by Amy Greene
Silver didn’t slow down until she came to her niece’s split-rail fence. There she paused and looked into the cornstalks, the shucks holding the roasting ears swaddled. After decades the Walker farm still reminded Silver of how her sister chose a man and his land over her own flesh and blood. But as far as they’d drifted from one another, Silver had felt like she was dying herself when she learned Mary had a cancer of the womb. On the winter night Mary died Annie Clyde sent James up the mountain to fetch Silver. He knocked on her door holding a lantern. She followed him back down with a quilt bundled around her shoulders. Mary was talking out of her head by the time Silver got there. Silver sat all night with Annie Clyde in Mary’s freezing bedroom shivering as the fire burned out. But she left before it was over, refusing to watch Mary take her last breath. She didn’t attend the funeral at the Free Will Baptist church either. She went back up the mountain and stayed indoors the rest of that winter, skitters of ice ticking at the windowpanes. She spent those months grieving and trying to keep warm. She forgot her own birthday that year because Mary would grow no older. Now standing this close to where Mary died was like reliving it all. She couldn’t fathom going up to the house and knocking on the door.
She was lingering at the fence, putting off the long walk up the track, when something dropped from above and landed at her feet. Her first confused thought was of the blackbirds. She half expected to find a pile of feathers in the damp grass. But when she crouched with the cotton sack trailing and her dress around her thighs what she discovered was an ear of sweet corn. Gnawed down to a few yellow-white kernels, fat to bursting and shining like pearls in the dimness. Silver rose and whirled around. When she saw the man across the road her backbone straightened. He was hunkered on one knee atop the bank overlooking the cornfield picking his teeth with a matchstick, staring across the tassels at the roof of Annie Clyde’s house. After a second he pitched the matchstick and shifted his stare onto Silver. She was overcome with a feeling like spiders crawling up her arms. He stood then, trampling wildflowers underneath his boots, the wind lifting the heavy tail of his peacoat. At the same time, some heaviness lifted from Silver. She hadn’t thought of Amos in years, but a part of her must have been waiting for him all along. She stayed put as he strode down the bank and stopped before her, his bindle on his shoulder. Up close, he smelled like moss and fungus. “How are you making it, Silver?” he asked.
She opened her mouth but could find no fitting answer. She studied him in silence, too moved to speak. She realized she’d given him up for dead years ago. It was a feat that he had managed to live this long. But she shouldn’t have doubted him. Amos was the only one who always came back. He was a force as sure and dangerous as the river. She took him in, her eyes starting at his worn boot toes, moving up the ragged legs of his gabardine trousers, resting at last on his lean face. Something came over Silver then. Maybe it was the day she’d spent out of sorts. Or the months spent feeling alone like never before. She reached out to lay her palm against his black-whiskered cheek. “You still look like yourself,” she told him. With her thumb she grazed over the scarring of his eye socket, a pocket of fever-hot flesh. “How come you don’t change?”
Amos didn’t flinch, but his fingers raised between them and closed around her wrist. He guided her hand back to her side and it hung there, burning. “I never saw the use in change.”
Silver swallowed a catch in her throat. “I guess you saw things are different around here.”
“But not you.” His attention turned to the cotton sack strapped on her shoulder, the wooden handle of her corn knife poking out among the trumpet weed umbels. “Still an outlaw.”
Silver felt herself smiling, her dry lips splitting in places. She touched the cuts as if to take her smile back, but Amos returned it. She glanced down again at the cuffs of his trousers, laden with muck from the ditch. He must have eaten his dinner in the gully, as she had hidden herself less than an hour earlier. But Amos was probably avoiding the sheriff and not James Dodson. She could have told him Ellard Moody was occupied with the power company, but she figured it would be better not to mention the sheriff’s name given her history with both men. “We got the place to ourselves now,” she said. “Ain’t that what we wanted when we was little?”
Amos’s smile vanished. “Seems so. They couldn’t get rid of us so they left it to us.”
Silver didn’t like the shadow that crossed his brow, the gleam that had come into his eye. She decided to change the subject. “Beulah’s still around, though. You headed up the holler?”
“And your niece,” Amos said, ignoring her question. “She’s still here.”
She thought of him up on the bank, staring across the corn. “You’ve seen Annie Clyde?”
