by Amy Greene
Annie Clyde flinched away. “I shouldn’t have come in here. I just needed to know if there’s a chance you could help me someway.” She swallowed hard. “Have you tried to look?”
“For your little one?”
Annie Clyde nodded.
“I been looking ever since you left here yesterday.”
“Have you seen anything?”
Beulah’s eyes were sad behind the scratched lenses of her glasses. “No,” she said. “I ain’t seen a thing.” She lifted the pouch from around her neck. “But if you want me to, I’ll try again.”
Annie Clyde’s pulse quickened. She put down the cup. It was what she wanted, but she recoiled at the thought of the bones. Beulah got up and stood at the head of the table. After a moment, Annie Clyde rose from her chair at the opposite end. Beulah loosened the neck of the pouch, her face lit by the drizzly window between them. She looked into Annie Clyde’s eyes. “Now, you be sure about this,” she said. Annie Clyde wiped her lips and nodded again.
Beulah turned the pouch up and spilled its contents. They bent over and studied them together, heads nearly touching. Annie Clyde wanted to see something herself, maybe Gracie’s face, but she couldn’t discern any pattern in the bones. After an agonizing minute or so she lost patience with Beulah’s silent concentration. “What is it?” she asked. “Do you see Gracie?”
Beulah raised her head like somebody waking up. “Yes,” she said, but with seeming reluctance. Her voice was far off and troubled. “Not where she’s at. Just that she’s alive.”
Annie Clyde released the breath she’d been holding and sat back down in the chair, almost knocking it over. The tears came then. There was no holding them in. It was a deliverance to hear someone say it, whether or not it was true. The sobs tore from her throat and wrenched her shoulders. “Hush now,” Beulah said. When she came around the table Annie Clyde could smell her oldness, like snuff and drying lavender and mellowing fruit. After a while, Beulah got slowly to her knees in front of Annie Clyde’s chair and took off the brogans she was wearing. She began to rub and knead Annie Clyde’s sore feet in her hands. “You’re wore out. Why don’t you come over here and close your eyes for a minute?” She led Annie Clyde to a bed in the corner and helped her onto the sagging mattress, drawing a blanket over her legs.
Annie Clyde meant to lie still just long enough to catch one breath. When she opened her puffed lids again she thought she’d slept a few seconds. But once her eyes adjusted she could tell by the slant of light across the bed and the dryness of her dress that it had been much longer. She got up quickly and began hunting her shoes. Beulah was standing at the fireplace making hoecakes, the smell filling the cabin. When she saw Annie Clyde awake she went to the table and took the brogans from under it. “Thank you,” Annie Clyde said as Beulah handed them to her. “You can thank me by having a bite of dinner,” Beulah said. “I get tired of eating by myself.” Annie Clyde paused and then put down the shoes. They sat at the table together and ate in silence. The hoecakes were sweet in Annie Clyde’s mouth. She shoveled them in, washing each bite down with more water from the spring. When she was finished at last she got up from the table without a word and went to the pie safe where James’s rifle was propped. She took the gun up and turned toward Beulah, clenching the stock tight enough to blanch her fingers. They looked into each other’s faces. Unlike Washburn’s, Beulah’s gaze didn’t waver. “Come back anytime,” she said. Annie Clyde was the first to drop her eyes. The heat from the cook fire made the room hard to breathe in. The gun was light enough to hold in one hand. She picked up both brogans in the other, gripping them by the heels. Tying the laces would take too long. She felt an urgent need to be away from Beulah and the stifling cabin. She would stop to put her shoes on once she’d put some distance between herself and the old woman’s fortune-telling bones.
