by Amy Greene
She didn’t follow them right away into the courthouse. She watched them disappear behind the double doors, afraid to find out what damage she had caused. It took a moment to collect herself and walk in through the entrance hall, past the mahogany staircase and the bulletin boards tacked with old notices, her shoes squeaking on the checkerboard tiles. She stopped and stood in the middle of the confusion with nobody paying attention to her. The constable that had questioned Beulah last night shuffled Amos to a desk in the corner scattered with papers beneath a map of the county. James Dodson sat on a bench against the wall holding his head in his hands, the curve of his back rouged by the stained-glass fanlights above the windows. Ellard walked over to a high counter where uniformed men from other police departments were operating a shortwave radio. Beulah tried to make sense of what he was telling these lawmen about bones in a cave, saying they needed to get somebody down to the Hankins woods to collect the remains. She thought at first he was talking about Gracie, but then one of the others mentioned contacting someone from the college in Knoxville to determine the age of the bones. She stood there for some unknown amount of time. Her eyes found the wall clock but it had run down. The calendar above the file cabinets hadn’t been changed since April either, as if the town had ceased to exist when the dam gates closed. Unable to stay on her blistered feet any longer, Beulah went to the bench and sat beside James. She touched his back through his coat but he didn’t lift his head.
Then she noticed the constable rising from behind the desk in the corner, steering Amos still handcuffed toward the stairwell leading down to the basement. She got up as quick as she could and hurried after them, too old to keep up. They went down two flights of stairs and a hall lined with shelves of moldering volumes labeled CRIMINAL MINUTES, their aged bindings unraveling and strings trailing from their broken spines, on past the door to a vault that held county records she supposed would be thrown away for all they mattered to the power company. At the end of the hall they came to the only cell. It looked hardly wide enough to turn around in, with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls, a bunk with a thin woolen blanket folded on top. The constable glared at Beulah as he opened the door. She knew he wasn’t fond of her since she’d refused to talk to him about Amos. After it clanged shut Amos backed up to the bars to have the handcuffs removed. When they were left alone he took a seat on the bunk and turned his beaten face to Beulah. She couldn’t keep from crying. “How come them to hurt you this way?”
“They didn’t give me a reason,” he said.
Beulah fished a handkerchief from her pocket. “What are they so wrought up over?”
Amos blinked at her between the bars. “They found some bones.”
“A child’s bones?”
“Yes.”
“A skeleton?”
He nodded.
“Where at?”
“Same place you found me.”
“How did they know where to look?”
“I showed them.”
Beulah mopped at her eyes. “How did you know where to look, then?”
Amos winced as he leaned against the cinder-block wall. “It’s been in there ten years or longer. Every time I get back a few more bones are carried off. But I’ve left it alone.”
“How do you reckon it got in there?”
“I would say the floods washed it in. Or the child crawled in, like I did.”
After a silence it struck her. “The little Deering boy. He’s the only one never found.”
“I guess he’s found now.”
Beulah stared down at the handkerchief crumpled in her hand, unable to look anymore at Amos’s swelling face, his bloody eye socket. “That still don’t tell me why James hurt you.”
There was a drawn-out pause. Beulah could hear rumbling voices and a flurry of movement upstairs. “He might have thought it was his daughter,” Amos said.
Beulah looked up. “Why would he think that?”
Amos touched his split eyebrow and studied his fingers without answering.
“You told him you found Gracie in that cave?”
“No,” he said. “That’s what he believed.”
Beulah felt light-headed. “Why would you do him that way?”
“I was just giving him what he wanted.”
“What in the devil does that mean?”
“He wanted to see a dead child and I showed him one.”
“That’s crazy talk. He didn’t want no such thing.”
“He wanted it over one way or another. If it was me, I wouldn’t have given up.”
“Lord, Amos. What have you done this time?”
He tried to smile. “Ellard was going to arrest me anyway.”
Beulah sighed. “You’re fixing to get yourself killed, son. You’ve nearly done it already.”
