by Amy Greene
Once the grander church was built Beulah kept at home on Sundays. It was too suffocating without the doors and windows open. Stained glass couldn’t be raised to let in butterflies. Beulah had a fine time talking to Jesus standing in front of her cabin looking into the woods anyway. She didn’t have to sit in a hot church house to be a Christian, and she could read enough to interpret the Scriptures for herself. Not that she was against the churches. They brought people together, gave them somewhere to go for fellowship on Sunday mornings away from the fields and factories. The people of Yuneetah were losing more than their property. They relied on each other. If a house was taken by a flood they rebuilt it. If a man got sick they worked his crops. If he died they rang the death bell and the whole town came to see what needed doing. It hurt them to part not knowing when or if they’d meet again. But grieved as they were, most had no bitterness about leaving. They believed they were doing it for their country, the same reason they signed up to fight in wars. It pained Beulah to see them going but she understood. She was eighty-five years old. Through the generations she had witnessed it again and again. What remained in the end was the rocks and the trees, the water running its course. To watch from her lonesome cabin made an ache in her chest, but there was just as much hope in it. Yuneetah might be dying out but those leaving on the road would surely take some of it along to the new places they settled. Even the river would go with them in the jars of water they took to pour in their radiators and dampen their parched throats. All the electric lights in the world couldn’t blind them enough to forget what they brought out and passed along to the babies she wouldn’t birth. Wherever they ended up, they’d still hear Long Man rushing in their sleep.
Beulah realized she’d been dozing only when she started awake again. She decided to allow herself a nap before clearing the dishes. Last night when she returned from her walk, her rest had been uneasy. She had dreamed all night of crossing the river. She hoped Fay Willet was wrong about what such dreaming meant. She hoped too as she got up from the table that the weather and her full stomach would lull her into an easier sleep this afternoon. But she halted halfway out of her chair. As much as she wanted to go to bed, she found herself unable to rise. That’s how it came over her sometimes, the knowing her mother claimed she was born with. It might be nothing more than a feeling that she shouldn’t lie down. Somehow she knew to be still and wait. She sat for several minutes looking at the door, half drowsing. When the sound came at last it was so faint that she wouldn’t have heard it if she hadn’t been listening. There were voices approaching the cabin and her fingers went to the pouch of bones around her neck. She tilted her head as the cries came closer and closer, trying to make out whose name they were calling. When a hammering finally came at the door her urge was to pretend she wasn’t home. She wanted nothing more than to climb into her bed and burrow under the blanket, but she brushed the biscuit crumbs from her dress front and went to open it. Annie Clyde Dodson was standing on the steps. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks and forehead, her face blanched white. Her husband James stood behind her looking shell-shocked, both of them huddled under the eave.
“Where is he?” Annie Clyde blurted out, her eyes glowing lamps in their sockets.
Beulah blinked behind her glasses. “Who do you mean?”
“Your boy, Amos,” James answered for his wife.
Beulah gaped at them, trying to think. She should have invited them to come inside but somehow she was afraid for them to cross her threshold, bringing the smell of the rain with them, tracking in leaves, slopping their trouble on her floor. She looked down at Annie Clyde’s mucky feet on the limestone slabs of the steps and felt ashamed of herself, but she still didn’t open the door wide enough for them to pass through. “Well, he’s not here—” she began.
Annie Clyde cut her off. “He was in my cornfield this morning.”
Beulah’s fingers went to the bones again. “What’s happened?”
For a moment she thought Annie Clyde might faint, leaning ashen against the doorframe. “He took her,” she said, and Beulah felt the color draining from her own face.
James put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “We can’t find Gracie. Have you seen her?”
“Where’s Amos?” Annie Clyde shouted over him, moving as if to push her way inside.
Beulah licked her lips. They were numb, but her words came out even. “I ain’t seen her, Annie Clyde. And Amos ain’t here.” She paused. “I know he ain’t been up to nothing, though. He’s been with me. He came straight up the holler from your place. Brought me some corn.”
James let out a breath. He seemed relieved, but Annie Clyde was still trying to see around Beulah into the cabin. “He’s been here with you?”
“Yes,” Beulah said. “About all day, but you know how Amos comes and goes. He took off again an hour or so ago.” She glanced away. “I might not see him for another five years.”