She lowered her head and rushed out the door. With a full stomach she descended the steps into the showering rain, afternoon sun shining through it. She thought as she hurried across the clearing toward the woods that there was no telling what had happened at the house while she was gone. She even allowed herself a flicker of hope that Gracie would be there when she got back. The deluge had washed a rut down the steepness of the lot and she skirted around it, through the locust trees at the edge of Beulah’s property, seeking what shelter they afforded. Before she’d made it far from the cabin there came a stabbing in her foot, so sharp that she cried out. She dropped the rifle and sat down on the watery ground. She lifted the foot and found in its sole the biggest locust thorn she’d ever seen. Her feet bottoms were leathered from more than twenty summers spent barefoot, but not tough enough it seemed. She bit her lip, steeling herself to pull the thorn out. But when she did, its point stayed behind, broken off inside her. She considered trying to dig it out, but it was in too deep and she’d already been at Beulah’s longer than she planned. She would have to leave it there embedded. She’d have to carry it home with her.
At noon James Dodson was back in the Hankins pasture. The sun was struggling to come out and in this poor light the lake looked like a slab of soapstone. He’d ended up here again after searching through the night with the others, some he had worked shoulder to shoulder with tending crops, raising barns and digging drainage ditches along the roads. They had come upon Long Man everywhere it was spread. They’d sloshed into abandoned houses where the river stood knee deep, washed into front rooms papered with newsprint, over fireplace hearths blacked by decades of cooking. Then James had followed the other men back to the fields along the former riverbed. He had gone with them over the bleached stones of the shore calling for Gracie, his old neighbors righting him whenever he stumbled, giving him sups from their canteens. When the canteens were dry they made their way to the reservoir to refill them, James crouched on a boulder staring into the pitchy water. It had come to him as he knelt there that with each passing hour his chances lessened of finding Gracie alive. He’d realized then that he couldn’t bear to be the one who found Gracie dead. He used to think farming had broken him, but he was wrong. This was what broken felt like, and there was no coming out of it whole.
Now James didn’t know how long he’d been standing here at the edge of this water. After a decade of avoiding the river, despising and cursing it, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the shore. He listened close for his father’s voice in the flood as he used to think he could hear it, but whatever had once spoken to him was gone. There were no answers for him in this part of the pasture where the reservoir had come far enough to cover the Hankins family graveyard, not even the top of a headstone visible. Two months ago he had helped with the removal of Dale’s kin, a hearse parked in the pasture to take away pine boxes filled with generations of Hankinses. He’d found beneath an unmarked stone the skeleton of an infant wrapped in a blanket turned to rags after long years in the ground, its bones delicate as periwinkles. The undertaker and the pastor of the Baptist church had been there, sober in dark suits with both hands clasped before them. James had stood there gripping a spade handle, the markers of opened graves littered around him, earthen walls writhing with grubs and tunneling beetles, not knowing how soon the remains of his own child would be on his mind.
His uncle Wallace had tried at some point to talk him away, had taken him by the shoulders and begged him to get some rest. Looking back into Wallace’s wearied eyes, James saw that his mother’s brother had grown old. His hair snowy under a rain hood, his hands twisted with rheumatism. It was plain that Wallace needed to rest himself. But James couldn’t go back to the farm with his uncle. He wanted to lie down and close his eyes but he couldn’t enter that house without his daughter inside. It seemed that Gracie had called him to the lake. If he heard any voice in the water now it was hers saying, “Daddy.” He had sent his uncle away alone. Though Wallace had raised James from a young age, he had never been James’s father. Once Earl Dodson died James had felt on his own. He took paying work wherever he could find it, pulling tobacco and thr
eshing wheat, chopping sugarcane and plowing gardens for ten cents an hour. One summer he worked with the iceman, riding in his Model T to the plant in Whitehall County early each morning, helping him load the truck, covering the ice with canvas to slow its melting. He had stayed at the parsonage with his sister Dora when all he wanted was to forget Tennessee. Like he would stay now at the water’s edge, where he felt as though Gracie had led him.