“Leave it alone,” he said, and she heard the pain in his voice.
She moved to the bars of the cell, wrapped her knotty fingers around them with the handkerchief balled in her palm. “They ought to let me clean you up. Where’s that constable?”
Amos closed his eye. “He won’t let you in here.”
“He will, too,” she said.
Amos rested against the wall and she loitered a moment more watching him. It felt like she was seeing his true face for the first time under that veil of bruises. It was something she’d needed to see before she died. She turned away from the cell with purpose, replacing the handkerchief in her pocket. She went down the hall the same way they’d come. She had started up the stairs when an echoing bang resounded down the stairwell. She paused. It sounded like the courthouse doors thrown open. Her first incoherent thought was that the wind had blown them in. Then she heard raised voices, one of them a woman’s. There was a pounding of feet overhead. Something toppled and crashed. As Beulah stood with her eyes fixed on the carpet rising out of sight around the bend leading to another flight of stairs, there was a second blast that could only have come from a gun. Annie Clyde had finally done it. Somebody was lying dead up there. Beulah should have rushed upstairs to see if she could help, but she didn’t want to know who it was. Ellard or James or some out-of-county lawman. Listening harder, she heard frantic scuffling. She looked over her shoulder toward Amos’s cell. “Don’t go up there,” he called down the hall.
“How did she find out where you are?” Beulah called back.
“Evidently word still gets around fast in Yuneetah,” he said. Then they both hushed and Beulah stood listening again. After several minutes passed the muffled voices upstairs seemed to calm somewhat. Beulah began to hope there was nobody shot. She was about to climb the stairs when she heard approaching feet and backed away from the bottom step. She kept her eyes on the bend in the staircase. It was Annie Clyde she saw first, the girl’s face wan and frail as a china cup. Her arms looked just as breakable, encircled by men’s hands. She was flanked by Ellard on one side and on the other by somebody Beulah didn’t know but whose kind she recognized. Her glance went to his wingtip shoes and back to his bewildered expression. He was surely wondering how he had gotten himself into this. He was younger than most of the caseworkers and county agents she’d seen sniffing around Yuneetah the last two years but he was one of them. His white shirt clean beside Annie Clyde’s dirtiness, his golden hair combed neat. Descending the stairs behind them was the constable, keeping an eye on James Dodson. But James didn’t need guarding. It looked to Beulah like he didn’t know where he was, still drunk with shock. She was relieved to see they all appeared unwounded as they brushed by her. None of them acknowledged Beulah as they passed. There was only the shuffle and screech of their footfalls down the dim hallway. As Beulah watched them go, it began to dawn on her what they were doing. “What’s wrong with you, letting her come down here?” she hollered after Ellard.
Ellard didn’t look back. “I should have let her shoot him, after what he done.”
“He’s in bad shape, Ellard. He ought to be in the hospital.”
“He’s right where he ought
to be, and you know it,” Ellard said. “He’s got trouble on his mind one way or another. It’s the best thing for him and everybody else if he stays locked up.”
“Well, I believe you’ve lost your mind,” Beulah said, out of breath as she shoved past him and the others to stand in front of the cell. Her eyes fell on the young power company man, holding Annie Clyde’s arm. As though he had some claim on her, some authority over any of them. “What are you doing,” she demanded of him, “poking your nose where it don’t belong?”
He seemed startled to be addressed. “Mrs. Dodson needed a ride and I offered her one.”
“Get out of the way, Miss Beulah,” Ellard ordered. “I told her she could talk to him.”
“Let her talk, then,” Amos spoke up, and a quiet fell over the rest of them. They stood still, gathered close in the grayish light from the window near the ceiling. Annie Clyde stared at Amos, her breath rapid. Beulah saw the rise and fall of her chest. If she wanted free from the men they might not be able to hold her. But Beulah did as Ellard said. She got out of the way.
