Long Man

AUGUST 2, 1936

By the first light of morning the rain had stopped. When the sun rose it twinkled on the surface of the water standing everywhere like thousands of eyes coming open. It was dawn of the third day, but Rusty had come down the mountain when it was still dark. For a long time he had been pent up, lying shivering on the packed earth. Nosing at blankets that still held the scent of other dogs, faint but present enough to vex him. He had been left a pone of burnt bread but he wouldn’t eat or drink. Whenever he heard movement he had barked to be let out. He had paced and scratched but nobody came. When the shed door opened at last he wasted no time. As lonely as he’d been he didn’t greet the one who turned him loose. He ran down the ridges on his way back home. But when he came to the woods behind the Walker farm he slowed down. He could tell Gracie had been there. So had others with blood like hers, left in flecks on the ferns and briars. He was sidetracked by the blackbirds that had reemerged after the storm to forage, rustling in multitudes as if the dark lake had already come to fill the woods. After he flushed them away he went on looking for Gracie with his nose to the ground. He missed her. She fed him biscuits and clover and sometimes sticks. She let him lick her eyes and mouth. She rolled with him on the ground. She tried to ride on his back. They knew each other’s smells and tastes and sounds.

In the night his keen ears had heard, apart from the rain, a distant crying. It might have been the gobble of wild turkeys or the chitter of weasels but it might have been otherwise. He went on through the pines with his broad head lowered, moving toward the source of the sound.

In a dream she heard Rusty whining and digging, crumbs of red clay sifting down on her eyes. She couldn’t open them anymore. There were pictures in her hurting head of the dog and the woman going into the pines where she couldn’t see them. She had waited near the apple tree, hanging back because she knew she shouldn’t follow. She thought the woman might scold her. But she wanted to see what they were doing in the woods. Spore caps of moss sprouted on rotten log backs with dotted tips like swarms of green gnats. Pokeberry shed its poisonous seeds like polished black beads. She looked up and tried to make out the high tops of the trees shifting in the wind, their slender trunks and leafy branches moving in a circular motion like dancing. They were too tall, swaying back and forth, creaking in a secretive way that almost scared her. They made her feel like she was up there clinging to their tips. One of the trees had fallen near the foot of the mountain. She had seen it with her mama. She wanted to climb on it like before but she couldn’t without help. She squatted and picked at the bark, skinned in places to reveal the lighter meat of the beech’s insides. Some of the tree’s limbs had broken in the fall, making splinters. There were crumbled chunks of shale and limestone washed white from the rain scattered all around. Gracie picked some up and dropped them in the pockets sewn onto her flour sack dress.

Then she wandered to the end of the trunk where the root ball arched above her head, thatched with sod ripped from the forest floor. It looked to her like an umbrella made of twisted roots. Some were braided pigtails and some coiled bedsprings, some claw fingers laced together. She squatted once again in the leaves plastering the ground and peered into the shadows between where the bowed roots parted. But she might never have crawled inside if not for a glimmer in the darkness. Just enough light penetrating the gloom under the umbrella to bounce off something shiny. Enough to make her curious. She found where the hanging roots were raised a little off the ground and got down on her belly. She reached for the shiny thing but her arm wasn’t that long. She gave up and tried wriggling underneath. Her dress rucked up as she slid on the orange mud into someplace her mama or daddy wouldn’t fit. Later they would search around the fallen beech, would even shine their lanterns on the tangled root ball, without ever knowing.

Gracie’s face brightened when saw what was glinting. It was the present the man gave her in the cornfield. She’d forgotten him and the toy both until that moment. Because she was three she didn’t wonder how or why the tin top had ended up under a tree. She couldn’t have known that her mama tossed it there a few hours ago. She scooted in farther, as she often burrowed into snowball bushes. She tried to get up on her knees but the arched roof of the root cavern was too low. She was reaching to pick up the toy when the mud began to shift beneath her weight.

Before she had time to fear a hole opened up. The ground collapsed and swallowed her. Either the fallen tree had created the hole or the weakened cave ceiling had caused the tree to fall. It didn’t matter. Gracie dropped four feet. It wasn’t too far. It was more how she landed, hitting her head and biting her tongue almost in two, mounds of clay piling on top of her. From below the hole was a source of pearly light that limned the moss dusting the limestone walls, narrow like a chimney stack. If Gracie had been able to move farther in, she would have found a blocked passage to another deeper and wider cave, one her daddy had used as a grave for his horse. On the first day and night Gracie didn’t wake at all. On the second day she cried and tried to call for her mama but her tongue was too big. Her head hurt too much. There was just enough space for her to lie in a knot with her knees drawn up to her chin. When rainwater ran down the narrow chimney stack of the mossy cave walls there was no room to get away. By the third morning she was lying in a puddle. She was cold and dreamed the stove had gone out. She was hungry and dreamed her mama was boiling oats. She wanted to go home and dreamed of the farm between the hills, cloud shadows passing over the fields. She dreamed of waving a stick with Rusty chasing her. She dreamed of other animals she had seen. Going across the road with her daddy where there was a ruddy calf in a pen with a leaky, pale pink nose. Going with her mama into the moldy shade of the springhouse and finding a mink curved around the butter crock. Stalking blackbirds that descended on the field like a funeral train. Running after them when they lifted off all together, the apples in her dress pockets bouncing against her knees.

More than anything she wanted her mama and daddy. It was them she dreamed of most. Riding on her daddy’s shoulders to church in her blue dress with tiny pink rosebuds. Him lifting her onto the wagon seat and showing her a garter snake he had found in the weeds. Walking out to the field with her mama to take him his dinner in a basket. Taking him water in hot weather, the cool smell of the earthen jug as she carried it across the baking furrows making her wish she was small enough to crawl inside. Lying in her crib pulled up close to her mama’s side of the bed, falling asleep with their hands clasped through the wooden slats. Getting an earache and nestling into the feather mattress between them, her mama pouring warm sweet oil into her ears. Sometimes she woke first and lay listening to them breathe. When it thundered she would seek out one of them to be rocked. When she got sick or stung, got a splinter or a tick, they held and kissed her. There had been no time before this when she cried and wasn’t comforted.

For two days Gracie had been by herself in the cave, buried under an avalanche of mud that dried to thick scales then cracked and fell off when she stirred. Her eyes were gummed shut by the matted blood from her scalp. When she finally struggled them open, she came out of a twilight state into a near darkness. Sometimes she turned her face to sip the water collecting in the craters of the cave floor, the same rain that filled the reservoir keeping her alive, but the effort hurt her bitten tongue. She had stopped crying for her mama, too, because her own voice ached her head. When light fell into the hole at dawn of that third day she rolled over in her sleep, trying to get warm. But she couldn’t wake up, even when Rusty barked. When he failed to force his shoulders through the roots he dug around the trunk, nosing deep enough to unearth some of the horse’s bones, already excavated and strewn about by other animals over the years. But as hard as Rusty tried he couldn’t get to Gracie. He scrambled among the roots and clods and rocks whimpering, too far from the house to be heard. By then it was Sunday and almost all of the searchers had gone home to church. Tomorrow they would go back to their jobs in factories and knitting mills, tobacco fields and logging camps. Yuneetah was empty again. Lying unfound, Gracie stopped moving. As the hours passed she opened her eyes less and less to look for her mama and daddy. She felt less and less like rolling over into the light filtering through the hole. She had lost the will to suck at the lukewarm water that came from the sky. She was too weak to cry anymore. Even one day was too long for a child to lie buried in the ground, given up for dead.

James Dodson opened his eyes at seven o’clock, having heard a sound in his sleep. His mouth was furred and foul-tasting. His hands were so swollen from the beating he’d given Amos that he could hardly open his fingers. His throbbing head was almost too weighted to lift. For an unclear moment after waking he thought he was taking a nap with his wife and child, like they did sometimes after Sunday dinner. It was good to sleep up there on summer afternoons, the bedroom shaded by the close trees. They could hear branches creaking if the window was open, a breeze puffing in the ruffled white curtains. When he blinked the blurriness from his eyes the first thing he saw was light reflected on the watermarked ceiling, low and slanted under the eave. Not as it looked grayed through storm clouds, but the golden yellow cast it had on fair mornings. Without the sound of rain, beating on the tin and ringing off the leaves, tapping his hat and his coat shoulders, James felt deaf. It took some amount of time for his eyes to readjust to the sun. He looked around the room at the wallpaper, faded green with paler roses. He looked at Gracie’s crib, whitewashed by Annie Clyde when she was still expecting, on the same day that she took a notion to paint all of the doors and windowsills and moldings in the house. He remembered her standing barefoot on sheets of newsprint, belly round beneath her apron. Seeing the crib brought the truth back. It was Sunday, but there had been no nap after church with his wife and child.

