by Amy Greene
At dusk of the same day Sheriff Ellard Moody drove toward the ink-stained sky glimpsed between rashes of wet leaves. He gripped the wheel and leaned close to the windshield, squinting through the flood down the glass, the weak shine of the headlamps doing little to light the curves ahead. So far he had been able to skirt the sloughs in the road winding deeper into Yuneetah but he didn’t know how much longer he could. From the corner of his eye he watched the man huddled against the car door, his face a pallid smear above the collar of the slicker Ellard had given him back at the courthouse. James Dodson’s truck had gotten stuck somewhere along the ditch. After he gave up trying to push it out of the mire he’d walked the rest of the way to the town square. When he came banging on the locked courthouse doors, Ellard had taken one look at him and seen the direness of the situation. James had refused at first to come inside but his teeth were chattering so that Ellard couldn’t understand a word he was saying until he’d warmed up some by the coal grate. Once Ellard heard a child was missing he’d got on the shortwave and roused the constable over in Whitehall County. Before this evening he’d been glad that most of Yuneetah had moved on without giving him trouble, but now he wished for the townspeople back. He would have to count on outside help to round up a search party, if they could make it across the county line at all in such foul weather without becoming mired as James had done.
Now as they were on their way to the Walker farm, James seemed unwilling or unable to speak anymore. Ellard was acquainted with him through Dale Hankins. They had once spent a winter night in Dale’s barn with their breath smoking, helping him turn a calf. After hours of labor, it had come out of the heifer steaming and fallen in a bundle on the hay with sealed-shut eyes and the umbilicus stringing from its underside. James was the kind of young man others respected, friendly and hardworking, raised right by his aunt and uncle. Ellard used to watch James walking down the road with Annie Clyde on their way to church, riding the little girl on his shoulders. Whatever struggles the Dodsons had farming, come Sunday it didn’t show on their faces. He hated to see that same smiling man in such miserable shape tonight. Ellard left James alone for the moment. There would be time for questioning later, after he took a look around.
More than anything, Ellard dreaded seeing Annie Clyde Dodson. He figured she would be even worse off than her husband. As a child he’d roamed the hollow with her aunt and her mother. He’d watched Annie Clyde grow up and had a fondness for her, though their relations had been complicated of late with her holding out against the power company. She had treated Ellard with reserve as the deadline for her removal drew closer, not knowing she would have been evicted weeks ago if he hadn’t held up the process. He’d done everything he could to keep the government from taking action, determined to avoid driving out to the farm with handcuffs in his back pocket. When the eviction paperwork came to him, he claimed it was shoddy and sent it back to the offices in Knoxville. He told the ones in charge that he couldn’t enforce evictions in good conscience until they proved their documents were in proper and legal order. Ellard had made enemies for Annie Clyde’s sake, but in his experience those with power often abused it.
When the first men in dark suits and late-model sedans showed up in Yuneetah, Ellard had vowed to keep a close eye on how the Tennessee Valley Authority conducted their business. He was on Annie Clyde’s side. He still thought of her as a bashful child with her head down and her eyes on the ground. She had always been different than her mother, Mary Ledford Walker, a well-liked and outspoken woman. Annie Clyde was unsociable in a way that put her neighbors off. She was polite to them but nothing more. Ellard heard some of them wondering out loud where Annie Clyde came from, as cordial as both her parents had been. They weren’t thinking, as Ellard often did, about her aunt Silver Ledford who lived like a hermit on top of the mountain, coming down so seldom that he caught sight of her only once or twice a year. He knew what Annie Clyde’s neighbors would say about her now if they were around. She was warned about the water getting up. If she’d moved months ago she wouldn’t be in this fix. But Ellard was sorry for Annie Clyde, whether or not she’d brought this on herself. He was sorry for the whole town.
On his last birthday Ellard had turned forty-six but he looked older. His face was carved with furrows. His eyelids drooped, his hair was powdered with ash. For twenty years he had kept his vigil over Yuneetah. In 1929 he’d heard of men jumping off the tall buildings in New York City and seen things come to pass here at home that he would rather not have. Women pawned their wedding bands for a few dollars and men turned in their shoes for the price of a meal, until the pawnshop business dried up when there was nothing left to trade. Some had even begun to steal watermelons from gardens, laundry from clotheslines, eggs from henhouses. One night sitting in his apartment at the back of the courthouse Ellard had heard President Roosevelt talking on the radio about a social experiment involving the future lives and welfare of millions. Talking about an uneducated man living on a mountainside with his ten children, making twenty-five dollars in cash a year, who had been forgotten by the American people. Roosevelt spoke of giving that man a chance on better land, bringing him schools and industries and electric lights, stopping erosion and growing trees. But as an incident to all of that, he said, it was necessary to build some dams. It seemed to Ellard the president sounded too far away to know what he was talking about, but he hoped it was true. The people of Yuneetah needed help beyond what Ellard could give them.
