another rock next to theirs. She had known then she would honor her mother’s wish.

On the day Gracie was born, she was sitting up in bed when James rose at first light. She told him the baby was coming but when he started after Beulah she put out a hand to stop him. “It’s not time. I’ll let you know.” A little after noon when the pains got closer together she gave in and went to the chicken coop where he was checking nesting boxes, as much as she dreaded seeing the old woman. While he was gone she waited at the window watching the whirling March snow flurries, lacy skeins blowing across the yard. When she heard the front door open and steps groaning up the stairs, she hopped into bed as if she’d been caught at something. James came in with Beulah behind him. He took Annie Clyde’s hand as Beulah unwound her shawl. Then she went to the window and cracked it enough to let in the crisp air. She turned to James and said, “Go fix you some coffee. This is woman’s business.” When James kissed Annie Clyde and headed for the door she reached for his sleeve, afraid to be alone with Beulah. By the time Gracie was ready to be born it was dark. Beulah scrubbed her hands and examined Annie Clyde under the lamp, moths circling up its glass chimney, the night so hushed Annie Clyde believed she could hear the papery rub of their wings. She was careful to look away from the pouch around the old woman’s neck, into the unlit corners of the room. As Gracie came she stared into the lamp so hard the flame made a stamp on her vision, giving birth in the same bed her mother died in. It wasn’t a difficult labor. The pains were distant. When she looked at her newborn for the first time, she felt grief over anything. She should have been happy but she couldn’t help missing her mother, left alone to share the birth of her baby with somebody she’d always feared.

Now as she stood at the edge of the clearing leaning on the rifle like a crutch, looking at Beulah’s dilapidated cabin, she supposed among all the other reasons Beulah made a foul taste in her mouth there had always been Amos. For as long as she could remember she had known about the one-eyed man, whose marred face she saw up close for the first time in the hayfield during early autumn. Her father and the neighbors were out that morning with the hay baler, the valley flooded not with water but with mist the bluish gray tint her newborn daughter’s eyes would be ten years later. Wandering among the haystacks she stopped to pull out a straw to chew on. When she looked up, Amos was under the apple tree watching her as if he had never not been there, dew glimmering on his shoulders. Annie Clyde felt like they were the last ones alive, the sound of the baler and the voices of the farmhands far away. Then Amos asked if she’d fetch him a drink and her paralysis broke. She ran through the door into the kitchen where her mother was cooking and panted that Amos was out in the field. Mary didn’t look up from the biscuit dough she was rolling but told Annie Clyde through tight lips, “You keep to the house. He can get his own water.” Annie Clyde understood then there was more wrong with Amos than a missing eye. That night in her bed she imagined him standing in front of this cabin looking down on the farm, thinking of her. It was possible he was hiding here now but she doubted him being that careless. Beulah probably had a notion where he was, though. If the old woman was keeping a secret, Annie Clyde intended to make her tell it. She wouldn’t let herself think of Beulah stooped over those odd-shaped fortune-telling bones. She wouldn’t ask if there was such a thing as second sight.

She drew in a shuddering breath and started across the lot to the cabin, wind clashing through the leaves. She braced herself before mounting the steps and knocking on the door as she had just yesterday. When there was no response she pounded harder, until she heard the shuffle of footsteps inside. At long last Beulah opened up with a broom in her hands. She looked as tired as Annie Clyde felt. Her puckered face browned with age, the folds of her neck grimed it seemed with years of soil, wearing a shawl over her checkered dress in spite of the season. As soon as Annie Clyde saw her time seemed to stop and the words tumbled out. “I know you lied.”

Beulah studied Annie Clyde, her rheumy eyes gleaming out of wrinkled pits. “I didn’t know where he was, though,” the old woman said. “That was the truth. And he ain’t here now.”

“But you know where he could be.”

“If I did, I wouldn’t tell it. Look at you. You might shoot him.”

“I’d shoot anybody over Gracie.”

“Well. I’d take a bullet over Amos.”

Beulah pressed her mouth into a line, her chin jutting. The sun came out some. Annie Clyde felt the light on her back. “He’s my son,” Beulah said, as if that was explanation enough.

Annie Clyde saw herself reflected in the old woman’s glasses, a gaunt shadow holding a gun. She lowered the rifle from her shoulder, overcome with sudden regret. She looked down at the rain blowing in on Beulah’s feet. “Would you let your son take my daughter away from me?”

“If I believed for a minute Amos had that baby girl,” Beulah said, “I’d put the law on him myself. I’d take a bullet for him, but that don’t mean I’d let him get away with nothing like that.”

There was another silence. Annie Clyde opened her mouth but her voice cracked.

“Lord, youngun,” Beulah said. “You’re plumb peaked. Get yourself in here.”

Annie Clyde sighed through her nose as she stepped across the threshold. Beulah put aside her broom and took the gun from Annie Clyde’s hands. She leaned it against the pie safe in the corner. She steered Annie Clyde to the table at the back of the room and pulled out a chair. It was straight and hard but Annie Clyde was glad to be off her feet. Beulah must have heard the click of her throat. She poured Annie Clyde a cup of water from an aluminum pitcher and sat down across from her. Annie Clyde drank deep, tasting the bitter minerals of the spring. There was no sound in the gloom of the cabin besides a clock ticking somewhere. Then Beulah asked, “Why don’t we get down to it, honey?” There was such compassion in her voice that Annie Clyde felt like crying. But she wouldn’t let herself. If the tears came out, she might be unable to stop them.

“I don’t believe in fortune-telling,” Annie Clyde said.

Beulah smiled. “That’s all right.”

“Seems like if anybody could see where Gracie is, it ought to be me.”

Beulah reached across the table to touch her hand. “It’s a mystery why certain ones have the sight. I never know if I’ll be showed anything. A lot of times it ain’t what I want to see.”

Annie Clyde flinched away. “I shouldn’t have come in here. I just needed to know if there’s a chance you could help me someway.” She swallowed hard. “Have you tried to look?”

“For your little one?”

Annie Clyde nodded.

“I been looking ever since you left here yesterday.”

“Have you seen anything?”

Beulah’s eyes were sad behind the scratched lenses of her glasses. “No,” she said. “I ain’t seen a thing.” She lifted the pouch from around her neck. “But if you want me to, I’ll try again.”

Annie Clyde’s pulse quickened. She put down the cup. It was what she wanted, but she recoiled at the thought of the bones. Beulah got up and stood at the head of the table. After a moment, Annie Clyde rose from her chair at the opposite end. Beulah loosened the neck of the pouch, her face lit by the drizzly window between them. She looked into Annie Clyde’s eyes. “Now, you be sure about this,” she said. Annie Clyde wiped her lips and nodded again.

Beulah turned the pouch up and spilled its contents. They bent over and studied them together, heads nearly touching. Annie Clyde wanted to see something herself, maybe Gracie’s face, but she couldn’t discern any pattern in the bones. After an agonizing minute or so she lost patience with Beulah’s silent concentration. “What is it?” she asked. “Do you see Gracie?”

Beulah raised her head like somebody waking up. “Yes,” she said, but with seeming reluctance. Her voice was far off and troubled. “Not where she’s at. Just that she’s alive.”

Annie Clyde released the breath she’d been holding and sat back down in the chair, almost knocking it over. The tears came then. There was no holding them in. It was a deliverance to hear someone say it, whether or not it was true. The sobs tore from her throat and wrenched her shoulders. “Hush now,” Beulah said. When she came around the table Annie Clyde could smell her oldness, like snuff and drying lavender and mellowing fruit. After a while, Beulah got slowly to her knees in front of Annie Clyde’s chair and took off the brogans she was wearing. She began to rub and knead Annie Clyde’s sore feet in her hands. “You’re wore out. Why don’t you come over here and close your eyes for a minute?” She led Annie Clyde to a bed in the corner and helped her onto the sagging mattress, drawing a blanket over her legs.

Annie Clyde meant to lie still just long enough to catch one breath. When she opened her puffed lids again she thought she’d slept a few seconds. But once her eyes adjusted she could tell by the slant of light across the bed and the dryness of her dress that it had been much longer. She got up quickly and began hunting her shoes. Beulah was standing at the fireplace making hoecakes, the smell filling the cabin. When she saw Annie Clyde awake she went to the table and took the brogans from under it. “Thank you,” Annie Clyde said as Beulah handed them to her. “You can thank me by having a bite of dinner,” Beulah said. “I get tired of eating by myself.” Annie Clyde paused and then put down the shoes. They sat at the table together and ate in silence. The hoecakes were sweet in Annie Clyde’s mouth. She shoveled them in, washing each bite down with more water from the spring. When she was finished at last she got up from the table without a word and went to the pie safe where James’s rifle was propped. She took the gun up and turned toward Beulah, clenching the stock tight enough to blanch her fingers. They looked into each other’s faces. Unlike Washburn’s, Beulah’s gaze didn’t waver. “Come back anytime,” she said. Annie Clyde was the first to drop her eyes. The heat from the cook fire made the room hard to breathe in. The gun was light enough to hold in one hand. She picked up both brogans in the other, gripping them by the heels. Tying the laces would take too long. She felt an urgent need to be away from Beulah and the stifling cabin. She would stop to put her shoes on once she’d put some distance between herself and the old woman’s fortune-telling bones.

