by Amy Greene
He had almost reached the farm when he saw Silver Ledford at the side of the road. She was coming down the bank across from the cornfield, her pale ankle flashing in the chicory as she stepped across the gully. Silver was unmistakable as anybody else. She possessed her own wild beauty, like bark and quartz rocks and flowering weeds. As she hurried ahead of the car Ellard sped up to pull alongside her. She glanced his way but kept walking in her liver-colored dress. He cranked the window back down, chill droplets splashing in on him. “Silver Ledford,” he called. She tucked her chin, pretending not to hear. He blasted the siren mounted on his front fender once and she stopped where she was, glowering as if he had slapped her. He reached across the seat and pushed open the passenger door for her. “Get in. I won’t keep you long.” She looked at him for another second before climbing inside. He turned off the engine, the downpour battering the roof. He closed up the window, the cornfield and the weedy bank blurring out of focus. “Why didn’t you go to Annie Clyde last night?” he asked. “I sent somebody after you.”
Silver huddled against the door, leaning her head on the misted window. Water had already begun to spread on the upholstery under her legs. “I’m on my way to see her now.”
“What about Amos? You ain’t seen him, have you?”
She turned farther away. “I been looking for him myself.”
“I got every lawman that would come here tracking him, but I bet you’d beat them all.”
“Amos don’t leave no tracks,” Silver muttered. “Not even for me to find him.”
“Amos is a human being, Silver. He can be caught. He’s just quicker and quieter than the average individual. Except maybe for you. I thought you might know the best place to look.”
Silver hugged herself, shivering. “I don’t know him as well as you think I do, Ellard.”
“You two seem awful close to me.”
“Anyhow I’d say Amos is long gone.”
“I figure you’ve seen him, though.”
“What if he ain’t done nothing wrong?”
“He never does no wrong, according to you and Beulah Kesterson.”
“I ain’t like the rest of you,” she said. “Blaming everything on him.” Even with her expression hidden behind her hair, Ellard could see the set of her jaw. “You been looking for an excuse to hang Amos going on forty years. All you been waiting for is a good enough reason.”
“That’s your sister’s grandbaby,” Ellard said. “You ought to be handing me the rope.”
Silver whipped her head around. “Don’t talk to me about my people.”
“I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt,” he went on. “Far back as we go. But if you ain’t telling me something, I’ll throw you and Amos both in jail. See how you like him then.”
She turned back to the window. “Amos is a lot of things, but he don’t bother children.”
“How do you know that?”
She didn’t answer.
“He’s up to something, or he wouldn’t be here. He needs to be put away.”
“I wouldn’t want to keep nothing from you that might help you find Gracie,” Silver said finally. “But I wouldn’t want to get Amos hung for something he didn’t do either.”
Ellard sighed. “It’s as bad to let a guilty man go as it is to hang an innocent one.”
She bowed her face, hiding it again. “I ain’t saying I’d let him go. I’d just have to look him in the eye before I made up my mind if he did anything wrong. Yours is done made up.”
Ellard studied the blurry windshield. “Surely you wouldn’t protect him over your kin.”
Silver shut her mouth tight, no sound but rain. Then Ellard was shocked when she opened the door and sprang from the car. He lunged across the empty seat where she had been. “Hold it.”
“I’m going to see Annie Clyde,” she shouted without looking back.
“I ain’t done with you,” he called after her. “Don’t stray too far.”
