by Amy Greene
“Here,” he said.
Beulah stepped back. “What?”
“Take it.”
“Lord, Amos. Have you lost your mind?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“There ain’t no telling how much that’s worth. You take it to a druggist somewhere and he’ll send it off to New York for you. Why, you could live off of that for a long time.”
Amos shook his head. “It’s for you.”
“I don’t need it. You’re the one without a home.”
He stepped closer. “I want you to have it.”
“What for, Amos?”
“Please. Take it.”
It occurred to her that since she’d found Amos he had never asked her to do anything. She held out her hand and accepted the pearl. She lifted it to her nose to smell the river that formed it. “See,” Beulah said. “I told you things’ll get better. I don’t need bones to show me that.”
It was almost sunset when Amos made his way back downstream to the dam. After Beulah left him at the riverside he lingered over the remains of their cook fire, smoke still rolling from the sodden kindling they’d used. He slouched over the guttering flames prodding with a stick at the charred mussel shells in a ring of stones until the shadows of the hemlocks behind him stretched out long on the rocky shore. Then he put on his hat, hoisted up his bindle and faded into the trees. He walked through the shade a mile or so until he came out again on the hillside where only yesterday at dawn he had scouted the dam and its buildings from the east. He knew he’d be exposed in the open for several minutes as he emerged from the hardwoods at the top of the slope and went across the closed highway’s pavement, then skidded down an embankment on the lake side of the dam and followed the sand a ways before receding again into a peninsula of evergreens. It took him some time but not much to find the ancient spruce he was looking for, its roots twisting up from a pile of needles. There was a hollow near its base and he got on his knees to reach into the knotty depths. Yesterday morning, after leaving Beulah’s shed with her bolt cropper and a burlap sack, he’d made a stop on the way to his camp in the clearing.
If the cinder-block hut in the woods along the stone wall marking the boundaries of the watershed had been empty when Amos broke the padlock he might have left Yuneetah already. But the hut wasn’t empty. There had been enough light when he pushed in the door. He had stood in the opening with the rain pouring off the corrugated eave above him, running downhill and away from the hut, built off the ground to keep its contents dry. Against the block walls he’d found sacks of cement, digging implements, and stacks upon stacks of rectangular wooden boxes with a maker’s label stamped on their sides. From the cobwebs he deduced that the building hadn’t been entered in weeks, perhaps a month. Amos had stepped inside the stale shadows and opened the hinged lid of a box on top. Yellow sticks, cylinders lying end to end. He recognized this brand of plastic explosive from his time blasting tunnels through mountains. The TVA had set off these charges to loosen tons of rock from the riverbed. They drilled holes, a hundred or more, then blew them clean with compressed air. They rammed a stick into each hole, pouring sand in and tamping it down. Then they wired the fuses into a central switch. He inspected the sticks to make sure they weren’t sweating. Unless dynamite was frozen then thawed or stored in the heat, it wasn’t all that unstable. It required a detonator to go off, unlike in the old days when pure nitroglycerin was used for blasting. Amos had carried dynamite by hand many times, working in coal mines and on road crews. But as he filled Beulah’s burlap sack with explosives, he transferred them with the same care he’d first learned to take as a powder monkey at a quarry.