She lowered her head and rushed out the door. With a full stomach she descended the steps into the showering rain, afternoon sun shining through it. She thought as she hurried across the clearing toward the woods that there was no telling what had happened at the house while she was gone. She even allowed herself a flicker of hope that Gracie would be there when she got back. The deluge had washed a rut down the steepness of the lot and she skirted around it, through the locust trees at the edge of Beulah’s property, seeking what shelter they afforded. Before she’d made it far from the cabin there came a stabbing in her foot, so sharp that she cried out. She dropped the rifle and sat down on the watery ground. She lifted the foot and found in its sole the biggest locust thorn she’d ever seen. Her feet bottoms were leathered from more than twenty summers spent barefoot, but not tough enough it seemed. She bit her lip, steeling herself to pull the thorn out. But when she did, its point stayed behind, broken off inside her. She considered trying to dig it out, but it was in too deep and she’d already been at Beulah’s longer than she planned. She would have to leave it there embedded. She’d have to carry it home with her.

At noon James Dodson was back in the Hankins pasture. The sun was struggling to come out and in this poor light the lake looked like a slab of soapstone. He’d ended up here again after searching through the night with the others, some he had worked shoulder to shoulder with tending crops, raising barns and digging drainage ditches along the roads. They had come upon Long Man everywhere it was spread. They’d sloshed into abandoned houses where the river stood knee deep, washed into front rooms papered with newsprint, over fireplace hearths blacked by decades of cooking. Then James had followed the other men back to the fields along the former riverbed. He had gone with them over the bleached stones of the shore calling for Gracie, his old neighbors righting him whenever he stumbled, giving him sups from their canteens. When the canteens were dry they made their way to the reservoir to refill them, James crouched on a boulder staring into the pitchy water. It had come to him as he knelt there that with each passing hour his chances lessened of finding Gracie alive. He’d realized then that he couldn’t bear to be the one who found Gracie dead. He used to think farming had broken him, but he was wrong. This was what broken felt like, and there was no coming out of it whole.

Now James didn’t know how long he’d been standing here at the edge of this water. After a decade of avoiding the river, despising and cursing it, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the shore. He listened close for his father’s voice in the flood as he used to think he could hear it, but whatever had once spoken to him was gone. There were no answers for him in this part of the pasture where the reservoir had come far enough to cover the Hankins family graveyard, not even the top of a headstone visible. Two months ago he had helped with the removal of Dale’s kin, a hearse parked in the pasture to take away pine boxes filled with generations of Hankinses. He’d found beneath an unmarked stone the skeleton of an infant wrapped in a blanket turned to rags after long years in the ground, its bones delicate as periwinkles. The undertaker and the pastor of the Baptist church had been there, sober in dark suits with both hands clasped before them. James had stood there gripping a spade handle, the markers of opened graves littered around him, earthen walls writhing with grubs and tunneling beetles, not knowing how soon the remains of his own child would be on his mind.

His uncle Wallace had tried at some point to talk him away, had taken him by the shoulders and begged him to get some rest. Looking back into Wallace’s wearied eyes, James saw that his mother’s brother had grown old. His hair snowy under a rain hood, his hands twisted with rheumatism. It was plain that Wallace needed to rest himself. But James couldn’t go back to the farm with his uncle. He wanted to lie down and close his eyes but he couldn’t enter that house without his daughter inside. It seemed that Gracie had called him to the lake. If he heard any voice in the water now it was hers saying, “Daddy.” He had sent his uncle away alone. Though Wallace had raised James from a young age, he had never been James’s father. Once Earl Dodson died James had felt on his own. He took paying work wherever he could find it, pulling tobacco and threshing wheat, chopping sugarcane and plowing gardens for ten cents an hour. One summer he worked with the iceman, riding in his Model T to the plant in Whitehall County early each morning, helping him load the truck, covering the ice with canvas to slow its melting. He had stayed at the parsonage with his sister Dora when all he wanted was to forget Tennessee. Like he would stay now at the water’s edge, where he felt as though Gracie had led him.

The only one James needed with him besides his daughter was Annie Clyde. He looked down the shore like she might be coming to him. He was used to seeing her from far off, doing chores. Beating rugs, airing out feather beds, scouring windows with newspaper. Even when they worked together she stood apart from him, digging potatoes or hoeing corn at the other end of the field. From a distance he appreciated her most, naked under the few dresses she owned. The red gingham with a tiny hole at the armpit, the flowered one with a bit of tattered lace at the collar, the blue one she wore to their wedding. If the sun was shining right he could see her skin through them. He needed her to lean on, like the time he twisted his ankle in a snake hole and she shored him up all the way to the house with her bone-thin but solid self. They should have been together. Though she was around somewhere he hadn’t seen her all night. She felt as lost to him as Gracie.

James knew why his wife was staying away from him and the lake. She was convinced the drifter was to blame for Gracie’s disappearance. Riding away from the courthouse after midnight in the backseat of some volunteer’s Studebaker James had heard the man behind the wheel talking about Amos, saying the sheriff had instructed the searchers to keep their eyes open for him. James had spoken up although his voice by that time was no more than a croak and told those in the car that the only one they needed to keep an eye open for was Gracie. He didn’t want their attention divided. James had been seeing Amos since he was a boy. Once when he was riding to town in the wagon bed on a pile of logs he and his father meant to sell, Amos stood in the ditch to let them pass. James couldn’t take his eyes off the drifter’s ruined face. When he turned around to stare Amos tipped his hat. Back when James’s mother was alive she complained if Amos cut through their cotton on his way to somewhere else. But Earl would say, “Why, he ain’t bothering nothing.” James didn’t hold the drifter’s strangeness against him any more than his father had. As a child he was curious but once he was grown he didn’t look twice if he saw Amos on the road. The last time they crossed paths, he and Annie Clyde were just married. James was about to dump the ash bucket over the fence and nearly ran into Amos, found himself looking into the pit of an eye socket. Amos tipped his hat again and said good morning. Then he climbed over the fence and walked up the slope into the hollow. James hadn’t liked seeing Amos on the farm that day. But if the searchers came across the drifter’s camp somewhere in Yuneetah, he didn’t expect they would find Gracie there.

On this morning it wasn’t Amos that James couldn’t take his eyes off. It was the boats floating out on the water, there on the horizon since sunrise. They were musseling boats and James had been seeing them since he was a child growing up on the river, the same as he had always seen the drifter. Homemade skiffs with boards at bow and stern on each side, notched at the tops to hold iron bars with strings of dangling scrap nails for hooks. Fishermen would drop the bars into the water and drag them across the mussel bed, then draw them in with shells hanging from the strings. As the sheriff organized the boats James couldn’t comprehend why the men would be out musseling. It was several minutes before it dawned on him that they weren’t dragging the lake for mussels. They were dragging the lake for his daughter. When he understood the wind rushed out of him as if he’d been hit. He had wanted to shout at them, to swim out and tell them they were wrong. But he knew that they weren’t. James couldn’t stop believing the river had taken Gracie, like it took his father away from him when he was twelve years old.

The Knoxville newspaper had called the flood that claimed Earl Dodson the May Tide. James’s aunt Verna had saved the clipping for him. The house the Dodsons rented was set so close to the river that when it was high James and Dora could lean out the rear window and trail their fingers in it. That night when the water came up to their doorstep they felt more awe than fear, until it began to leak inside. Earl gathered Dora onto his hip and hoisted James up under the arms. They sloshed through the rising water in the front room and out the door, plunging into the flood. As far as James could see the land was covered with roaring water. He could feel the current trying to sweep him away. He could hear his father grunting as he battled toward the higher ground of the ridge alongside the house. When Earl had made it through the rapids with both children still in his grasp he pushed them uphill ahead of him. At the top he paused, looking down on the flood and the hog lot. James knew what his father was thinking. He’d been counting on that sow to feed them through winter. Earl ordered James and Dora not to move. Then he lowered himself back down the ridge. James stood under the sycamore watching Earl wade into the flood, his head a black spot. Earl had almost made it to the hog pen before he lost his footing, the blot of his hair disappearing underwater. James kept on looking, straining to see through the lashing rain, but his father never resurfaced. After what must have been hours he sank down under the sycamore and took Dora into his arms. When the May Tide was over nine other lives had been lost and the body of Wayne Deering’s son was never found. It was a chilly spring. All that night James and Dora huddled shaking on the ridge, too shocked to speak. They watched straw stacks and barn doors rush down the river until their landlord found them.