Ellard knew he shouldn’t let Silver get away but his temples were throbbing. He needed to collect himself. He shut the passenger door and leaned back in the seat, her woodsy smell still in the car with him. Most of the time he was careful not to think about Silver. About that day he’d found her under the shade trees along the river without her dress on, painted from head to toe in mud, hair plastered down with it. She’d seemed like part of the bank, as if she was growing up out of it. Back then she wasn’t a liar but Amos might have turned her into one. He had some kind of hold over her. She saw some appeal to him that nobody else in Yuneetah did. When Ellard, Silver and Mary had played together as children they would turn around and find Amos spying on them from the thicket. Or they might be catching minnows and tadpoles in a coffee can when Amos would come out of nowhere and kneel on the bank beside them. He would splash his hands in the water to scare away the fish and pull the claws off the crawdads they had been baiting with worms. After a while his eyes would meet Silver’s and she would walk off into the trees with him, leaving Ellard and Mary alone. It gnawed at Ellard how they seemed to belong together, both tall and lanky with hair the color of the shadows they passed through. Ellard would have liked to bloody Amos’s nose, to fight him as he sometimes did other boys in the school yard, but Amos had never raised his fists first. It wasn’t in Ellard’s nature to start a fight, so he stood back and watched as Amos stole Silver away from him again and again.
Both Ledford sisters were lovely to look at, but Silver was the loveliest to Ellard. In those days most girls wore their hair in plaits, but Silver kept hers unbound. It poured like mountain water down her back, into her eyes, over her shoulders. She was hard to catch when they played tag, hard to find when they played hide-and-seek. She could fit herself into any crevice or hole. Once she’d hidden from Ellard in a junked stovepipe. She didn’t talk much and when she did her words were gruff, but he recognized her bluster for what it was. She might have fooled Amos and Mary but Ellard saw tender skin underneath the shell she had grown over years of mistreatment. Sometimes he heard Silver mimicking the birds, blowing through her thumbs to answer a bobwhite. He had come upon her peeping in at a praying mantis she’d caught in the trap of her fingers. Sometimes she hummed or whistled if she thought nobody was paying attention.
It was only after Mary got married that Ellard had Silver to himself. Amos had been gone for three years by then. Silver seemed lost without her sister, wandering around with bewildered eyes. At that time her grandfather had already drunk himself to death and she lived alone with her grandmother. Ellard didn’t care what made Silver turn to him. For one summer when he was seventeen and she was fifteen they walked the back roads and ridges of Yuneetah alone. Crossing meadows on the way to the river with their cane poles he would pluck the frilled petals off a daisy and give her the yolk at the center. He would find red cardinal feathers in the grass and tuck them behind her ears. He wanted her to have the color she was missing in her drab shack on the mountaintop. Whatever was bright in a landscape of putty gray, faded green, smoky blue.
One hazy afternoon at the end of June, Ellard left his chores and went up the mountain to see if Silver wanted to go swimming. When he found that she wasn’t at home he headed to the shoals alone, undressing on his way to a part of the river where the water was broad and the current was tame, where willows bowed shedding yellowy leaves. Entering the deep shade naked he saw a flash of motion before he reached the edge of the shore. Silver was hunkered on the bank several feet downriver, camouflaged by the silt she had slathered on against the mosquitoes and the burning sun. She looked at him, eyes glittering coals in her smeared face. When she rose up Ellard couldn’t keep from rushing to her. He took in her clotted hair, her pointed breasts, the fork of her legs. As she stood on the bank bare as the day she was born Ellard saw the last plates of her shell fall away. Nothing could have stopped him then from pulling her slippery into his arms, kissing her so hard that their teeth clashed together. He was trembling as he lifted her up, as her thighs clos
ed around his hips. Though Ellard felt everything it was almost like watching himself.
