by Amy Greene
James and Ellard set out across the field, ragweed soaking their pant legs to the knees. When they reached the other end they straddled the fence, the mesh of the tree canopy shielding them like an umbrella. A fecund odor rose up from the swamp between the close trunks. The deeper in they walked, the wilder the growth became. Soon they were traipsing through the nettles foot by foot, tearing the bushes aside with their hands. They had the axes but neither of them was prepared for the laurel hell when they came to it, their way blocked by a dense tract of shrubbery stretching what looked like miles in every direction, crowded branches twelve feet high blocking out what little sun there was shining. Hunters and trappers had been known to get lost trying to hack through lesser laurel hells than this one. Though James was sure they were wasting their time he started chopping anyway because his wife would have wanted him to, rooting out a tunnel for himself as Gracie used to do in the snowball bushes on the farm.
He and Ellard labored for what seemed all day to make a yard or two of progress, cutting into the leafy darkness until their shoulders ached. After a while James became so intent on his work that he stopped feeling anything. It was dim enough that he forgot about Ellard being there with him. He chopped on with single-minded purpose, blisters breaking open on his palms, locked in battle with the land he’d come to hate long before this day. He should have already been a hundred miles closer to Michigan. He and Annie Clyde and Gracie would have already stopped along the road to eat their dinner, biscuits and salt pork that Annie Clyde had wrapped in a dish towel. A brown bag of apples for Gracie. He should have already been shed of this godforsaken place. By the time he and Ellard had forged a half mile through the thicket he could hardly move his arms. At first he doubted his sight when he detected a shaft of light ahead, sun filtering into the claustrophobic shade. As he forced a path toward a gap in the laurel, he couldn’t help feeling hopeful. If Amos did have Gracie, if she was on the other side of this thicket, it would be over. When he reached the gap he slung the axe into the bushes and shouldered his way through, ripping aside branches until he stumbled out of the shrubbery.
James remembered Ellard only when the sheriff emerged from the laurel himself. He stepped in front of James, a scratch on his forehead. He brought a grim finger to his lips and James nodded. Dazed and out of breath, James followed Ellard on through a copse of poplars until he saw up ahead the clearing Beulah Kesterson had told Ellard about. He noticed Ellard’s hand hovering over the holster at his hip and wished for his own weapon. If he had been thinking straight he would have kept the axe. With each step closer to the clearing his daughter seemed more within his reach. He fought to bring his breathing under control, to walk with the same steadiness as the sheriff. Ellard searched the ground as they went for fresh-turned earth or perhaps footprints smaller than a man’s. After proceeding for several yards they entered what appeared to be a makeshift camp near the foot of a bluff draped in vines. There was a lantern hanging from a low bough, a lean-to fashioned from birch limbs and a tarp. James’s boots stuttered. Under the lean-to Amos was sitting on a milk crate, bent over a kettle and a smoldering cook fire. He lifted his face, looking up with bland expectation. He seemed unalarmed to have been discovered. James’s first urge was to run and take him by the throat but he saw lying not far from the kettle a rusted machete. He had to think. One mistake could cost him Gracie.
“Hello, Ellard,” Amos said, stirring the swill in his pot with a ladle. “I see you got here the hard way. But you wouldn’t have made it down the bluff in this rain. I nearly fell myself.”
“Hidee, Amos. I was hoping I wouldn’t be seeing you again.”
Amos smiled. “I didn’t mean for you to.”
“What are you doing out here?” Ellard asked.
“Nothing much,” Amos said.
“You know this place is fixing to be flooded?”
“That’s why I came back. I wanted to see it one more time before it’s gone.”
Ellard spat into the drifter’s fire. “You’re awful brave,” he said. “Or dumb.”
Amos blinked at Ellard in the dripping green shade. There was an almost preternatural stillness about him. “I appreciate it, but don’t concern yourself. I won’t let the water get me.”
“Somebody’s liable to get you for trespassing,” Ellard said.
Amos went back to tending his pot. “This land belongs to nobody now.”
