by Amy Greene
Gracie climbed down from her chair and went out. James listened as she padded to the end of the hall where the washstand stood and scraped back the wooden stool she used to reach the enamel bowl. He felt a sinking. Without her the kitchen was closer and darker. After a spell of silence Annie Clyde got up and headed for the door to rake her scraps to the dog. James tried to go on eating but found that his appetite was gone. He couldn’t bear the strain anymore. He made up his mind to have it out with Annie Clyde at last. To say all that had gone unsaid for the past two years. They had to if they meant to start over in Michigan. But when Annie Clyde came inside and cleared the dishes from the table, he couldn’t bring himself to say anything at all. He stared at her, bent over the basin. He wished Gracie would come back but she had quit splashing at the washstand and gone off most likely to play with her dolls. James was alone with his wife. When the dishes were done he would have to say something. He watched her taking time with each cup and utensil, washing some of them twice. Scrubbing the bread pan after it was clean. Drying the plates one by one until they squeaked, putting him off. She seemed to know what was coming. He glanced up at the wall clock. It was almost three. His tailbone was sore on the cane seat. Finally she turned around with the dishrag in her fist, pale and drawn. James blinked. Nothing he’d planned to say came out. What did was the truth he guessed he had known.
“Annie Clyde,” he said. “You don’t mean to come with me. Do you?”
She didn’t answer, but her face told him enough.
His shoulders sagged. “I was wrong the other night.”
“James,” she said.
“You love Gracie better than life.”
“Please hush.”
“Why don’t you love me, though?”
She looked pained. “I do.”
“Where do you aim to go?”
“I’m staying here.”
“There ain’t no staying here.”
“We’ll live in Whitehall County.”
“And do what?”
“I could farm a few acres.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes. We’ll be all right.”
His hands clenched on the table. “You and Gracie.”
She looked at him again without speaking.
“You can’t have my little girl, Annie Clyde.”
She shook her head. “No. That’s not what I meant.”
“She’s as much mine as she is yours.”
Annie Clyde paused, twisting the dishrag. “Then stay with us.”
James fell silent. He rubbed his forehead. “You know I’d do anything for you and Gracie. But I can’t—” Before he could go on the storm that had been brewing all day broke loose, barraging the tin roof with rain. They both looked up, startled. Annie Clyde had dropped the dishrag. As she stooped to grab it her eyes settled on a fallen lump of Gracie’s apple pie.
“Just come with me,” James was saying. “I ain’t never begged you for nothing before.”
Annie Clyde glanced around the kitchen, not seeming to see him anymore. She started for the doorway but James blocked her path. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Don’t ignore me, Annie Clyde. I’ve had enough of that.” He saw the color rising in her cheeks. She pushed past him and he followed her into the hall. She looked toward the washstand, at the spilled water on the floor before it. She turned and went to the front room, rivulets pouring down the windows.
“Where’s Gracie?” she asked, almost to herself, lifting the curtains that Gracie liked to hide behind sometimes. She stood in the middle of the shadowed room, seeming to forget James was there. She went to the bottom of the stairs and called Gracie’s name, her voice ringing in the emptiness. When she started up James took her arm. She whirled on him. “Let me go,” she said.
He went up to the bedroom close on her heels. “I ain’t done talking to you,” he said. She knelt to look under the maple bed as if she hadn’t heard him, tossing the hem of their quilt out of her way. He had thought he knew what she was doing, avoiding the argument they should have had a long time ago. But then she raised up and looked him in the eye. Stormy light from the window shone on her face and the cabbage roses of the wallpaper. She was white, now, with fear.
