by Amy Greene
She headed back to the kitchen door, tripping up the stoop. Gracie was still holding the tin top the drifter had given her. Annie Clyde’s stomach turned at the sight of it, but there was no time to throw it away. She swung Gracie onto her hip again and went running with her, out past the elm and the charred trash barrels standing amid puddles floating with cinders, inside them heaps of ash wetted to gray lumps from the storms. As she cut through the blowing hayfield weeds the blackbirds lifted off together in a train the way they had landed. Rusty gave chase, tracking the rash they made across the overcast sky. By the time Annie Clyde and Gracie reached the apple tree Rusty had disappeared into the woods at the end of the field. She put Gracie down among the fallen fruits, pecked and streaked with droppings. She whistled and Gracie shouted for Rusty but he wouldn’t come, not even to the one he loved most.
Annie Clyde didn’t like the thought of taking Gracie back to the house without the dog around to bark. She couldn’t stop seeing Amos’s one dead eye. He used to come into the yard when she was a girl, asking for water and apples. Over the last decade many had knocked on their door looking for work or food. When Annie Clyde’s mother was alive she gave what she could spare, even to Amos, but she had mistrusted him. Annie Clyde didn’t trust him either. But she couldn’t deny what he’d said in the cornfield. The power company didn’t care about her or Gracie. Her neighbors didn’t understand why she wouldn’t move. She wanted to tell them, but she was too used to keeping to herself. The farm was part of her. She knew the lay of its land like her tongue knew the back of her teeth. On the east side of the house was the field her father had planted with alfalfa and the slope at the verge of the hollow where he’d grown tobacco. On the west was another field where he’d sown wheat and beyond that a stand of pine timber. Below the house were several roadside acres of corn and behind it this hayfield at the foot of the mountain with this apple tree rooted in the weeds. As a child she’d walked among the stobs of the tobacco field after the harvest, touching the teepees the bundled stalks made. She’d stood in the shed under curing leaves, hiding in shadows the same brownish color the wrinkled tobacco was turning. She would pry up flat limestone rocks that her father said were made from the beds of evaporated seas, marked with the fossils of ancient mollusks, and bang them together to hear their echoes. Her father was called Clyde and after three stillborn babies, his wife vowed to give the next one his name whether it was a son or not. Losing the farm would be like losing him all over again.
Now her father’s forty acres were quiet aside from the wind stirring the ropes of the swing hanging from one of the apple tree’s crooked branches. Gracie stood with yellow and green leaves fluttering down around her. She lifted her toe to scratch her ankle and Annie Clyde wondered if she would be able to tell her child someday. About the farm and the swing and how she looked in this moment, wearing the light blue dress with pink rosebuds that Annie Clyde had sewed for her. How she looked out from under her matted eyelashes with her nose running some. She seldom cried and Annie Clyde wondered if she might have bitten her tongue on their way through the hayfield. She knelt and wiped at Gracie’s upper lip. “Where does it hurt?” she asked.
After thinking for a second Gracie pointed to her knee. “Right here.”
Annie Clyde tried to smile. “That’s a scab. You got shook up, is all.” She paused to wave the gnats out of Gracie’s face, to make sure her voice wouldn’t break. “Did that man scare you?”
Gracie brought her thumb toward her mouth and Annie Clyde tugged it away. Gracie raised the top to show it without answering, the tarnished knob glinting. “Look,” she said.
“Can I have it?” Annie Clyde asked. When she reached for it, Gracie drew it closer.
They studied each other’s faces. “Rusty bit him,” Gracie said.
“Yes,” Annie Clyde said. “But he’s gone now.”
“Where did he go?”
Annie Clyde looked away, down at the fruit on the ground. “You want an apple?”
Gracie nodded, eyes wet.
“Let’s find you a good one.”
Annie Clyde pretended to sort through the fruit but she was rattled. Gracie squatted with her dress hem soaking up puddles, holding the top aloft in one hand. Annie Clyde was still trying to calm herself when she heard a loud crack from the woods at the end of the hayfield. She jumped up and turned in that direction, listening. Her first thought was not of the dog out there stalking blackbirds, but of Amos out there somehow spying on them. Within seconds another crack came, like a lightning strike. She waited with her eyes fixed on the trees for thunder. Then there was a pop and another, a string of them picking up speed. After that came a whoosh and a roaring crash. The treetops shivered, disturbed as though something monstrous had passed among them. In the wake of that sound there was nothing but the buffeting wind, even Gracie awed to silence. As Annie Clyde stared at the woods, she felt Gracie’s warm fingers creeping into her own. Annie Clyde looked down into her daughter’s upturned face. “We’re all right,” she said. “It was just another tree falling.” Gracie didn’t say anything back but Annie Clyde knew. They both needed the dog around to ease their minds. She decided it wouldn’t hurt to walk a piece into the woods. Sometimes the sky brooded all day before it opened up on Yuneetah. Sometimes the wind blew like this for hours before the first drops fell like slugs. Her father would have said the dam had disturbed the natural order of things. After listening another moment for thunder Annie Clyde and Gracie started across the hayfield, parting the coarse weeds with their legs.