Not long before he married Annie Clyde, James saw again that riverside shack where he and Dora had lived on the cotton farm. He’d found himself in the vicinity, helping one of the church deacons round up beeves for the stock barn. The house was wide open and caked with clay, the doors and windows missing. It looked like a corpse with a gaping mouth and sightless eyes. James stood outside staring into the rooms, unable to cross the threshold, grateful for having been spared. Now he thought he might have been better off if he had drowned with his father that night. He was still looking at the musseling boats floating over the stones of the Hankins family graveyard, at the men leaned over the sides with their grappling hooks, when he felt a firm hand on his shoulder. He thought it would be his uncle again. When he turned he was startled to see Ellard Moody. He tried to gauge the sheriff’s hangdog face but it was long and mournful as usual. There was no telling what kind of news Ellard had brought. James opened his mouth, feeling outside of himself, trying to work up the courage to ask. He hadn’t spoken in hours. When the words came they were almost too rough to discern. “Did you find anything?”

“No,” Ellard said. “But I been to Beulah Kesterson’s.” James noticed that Ellard held something in each hand. At first he thought the sheriff had brought his useless rifle back, the one he’d sent to the house with Wallace, tired of lugging it around. Then he blinked his blurry eyes and realized that what the sheriff had brought him was an axe. “I sent the constable to see her last night but she wouldn’t tell him nothing,” Ellard continued. “So I decided to go back and try her myself. Looks like Beulah’s had a change of heart. She’s done told me where Amos is at.”

“How come?” James asked, still out of sorts.

“On account of your wife.”

“What’s Annie Clyde got to do with it?”

“I reckon Annie Clyde went up there and scared some sense into Beulah. She wants me to find him before your wife does, is what she told me. She thinks he might be safer locked up.” Ellard paused, squinting out at the bobbing skiffs on the lake. “I ain’t seen him yet, though.”

“Why not?”

“This may not be the smartest thing I ever done, James, but I think you’ve got a right to come with me. If you want to, that is. I believe you can keep your head or I wouldn’t offer.”

James closed his eyes for a second. “We better stop at the house and tell Annie Clyde.”

“I don’t know about that.” Ellard paused again. “She ain’t home nohow.”

“You mean Annie Clyde?”

Ellard nodded. “I seen her sleeping up at Beulah’s.”

“Sleeping?”

“Listen, we ought to move before Amos does.”

James rubbed his grizzled face. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go find him.”

Ellard inclined his head toward the other end of the pasture, where the thick woods steamed with mist. He held up the axes, their blades whetted. “Beulah claimed he makes his camp over yonder. Said you go about half a mile through the thicket and come to a clearing.”

“Across the fence? That ain’t nothing but a laurel hell. Can’t nobody camp over there.”

Ellard looked at James without saying what they both knew. If anybody could, it was Amos. James had seen some of the deputies from elsewhere poking around the thicket but he doubted they had ventured far into it, with the poison ivy and copperheads. James and Dale hadn’t even tried to penetrate the laurel whenever they went hunting on the other side of the fence. Only rabbits and squirrels and songbirds lived in it, nothing worth shooting at. He and Dale had preferred bigger game. Pheasants, deer, wild turkeys. Dale had talked over the years about having the laurel cleared but never got around to it before the TVA came to town.

“You sure you want to come with me?” Ellard asked.

“I know I don’t want to stand around here no more,” James said.

Ellard passed James an axe. “If he ain’t lit out by now, we’ll give him a surprise.”

“People say he can’t be tracked,” James said, hefting the handle. “Like he’s a spook.”

“Well, he ain’t a spook. Otherwise he’d have two eyes instead of one. It might be tricky keeping quiet in them briars but we can slip up on him. Pay no mind to the nonsense.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” James said. “Come on, if we’re going.”

James and Ellard set out across the field, ragweed soaking their pant legs to the knees. When they reached the other end they straddled the fence, the mesh of the tree canopy shielding them like an umbrella. A fecund odor rose up from the swamp between the close trunks. The deeper in they walked, the wilder the growth became. Soon they were traipsing through the nettles foot by foot, tearing the bushes aside with their hands. They had the axes but neither of them was prepared for the laurel hell when they came to it, their way blocked by a dense tract of shrubbery stretching what looked like miles in every direction, crowded branches twelve feet high blocking out what little sun there was shining. Hunters and trappers had been known to get lost trying to hack through lesser laurel hells than this one. Though James was sure they were wasting their time he started chopping anyway because his wife would have wanted him to, rooting out a tunnel for himself as Gracie used to do in the snowball bushes on the farm.

He and Ellard labored for what seemed all day to make a yard or two of progress, cutting into the leafy darkness until their shoulders ached. After a while James became so intent on his work that he stopped feeling anything. It was dim enough that he forgot about Ellard being there with him. He chopped on with single-minded purpose, blisters breaking open on his palms, locked in battle with the land he’d come to hate long before this day. He should have already been a hundred miles closer to Michigan. He and Annie Clyde and Gracie would have already stopped along the road to eat their dinner, biscuits and salt pork that Annie Clyde had wrapped in a dish towel. A brown bag of apples for Gracie. He should have already been shed of this godforsaken place. By the time he and Ellard had forged a half mile through the thicket he could hardly move his arms. At first he doubted his sight when he detected a shaft of light ahead, sun filtering into the claustrophobic shade. As he forced a path toward a gap in the laurel, he couldn’t help feeling hopeful. If Amos did have Gracie, if she was on the other side of this thicket, it would be over. When he reached the gap he slung the axe into the bushes and shouldered his way through, ripping aside branches until he stumbled out of the shrubbery.

James remembered Ellard only when the sheriff emerged from the laurel himself. He stepped in front of James, a scratch on his forehead. He brought a grim finger to his lips and James nodded. Dazed and out of breath, James followed Ellard on through a copse of poplars until he saw up ahead the clearing Beulah Kesterson had told Ellard about. He noticed Ellard’s hand hovering over the holster at his hip and wished for his own weapon. If he had been thinking straight he would have kept the axe. With each step closer to the clearing his daughter seemed more within his reach. He fought to bring his breathing under control, to walk with the same steadiness as the sheriff. Ellard searched the ground as they went for fresh-turned earth or perhaps footprints smaller than a man’s. After proceeding for several yards they entered what appeared to be a makeshift camp near the foot of a bluff draped in vines. There was a lantern hanging from a low bough, a lean-to fashioned from birch limbs and a tarp. James’s boots stuttered. Under the lean-to Amos was sitting on a milk crate, bent over a kettle and a smoldering cook fire. He lifted his face, looking up with bland expectation. He seemed unalarmed to have been discovered. James’s first urge was to run and take him by the throat but he saw lying not far from the kettle a rusted machete. He had to think. One mistake could cost him Gracie.

“Hello, Ellard,” Amos said, stirring the swill in his pot with a ladle. “I see you got here the hard way. But you wouldn’t have made it down the bluff in this rain. I nearly fell myself.”

“Hidee, Amos. I was hoping I wouldn’t be seeing you again.”

Amos smiled. “I didn’t mean for you to.”

“What are you doing out here?” Ellard asked.

“Nothing much,” Amos said.

“You know this place is fixing to be flooded?”

“That’s why I came back. I wanted to see it one more time before it’s gone.”

Ellard spat into the drifter’s fire. “You’re awful brave,” he said. “Or dumb.”

Amos blinked at Ellard in the dripping green shade. There was an almost preternatural stillness about him. “I appreciate it, but don’t concern yourself. I won’t let the water get me.”

“Somebody’s liable to get you for trespassing,” Ellard said.

Amos went back to tending his pot. “This land belongs to nobody now.”

“I guess the power company would disagree with you about that.”

Amos turned his attention to James. “Who did you bring with you?”

“This here’s James Dodson.”

“Do we know each other?” Amos asked.

James took the drifter in, his forearms where his shirtsleeves were rolled up crosshatched with cuts. Thin lashes, scabbing but fresh. “I’d say we know of each other,” he said.

Amos considered. “That’s a good way to put it. We all know of each other around here, don’t we?” He sipped from the battered ladle, sampling his dinner. “Are you men hungry?”

Ellard’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t come out here to eat.”

Amos stopped stirring. “What can I do for you then?”

“I came to have a talk with you. But I figure you won’t care if I take a look around first.” Ellard kept his eyes on Amos as he neared the fire and picked up a blown-down branch. He poked with the stick at the charred stones around the kettle, probably looking for signs of bone or tooth. The thought knotted James’s guts. When Ellard seemed satisfied there was nothing to be gleaned from the ashes he ducked under the plinking lean-to eave. After a moment James saw him prodding at a bundle tucked in one corner of the shelter with his foot, something wrapped in a piece of canvas. James held his breath. Ellard knelt and James heard the sheriff’s knees popping over the rain. He unwound the covering and let its contents fall out. It was the drifter’s bedroll, tied with a piece of twine. Ellard pulled the string to unbind it. Rolled inside were the implements a drifter carried. A tin plate, a cook pot, a frying pan. Ellard studied these provisions for a time then got up and walked back to the front of the lean-to with his hands on his hips.

Amos sat back on the milk crate. “What is it you want to talk about, Ellard?”

“James’s little girl is missing.”

Amos looked at James. “I heard something about that. I’m sorry for you and your wife.”

“You scared Annie Clyde yesterday,” James said.

Amos put down the ladle. “That wasn’t my intention.”

“Annie Clyde thinks you know where Gracie’s at,” Ellard interrupted, as Amos went on gazing at James without response. “You ain’t seen any missing children, have you?”

