Long Man

by Amy Greene

  ALSO BY AMY GREENE

  Bloodroot

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Amy Greene

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  A portion of this work first appeared in Appalachian Heritage 41, no. 4 (Fall 2013).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greene, Amy, [date]

  Long Man : A novel / Amy Greene. — First Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-59343-6 (hardcover); ISBN 978-0-307-95846-4 (eBook)

  1. Dams—Tennessee—Fiction. 2. Abduction—Tennessee—Fiction. 3. Missing children—Tennessee—Fiction. 4. Tennessee—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.R45254L66 2013 813'.6—dc23 2013018846

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket photograph by Jack Delano. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, FSA-OWI Collection, Washington, D.C.

  Jacket design by Stephanie Ross

  ep_v4.0

  For my mother and father

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Amy Greene

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  June 30, 1936

  July 31, 1936

  August 1, 1936

  August 2, 1936

  August 3, 1936

  July 31, 1937

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  In the summer of 1936 there was one woman left on the mountaintop where the river’s headwaters formed in rocks ages old and shining with mica, the sediment washing down to tinge its shoals yellow-brown. Most others with her last name had died or moved on decades ago. Though darkness came to her high place first she could climb to this limestone ridge overlooking the cornfields and see daytime lingering in the valley town below. She would stand shielding her eyes until her legs grew tired. Then she would lower herself to the rocky edge and take off her brogans to rub her sore feet. She would watch with her knees gathered up as the last light mellowed into dusk, falling down the piney bluffs. Before half of the homesteads were razed the lowering sun would stain the tin roofs of houses and barns, deepening the rust to oxblood. Gilding wheat sheaves and tobacco rows, shading red clay furrows. Last summer she might have heard a farmer calling in his cows. She might have heard workers on scaffolds calling to each other over the rumble of cranes and bulldozers, steam shovels gouging the cliffside above the river and dumping out rocks to be crushed for the cement mixer. But now there was only stillness and silence besides the tree frogs singing as twilight drifted toward night. This time next year if she came up here looking for a little more light she would see only miles of endless blue lake.

  Long before most of them were run off their land the woman’s neighbors in the valley had stopped seeing her, even when she came down among them. But she kept an eye on them. Looking to the southeast she could see the dam out near the Whitehall County line. It stood over two hundred feet high but from up here it seemed small, wedged between shoulders of limestone with the river wending downstream through the forested humps of the foothills to its base. Standing on the riverbank, it was grand enough to steal her breath. Though the woman’s hair was still dark, her face unwrinkled except at the eye corners, the dam made her feel old. The Methodist preacher claimed it went against nature but there was nothing he or anybody else could do to stop it. It took two years to build, billows of grit from tunneling and excavating bitter in her mouth and dynamite rocking the ground under her feet when she walked to the market. Freight trucks, tractors and the axe men of the clearance crews blocked the road. Behind the power company’s concrete wall, on the upstream side of the river, the water was rising to form a reservoir that would drown the town of Yuneetah.

  The woman eavesdropped on the talk of her neighbors. They said it would take a year or longer for the whole town to disappear. But this spring there had been heavy rainfall and the lake was swelling faster than expected. Since the dam gates closed on April 30, water had already moved into the kitchen gardens of the houses nearest the site, soaking into their foundations, tasting the minerals in the boulders settlers had hauled with oxen down from the bluffs in 1786. Soon the growing lake would spread over grassy hillocks dotted with clover and the chicory edging the roadsides. By the end of the year lagoons would be made from clefts in the mountains. Fish would swim in dens once inhabited by foxes. The reservoir would eventually reach sixteen miles wide, spilling across the lowlands the town had occupied since two brothers put up a lean-to shed along the riverbank to trade with the Cherokees and a settlement sprang up around it. The water would keep flooding backward from the base of the dam over acres of farmland and timber, over the Baptist church nestled in a copse of pines, over the Methodist church with its neat white parsonage, over the post office and the druggist’s and Gilley’s Hotel, until it reached the marble steps of the courthouse. By August a hundred families would be evacuated from their dwellings of log, brick, clapboard and stone. Next summer all of Yuneetah would be underwater.