James remembered little of the night before. He’d insisted that Wallace and Verna go home and rest. Wallace had to get back to his congregation. He had a sermon to prepare. James meant to lie down and sleep with Annie Clyde. He had sworn to his aunt and uncle that he and Annie Clyde would be fine on their own until morning. But after they left James was overcome. He went out to the barn where he’d stashed a jar of Silver Ledford’s moonshine in the loft. Mary and Clyde Walker had been hard-shell Baptists who wouldn’t have a drop of liquor in their house. Out of respect to them Annie Clyde didn’t keep any herself, other than for medicine. James wasn’t much of a drinker, aside from taking a swig or two with Dale some evenings when their work was done. But last night he had drunk himself blind. James had a faint recollection of Annie Clyde’s aunt being here when he came back inside. The next thing he remembered was taking off his boots, unbuttoning his shirt and dropping it to the floor. Climbing into bed and curving himself around his wife, making a cocoon for her body. Now he lay with his arms around her waist, listening to the absence of drumming on the roof. “Annie Clyde,” he said into her hair, “it ain’t raining.” But she didn’t stir. He became aware of her heat under the cover, like an ember from the fireplace. It brought back what Silver had told him. That Annie Clyde had blood poisoning. James sat up with sudden alarm. He had slept with her, woke holding her, but someway he’d been too deep in his own misery to notice how bad off she was. James took his wife by the shoulder. “Annie Clyde,” he repeated over the thud of his heart. “Are you awake?”

“I think so,” she mumbled, without opening her eyes.

“Get up. It’s time to go to the doctor.”

She drew the sheet around her. “No. Somebody might come about Gracie.”

“Dammit, Annie Clyde,” James said.

“Why don’t you go get him? Bring him back here.”

“Sit up,” James ordered. “Take some of this medicine.”

“No,” she said again, sounding near tears. “It don’t help me.”

“You drink this and then we’re leaving.”

“Go on,” she said. “I just need to sleep.”

James thought then of his truck, still mired to the running boards. There was no way Annie Clyde could walk that far down the road. She was too ill even to be carried. He would have to push the truck out and go by himself. “At least let me change that dressing first,” he said.

He got out of bed and went to the washstand feeling warm himself, not with fever but with shame. After what happened in the courthouse he should have been more worried about Annie Clyde. Busting in wild-eyed with his rifle. James hadn’t even moved when they wrestled it away from her. Hadn’t flinched when she fired a shot into the wall, plaster showering down. He ripped another strip from the sheet for a clean bandage. He washed and wrapped his wife’s foot as well as he could. Then he knelt at her bedside. Her flushed face was turned aside, her hair dark against her neck. He might have thought her at peace if not for the line between her brows, if not for her thinness. She hadn’t been eating much, not just for the last two days but for the last two years. Each evening he watched her rake some of her supper onto Gracie’s plate. But as she lay there in the sunlight her beauty still moved him. He didn’t want to leave her. He wanted to put his aching head back down and sleep with her. He lifted her clammy hand and pressed it to his cheek. “Whatever you want when this is over, I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll live wherever you tell me.”

“I’m not going tomorrow, if they try to make us,” she murmured, drifting off deeper into sleep. “I can’t leave Gracie. If she’s alive or if she’s dead, I’m taking her with me.”

James smoothed her hair. “I’ll stand behind you this time,” he said, but she didn’t hear.

Buttoning his shirt on the way downstairs, his other bruised hand stiff on the banister, James felt like he was choking. He didn’t want to but he was already thinking of the people he’d have to tell that Gracie was gone for good. Dale Hankins. His sister across the mountain, the one he still pictured as a toddler chewing on a stalk of sugarcane. Her white-blond hair so much like the soft-blossomed tufts of cotton they plucked with sacks strapped to their small shoulders, the dried bristles at the ends of the plants making stinging cuts on their fingers. Dora was there the last time the river took somebody away from him. Dora stood with him at their mother’s bedside after she died giving birth to a stillborn baby, staring down at the mattress soaked with more blood than it seemed a woman’s body could hold. But this time James was alone. Disbelief washed over him, that any of this was happening. Last summer he and Annie Clyde were hoeing in the garden with Gracie at their feet, at dusk with the first stars out and a ghost of moon hovering. Their life on the farm had been for the most part happy. He could see that now. When it was all over. There was seldom more than a few cents in James’s pocket and their clothes were washed thin, but they hadn’t missed what they didn’t have. They’d always managed to keep Gracie’s belly full, even if it was with beans and pone bread instead of meat. When there were only vegetables from the garden, Annie Clyde fixed a meal of cabbage, peppers and tomatoes. They were poor but Gracie didn’t know it. Now she was lost and Annie Clyde was burning alive.

When he went outside the glare of the sun blinded him. The sky looked bluer, the corn down at the road greener than he remembered. He could hear running water but the spring was too far away, at the verge of the hollow. In the night the lake must have crossed the last hillock of the Hankins pasture, spilling off the edge of the bank into the roadside gully. Whether the road was washed out or not, he wouldn’t be going anywhere if he couldn’t find somebody to help him push his Model A out of the slough. He should have had it towed out with a tractor before the other men went home but he didn’t think of that. The truck was the last thing on his mind yesterday. He lowered himself to the top step to put on his muddy boots. Out of habit he had left them on the porch last night to keep from tracking dirt through the house. He was about to get up when he heard a thump from beneath him. He frowned and peered between the cracks in the steps. As he bent over, something dashed out from under the porch. He jumped up, catching himself on the railing. When he saw it, he didn’t understand at first. There was a red dog with a white patch on its chest standing in the yard where the snowball bushes drooped. Its tail wagged as it looked at James, waiting for him to move. When James came down the steps with leaden feet the dog ran to him, dancing a circle around his boots. James sank to his knees, thinking it couldn’t be Rusty. It must be some other coonhound that looked the same. But once James pinned the dog down and held it still, he felt like the wind had been knocked out of him again.

For too long James knelt in the grass unable to get up. Rusty went on lapping at his face, lunging and twisting in his arms, soiling his shirtfront. He fumbled his stiff fingers over Rusty’s coat, scabbed with burrs and beggar’s-lice, searching for clues to where the dog had been. He tried to shout for Annie Clyde but his voice was gone. He couldn’t think what it meant that Gracie’s dog was not dead, not drowned in the lake. He was about to take the dog around the house and call his wife’s name under the bedroom window when he spotted something stark against the grass. Something he realized Rusty must have dragged from under the porch and through the yard. It appeared to be a bone, but after all James had seen his eyes might be playing tricks. He crawled across the ground for a closer look, water seeping into his trouser knees. It was long and balled like a fist at one end. He had been right. It was a bone. But not a human one.

James picked the bone up in both hands to inspect it, hefty with thick orange mud caking its porous marrow. Then he dropped it as though it had seared his palms.

He got to his feet and ran in a lurch around the house toward the barn. Somewhere inside there was a mattock with a dull chopping blade and a split ash handle, so worn he wouldn’t have taken it to Detroit. Just like on the day that Gracie went missing, he paused and stood panting in the barn opening, the eave plinking above his head. His eyes skated over the near emptiness, knowing he had seen it but not sure where. The feed buckets still hung from the brassy wall planks, sun streaming between them. The rafters were still lined with swallow nests, abandoned and crumbling. He went into the first stall, heaving a dusty crate out of his path, the dog shying from the racket. The mattock was propped in the stall corner, the digging end of its head buried in chaff. He grabbed it by the handle, flashing back to yesterday when he’d chopped through the laurel with Ellard’s axe, the blisters bursting to raw flesh again. He tore out of the barn and into the field with Rusty loping in front of him. He could hear the dog’s barking and his own tortured breathing, his boots stomping up rainwater. But that was all far away. The hayfield seemed a mile long stretching out before him, the mountain swelling high and shady at the other end, the beaded weeds clashing as Rusty dove through them, his red tail waving over the purpled tips.

When James finally reached the woods it seemed the hour had changed from morning to gloaming. Bugs swarmed in shafts of golden light, mosquitoes hovered over marshes lying flat and still between the trunks. The peepers and cicadas had come back out, snake doctors buzzing in darts and swoops. James didn’t feel the gnats in his eye corners. He didn’t bother to blink them out, or slap at the sweat bees teasing his ears. Near certain that he was running toward his daughter’s death, for as long as she had been missing, he barreled forward anyway. By the time he heard freshets trickling down the mountain his breath was sobbing, his legs giving out. When he reached the place where his horse Ranger was buried he came to a halt, the mattock hanging at his side. He must have seen the beech across the grave, must have clambered over it as he looked for Gracie. But this whole time, from the second he held the horse bone in his palms, as he crashed through the thicket, he was picturing the cave as he and Dale had left it after they filled it in. A slick pit that Gracie could have slipped into and gotten stuck. Drowning not in the lake but in the wagonload of dirt he had dumped himself. James had been this way more than once with the other searchers, shouting Gracie’s name over the rain until they lost their voices, and never once considered the ground could have swallowed her up like it did Dale’s house.

Catching his breath with his hands on his knees, James noticed that Rusty had been digging around the beech trunk. Ferns were disturbed, white horse bones scattered. But the truth didn’t dawn on him until the dog raced to the end of the trunk and began to burrow again, spraying dirt with his hindquarters raised and his nose hidden under the scaly roots. James straightened and took off after Rusty to where the root ball bowed scraping the softened ground. Thinking his little girl’s name but too winded to call it, he dropped to his knees and shoved the dog aside. There was no way a grown man could shoulder through the tangle. Rusty had made progress, but the trough he’d dug wasn’t deep enough for James. His first instinct was to make a trench for himself using the shovel end of the mattock. He worked for what felt like too long before attempting to wriggle under the roots, his face printing the mud and his nostrils plugging with it. But James couldn’t force his way in. He backed out and groped for the mattock, raised it high and began to hack at the sod-thatched root ball. Chopping with the pick end, guttural breaths wrenching from his throat, pulp flying into his mouth, the cuts Amos’s teeth had made on his knuckles bleeding. He cleaved and severed until slivers were lying everywhere, the mangled roots flayed back. Then Rusty rushed into the cavern the roots had once made and stood in the rubble, barking so hard that foam flew from his jaws. With the morning sun penetrating the leaves overhead, James saw the same thing the dog did. There was an opening in the packed earth. Something like the groundhog holes he found along the fencerows bordering the farm. Too much like the last hole he had looked in. He dropped the mattock and stretched out flat once more, bars of light striping his filthy shirt. He slid forward until he was near enough to peer inside. But this time he didn’t see a child’s skull on the floor of a cave. He saw nothing, blinded by tears and sweat. When he rubbed his eyes he still couldn’t see. There wasn’t enough light.