“Lord, Annie Clyde,” James said. “What’s got into you?” She pushed past him again and stumbled down the stairs. “Slow down,” he hollered after her. “Before you break your neck. She can’t be too far.” But he felt the first inkling of worry himself. If Gracie had gone outside, she was caught in the storm. He followed Annie Clyde back through the front room and out the door. He paused on the porch to shove his feet into his boots, not bothering to tie them, then hurried to catch up with her. Together they moved through the yard, through the sheeting rain that was plastering their hair to their skulls, running into their mouths and filling their ears. When there was no sign of Gracie they ran around the side of the house, puddles splashing up their legs. As they reached the elm shading the barn lot Annie Clyde staggered to a stop. The chain was still wrapped around the base of the trunk but Rusty was gone. She turned to James with wide eyes. He knew what she was thinking. Someone had let the dog loose. Gracie couldn’t unfasten the hasp on the chain by herself. They ran on to the barn where Gracie liked to play sometimes and stood panting in the opening, water pouring from the eaves. James was certain she would be there. There had been moments of panic before when she was only hiding from them in the box wagon or the corncrib. But there was nothing in the barn besides the smell of old saddle leather.
After that, without even having to speak, Annie Clyde and James split up. She headed across the hayfield while he went back around the side of the house. He whistled for Rusty under the porch, checked the privy and the hog pen. Everywhere he looked, he expected to find Gracie. He couldn’t grasp what was happening. Only minutes ago he had been in the kitchen pleading with his wife. He was thinking how foolish he would feel later, after Gracie came out of her hiding place, when Annie Clyde called his name. It was a strangled scream, loud enough to be heard over the downpour. James ran out to the hayfield, his breath coming in wheezing huffs. Through the weeds he saw the dark top of Annie Clyde’s hair. She was on her knees under the apple tree. He was sure then that Gracie had fallen out of the swing and hit her head. He was sure that he would find Annie Clyde kneeling over their little girl. He was prepared to gather Gracie into his arms and run with her to the truck, praying the road to the doctor’s office in Whitehall County would be passable. But when he reached the tree Annie Clyde hovered over nothing it seemed, on her hands and knees among the puddles under the lowest boughs, where there wasn’t enough light for grass to grow. “What?” James shouted at her. “What is it?” She turned her face up to him, drenched hair in strings, shuddering in the cold rain. “Amos,” she said. “What are you talking about?” he asked, sinking down beside her. Then he saw it. There in the mud, surrounded by leaves and filled with water, was a single long footprint.
At four o’clock on the afternoon Gracie Dodson went missing, Beulah Kesterson was eating a biscuit smeared with apple butter, whitish light falling across the flowered tablecloth under the window. She dreaded getting up to wash her dinner dishes. There had been enough rain that toadstools sprouted between the floorboards. The dampness pained her joints. In recent years her fingers had grown too crooked to tat the lace she used to sell. Few bought the medicines she made either, since the druggist had come to town and a doctor had set up an office right across the county line. With no neighbors left she didn’t have the offerings they brought her in return for reading the bones. She was growing too feeble to hunt and trap, even to gather morels. The savings once pinned to the lining of her nightgown had dwindled to nothing. She didn’t know how she was going to survive whatever days she had left, especially if she lived to see another winter. This high in the mountains she was snowbound for months at a time, icicles hanging from the eaves like prison bars. Her days seemed endless then in the one room of her cabin, walls papered with pages of newsprint to keep ou
t the cold. Often her fingers would travel to the bones hung around her neck and trace their familiar shapes inside the soft brown pouch, worn thin but somehow not worn through. They called on her to convene with them, to hear out the sorrows they had to tell.
Beulah had come to depend on the weight of the bones, in spite of the bothersome things they showed her. Worse than what formed in them was what she had seen with her first sight and not her second. The stillborn babies she had caught, the dead and dying she had been begged to save. One winter after the banks closed in 1929 a woman had brought her child bowlegged and bloat-bellied seeking some elixir to cure him. She was the wife of a tenant farmer and had seven more children in similar shape but the youngest was the worst off, too listless to play anymore. Beulah told the woman that the only cure for the child was food. She gave him a cup of goat’s milk and gave the woman some of her savings to see about buying a shoat. After the first thaw she went down to the woman’s tar-paper shack in the valley. The woman showed her the child’s grave under a chokecherry tree, the only thing growing green on their plot of rented land.