  But the woman wasn’t mourning the loss of the town. She had done without neighbors for the better part of her forty-four years and wouldn’t miss them. She was thinking of the apple tree. When the cicadas came each season she remembered it standing in a hayfield old and alone with its fruit. In summer she and her sister used to follow a winding rut down from the hollow and the white-haired farmer would give them a bushel basket to fill. Before the leaves turned this autumn, the tree would be gone. Like her sister. She had managed to forget the others. Her mother whose plaits unloosed swept the ground and her father whose Cherokee blood showed in the glare of the lanterns he carried out hunting. But the memory of her sister stayed with her. For sixteen years they lived together in a house hewn from the timber and bedrock of the mountain. A two-room shack with puncheon floors and a kitchen tacked on the back, the shake roof buried under honeysuckle in summer and the chimney hung with dead vines in winter. At night they lay in each other’s arms with their dark locks blending together, unable to tell where one sister ended and the other began, keeping warm in a nest of blankets and each other’s hair. Until the day the woman’s sister ran off to live with the white-haired farmer and eat all the apples she could hold.

  Now the woman had the shack to herself. The last to go had been her grandmother, dead fifteen years. When snakes slithered behind her walls, even copperheads, she let them be. Long combs of wasp nest lined the rafters. She welcomed anything but her own kind. It wasn’t that she trusted the copperheads or wasps more than she did people but animals tended their own business. The woman had chosen her solitude. She liked her house buried in honeysuckle vines that pried into the foundation cracks and wound up the broken windowpanes to make nights sweet in the room where she slept. She liked napping in the heat of the afternoons and making snowshoes for the rambling walks she took when the deep snows came. She had forgotten what hungry meant, growing used to eating no more than it took to keep alive. She had developed a taste for groundhog and muskrat. She had heard about a Depression going on but saw no evidence of it herself. She didn’t understand the power company’s reasoning. She didn’t need electric lights when she could see by the sun and moon. She had the spring and the earth to keep her food from spoiling. She had a washboard for scr
ubbing clean her dresses. If a person didn’t come to depend on material things, it wouldn’t hurt to lose them. Not like it hurt to lose a sister.

  Most of the woman’s kin were buried in the hollow graveyard, but on the farm at the foot of the mountain there lived a three-year-old child with her sister’s face. Last summer the woman had gone barefoot through the dry hayfield weeds with a bushel basket for apples, grasshoppers flying before her. She had found the child playing under the tree with a dog, low boughs crooked around them like leafy arms. If the dog hadn’t barked the woman might have taken the child’s hand and led her to the river where she used to go with her sister. Where the water was broadest a birch leaned over with its roots submerged, touching the surface as if to sip from it. They would scoot along its arched trunk as far as they could to drape themselves over its sturdiest limb, wetting their trailing fingers. Sometimes turtles shared the birch with them, snugged in the algae-bearded forks of its branches, heads tucked in and shells dripping sleek black. In the mornings mist cloaked the river so thick it was hard to see the woods on the opposite bank. If they were still they could watch herons fishing from the rocks. At sundown deer crossed to the other shore, the current rippling out around their velvet brown hides, their white-tipped ears flicked back. The woman had called the child by her sister’s name as they stood in the hayfield with fallen blossoms caught in their hair. Her sister was gone. But for the time being, the child was not.

  On the last day of April the woman had perched on this overlook and watched most of Yuneetah clear out, some riding on tick mattresses among the heaps of chattel in their wagon or truck beds, the wheels of their mule-drawn carts and packed jalopies stirring the dust of the main road for the last time. The dam site was quiet these days, the dormitories the workers had lived in deserted. Only the child’s mother, her sister’s daughter, was holding out against the power company. The girl had been fighting to keep her land for two years, but she couldn’t hang on to it for much longer. Looking over the hayfield and the lone apple tree, the woman had an urge to rush down the footpath to the farm and beg the girl to take her along when she finally left. The woman had no right to ask. She had kept her distance. But the thought of her last living kin leaving her behind filled her with fear. Soon it would be too late. She had watched the county agents coming and going in their motorcars. They lifted their hats as they passed while she picked wild strawberries along the road, carrying her neighbors off in their backseats to see new farms that might replace the condemned ones. Most of the townspeople had never ridden in automobiles. It must have felt good to rest their feet, after all their lives walking wherever they went. They couldn’t resist the change that had come, for better or worse. Nobody could stand alone against the government. The girl would surely give in. Even now a slow black Dodge was weaving its way into town, taking the curves between the bluffs like something with a carapace.

  JUNE 30, 1936

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

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

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

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

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

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