The only one James needed with him besides his daughter was Annie Clyde. He looked down the shore like she might be coming to him. He was used to seeing her from far off, doing chores. Beating rugs, airing out feather beds, scouring windows with newspaper. Even when they worked together she stood apart from him, digging potatoes or hoeing corn at the other end of the field. From a distance he appreciated her most, naked under the few dresses she owned. The red gingham with a tiny hole at the armpit, the flowered one with a bit of tattered lace at the collar, the blue one she wore to their wedding. If the sun was shining right he could see her skin through them. He needed her to lean on, like the time he twisted his ankle in a snake hole and she shored him up all the way to the house with her bone-thin but solid self. They should have been together. Though she was around somewhere he hadn’t seen her all night. She felt as lost to him as Gracie.
James knew why his wife was staying away from him and the lake. She was convinced the drifter was to blame for Gracie’s disappearance. Riding away from the courthouse after midnight in the backseat of some volunteer’s Studebaker James had heard the man behind the wheel talking about Amos, saying the sheriff had instructed the searchers to keep their eyes open for him. James had spoken up although his voice by that time was no more than a croak and told those in the car that the only one they needed to keep an eye open for was Gracie. He didn’t want their attention divided. James had been seeing Amos since he was a boy. Once when he was riding to town in the wagon bed on a pile of logs he and his father meant to sell, Amos stood in the ditch to let them pass. James couldn’t take his eyes off the drifter’s ruined face. When he turned around to stare Amos tipped his hat. Back when James’s mother was alive she complained if Amos cut through their cotton on his way to somewhere else. But Earl would say, “Why, he ain’t bothering nothing.” James didn’t hold the drifter’s strangeness against him any more than his father had. As a child he was curious but once he was grown he didn’t look twice if he saw Amos on the road. The last time they crossed paths, he and Annie Clyde were just married. James was about to dump the ash bucket over the fence and nearly ran into Amos, found himself looking into the pit of an eye socket. Amos tipped his hat again and said good morning. Then he climbed over the fence and walked up the slope into the hollow. James hadn’t liked seeing Amos on the farm that day. But if the searchers came across the drifter’s camp somewhere in Yuneetah, he didn’t expect they would find Gracie there.
On this morning it wasn’t Amos that James couldn’t take his eyes off. It was the boats floating out on the water, there on the horizon since sunrise. They were musseling boats and James had been seeing them since he was a child growing up on the river, the same as he had always seen the drifter. Homemade skiffs with boards at bow and stern on each side, notched at the tops to hold iron bars with strings of dangling scrap nails for hooks. Fishermen would drop the bars into the water and drag them across the mussel bed, then draw them in with shells hanging from the strings. As the sheriff organized the boats James couldn’t comprehend why the men would be out musseling. It was several minutes before it dawned on him that they weren’t dragging the lake for mussels. They were dragging the lake for his daughter. When he understood the wind rushed out of him as if he’d been hit. He had wanted to shout at them, to swim out and tell them they were wrong. But he knew that they weren’t. James couldn’t stop believing the river had taken Gracie, like it took his father away from him when he was twelve years old.
The Knoxville newspaper had called the flood that claimed Earl Dodson the May Tide. James’s aunt Verna had saved the clipping for him. The house the Dodsons rented was set so close to the river that when it was high James and Dora could lean out the rear window and trail their fingers in it. That night when the water came up to their doorstep they felt more awe than fear, until it began to leak inside. Earl gathered Dora onto his hip and hoisted James up under the arms. They sloshed through the rising water in the front room and out the door, plunging into the flood. As far as James could see the land was covered with roaring water. He could feel the current trying to sweep him away. He could hear his father grunting as he battled toward the higher ground of the ridge alongside the house. When Earl had made it through the rapids with both children still in his grasp he pushed them uphill ahead of him. At the top he paused, looking down on the flood and the hog lot. James knew what his father was thinking. He’d been counting on that sow to feed them through winter. Earl ordered James and Dora not to move. Then he lowered himself back down the ridge. James stood under the sycamore watching Earl wade into the flood, his head a black spot. Earl had almost made it to the hog pen before he lost his footing, the blot of his hair disappearing underwater. James kept on looking, straining to see through the lashing rain, but his father never resurfaced. After what must have been hours he sank down under the sycamore and took Dora into his arms. When the May Tide was over nine other lives had been lost and the body of Wayne Deering’s son was never found. It was a chilly spring. All that night James and Dora huddled shaking on the ridge, too shocked to speak. They watched straw stacks and barn doors rush down the river until their landlord found them.