Annie Clyde came forward and Amos rose from the bunk. Ellard’s other hand went to the butt of his revolver. Beulah looked from one to another of them. Amos shadowed in the recess of the cell. Annie Clyde lit by the window. The men holding her away from the bars with their backs almost against the wall. James Dodson standing there with the constable like someone dreaming. “What do you want to know?” Amos asked, any trace of pain gone from his voice.
“Where’s Gracie?”
“That I can’t tell you.”
“What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.”
“You took her.”
“What makes you think so?”
“You were down at the house.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Have you got her?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t have her.”
“Did you hurt my baby?”
“I wouldn’t hurt her. She’s all that’s worth saving in this place.”
“You tell me the truth,” Annie Clyde said through her teeth.
“All right,” Amos said back. “Here’s the truth. I’m not the one you ought to be worried about.” His gaze flicked to the young power company man standing near Annie Clyde’s elbow. “That’s your enemy right there. He’s the one fooling you, acting like he’s going to help you. But he’ll be at your door with a court order in the morning.”
“Shut up,” Annie Clyde said. “You. You took Gracie.”
Amos favored her with his one swollen eye. “I didn’t take her,” he said. “You lost her.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Annie Clyde moved like a blur. She yanked her arms up and brought them downward, wrenching free in an instant. It was the power company man who acted first, lurching in front of Annie Clyde as if to take a bullet for her. At almost the same time Amos’s arm shot between the bars and snaked around the man’s neck, pulling him into a choke hold. Beulah saw dully that there was something in Amos’s hand. A hunting knife. Somehow he had kept it concealed from Ellard and the other lawmen in all the uproar. But he hadn’t pulled the knife on James Dodson, even to defend himself. Beulah searched out James in the tumult and saw him snatching Annie Clyde against his chest. Amos was holding the power company man close enough to whisper in his ear, their cheeks smashed together between the bars, the knife tip dimpling the flesh under his chin. The man struggled, his wingtip shoes scuffing the floor, until Amos’s hold tightened enough to cut off his wind. Then he went limp. Ellard pulled his revolver and leveled it at Amos. “Drop what you’re holding there.”
“Just a minute,” Amos said. “I want to ask him something.” He pressed the knife tip into the power company man’s flesh, drawing a line of blood in its pale smoothness. Beulah remembered one of the man’s coworkers walking away from Bud and Fay Willet in a pin-striped suit, leaving them weeping on their porch. As young as he looked, she had no sympathy for him.
“Let him go,” Ellard said.
“What are you here for?” Amos asked.
The power company man stared straight ahead unable to answer, walleyed with fear.
“You’re here to run people off their land,” Amos answered for him.
“No—” the man protested, cringing away from the knife.
“Don’t you work for the TVA?”
The man raised a feeble hand to pry at Amos’s forearm, a ring with a topaz stone glinting on one of his fingers. Beulah doubted he even knew what he was saying. “Yes, but—”
“What department?”
“Family Removal Section,” he gasped out.
“Removal Section. That’s a choice. Who else is running people off, if not you?”
“Not me,” he insisted, his face turning bluish. “They give the orders—”
“There is no ‘they,’” Amos said, pressing the point of the knife deeper into the man’s throat. “Like your head. It’s one part of your body, but you wouldn’t be much use without it.”
“That’s about enough,” Ellard shouted, pulling the hammer back on his gun.
The power company man’s eyes rolled around as if to seek help, his blood mixing pink with the sweat soaking his once clean white shirt collar. “What would happen,” Amos asked into the man’s ear, “if I cut off one of this dam builder’s parts? Would it make any difference?”
“No,” the man begged.
Ellard stared at Amos’s battered face over the barrel of the revolver. Amos looked back at him steadily. “I’ve been itching to kill you going on forty years,” Ellard said. “I’ll do it, Amos.”
“I know you pretty well after that long,” Amos said. “You’re all talk.”
“What about me?” James broke in, letting go of Annie Clyde. “You reckon I’m all talk?” He stepped forward, his auburn hair and ruddy skin bright in the dreary cinder-block basement. He was a head taller and twenty years younger than Ellard or the constable. Beulah didn’t see what either one of them could do if he rushed the jail cell bars and got his hands on Amos again.