At the end of the field they entered the shade, Annie Clyde watching the ferny ground for copperheads. In this dampness everything was growing. Liverwort sprouted on wet rocks, jewelweed poked up through brushwood, lichens wreathed south-facing trunks like chains of greenish ears. They called Rusty’s name as they went, the blackbirds he had been chasing settled in the branches overhead. Farther in they came to the thicket where Annie Clyde and James chopped wood, the standing rainwater around the stumps swirling with chips of sawdust. The trees there were so tall it made her dizzy to look up at their swaying tips. At the edge of the thicket, where freshets drained down from the ledges making gullies between the bases of the trunks, they discovered what had fallen. There was an old beech lying at the foot of the mountain.
Annie Clyde had seen more than one tree uprooted in all this foul weather. She had heard the rain every way that it fell, hard like drumming fingers, in sheets like a long sigh, in spates like pebbles tossed at the windows. When she crossed the road and went up the bank, she could see water glinting between the tree stumps. The river had already become a lake. As she watched it seemed to lie stagnant, but maybe it was biding its time until dark. Then it would move again. She could almost hear it seeking whatever there was outside its banks, searching fingers moving over gnarled root and scaly stump bark. Leaking between trunks and lapping at grasses, mussels clicking against each other and the scoured rocks of the shoals. She dreamed of it coming for her, black and rippling. She woke afraid it would be pooled around the porch steps, the rains bringing it closer and closer. Since spring a scent had been lingering in the eastern part of town where the woods and pastures were halved by the river. She smelled it in the house sometimes, algae and carp and decayed wood from long-ago boats run aground. When she opened her door it slipped in as if to scout her home before the lake came to fill her chimney flue with the opposite of fire.
It was the biggest trees that fell in all the wind and rain, the oaks and beeches and hickories, because of their shallow roots. It was harder for them to find purchase in Yuneetah’s soil, thin clay with limestone caves underneath. She guessed it was over four years ago that James had buried his horse in a deep cave back here and filled in the hole. A Tennessee walker named Ranger. Now the beech trunk lay over the horse’s grave as if to mark it. Just when she was about to whistle for the dog again, Annie Clyde heard the snap of a twig beneath the wind. She froze in her tracks, squeezing Gracie’s sweaty hand. “
Rusty?” she called into the thicket across the fallen tree. There was a thrashing in the underbrush and she shouted again. “Rusty! Here, boy!” When a low shape shot out of the shadows around the beech’s root ball Annie Clyde stopped breathing, although she knew it was only the dog minding her at last. Rusty loped to Gracie’s side with his tail wagging, snout caked with clay the color of his coat. “Bad dog,” Gracie told him as he licked her chin. Annie Clyde remembered Gracie crouched in the dirt of Dale Hankins’s barn after his hound had whelped, the pup with a white patch on its chest tottering over to sniff her fingers. From the day Gracie started walking Rusty followed her everywhere, though James was the one who wanted him for a hunting dog and gave him his name. Annie Clyde didn’t know how to tell Gracie they’d have to leave him behind for a while if they moved.
Rusty must have lost interest in the blackbirds after the beech tree came crashing down. Annie Clyde could see where he had already dug around its trunk. Ferns crushed in the fall were disarranged, red clay turned. Annie Clyde could see, too, a white bone in the rich humus. Much like the trees, bones were being dislodged across the valley by weather and water, swept along as the lake moved toward the roads. Most of the dead had been exhumed and reinterred elsewhere, their surnames chalked on the lids of pine boxes as they rode in hearses to strange churchyards. But some had been left alone, those whose kin chose not to disturb them or victims whose grave sites were unknown. Those she imagined the overflow released from secret vaults of mud and crag and riverside root. Femurs sailing on eddies, skulls rising toward the surface seeking light after centuries buried, the unleashed river rushing in to fill burrows and trenches like mouths open to drink its alluvial silt. But this bone unearthed by the rain or uprooted by the fallen tree wasn’t human. It belonged to James’s horse. She used to ride double with her husband on Ranger’s back, his arms loose around her waist and holding the reins in her lap. He would rest his chin on her shoulder or she would lean her head against his chest as they ducked under bowers of twilit leaves in the cool of the evenings, forgetting whatever work they’d left undone.
As Annie Clyde approached the horse’s grave for a closer look the beech’s limbs creaked. Its leaves twitched and shifted. Gracie let go of Annie Clyde’s hand to feel the silvered scabs of the bark, the scars and bumps. Annie Clyde opened her mouth to say they’d better get on to the house but the words stuck in her throat. She found that she was shaking. Her legs were weak. This long morning had been too much for her. She had to get her breath. The rain wouldn’t harm them if it came. Some hot afternoons they ran out of the house and played in the chilly showers. “Let me see that,” she said, reaching for the tin top again. Gracie resisted for only a second this time before giving it over. Annie Clyde slipped it into her dress pocket like something poisonous. Then she tucked her hands under Gracie’s arms and lifted her onto the beech’s back. As Gracie sat swinging her feet Annie Clyde rested against the end of the trunk. Rusty sniffed at the root ball, mounded with orange mud and green sod like a thatched roof for the hut the bowing roots made. They looked almost alive, a tortured mass of petrified legs, twined arms and hooked fingers, overhung with a finer layer of filaments like the stringy hair of a woman caught out in the rain.
