Long Man

by Amy Greene

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

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

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

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

  His heart didn’t beat until she spoke.

  “Why is that?” she asked.

  “Why is what?”

  “Why should we get married?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “You know I can’t leave Mama.”

  “She can come with us.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Did you? What else did you do?”

  “I got some apples,” she said.

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

  She shook her head, eyes shining.

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

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

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