Amos’s eye stayed on Ellard and the gun. “No,” he said. “But I think you’re beat.”
Splotches bloomed in James’s cheeks. “You just keep on thinking that way.”
Beulah felt panic overtaking her. Threatening the power company man wouldn’t stop James Dodson from finishing what he’d started in the Hankins woods. She doubted James would care much if Amos cut off the power company man’s fine blond head. But Amos was ignoring the danger. “I’ve been shot at before,” he told Ellard. “As long as I can remember, people have been trying to get rid of me. You won’t be the one to do it.” Then he shifted his shining eye back to Annie Clyde. “Go ahead and put the blame on me, if it makes you feel better.”
“Please, son,” Beulah pleaded. “Turn him loose.” There was a charged pause. She could hear the breathing of those around her. The power company man’s eyes darted about in search of rescue but nobody moved. Then without warning Amos let go, giving the man a shove. He took in a whoop of air and staggered out of Amos’s reach, falling then scuttling to his feet. Even in that moment Beulah knew Amos hadn’t released the man because she told him to do it. He did nothing unless it suited him. He let the power company man go for the same reason he would never have hurt Gracie Dodson. Amos was not a murderer, no matter what they thought of him.
As dark settled over the valley Silver Ledford plodded down the winding mountainside. She carried no light through the trees but over the years she had learned not to need one, feeling her way along the ridges. She was headed to Beulah Kesterson’s cabin after having spent an hour in the woods a mile above her shack. She’d meant to make sure no lawman or searcher had stumbled across the still, though it would have been nigh impossible. Plum had taught her that trails led the law to a man’s whiskey so she never took the same path twice in a row. She’d approached from downstream, the water rushing engorged. She knelt to inspect the concealing laurel she’d
piled and it seemed undisturbed. There were no footprints in the clay of the bank save those of minks and raccoons. She moved the bushy limbs, drops spraying from the leaves, and found the still pot unmolested. After a while she got up again and looked into the foggy woods to the right of the stream. Over there she could see the outline of the shed leaning under a chinquapin tree, leaves and spiked burrs littering its tin roof. Like her grandfather before her, she stored sugar, sweet oil and mash barrels inside. But now the shed held more than that. She had wanted to move toward it but her feet were rooted for a long time. Her eyes wouldn’t blink. They filled with rain. For most of her life Silver had kept her own counsel. But as she stood there immobile, Beulah had come to her mind. She knew she had to see the old woman, if she couldn’t see Amos.
When it was still early morning Silver had gone into the canebrakes other searchers avoided, the briar thickets that tore scarlet lines in their arms. Disturbing nests of copperheads heaped over with leaves, probing with her fingers into the slick nooks of the riverbank on the other side of the dam and drawing them out catfish-bitten. She had scouted the Hankins pasture and the bracken across the fence, knowing Amos made his camp somewhere close. She’d tried to crawl into the laurel, twigs snagging her hair, but not even a child Gracie’s size could have forced her way in. Then at around eleven o’clock, coming down the bank in front of the Walker farm, she was stopped by Ellard Moody. While she was trapped in a car with him the old loss had threatened to surface. If she drew pictures, she could have sketched his boyhood face from memory. It was once that dear to her, freckled and serious with sad brown eyes. His body lean with muscle, his head full of cowlicks the color of maple sap. Decades had passed since her summer with Ellard but she could still feel his lips forming her name against her ear. Sometimes she would go to the river and remember lying there with him, the sun lighting his smooth brow above her, minnows swimming over and between their skins. When the wind mimicked the wail of a baby she looked around as if she might have had some other life with Ellard that she’d somehow forgotten. Theirs would have been a girl with eyes like flakes of moon. If she fretted, Silver would have held her. If she got cold, Silver would have stoked the fire. If food was scarce, Silver would have given her portion. If colored leaves were ankle deep, Silver would have swished through them with her.