Amos seemed to mull it over. Then his one eye settled back on James. “Yes,” he said.

“You’ve seen one?”

“Yes.”

“A lost child?”

“A dead child.”

James gaped at him, stricken. For a second Ellard didn’t move or speak either. Rain tapped at the tarp roof of the shelter. “You saying you found a body?” Ellard asked at last.

“Yes.”

Ellard moved toward Amos. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I generally try to avoid the law,” Amos said.

Sweat sprang out in beads on James’s brow. “Where is it?”

“I’d have to take you to it.”

“Then take me to it,” James said, his voice unfamiliar to his own ears.

“Wait a minute, James,” Ellard said. “I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”

James’s hands tensed into fists. “I’m done waiting.”

Ellard cursed under his breath, touching his holster. “Watch your step,” he warned Amos.

The drifter took his hat from beside the milk crate and put it on his head. He stood up and regarded James as if to make sure of something. Then he nodded and glided past James on almost silent feet. James followed him numb and mindless across the clearing toward the bluff. Ellard came behind them, revolver drawn, but James ignored both of the other men. As he walked, he conjured Gracie’s face to hold before him in place of whatever he was about to see. He pictured her sleeping in her crib with her fingers curled under her chin, lips suckling as if she nursed in a dream. He didn’t know if a human being was made to withstand a thing like this. It seemed possible he wouldn’t survive. They walked a few yards to the rocky ledges, lush with a fall of white-flowered woodbine. At the bottom of the bluff it appeared as though Amos had hacked through the greenery with the rusted machete. He pulled the vines aside and looked up at James with his impassive face, waiting. Ellard stepped between them. “Let me do this,” he said.

James shook his head. “No. She’s mine.” But he stopped and bent over, gulping.

“Don’t you want to see?” Amos asked.

“Shut your mouth,” Ellard shouted at Amos.

It took every ounce of James’s will to look down. There was a fissure at the foot of the bluff, something he took at first for an animal burrow. On closer inspection, he saw that it was a shallow limestone cave, the kind that honeycombed the valley floor. He let out a chuff of breath and lowered himself to his hands and knees. From that position he realized he would have to stretch flat on his belly to see what was inside. That close to the spongy topsoil the smell of it choked him. Bugs crawled into his collar, tickling his neck. He braced himself and turned his head to peer in the hole. For an instant in the grainy light he saw not the corpse he dreaded but Gracie as he remembered her, asleep on the floor of the cave as she would have been in her crib. But when his vision cleared what he saw was the skeleton of a child. Blackened leaves had sifted down through the shroud of woodbine to drift all around it, rotting in a scum of stagnant water. Some of the ribs were missing, carried off by animals. Milk teeth were gone from the jawbone. The small, tea-stained skull was broken, bashed in on one side. James scrambled backward in the litter of chopped-away vines and pushed himself up onto his knees. He retched but nothing came out. “That’s not Gracie,” he heard himself saying, but in his heart he felt that it was.

Not long after two o’clock, Beulah Kesterson went to the washstand and splashed her face. She ran a comb through her long ivory hair and braided it. She put on her best smock, the one she wore to funerals, then strained to bend and tie her shoes. After covering her braid with a head scarf, she crossed to the door with Annie Clyde Dodson still on her mind. The girl seemed to have aged a decade since yesterday. Her eyes had been like holes, her hair snarled, her dress soiled. In the past when Beulah couldn’t help those who came to have the bones read she sent them away without false hope. But she’d never been asked to look for a missing child. Others had disappeared after the floods but they were found, besides the Deering boy. Beulah imagined it would be even worse left wondering like this than knowing Gracie was dead. She felt she had to do something for Annie Clyde but she hadn’t meant to lie to her again. The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. She claimed to have seen the little girl alive, when in truth the bones had showed her nothing. Beulah told Annie Clyde what she wanted to hear because she had witnessed too much suffering. She couldn’t take any more of it. But maybe one last lie made no difference. Maybe there was nothing else Annie Clyde Dodson would have believed.

Then Ellard Moody had pecked on the door while Annie Clyde was still sleeping in Beulah’s bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had more than one visitor in the same day. Under other circumstances her spirits would have lifted to see Ellard. His parents had been good neighbors and he was always a respectful boy. He’d spent many afternoons playing under the shade trees around her cabin. Sometimes in the winters after Amos left, Beulah would pay Ellard a dime to bust kindling for her. She had watched him grow into a fine man over the years. When she opened the door she was troubled to see him looking nearly as bad off as Annie Clyde, standing on her steps slump-shouldered in the pouring rain. Each line of his face was a crack under iron-colored stubble, his drooping eyes red-rimmed. She knew what he came for and what she had to do, as much as it pained her. She told Ellard about Amos’s hiding place in the clearing only to protect him. She had seen a desperation close to madness in Annie Clyde Dodson. She wouldn’t have betrayed her son for any other reason than to save him. Not just from Annie Clyde, but from himself. After talking with Amos in the shed yesterday morning she’d come away certain of what he was planning. Something he might not live through. What troubled Beulah most was that Amos didn’t seem to care whether he got out of Yuneetah in one piece or not. She needed to make sure he understood her reasoning. She was headed out to tell him herself.

Beulah stepped into the storm, the sun still trying to break through the clouds. The rain was slackening but not over. She’d seen it pour weeks at a time on the valley. If it didn’t let up the search would be impossible to continue. Soon the lake would reach the main road. There would be no getting in or out. It wasn’t just the child slipping farther away every minute. It was all of Yuneetah. She hurried down the hollow, past the graveyard and the Walker farm. At the end of the track she turned north, catching winks of water between the roadside trees. She used to go to the shoals on the first of March each season to see the river unthawing, a ritual that meant winter was over. In the cold months she dreamed of its damp slate smell, its eroding banks studded with oval rocks washed smooth as glass. Like the Cherokees, Beulah thought the river might be speaking to her. She wondered if the bones passed down to her had come from some strange fish caught in its waters. If it wasn’t Long Man whispering to her about the people that lived along its shores, communicating in some way much older than hers, from before language. As close as the people of Yuneetah had lived to it, having fished from and drunk of and swam through its waters, maybe they too could have heard the truths it told if they’d listened closer.

But the river as Beulah knew it was gone. She moved on from what it was becoming, a flood seeping into her shoes and wetting her rolled-down stockings. About two miles from the Walker farm she came to a truck mired along the shoulder to its running boards. She recognized James Dodson’s Model A Ford and stopped to see if he was close by. She listened for the searchers she’d heard calling through the night but their voices had abated. A little farther down the road she met a party of men walking and they tipped their hats at her. She could read the defeat in their postures. She knew how much they wanted to find the child alive, especially the townspeople who had returned from other counties. She understood what it would have meant to them. Now the search had become one last disappointment. She’d seen the same thing in Ellard’s long face. He had given up on finding Gracie, maybe even before he started looking for her. At least Beulah had helped him in some small way, though she doubted he would get much satisfaction from Amos. She ducked her head as she rushed past the Hankins property and the thorny wood where her son would be arrested, if he wasn’t already locked up in the courthouse basement. He had been content camping there, close enough to the river that when it left its banks all manner of useful junk washed up and got snared in the vines at the foot of the bluff. Amos might have hidden there comfortably until the lake flooded him out if not for Beulah.

She kept her eyes on the road as she passed the demolished and burned-down houses of Yuneetah. Seeing the destruction she felt the souls of those who built the town from its foundation and died within its boundaries. The settlers who wasted away from starvation and disease, the Rebel and Union soldiers, the farmers who dropped in the boiling heat of cotton fields and tobacco rows, the mothers who died in the sweat of childbed fever, the elders who went in their sleep at the end of long lives with loved ones holding their hands. It was the last time she’d travel this way, her last trip to town. But Amos mattered more to her than anything else right now. She was out of breath before she made it to the square, her legs and back aching. When she reached the courthouse and saw that the sheriff wasn’t parked out front she went up the broad steps and heaved herself down to wait under the portico. The sidewalk was deserted besides a car and two trucks alongside the curb, bathed shiny with the overcast sun lighting their beaded cabs. Beulah could remember when the town had no sidewalks. When the square was made of dirt, a rain like this had turned it into a hoof-printed sump, the horses people rode then wearing crusty mud boots. She hadn’t been here since spring, before everybody cleared out. She’d gone into McCormick’s to see some of her neighbors off, having birthed them and their babies. She sat at the counter and with a nickel of her dwindling savings ordered a piece of cherry pie. Now the cafe’s plate-glass window was broken. She looked out at the neat buildings lined up in a row, red brick with white-painted moldings, awnings darkening their boarded facades. Sitting there in her funeral dress, saddened by the emptiness of the main street, she began to fear something had gone wrong. She prayed she’d done the right thing by turning Amos in.