“I guess the power company would disagree with you about that.”
Amos turned his attention to James. “Who did you bring with you?”
“This here’s James Dodson.”
“Do we know each other?” Amos asked.
James took the drifter in, his forearms where his shirtsleeves were rolled up crosshatched with cuts. Thin lashes, scabbing but fresh. “I’d say we know of each other,” he said.
Amos considered. “That’s a good way to put it. We all know of each other around here, don’t we?” He sipped from the battered ladle, sampling his dinner. “Are you men hungry?”
Ellard’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t come out here to eat.”
Amos stopped stirring. “What can I do for you then?”
“I came to have a talk with you. But I figure you won’t care if I take a look around first.” Ellard kept his eyes on Amos as he neared the fire and picked up a blown-down branch. He poked with the stick at the charred stones around the kettle, probably looking for signs of bone or tooth. The thought knotted James’s guts. When Ellard seemed satisfied there was nothing to be gleaned from the ashes he ducked under the plinking lean-to eave. After a moment James saw him prodding at a bundle tucked in one corner of the shelter with his foot, something wrapped in a piece of canvas. James held his breath. Ellard knelt and James heard the sheriff’s knees popping over the rain. He unwound the covering and let its contents fall out. It was the drifter’s bedroll, tied with a piece of twine. Ellard pulled the string to unbind it. Rolled inside were the implements a drifter carried. A tin plate, a cook pot, a frying pan. Ellard studied these provisions for a time then got up and walked back to the front of the lean-to with his hands on his hips.
Amos sat back on the milk crate. “What is it you want to talk about, Ellard?”
“James’s little girl is missing.”
Amos looked at James. “I heard something about that. I’m sorry for you and your wife.”
“You scared Annie Clyde yesterday,” James said.
Amos put down the ladle. “That wasn’t my intention.”
“Annie Clyde thinks you know where Gracie’s at,” Ellard interrupted, as Amos went on gazing at James without response. “You ain’t seen any missing children, have you?”
Amos seemed to mull it over. Then his one eye settled back on James. “Yes,” he said.
“You’ve seen one?”
“Yes.”
“A lost child?”
“A dead child.”
James gaped at him, stricken. For a second Ellard didn’t move or speak either. Rain tapped at the tarp roof of the shelter. “You saying you found a body?” Ellard asked at last.
“Yes.”
Ellard moved toward Amos. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“I generally try to avoid the law,” Amos said.
Sweat sprang out in beads on James’s brow. “Where is it?”
“I’d have to take you to it.”
“Then take me to it,” James said, his voice unfamiliar to his own ears.
“Wait a minute, James,” Ellard said. “I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”
James’s hands tensed into fists. “I’m done waiting.”
Ellard cursed under his breath, touching his holster. “Watch your step,” he warned Amos.
The drifter took his hat from beside the milk crate and put it on his head. He stood up and regarded James as if to make sure of something. Then he nodded and glided past James on almost silent feet. James followed him numb and mindless across the clearing toward the bluff. Ellard c
ame behind them, revolver drawn, but James ignored both of the other men. As he walked, he conjured Gracie’s face to hold before him in place of whatever he was about to see. He pictured her sleeping in her crib with her fingers curled under her chin, lips suckling as if she nursed in a dream. He didn’t know if a human being was made to withstand a thing like this. It seemed possible he wouldn’t survive. They walked a few yards to the rocky ledges, lush with a fall of white-flowered woodbine. At the bottom of the bluff it appeared as though Amos had hacked through the greenery with the rusted machete. He pulled the vines aside and looked up at James with his impassive face, waiting. Ellard stepped between them. “Let me do this,” he said.
James shook his head. “No. She’s mine.” But he stopped and bent over, gulping.
“Don’t you want to see?” Amos asked.
“Shut your mouth,” Ellard shouted at Amos.