Though he feared widening the hole with his hands might send more mud collapsing in, he had no choice but to furrow back the loamy earth with his fingers. He kept shoveling handfuls until there was enough room for him to lean inside, until there was enough light to make out a hump at the bottom of the burrow. It looked like a mound of clay. But as more sun filtered into the well of the cave, more of his child was revealed to him. Like the day she was born, pulling back the blanket to discover one part of her at a time so as not to make all of her cold. He rubbed his eyes to clear them again. Gracie was down there. Lying in a knot on her side. Knees drawn up and chin tucked. Under the mud he saw her dirty dress. Her dark curls. Her feet, small and creased. Not much bigger now than when he kissed them for the first time. But unlike that first time, her toes were blue instead of pink. A near-crippling dread came over James. He thrust his arm inside the cave to the shoulder, grasping with desperation. He could feel how chilly it was down there where his daughter had lain for two days and nights without him. She was too still. She should have been shivering. He couldn’t let her lie there any longer unmoving. If he could just snag the hem of her dress. If he could graze one curl of her hair. If he could touch her anywhere. He pushed in deeper, arm swiping, holding his breath until it burst out in frustration as his fingers skimmed nothing besides the dank air. But when he backed out of the hole some he found that his shoulders had forged its mouth wider, flooding the cave with more light.

Now James could see the side of Gracie’s face, blotched with dried red blooms. He could see the gash on her forehead clotting beneath the matted clumps of her hair. She looked like a doll carved from wax. Nothing like the child he last saw eating apple pie with her hands in the kitchen. Gracie wasn’t far below him. But he didn’t know if she was really there in the cave with him at all, or in some other place where he could never reach her. As lost to him as she had been when he opened his eyes this morning. James’s will failed him. The strength ran out of his arm. It dangled there useless. That’s when Annie Clyde’s words came back to him as though she spoke into his ear. No matter what, alive or dead, James had to give Gracie back to her mother. “Please Jesus,” he whispered, his tendons stretching taut. His whole self strained toward his child. He needed to widen the hole, to dig and shovel more with the mattock, but getting up would be too much like leaving her. He couldn’t let her out of his sight. Rusty barked and paced somewhere behind him, treading over and over his outstretched legs, his scrabbling boots. Dirt crumbs sifted and water trickled down the crags of the narrow cave walls. But to James everything had stopped. He was so close. When his fingertips made contact at last, just a brush against the sole of her foot, sparks rocketed up his arm. “Gracie,” he said, but she didn’t respond. “Gracie,” he crooned to her as he used to when she slept in her crib, when he tickled the bottoms of her feet to rouse her. “Gracie,” he pleaded, beginning to weep. “Wake up.” And down there in the pit, struggling against the blood that crusted it shut, his daughter’s eye fluttered open.

Annie Clyde Dodson had been asleep for what might have been minutes or days. By the light in the room she guessed it to be around nine but the clock she’d always kept near the bed was packed away in a crate. She had been dreaming that James was gone out to harvest the corn before the water took it. Standing in the box wagon holding the reins, opening the shucks with his peg, scooping corn into the crib with the neighbors that helped him each season. But then the dream of James merged into another one, of Rusty ranging the hills, poking his nose into burrows and dens to sniff the musk other animals had left behind, exploring thickets and caverns and shadowed breaches between plunging rock faces where his barking echoed off the cool walls. The sound had seemed to come from outside of Annie Clyde’s sleep. It seemed to have been the thing that woke her. She pushed herself up on her elbows and listened, then rested back on the pillows. She had vague memories of Silver sitting on the edge of the bed. Some of what her aunt said came back to her. But Annie Clyde couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t dreamed Silver and Rusty both. There was nobody in the room with her now. When she sat up the walls spun. She held her sweaty head until her dizziness passed. Then she lowered herself off the bed, crying out from the pain in her foot. She steeled herself before limping to the window to see the elm where the dog had been tethered. He still wasn’t there, but the barking had been so real.

Annie Clyde left the window and went out of the bedroom, descended the stairs with her head still swimming and her bad foot lifted, the sheeting bandage already stained through. On her way down, the shine through the crevices of the front door hurt her eyes. The rain was over. The lake would stop rising. She could find Gracie if the power company left her alone. All she needed was time. She stopped to breathe, leaning against the banister, before hobbling on to the kitchen. Crossing the linoleum was enough to sap what remained of Annie Clyde’s strength, but she was determined. She didn’t bother looking for her shoes. The damage was done. Her foot was too swollen. It throbbed with her pulse as she concentrated on moving forward. The closer she got to the door, the more convinced she became that the dog’s barking hadn’t been a dream. Finally she pushed the door open, shielding her eyes from the glaring sun, and hopped down the stoop.

If Annie Clyde had gone out the front door she would have seen paw prints around the porch steps. She would have discovered the horse bone where her husband dropped it. But in the side yard, where it seemed the barking came from, there was no evidence of Rusty. She turned her head toward the barn her father had repainted red not long before he died, now a dulled maroon, and took some uncertain steps out into the grass. She wanted to whistle but didn’t have the breath. The farm was silent besides the cicadas and bullfrogs, farther off the running water. Then she heard a bang from behind her. A car door slamming. She pivoted around, wincing at the pain shooting through her foot. The Dodge coupe she had come to recognize was parked at the end of the track. It must have been there all along. She waited as Washburn came through the sweet clover to reach her. From a distance he looked more composed than the last time she saw him, in a clean suit and tie with his dark blond hair combed neat again, a feather in the band of his fedora. When he got close she saw the cut under his chin. She remembered blood running down his neck into his collar. She felt none of her former anger, seeing the government man back again. She was almost too distracted to acknowledge him at all. “I thought nobody was home,” Washburn said. Then he paused to scrutinize her face. “You’re unwell, Mrs. Dodson.”

“My husband went after the doctor.”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“I heard barking out here.”

Washburn glanced around the yard, then over her head toward the hayfield. “I got ahold of a man in Clinchfield with bloodhounds. I wasn’t expecting him until this afternoon, though.”

“Shh,” she said. “Listen.”

“How long has your husband been gone?”

“Do you hear that? That’s Rusty’s bark.”

“I believe you need to sit down, Mrs. Dodson.”

“Silver told me last night. I thought I was dreaming.”

Washburn looked to the kitchen door and the cement steps Annie Clyde’s father had poured when she was a child, the neglected geraniums of her mother’s flower beds growing up against them. His arm came around her waist but she wouldn’t let him lead her to the stoop. She’d heard again what she had been listening for since she made it outside. It was the sound from her dream. A high yelping that echoed across the emptiness of Yuneetah. It was how Rusty sounded when he saw a snake or cornered a muskrat at the spring. When he found a drifter in the cornfield. The way he warned her that something was wrong. “I know you heard it that time,” she said to Washburn. He opened his mouth to answer but she raised a hand to hush him again. When another string of barks drifted across the field she grabbed his arm for leverage to turn around, both of them staring in that direction. Then Annie Clyde took off, bad foot forgotten.

As she dodged past the barn and thrashed into the hayfield, Washburn hurried to match her stride, his arm around her waist again. “Rusty!” She had made it as far as the apple tree when she saw the dog emerging from the pines. From fifty yards away Annie Clyde still recognized him. He rushed toward her through the long grasses, tongue flopping. If not for the press of Washburn’s fingers holding her up by the ribs she might have believed she was dreaming again.

Washburn’s voice broke her stupor, sharp as a slap. “Who is that?” he asked. She followed his eyes, staring across the weed tips. Her throat clenched shut, cutting off her breath.

Even as she watched him coming behind the dog, his auburn hair a blaze against the pines, she thought she might be seeing things. It was her husband. It was James. Then he was saying her name. “Annie Clyde!” His voice was as real as Rusty’s barking had been. He was carrying their daughter, bringing Gracie out of the woods. She lolled in his arms as he tried to run with her. Legs dangling like when he used to scoop her sleeping from a nest of hay at the end of a summer evening spent working in the barn. Annie Clyde was paralyzed at first. Washburn had to yank her forward, wading out to James and Gracie with her foot bandage unraveling.

When the four of them came together in the middle of the field Annie Clyde reached for her child. “Give her to me!” she demanded, but James kept on running like she wasn’t there.

“Where was she?” Washburn asked. “Is she breathing?”

“Why isn’t she moving?” Annie Clyde shouted. “James!”

“I ain’t got the truck,” James panted as they ran.

“We can take my car,” Washburn flung back over his shoulder, racing on ahead, trampling a path through the sedge. Annie Clyde stumbled, trying to keep up. She didn’t want to hinder them, but she didn’t know how she’d survive if they drove off without her.