Yesterday morning he had made two trips from the cinder-block hut to this hollow spruce he’d discovered along the lakeshore. Then he’d covered his footprints, rearranged the boxes and slung the broken padlock far out across the reservoir where it sank without making much of a splash. Amos assumed the watchman didn’t come up the trail along the watershed often. He had found no tracks but his own. Now he hoped the power company hadn’t discovered thirty sticks of their dynamite missing, as he eased out what was stashed in the spruce. The burlap sack was damp but the explosives inside were waterproof. Besides the sack, there were two more bundles of dynamite knotted along a length of the detonating cord he’d brought out of Nebraska. He had made a second bundle from his undershirt and a third from a mildewed blanket. He had tied one end of the detonating cord to the head of a railroad spike found lying corroded with rust along the tracks, leaving some of the cord trailing as a fuse. He would drive the spike into the concrete of the dam with a ball-peen hammer he’d stolen from a blacksmith shed. The hammering might draw attention, but by then it would be nearly over. The chain of charges would explode almost in unison after he lit the fuse. In his trouser pocket he kept a small corked glass bottle of wooden matches. He had dipped the match heads in turpentine, which would keep them water resistant for months. But he’d sealed them in the bottle to be certain. The fuse was reinforced as well, coated in olive drab plastic. Even soaked it would detonate, as long as there was a dry end to ignite. Even underwater the wick would burn. Soon after sundown Amos could place the three bundles in one of the two rowboats tied to the dock near the dam if he chose. Though he’d made preparations he hadn’t decided to carry out his plan. There was light left in the sky. He would know in the haziness before nightfall, after bats had begun to dive around the dam’s tower.
For now, he leaned back against the spruce with the bundles gathered into his lap. His coat scratched and caught on the rough bark as he tried to get comfortable. He was tired after having spent the night before tossing in pain on the jail cell bunk, but he kept alert. He listened for the watchman, thinking because it was Sunday and because of the excitement with the child the dam workers might not appear. But before half an hour had elapsed Amos heard echoing voices and carefully replaced the dynamite bundles in the spruce hollow. Then he padded through the coppery needles to the edge of the evergreens and stood there without breaking cover, observing the watchman’s shadow on the sand, the silhouette of his hatted head moving up on the dam’s pedestrian sidewalk. When Amos heard calling voices again from somewhere distant he knew there was more than one worker patrolling the site. But as the dark deepened the voices subsided and Amos’s mind quieted with them. He went back through the woods underneath the low boughs to the spruce and settled once again to rest against its scratchy bark. He wasn’t worried about the watchman. He wasn’t worried about the sheriff of Yuneetah finding him again either.
Ellard Moody had been afraid of Amos since they were boys. His face was sheepish even as a child, his timid eyes downcast, always tagging after the Ledford sisters. Amos used to lure Silver Ledford away from Ellard just to watch the other boy’s ears turning red. But as often as Amos goaded Ellard into anger, he had never once struck back. Ellard would stand aside and let Amos steal his marbles away from him, his slingshots and nickels, without putting up much of a fight. Now Ellard had given Yuneetah up to the TVA out of the same weakness. Amos had watched unsurprised as his boyhood neighbor grew into the kind of man who took what the government gave him. The kind who licked boots and did as he was told. When Ellard pointed his revolver in the courthouse basement yesterday Amos had seen over the barrel of the gun the knowledge in the sheriff’s eyes. Ellard knew he was a failure. Amos could do more for Yuneetah in the next few minutes than Ellard had in twenty years as sheriff. He had traveled this whole country unseen, but that was by choice. He could make thousands look at him if he wanted.
This afternoon Ellard couldn’t face Amos long enough to even turn him loose. He’d sent Silver Ledford to do his bidding. She said nothing as she rattled the key in the lock but Amos knew what it meant that she was there. She swung the door open wide and came inside where it was dim although the sun was shining on the rest of Yuneetah. She placed his bindle at his feet and examined his face, made speechless by the state he was in. Amos had no urge to touch Silve
r as he’d done in the past. But hers was the only companionship he missed sometimes on the road. When he saw lava rocks in New Mexico unlike anything they had found in the caves of Yuneetah. When he saw redwood trees too tall for either of them to have climbed. Silver had aged but he always remembered her as an almost feral child standing at the edge of Beulah’s yard staring at him with open curiosity. He remembered her swimming in the river with minnows flashing, caught in the snare of her hair. He remembered her exploring the abandoned iron mine with him, climbing up the buried grooves of a track to what was once the superintendent’s house, the windows broken and the front door gone. Together they had crawled underneath the clustered blooms of an overgrown lilac bush planted at the porch corner, and Silver had asked Amos if they could stay there forever. Hiding out from the ones in town below who considered them nothing.