When Beulah saw Ellard’s car coming at last, a red light revolving on its roof, she got to her feet. As he pulled up to the steps and switched the motor off she noticed through the blurred windshield someone sitting beside him in the front seat. Ellard got out and went around the car to open a rear door. At the same time the man on the passenger side almost tripped onto the sidewalk. It was James Dodson. She knew her fears had been founded. Something had gone wrong, but she couldn’t understand exactly what. Then she saw that Ellard was pulling her boy out of the backseat by the arm and her fingers went to her pouch of bones. She stood there clutching the pouch as Ellard led Amos up the courthouse steps with his hands cuffed behind him. When they reached the top Amos lifted his chin, hatless with his hair wetted sleek. Beulah sucked in a breath. His face was beaten misshapen. His lips mashed against his teeth, his nose bent, his eyebrow gashed, blood caked at his hairline. And yet he seemed unruffled as ever. Ellard was the one who looked shaken. James Dodson shambled up the steps behind them with his skinned fists hanging at his sides like he had taken the beating. When Beulah found the voice to ask Ellard what happened he turned to her and said, “He’s lucky I didn’t blow his head off.”

She didn’t follow them right away into the courthouse. She watched them disappear behind the double doors, afraid to find out what damage she had caused. It took a moment to collect herself and walk in through the entrance hall, past the mahogany staircase and the bulletin boards tacked with old notices, her shoes squeaking on the checkerboard tiles. She stopped and stood in the middle of the confusion with nobody paying attention to her. The constable that had questioned Beulah last night shuffled Amos to a desk in the corner scattered with papers beneath a map of the county. James Dodson sat on a bench against the wall holding his head in his hands, the curve of his back rouged by the stained-glass fanlights above the windows. Ellard walked over to a high counter where uniformed men from other police departments were operating a shortwave radio. Beulah tried to make sense of what he was telling these lawmen about bones in a cave, saying they needed to get somebody down to the Hankins woods to collect the remains. She thought at first he was talking about Gracie, but then one of the others mentioned contacting someone from the college in Knoxville to determine the age of the bones. She stood there for some unknown amount of time. Her eyes found the wall clock but it had run down. The calendar above the file cabinets hadn’t been changed since April either, as if the town had ceased to exist when the dam gates closed. Unable to stay on her blistered feet any longer, Beulah went to the bench and sat beside James. She touched his back through his coat but he didn’t lift his head.

Then she noticed the constable rising from behind the desk in the corner, steering Amos still handcuffed toward the stairwell leading down to the basement. She got up as quick as she could and hurried after them, too old to keep up. They went down two flights of stairs and a hall lined with shelves of moldering volumes labeled CRIMINAL MINUTES, their aged bindings unraveling and strings trailing from their broken spines, on past the door to a vault that held county records she supposed would be thrown away for all they mattered to the power company. At the end of the hall they came to the only cell. It looked hardly wide enough to turn around in, with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls, a bunk with a thin woolen blanket folded on top. The constable glared at Beulah as he opened the door. She knew he wasn’t fond of her since she’d refused to talk to him about Amos. After it clanged shut Amos backed up to the bars to have the handcuffs removed. When they were left alone he took a seat on the bunk and turned his beaten face to Beulah. She couldn’t keep from crying. “How come them to hurt you this way?”

“They didn’t give me a reason,” he said.

Beulah fished a handkerchief from her pocket. “What are they so wrought up over?”

Amos blinked at her between the bars. “They found some bones.”

“A child’s bones?”

“Yes.”

“A skeleton?”

He nodded.

“Where at?”

“Same place you found me.”

“How did they know where to look?”

“I showed them.”

Beulah mopped at her eyes. “How did you know where to look, then?”

Amos winced as he leaned against the cinder-block wall. “It’s been in there ten years or longer. Every time I get back a few more bones are carried off. But I’ve left it alone.”

“How do you reckon it got in there?”

“I would say the floods washed it in. Or the child crawled in, like I did.”

After a silence it struck her. “The little Deering boy. He’s the only one never found.”

“I guess he’s found now.”

Beulah stared down at the handkerchief crumpled in her hand, unable to look anymore at Amos’s swelling face, his bloody eye socket. “That still don’t tell me why James hurt you.”

There was a drawn-out pause. Beulah could hear rumbling voices and a flurry of movement upstairs. “He might have thought it was his daughter,” Amos said.

Beulah looked up. “Why would he think that?”

Amos touched his split eyebrow and studied his fingers without answering.

“You told him you found Gracie in that cave?”

“No,” he said. “That’s what he believed.”

Beulah felt light-headed. “Why would you do him that way?”

“I was just giving him what he wanted.”

“What in the devil does that mean?”

“He wanted to see a dead child and I showed him one.”

“That’s crazy talk. He didn’t want no such thing.”

“He wanted it over one way or another. If it was me, I wouldn’t have given up.”

“Lord, Amos. What have you done this time?”

He tried to smile. “Ellard was going to arrest me anyway.”

Beulah sighed. “You’re fixing to get yourself killed, son. You’ve nearly done it already.”

“Leave it alone,” he said, and she heard the pain in his voice.

She moved to the bars of the cell, wrapped her knotty fingers around them with the handkerchief balled in her palm. “They ought to let me clean you up. Where’s that constable?”

Amos closed his eye. “He won’t let you in here.”

“He will, too,” she said.

Amos rested against the wall and she loitered a moment more watching him. It felt like she was seeing his true face for the first time under that veil of bruises. It was something she’d needed to see before she died. She turned away from the cell with purpose, replacing the handkerchief in her pocket. She went down the hall the same way they’d come. She had started up the stairs when an echoing bang resounded down the stairwell. She paused. It sounded like the courthouse doors thrown open. Her first incoherent thought was that the wind had blown them in. Then she heard raised voices, one of them a woman’s. There was a pounding of feet overhead. Something toppled and crashed. As Beulah stood with her eyes fixed on the carpet rising out of sight around the bend leading to another flight of stairs, there was a second blast that could only have come from a gun. Annie Clyde had finally done it. Somebody was lying dead up there. Beulah should have rushed upstairs to see if she could help, but she didn’t want to know who it was. Ellard or James or some out-of-county lawman. Listening harder, she heard frantic scuffling. She looked over her shoulder toward Amos’s cell. “Don’t go up there,” he called down the hall.

“How did she find out where you are?” Beulah called back.

“Evidently word still gets around fast in Yuneetah,” he said. Then they both hushed and Beulah stood listening again. After several minutes passed the muffled voices upstairs seemed to calm somewhat. Beulah began to hope there was nobody shot. She was about to climb the stairs when she heard approaching feet and backed away from the bottom step. She kept her eyes on the bend in the staircase. It was Annie Clyde she saw first, the girl’s face wan and frail as a china cup. Her arms looked just as breakable, encircled by men’s hands. She was flanked by Ellard on one side and on the other by somebody Beulah didn’t know but whose kind she recognized. Her glance went to his wingtip shoes and back to his bewildered expression. He was surely wondering how he had gotten himself into this. He was younger than most of the caseworkers and county agents she’d seen sniffing around Yuneetah the last two years but he was one of them. His white shirt clean beside Annie Clyde’s dirtiness, his golden hair combed neat. Descending the stairs behind them was the constable, keeping an eye on James Dodson. But James didn’t need guarding. It looked to Beulah like he didn’t know where he was, still drunk with shock. She was relieved to see they all appeared unwounded as they brushed by her. None of them acknowledged Beulah as they passed. There was only the shuffle and screech of their footfalls down the dim hallway. As Beulah watched them go, it began to dawn on her what they were doing. “What’s wrong with you, letting her come down here?” she hollered after Ellard.

Ellard didn’t look back. “I should have let her shoot him, after what he done.”

“He’s in bad shape, Ellard. He ought to be in the hospital.”

“He’s right where he ought to be, and you know it,” Ellard said. “He’s got trouble on his mind one way or another. It’s the best thing for him and everybody else if he stays locked up.”

“Well, I believe you’ve lost your mind,” Beulah said, out of breath as she shoved past him and the others to stand in front of the cell. Her eyes fell on the young power company man, holding Annie Clyde’s arm. As though he had some claim on her, some authority over any of them. “What are you doing,” she demanded of him, “poking your nose where it don’t belong?”

He seemed startled to be addressed. “Mrs. Dodson needed a ride and I offered her one.”

“Get out of the way, Miss Beulah,” Ellard ordered. “I told her she could talk to him.”

“Let her talk, then,” Amos spoke up, and a quiet fell over the rest of them. They stood still, gathered close in the grayish light from the window near the ceiling. Annie Clyde stared at Amos, her breath rapid. Beulah saw the rise and fall of her chest. If she wanted free from the men they might not be able to hold her. But Beulah did as Ellard said. She got out of the way.

Annie Clyde came forward and Amos rose from the bunk. Ellard’s other hand went to the butt of his revolver. Beulah looked from one to another of them. Amos shadowed in the recess of the cell. Annie Clyde lit by the window. The men holding her away from the bars with their backs almost against the wall. James Dodson standing there with the constable like someone dreaming. “What do you want to know?” Amos asked, any trace of pain gone from his voice.

“Where’s Gracie?”

“That I can’t tell you.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Nothing.”

“You took her.”

“What makes you think so?”

“You were down at the house.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Have you got her?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t have her.”

“Did you hurt my baby?”

“I wouldn’t hurt her. She’s all that’s worth saving in this place.”