She caught up as Washburn was opening a back door for James and Gracie. Washburn waited for her with his arm outstretched. She climbed in after James, bumping her head without feeling it. Washburn slammed the door behind her, catching her dress tail. She tore it loose and moved to take her child, cold and painted with orange mud. For the first time since Gracie was born, Annie Clyde didn’t want to look at her. The fear was too much. But she made herself study Gracie under the clay and blood as if it had been two years and not two days. She lifted her daughter, careful of her wounded head, and pressed an ear to her frail chest. She gathered up Gracie’s limp arms, buried her face in Gracie’s curls. Washburn swiveled to pass his suit coat across the seat, warm from his skin, and she used it to swaddle Gracie tight. She promised as Washburn reversed down the track to make Gracie an apple pie, to build her a rabbit hutch, to let her hold the baby chicks. Promising anything if she would only wake up. “Please, hurry,” Annie Clyde begged Washburn. She could feel Gracie’s spirit leaving her body faster than the car was moving.

Annie Clyde didn’t look back as Yuneetah receded. At the steep rising mountains or the ponded cow pastures or the river glinting between the shade trees. At Joe Dixon’s store or Hardin Bluff School or the tumbled-down foundation stones of the churches. The thought of this day had once broken her heart. Now the death of the town seemed like nothing compared to the waning life she held in her arms. Let the lake have it. She had all that counted. She closed her eyes and inhaled the farmland smell of Whitehall County blowing through the car, replacing the graveyard stench of dirt, limestone and moss. Buffeting her hair and flapping the sleeves of Washburn’s suit coat. She clutched the bundle of Gracie to her chest and pretended they were somewhere else to keep from losing her mind. They were riding to the market in the bed of Dale Hankins’s pickup. She was leaning against the cab holding Gracie between her knees, loose straw flying all around them. Or they were on a hayride tucked in a musky horse blanket, the wagon bumping down the road under the harvest moon, passing the frosted fields with James’s arms around her and Gracie both, the scent of autumn crisp and smoky on their skins. She remembered her husband then. She cracked her fevered lids to see him slumped beside her on the seat. His hair tousled, his shirt torn ragged. Mud and bark caking his fingernails. Soaked to the hip from the tall weeds he’d parted to bring Gracie home. “James,” Annie Clyde rasped, and his eyes rolled toward her. She was overcome with love for him, even in the midst of all this. The one who gave her daughter back to her. At last she understood what he’d meant when he said he had worshipped her from the moment he saw her standing on the riverbank. “She won’t wake up,” Annie Clyde whispered, shaking Gracie a little, tears leaking down her face. James forced himself to smile. For her sake, like so much of what he had done. “She will,” he said, and Annie Clyde tried to believe him.

Around noon Ellard Moody found himself alone with the Deering child’s bones. The remains from the cave in the clearing had been brought to the courtroom where the light would be best. Despite the power company’s deadline, there were still pews behind the railing. Flags still flanked the judge’s bench. Chairs remained on the witness stand and the raised jury platform as if there might be a trial tomorrow. Not that many trials had taken place in Yuneetah. There hadn’t been enough crime to warrant building a courthouse until 1830. Before then the sheriff made do with a stockade on the riverbank. Many times Ellard had stood at the back of this room with his hands clasped in front of him and his revolver on his hip as men were sentenced for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace. He had broken up only one fight in the courtroom himself, a scuffle between the owner of Gilley’s Hotel and a bachelor who owed him rent. Only once had there been a gunshot fired in the courthouse during his tenure, and that was yesterday afternoon. Ellard supposed there wasn’t much history worth preserving here, but he hoped before the water flooded in that somebody would take away the old furnishings and the old portraits of white-headed circuit court judges lining the walls. It could all be used elsewhere, in a church or in some other county’s court. If not, at least one of the lawyer’s tables was serving a final purpose. It had been cleared of the water pitcher and the stacks of law books to make room for the Deering boy’s skeleton, arranged now in the pattern of a child on its scarred walnut top.

Most of the morning Ellard had been there with a professor of anthropology from the college in Knoxville and a serious young man that appeared to be his student. For hours Ellard had looked over their shoulders at the broken skull and the brittle rib fragments, listening as they pieced together a story he could have told them. Judging by the pelvis, the professor said, this was a male. No more than five years old given the length of the femur. In his brief lifetime he had suffered from rickets. Then his head had been dashed on the rocks of the riverbed. For at least a decade after that his bones had lain in a shallow limestone cave being gnawed at by animals and eroded by weather. But the professor didn’t say what a shame it was that this child had suffered and died. That somebody had lost a son. Ellard wished they’d seen Wayne Deering slogging through the floodwaters with one boot on, out of his mind with grief. He hated to hear them talking about this child’s life and death in the same offhand way they’d remarked on the condition of the roads in from Knoxville, but he was unwilling to leave one of his own alone in the hands of these strangers. From the time the professor and his student had arrived in town this morning, Ellard had been out of temper. He couldn’t summon much friendliness toward them.

They had come as far as the courthouse then Ellard drove them down to the Hankins woods. He would have liked a preacher or at least an undertaker present to speak over the remains before they were disturbed but neither could be reached, so he had done the best he could by himself. He had stood at the foot of the bluff holding his hat in his hands, looking down at the leftover signs of a struggle. Furrows made in the spongy earth by feet digging and sliding as Ellard tried to grapple James off of Amos. Vines littered around the mouth of the cave. He had shut his eyes and bowed his head against the memory of the day before. Not just what had taken place between Amos and James Dodson, but the sight of the drifter sitting there unfazed beneath his shelter when Ellard and James found the camp, as if he was expecting them. It had taken all of Ellard’s willpower to match Amos’s maddening calm. Even when he was standing over the Deering child’s bones in the cave Ellard’s blood had begun to heat again, remembering the glint of mockery in Amos’s eye. After fumbling through the Lord’s Prayer he had turned his back and walked off.

While the college men huddled over the hole at the foot of the bluff with their sleeves rolled up, a tarp spread to receive the bones, Ellard went about his own business. In the cut-back laurel he found the axes, James’s thrown and his set aside forgotten. He had surveyed the drifter’s camp again, collapsing lumps of cook fire ash with his boot toe, crouching to examine the print of his own heel still marking the topsoil. He had knelt to retrieve the drifter’s belongings, untying the bindle and sorting through the chattel, finding nothing much besides pots and pans. A thick spool of rope. Matches kept dry in a corked glass bottle. A bolt cropper, surely used for thieving. A ball-peen hammer and some railroad spikes, Ellard supposed for building his shelters. His hat with the wilted brim and the buff-colored crown, the sweat-stained band. None of it told Ellard what Amos was doing in Yuneetah. Then Ellard had unfolded the drifter’s peacoat, smelling the road dust of his travels. Reaching into an inner pocket he had discovered a darned sock that looked like a fat snake, bulging with whatever was stuffed inside. Wary to put his hand in the sock Ellard had sat on the milk crate to upend and shake it out, a collection of objects dropping on the bedroll unfurled at his feet. A hair ribbon, tied into a bow. A Kewpie doll. A toy soldier. The items looked old and unlikely to belong to Gracie Dodson, as Amos appeared to have been carrying them for far longer than three days. Ellard had turned each seeming keepsake over in his hands, thinking dark thoughts, unable to fathom their meaning.

After taking Amos’s belongings out to the trunk of his car he went to the bluff and helped wrap the excavated bones in canvas. Back at the courthouse he watched as the professor and his student laid them out, determined to make sure they were handled with the proper respect. He had observed with his arms folded as they brushed away the dirt, as they measured and stood back to consider. After they’d finally packed up their tools they shook Ellard’s hand and went out. He supposed their business was done. They would go on back to Knoxville, write up their report about the Deering boy and think nothing more of him or Yuneetah. Now Ellard lingered in the courtroom standing over the lawyer’s table, trying to feel the right way after all his years of beating the bushes for the Deering child’s bones. It turned out that finding the boy changed little. Wayne Deering had still lost his son. Looking down at the bones Ellard wished for some memory of what they were like with skin on them. He had an image of a child with sandy hair and bowed legs running around his car when he went down to the hog farm, but that might have been any of the Deering brood. He remembered them swimming in the river that ran along the edge of the farm not realizing it could rise up and kill them as easily as it floated them on their backs in its shallows. Ellard hoped burying the child would bring some measure of comfort to his father. He didn’t know where the surviving Deerings had ended up, but Wayne would have to be notified.

Thinking of all that needed doing before the day was over Ellard passed out of the courtroom for the last time, casting one final look up at the balcony as though someone might be watching, heels scuffing the oak floor that had gone all these months unpolished. The one lawman around this morning besides Ellard was the Whitehall County constable, but he and Ellard went way back. They had always come to each other’s aid when and however they could. As Ellard went through the lobby on the way to his office he nodded to the constable sitting at the counter behind the box of the shortwave, twisting the knobs and producing static, the dials glowing amber. The constable yawned into his fist, rubbed the back of his neck where his dark hair was clipped close. Ellard thought about telling him to take a break, maybe even to go on home. Yesterday had aged both of them. He could see it in the bags under the constable’s eyes and could feel it in his own joints. But he needed what help he could get.