“Not much of her,” he said. “She ran me off.”
“What are you doing out here, Amos?”
“Wondering if I can beat the rain up to Beulah’s.”
“I doubt it. You better find someplace to get in.”
“You better, too.”
“I don’t mind the rain,” she said.
“No,” he said, his one eye meeting hers. “You never did.”
Silver felt the burn in her palm spreading. “You can come up the mountain with me.”
He looked over his shoulder, toward the weedy bank. “I ought to be getting along.”
“Will you come directly? I got a lard can full of blackberries going to waste up yonder.”
Amos paused, gazing at her in a way that would later trouble her dreams. “I don’t know this time, Silver,” he said. Then he tipped his hat and walked off. She watched him go with loose-limbed grace up the bank, his lithe back moving away from her. Once he was out of sight she turned and braced herself on the fence rail. Since childhood Amos had had a way of shaking Silver up, muddling her senses. She suspected he had the same effect on other women in the far-off places he passed through, at least those unafraid to look at him for long. Silver had never feared Amos as most others did. From the time he was a foundling the townspeople of Yuneetah had turned their heads when Beulah Kesterson brought him along on her peddling rounds. He wasn’t an ugly boy. His face was almost too perfect. Like a mask, white and smooth as porcelain. Unlike the rest of Yuneetah, Silver couldn’t get her fill of Amos’s looks, even after his eye was lost. When they were children playing in the hollow he used to smile at her like they had a secret, as though she was complicit in his mischief. Ellard Moody was a sweeter boy, braiding willow crowns for Silver’s head and giving her his best marbles. But she had wanted Amos.
When Mary started leaving Silver behind, Amos was her friend. He sought her company, tossing chips of shale at her window to call her out. She would go with him collecting rocks and periwinkles along the river, standing still together when fawns came out of the bluff oaks to drink. One night during a meteor shower they climbed to the mountaintop, stars streaking close enough to catch them on fire. He showed her all of the town’s hiding places. The caves where men escaped from the Home Guard during the Civil War. The foundation stones of a burned-down tavern where there had been a battle with many soldiers killed inside. One summer he led her across the Whitehall County line to an abandoned iron mine up in the hills. They went several miles down a cart trail used by mules to pull the ore then followed an old railbed until the woods thinned enough for them to see the tipple. They stood inside the shaft’s lower entrance, fifty feet high with chalked arrows marking the ore veins. Outside the upper shaft they watched the cool air of the mine turn to steam as it met the heat outside. They ventured a long way down the deep tunnels, curving out of sight into nothingness. They peered into the broken windows of the superintendent’s house, once painted white with cheerful blue trim, and Silver had wished to live there with Amos until she died. Never to go back to Yuneetah and her hateful grandmother.
As much as Silver loved her sister she felt kin to Amos in a way that went deeper than blood. Every few years since he left on a train he had come back to visit her.
She might get home from picking blackberries and find him leaning against her door with his hat brim shading his eye socket. He would greet her as though days and not years had passed. Then he’d ask for a bite to eat and she’d bring him whatever she had. When he was full he would get up without a word to see what needed fixing around her place. In winter he chopped firewood. In summer he hacked down the honeysuckle burying the side of her shack. When the work was done he might camp for a night in her woods. He would build his fire and she’d sit with him awhile. She would look at him through the rolling smoke and he would look back, mouth corners lifting. She’d remember other fires they built together as children in the caves where they hunted for mica, feldspar and quartz. Where they drew in the ash with their fingers and wrote their names on the craggy walls. She would meet his eye as she seldom did anyone else’s and a heat that had nothing to do with the fire would rise up from her belly. She tried to contain such feelings. It was hard on her, though. With his hat off and his hair black as oil tucked behind his ears he looked naked. She always went to him first, sometimes crawling, getting her hands and knees sooty. He wouldn’t touch her otherwise. She’d slip her dress off her shoulders, reach for his hand and put it where she wanted it. Then he would lay her down so close to the flames that cinders lit on her forehead, that the ends of her hair were singed. She might feel ashamed of herself once he was gone, and even more unwanted, but for some reason she had no pride when it came to Amos.
