by Amy Greene
In the Midwest where Amos had spent most of the last five years he could buy cheap plastic explosives with fuses and blasting caps at hardware stores. The farmers out there used them to clear their land of trees and stumps for pasture. He had carried a length of detonating cord across the country rolled in his bindle. Anyone who found it among his possessions would take it for a spool of rope. Amos had spent a longer time in Nebraska than he did in most places. He had a woman there. He’d seen her son first, bringing in water from a well. He remembered that day with fondness, moving between seas of pale witchgrass on an old wagon road underneath a wide blue sky. A hawk had swooped down to snatch up a blacksnake stretched basking across the road not a yard ahead of him. He had watched it rise and soar out of sight with the snake dangling from its clutches, the only witness. The only human being for miles, he’d assumed. A little farther on he’d come to a stretch where a path was mown through the grasses out to an oak tree. Beneath its shade, aged stones marked what Amos had supposed to be graves. He’d lowered himself down and sat looking ahead at the cloud shadows on the swells of the cedar hills at the end of the plains for most of an afternoon, until he saw the boy’s towhead moving above the high weeds and got up to follow. He had hung back unnoticed watching the boy lug the bucket home, sloshing water onto his legs, until he came at last into the yard of a run-down farmhouse. The woman had been on her knees bent over a washtub. She’d looked up startled when Amos asked for a drink. He’d thought then she must have been comely as a child. Her hair was something like her son’s but dulled by years of field work. She’d stared at Amos with fevered brown eyes as he drained the dipper. Then she’d asked if he wanted to come in where it was cooler. There was only her and the boy. Her husband had abandoned them and the land had gone to seed. She grew a garden and took in washing to feed her son. She made no demands of Amos. It was enough to have him sometimes in her bed. She was the one who told him about the man from the county Farmers’ Holiday Association. He had knocked on her door and invited her to a meeting.
Later that week Amos went down the old wagon road to a library basement in the nearest town where the meeting was held. He had read of the national association in the newspapers. They had formed to protest their land being auctioned off by the government. They had named themselves after the nationwide bank holiday, saying if bankers could take time off to reorder their business then farmers could do the same. Farm prices were so low they were dumping milk and burning corn for fuel. They thought if they reduced the supply by cutting off delivery of their goods the demand and the prices would rise. They had been blockading roads and highways to cut off milk deliveries, picketing cheese factories and creameries. Amos thought they were going about it wrong. Their protests had done nothing so far, their petitions had fallen on deaf ears. Thousands had marched on the capitol building in Lincoln demanding a moratorium on farm foreclosures. Chanting, “We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs, and let them eat their gold.” The legislature had halted foreclosure sales but still let district judges decide how long a foreclosure could be postponed. They could still order the proceedings to go forward anyway if they chose.
Over the year that Amos stayed with the woman and her son he made himself a presence among the farmers until they got used to him. He began speaking up, not during their meetings but before them, as they milled around with coffee gossiping and complaining. He told them it wasn’t reform they were after, not gradual change. It would take a revolt to see relief in their lifetimes and they were too hungry to wait. He whispered into their ears that they had to fight in defense of their homes and families. He made suggestions in such a subtle way that they thought his ideas were their own. In Bedford they dragged a judge out of his courtroom and put a noose around his neck, threatening to hang him if he didn’t stop approving farm foreclosures. In Brainard they burned down a milk bottling plant. In Falls City they rigged explosives on a switch track to go off when a boxcar hauling livestock crossed the state line. But the charge didn’t explode, as cheap dynamite bought over hardware store counters was harder to detonate. Then things took a turn when they tried to storm a butter creamery in Madison County. The gatekeeper called the sheriff and when he came the strikers pelted him and his deputies with rocks. A brawl broke out, blackjacks made from bars of soap in stockings knocking men down at Amos’s feet. He crossed the road and stood on a knoll in a wildflower meadow as a mob rocked the sheriff’s car until it turned over. One deputy hit a striker with his pistol butt. The sheriff sent off a tear gas canister. Most of the gas went into the crowd but some blew back on the deputies. In the confusion they started firing. Amos took up his bindle and headed east. The satisfaction he felt as he walked away had nothing to do with the farmers he’d spent the past year among. He had no real ideology. He had no set convictions. He had only his loathing for the men who ran everything. He left Nebraska without seeing the woman and her towheaded son again. But he thought about them often, and still carried in his inner coat pocket one of the boy’s toy soldiers.
Amos had brought that soldier out of the Midwest along with the length of detonating cord, reaching in sometimes to rub it with the ball of his thumb like a charm against the images that followed him. Children wearing masks to school in towns so covered with dust that he spat brown clots for days after passing through. Starving jackrabbits coming down from the hills in multitudes, fathers and their young sons herding the animals into pens and clubbing them to death. On a country road in Iowa he came upon a man changing a flat on his DeSoto. As he approached the jack slipped and the weight of the car came down on the man, whose face Amos never saw. Amos pried at the front fender but in the end he could only stand in the road and watch the man die, legs jerking as the DeSoto crushed the life out of him. When the man’s legs were still, Amos moved on. Not long after that he passed through Kansas as a dust storm was coming. It had seemed like the end of everything, a wall of swarming cloud stretched across the horizon, blotting out the sun. Amos stood still at first, rooted in place. Then the wind began to stir the roadside trees and an oppressive silence descended, every other living soul in hiding. When the first of the grit pelted his face he took off running until he came at last to an outhouse, the only shelter he could find, and shut himself in with the stink as the blackness drew down.
