by Amy Greene
Now he saw the lichen-blotched ladder of a board stile on a fence and glanced down to consult a scrap of paper scrawled with directions, knowing he was getting close. Beneath his suit coat, his white dress shirt was plastered to his skin. He was pouring sweat, as much from the prospect of staring down the barrel of the Dodson woman’s rifle as from the stifling heat. When he raised his head the house had come into view across rows of corn. Most of the farmers in Yuneetah had harvested what crops they could early and taken them to market before leaving town, but not the ones living here. The place looked as the other caseworker had described in his report, a two-story clapboard with a covered porch and a fieldstone chimney. There was a smokehouse and a corncrib out back, a barn on the verge of a hayfield with one crooked tree. Past the hayfield, pines marched uphill into the mountains. On the other side of the house were more thick woods. He turned off the road onto a track alongside the cornfield dividing the farm from the looming mountainside. Weeds slapped at his car doors and grasshoppers sprang across the hood. His wheels jarred and bumped over shelves of rough limestone, rocking the car on its springs. Once he was past the shade of the cornfield the sun shone bright on the overgrown lot that fronted the house, the piney swelling of the hills dark in contrast. Washburn had still formed no definite plan for facing the Dodson woman. He couldn’t concentrate for the chirr of cicadas. The humidity had brought them early. When he stopped the car and got out, the sound hurt his ears.
Washburn started for the porch but paused when he saw her already standing there with a dog at her side, as if she’d been waiting. As if she had watched him come. He didn’t know how he had failed to notice her there on his way up the track. She seemed to have materialized. What startled him even more than her waiting presence was how little she resembled the farmwife he’d been picturing. She was around his age, in her early twenties. It was her bearing that struck him most, how straight she stood, unlike most of the women in Yuneetah with their backs curved over their sunken bellies. He shaded his eyes against the sun and looked up at her. She towered over him. His first instinct was to turn and go back to the car. There was no way to do what was asked of him. She would not be moved. He glanced around, hoping her husband was at home. He had read the reports, but nothing prepared him. Something about her fierceness made her beautiful.
It was an effort to cross the neglected grass and approach the porch, its whitewashed posts drifted over with soot. He had already made it farther than the other caseworker without being shot at and forced himself to keep going. Then he saw the gun propped by the front door and his confidence faltered. It took gumption to set his foot on the bottom step. When the dog began to bark the woman laid her hand on its broad reddish head to hush it. Washburn’s mouth was dry as he climbed the steps. Standing across from Annie Clyde Dodson, he realized she wasn’t as tall as she’d seemed, but she was no less intimidating. She didn’t reach for the rifle. She only looked at him. He’d thought her eyes were brown, but now closer up he saw they were hazel. She wore men’s shoes and a faded shift. She had dark hair pulled back from her face and high cheekbones. Her skin was the color of coffee with milk. He was about to speak when a sound came from the open window behind her, like a child crying out in its sleep. The woman glanced over her shoulder. When the cry didn’t come again, her eyes settled back on Washburn.
“Annie Clyde Dodson?”
“Yes.”
He extended his hand. “My name is Sam Washburn. How do you do?”
“I’m tired,” she said.
He dropped his hand.
“I know you’re just doing your job, but you’re not welcome here.”
“I came a long way to talk to you.”
She studied him, down to his polished shoes. “Well. You wasted a trip.”
He hesitated, choosing his words. He decided to be direct with her. “If you’re not gone by the third of August, you’ll be evicted. I’m asking you to hear me out, before it comes to that.”
“You all say the same things,” she said. “I don’t need to hear it again.”
He lifted his hat and scratched beneath it. He didn’t know what else to do with himself. “The problem is all the rain we’ve had. It’s dangerous to stay here with the reservoir rising.”
“Then I guess you better get on back to Knoxville.”
Washburn’s cheeks colored. “You know you’re going to lose your land, Mrs. Dodson.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you making this harder on yourself?”