Though Silver had a kind of love for Amos she’d seen the other side of him. He hadn’t turned his cruelty on her, but she’d been witness to it. There was a thoughtful anger he harbored, patient like all else about him. The summer before he first left Yuneetah, Buck Shelton had accused him of stopping up his well with rocks. Shelton was a gambler and a drunkard with more than one enemy, but somehow he was convinced that Amos was the culprit. He probably figured he could thrash a young boy easier than he could a grown man. When Shelton came up the mountain to buy whiskey Silver had heard him cussing Amos, swearing to Plum that he was going to stripe the boy with a switch. After he sobered up he’d gone to the sheriff, but Beulah had slipped Amos out the side door when they came up the hollow looking for him. Silver had forgotten all about the incident until twenty-five years later, when Shelton’s back field caught fire. She had watched it burn from her ridge near the mountaintop, able to see miles of the valley when the trees were bare in autumn. As she stood there on the cool limestone ledge Amos appeared beside her, the only creature that could sneak up on her. She hadn’t seen him in months but he made no greeting. Just lingered at her side smoking a cigarette. “I never stopped up any well,” he said at last. He was a liar but Silver believed he was mostly honest with her. She looked at the ember of his cigarette tip and then back at the other smoke below, knowing without having to ask that he’d used the blazing sedge like a match as he walked out of the field.
Silver had taught herself not to think of Amos while he was away but when she was younger she used to wonder as she drifted to sleep what other fires he had set elsewhere. What other, worse trouble he might have caused. She supposed he should have been locked up long ago. But she couldn’t imagine him caged. Now she looked into the corn tossing behind the split-rail fence, unable to see the house with Annie Clyde and Gracie alone inside. She had known Amos for almost forty years but that didn’t mean she fully trusted him. This would be the time for him to settle any business left unfinished in Yuneetah. She couldn’t think of anything he might hold against the Dodsons but she wasn’t fool enough to believe he would leave her family alone on her account either. She rubbed a knuckle across her split lips, tasting blood and dirt. Then she heard the racket of James Dodson’s truck coming again and felt far more burdened than she had started out this morning. Before James appeared around the curve Silver hoisted herself over the fence into the field, pulling the sack across the top rail behind her. She receded into the corn as the Model A Ford approached, the plants shaking in the wind and the blackbirds scolding each other in the fencerow. She didn’t want to ever come out. She might stand there among the living stalks until she became one of them. Until the lake came at last to drown her with them.
Near one o’clock James Dodson had parked his truck alongside the road, less than a mile from home. He had set out early to Sevierville and been gone for hours. His back ached and his head pounded. What stopped him was the absence of Dale Hankins’s house from the field where it had stood for at least a century. As Dale told it, the Hankins patriarch had built the house himself. He dragged from the river on a sledge the same kind of rocks that could be found in cemeteries all over the valley marking graves of men, women and children the floods had swept away. Each time James ate Sunday dinner there it seemed he could smell brackish water in the walls. It wasn’t unusual to come upon houses torn down in Yuneetah these days, but Dale’s wasn’t being demolished. James thought he was seeing things. He rubbed his eyes and got out of the truck, knowing that he risked never getting it started again. He climbed stiff-legged up the bank and paused at the fence, seeing in his mind what used to be there. Dale’s homeplace standing alone in the flat pasture looking stranded, cattle grazing near the porch with nothing to keep them out of the yard. Dale had farmed this plot since he was a boy, a hundred acres of bottomland on the river. Now the livestock had gone to slaughter and the house had disappeared.
James ducked between the barbed strands of the fence and swished through the weeds, knee high without cows to crop them. He hadn’t gone far when he saw it. A rugged gash at least sixty feet wide and almost as deep cleaved the pasture in two. A chasm had opened up in Dale’s field. It must have swallowed the house whole. James stood still. He could almost hear the groan as he pictured it listing and then heaving into the abyss, joists splitting and floorboards popping, sending up a column of sand. He guessed the ground had sunk under the weight of standing rainwater. All over Yuneetah the land was eroding, groundwater causing depressions like bowls, soil over cavernous bedrock collapsing. The same caves underlay the Walker farm. James had noticed some of the fence posts slumping. They were lucky to be getting out of town unscathed. Everybody else was already gone. James hadn’t passed a soul on the way in, save for Annie Clyde’s aunt with a sack full of trumpet weed along the ditch, and Silver lived above the taking line. They were cutting it too close for James’s comfort, leaving just before the August 3 deadline the power company had given them, but he was thankful they were finally going. He moved as near to the edge as he dared and looked into the red clay pit piled with rubble. On top of the busted rock, warped tin collected rain. Glass shards reflected the sun behind a knot of clouds. At least Dale and his family were safe in Detroit. They had left Yuneetah months ago.