It took every ounce of James’s will to look down. There was a fissure at the foot of the bluff, something he took at first for an animal burrow. On closer inspection, he saw that it was a shallow limestone cave, the kind that honeycombed the valley floor. He let out a chuff of breath and lowered himself to his hands and knees. From that position he realized he would have to stretch flat on his belly to see what was inside. That close to the spongy topsoil the smell of it choked him. Bugs crawled into his collar, tickling his neck. He braced himself and turned his head to peer in the hole. For an instant in the grainy light he saw not the corpse he dreaded but Gracie as he remembered her, asleep on the floor of the cave as she would have been in her crib. But when his vision cleared what he saw was the skeleton of a child. Blackened leaves had sifted down through the shroud of woodbine to drift all around it, rotting in a scum of stagnant water. Some of the ribs were missing, carried off by animals. Milk teeth were gone from the jawbone. The small, tea-stained skull was broken, bashed in on one side. James scrambled backward in the litter of chopped-away vines and pushed himself up onto his knees. He retched but nothing came out. “That’s not Gracie,” he heard himself saying, but in his heart he felt that it was.
Not long after two o’clock, Beulah Kesterson went to the washstand and splashed her face. She ran a comb through her long ivory hair and braided it. She put on her best smock, the one she wore to funerals, then strained to bend and tie her shoes. After covering her braid with a head scarf, she crossed to the door with Annie Clyde Dodson still on her mind. The girl seemed to have aged a decade since yesterday. Her eyes had been like holes, her hair snarled, her dress soiled. In the past when Beulah couldn’t help those who came to have the bones read she sent them away without false hope. But she’d never been asked to look for a missing child. Others had disappeared after the floods but they were found, besides the Deering boy. Beulah imagined it would be even worse left wondering like this than knowing Gracie was dead. She felt she had to do something for Annie Clyde but she hadn’t meant to lie to her again. The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. She claimed to have seen the little girl alive, when in truth the bones had showed her nothing. Beulah told Annie Clyde what she wanted to hear because she had witnessed too much suffering. She couldn’t take any more of it. But maybe one last lie made no difference. Maybe there was nothing else Annie Clyde Dodson would have believed.
Then Ellard Moody had pecked on the door while Annie Clyde was still sleeping in Beulah’s bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had more than one visitor in the same day. Under other circumstances her spirits would have lifted to see Ellard. His parents had been good neighbors and he was always a respectful boy. He’d spent many afternoons playing under the shade trees around her cabin. Sometimes in the winters after Amos left, Beulah would pay Ellard a dime to bust kindling for her. She had watched him grow into a fine man over the years. When she opened the door she was troubled to see him looking nearly as bad off as Annie Clyde, standing on her steps slump-shouldered in the pouring rain. Each line of his face was a crack under iron-colored stubble, his drooping eyes red-rimmed. She knew what he came for and what she had to do, as much as it pained her. She told Ellard about Amos’s hiding place in the clearing only to protect him. She had seen a desperation close to madness in Annie Clyde Dodson. She wouldn’t have betrayed her son for any other reason than to save him. Not just from Annie Clyde, but from himself. After talking with Amos in the shed yesterday morning she’d come away certain of what he was planning. Something he might not live through. What troubled Beulah most was that Amos didn’t seem to care whether he got out of Yuneetah in one piece or not. She needed to make sure he understood her reasoning. She was headed out to tell him herself.
Beulah stepped into the storm, the sun still trying to break through the clouds. The rain was slackening but not over. She’d seen it pour weeks at a time on the valley. If it didn’t let up the search would be impossible to continue. Soon the lake would reach the main road. There would be no getting in or out. It wasn’t just the child slipping farther away every minute. It was all of Yuneetah. She hurried down the hollow, past the graveyard and the Walker farm. At the end of the track she turned north, catching winks of water between the roadside trees. She used to go to the shoals on the first of March each season to see the river unthawing, a ritual that meant winter was over. In the cold months she dreamed of its damp slate smell, its eroding banks studded with oval rocks washed smooth as glass. Like the Cherokees, Beulah thought the river might be speaking to her. She wondered if the bones passed down to her had come from some strange fish caught in its waters. If it wasn’t Long Man whispering to her about the people that lived along its shores, communicating in some way much older than hers, from before language. As close as the people of Yuneetah had lived to it, having fished from and drunk of and swam through its waters, maybe they too could have heard the truths it told if they’d listened closer.