“You’re the one I’m making it harder on, Mr. Washburn.”
He hesitated again. “I understand your feelings. I grew up on a farm like yours.”
“This is not my farm,” she said.
Washburn opened his mouth and closed it.
“I have a little girl. It belongs to her.”
He cleared his throat. “Yes. Well. Do you want her to see you dragged off in handcuffs?”
The Dodson woman’s eyes caught fire. “That’s exactly what I want.”
“Mrs. Dodson—”
“I want her to see it and never forget it.”
“Will you just sit down with me for a minute?”
“I want her to know I fought for what was hers.”
They fell silent, facing each other. There was no sound but the chirring cicadas and the panting dog. Washburn wondered if she would reach for the Winchester beside the door but she kept still. He groped for more to say. She had confused him, made him doubt his reason for being there. Then the noise came again from the house, a child’s sleepy crying. Some of the fierceness went out of Annie Clyde Dodson. There was a sag in her posture. He stared, unable to help himself at the freckle on her collarbone, the tendril tucked behind her ear. He saw how thin she was, her cheeks hollow and the neck of her shift bagging. He could almost feel the weight of her weariness on his own chest. He took a pace backward and then wavered. After two years he still felt like he was proving himself. He didn’t want the chief to doubt his competence. More than that, it was humbling to have his authority undermined by a woman of his own age. But she had the soul of one much older. It was clear that he wouldn’t be able to sway her. She was right. He had wasted a trip. When he got to the office he would start the eviction paperwork. The thought made him uncomfortable, as if he had spoken it out loud. He found himself leaving without being told. She didn’t have to point her rifle. But as he backed down the steps, the child’s cries drifting after him, his eyes played a trick. Somehow the glare of the sun and the shade of the porch made him think he saw water running down the Dodson woman’s face. Not pouring on her, but pouring from her. Seeping between the fullness of her lips, spouting from her lids to mat her lashes, flowing from the roots of her hair and soaking her dress. The image lasted only until he blinked, but it stayed with him all the way back to Knoxville. Driving away he was glad to be done with her and the town of Yuneetah. He didn’t know then how soon he would see her again.
JULY 31, 1936
Amos followed the river south twenty miles into Yuneetah, from a train yard in Knoxville. Sleeping on sacks in boxcars and under the struts of bridges he had dreamed of this valley, a green trough carved out between two mountain ranges, made of crumbling limestone ridges plunging into steep lowlands. For most of the way he’d kept to the woods, eating berries and making pine needle tea. At ten o’clock on that morning he crossed over the Sevier County line and picked a path down the snaky bluffs to the road. He could tell by the puddles there had been rain in the night. From the looks of the sky there would be more to come. Cloud banks were moving in from the west to blot out the sun, thunder gathering in their bellies. When he saw the first scattered houses on the edge of town, some tucked in the lee of the foothills and some nearer the road, it was already clear how things had changed. No rags flapped on the clotheslines. No plow mules cropped at the fields. Even the plank shack he passed with goats wrestling in its grassless dooryard seemed empty, their bleats startling in the humid stillness. These homes a
t the rim of the basin would be spared by the reservoir waters as they hadn’t been by decades of punishing weather, slumped on their pilings with their porches canted and their shutters unhung.
For the past seven years, hunger had driven families out of Yuneetah looking for work. It was the same all over the country. In California Amos had picked fruit alongside migrants run off their farms by bankers. In the Midwest where they’d come from their crops were buried under veils of windblown soil and their kin were dying of dust pneumonia, choking on gobs of plowed-up earth. Camping under the arch of a viaduct in New Orleans, he had watched one man stab another in the guts over a tin of sardines. The next day he’d returned to take the gabardine suit pants from the stiffening corpse, having learned enough in these lean times to leave nothing useful behind. He had come upon other men lying frozen in culverts and ditches, children trailing cotton sacks into fields at dawn, whole towns abandoned with the smokestacks of their shut-down factories cold outlines against the skies. He’d seen thousands waiting in line outside steel mill gates where two or three jobs were being offered. Those turned away took to the rails so the boxcars he’d once had to himself were now crowded with men. He had huddled among them in hobo jungles, eaten with them from trash bins behind restaurants and been sickened by the rat poison added to the scraps to keep them out. He had seen them arrested by the dozens for burglary, stealing milk off back stoops and crackers from the shelves of general stores. He had witnessed all manner of hardship since 1929. But what disturbed him most was to see, as he descended the steep slope into Yuneetah, what had become of the place he thought of as home.