Other than the constable, only Sam Washburn had returned to the courthouse after the events of yesterday afternoon. Ellard had meant to see if Washburn needed medical attention once Amos was subdued and the Dodsons were led away, but the boy had disappeared. Then earlier he had been waiting on the bench in the vestibule when Ellard arrived back at the courthouse with the college men. As Washburn rose to greet Ellard they didn’t mention what had happened down in the basement, or the shallow cut under the boy’s chin, although Washburn’s presence spoke something of his grit. He told Ellard he had met with the director of the TVA first thing this morning. If Gracie was still missing tomorrow, a drawdown would be ordered. Ellard found this concession somewhat hard to believe after how their meeting with Harville had gone but he saw no reason to doubt Washburn’s word. He supposed the boy knew better than he did how to deal with his own kind. When Washburn told Ellard he was headed to the Walker farm, Ellard said he would drive out directly to see the Dodsons himself, but he knew they’d be in good hands until he got there. It was his way of thanking Washburn for coming back to Yuneetah when others hadn’t. Their eyes locked and Ellard thought they understood each other.

Now Ellard stepped into his office and closed the door behind him, shutting out the static from the radio. He considered all the hours he’d spent in this long room, drafty enough in the winter to wear a coat and hot enough in July to sweat through his shirt because of the tall window overlooking the square. He glanced at the portrait on the wall of his predecessor. Twenty years he’d spent here, and this was the end. He wondered if the man in the picture over the desk would have appreciated more the gravity of this moment. If he would have done better by the town in its last days. Right now Ellard felt as wrung out and empty as the street beyond the window. He had never been more ready to head back up the hollow to his childhood home.

Then out of the corner of his eye he saw Silver Ledford rushing up the sidewalk, looking like the lone survivor of some disaster. Ellard knew she wasn’t coming to see him. He would meet her at the door and send her away but for a few seconds he allowed himself to observe her. Before yesterday, he hadn’t seen much of her in the last three decades. He would nod if he met her coming out of the store or drove by as she traveled down the road dragging her cotton sack through the pricker bushes. When he was younger he thought about her for days after encountering her. He turned the memory of her over in his mind in the night. When people teased that his apartment was too big for one man or said he needed a wife to cook for him, he grinned and lowered his head. There had been other women. He just hadn’t met one since Silver that he wanted to marry. As he grew older he was able to forget about her for long stretches. He would think he was over her until he heard somebody snickering in Joe Dixon’s or at McCormick’s Cafe as he ate his dinner, the ones who bought whiskey off Silver saying they had seen Amos up on the mountain. After all this time, he couldn’t stand to think about her with anybody else. Even now it galled Ellard to know she was here for Amos and not for him.

He was about to move from the window when he saw that Silver wasn’t coming by herself. There was a redbone coonhound trailing behind her, its nose to the ground. Ellard frowned, squinting through the flawed glass panes, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It was the Dodsons’ dog, there was little question about it. As Silver left the pavement and started across the lawn it trotted through the grass at her heels. When she and the dog both disappeared from view of the window Ellard got moving. He was emerging from his office just as Silver was bursting into the vestibule, a shaft of sun falling in the door behind her. The dog halted at the threshold, stood on the top step looking in at the tile floor. Silver let the heavy door slam behind her and came farther inside, her feet leaving wet tracks. She tried to speak but didn’t seem to have enough wind. “What is it, Silver?” Ellard asked, his eyes searching her face.

“It’s Gracie,” she managed.

Ellard touched her shoulder. “Slow down and get your breath. Tell me from the start.”

“I was up on the ridge and heard the dog barking.”

“All right.”

“By the time I made it down the mountain Annie Clyde and James was getting in the car with some government man.” Silver took in a hitching breath. “They had Gracie with them.”

“You’re saying they found her?”

Silver nodded.

Ellard tried to organize his thoughts, his mind racing with questions. He didn’t know which to ask first. Finally he settled on the most important one. “Is she alive?”

“I think so. They was in a hurry.”

“Could you tell what kind of shape she was in?”

“She didn’t look well, from what I could make out.”

Ellard hesitated, searching Silver’s face again. “You don’t look too well either,” he said. “Come in here and have a seat.” She didn’t protest when he took her by the arm and led her through his office door to a chair in front of his desk, the same one James Dodson had been sitting in two days ago. She took several minutes to tell it all, in a fragmented way that Ellard, watching her lips so as not to miss a word, had trouble putting together. She’d been up on the ridge this morning when she heard the clamor. She tried to see off the ledge but couldn’t for the trees. The barking was coming from the woods and not the house. She thought the dog must be in a tangle with a coon or a skunk. She stayed where she was until she heard high voices mingled with the yelping. Then she made her way as fast as she could down the rocks, scrambling to reach the farm. But in the woods at the foot of the mountain where a beech tree was fallen she paused to absorb what she saw. The beech’s root ball was hacked to chunks, the mud around it ravaged. There was a hole in the ground underneath the tree, a narrow cave or burrow, but she hadn’t realized then that Gracie must have been inside it. When she ran out of the pines into the hayfield she found a path trampled through the weeds. She pursued James and Annie Clyde but was too late to catch them. Stopping at the side of the house with a stitch in her side, she saw James lowering himself with Gracie in his arms into the back of the government man’s car.

A hush fell over both of them. Ellard went on studying her for a while, the sun reflecting off the white plaster walls into his eyes. It took a minute for him to get it straight in his head, that Amos had never been involved. “What time did you see them?” Ellard asked at last.

“I don’t know. I went down the road after the car a piece. I tried to follow their tire tracks but I gave up. I’d say it took me about an hour to make it here walking. I couldn’t get a ride.”

“What direction was they headed?”

“South. Over into Whitehall County.”

“Taking her to the doctor. Sit tight and I’ll be back as soon as I know something.”

“Wait,” she said, before he could leave. “What about Amos?”

Ellard stopped. In the stillness he heard the constable’s voice, the crackle of static. “Let me ask you something, Silver. What put you in such a rush to get here? Was it Gracie or Amos?”

Silver looked away. Ellard had never wanted to slap a woman before but his hand itched now to meet with her cheek, to strike some color into it. He could even imagine how the print of his fingers would appear there as stripes. “I reckon I ought to let him go. Just take your word.”

“You think I’d lie to you about a thing like this?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you’d do for him,” Ellard said. But as quick as the old fire flamed up it died out of him. It was suddenly meaningless. It occurred to him that if he and Silver stayed here long enough the flood would wash them out, float them up like the curtain hems and the papers on his desk. In those few seconds he pictured how the shine of the window would look through murky water, lighting Silver’s waxen face riven with lines. A clutch of bubbles purling up from the slits of her nostrils like unstrung pearls. Both of them swimming in the coils of her black hair, in the rags of her calico dress. If they didn’t move they would both be buried underneath the lake. Whether they moved or not, they would both be forgotten with the rest of Yuneetah. Even Gracie. The dam would stand in memory, but not of their individual lives. Only of a moment in history. Ellard’s arm felt like lead as he reached for the doorknob. Then he dropped it when he heard the constable’s brisk footsteps approaching, resounding on the tile.

Ellard’s eyes remained on Silver as the constable knocked on the door and opened it without waiting to be invited into the office. “A call came in from my boys over at Whitehall County,” he said, all of his previous weariness gone. “Gracie Dodson has been found.”

“That’s what this woman is telling me,” Ellard said. “Who reported it to them?”

“I reckon it was Dr. Brock’s nurse.”

“What did they say about her condition?”

“They didn’t have a whole lot of information. Her mama and daddy brung her in. I reckon the doctor has done took them on to the hospital in Clinchfield.”

“I better head out there,” Ellard said.

“What about your prisoner?” the constable asked.

Silver raised her face to Ellard. A greenfly had entered with her and it buzzed between them. Ellard spoke more to Silver than to the constable. “I don’t reckon we can hold him.”

“You want me to turn him loose?” the constable asked.

“Naw,” Ellard said. “If you will, get on the radio and see what else you can find out.”

When the constable left the room Ellard went to his desk, strewn with paperwork from the power company. He opened the right-hand drawer with a key on an iron ring inside, took the key out and placed it on the desktop before Silver. As she stared down at the key he got up and went to the wall behind the door where Amos’s peacoat hung from a hook beside his own rain slicker, as though Amos was a guest and not a prisoner. On the floor beside Ellard’s rubber boots was the drifter’s bedroll. He hefted it under his arm, then took the coat from the hook. He carried them both to Silver, shoving the drifter’s things into her lap. “Here. You let him go. I can’t hold him, but I can’t be the one that turns him loose. I’ll let it be on your hands, since you think so well of him.” When Silver said nothing Ellard gritted his teeth. “There ain’t no telling what he’s done before and what he’ll do after this. You know that, don’t you? You know it and you don’t care.”

Silver blinked at the key on the desk, then up at Ellard. “Don’t be like this,” she said.

“I don’t know how to be any other way.”

“I don’t either. That’s been our problem, ain’t it?”

Ellard glanced out the window and saw the hound sniffing at the tires of his car. Amos was still down there in the bowels of the building. Ellard considered going downstairs to question him further but in the end he had nothing more to say to Amos. As there was nothing more to say to Silver Ledford now. “Should I wait on you in the car?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, looking so ill that he thought she might need a doctor herself. “I’ve got to watch after Gracie’s dog. But you come up and tell me how she is as soon as you get back.”

“You can stay here and wait for me,” Ellard said. “Unless you’re going off with him.”

