by Amy Greene
Ellard had treated Silver like something precious. But when Amos came back to Yuneetah at the end of that summer, three years after he left for the first time on a northbound boxcar, Silver was drawn right back to him. She had tried not to think about Amos when she closed her eyes, but she tossed and turned all night in her bed. Knowing he was down the hollow at Beulah’s she burned herself lighting the fire at breakfast. At dinnertime she scorched the beans. She cared for Ellard but she didn’t belong with him. She had thought while she was caught up in his arms that she might always be with him, that she might even marry him. Then Amos came back tossing shale at her window and the pull she felt toward him was stronger than ever. She found herself choosing to go off with Amos when she had agreed to wait for Ellard down at the river with her fishing pole. Amos would come to her with a bucket for blackberry picking and she would follow him into the canes to sit on the trunk of a fallen chestnut, to gorge together until their bellies swelled. Silver spoke her mind more to Amos than to anybody. But that late September she didn’t tell him about the illness she’d begun to feel in the mornings.
Silver should have been more careful during her time with Ellard. It didn’t occur to her until she grew sick how foolish they had been. Though she told herself the blood would come any day, she was worried. She tried to keep even farther away from her grandmother during those months but one evening as she sat with Mildred at the kitchen table not eating her supper, she felt the old woman’s eyes on her. She got up and rushed outside for some air, trying to settle her stomach. When she came back inside with an armload of kindling, the coals were glowing under the kettle. Mildred pulled out a chair for her to sit. She took the kettle off the fire and poured its scalding contents into a cup. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing?” she spat, thrusting the cup into Silver’s hand. “Just like your mama.” Silver stared into the swirling pennyroyal dregs. She knew it would make her trouble go away, but in that moment she hated her grandmother more than ever. Even as she drained the cup in one searing gulp.
For almost three decades Silver had kept that secret from Ellard Moody. Now she was keeping another one. But she hadn’t lied to him about where she was headed when she got out of his car this morning. She’d gone straight across the road to the Walker farm and up to the porch where a group of men in slickers were drinking coffee. She recognized one of them without remembering his name. Someone she had gone to third grade with until she quit, one of the boys that had chucked rocks at her in the school yard. He told her that Annie Clyde wasn’t home, his mean eyes calling her all the names his mouth used to thirty-five years ago. Silver wanted to wait for her niece but not with the man’s eyes on her. Not inside with the women either. She knew what they thought of her. She went around to the barn where she could rest within earshot of the house, lying on her side in the scattered hay of a stall. Sometime later she heard tires churning and realized she’d been asleep. She scrambled up shedding straw and went to the side of the house. A group of men were pushing a pickup truck out of the bog of the yard. The farm had emptied over the course of the afternoon. When the truck was gone only the Packard remained. Silver knocked on the kitchen door and James’s aunt opened it. Her face was severe, strands escaping the knot at her nape. Silver asked for Annie Clyde and the woman said, “She’s down at the jail. I reckon they got Amos.” Without hesitation Silver turned and fled for town.
She had arrived at the courthouse near dusk, the sky whorled with orange clouds. The rain had tapered enough for swifts to return to the clock tower, wheeling and swooping around the dome roof. Silver paused at the flagpole to catch her breath. She’d expected to see curious or perhaps angry searchers but the lawn was deserted, only a few vehicles at the curb. She’d thought they were leaving the farm to come to the courthouse but maybe Ellard had already run them off. He would probably send Silver away as well, but she meant to try. She was about to make for the courthouse doors when they burst open. A young fair-headed man came down the steps. Rushing across the lawn to the street he slid and pitched forward, skidding on his face. He lay there without getting up, his mouth plugged with the earth and grass and water of Yuneetah as if he was drowning in it. Silver was too astonished to go to him. Finally the young man picked himself up, coughing and wiping his face, then limped on to the curb and drove away. Silver wanted to run into the building and demand to know what had happened. But she forced herself to take care up the cobbled walk, treacherous with leaves. As she reached for the door a lawman with a badge pinned to his shirt was coming out of the building. “Nobody’s getting in here tonight,” he said. “You’ll have to come back in the morning.” Then he went down the steps to a car like Ellard’s, a gold star on its side. Silver paced back and forth for a while under the portico wringing her hands, thinking of begging Ellard to let her see Amos but knowing better.
Now she continued down the footpath winding around the side of the mountain until she saw a glow through the limbs clustered over the trail she was following, the only light visible for miles. The cabin in the clearing looked like a haven when she came upon it, sheltered by walnut trees and wild chokecherry bushes, a curl of chimney smoke hanging over the shakes of the roof. Silver tramped up the steps and pounded on the plank door. “It’s Silver Ledford,” she cried out. There was a long lapse although Silver knew Beulah was in there. When the old woman answered she sounded reluctant, like she would rather have hidden from her company.
“Come on in,” Beulah allowed.