Sometimes he stayed away for a few months, sometimes a few years. This time it had been five. Under other circumstances he wouldn’t have walked through the middle of town before dusk. Out of habit, he pulled down the brim of his hat to shade his face as he moved between the low buildings. The square was deserted, the only sound a metal signpost marking Gilley’s Hotel squeaking when the wind freshened. The hotel had been standing on the same patch of sod since the 1800s. Out front a trough that the owner had kept from those days for the townspeople who still got around by horse or mule was filled with rainwater. Brocade curtains still draped the windows, but the glass was dark. Back in spring the bachelors who rented rooms there would have been perched on the steps or slouched against the trunk of the oak at the porch corner, the smoke of their home-rolled cigarettes threading into the leaves. Across the way the courthouse loomed with its shining dome roof. For once Amos didn’t hurry past. Before he would have crossed to that side only during the evening, if no lamp was burning in the sheriff’s office. Now he went to the opposite sidewalk and stopped to linger on the wide courthouse lawn. After a moment he moved on, past the boarded-up cafe with no millworkers eating dinner at the counter, past the shuttered post office with the flag missing from its pole, past the shadowed blacksmith’s shed set back from the road in a thicket, past the closed gristmill’s roof glinting over the pines. Soon anything not torn down would be swamped. He had waited almost too long.
Amos kept moving until the town square was at his back and the hills closed in on both sides. He watched his boots as he walked, their soles coming untacked, making no footprints even in the softened wheel ruts he followed. He had learned to pass without leaving a trace. He was the sort decent men and women turned their heads from. He had a missing eye and his face was scrawled with whiskers. He was tall and gaunt with long black hair, lank on the shoulders of the peacoat he wore even in the heat of summer. On the streets he wandered crowds parted around him. For the most part he was left alone wherever he went, but traveling this familiar road he felt more at ease than anywhere else. He knew before long it would be a lake bottom, minnows darting in the grass up its middle. On the left he saw acres of stumps. Across a gully a tractor was mired in the mud near a stack of nail-spiked boards and a cellar hole filled with rainwater. One winter the widower who lived there had invited Amos in and given him coffee. But that was a decade ago. He stopped and spat on the tractor’s caked tires before pushing on.
Another half mile down the road he came to a field of sedge where the foundation of the Methodist church was tumbled in a heap. He imagined the congregation hauling their river rock sanctuary to higher ground and rebuilding it stone by stone. It would have been a painstaking task but he had lived among the people of Yuneetah long enough to know what they clung to in their war against the land and the floods. They might be willing to leave behind their dried-up farms but they would take their God with them. Amos hoped at least one of them had held out against the power company. His throat was parched and there was a gnawing in his stomach. Even those who watched him with mistrust from the corners of their eyes used to offer whatever they had to eat whenever he came around, turnips and pone bread and dippers of cool water. After another stretch of woods he came at last to a derelict cabin with a chimney mortared from hog’s hair and mud, the lot choked with milkweed. A guinea hen flapped up cackling at his approach, small and ring-tailed, but there was no other sign of life. He paused to hunt out its nest and found a clutch of eggs that he pocketed to boil when he finally made camp. He rested for a spell then shouldered his bindle and walked on. Each farm he passed looked more vacant than the last. The screen door on the Shelton place was off its hinges and their hounds were gone from under the porch. The Hubbards had left a hay mower corroding in their pasture. He wasn’t much surprised. He had met few others like himself, unafraid of the men in suits who ran everything.