If they were staying, James would have come with his saw when he got home and cut the fallen beech into logs. Last year he’d worked with the reservoir clearance gangs stripping the banks of timber to make navigation channels for boats and to keep the penstock in the dam from getting clogged with brush. The power company said the people could take home the good logs but most had no means of carrying them so they ended up being burned. For weeks the smoke was everywhere, Gracie’s eyes tearing as she played in the yard. James said it would be crazy to turn down any kind of work and she couldn’t dispute him. But it had felt like a betrayal to her.
There were many things she and James had done and said to hurt one another since the power company came to town, but the worst for her had been about a month ago. He had walked up to the porch where she was snapping beans and told her, “The Hankinses’ back pasture’s flooded. That’s right across the hill. Gracie’s liable to take off and be in that lake before you know it.” He was always finding ways to tell her they should leave without saying it outright. Most of the time he was careful with her, perhaps feeling guilty for not standing with his wife against the government, in spite of his own convictions. Not wanting to argue, she’d gone back to her beans. When she didn’t respond he’d shaken his head. “I don’t know,” he’d said. “Sometimes I believe you love this place more than you do me or her either one.” She was stunned by how little he understood her. She loved the farm, but that wasn’t why she fought the power company. From the time she realized she was expecting, she had dreamed of her child roaming the fields in summer. She knew the trees she wanted her child to climb, the flowers she wanted her child to name, the fruits she wanted her child to taste. But her husband had still been talking, and she’d lifted her eyes to meet his as he told her about the job in Michigan. He’d said their nearest neighbor Dale Hankins’s brother was a foreman at a steel mill. He had offered to hire Dale and James both.
Since then she had watched James making plans to settle them up north, too wounded to talk to him about it much. She had let him rent a house in Detroit and take off their furniture without stopping him, not knowing what she wanted herself. She had thought in the beginning she would never give up the farm. She had watched the power company mapping the reservoir area and waited for them to send her one of the field appraisers. When he came in his suit and striped vest, wingtip shoes and a tack gleaming in his tie, she sent him right back to them. The man said he was offering her fair market price but she asked how much more he was going to give her for the appreciation of the land and the trouble it would cause her to move. She told him to figure out how much all of that was worth and come back. The last time he returned, she listened in silence as he explained how things worked. He said his report went before a committee of county agents that knew the value of land in Yuneetah. He hadn’t come up with the price and she ought not to blame him if she didn’t like it. When she suggested he should tell his committee that she wasn’t going anywhere until the water floated her out, he threatened her with condemnation proceedings. After the appraiser left she told James she was going to make them send a marshal with a court order. She was going to appeal her case to the district court and the circuit court of appeals if it came to that. She had seen how fed up her husband was then, how ready to move on, maybe with or without her. James said, “You can’t stand against a flood, Annie Clyde.” He was right, but she’d wanted at least to put the power company out some.
In the end, she had worn down like the rest of the town. There was a dead tiredness that sometimes a person had to obey and lately it had come over her. She went to bed some nights without washing her feet. She knew the land would be taken. Her labors were useless. She’d seen the homes of her neighbors knocked down and burned. She had seen the burial mounds on the riverbank, made by Indians that had lived in caves along the water longer ago than the Cherokees, destroyed by archeologists from Knoxville and the workers they’d hired to do the digging. The largest had been over thirty feet tall with trees growing up its sides, their hoary branches like a covering of cobwebs in winter. They had found among the tools and pottery shards counters used for a game like checkers. She heard the diggers weren’t careful enough and some of the bones were broken, splintered to pieces. Flakes so fine they had returned to dust, particles whirling among the water bugs. Washed away with all those other lost remains.
She guessed part of her hadn’t believed August would ever come, but now it was upon her. She couldn’t fathom what it would be like in Michigan. She pictured a house on a square of balding grass near a curb, the dirty color of winter slush. James going off in the early mornings to a factory where he would work behind a welder’s mask, sucking in and blowing out the suffocating heat of his own breath, leaving her and Gracie alon
e. She hadn’t even told Gracie they were leaving. She didn’t know how to explain it to a three-year-old. But these last few days she’d been thinking, wondering if she could make it farming on her own. Forty acres was too much, but ten she might be able to manage. Maybe she should have taken the house in Whitehall County the relocation man had offered to show her, less than twelve miles away. She’d felt it didn’t matter how close she lived to her farm. It would still be underwater. James had accused her of being stubborn and selfish but she listened to him more than he thought. He said change was coming whether she wanted it or not. Neither of them had grown up with much, but these past several years were the leanest they’d ever known. He said she ought to be thankful that Gracie might have it easier someday. He said farming killed their parents. But at least the years Mary and Clyde Walker had were spent where they belonged, on their own land. Annie Clyde couldn’t bear to think of Gracie not knowing the closeness to God she had found in this valley. For the first time since Gracie’s birth, Annie Clyde wasn’t sure what was best for her child.