by Amy Greene
There was no way of knowing why Amos did such things or when he would do them. He was unpredictable. Ellard had learned back then to stay away from him. He had felt from the time they were children together in the hollow that darkness seeping out of Amos. In later years he’d had clearer reasons, but as a boy Ellard couldn’t have explained his loathing. It seemed they were born enemies. Of course, it was hard to tell if Amos had enough human feeling in his breast to love or hate Ellard either one. At the least, he was a troublemaker. As sheriff, Ellard had kept the town as ordered as his rooms at the courthouse. He had seen himself to Yuneetah’s upkeep, appointing crews to repair any storm damage done to the roofs each spring and to dig drainage ditches along the roads. The town was for the most part peaceful, until Amos would arrive. He always brought disorder. There were more fights for Ellard to break up, more farming accidents. There seemed even to be more deaths of natural causes when Amos passed through. He never left Yuneetah without making some manner of mess, if it was only a shattered storefront window. One autumn he had failed to smother a campfire he’d lit in Buck Shelton’s back field and burned down the pole barn. Ellard was sure Amos had left that fire going on purpose.
But to accuse Amos of taking a child, that was something else. Amos hadn’t done serious harm in Yuneetah that Ellard knew of, although he got a feeling the man might be capable of murder just from the deadness in his one eye. Amos was dangerous aside from any threat he posed to the Dodsons. It had been so long since Ellard last saw Amos he’d begun to hope the drifter had finally landed himself in the penitentiary somewhere. There must be a reason he was in Yuneetah during its last days that had nothing to do with Gracie Dodson, but Amos being seen hours before she disappeared seemed like too much of a coincidence. Whether she’d drowned or not, he might well have had a hand in whatever happened to her.
If Ellard had known before leaving the courthouse that Amos was around he could have radioed the other counties to be on the lookout for the drifter as well as for Gracie. He wished James had said more about the situation up front. Amos was a worse menace than the lake. He moved faster and with more cunning. He would be hard to track and Ellard needed backup if he meant to catch him, maybe more than the boys from Whitehall County. He would have to get the state police involved if Gracie didn’t turn up by morning. Now he moved around the house behind Annie Clyde with rain pouring off his hat brim. Nearly half an hour had passed from the time he turned up the track by the cornfield until they stopped at the elm beside the barn. “We can’t find the dog either,” James spoke up, his voice hoarse. “He was tied here. Gracie must have turned him loose.” Ellard bent with his lantern, drops falling from the leaves onto his back. He plucked the chain out of the bog at the base of the trunk. The links and hasp were unbroken. The slurry was marred with prints from both feet and paws, too mottled to tell Ellard anything useful. He stood and held the lantern aloft, lighting the tree’s skinned bark and the ropy twist of its roots. His brow knitted. Every second evidence was washing away and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. When he was ready to go on, they crossed the hayfield under the starless sky. Weeds whisked over Ellard’s slicker, water bounced off his shoulders. It had become nighttime. Looking up he saw that the clouds were dark shapes against a darker backdrop. The weather was dulling his senses, muffling his hearing, blurring his vision. It seemed to Ellard that everything was working against him and the Dodsons. The hour, the empty town, nature.
When they reached the second tree it shook like something alive, pelted leaves whirling, apples thudding. Ellard lowered himself to one knee and inspected the ground where Annie Clyde pointed. What might have been a footprint was now a misshapen trough. “It was there,” Annie Clyde said, begging with her eyes for him to believe her. He got to his feet and she took his arm again, jogging the lantern. “We ought to be out finding Amos,” she said. He looked at James standing hatless beside his wife, as if he didn’t feel the rain down the planes of his face. Their eyes met long enough for Ellard to see that what little hope James had had in the first place was waning. When Ellard plunged back into the weeds they followed like lost children themselves.
For another half hour they canvassed the farm. Ellard walked through the cornrows but Amos had left no trace behind. In the barn, the smokehouse, the corncrib, Ellard cast his light into corners looking for tracks in the dirt, blood drips on the plank walls, strands of hair or cloth snagged on nails. After the three of them had inspected the outbuildings they went back through the slapping hayfield weeds to where the trees started, the storm and the deep shade making the woods pitch black. Even with their lanterns it was near impossible to see under the dense canopy of leaves, fog seeping between the close trunks. Ellard could hardly hear himself shouting for Gracie over the storm. They climbed a ways up the mountain, calling to the child and whistling for the dog. But if she was calling back they couldn’t hear it. Or if Amos was in the trees laughing at them. All Ellard could do was keep his eyes open for signs of movement. Finally he led them out of the woods to convene in the hayfield. “I’ve done radioed Whitehall County,” he said. “They’ll be along anytime. We can talk back at the house until they get here.”
“We need our own people to look,” Annie Clyde rasped. “But everybody’s gone now.”
“There’s still some around,” Ellard said.
Annie Clyde leaned against James. “Where are your men? They’re taking too long.”
“Me and James’ll go on if they don’t make it before much longer,” Ellard said. “Best thing for you to do is stay and light the lamps so she can see to get home if she’s out here lost.”