“You sure you ain’t seen Gracie?” James asked.
“No, honey,” Beulah told him, still watching his wife. “But I’ll keep my eyes open.”
“He’s here,” Annie Clyde said, looking at Beulah hard enough to make her fidget.
“Let’s go,” James said, taking his wife by the elbow. “We’re wasting time.”
Then they were gone from her steps as quick as they’d come. Beulah went to the front window and peeled back the lace curtain. She watched through the blurring rain as they searched the clearing. When they disappeared around the cabin she went to the window over the table and peered out but couldn’t see them anymore. She went back to her chair, lowering herself with a grunt, letting out the breath she’d held while they were at her door. She stared at the soiled dishes on the tabletop, her old heart laboring. If Annie Clyde had come in she might have noticed one plate, one cup. Beulah hadn’t seen Amos in five years. But she still loved him like a son.
Her mind went to Gracie Dodson and the day the little girl was born. She remembered it well because she had woke feeling puny. She used to be a stout woman but that morning she’d noticed herself shrinking. She had outlived the age at which her mother died but she wasn’t ready yet to lie down under the sassafras tree. She still feared death like a child. She supposed it was foolish to be so old and want so much to keep on living, but that’s how it was. So she’d rolled out of bed like it was any other day and carried on, wiping her handkerchief across her clammy brow again and again as she went about her chores. Around dinnertime she went behind the cabin to pick greens, all she could think of eating. The best place to find them in early March was along the spring, its edges brittle with ice left over from winter. She was looking on the bank when she came upon a crack in the ground. As she watched a nest of granddaddy longlegs boiled up from it, thousands upon thousands, and her own legs nearly gave out. She stumbled away without picking any greens, sure she’d seen an ill omen. On her way back to the cabin snow began to flurry in whorls, whitening the grass. Coming into the yard she could make out the shape of a man sitting on the steps and her dread deepened. But once she got closer she saw that it was James Dodson. He was a different man then than the one she had seen minutes ago, with clear blue eyes and high color in his cheeks, dots of snow in his auburn hair. She smiled because she knew what he wanted. Annie Clyde’s time had come. Just the sight of James perked Beulah up. If the child hadn’t been born on that particular day, she might have laid down and died like her mother. In a way, birthing Gracie Dodson had given her new life.
Beulah had been the first to look upon Gracie’s face, red and crumpled. She had been the one to sever the cord binding mother and child. She couldn’t bear to think of Gracie harmed. But wherever Gracie was, Amos had nothing to do with her absence. She was sure of that. It was true that he was a hard man to figure out. All the years he lived with Beulah there was a sort of fog rising off him, swirling up his legs and around his shoulders, issuing from his mouth. She didn’t lie to herself about Amos. She only tried not to think about the wrong he was doing out
in the world. She didn’t want to know of his other sins. But he wouldn’t take an innocent child. He’d been one himself. Beulah couldn’t forget the condition he was in when she found him. There was a clearing by the river that only Yuneetah’s elders knew about. Any habitable dwelling ever built there was crept over with thornbushes and ground-cover vines, a shaggy overgrowth that draped down a bluff into a shaded glade. Beulah doubted even Dale Hankins knew of the spot and it was on his property. She hadn’t told anyone in town about it either. Mushroom hunters like her kept their secrets. Morels grew from early April to the beginning of May, and they usually didn’t come up in the same places each year. But in that clearing on Hankins’s land there was a dead chestnut tree with fat clusters of the spongy cones always sprouting from its base. It was hidden behind a laurel thicket but Beulah knew another way to get there. When she was more nimble, she used to climb down the bluff using tough strands of woodbine and creeper like rope. The day she found Amos, she was on her knees at the base of the chestnut with a burlap sack when she heard a sound that raised the hairs on her arms. It was a kind of keening, so mournful that she thought it was coming from a spirit. She followed the sound to a hole at the foot of the bluff and when she pulled back the vines there was a small boy in a cave, lying in a gruel of stagnant water. He turned his face to look up at her, his eyes wide blanks, his mouth open and that high-pitched noise coming out as if some other boy trapped inside him was making it. Beulah was frightened before her vision cleared and she saw him for what he was, an abandoned child.