Once they’d turned themselves loose, they couldn’t get enough of each other. Silver would find Ellard in the henhouse gathering eggs and they’d lie down in the patterns the chickens had scratched. They would roll in spruce needles under the trees until their sweating flesh was pasted with them, motes dancing around Silver’s head as the sun sank behind the mountains. But that whole summer, some part of Ellard was miserable waiting for it to end. Looking back he understood. All those warm months he felt like he’d just been borrowing Silver. When Amos showed up that September, back for the first time in three years, it was almost like Ellard had been expecting him. He’d been nailing down a piece of roof tin that had come loose in a storm for his mother when he spotted a figure heading up the hollow footpath with a bedroll under one arm, bending to drink from the trickling spring. He had grown taller, his hair longer, but he moved with the same stealth. When he lifted his face dripping from the spring Ellard could tell there was something altered about it, could see the void where his hat shaded an empty eye socket. But Ellard never doubted it was Amos. He didn’t come down the ladder. He watched Amos disappear up the path, his own eyes watering. Maybe Ellard wouldn’t have wanted Silver as much if she hadn’t preferred his enemy. Maybe his hatred for Amos had made his love for her burn hotter. Whatever the reason, the fire took ages to go out. It was years before Ellard could think of Silver without longing and only as something that had once happened to him.
Now Ellard wondered if Amos still had a hold over Silver. He looked at the damp she’d left on the seat, the same shape her hair used to make when she lay on the ground underneath him. He put his hand on the upholstery and pressed but nothing seeped up. She knew something she wasn’t saying. He would talk to her again if he hadn’t found Gracie or Amos by this afternoon. The constable had gone to see Beulah Kesterson last night and gotten nowhere with her either. It was time for Ellard to pay Beulah a visit himself. He pulled his revolver from its holster, popped out the cylinder, emptied the bullets into his hand then reloaded them. As he sat behind the wheel of the sheriff’s car the lake broadened and deepened across the bank in the Hankins pasture, overtaking the tasseled weeds in uneven ponds, touching the lowest wires of the fence still tufted with hanks of bovine hair. Rising over any scrap of sacking snagged from a child’s home-sewn dress hem. Swirling up any pattered bead of red. Drifting off any wisp of hair. Washing away every remaining shred of anyone’s child, not just the one he was searching for. Erasing the footprints of those living along with those dead, those moved on to inhabit other towns along with those lost forever. Too soon no sign would remain of any child ever torn from its mother.
That midmorning Annie Clyde Dodson wound up back in the cornfield where she’d started, as if she might find Gracie and Rusty waiting again at the end of a row. She didn’t know what hour it was but when she looked up the sun was higher behind rafts of cloud. After all night without sleep she felt lost on her own land. As she wandered between the stalks calling her daughter’s name she dreamed on her feet, remembering how she’d sat yesterday on the bottom porch step plucking chicken feathers and looking out at this field, corn swaying in the uneasiness before the windstorm. Earlier going into the musty gloom of the coop, singing to soothe the rooster. He had perched on an empty nesting box, manure hardened on the rotting straw, waiting for her. Once the rooster was plucked she had meant to ride Gracie among these rows in the wheelbarrow, collecting roasting ears for their dinner. She had told Gracie to stay on the porch, left the front door propped open with an iron long enough to put the carcass in the basin and get the flour. From the kitchen she had heard Rusty barking and gone through the dim hall toward the lit doorway. She had watched the dog running into the field with Gracie behind him. Then the corn had swallowed Gracie up and she couldn’t see her anymore. That was where everything had gone wrong. Now she slapped aside the stalks spraying drops, shouting for her daughter. There was no answer. Not even Rusty barking to say there was someone in the field who didn’t belong. This time there was only water standing at the end of the row. Instead of Gracie, a formless puddle.
But Annie Clyde felt in her bones that Gracie was somewhere close. The reservoir was filling, the floodwaters spreading. If they didn’t find her quick she might be drowned with the rest of the town. Annie Clyde couldn’t stop imagining Gracie wrapped in algae, sinking into a darkness with no bottom. Last night after James left with the sheriff she had waited in the house until she could take it no longer. She had gone back out and searched the roadside pines alone while the others were down at the water. She’d known even as she ran to the river at dawn when she heard clamoring voices that it wasn’t Gracie. No matter what the men believed, or what her husband believed. It made her wonder how much James loved Gracie if he could give up on her. Then she thought of the day Gracie was born, when he bent over the swaddled bundle of her to kiss the tips of her matchstick fingers. She thought of him carrying Gracie on his shoulders to church, handsome in suspenders and a hat with a striped band. But a man’s love, a father’s love, must be different than a mother’s. She’d seen his eyes before he went to the water last night. He was mourning already. She remembered the remark he made weeks ago about Gracie running off into the lake. She’d wanted to kill him when he said that. Now she wanted to kill herself. She might have done it already, if she didn’t believe Gracie was still alive.