“No. I’m going with you.”
James looked down. “Gracie can’t come back to an empty house.”
Ellard nodded. “I’d say she’ll be wanting her mama.”
It got quiet besides the rain tapping on the slickers of the men. Annie Clyde looked from James to Ellard, as if trying to believe it was possible that Gracie might come home on her own. Then she wilted, her shoulders caving. When her knees weakened James put his arm around her waist and helped her back across the field behind Ellard. They went in the kitchen door. James led Annie Clyde to the pine table where she sat staring at the stove as he made a fire in it. Ellard took a seat across from her while James lit the lamps. He removed his hat and set it aside on the table, hung his slicker from the back of the chair. He wondered if Annie Clyde or James wanted to change their clothes but they only waited for him to go on. He brought a notebook from his breast pocket and asked them to talk him through the details of the day. James began with coming home from Sevierville. Annie Clyde began with Gracie chasing the dog into the corn. Their voices flat, their eyes glazed. When they had both fallen silent he replaced the notebook in his pocket. “All right then,” he said. “You all sit and rest yourselves while I take a look around.”
Ellard stood and shrugged back into his slicker. Annie Clyde asked, as if out of nowhere, “Will you get my aunt Silver? I didn’t make it that far up the mountain. She don’t know yet.”
At the mention of Silver Ledford’s name Ellard felt his mouth corner twitching. He didn’t know if he could take her on top of everything else. She was a nerve-racking woman, and as far as Ellard knew not much of a doting aunt either. But he supposed Annie Clyde needed her mother right now and Silver was the closest thing she had. “I’ll send somebody up yonder to get your aunt before me and James leave,” he said. “You ought not to be here by yourself.”
Annie Clyde dropped her head, her hands lying limp in her lap. Ellard put on his hat and left her at the table with James to investigate the rest of the house, his shadow moving on the wallpaper. There was nothing out of place, no print they hadn’t tracked in themselves.
He thought as he climbed the stairs about what came next, once the Whitehall County constable made it to the farm. Beulah Kesterson would have to be questioned, but Ellard didn’t know how far he would get with her, in spite of the soft spot she had for him. Beu
lah had been something like a grandmother to Ellard growing up in the hollow. He’d spent many afternoons shooting marbles under the shade trees around her cabin. In the summers after Amos hopped a train he’d helped Beulah tend her goats and her bees. But he didn’t doubt where her loyalties lay. It might be better to send the constable up to see her, considering she knew Ellard and Amos to be enemies. She might be more willing to give Amos up to somebody else. Ellard needed to put most of his efforts tonight into rounding up a search party. Standing alone in the Dodsons’ bedroom, his lantern casting a shine on Gracie’s empty crib in the corner, he feared it would be a difficult task. He was relieved when he heard at last the sound of slamming vehicle doors and the faint but clear voices of men in the yard below. Ellard hoped for a competent tracker in the bunch, or that someone had brought along a dog. Though as far as Ellard knew there was one man in these parts that raised bloodhounds and he was in Clinchfield, an hour out of reach.
When Ellard went back downstairs James was waiting for him at the front door. “Let’s go,” he said. Ellard didn’t have to ask where he meant. But before they left Annie Clyde spoke up from behind them, her voice a husk. “James.” They turned around and she was standing there in her still-soaked dress. In one hand she held James’s hat, in the other a Winchester rifle. James took the hat and put it on his head. He hesitated before reaching for the gun. Annie Clyde thrust it into his hands. “If he’s got her, I want you to kill him.” Ellard studied Annie Clyde’s haggard face. Without a word James took the rifle and went out the door. Ellard followed, boots thumping across the porch planks and down the steps toward whatever waited.
AUGUST 1, 1936
When the sun was barely up and Amos felt confident any workman or watchman left in the bunkhouse was asleep or just rising, he went out on the dam spanning the gorge where the river valley narrowed. There was a road running across the top of the mammoth structure, a two-lane highway with double yellow lines. Looking west he could see the road crooking out of sight around the humped mountainsides, blasted by the power company. When it was open it would connect this part of the valley to US 25 and Knoxville. Along the deserted highway there ran a pedestrian sidewalk. Amos trailed his fingers down its metal railing, overlaid in places with a sticky netting of cobwebs. He paused when he came to the middle of the dam where a concrete tower loomed over his head with two flags hanging limp from a pole, one American and the other blue with a white TVA emblem. Inside the tower an elevator shaft led down to the powerhouse, its locked steel door scratched and grimed with dirt. From two hundred feet high Amos could see, far in the distance, the rain-pocked water curving away between the forested hills. Leaning over with both hands on the railing he could look straight down the slant of the algae-stained spillway and see the dam doing its work, white water sluicing into the river below. He could see the tile roof of the powerhouse and its reflection rippling on the outflow, the framework of the transformer pad like a cage of prison bars on the bank. He supposed the design of the dam and the buildings was meant to be modern but they reminded him of a penitentiary.