She told the sheriff at the time about finding Amos but nobody claimed him. She was thankful because as strange as he was, he already felt like her son. He was as close to a child of her own as she’d ever have and she loved him like a mother would, even after he started vexing her. The tidiness of the house she kept seemed to provoke him somehow. The crockery stacked on the sideboard, the ladle hanging on a nail within reach of her hand, the preserves put away in the pie safe. Often he would take a jar of apple butter and dash it against the limestone slabs up to the cabin door, would hide her skinning knife or her iron skillet. At first she had encouraged Amos to play with the other children in the hollow, figuring a little boy like him shouldn’t spend all of his time with an old woman. She had hoped too that he might learn how to act from them. But often Ellard Moody or Mary Ledford would come running to tell on Amos for tossing their marbles into the weeds or kicking down the forts they built. As he grew up the neighbors began to complain that he slept in their barns, plundered their gardens or left the remains of his campfires smoldering in their fields. Rambling through town he would stomp down the tulips farmwives planted near the road. Beulah hadn’t known what to do about him.
She would turn to the bones, trying to understand. But on the subject of Amos the bones were silent. It took much thinking on her part, and much watching. It was the boy’s lies that baffled Beulah most. Every man, woman and child alive had lied at some time or another. Most lied because they wished to be something else than what they were, or because they had something to gain. Amos’s reasoning didn’t make sense to Beulah. More than once he owned up to something he couldn’t have done. Like the time Lee Hubbard came up the hollow looking for the muddy work boots he’d left on his stoop, swearing Amos stole them. Beulah said Amos was helping her in the garden and hadn’t left her side long enough to steal anything. But Amos stepped forward and said, “I took them. I took them and threw them off the bluff.” Beulah stared at her boy flabbergasted. Then she saw Lee Hubbard’s face turning plum, spittle gathering in his mouth corners. She had to stave Lee off with a hoe to keep him from whipping Amos. Once Lee Hubbard lost his wits, Amos got the upper hand. He took charge for a minute or two of the world he passed through nearly invisible. The people of Yuneetah noticed Amos only when he lied or got into meanness. They looked at him directly instead of turning their heads from his unsettling face, his glittering eyes that seldom blinked. It seemed to Beulah a child like Amos, left for dead by his mother and treated like a cur dog by his neighbors, might want to make a mark just to prove that he was alive. She almost couldn’t blame him. Beulah didn’t deny that Amos was a troublemaker. But she believed there was more goodness in him than ire.
There had been many times with Amos that rewarded her belief, peaceful days that reminded her of those spent with her mother. Even as a small boy he would rather work than play. He couldn’t stand to be idle and Beulah was the same way. When they ran out of chores they made up more for themselves. They kept busy stacking cordwood in the winter months, shucking corn and breaking beans in the summers, canning and making jam in the fall. At night he helped her darn stockings, patch their clothes and tat lace to trade at the general store. They kept bees and Beulah sold the honey to their neighbors, floating with pieces of comb. She and Amos had built the hives together one year out of scrap wood. Amos robbed the bees as if he belonged among them. They stung Beulah but never him, crawling sluggish over his face and arms. He had the steadiest hands she’d ever seen. She didn’t have to rely on the smithy to fix her tools or her cart when a wheel came off. Once during a chestnut blight Amos sawed down the diseased trees in danger of falling on her roof and then mixed batches of homemade dynamite to blast the rotten stumps. He wouldn’t say how he learned to make it, pouring nitric acid and glycerin in a bowl of oats to soak up the liquid. Only one as still and patient as he was could have kept from losing a finger. Beulah knew there would be trouble when she saw how Amos took to the dynamite, how his usually blank eyes kindled up with sparks when he handled it.