Not long before he married Annie Clyde, James saw again that riverside shack where he and Dora had lived on the cotton farm. He’d found himself in the vicinity, helping one of the church deacons round up beeves for the stock barn. The house was wide open and caked with clay, the doors and windows missing. It looked like a corpse with a gaping mouth and sightless eyes. James stood outside staring into the rooms, unable to cross the threshold, grateful for having been spared. Now he thought he might have been better off if he had drowned with his father that night. He was still looking at the musseling boats floating over the stones of the Hankins family graveyard, at the men leaned over the sides with their grappling hooks, when he felt a firm hand on his shoulder. He thought it would be his uncle again. When he turned he was startled to see Ellard Moody. He tried to gauge the sheriff’s hangdog face but it was long and mournful as usual. There was no telling what kind of news Ellard had brought. James opened his mouth, feeling outside of himself, trying to work up the courage to ask. He hadn’t spoken in hours. When the words came they were almost too rough to discern. “Did you find anything?”
“No,” Ellard said. “But I been to Beulah Kesterson’s.” James noticed that Ellard held something in each hand. At first he thought the sheriff had brought his useless rifle back, the one he’d sent to the house with Wallace, tired of lugging it around. Then he blinked his blurry eyes and realized that what the sheriff had brought him was an axe. “I sent the constable to see her last night but she wouldn’t tell him nothing,” Ellard continued. “So I decided to go back and try her myself. Looks like Beulah’s had a change of heart. She’s done told me where Amos is at.”
“How come?” James asked, still out of sorts.
“On account of your wife.”
“What’s Annie Clyde got to do with it?”
“I reckon Annie Clyde went up there and scared some sense into Beulah. She wants me to find him before your wife does, is what she told me. She thinks he might be safer locked up.” Ellard paused, squinting out at the bobbing skiffs on the lake. “I ain’t seen him yet, though.”
“Why not?”
“This may not be the smartest thing I ever done, James, but I think you’ve got a right to come with me. If you want to, that is. I believe you can keep your head or I wouldn’t offer.”
James closed his eyes for a second. “We better stop at the house and tell Annie Clyde.”
“I don’t know a
bout that.” Ellard paused again. “She ain’t home nohow.”
“You mean Annie Clyde?”
Ellard nodded. “I seen her sleeping up at Beulah’s.”
“Sleeping?”
“Listen, we ought to move before Amos does.”
James rubbed his grizzled face. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go find him.”
Ellard inclined his head toward the other end of the pasture, where the thick woods steamed with mist. He held up the axes, their blades whetted. “Beulah claimed he makes his camp over yonder. Said you go about half a mile through the thicket and come to a clearing.”
“Across the fence? That ain’t nothing but a laurel hell. Can’t nobody camp over there.”
Ellard looked at James without saying what they both knew. If anybody could, it was Amos. James had seen some of the deputies from elsewhere poking around the thicket but he doubted they had ventured far into it, with the poison ivy and copperheads. James and Dale hadn’t even tried to penetrate the laurel whenever they went hunting on the other side of the fence. Only rabbits and squirrels and songbirds lived in it, nothing worth shooting at. He and Dale had preferred bigger game. Pheasants, deer, wild turkeys. Dale had talked over the years about having the laurel cleared but never got around to it before the TVA came to town.
“You sure you want to come with me?” Ellard asked.
“I know I don’t want to stand around here no more,” James said.
Ellard passed James an axe. “If he ain’t lit out by now, we’ll give him a surprise.”
“People say he can’t be tracked,” James said, hefting the handle. “Like he’s a spook.”
“Well, he ain’t a spook. Otherwise he’d have two eyes instead of one. It might be tricky keeping quiet in them briars but we can slip up on him. Pay no mind to the nonsense.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” James said. “Come on, if we’re going.”