Amos had watched the dam site all night, camped in the trees at the edge of the cliff on the west side. Up there the limestone was so sheer and wet that he had to crouch on an incline clinging to saplings. He was perched there for so long that his leaking boots had given him trench foot and his fingers had shriveled like those of the dead. A salamander had shinnied up his arm and hung by its spatulate toes to his coat shoulder. Rainwater had run off his brow to pool in the curve of his eye socket. For now the site was as vacant as the town but at dusk yesterday a watchman in a slicker had patrolled the perimeter of the chain-link fence surrounding the transformer pad and the paved path along the bank up to the powerhouse. After midnight when Amos was certain the watchman was gone he had scrambled down, showering pebbles before him, to look up close at the waters in the dark. On the downstream side of the dam there was no shore to stand on, nothing but an edging of bleached rocks crowded with poplar, cottonwood and elderberry trees. On the reservoir side peninsulas of red sand peeked from beneath the skirts of thick evergreens. The lake was much deeper and bluer than the river, rilled with waves. Looking out across the water from the bluff Amos had seen two rowboats lined up for use by the workers, painted orange with numbers stenciled on their sides, anchored by tie-off pins to a small dock.
Now that there was more light, Amos turned and walked through the misty rain down the double yellow lines of the highway. He went back across the dam and through the fog over to the east side where he stood atop a rolling hill among a sparse copse of hardwoods with power wires strung between them. From this vantage point he had a side view of the transformer pad and beyond it the low powerhouse set on the riverbed with its rows of reflective windows, its great generators connected to the turbine inside the dam. He followed the slope downward along the east abutment wall where the concrete met the grass, tar hardened in patches and rivets bleeding rust down its slanted face. At the bottom of the slope he hunkered for a while behind a crop of milkweed, studying the transformers through the chain-link fence, the chalky white metal of the framework bars. Then Amos went around the transformer pad and picked his way over the rock rubble of the shore until the river entered his boots. He craned his neck to see the dam’s tower from below, a castle turret with its drooping flags. He left his bindle and waded out, icy water riding up his legs, toward the bluff where he’d spent the night. He went farther across the foggy river, drawing closer to the dam, battling the outflow until his toes bumped the cement edge of the spillway. He stepped up onto it, the thunderous spray cascading over his boots, and inched forward to where the west abutment wall joined the cliffside. The seam was drifted with trailing scarves of scattered leaves, almost hidden by vines. Amos probed among them, parting the strands enough to see several snaking chinks. Settling like this wouldn’t affect the structure but he figured the TVA was worried about leaks anyway, wondering if their unproven dam would hold as fast as the reservoir was backing up. Whatever their concerns they’d keep them quiet. They wouldn’t draw unwelcome attention to their business in Yuneetah. In this same spot on the other side the structure would be most vulnerable, where it clung to the weak limestone. This was a gravity dam. It would have to be struck at the base to cause a breach near the bottom. Then the pressure of the water the wall held back would sweep it away, releasing the surging lake.
Amos knew as much because he understood explosives. If he had been born for anything, it was to handle dynamite. He had the steady hands it took. Once he’d worked as a powder monkey at a gravel quarry, the first job he found after leaving Yuneetah. His duty was to bring tools and explosives to the other men. Eventually they saw how fearless he was in spite of his young age and let him insert the fuses in the dynamite, punching holes in the cylindrical sticks with crimpers. Then for a time after the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1925 was passed, bringing with it rest areas and filling stations and eyesore bridges of steel, Amos had blasted tunnels in mountainsides to make room for the roads. He’d watched as motorcars caught on and blacktop reached deeper into the backwoods, cutting down whatever was in the way, sickened by what he saw. It used to be that he could walk a trail with deer grazing in open fields on both sides of him, plovers leading chicks through the bracken. These days traffic was running the plovers off and killing the deer. The bird nests Amos used to plunder gone. The gullies he once slept in fouled with roadkill. But however much he hated road building he sought the work out wherever he could find it. If he put himself in the right situations, sometimes an opportunity arose to hinder the government’s progress. It was then a matter of deciding whether or not to take it.
Yesterday before sunset after his camp was made, his guinea hen eggs boiled and eaten, the dog bite on his shin cleaned and wrapped with a strip torn from his shirt, Amos walked southeast until he saw a gap in the trees near the Whitehall County line where he knew the dam would be. Because there was still some daylight he avoided the site itself an
d ventured down an access road to the dormitories where the workmen used to be housed. He climbed the embankment alongside the dam into the woods where he discovered a stone wall marking the boundaries of the watershed. He followed the wall to a cinder-block hut with a padlocked door and stood contemplating it. When he pried a heavy rock from the mud and tried to smash the pendulous lock, the rock broke to pieces in his hands. But there were other ways to open it. There might be nothing inside but he was willing to wager there had been dynamite left after blasting the dam’s foundation. He wasn’t impatient to find out. He had learned to wait and see. He made decisions when the time came and not before, his actions dictated by what his instincts told him in the moment. If he discovered a shed full of explosives behind the door he might turn and walk away from them. But standing there he felt the opposition that had been inside him since his first memories of consciousness, thrusting like a fist under his breastbone, to all forms of government and hierarchy and authority. His resistance to all those who tried to keep him out with their locks.