Silver had been wilder as a girl, before her sister Mary ran off and left her alone. Amos supposed some of what had drawn him to Gracie Dodson that morning in the cornfield was her resemblance to his only friend. The child looked like Mary except through the eyes. There he had seen the curiosity she inherited from her great-aunt Silver. He had seen the Cherokee in her, as he did in her mother. They were remnants, shadows, of those who first lived on this river and gave it a name. Gracie Dodson, one last child occupying the land that was taken from them all, standing in the corn with a drop or two of Indian blood coursing through the threads of her veins. About to be purged by the same government, unaware in her innocence that her birthright was being stolen. Amos usually took something to remember the children he met in his travels but he’d felt compelled to give Gracie Dodson something instead. Now he saw looking through the branches at the lake spreading closer by the hour to the loam she had claimed with the print of her toes that a toy wasn’t enough. If the child had been found drowned or not at all Amos might have reached another conclusion. But it came to him now that the act he was about to commit would join them. She wouldn’t be told her own story without hearing Amos’s. If he taught her something of defiance maybe she wouldn’t change. He knew the risk he was taking. As he knew that he couldn’t stop the dam builders. They had plans to inundate hundreds of thousands of valley acres. His act was no more than an obstacle to their end result, but he wasn’t meant to grow old anyway. If he died blowing up one of their dams, they’d have to admit he had once been alive.
It had become impossible to shift to a more comfortable position against the tree for the ache in his ribs so Amos roused himself. He looked up at the emerging moon, thinking there was enough light to see by and enough dark to hide him. With caution he retrieved the bundles and carried them wrapped in detonating cord back to the edge of the evergreen woods. He waited there for a while longer listening to the reservoir lapping at the sand, until there was no other movement or sound in all of Yuneetah it seemed. When he finally headed on to the shore his boots gritted in a way that reminded him of snow and the winters he’d spent here. His fingers frozen around the axe handle as he chopped Beulah’s wood, his face baking in the heat as they roasted chestnuts so that it felt about to crack open. The same way it felt now for a different reason, his bruised bones chafing at his knuckle-split skin. He cradled the bundles in his arms like a newborn as he went, pulling his hat brim down to hide the glint of his eye just in case, although it was filled with blood. His peacoat over his dingy shirt, his trousers and boots so grimy they had ceased to be any color, he moved like smoke toward the dock near the dam.
Amos would have to launch out here in the open and row all the way across to the seam where the concrete met the bluff since there was no shore on the opposite side of the lake, nothing where the poplars and cottonwoods ended but cairns of rubble. He knelt on the dock, so recently built it smelled of raw lumber, glancing up at the dam to be sure the highway was still deserted. He placed the bundles in the well between the rowboat seats, checking to see that the oars were in the oarlocks. That the handle of the ball-peen hammer was tucked in one of his deep coat pockets, though he could feel its ten-pound weight. He lowered himself into the bow of the boat and cut it loose from the tie-off pin with his hunting knife, then eased into the water and rowed out in the shadow of the dam. He drew as close to the concrete wall as he could get, its face on the lake side striated with lines where the reservoir had risen and receded in the rain. The dip of Amos’s oars was nearly silent as he went along the stretch of the spillway, closing in on the west abutment wall. When he reached the other end he would lower the explosive charges knotted along their tether into the reservoir where he thought the rock seam was faultiest, maneuvering the rowboat so that the bundles came to rest at intervals along the sloping wall. Then he would hammer in the railroad spike to anchor the explosives where he wanted them. After the fuse was lit he’d row as fast and far as he could, gaining as much distance as possible from the blast. He hoped for enough time to scramble up the bluff and watch as the underwater explosion separated the lake bottom from the dam’s foundation, the water retreating then rushing back toward the fractured seam, a torrent of silt and river roaring unleashed through the chasm.