“I’ll be around, Ellard,” Silver said. “Like I always have been.” Then she took the key and Amos’s possessions to the door, so tall her head nearly touched the frame. Ellard sat on the edge of his desk and looked across at her with the grayed roll of the bindle in her arms, past her shoulder the notice board tacked with papers as flimsy as their lives still seemed to him. He took in her paleness, the dark hair that spilled down her back almost to her waist. He didn’t try to close the distance between them as he once did on the riverbank. He had Silver for a summer when he was seventeen and he guessed that would have to do him. But he would think later that letting her go didn’t mean she never belonged to him. Nothing could change what was already done. The past at least was permanent. Whatever there was to come for himself and the neighbors he’d served and protected for twenty years, whatever lives and places they moved on to, he had known them in this one. As he’d known Silver Ledford in a way that nobody else ever could. The thought would comfort Ellard some when he’d remember how she turned her back on him with the bindle in her arms. How she left him there as she had done before and went to Amos.

At one o’clock Beulah Kesterson sat in the slat chair she kept beside the front door with her shoes off to let her blisters dry in the sun. Her legs and feet still ached from walking to town and back yesterday. It was hard to figure how she had traveled ten miles a day with her mother when they were peddling. She lifted her face to the breeze. As high over the valley as she lived, she could smell the river. It made her think about musseling. When her mother was alive they called it toe digging, pulling the shells from the riverbed silt to collect in their pans, taking turns with the good shucking knife. Sometimes they would boil the mussels in a smoke-blacked pot on the shore when they stopped to rest beside the river on their peddling rounds. The best mussel bed they’d found was now on the other side of the dam. It was past dinnertime and Beulah’s stomach was empty. She hoped Amos wasn’t hungry down at the jail. They had gone musseling together often when he was a child. The lassitude of the work had suited his patient nature. She had a notion to take him a pan of mussels right now, worn out as she felt. Even without her fortune-telling bones, she still had her intuition. She hadn’t escaped her inheritance. She supposed the discernment was like her blood, unseen but there inside her, a thing that could die only when she did. If she went to the courthouse Ellard Moody would let her in. She was the one who birthed him. He owed her some respect. She looked down at the bunions on her feet, the weeping blisters, and knew that she had to go in spite of them. She heaved herself from her chair, put on her shoes then went inside to find her musseling pan and her shucking knife.

Leaving the cabin again with an apron tied around her waist she made her careful way down the steps, taking them one at a time, then ambled across the yard in her mannish brogans and set off down the hollow. On the footpath she flushed a baby rabbit out of the briars. It went skittering off into the graveyard, its cottontail flashing between the pickets and disappearing into the grass behind them. Beulah half expected when she turned her head that way to see Clyde and Mary Walker standing at the fence. Beckoning her over to whisper into her ear what had become of the grandchild they would never hold. She could almost make them out, Mary still slim with the black curls she had kept until the end. Clyde tall and sunburnt. Beulah would have welcomed such a visitation. But there were only sugar maple trees standing against the fence, shedding the last raindrops. Once the graveyard was underwater Beulah wouldn’t even be able to see the headstones of her old friends.

As she picked her way down the slope she consoled herself with the thought that after this she wouldn’t leave her cabin again for a long time. The blisters on her heels had reopened and her breathing pained her chest. The musseling pan tapped against her aching leg as she limped through the springing grasshoppers down to the track dividing the hollow from the Walker farm. On the way to the road she took care not to twist her ankle, avoiding clods of tire-churned earth and the divots they left, filled with rain. When she glanced at the house and the land it looked vacant. A hawk was circling over the cornfield. A sumac vine with reddening leaves was winding up the fieldstone chimney. The townspeople had given up searching for Gracie Dodson. As the end of this hard decade approached she guessed they dared not hope a little girl declared dead in their minds would be found alive. Beulah couldn’t judge her neighbors. These days she knew too well how a person’s belief could waver. She looked over her shoulder. There wasn’t much of a breeze but she heard a sound carrying across the hayfield, a lonesome creaking. The ropes of Gracie’s swing in the apple tree. Annie Clyde and James were gone as sure as the child was, and the dog that used to come out from under the porch wagging his tail to greet Beulah when she went picking strawberries in the field. She had another intuition, more like sadness than a premonition, that none of them would come back to this place. The last holdout had given in. The last farm was abandoned. There was no turning back from the course Yuneetah had been set on. Standing there on Annie Clyde’s land Beulah could almost feel the forward motion. She had seen and lived through so much but eighty-five years still seemed short to her. It seemed like just the other day she was out in that smokehouse with Mary, packing pork shoulders in salt. Time was unmerciful. She’d always known it, but today the vacant Walker homestead was her proof.

Beulah went out past the cornfield then paused in the middle of the road with a hand on her hip. The Whitehall County line and the mussel bed past the dam were off to the right but she turned for a moment in the opposite direction, where she could see lake water running off the steps of the bank into the gully. Farther down she could see more water through the scratched lenses of her glasses, part of the roadway washed out. Even farther on than that, beyond the sparkling slough, she believed she saw movement. There was a bobbing head coming around the bend. Her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, but she thought it was a man. Tall and reed thin, black-haired with a bindle on his shoulder. The late summer trees gathered behind him, crowded up against the ditch as if to watch him come. As if to see what Beulah’s face would do when she recognized him. Her heart lifted, not only to realize that Ellard had turned her son loose. In that instant it came to her what Amos’s appearance must mean. Gracie Dodson had surely been found alive. If she had been drowned, if her bones were broken, Amos would have been blamed. Beulah hadn’t wanted to agree with Silver Ledford last night but she knew that it was true.

Amos took his time meeting Beulah and she savored every moment until he reached her. For as long as her son remained obscured behind the afternoon heat rising up from the road and the glare of the sun on her glasses, she could feel relieved. It was only when he closed the distance in front of the Dodsons’ cornfield that she was saddened again by his battered face. It looked worse than yesterday. The split cheekbone, the bloody lips. But underneath the bruises he was much like the boy she had found in the woods, even with a missing eye and whiskers. She reached for his coat sleeve, needing to touch him. “They found her,” he said.

“I figured as much.”

“Your bones told you?”

“No, you told me. If she wasn’t found, you wouldn’t be standing here. Was she—”

“Alive.”

“Praise Jesus,” Beulah said. “Is she going to be all right?”

“I thought you’d be able to tell me that.” His eye settled on her bare neck where the frayed pouch used to hang. She couldn’t put anything past him. “Where are they anyway?”

“I got no more use for them,” she said.

“I guess you’ve renounced the old ways. Like the rest of the town.”

She waved her hand. “I ain’t renounced nothing. I reckon a body can have it both ways.”

Amos looked toward the mountain where her cabin was nestled. “How long until they string their power lines up the hollow? Did you divine that before you gave up your bones?”

Beulah looked with him. “I don’t know. Might be nice to have me a washing machine. One of them electric stoves.” She shook his sleeve, changing the subject. “Did you eat yet?”

Amos glanced at the musseling pan. “You must know the answer to that at least.”

“Let’s see if we can dig us up some dinner then,” she said.

Without another word they turned toward Whitehall County. Walking beside Amos as if nothing had happened was bittersweet. It occurred to Beulah that love was so often a burden. She knew it was the last time she would ever be with her son, whichever one of them departed first. She tried to push off the weight of her sadness and appreciate his silent companionship. If she didn’t look at him she could pretend his shoulder was level with hers as they went along, like back in the days when they’d lived together, before he stood two heads taller than her. She could pretend the sound of trickling water was Long Man from some time before and not the power company’s lake running off the banks. When a blackbird burst out of the pines and flew off ahead of them toward the dam she tried not to see it as a portent. She tried not to remember droplets seeping up through her tablecloth, flowers magnified in a circle of bones. She thought how confounding it was that this dark man beside her had been the light of her life. She thought how the Lord’s ways were mysterious and there was no use in questioning them. She’d learned to accept His unfathomable nature, the same way she had quit trying to understand Amos. But she couldn’t quit trying to protect him. She couldn’t ever quit praying that her son would outlive her.

They went past where the dam brooded in the woods without looking that way or mentioning its presence, but Beulah was glad when it was behind them. They kept on until they could see the river between the trunks then took the road a piece more before heading down to the water. She carried her pan to the river’s edge, searching for the mussel bed she had found with her mother back when she was young. Amos went ahead of her with his hat off to fill like a bowl. When he bent over stiffly Beulah could see his soreness, but he didn’t let on. They dug side by side, cold water swirling into Beulah’s shoes. Though they had come almost a mile from the dam its flagged tower rose above the distant sycamore and bluff oak trees. When Amos found a large shell with an iridescent blue sheen he dropped it into her pan, still prone to unexpected acts of kindness. After a while, he took out a pocketknife to hunt for pearls. “Mammy said people used to come in droves to go pearling,” Beulah told him, taking her own shucking knife from her apron. “These days you can’t hardly find any, but back then some man collected two hundred dollars’ worth in a week’s time. Bought hisself a farm.” Amos seemed to listen as she prattled on, talking to hide her mounting unease. She had the same feeling here with him that the vacant Walker house gave her. As relieved as she was in that first moment to see him released from jail, she had to remember the reason she’d turned him in. She knew his mind was moving beneath his stillness. After working a minute longer she looked into his hat. “I believe you got them all.”