Now as he stood on the dam’s spillway before its chinked seam, there was not enough light to burn off the fog so it lingered. Amos thought it would be safe to head for Beulah’s cabin if he kept to the trees. He waded back across the river, took his bindle and went up the slope again, following the hillside deeper into the hardwoods until he came at last to a roadside bluff. He descended the stepped ledges then crossed the road and climbed another bank. The going was slick with waterfalls trickling down from the mountains. After gaining the top of the bank he disappeared into the hollow, copper needles muting his footfalls. It was in those woods away from the roar of the dam that he began to hear voices. At first he pushed on, thinking it might be the rush of the outflow down the spillway impressed on his eardrums. But when he grew certain that he wasn’t imagining things he stopped on the crest of a rise, the edge ragged with hanging roots, overlooking the leafy ground where it dropped off below. Amos listened. There were a number of them. They must have come from other counties, or some of the townspeople must have returned. It was plain to Amos that they were searching for someone. If they had been making less noise he would have assumed they were looking for him. It was hard to tell what direction the voices were coming from but the searchers sounded far enough away that he wouldn’t encounter them. He stood still awhile longer in the mist among the alder trunks, soaked sleek and tall like one of them. He tilted his ear until at last he made out the name they were calling. It was Gracie, the same name he had heard in the cornfield yesterday morning.
Considering the distance of the voices Amos was caught off guard when someone came weaving through the trees below him, shoes sliding through the leaf litter. A moment after the rustle of feet she c
ame into sight, her head rising and falling with the uneven terrain. He knew before she got close enough for him to see her profile that it was Annie Clyde Dodson. She paused almost directly beneath him to rest against a poplar trunk. This time Amos didn’t make himself known to her as he had in the corn, though he could have knelt down and reached out to touch her shoulder. He wasn’t surprised to see her searching apart from the others. She was more like her aunt Silver than like her mother. Even among the people of this forgotten town, Annie Clyde Dodson and Amos were outsiders. They were not as different as she would want to believe. But she couldn’t see herself as he did now. Laid bare with her sodden dress showing the starved slats of her ribs, no more than a film on her tawny skin. It was common knowledge the Ledfords were Cherokees, the first to be run off this land. Maybe that loss, and not her father’s farm, was Annie Clyde Dodson’s inheritance. As Amos observed her from the thicket she lifted her chin. Though she hadn’t spotted him, he could see the rain beaded on her lips and on the fine hairs of her arms. He waited for her to sense his presence, to call him out or charge up to meet him, but she didn’t feel how close they were. “Gracie?” she shouted into the trees above her head. “Gracie!” Amos didn’t move, his breathing even. Then Annie Clyde’s eyes shifted. She turned back toward the way she’d come, hearing something. It was the other searchers, making a commotion somewhere near the river. Annie Clyde took off in that direction. Amos figured she would slow down once she realized she might not want to see what they had found in the water.
Amos had seen the drowned himself and chose not to picture Gracie Dodson that way. He thought of how she had looked in the cornfield instead, standing between the rows with seedpods in her curls like those he shook from his own hair after sleeping on the ground. If they found her alive they would likely take her up north, where no corn was growing. Many of the displaced were heading to the cities. Amos hated the smog, the heat shimmering off the streets. He hated the neighborhoods with neat bungalows lining the gaslit curbs, yapping dogs snapping at him through the pickets and gates of fenced yards. He liked knowing whether those inside did or not that he was trespassing where he wasn’t wanted. Sometimes he waited for them to part their window curtains and see him standing on their flagstone walks. He always left something behind for them to find in the morning, a cigarette butt floating in a birdbath or a heel print at the edge of a flower bed. He didn’t want to think of the little girl from the cornfield growing up somewhere like that. If they had her back they would just make her over in their own image, raise her up in their ways and marry her off to a man who gave orders from behind a desk. Amos thought it might be for the best if they never found her. Best if she was returned to the earth.