“You tell me the truth,” Annie Clyde said through her teeth.

“All right,” Amos said back. “Here’s the truth. I’m not the one you ought to be worried about.” His gaze flicked to the young power company man standing near Annie Clyde’s elbow. “That’s your enemy right there. He’s the one fooling you, acting like he’s going to help you. But he’ll be at your door with a court order in the morning.”

“Shut up,” Annie Clyde said. “You. You took Gracie.”

Amos favored her with his one swollen eye. “I didn’t take her,” he said. “You lost her.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Annie Clyde moved like a blur. She yanked her arms up and brought them downward, wrenching free in an instant. It was the power company man who acted first, lurching in front of Annie Clyde as if to take a bullet for her. At almost the same time Amos’s arm shot between the bars and snaked around the man’s neck, pulling him into a choke hold. Beulah saw dully that there was something in Amos’s hand. A hunting knife. Somehow he had kept it concealed from Ellard and the other lawmen in all the uproar. But he hadn’t pulled the knife on James Dodson, even to defend himself. Beulah searched out James in the tumult and saw him snatching Annie Clyde against his chest. Amos was holding the power company man close enough to whisper in his ear, their cheeks smashed together between the bars, the knife tip dimpling the flesh under his chin. The man struggled, his wingtip shoes scuffing the floor, until Amos’s hold tightened enough to cut off his wind. Then he went limp. Ellard pulled his revolver and leveled it at Amos. “Drop what you’re holding there.”

“Just a minute,” Amos said. “I want to ask him something.” He pressed the knife tip into the power company man’s flesh, drawing a line of blood in its pale smoothness. Beulah remembered one of the man’s coworkers walking away from Bud and Fay Willet in a pin-striped suit, leaving them weeping on their porch. As young as he looked, she had no sympathy for him.

“Let him go,” Ellard said.

“What are you here for?” Amos asked.

The power company man stared straight ahead unable to answer, walleyed with fear.

“You’re here to run people off their land,” Amos answered for him.

“No—” the man protested, cringing away from the knife.

“Don’t you work for the TVA?”

The man raised a feeble hand to pry at Amos’s forearm, a ring with a topaz stone glinting on one of his fingers. Beulah doubted he even knew what he was saying. “Yes, but—”

“What department?”

“Family Removal Section,” he gasped out.

“Removal Section. That’s a choice. Who else is running people off, if not you?”

“Not me,” he insisted, his face turning bluish. “They give the orders—”

“There is no ‘they,’” Amos said, pressing the point of the knife deeper into the man’s throat. “Like your head. It’s one part of your body, but you wouldn’t be much use without it.”

“That’s about enough,” Ellard shouted, pulling the hammer back on his gun.

The power company man’s eyes rolled around as if to seek help, his blood mixing pink with the sweat soaking his once clean white shirt collar. “What would happen,” Amos asked into the man’s ear, “if I cut off one of this dam builder’s parts? Would it make any difference?”

“No,” the man begged.

Ellard stared at Amos’s battered face over the barrel of the revolver. Amos looked back at him steadily. “I’ve been itching to kill you going on forty years,” Ellard said. “I’ll do it, Amos.”

“I know you pretty well after that long,” Amos said. “You’re all talk.”

“What about me?” James broke in, letting go of Annie Clyde. “You reckon I’m all talk?” He stepped forward, his auburn hair and ruddy skin bright in the dreary cinder-block basement. He was a head taller and twenty years younger than Ellard or the constable. Beulah didn’t see what either one of them could do if he rushed the jail cell bars and got his hands on Amos again.

Amos’s eye stayed on Ellard and the gun. “No,” he said. “But I think you’re beat.”

Splotches bloomed in James’s cheeks. “You just keep on thinking that way.”

Beulah felt panic overtaking her. Threatening the power company man wouldn’t stop James Dodson from finishing what he’d started in the Hankins woods. She doubted James would care much if Amos cut off the power company man’s fine blond head. But Amos was ignoring the danger. “I’ve been shot at before,” he told Ellard. “As long as I can remember, people have been trying to get rid of me. You won’t be the one to do it.” Then he shifted his shining eye back to Annie Clyde. “Go ahead and put the blame on me, if it makes you feel better.”

“Please, son,” Beulah pleaded. “Turn him loose.” There was a charged pause. She could hear the breathing of those around her. The power company man’s eyes darted about in search of rescue but nobody moved. Then without warning Amos let go, giving the man a shove. He took in a whoop of air and staggered out of Amos’s reach, falling then scuttling to his feet. Even in that moment Beulah knew Amos hadn’t released the man because she told him to do it. He did nothing unless it suited him. He let the power company man go for the same reason he would never have hurt Gracie Dodson. Amos was not a murderer, no matter what they thought of him.

As dark settled over the valley Silver Ledford plodded down the winding mountainside. She carried no light through the trees but over the years she had learned not to need one, feeling her way along the ridges. She was headed to Beulah Kesterson’s cabin after having spent an hour in the woods a mile above her shack. She’d meant to make sure no lawman or searcher had stumbled across the still, though it would have been nigh impossible. Plum had taught her that trails led the law to a man’s whiskey so she never took the same path twice in a row. She’d approached from downstream, the water rushing engorged. She knelt to inspect the concealing laurel she’d piled and it seemed undisturbed. There were no footprints in the clay of the bank save those of minks and raccoons. She moved the bushy limbs, drops spraying from the leaves, and found the still pot unmolested. After a while she got up again and looked into the foggy woods to the right of the stream. Over there she could see the outline of the shed leaning under a chinquapin tree, leaves and spiked burrs littering its tin roof. Like her grandfather before her, she stored sugar, sweet oil and mash barrels inside. But now the shed held more than that. She had wanted to move toward it but her feet were rooted for a long time. Her eyes wouldn’t blink. They filled with rain. For most of her life Silver had kept her own counsel. But as she stood there immobile, Beulah had come to her mind. She knew she had to see the old woman, if she couldn’t see Amos.

When it was still early morning Silver had gone into the canebrakes other searchers avoided, the briar thickets that tore scarlet lines in their arms. Disturbing nests of copperheads heaped over with leaves, probing with her fingers into the slick nooks of the riverbank on the other side of the dam and drawing them out catfish-bitten. She had scouted the Hankins pasture and the bracken across the fence, knowing Amos made his camp somewhere close. She’d tried to crawl into the laurel, twigs snagging her hair, but not even a child Gracie’s size could have forced her way in. Then at around eleven o’clock, coming down the bank in front of the Walker farm, she was stopped by Ellard Moody. While she was trapped in a car with him the old loss had threatened to surface. If she drew pictures, she could have sketched his boyhood face from memory. It was once that dear to her, freckled and serious with sad brown eyes. His body lean with muscle, his head full of cowlicks the color of maple sap. Decades had passed since her summer with Ellard but she could still feel his lips forming her name against her ear. Sometimes she would go to the river and remember lying there with him, the sun lighting his smooth brow above her, minnows swimming over and between their skins. When the wind mimicked the wail of a baby she looked around as if she might have had some other life with Ellard that she’d somehow forgotten. Theirs would have been a girl with eyes like flakes of moon. If she fretted, Silver would have held her. If she got cold, Silver would have stoked the fire. If food was scarce, Silver would have given her portion. If colored leaves were ankle deep, Silver would have swished through them with her.

Ellard had treated Silver like something precious. But when Amos came back to Yuneetah at the end of that summer, three years after he left for the first time on a northbound boxcar, Silver was drawn right back to him. She had tried not to think about Amos when she closed her eyes, but she tossed and turned all night in her bed. Knowing he was down the hollow at Beulah’s she burned herself lighting the fire at breakfast. At dinnertime she scorched the beans. She cared for Ellard but she didn’t belong with him. She had thought while she was caught up in his arms that she might always be with him, that she might even marry him. Then Amos came back tossing shale at her window and the pull she felt toward him was stronger than ever. She found herself choosing to go off with Amos when she had agreed to wait for Ellard down at the river with her fishing pole. Amos would come to her with a bucket for blackberry picking and she would follow him into the canes to sit on the trunk of a fallen chestnut, to gorge together until their bellies swelled. Silver spoke her mind more to Amos than to anybody. But that late September she didn’t tell him about the illness she’d begun to feel in the mornings.

Silver should have been more careful during her time with Ellard. It didn’t occur to her until she grew sick how foolish they had been. Though she told herself the blood would come any day, she was worried. She tried to keep even farther away from her grandmother during those months but one evening as she sat with Mildred at the kitchen table not eating her supper, she felt the old woman’s eyes on her. She got up and rushed outside for some air, trying to settle her stomach. When she came back inside with an armload of kindling, the coals were glowing under the kettle. Mildred pulled out a chair for her to sit. She took the kettle off the fire and poured its scalding contents into a cup. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing?” she spat, thrusting the cup into Silver’s hand. “Just like your mama.” Silver stared into the swirling pennyroyal dregs. She knew it would make her trouble go away, but in that moment she hated her grandmother more than ever. Even as she drained the cup in one searing gulp.