He smiled. “There’s at least two or three left.”

“Well,” she said. “Let’s cook some of these up. Then you better get on down the road.”

She thought at first that he was going to ignore her. But finally he responded without looking up from the mussels. “I told you. I’ll head out after I’ve finished my business.”

Beulah shifted in the boats of her shoes, reached out of habit for her discarded pouch. “I need you to listen to what I’m telling you for once,” she said. “You can’t go on doing wrong, Amos. One of these days you’ll answer for it.”

He pried open a mussel with his knife, plucked out a grain of pearl and slipped it into his pocket. “I have no problem with that,” he said. “As long as the same rule applies to everybody.”

“This river will always be here. It’ll keep on running, no matter how they dam it up.”

“I’ve been all over the country. I’ve seen how it is. Once the electric power and the factories come around, nobody in this valley will remember what the river gave them.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “This river’s underneath their skin. They won’t forget.”

“They think they’re saved,” he said. “But a hundred dams wouldn’t fix this mess.”

“Well. I’ve lived a lot longer than you, Amos. Good times always come around again.” Beulah paused, standing on the shoals where they had dug when he was a boy without the dam watching them through the trees. “Promise me, son,” she said, looking downstream and then into his eye, its white turned crimson. “Promise you won’t do nothing else to get yourself hurt.”

Amos regarded Beulah, studied her face. His own face was no longer blank. Everything he had seen and done seemed written there. She guessed she had never been certain before then if he loved her back. “I promise,” he said. Beulah’s breath came ragged but she willed away her tears. They went back to the mussels, working on for a spell in silence besides the running river. Finally she noticed that Amos had cracked open a dripping shell. He stood gazing down into it.

“What is it?” she asked. “Did you cut yourself?” He tipped the big shell to one side, until something that Beulah couldn’t see rolled into his palm. She put down her musseling pan and went to him. He held out his hand. There was a good-sized pearl in it, misshapen and gritty. “They laws,” she said, as he held it aloft in the sun. Then he turned and offered it to her.

“Here,” he said.

Beulah stepped back. “What?”

“Take it.”

“Lord, Amos. Have you lost your mind?”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“There ain’t no telling how much that’s worth. You take it to a druggist somewhere and he’ll send it off to New York for you. Why, you could live off of that for a long time.”

Amos shook his head. “It’s for you.”

“I don’t need it. You’re the one without a home.”

He stepped closer. “I want you to have it.”

“What for, Amos?”

“Please. Take it.”

It occurred to her that since she’d found Amos he had never asked her to do anything. She held out her hand and accepted the pearl. She lifted it to her nose to smell the river that formed it. “See,” Beulah said. “I told you things’ll get better. I don’t need bones to show me that.”

It was almost sunset when Amos made his way back downstream to the dam. After Beulah left him at the riverside he lingered over the remains of their cook fire, smoke still rolling from the sodden kindling they’d used. He slouched over the guttering flames prodding with a stick at the charred mussel shells in a ring of stones until the shadows of the hemlocks behind him stretched out long on the rocky shore. Then he put on his hat, hoisted up his bindle and faded into the trees. He walked through the shade a mile or so until he came out again on the hillside where only yesterday at dawn he had scouted the dam and its buildings from the east. He knew he’d be exposed in the open for several minutes as he emerged from the hardwoods at the top of the slope and went across the closed highway’s pavement, then skidded down an embankment on the lake side of the dam and followed the sand a ways before receding again into a peninsula of evergreens. It took him some time but not much to find the ancient spruce he was looking for, its roots twisting up from a pile of needles. There was a hollow near its base and he got on his knees to reach into the knotty depths. Yesterday morning, after leaving Beulah’s shed with her bolt cropper and a burlap sack, he’d made a stop on the way to his camp in the clearing.

If the cinder-block hut in the woods along the stone wall marking the boundaries of the watershed had been empty when Amos broke the padlock he might have left Yuneetah already. But the hut wasn’t empty. There had been enough light when he pushed in the door. He had stood in the opening with the rain pouring off the corrugated eave above him, running downhill and away from the hut, built off the ground to keep its contents dry. Against the block walls he’d found sacks of cement, digging implements, and stacks upon stacks of rectangular wooden boxes with a maker’s label stamped on their sides. From the cobwebs he deduced that the building hadn’t been entered in weeks, perhaps a month. Amos had stepped inside the stale shadows and opened the hinged lid of a box on top. Yellow sticks, cylinders lying end to end. He recognized this brand of plastic explosive from his time blasting tunnels through mountains. The TVA had set off these charges to loosen tons of rock from the riverbed. They drilled holes, a hundred or more, then blew them clean with compressed air. They rammed a stick into each hole, pouring sand in and tamping it down. Then they wired the fuses into a central switch. He inspected the sticks to make sure they weren’t sweating. Unless dynamite was frozen then thawed or stored in the heat, it wasn’t all that unstable. It required a detonator to go off, unlike in the old days when pure nitroglycerin was used for blasting. Amos had carried dynamite by hand many times, working in coal mines and on road crews. But as he filled Beulah’s burlap sack with explosives, he transferred them with the same care he’d first learned to take as a powder monkey at a quarry.

Yesterday morning he had made two trips from the cinder-block hut to this hollow spruce he’d discovered along the lakeshore. Then he’d covered his footprints, rearranged the boxes and slung the broken padlock far out across the reservoir where it sank without making much of a splash. Amos assumed the watchman didn’t come up the trail along the watershed often. He had found no tracks but his own. Now he hoped the power company hadn’t discovered thirty sticks of their dynamite missing, as he eased out what was stashed in the spruce. The burlap sack was damp but the explosives inside were waterproof. Besides the sack, there were two more bundles of dynamite knotted along a length of the detonating cord he’d brought out of Nebraska. He had made a second bundle from his undershirt and a third from a mildewed blanket. He had tied one end of the detonating cord to the head of a railroad spike found lying corroded with rust along the tracks, leaving some of the cord trailing as a fuse. He would drive the spike into the concrete of the dam with a ball-peen hammer he’d stolen from a blacksmith shed. The hammering might draw attention, but by then it would be nearly over. The chain of charges would explode almost in unison after he lit the fuse. In his trouser pocket he kept a small corked glass bottle of wooden matches. He had dipped the match heads in turpentine, which would keep them water resistant for months. But he’d sealed them in the bottle to be certain. The fuse was reinforced as well, coated in olive drab plastic. Even soaked it would detonate, as long as there was a dry end to ignite. Even underwater the wick would burn. Soon after sundown Amos could place the three bundles in one of the two rowboats tied to the dock near the dam if he chose. Though he’d made preparations he hadn’t decided to carry out his plan. There was light left in the sky. He would know in the haziness before nightfall, after bats had begun to dive around the dam’s tower.

For now, he leaned back against the spruce with the bundles gathered into his lap. His coat scratched and caught on the rough bark as he tried to get comfortable. He was tired after having spent the night before tossing in pain on the jail cell bunk, but he kept alert. He listened for the watchman, thinking because it was Sunday and because of the excitement with the child the dam workers might not appear. But before half an hour had elapsed Amos heard echoing voices and carefully replaced the dynamite bundles in the spruce hollow. Then he padded through the coppery needles to the edge of the evergreens and stood there without breaking cover, observing the watchman’s shadow on the sand, the silhouette of his hatted head moving up on the dam’s pedestrian sidewalk. When Amos heard calling voices again from somewhere distant he knew there was more than one worker patrolling the site. But as the dark deepened the voices subsided and Amos’s mind quieted with them. He went back through the woods underneath the low boughs to the spruce and settled once again to rest against its scratchy bark. He wasn’t worried about the watchman. He wasn’t worried about the sheriff of Yuneetah finding him again either.

Ellard Moody had been afraid of Amos since they were boys. His face was sheepish even as a child, his timid eyes downcast, always tagging after the Ledford sisters. Amos used to lure Silver Ledford away from Ellard just to watch the other boy’s ears turning red. But as often as Amos goaded Ellard into anger, he had never once struck back. Ellard would stand aside and let Amos steal his marbles away from him, his slingshots and nickels, without putting up much of a fight. Now Ellard had given Yuneetah up to the TVA out of the same weakness. Amos had watched unsurprised as his boyhood neighbor grew into the kind of man who took what the government gave him. The kind who licked boots and did as he was told. When Ellard pointed his revolver in the courthouse basement yesterday Amos had seen over the barrel of the gun the knowledge in the sheriff’s eyes. Ellard knew he was a failure. Amos could do more for Yuneetah in the next few minutes than Ellard had in twenty years as sheriff. He had traveled this whole country unseen, but that was by choice. He could make thousands look at him if he wanted.

This afternoon Ellard couldn’t face Amos long enough to even turn him loose. He’d sent Silver Ledford to do his bidding. She said nothing as she rattled the key in the lock but Amos knew what it meant that she was there. She swung the door open wide and came inside where it was dim although the sun was shining on the rest of Yuneetah. She placed his bindle at his feet and examined his face, made speechless by the state he was in. Amos had no urge to touch Silver as he’d done in the past. But hers was the only companionship he missed sometimes on the road. When he saw lava rocks in New Mexico unlike anything they had found in the caves of Yuneetah. When he saw redwood trees too tall for either of them to have climbed. Silver had aged but he always remembered her as an almost feral child standing at the edge of Beulah’s yard staring at him with open curiosity. He remembered her swimming in the river with minnows flashing, caught in the snare of her hair. He remembered her exploring the abandoned iron mine with him, climbing up the buried grooves of a track to what was once the superintendent’s house, the windows broken and the front door gone. Together they had crawled underneath the clustered blooms of an overgrown lilac bush planted at the porch corner, and Silver had asked Amos if they could stay there forever. Hiding out from the ones in town below who considered them nothing.