It had been given to Beulah to know and she had done her duty. When she died, she wanted the Lord to say well done. But she hoped for a little more time. As many burdensome things as she had witnessed, there had been many more things of beauty. She would like to sit again in her yard watching the leaves turn colors. She would like to raise a few more goats. She would like to eat more apple butter. She would like to see another Easter flower pushing up from the early springtime ground. She would like to wipe the afterbirth from one more living baby.
It was the rain and lack of sleep that turned her thoughts woeful. When her aching joints wouldn’t let her lie still she sometimes went wandering in the dark. Last night she’d walked under the dripping limbs of the hollow woods all the way to Hardin Bluff School, moldering now with its benches overturned, its blackboard coming unanchored from the wall. The schoolhouse was built high out of reach after the first one washed down the river in the flood of 1904. Before it was closed, students came up from their houses in the valley or walked from the narrow hillsides their fathers farmed until they got tired of hauling their corn down the ridges to market and moved off to work at the rayon plant in Whitehall County. Some who graduated from Hardin Bluff School had left town and gone on to make names for themselves. In Nashville there was a state senator growing old in a mansion grander than anything he must have imagined while staring out the schoolhouse window. There was a well-known baseball player who was said to have carved his initials into one of the schoolroom benches. Most of the rest settled in Yuneetah but others died in wars and bar fights and logging accidents. Since this past spring when the last class was dismissed, the schoolhouse had stood empty. Much like seven years ago, when half the town headed north. Back then Beulah could have walked down the road and seen near as many deserted homesteads as she did today. But when the factories started closing up there they came back, and the land had deteriorated even more after those who couldn’t make it in the cities returned to their hillsides to farm again. Yuneetah had been declining for a long time. These days Beulah wondered what would finish it off first, the power company or the weather.
According to Beulah’s mother, Yuneetah had gone downhill farther back. She claimed this part of the country never recovered from the Civil War. The men of these mountains were as likely to fight on the Union side as the Confederate since they couldn’t afford to own slaves. When the war was over they were even poorer. She said that’s why there were so many believers around here. God was all they had left in the end. But before the Civil War, a clan of Beulah’s kin descended from those who came across the ocean had lodged between the wooded ridges of the mountains surrounding the farmland below, a wedge-shaped notch barely flat enough to build on, isolated from the rest of Yuneetah by two sheer rock walls. The bottomland had been claimed by the English, leaving the latecomers and the poor to settle the highlands. They trapped for hides and shot deer for venison and raised cabins smelling of raw timber. Sometimes when Beulah sat in her yard it seemed she could scent the smoke of their hearth fires, could hear the notes of their ballads about lovers left on distant shores. After the war, the first of them had gone down to the valley as a child bride and married a farmer. Soon others had moved closer to the road, a dirt trail weaving its way between the hills. Over the decades their abandoned barns and shacks had fallen in and lay decomposing under piles of mossy shingles. Beulah often came upon the ruins on her walks, the creeper-hung chimneys of their forgotten homesteads. They had gone and built sturdier houses below, living as close to the road as they could get. Before they blamed all their hardship on the mountain’s rockiness, until they came down to the valley and saw the floods. That’s when they first started moving out of town, into the big cities and up into the north.
By the time Beulah was born, most of her kin were gone from the hollow, besides a handful of distant cousins. Beulah and her mother had lived alone in the cabin. Her mother was a midwife and Beulah’s first memory was of being strapped to her back on the way to a birthing, rocked to sleep by the gait of their white jenny mule. After the mule died of old age Beulah and her mother walked everywhere. They had the blacksmith to build them a cart for peddling the medicines they made. When Beulah’s feet got sore, she rode in the cart. Sometimes they slept in open fields under the moon. When they got tired of traveling they put the cart away for a while and took up lace tatting, connecting knots and loops into doilies, dress collars and curtains. Beulah still had her mother’s shuttle, an oval piece of ivory with a hook on one end. They spent many peaceful years together gardening, canning and doing the wash. Then one morning without warning, Beulah found her mother lying under the sassafras tree near the cabin. She must have been gathering the bark and leaves she used to soothe laboring women. Her eyes were not closed but Beulah could tell they saw nothing, at least in this world. She knelt to touch the tasseled end of her mother’s long braid to her lips. Then she bent to kiss her mother’s toes, remembering them sunk in garden soil and spread in riverbank silt as she cast her seining net.