But the river as Beulah knew it was gone. She moved on from what it was becoming, a flood seeping into her shoes and wetting her rolled-down stockings. About two miles from the Walker farm she came to a truck mired along the shoulder to its running boards. She recognized James Dodson’s Model A Ford and stopped to see if he was close by. She listened for the searchers she’d heard calling through the night but their voices had abated. A little farther down the road she met a party of men walking and they tipped their hats at her. She could read the defeat in their postures. She knew how much they wanted to find the child alive, especially the townspeople who had returned from other counties. She understood what it would have meant to them. Now the search had become one last disappointment. She’d seen the same thing in Ellard’s long face. He had given up on finding Gracie, maybe even before he started looking for her. At least Beulah had helped him in some small way, though she doubted he would get much satisfaction from Amos. She ducked her head as she rushed past the Hankins property and the thorny wood where her son would be arrested, if he wasn’t already locked up in the courthouse basement. He had been content camping there, close enough to the river that when it left its banks all manner of useful junk washed up and got snared in the vines at the foot of the bluff. Amos might have hidden there comfortably until the lake flooded him out if not for Beulah.
She kept her eyes on the road as she passed the demolished and burned-down houses of Yuneetah. Seeing the destruction she felt the souls of those who built the town from its foundation and died within its boundaries. The settlers who wasted away from starvation and disease, the Rebel and Union soldiers, the farmers who dropped in the boiling heat of cotton fields and tobacco rows, the mothers who died in the sweat of childbed fever, the elders who went in their sleep at the end of long lives with loved ones holding their hands. It was the last time she’d travel this way, her last trip to town. But Amos mattered more to her than anything else right now. She was out of breath before she made it to the square, her legs and back aching. When she reached the courthouse and saw that the sheriff wasn’t parked out front she went up the broad steps and heaved herself down to wait under the
portico. The sidewalk was deserted besides a car and two trucks alongside the curb, bathed shiny with the overcast sun lighting their beaded cabs. Beulah could remember when the town had no sidewalks. When the square was made of dirt, a rain like this had turned it into a hoof-printed sump, the horses people rode then wearing crusty mud boots. She hadn’t been here since spring, before everybody cleared out. She’d gone into McCormick’s to see some of her neighbors off, having birthed them and their babies. She sat at the counter and with a nickel of her dwindling savings ordered a piece of cherry pie. Now the cafe’s plate-glass window was broken. She looked out at the neat buildings lined up in a row, red brick with white-painted moldings, awnings darkening their boarded facades. Sitting there in her funeral dress, saddened by the emptiness of the main street, she began to fear something had gone wrong. She prayed she’d done the right thing by turning Amos in.
When Beulah saw Ellard’s car coming at last, a red light revolving on its roof, she got to her feet. As he pulled up to the steps and switched the motor off she noticed through the blurred windshield someone sitting beside him in the front seat. Ellard got out and went around the car to open a rear door. At the same time the man on the passenger side almost tripped onto the sidewalk. It was James Dodson. She knew her fears had been founded. Something had gone wrong, but she couldn’t understand exactly what. Then she saw that Ellard was pulling her boy out of the backseat by the arm and her fingers went to her pouch of bones. She stood there clutching the pouch as Ellard led Amos up the courthouse steps with his hands cuffed behind him. When they reached the top Amos lifted his chin, hatless with his hair wetted sleek. Beulah sucked in a breath. His face was beaten misshapen. His lips mashed against his teeth, his nose bent, his eyebrow gashed, blood caked at his hairline. And yet he seemed unruffled as ever. Ellard was the one who looked shaken. James Dodson shambled up the steps behind them with his skinned fists hanging at his sides like he had taken the beating. When Beulah found the voice to ask Ellard what happened he turned to her and said, “He’s lucky I didn’t blow his head off.”