It seemed James couldn’t admit that Gracie may have been taken by Amos. It seemed he would rather accept that anything else had happened to her. Amos had been passing in and out of town since before Annie Clyde was born. It was frightening to find Gracie in the cornfield with him, but she didn’t believe he was a child murderer, however certain she felt that he was keeping her daughter from her. Whatever Amos did to Gracie, as long as Annie Clyde got her back alive, it could be fixed. Annie Clyde could wash away any mark he left. As long as Gracie was found and returned with life still in her body, the one Annie Clyde knew every inch of as well as or better than she did her own, they’d be all right. Annie Clyde could love her child back from anything but death. If James was here beside her now she would have reminded him there was no coming out of that lake. Whatever it spread over was gone. Whatever the water took, it kept. But she could make Amos give Gracie back to them. All she had to do was get to him before the law did. Thus far she had managed to remain in motion, even with guilt crushing the breath out of her. It was her fault for not watching Gracie. There was no one else to blame. If she hadn’t been planning to leave her husband, she wouldn’t have been distracted. She had to be the one to make it right.
Annie Clyde was trying to get her bearings in the field when she heard a vehicle fishtailing down the track to the road, another band of men going off to look for her daughter. Around sunup a truckload had left with the only picture of Gracie she owned, taken last summer by a man who traveled around the countryside with his camera making family portraits. Annie Clyde had used money set aside for coffee and salt to pay him with, but it was worth the sacrifice. She hadn’t wanted to forget what Gracie looked like at two years old. Now she wanted her picture back. Her instincts told her it was as useless looking outside of Yuneetah as it was looking into the lake. It was the same waste of time. She thrashed her way between the rows and out of the field to see more cars and trucks parked in the knee-high grass of the lot fronting the house. One belonged to James’s uncle, the Packard she rode in on her wedding day. Wallace and his wife Verna had come from Sevier County, where the Methodist church was relocated. They’d been there after James lost his father in the flood of 1925 and now they were back to see their nephew through again. Annie Clyde didn’t know how they got word, or any of the others. She’d returned home sometime in the night to find Verna with the wives of men who came down from the mountains and from other counties making coffee in her kitchen. Her mouth grew dry thinking about it. She needed to have a drink of water and a bite of bread in her sto
mach. Maybe to sit and warm herself beside the stove for a minute, change into a clean dress and put on a hat. She had to get her head on straight if she meant to outwit the drifter and find his hiding place.
Emerging from the corn to cross the yard she nearly slipped again as she had at the riverside, the ground a leaching mouth that sucked at her shoes, patterned by treads from all those that had come and gone. There were footprints under the elm and the apple tree of every shape and size, the whole farm tracked over. If the one print she believed had belonged to the drifter remained it was mixed up among the rest. Walking with her eyes lowered to watch her own feet, she didn’t see the government man standing on the porch until she started up the steps. Right away she recognized him, from a month ago when their positions were reversed. He stood above her now under the pouring eave, his umbrella propped beside the front door instead of James’s gun. As if he had already taken possession of the place. He looked wrong with the unpainted door and the peeling clapboard of the house behind him. He seemed untouched by the weather, the slicker he wore over his charcoal suit the only evidence he’d come through it. He took off his fedora to reveal a head of dark golden hair. They looked at each other, his eyes very blue. “How long have you been here?” she asked, glancing over to see his black Dodge coupe near the end of the track as if he’d made it no farther, its wheels sunk into the marshy grass.