For almost three decades Silver had kept that secret from Ellard Moody. Now she was keeping another one. But she hadn’t lied to him about where she was headed when she got out of his car this morning. She’d gone straight across the road to the Walker farm and up to the porch where a group of men in slickers were drinking coffee. She recognized one of them without remembering his name. Someone she had gone to third grade with until she quit, one of the boys that had chucked rocks at her in the school yard. He told her that Annie Clyde wasn’t home, his mean eyes calling her all the names his mouth used to thirty-five years ago. Silver wanted to wait for her niece but not with the man’s eyes on her. Not inside with the women either. She knew what they thought of her. She went around to the barn where she could rest within earshot of the house, lying on her side in the scattered hay of a stall. Sometime later she heard tires churning and realized she’d been asleep. She scrambled up shedding straw and went to the side of the house. A group of men were pushing a pickup truck out of the bog of the yard. The farm had emptied over the course of the afternoon. When the truck was gone only the Packard remained. Silver knocked on the kitchen door and James’s aunt opened it. Her face was severe, strands escaping the knot at her nape. Silver asked for Annie Clyde and the woman said, “She’s down at the jail. I reckon they got Amos.” Without hesitation Silver turned and fled for town.

She had arrived at the courthouse near dusk, the sky whorled with orange clouds. The rain had tapered enough for swifts to return to the clock tower, wheeling and swooping around the dome roof. Silver paused at the flagpole to catch her breath. She’d expected to see curious or perhaps angry searchers but the lawn was deserted, only a few vehicles at the curb. She’d thought they were leaving the farm to come to the courthouse but maybe Ellard had already run them off. He would probably send Silver away as well, but she meant to try. She was about to make for the courthouse doors when they burst open. A young fair-headed man came down the steps. Rushing across the lawn to the street he slid and pitched forward, skidding on his face. He lay there without getting up, his mouth plugged with the earth and grass and water of Yuneetah as if he was drowning in it. Silver was too astonished to go to him. Finally the young man picked himself up, coughing and wiping his face, then limped on to the curb and drove away. Silver wanted to run into the building and demand to know what had happened. But she forced herself to take care up the cobbled walk, treacherous with leaves. As she reached for the door a lawman with a badge pinned to his shirt was coming out of the building. “Nobody’s getting in here tonight,” he said. “You’ll have to come back in the morning.” Then he went down the steps to a car like Ellard’s, a gold star on its side. Silver paced back and forth for a while under the portico wringing her hands, thinking of begging Ellard to let her see Amos but knowing better.

Now she continued down the footpath winding around the side of the mountain until she saw a glow through the limbs clustered over the trail she was following, the only light visible for miles. The cabin in the clearing looked like a haven when she came upon it, sheltered by walnut trees and wild chokecherry bushes, a curl of chimney smoke hanging over the shakes of the roof. Silver tramped up the steps and pounded on the plank door. “It’s Silver Ledford,” she cried out. There was a long lapse although Silver knew Beulah was in there. When the old woman answered she sounded reluctant, like she would rather have hidden from her company.

“Come on in,” Beulah allowed.

Silver pushed open the door then poked her head inside, the blustery draft she brought with her riffling the calendar pages tacked over Beulah’s bed in the corner and swaying the bundled herbs in the rafters. Her eyes moved over the split-log walls, the fireplace with a heap of cinders spilled onto the hearth. She smelled cooking. When she turned her head the old woman was taking a jar from a pie safe. She crossed the threshold, her shoes tracking the floor. It had been years since she entered a home not her own. “I hate to bother you late like this,” she said.

“It ain’t no bother. I been gone all day. I’m just now getting done with supper.”

“I won’t stay long.”

“I got squirrel. Tastes pretty good if you ain’t had meat in a while.”

“Nothing wrong with squirrel,” Silver said. She looked down at herself, still wearing the liver-colored dress, her legs streaked with silt. But Beulah didn’t seem to mind her state.

“Here’s some apple butter, too.” She opened the jar she held in her hand, popping the seal. “This is the last of it, but I can’t think of no reason to save it.”

“Neither can I,” Silver said.

Beulah took down crockery from a shelf and a pan of biscuits from the sideboard. She dished what was left of her supper onto a plate and Silver’s mouth filled with water. She hadn’t eaten. Beulah pulled out a chair but Silver hunkered before the waning cook fire with her food as she did at home. Beulah sighed and took the seat herself. “I never saw such a day. Did you?”

Silver took a bite of the stringy meat. “Not that I remember.”

“I never dreamed I’d see you at my door neither.”

“It’s a strange time,” Silver said.

Beulah shook her head. “It surely is.” She watched as Silver gnawed the squirrel bones clean and tossed them one by one into the fireplace. “I reckon we’re the only ones left up here now. I’ve thought about coming to see you sometime. But you don’t seem to like visitors.”

Silver went on chewing, not saying what came into her mind. Amos was about the only visitor she ever had. She looked around the shadowy cabin and thought it was no wonder he had left. He couldn’t have stayed here. The room was too smothering and close. She pictured him in a jail cell and lost some of her appetite. She supposed the reason she hadn’t asked Beulah about Amos yet was that she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to know anymore. Then Beulah put her out of her misery. “Go ahead. You got such a cloud over you, it’s liable to rain in here.”

Silver choked down a last bite. “They wouldn’t let me in to see Amos.”

Beulah studied her lap. “Well. I seen him.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s alive, but I won’t say he’s all right.”

“I knew it,” Silver said. “Ellard would just as soon kill him as look at him.”

Beulah pulled a handkerchief from her apron. Her eyes when she took off her pointed glasses to dab them were small and naked. “I’m the one that turned him in.”

Silver’s mouth dropped open. “What? Why?”

“I been trying to keep him from hurting hisself or anybody else.”

Silver’s hands trembled as she put aside her cleaned plate. She stared back into the dying fire with her knees gathered up. “There’s no telling what they’ll do to him tonight, much less if this goes to court. They’ll find a way to hang him. Mark my words. Even if Gracie ain’t found.”

Beulah sniffed and put her handkerchief away. “All we can do is wait and see.”

“I need you to tell me, Beulah,” Silver said. “Tell me he wouldn’t hurt a child.”

Beulah shook her head. “I can’t do that. I’m tired of telling.”

“If you don’t believe him,” Silver said, “he ain’t got nobody.”

“I didn’t say I don’t believe him,” Beulah said. “I’m just wore out.”

Silver covered her mouth as if to wipe it. Then she said through her greasy fingers, “If Amos has done something to Gracie, on purpose or not, how am I supposed to live with that?”

When Beulah didn’t answer, Silver raised her head. The old woman was still there, bathed in firelight. She got up heavily from her chair, hands on her back. “Laws, I’ll be glad for this day to end,” she said, eyes wandering to the pile of squirrel bones in the ashes. After another moment Beulah’s crooked fingers went to the pouch around her neck. She opened the drawstring and dumped the bones from it into the fire. They were quickly blackened by the guttering flames.

Silver looked up at her in shock. “Why did you do that?” she asked.

“There ain’t no more future I want to see,” Beulah said.

Silver felt sick to her stomach, like that long-ago evening at supper with her hateful grandmother. She got abruptly to her feet and left the cabin, not even thanking Beulah for the meal. She inhaled the fresh air as she went through the rain, across the lot and back into the trees. Before she lost her nerve she headed down the hollow, past the house where Ellard Moody once lived with his parents and the graveyard where Mary was buried, on to the Walker homestead. Gilded clouds hung over the roof, the moon a smudge behind them. One lamp burned in a front window and Silver made for the lit porch. There were no vehicles parked now at the end of the track. Even the Packard was missing. Silver mounted the porch steps and opened the door without knocking. It couldn’t wait any longer. If Annie Clyde was asleep she would wake her.

But when the door swung in on the front room, its darkened walls papered with vines, Silver couldn’t go in. She hadn’t been here since Mary died. She leaned on the doorjamb, looking into the shine of the oil lamp perched on the fireplace mantel. Aside from the lamp the mantel was bare, cleared of the china figurines that had belonged to her sister. There was an oval of paler wallpaper where a tinted portrait of Mary and Clyde used to hang. The house was silent, not even settling. Then Silver heard a whispery sound. A ragged intake of breath. With a start she turned her head. There was someone sitting on the shadowed bottom stair. For one disoriented instant she thought it was Gracie. But stepping through the doorway she realized that it was her niece instead. “Annie Clyde?” Silver asked, kneeling before her. What she saw sped up her heart. The lamp was running low on oil but she could tell anyhow that the girl was in trouble. Annie Clyde’s eyes were glazed over. There was heat coming off her in waves. “Where is everybody?”

“Gone,” Annie Clyde said, her voice a scratch. “They have babies of their own.”

“Come on. Let’s get you in the bed.”

Annie Clyde shook her head. “I can’t get up.”

“You’re all right,” Silver said, willing it to be true.

“No,” Annie Clyde said. “It’s my foot.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I stepped on a locust thorn.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

Silver took hold of Annie Clyde’s foot. It was wrapped in a discolored bandage, stained with seepage. She untied the wrapping and saw that the foot was bloated, red and hot to the touch with streaks of infection climbing up the ankle. “Oh,” she breathed. “I believe you’ve got blood poisoning, Annie Clyde. We can’t fool around with that. As run-down as you are, it’s hit you hard. I better go to the road and see if I can find somebody that’ll take you to the doctor.”