Amos had rowed the boat out to the middle of the spillway, the bluff drawing closer with each stroke, when he heard the sound of movement somewhere behind him. His ears had grown attuned long ago to approaching footsteps, however distant. When he looked over his shoulder he saw the watchman standing on the dock, a tall figure in a hard hat and coveralls. Then the voice that had once come from up on the highway echoed out across the water, shattering the silent calm. “Halt where you are!” From forty yards away Amos couldn’t make out the features of the watchman’s face but he could see in the last indigo evening light the rifle the man was pointing. Perhaps the power company had discovered their dynamite missing after all. Perhaps they had been watching and waiting for Amos. In one swift motion he switched from the bow to the stern of the boat and began rowing backward toward the west abutment wall, still keeping as close to the dam’s spillway as he could manage, counting on the watchman not being skilled enough to shoot a moving target. “You better do what I told you, buddy!” the man shouted after him.
“You don’t want to pull that trigger,” Amos shouted back. “I’ve got a boatload of dynamite here.” But before the words were out of his mouth he heard the whine of a bullet passing close to his ear, ricocheting off the water between his boat and the dam. He saw another worker running down the grass embankment along the east abutment wall to join the first man on the dock. Amos realized that he wouldn’t make it to where the vulnerable seam met the bluff. Halfway there would have to be close enough. He was reaching into his trouser pocket for the corked glass bottle of matches when he heard another report. The next second he felt something like a great fist striking the left side of his body, fire ripping through his upper arm. The bottle flew from his hand as he fell backward. His head knocked against the boat and he caught a glimpse of the dam’s tower, its flags hanging two hundred feet above him. He took a stunned instant to collect his wits before scrabbling to his knees, the rowboat wobbling as he dragged up his struck arm. He looked ahead across the water and saw the two men on the dock, blurred through his tearing eye. His sleeve was soaked with blood but he felt no pain. Only dizziness.
The men would be rowing out in the other boat. He would have to think, as hard as it was to concentrate. He reached down between the seats of his own boat where the bundles of dynamite still rested, darker than the light wood of the bottom. As he fumbled them up by the detonating cord another bullet struck him in the chest on the right, near his shoulder. This time he flailed over the stern and splashed into the lake. His eye bulged in the swirling murk, his lungs already grasping to fill. He could see the bottom of the boat growing smaller as his coat, weighted with the ball-peen hammer, sank him fast. Beside the boat’s shadow on the surface of the lake, Amos noticed his hat bobbing. He had gotten years of use from the hat. He was seldom without it. Somehow the sight of it drifting away told him that he was dying. He had t
o use whatever time there was left to finish what he’d started. It took an almost inhuman act of will to wrestle out of his coat while sinking underwater. When he was finally shed of its weight he battled upward, swimming one-armed. He broke the surface with a gasp and hauled himself up by the side of the boat, nearly capsizing it, coughing bitter water. He couldn’t feel the wounds spurting warm blood inside his shirt. Balancing on the boat’s edge, too weak to hoist himself over inside, he reached down into the shallow well and managed with his arms to gather the three tethered bundles of dynamite from between the seats up under his chin. With his left hand he groped around the bottom until he located the bottle he’d dropped when the first bullet struck him. He ground his teeth as he pried at the cork then shook out a turpentine-treated matchstick. When he swiped the match against a patch of fairly dry-looking wood on the bow-side seat he had a moment of certainty that it wouldn’t flare alight. But with the other boat nearing, rocking the bloody waters with its oars, the match head burst into dancing flame.
As the second rowboat drew within yards of where Amos’s own still floated near the middle of the spillway with him clinging to its side, he touched the match to the long fuse trailing from the head of the railroad spike. He held the flame against the detonating cord with the strength draining out of him, sensing the watchman taking aim again.
When the blue flame began to travel down the wick Amos sucked in a breath that he would never exhale. He slipped back into the lake cradling the bundles of dynamite as the watchman’s bullet splintered the boat side not an inch above his skull. He had lost the hammer with his coat. He couldn’t attach the charges to the dam with the railroad spike. He’d have to sink them with his body, as close to its foundation as he could get before they exploded. He’d have to press the dynamite against the concrete with his chest. He didn’t need to swim much. The dam was a yard from the boat. He held out his injured arm until his hand bumped the wall.