Now Beulah was alone in the hollow besides Silver Ledford who seldom came down from her shack near the mountaintop and Sheriff Ellard Moody who sometimes came back home to sleep in the loft of the frame house where he grew up. As the town emptied little by little, she had seen more and more of the power company men. Last summer she had walked down the hollow to bring the Willets a bottle of the liniment she made for arthritis and met one of the men headed back to his car dressed in a pin-striped suit. His eyes had passed over Beulah like she was nothing. When she got to the porch the Willets had been sitting there crying. She’d asked what was wrong and Bud couldn’t talk, looking bewildered with his swollen hands hanging between his knees. “I tried to tell him we can’t go yet,” Fay had said. “I keep dreaming about crossing the river, Beulah. You know as well as I do what that means. If one of us is fixing to pass on, I want it to be in our own house.” Fay had dabbed at her eyes, struggling to get the rest of it out. “He said that ain’t nothing but superstition. Said it’s unchristian.” Beulah had been holding her temper, but when she heard that word she tried to catch up with the power company man. She had gone halfway down the track waving her walking stick. She’d wanted to ask him who he thought he was, talking to the Willets that way. She’d wanted to ask him what he knew about the state of their souls. He had a job to do but passing judgment wasn’t part of his business in Yuneetah. Unchristian was the worst thing he could have called Bud and Fay. “I’ll guarantee they know the Lord a whole lot better than you do, feller!” she had shouted toward the road, even though the man was gone.
Beulah had tried to be tolerant of these outsiders, reasoning that they had different ideas about religion in the cities some of them came from. They didn’t understand what faith meant in Yuneetah. Without something bigger than themselves to lean on, the people might not survive their losses. Bud and Fay Willet turned to the land rather than
books to decipher the Lord’s plans for them. They couldn’t read the Bible but they could read signs and omens. They knew how to take the burn out of fire and plant by the phases of the moon. They ate black-eyed peas on New Year’s Eve and carried buckeyes in their pockets to ward off evil. Their ancestors had brought such teachings across the water alongside the Scriptures. It was how they were raised and they’d never been called on to defend themselves or their ways before the dam was built. If Beulah was fifty years younger she might have tried to comfort Bud and Fay, but being their age she knew there was nothing she could say. It was the old she felt for most. The river had formed them, as sure as it had the land. The young might be able to take other shapes but not her or the Willets. They were already mapped and carved out. There was no more give to them, worn stiff as hanks of rawhide. It might be hard to love a place that had used them up, but it was what they knew. They set even greater store by signs and omens with everything familiar to them falling away.
Beulah figured the power company man would have called her the same thing as he did the Willets. But she considered her gift of discernment divine and herself as Christian as anybody else, although she was born at a time when Yuneetah was still mostly unchurched. The first to settle here wanted nothing more to do with formal rites or cathedrals. They adhered to the Gospel but worshipped on the bank with their feet steeped in the river. When the Free Will Baptists put up a church house it was small and plain besides an oaken pulpit that had come across from Ireland on a boat, ornately carved with scrolls and garlands. Most Sundays the congregants kept the church doors propped open with rocks and the windows propped open with branches fallen from the close trees. The pianist played by ear and they knew the hymns by rote. Wasps would drift in sometimes. Butterflies would flutter through the sanctuary, mourning doves would coo in the rafters. The church was near enough to the river that Beulah could hear it flowing underneath the preacher’s sermon. She sat on the back row for years with the sun warming her face. Then the congregation decided they needed a roomier place to meet with a spire and stained-glass windows. Beulah knew that times and people changed, even in Yuneetah. She didn’t protest but she hated to see the old building torn down. She wished they had saved at least a few relics, like the pulpit she used to admire during preaching, thinking about the hands that had carved it and the land it had come from. But anything scarred and worm-eaten the congregation cast out.