For the most part Ellard believed he had done right by his hometown. Outsiders might have judged him for looking the other way when the moonshine runners came through from Kentucky and packed whiskey out by the carloads, but the next day he would see the bootleggers paying their druggist bills and settling up with Joe Dixon. Ellard had always put the well-being of his neighbors above any stranger’s idea of morality or justice. When the TVA showed up he decided it might be better for the town if he worked with the federal government rather than against them, regardless of his disdain. He only hoped the losses his people suffered were in their best interests, as Roosevelt had claimed on the radio. But whoever was responsible for the dam, God or the devil, it was out of Ellard’s hands. He meant to keep his badge on until the last soul was gone from Yuneetah. Then he would unpin it and head back up to his childhood house in the hollow. He would stand under the shade trees until it felt like he’d never left. He would clear away the leaves drifted against the door. He would sit on the unswept floorboards letting home sink back into him, listening to the crows cawing in the locusts and the bleat of Beulah Kesterson’s goats carried downhill. He would go squirrel hunting. He would see if he could make corn bread to taste like his mother’s or at least somewhat close, as hers was the best he’d ever put in his mouth. He would try to remember what he must have known once, what he guessed all of Yuneetah had forgot. How a fresh crewelwork of snow dressed even the dustiest of their farmyards. How leaves shaped like the hands of their babies sailed and turned on the eddies of the river. How an open meadow sounded when they stood still. How ripe plums tasted when they closed their eyes. How cucumbers smelled like summer. How lightning bugs made lanterns of their cupped palms. How it felt to come in from the cold to where a fire was built. These things they hadn’t lost. But, like Ellard, they had grown too weary to see them anymore.
Now the little Dodson girl was missing and there would be no rest for him after all, at least not tonight. He tried to remember when he last saw her. It must have been back in March, at Joe Dixon’s. It was chilly but warm enough for the door to be propped open. She was standing against it, her head not high as the handle, leaning there under a sign advertising the Hadacol Goodwill show. She was wearing a sweater buttoned over her belly and a gingham dress that showed her dimpled knees, grubby socks rolled down and scuffed shoes chalky from the gravel outside. Somebody had given her a bottle of orange drink and as she waited for her mother to pay at the counter she kept her mouth on the rim of it, looking at Ellard from under her las
hes as if he might try to steal it from her, staring at his tall lankiness and his long mustache and the silver star on his lapel. “Hey, Fred,” he had teased, trying to look stern. After a while she had smiled at him around the soda pop bottle. “Is your name Fred?” he had asked, and she had shaken her mop of messy curls from side to side. When they left he watched them go down the steps, Annie Clyde carrying a parcel in one hand and Gracie swinging the other back and forth, prattling on about something only her mother could have understood. Just like Ellard, everybody in town got a kick out of Gracie Dodson. He thought of her at that last molasses making, dancing in the firelight. Nobody could take their eyes off her because she was hope right there in the middle of them. It was probably the last night they’d spend together in one place, but if they could believe it was all for her sake, they could bear it. If they could think about it like that. They were leaving behind their homes so things might be easier on Gracie someday than they had ever been on them. It was more than amusement that made them whoop and clap their hands. She was making everything all right, at least for the time being. They might have to start packing up their things in the morning, but in that moment they felt like it would all work out for the best.
Ellard intended to look for Gracie alive, but if she didn’t turn up by first light he could assume what had happened. She’d wandered off and drowned in the spreading lake, less than half a mile from the front door of her house and growing closer with each passing minute. He didn’t like to draw such a conclusion before he’d even reached the Walker farm or spoken to Annie Clyde, but it was where his mind went after the bleak decade he had lived through. After all he had seen. Just three months ago he’d gone out to talk with a man named Clabe Randall who was slow about moving. Clabe was a widower and lived in a brick house on a hill with musket balls embedded in its walls from the Revolutionary War. After his wife died he had stopped growing tobacco and sold off several acres of the pine timber on his farm. The timber had fetched a fair price and he was able to retire. Ellard had spent many afternoons listening to Clabe’s stories, sitting under the shade of the red oak in his yard. Clabe had spoken at length of his great-great-grandfather who built the house and of his grandmother who shot several Yankees to defend it. One afternoon Clabe had looked up at the red oak’s limbs and told Ellard, “This is a fine old tree. I had a swing here when I was a boy.” On the first of May, Ellard had parked at the road and gone up the hill into the clearing where Clabe’s brick house stood in the shade of the red oak. When he entered the lot he saw the grass cut and the flower beds tended, as if Clabe didn’t plan on going anywhere. The house was silent but he figured Clabe was tinkering in the barn. Then the breeze picked up and shivered the leaves and the hollyhocks in the garden. Ellard heard the creak of the rope before he saw Clabe Randall hanging from one of the red oak’s limbs. Perhaps the same one he’d swung from as a boy. Ellard approached and stood for a spell looking up at the swaying body before cutting it down, at the dried earth of Clabe’s land edging his boot heels. Ellard had seen the dead before. But he had never felt such sorrow as he did right then, not only for his friend but for the graveyard all of Yuneetah was soon to become.