The townspeople had always been wary of Amos. Nobody knew where he came from. He had only fragmented memories himself, of being cast into the river when he was four or five years old. Opening his eyes in the silt-swirling murk, gulping its bitterness, being borne on its current until he fetched up on the roots of a beech tree. He’d hauled himself onto the bank and staggered into a clearing where he fell in a heap at the foot of a bluff. Shivering he turned his head and saw a crack in the earth, half hidden by ground-cover vines. He discovered a hole leading into a shallow limestone cave and crawled inside. Then he waited to die in the stagnant gloom, looking up at the sun through ropes of woodbine, earthworms coiled like wet strands of flesh between his toes. When he didn’t die and emerged at last the worms came out with him, stuck to the backs of his legs. He might have thought he dreamed it all if he hadn’t gone searching for the clearing as an older boy. He’d hacked away the ground cover with a machete and found the cave buried under years of growth, littered with detritus the floods had washed in. Whenever he returned to Yuneetah he uncovered that cave again. Each time there was something of use the river had left him. Combs with broken teeth, twists of baling wire, splinters of barn board for kindling his fires. But there were some things washed up in the floods that he didn’t claim. Since time out of mind the river had been giving with one hand and taking away with the other. The remains of what had drowned, the bones it spat back out, he left undisturbed.
It was a woman named Beulah Kesterson who took him in when he was a child. She found him one morning while she was out gathering morels. She was not old back then, her braid not yet the ivory it would turn. She looked at him in thoughtful silence, her mouth sunken over her gums. When she leaned down at last to take his hand, the pouch of fortune-telling bones she wore on a string around her neck dangled before his eyes. She led him to her cabin and scrubbed his ears, trimmed his unruly hair, boiled cornmeal mush in a kettle over the fireplace cinders and set the bowl in his hands to warm them. She called him Amos, after a twin brother that died when she was born. Though he looked old enough to talk he wouldn’t speak to her. When he finally did a few months later, the first words out of his mouth were a lie. He had stood watching a neighbor’s coonhound dig up Beulah’s cucumber seedlings and then waited for her to come out to the garden. She leaned on her hoe and said in disgust, “I wish they’d tie that blamed dog.” Amos looked up into her face and told her, “I did it.” Her eyebrows lifted some at the sound of his voice. When she recovered f
rom the shock of hearing him speak, she asked what for. He couldn’t answer. Then she inspected his hands and saw no crumbs of dirt. When she asked why he wanted to lie on himself, he couldn’t answer that either. He’d been a liar ever since.
Amos had stayed with Beulah Kesterson for as long as he could stand it. But a roof, even one with holes, was like a coffin lid over him. At night he’d lie awake with his eyes moving over the cabin’s fissured logs, its moldy chinking, the rotting beams of the rafters showing bright coins of moon. In the daytime he’d stand in the shadows beside the hearth as Beulah cast her bones over a flowered tablecloth for the townspeople of Yuneetah, divining the paths their futures would take. Most often they were amorous young girls with chewed bottom lips, but once a wife had brought her sick husband in a horse-drawn cart and led him into the cabin leaning on her shoulder. He looked like a walking skeleton and Beulah said with her hand on the woman’s back, “You and me both know I got no reason to cast these bones.” The woman crumpled to the cabin floor and wept out loud as her husband looked on, his lips cracked and lids leaking viscous fluid. Beulah sent them away with a powder she had ground from herbs. When Amos asked if it would save him, she said, “No, it won’t.” After that he began roaming to escape Yuneetah’s troubles, through blackberry thickets and laurel hells, down cow paths and cliffside trails. By around thirteen he knew every inch of the town to its farthest reaches. He’d explored the clefts of the mountains and the creases of the valley. He had followed the riverbank into Whitehall County. One day he knew it was time to find out whatever there was beyond the hills.