Silver had been wilder as a girl, before her sister Mary ran off and left her alone. Amos supposed some of what had drawn him to Gracie Dodson that morning in the cornfield was her resemblance to his only friend. The child looked like Mary except through the eyes. There he had seen the curiosity she inherited from her great-aunt Silver. He had seen the Cherokee in her, as he did in her mother. They were remnants, shadows, of those who first lived on this river and gave it a name. Gracie Dodson, one last child occupying the land that was taken from them all, standing in the corn with a drop or two of Indian blood coursing through the threads of her veins. About to be purged by the same government, unaware in her innocence that her birthright was being stolen. Amos usually took something to remember the children he met in his travels but he’d felt compelled to give Gracie Dodson something instead. Now he saw looking through the branches at the lake spreading closer by the hour to the loam she had claimed with the print of her toes that a toy wasn’t enough. If the child had been found drowned or not at all Amos might have reached another conclusion. But it came to him now that the act he was about to commit would join them. She wouldn’t be told her own story without hearing Amos’s. If he taught her something of defiance maybe she wouldn’t change. He knew the risk he was taking. As he knew that he couldn’t stop the dam builders. They had plans to inundate hundreds of thousands of valley acres. His act was no more than an obstacle to their end result, but he wasn’t meant to grow old anyway. If he died blowing up one of their dams, they’d have to admit he had once been alive.

It had become impossible to shift to a more comfortable position against the tree for the ache in his ribs so Amos roused himself. He looked up at the emerging moon, thinking there was enough light to see by and enough dark to hide him. With caution he retrieved the bundles and carried them wrapped in detonating cord back to the edge of the evergreen woods. He waited there for a while longer listening to the reservoir lapping at the sand, until there was no other movement or sound in all of Yuneetah it seemed. When he finally headed on to the shore his boots gritted in a way that reminded him of snow and the winters he’d spent here. His fingers frozen around the axe handle as he chopped Beulah’s wood, his face baking in the heat as they roasted chestnuts so that it felt about to crack open. The same way it felt now for a different reason, his bruised bones chafing at his knuckle-split skin. He cradled the bundles in his arms like a newborn as he went, pulling his hat brim down to hide the glint of his eye just in case, although it was filled with blood. His peacoat over his dingy shirt, his trousers and boots so grimy they had ceased to be any color, he moved like smoke toward the dock near the dam.

Amos would have to launch out here in the open and row all the way across to the seam where the concrete met the bluff since there was no shore on the opposite side of the lake, nothing where the poplars and cottonwoods ended but cairns of rubble. He knelt on the dock, so recently built it smelled of raw lumber, glancing up at the dam to be sure the highway was still deserted. He placed the bundles in the well between the rowboat seats, checking to see that the oars were in the oarlocks. That the handle of the ball-peen hammer was tucked in one of his deep coat pockets, though he could feel its ten-pound weight. He lowered himself into the bow of the boat and cut it loose from the tie-off pin with his hunting knife, then eased into the water and rowed out in the shadow of the dam. He drew as close to the concrete wall as he could get, its face on the lake side striated with lines where the reservoir had risen and receded in the rain. The dip of Amos’s oars was nearly silent as he went along the stretch of the spillway, closing in on the west abutment wall. When he reached the other end he would lower the explosive charges knotted along their tether into the reservoir where he thought the rock seam was faultiest, maneuvering the rowboat so that the bundles came to rest at intervals along the sloping wall. Then he would hammer in the railroad spike to anchor the explosives where he wanted them. After the fuse was lit he’d row as fast and far as he could, gaining as much distance as possible from the blast. He hoped for enough time to scramble up the bluff and watch as the underwater explosion separated the lake bottom from the dam’s foundation, the water retreating then rushing back toward the fractured seam, a torrent of silt and river roaring unleashed through the chasm.

Amos had rowed the boat out to the middle of the spillway, the bluff drawing closer with each stroke, when he heard the sound of movement somewhere behind him. His ears had grown attuned long ago to approaching footsteps, however distant. When he looked over his shoulder he saw the watchman standing on the dock, a tall figure in a hard hat and coveralls. Then the voice that had once come from up on the highway echoed out across the water, shattering the silent calm. “Halt where you are!” From forty yards away Amos couldn’t make out the features of the watchman’s face but he could see in the last indigo evening light the rifle the man was pointing. Perhaps the power company had discovered their dynamite missing after all. Perhaps they had been watching and waiting for Amos. In one swift motion he switched from the bow to the stern of the boat and began rowing backward toward the west abutment wall, still keeping as close to the dam’s spillway as he could manage, counting on the watchman not being skilled enough to shoot a moving target. “You better do what I told you, buddy!” the man shouted after him.

“You don’t want to pull that trigger,” Amos shouted back. “I’ve got a boatload of dynamite here.” But before the words were out of his mouth he heard the whine of a bullet passing close to his ear, ricocheting off the water between his boat and the dam. He saw another worker running down the grass embankment along the east abutment wall to join the first man on the dock. Amos realized that he wouldn’t make it to where the vulnerable seam met the bluff. Halfway there would have to be close enough. He was reaching into his trouser pocket for the corked glass bottle of matches when he heard another report. The next second he felt something like a great fist striking the left side of his body, fire ripping through his upper arm. The bottle flew from his hand as he fell backward. His head knocked against the boat and he caught a glimpse of the dam’s tower, its flags hanging two hundred feet above him. He took a stunned instant to collect his wits before scrabbling to his knees, the rowboat wobbling as he dragged up his struck arm. He looked ahead across the water and saw the two men on the dock, blurred through his tearing eye. His sleeve was soaked with blood but he felt no pain. Only dizziness.

The men would be rowing out in the other boat. He would have to think, as hard as it was to concentrate. He reached down between the seats of his own boat where the bundles of dynamite still rested, darker than the light wood of the bottom. As he fumbled them up by the detonating cord another bullet struck him in the chest on the right, near his shoulder. This time he flailed over the stern and splashed into the lake. His eye bulged in the swirling murk, his lungs already grasping to fill. He could see the bottom of the boat growing smaller as his coat, weighted with the ball-peen hammer, sank him fast. Beside the boat’s shadow on the surface of the lake, Amos noticed his hat bobbing. He had gotten years of use from the hat. He was seldom without it. Somehow the sight of it drifting away told him that he was dying. He had to use whatever time there was left to finish what he’d started. It took an almost inhuman act of will to wrestle out of his coat while sinking underwater. When he was finally shed of its weight he battled upward, swimming one-armed. He broke the surface with a gasp and hauled himself up by the side of the boat, nearly capsizing it, coughing bitter water. He couldn’t feel the wounds spurting warm blood inside his shirt. Balancing on the boat’s edge, too weak to hoist himself over inside, he reached down into the shallow well and managed with his arms to gather the three tethered bundles of dynamite from between the seats up under his chin. With his left hand he groped around the bottom until he located the bottle he’d dropped when the first bullet struck him. He ground his teeth as he pried at the cork then shook out a turpentine-treated matchstick. When he swiped the match against a patch of fairly dry-looking wood on the bow-side seat he had a moment of certainty that it wouldn’t flare alight. But with the other boat nearing, rocking the bloody waters with its oars, the match head burst into dancing flame.

As the second rowboat drew within yards of where Amos’s own still floated near the middle of the spillway with him clinging to its side, he touched the match to the long fuse trailing from the head of the railroad spike. He held the flame against the detonating cord with the strength draining out of him, sensing the watchman taking aim again.

When the blue flame began to travel down the wick Amos sucked in a breath that he would never exhale. He slipped back into the lake cradling the bundles of dynamite as the watchman’s bullet splintered the boat side not an inch above his skull. He had lost the hammer with his coat. He couldn’t attach the charges to the dam with the railroad spike. He’d have to sink them with his body, as close to its foundation as he could get before they exploded. He’d have to press the dynamite against the concrete with his chest. He didn’t need to swim much. The dam was a yard from the boat. He held out his injured arm until his hand bumped the wall.

Amos’s blood flowed out in ribbons as the impounded waters of the river Long Man flowed back into him. But he would drown before he bled to death. He knew the feeling from his veiled memories of being cast into a flood. He kept his eye open for as long as he could to see the dam, his shoulder grazing its concrete as he sank down its length toward the foundation, hugging the first bundle of charges in his numbing arms, the other two tangled in his legs, dangling knotted to the lit detonating cord. The flame went on traveling down the reinforced fuse, harder to drown than a man. Outside the halo of the wick’s burning trail the lake was as black as the night outside Beulah’s cabin in winter, as cold as the fallen snow. As he curled himself around the dynamite and turned to press it with his bleeding chest against the wall, Amos’s last conscious thought was of the promise he was breaking to the woman who had loved him like a mother. Not of bringing down the dam or any of his reasons for trying. His eye was still open when the blast shot a glaring fireball along the wall but he didn’t see it. His soul was released into the water a moment before his ashes. His life, begun with a lie, had ended with one.