James had known since he was a child that the valley belonged to the river and the weather, no matter what a man did to tame it. Dale had once confided to James that he felt the same way. It could beat a man down, trying to farm land not fit for row crops, each season losing some of what little he was able to grow to the floods. “I’m ready to get out of here,” Dale told James when the TVA came to town. “Everybody’s squalling, but I ain’t sorry. I’ll take what I can get and run. All I care about is my people. That’s all that’s worth anything, when it comes down to it.” They both knew that working in a steel mill would be no easier than farming. They would trade hot sun for a furnace, cracked earth for molten metal, a cloud of grit for a film of black soot. Neither of them knew exactly what to expect, moving off to live in a northern city. But at least there would be a paycheck at the end of each week. Now finally Dale had escaped Yuneetah and tomorrow James would follow him out. They would be neighbors again in Michigan.
Dale and James were often mistaken for brothers, with their same reddish hair, but they hadn’t met until James married Annie Clyde. Dale was the kind of man who offered his help before a neighbor had to ask for it. Like after what happened to James’s horse. His uncle Wallace had given him Ranger, already old, a Tennessee walker with
a sorrel coat. In the months after James’s father died and he went to live at the parsonage beside the Methodist church, being with the horse had eased his mind as nothing else could. A tap of his booted heels would send Ranger trotting across creeks and pastureland, wind lifting James’s sweaty hair from his forehead. Some nights he slept in the barn under a blanket matted with hairs, lulled by the sound of the horse and the two plow mules snorting and pawing at their stalls. He’d dreamed back then of moving to Texas and working on a ranch breaking wild mustangs. He imagined how it would be to stand in a corral among their jostling necks, their muscled flanks, their high tails, the plumes of dust they kicked up settling over him. But as he grew into a man he saw how that couldn’t happen.
After James and Annie Clyde got married Ranger was the only thing he brought with him to her farm, the only thing worth having from his former life. When they were courting, each Saturday he’d ridden over the hills and down the back roads to visit her. One morning he galloped to the garden as she drudged in the loam on her knees. He dismounted and stood over her. She looked up but didn’t smile, as if he was bothering her in the middle of something important. He saw the lines around her hazel eyes that hours of toil in the sun had already hatched. “Get up,” he ordered and she frowned. “Come on, just for a little while.” She came to him at last, seeming doubtful even as he took hold of her hips and hoisted her up into the saddle. He climbed on behind her and walked Ranger up the hill where tobacco used to grow, past the pond yellowed with pollen and dimpled by the mouths of walleyed bass. They rode into the pines where there was only the clop of the horse’s hooves, the salty tang of Annie Clyde’s sweat. When she said, “I ought to be getting back,” James dug his heels into Ranger’s sides, urging him into a gallop again. Annie Clyde laughed then, carefree in a way that James seldom saw her.
Not long after Annie Clyde and James were married, Ranger stumbled in the rocky furrows of the farm’s lower field and broke his leg. On the morning it happened, Dale had come driving up to the fence to see if James and Annie Clyde wanted a ride to the market in Knoxville. He found James kneeling with his back to the field, unable to look at the horse. Ranger lay where he’d gone down, bloodshot eyes rolling. Dale asked what was wrong and James was ashamed to tell him. Dale looked toward the field, eyes squinted. He squirted tobacco juice between his teeth and said, “I lost mine the same way. The horse doctor put him down for me. I couldn’t do it myself.” He glanced at James. “I got my rifle in the truck.” James nodded once then dropped his eyes. When the shot came, he jumped as if the bullet had hit him instead. They hitched Ranger to Dale’s team and dragged him into the trees across the hayfield to a cave something like the sinkhole gaping now in Dale’s pasture, fifteen feet deep with roots coiling down its walls. James and Dale heaved the corpse into the hole then filled it up with a load of dirt. Afterward they drove the mules out of the woods and had a snort of moonshine. Ever since, they’d felt like kin.