One night not long before Amos left on a boxcar Beulah noticed that he was gone from his pallet on the floor. She wasn’t alarmed because he had taken to sleeping outdoors. Even in winter he lay in the woods under a strand of hanging chimney smoke, covered with a mound of frost-etched leaves. When she called him to breakfast in the mornings he would bolt upright, the makings of his bed fluttering around him and catching in his hair. She got into her own bed that night and about the time her eyes slipped shut there came a bang that clattered her dishes. She sat up fast in the dark. At that hour sound carried for miles. When she went out the cabin door she could hear dogs barking all over Yuneetah. She turned and saw smoke above the treetops, but not from her chimney. She knew it was Amos. She only prayed that he hadn’t hurt himself or anybody else. She followed the smoke up the hollow, half certain she would find her son in pieces. The closer she got to the source of the smoke the stronger the night smelled of blasted earth. She walked under the scorched trees, over the showered-down bark, to a clearing where branches were burnt away. By the moon she saw a patch of seared ground. She knew that part of the woods, where one of the old homesteaders had left behind a root cellar dug into the mountainside, stacked limestone with a plank door. In its place was a mound of rubble, splintered boards still smoking. She stood at a distance and called Amos’s name, convinced he was buried under the pile. After a pause she heard a rustle in the thicket. He stepped out from behind a sapling to show himself. Beulah understood then why others were disturbed by the mask of his face. His eyes made her feel as if he knew her better than she did herself. Nobody had been harmed. For once she turned away like the rest of the town and went back down the hollow.
Now, as they often did in times of trouble, Beulah’s fingers crept to the pouch her mother had given her. An inheritance passed down through generations of the women in her family, come across the ocean with the first of them to settle in the hollow. Her mother had given her the bones when she started dreaming. Before each flood she would dream of a fish, the same middling-sized bass, washed up and gasping for air. She would wet the bed she shared with her mother and they would get up to change both their nightgowns. They would sit by the lamp together and wait for the rain to start, wait to see how many would drown. It was around the same time that Beulah began to bleed. The night the blood came her mother showed her how to catch it in rags pinned to her bloomers. Then she reached under the bed, the same one Beula
h still slept in, and pulled out a tarnished snuff tin. She opened the tin and took from it the brown pouch. Everything they had was old, tattered and frayed, but the pouch was older. Beulah’s mother stroked her unbound hair as she told Beulah how it was with Kesterson women. There was something in their makeup, or something ordained by God, that they would have daughters. If a son was born, like the twin that had come with Beulah, he seldom drew breath. Once in a while one of these daughters saw things most others couldn’t. She led Beulah back then to this same table but with a different cloth and told her what to do. For the first time Beulah upended the pouch and spilled out the bones. When she could make nothing of them she was abashed, for herself and for her mother who might have felt like a fool. She said, “I can’t see anything.” Her mother said, “You will.” Beulah asked, “How do you know?” Her mother said, “I just do.” Not because she had second sight herself, but because a mother has faith in her child.
Beulah guessed there was no use in repenting what she’d done for Amos. She had lied for him, as her mother would have for her, as Annie Clyde would for Gracie. She meant to stand behind him. She was afraid for him and the little girl both. She didn’t like what she’d seen in Annie Clyde’s eyes. The cabin was dim and she raised up to light the wick of the lamp, casting her shadow across the table and the ceiling. Then she lifted the pouch from her bosom, loosened the neck and spilled what was inside. The bones were stained with age and worn shiny from handling, their scattering muffled by the flowered cloth. It was hard to tell what kind of living thing they’d come from. If Beulah’s mother knew, she never said. Beulah moved her fingers across them. After puzzling over the pattern they made, she grew discouraged. For a while she saw nothing, like that first time. But after staring longer it seemed they had knitted themselves into a ring. As she studied the circle, a shining bead formed in the center on the tablecloth. Then another and another, drops drawing together. She thought it was blood, like that long-ago blossom on the dingy cotton of her underclothes. It had been ages since she bled that way, at least thirty years, but she remembered what it looked like. It took only a second to realize that she was wrong. It was water. More and more of it. Clear and gleaming, the faded tablecloth flowers magnified under the beads before they soaked in. For a choking instant Beulah’s mouth and nose filled with its mineral coldness. Then the water was gone and she could breathe. She stared until her eyes blurred out of focus. When she blinked the bones went back to being scattered, the tablecloth dry again. She gathered them into the pouch and went to her bed in the corner. She lay on her side listening to the rain, looking at the gray light pressing against the window glass and falling on the floor, at the showers driven by the wind under the door. Annie Clyde and James were out searching in this storm and she hadn’t asked them inside. Sometimes she felt like in eighty-five years she had learned nothing. Had grown no wiser than that child who bled and was given the bones. She was tireder than ever, but no sleep came to her.