Amos knew there were ways to use this distraction to his advantage. It was bound to cause problems for the power company. But he put the notion aside for the time being. Annie Clyde Dodson was looking for her daughter. He was looking for something to break a lock. His mind turned back to the dam and the task at hand. He pushed on deeper into the hollow until he reached the clearing where Beulah’s cabin stood, approaching from the back of the lot. He would have followed the path his boots had worn to her door over the years and asked for a bite of breakfast, but he didn’t want to cause the old woman any trouble. Maybe there would be time to pay her a visit later. For now, he only needed to visit her shed. Hurrying for cover, he went past the ordered rows of the garden and the bagging wire of the goat pen. When he got to the shed he found the plank door open a crack and forced it the rest of the way. He stood in the weak light falling through the door and searched the shadows, cloying with mold and corroding tin. He and Beulah had built the shed for storing tools, seeds and grain. Over the years it had grown full and junk had accumulated out behind the cabin. Somewhere Beulah had a bolt cropper. He knew because he’d used it himself for cutting wire mesh when they built the henhouse. His eye scanned the boards of the wall where Beulah had hung her gardening shears, her mule bridles, her rusty machete. When he spied the long bolt cropper hanging from a tenpenny nail he slipped it down at his side. Then he stopped cold, still facing the wall. He could feel someone standing behind him. With sudden speed, he snatched the machete off the wall with his other hand and turned around. Beulah was there just inside the shed door, a head scarf tied under her chin against the weather. They regarded each other for a moment. She looked the same as ever, hair in a yellowed braid over her shoulder and the pouch on a string around her neck. After a while, she took off her pointed glasses to wipe the raindrops from the lenses. “Hidee, Amos,” she said.
“Hello, Beulah,” he said back.
“What are you looking for?”
Amos held up the machete. “Bluff’s too wet. I’ll have to cut through the thicket.”
Beulah put her glasses back on. “Your place might be flooded. You think of that?”
Amos smiled. “What are you doing out here?”
“Fixing to check my traps.”
He noticed the burlap sack she was holding. At first she’d seemed unchanged, but looking closer he saw a difference. Her hand was shaking, her eyes dull, her dress stained. It wasn’t just Yuneetah that had seen its last days. “Don’t look like you been catching anything,” he said.
She took a step closer, sizing him up. “You’re one to talk.”
Amos smiled again. “I’ve been eating.”
“What, pine needles? You can’t live on that. A man needs meat.”
“I get some every once in a while.”
“Well. I wish I could offer you some breakfast.”
“I know,” he said. “Another time.”
Beulah nodded. “You better clear out.”
“I will tomorrow.”
“Why not today?”
He didn’t answer.
“What do you need with them bolt croppers anyhow?”
After a pause he said, “I better not tell you.”
“Amos,” she said. “I got an awful feeling.”
He smirked. “Bones been talking to you?”
“I ain’t kidding. I believe there’s fixing to be bloodshed. I just don’t want it to be yourn.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Huh. You wouldn’t risk your own hide for nothing.”
“Things change,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Nothing wrong with change.”
“But there’s something wrong with those that have taking away from those that don’t.”
“Well. There’s the right way to stand against something and the wrong way.”
“Who gets to decide what the right way is, Beulah?”
Her mouth folded over her gums. “I never could tell you nothing.”
He turned the machete over, inspecting the blade. “You believe in gods.”
“I believe in one God.”
“All right. What if God took that child they’re looking for as a punishment?”
Beulah’s brow creased. “Who, Gracie? That innocent little girl?”
“For messing with Him.”
“It don’t work that way. The Lord won’t take a child away from her mama over a dam.”
Amos looked up. “Yeah, well. Maybe He’ll give her back if the dam goes away.”
Beulah shook her head. They studied each other.
“If I make it out of here I won’t be back,” he said.
“Why in the world not?” she asked. “This place is your home.”
“If the government has their way, this place is about to be gone.”
“Even if it’s covered up, it’ll still be here.”
He gestured with the machete. “Look around. Nothing left here but hard times.”
“Amos,” Beulah said. “It don’t matter what’s built or tore down by a man’s hands. The Lord’s in charge. Sure as the river keeps on running, good times will come back around.”
Amos grinned. “Maybe you ought to ask your bones if you’ve got it right or not.”
She smiled back a little. “You better
watch that smart lip.”
“I better get out of sight,” he said. “Fog’s burning off.”
She held out the burlap sack, bloodied by the rabbits, coons and groundhogs she had snared and carried home to the cabin. “Here,” she said. “See if there’s some meat for your breakfast.” He tucked the bolt cropper under his arm and took the sack. Their fingers touched and he felt a pang of sorrow or love for this old woman he might never lay his one eye on again. He didn’t know why she had always been kind to him. They never spoke of it. She stepped aside and let him pass through the door on his way to the clearing at the foot of the viny bluff.
At a quarter to eight, Sheriff Ellard Moody sat parked at the curb in front of the former Customs House on the corner of Clinch and Market, across from the Tennessee Theatre. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for the caseworker assigned to Yuneetah, Sam Washburn. In the other hand he pinched a cigarette, smoke curling out the window. He peered up through the windshield at the light poles, the power lines crossing over the rooftops. Much had changed since the first time Ellard came into the city with his father, gawping at the tall buildings and the motorcars lining the brick-paved streets, watching the fashionable ladies pass with their hair cut short and marcelled into waves. The Customs House still had the same facade as it did back then, gray marble with cast-iron columns, but it had changed in other ways since the power company took it over for their headquarters. Until 1933 the old building had housed the federal court, the excise offices and the post office. Now it held only the TVA offices. Ellard had made this trip too often in the last couple of years. When the townspeople complained of how they were treated he came here and demanded to see somebody in charge, determined not to let the big government machine forget they were dealing with individuals in Yuneetah. Most of the time he was put off or sent away dissatisfied. This morning at least he was seeing an official, the chief of the Reservoir Family Removal Section.