Before the TVA came along, flooding caused Ellard’s neighbors as much or more grief as being run off their land by the government would. He couldn’t help thinking back to the flood of 1925 on his way out to the Walker farm to search for Gracie Dodson, especially since James’s father Earl Dodson had been among the many lost that season. It was the worst flood Yuneetah had ever seen, the whole valley devastated. He heard when it was over there was a steamboat in the middle of the street in Chattanooga. After the waters receded he went out in rubber waders to see what he could do for the town and came upon Wayne Deering stumbling around with one brogan on, the other sucked off by the sump. Not much remained of Wayne’s hog farm by the river. His two eldest sons were with him but his wife and three other children were missing, swept away when the porch they stood on was rent from the house. It didn’t take Ellard long to find the body of Wayne’s daughter slathered in clay on the riverbank. Farther down shore he spotted a mattress lodged in the branches of a sweet gum. He waded out and shinnied up the tree high enough to look down on the mattress, soaked and matted with vines. Lying in the middle was the smallest Deering, a baby in a nightshirt waving its arms and legs, its jaw trembling and its lips blue. As Ellard shifted his weight shavings of bark fell into its eyes. When it turned red in the face and began to wail, Ellard knew that it would live. He clung to the sweet gum branches for longer than he should have, too stunned to reach for the baby. Wayne’s wife washed up dead the next morning with the wreckage on a raft of barn board. But the third Deering child had seemed to vanish. No body was ever found. Ten years later Ellard was still looking for him, beating the bushes for his bones. Not finding him numbered among the regrets he counted alone in his apartment at night. Ellard had been a younger and more hopeful man back in 1925. Now, after twenty years as sheriff, he thought a second missing child might be more than he could stand.
With his mind wandering, Ellard was startled when James’s Model A Ford loomed out of the rain ahead. By then they were within sight of the Walker farm, which meant James had walked over five miles to town. Ellard guessed without looking at his pocket watch that it was sometime around eight o’clock. He guided the car through the slough and around the truck as well as he could, his wheels spinning but not getting stuck. James didn’t look at the mired Ford as they passed. He kept his eyes on the rills streaming down the window until Ellard turned beside the cornfield, headlamps cutting through the downpour and sweeping the stalks. But partway up the track Ellard slammed on his brakes. Something else had appeared like a ghost in the glow of his headlamps. It took an instant for him to recognize Annie Clyde Dodson. He’d come close to running her down. She came around to his side of the car and took his arm as soon as he stepped out, her fingers biting in deep. “Come,” she panted, water dripping off her chin.
Ellard stood in the rain trying to light the lantern he’d brought. “Hold up, Annie Clyde—”
“That old woman’s lying,” she said.
“If you’ll just be still for a minute—”
“Beulah Kesterson claims he was with her.”
Ellard’s eyes flicked to James. “Can you fetch us another lantern?” he asked. After James disappeared in the dark he turned back to Annie Clyde. “I need you to talk sense.”
“What did James tell you?”
“That your little one slipped off from the house.”
Annie Clyde shook her head. “No.”
“Well, what did happen then?”
“Somebody took her.”
“You seen somebody take her?”
“I saw him with her.”
“Who did you see?”
“Amos.”
Ellard covered her hand with his own. “Amos was here?”
“He was down there in the corn.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Come on,” she repeated. “We don’t have time.”
“Wait, now,” Ellard said. “Let’s figure this out.”
She snatched her hand away. “I’m trying to tell you. There’s a footprint.”
“All right,” he said, stepping back some. “Here comes your husband with the light.”
When James reached them, the lantern he carried haloed in mist, the three of them headed out to the hayfield together. Ellard’s thoughts were racing. There were few people he disliked, but Amos was one of them. Ellard’s father had been kind to Amos because he was an orphan. He had taught Ellard and Amos both to shoot. Ellard thought back to the night that, for the first time, his father allowed the boys to carry rifles. They were around ten years old. It was November and cold on the mountainside where they turned loose the hounds. While they trudged over the crackling leaves Amos’s eyes were fixed on Ellard and not the path before them. As Ellard’s father went on with the neighbors in their mackinaws and caps, Ellard lagged
behind. Amos matched his stride, holding back even though he was nimble enough to move faster. Then the dogs took off baying and the men ran after them. Ellard hustled to keep up, but their lanterns grew farther off. Soon the high yelping of the dogs faded and the men were out of sight over a ridge. There was silence except for the sound of his feet on the trail. He could barely make out the faint glow of light through the woods ahead. Clumsy in the oversized boots he was wearing, Ellard tripped forward and lay in the powdery snow. He was about to get up when he heard the cock of a rifle. He turned himself over on the frozen ground and saw Amos standing above him with the gun pointed at his heart. He gaped up at the other boy’s soulless face, unable to breathe. At the age of ten, Ellard already had a sense of his fate being decided. He covered his eyes. There was nothing but the cold and the yelping dogs. In his mind he saw the hounds gathered around the tree, leaping over each other to get at the coon as it clung to the tip of a branch. He waited for the gunshot, but nothing happened. “Blam,” Amos said. Ellard uncovered his face. Amos lowered the rifle. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “I was just funning you.”