Annie Clyde shook her head again. “I have to be here when Gracie gets back.”

“You need medicine,” Silver insisted. “Just let me go down to the road.”

Annie Clyde reached out and clutched Silver’s wrist. “Don’t leave me.”

Silver stared down at her niece’s burning fingers. “Then let’s cool you off some.”

“I can’t walk,” Annie Clyde said.

Silver looked around as if for some kind of help but she and Annie Clyde were alone in the stillness of the house. Being taller and sturdier than Annie Clyde, Silver stooped and picked her niece up without much effort, like the girl child she might have had. Annie Clyde was light on the way up the stairs, a bundle of rags. Silver remembered the way to Mary’s upper bedroom but she watched her step with only the sallow shine from the front room to guide her. After lowering Annie Clyde to the feather mattress she ripped off a length of the sheet to make a fresh bandage, working almost in the dark. She went to the washstand in the corner, a cloth draped on the side of its flowered porcelain bowl. Annie Clyde closed her eyes as Silver swabbed her face, her throat, her wrists. Silver thought her niece was dozing, hair spread out and arms limp at her sides. Then Annie Clyde said with her eyes still shut, “I told her she’d be the death of me.”

Silver dropped the washcloth back into the flowered bowl. “You ain’t dying,” she said, too loudly in the quiet room. “All you need is medicine. I’ll see if I can find something here.”

“No,” Annie Clyde said. “Stay with me.”

Silver felt the prick of tears. She felt all the years she had lived alone, every stick of wood she had chopped and pail of water she had toted, every winter she had lasted through, every night with the woods pressing in around the weak flicker of her light. “Close your eyes,” she said.

When Annie Clyde obeyed Silver hurried down the stairs, taking the lamp with her into the kitchen. In there the walls were sooty from the woodstove, the mildewed curtains hanging limp. She found nothing much in the larder besides a sack of meal and a stack of newspapers for lighting cook fires. She flung open the cupboard doors, loose on their rusty hinges. Finally she yanked back the skirt under the sink basin and found what she had been rummaging for. An old bootleg jar of her own chartered whiskey, half gone from many seasons of treating croups and fevers. She remembered this batch by the beryl-colored glass. Dandelion, horsetail, nettle and birch leaves. She went back upstairs with the lamp in one hand and the medicine in the other, the risers groaning under her shoes. She paused in the doorway watching Annie Clyde breathe. She was reminded too much of the night Mary died, when she came into this same room with her teeth rattling in the February cold. Only now it was too hot. She put down the lamp on the bedside table and opened the window. Then she went to the bed and sat on the edge. “Here,” she said, propping the back of Annie Clyde’s head to let her drink. “Take you a few sups of this.”

Annie Clyde grimaced but didn’t protest, although the whiskey was strong. At Silver’s urging, she took several long gulps before falling back on the pillows. As Annie Clyde rested Silver listened to the weather outside. Studying her own distorted reflection in the windowpanes she began to talk, not knowing at first what would come out. “I won’t ask you to forgive me,” she said. “For none of this.” She stole a glance at Annie Clyde. The girl’s eyes were open but they seemed unfocused. “I hope you’re listening to me. Because I don’t believe I can tell it twice.”

Annie Clyde moistened her parched lips but didn’t speak.

“I seen Amos out here yesterday, not much after dinnertime. I didn’t say nothing to you or Ellard because I didn’t think Amos took Gracie. I still don’t think so. I ain’t saying I trust him all the way, but I don’t believe he would bother a child.” Silver hesitated. “He’s been a friend to me. I was frightened of what might happen to him if I said he was hanging around your house.”

Annie Clyde’s brow furrowed. “You saw Amos?” she asked, her speech whiskey-thick.

“Yes. But that ain’t the worst of it.” Silver tried to swallow down a thickness in her own throat. “I saw Gracie, too. I guess I was the last one to see her.” Silver shut her mouth but the words were already out. “I reckon it was about two o’clock. I decided to go ahead and take the dog, so I didn’t have to be around when you left.” She tried to remember it right. She’d walked out of the cornfield flustered after her run-in with Amos, knowing she didn’t have the will to come back down the mountain tomorrow and see the Dodsons off. She’d passed James’s Model A Ford at the end of the track and pressed on to the front door. She’d rapped on the wood but the wind had carried her knock away. When nobody came she’d gone around to the side. Her hair had been whipping as she stood on the stoop but she could still hear raised voices from the kitchen. “I meant to tell you I was taking the dog but it sounded like you was fussing with your husband,” Silver said. “I wanted no part of that. You never asked me a favor before and I wanted to do it, but my nerves was all to pieces. I went back down the steps not hardly knowing if I was coming or going. I was fixing to give up and head home, until I seen her.” Gracie. Standing under the elm where the dog was tied, reaching up to catch the blowing leaves, chattering to him like he was another child. Silver would have gone on up the mountain, no matter how much it hurt to come back the next morning as they loaded their truck, if Gracie hadn’t been there looking so much like Mary. She thought it might kill her to see her sister’s granddaughter leaving Yuneetah.

“I should have figured you wouldn’t let her out by herself,” Silver stammered on. “I don’t know nothing about children.” She hesitated again, shaking her head. “Gracie didn’t want me to take him. Said Rusty was her dog. I knew I shouldn’t take him without telling you, but I thought I had to get it over with.” It had felt too late somehow to abandon her course, so she’d turned her back to Gracie and unchained the dog. Once the rope was around his neck she’d set out pulling him across the field, wind rippling the weeds. When she’d looked over her shoulder Gracie was behind her, watching with a somber face. “She followed me as far as the apple tree. I stopped and told her to get to the house but she wouldn’t.” Silver paused once more, gathering herself to finish. “I looked back when I got to the woods and she was still there. I figured she’d be all right in her own yard. I never dreamed anything would happen to her.” What Silver didn’t tell Annie Clyde was how she had waved to the child with her left hand as she stood at the verge of the pines, grappling with the rope in her right. How she had said good-bye to Gracie knowing it was the last time she would ever see her, but not that it might be the last time anybody ever saw her again.

“You have Rusty?” Annie Clyde asked. Her forehead was clammy. Her fever had broken.

Silver blew out a breath. “If I gave him back to you yesterday I would have had to tell on myself and Amos both. Just because he was hanging around don’t mean he’s to blame. Gracie wouldn’t have wandered off if I’d knocked on the door. Or made sure she went back to the house before I took the dog home with me. I put him in the shed, up at the still where Granddaddy used to keep his watchdogs. It was nighttime before anybody came and told me Gracie was gone.”

“Gracie,” Annie Clyde whispered, tears dropping from her reddened lids.

Silver reached to thumb the wetness from her niece’s cheek. “I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to look you in the face again after this, Annie Clyde,” she said. “As much as I care for you. I’ll turn your dog loose, but I won’t be bringing him back. I know that dog can find his way.”

Annie Clyde tried to push up on her elbows and they gave out. “But where’s Gracie?”

“No,” Silver said. “I don’t know where Gracie’s at. You’re mixed up, Annie Clyde.” She was selfishly glad for the medicine muddling her niece’s head. She didn’t want to hear what the girl might say if she had her faculties. She captured Annie Clyde’s hand, the delicate fingers so much like her sister’s. So much like her own. Then she heard a creak and leapt up like she’d been caught stealing. She turned to see James Dodson leaning against the wall, the room filled with a reek of moonshine but not from the jar by the bed. His hair was mussed, his clothes disheveled.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Silver was startled by her own anger. “Your wife’s sick. How come you had to leave her?”

“I didn’t leave her,” James said. “I was in the barn.”

“Where’s your aunt and uncle?”

James squinted down at Annie Clyde. “I asked you what’s going on.”

“She’s got blood poisoning,” Silver snapped. “She stepped on a locust thorn. Her fever’s broke, but if it comes back don’t you wait until morning to get her to the doctor. That medicine is bitter, but make her drink some more if she wakes up hurting. And don’t let her get out of the bed, either.” When Silver stopped her mouth was dry, having talked more on this night than she had in a decade. A weariness came over her. She couldn’t tell it again, what she had told Annie Clyde. Not to this man who had sought to take what remained of her sister away from her again. They stood across from each other in the lamplight, James blinking at her with bloodshot eyes. Then she pushed past him, the whiskey fumes enough to sting her nose, and ran down the stairs.

She escaped out the wide-open door into the endless rain and went around the side of the house, splashing up darts of water. Thistles lashed her legs as she cut through the hayfield, as she tripped over what had blown down on her way to the foot of the mountain. Once again she followed the familiar ridges up to the still. She was shaking as she approached the shed and paused under its eave, burrs falling from the chinquapin onto the roof. She reached to touch the splintery boards, drew close to press her ear against the side of the building. After a second there came a whimpering. Then scratching where the warped boards met the packed dirt. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the rough wood. There was nothing left to do but let him go.