Silver pushed open the door then poked her head inside, the blustery draft she brought with her riffling the calendar pages tacked over Beulah’s bed in the corner and swaying the bundled herbs in the rafters. Her eyes moved over the split-log walls, the fireplace with a heap of cinders spilled onto the hearth. She smelled cooking. When she turned her head the old woman was taking a jar from a pie safe. She crossed the threshold, her shoes tracking the floor. It had been years since she entered a home not her own. “I hate to bother you late like this,” she said.
“It ain’t no bother. I been gone all day. I’m just now getting done with supper.”
“I won’t stay long.”
“I got squirrel. Tastes pretty good if you ain’t had meat in a while.”
“Nothing wrong with squirrel,” Silver said. She looked down at herself, still wearing the liver-colored dress, her legs streaked with silt. But Beulah didn’t seem to mind her state.
“Here’s some apple butter, too.” She opened the jar she held in her hand, popping the seal. “This is the last of it, but I can’t think of no reason to save it.”
“Neither can I,” Silver said.
Beulah took down crockery from a shelf and a pan of biscuits from the sideboard. She dished what was left of her supper onto a plate and Silver’s mouth filled with water. She hadn’t eaten. Beulah pulled out a chair but Silver hunkered before the waning cook fire with her food as she did at home. Beulah sighed and took the seat herself. “I never saw such a day. Did you?”
Silver took a bite of the stringy meat. “Not that I remember.”
“I never dreamed I’d see you at my door neither.”
“It’s a strange time,” Silver said.
Beulah shook her head. “It surely is.” She watched as Silver gnawed the squirrel bones clean and tossed them one by one into the fireplace. “I reckon we’re the only ones left up here now. I’ve thought about coming to see you sometime. But you don’t seem to like visitors.”
Silver went on chewing, not saying what came into her mind. Amos was about the only visitor she ever had. She looked around the shadowy cabin and thought it was no wonder he had left. He couldn’t have stayed here. The room was too smothering and close. She pictured him in a jail cell and lost some of her appetite. She supposed the reason she hadn’t asked Beulah about Amos yet was that she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to know anymore. Then Beulah put her out of her misery. “Go ahead. You got such a cloud over you, it’s liable to rain in here.”
Silver choked down a last bite. “They wouldn’t let me in to see Amos.”
Beulah studied her lap. “Well. I seen him.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s alive, but I won’t say he’s all right.”
“I knew it,” Silver said. “Ellard would just as soon kill him as look at him.”
Beulah pulled a handkerchief from her apron. Her eyes when she took off her pointed glasses to dab them were small and naked. “I’m the one that turned him in.”
Silver’s mouth dropped open. “What? Why?”
“I been trying to keep him from hurting hisself or anybody else.”
Silver’s hands trembled as she put aside her cleaned plate. She stared back into the dying fire with her knees gathered up. “There’s no telling what they’ll do to him tonight, much less if this goes to court. They’ll find a way to hang him. Mark my words. Even if Gracie ain’t found.”
Beulah sniffed and put her handkerchief away. “All we can do is wait and see.”
“I need you to tell me, Beulah,” Silver said. “Tell me he wouldn’t hurt a child.”
Beulah shook her head. “I can’t do that. I’m tired of telling.”
“If you don’t believe him,” Silver said, “he ain’t got nobody.”
“I didn’t say I don’t believe him,” Beulah said. “I’m just wore out.”
Silver covered her mouth as if to wipe it. Then she said through her greasy fingers, “If Amos has done something to Gracie, on purpose or not, how am I supposed to live with that?”
When Beulah didn’t answer, Silver raised her head. The old woman was still there, bathed in firelight. She got up heavily from her chair, hands on her back. “Laws, I’ll be glad for this day to end,” she said, eyes wandering to the pile of squirrel bones in the ashes. After another moment Beulah’s crooked fingers went to the pouch around her neck. She opened the drawstring and dumped the bones from it into the fire. They were quickly blackened by the guttering flames.
Silver looked up at her in shock. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
“There ain’t no more future I want to see,” Beulah said.
Silver felt sick to her stomach, like that long-ago evening at supper with her hateful grandmother. She got abruptly to her feet and left the cabin, not even thanking Beulah for the meal. She inhaled the fresh air as she went through the rain, across the lot and back into the trees. Before she lost her nerve she headed down the hollow, past the house where Ellard Moody once lived with his parents and the graveyard where Mary was buried, on to the Walker homestead. Gilded clouds hung over the roof, the moon a smudge behind them. One lamp burned in a front window and Silver made for the lit porch. There were no vehicles parked now at the end of the track. Even the Packard was missing. Silver mounted the porch steps and opened the door without knocking. It couldn’t wait any longer. If Annie Clyde was asleep she would wake her.
But when the door swung in on the front room, its darkened walls papered with vines, Silver couldn’t go in. She hadn’t been here since Mary died. She leaned on the doorjamb, looking into the shine of the oil lamp perched on the fireplace mantel. Aside from the lamp the mantel was bare, cleared of the china figurines that had belonged to her sister. There was an oval of paler wallpaper where a tinted portrait of Mary and Clyde used to hang. The house was silent, not even settling. Then Silver heard a whispery sound. A ragged intake of breath. With a start she turned her head. There was someone sitting on the shadowed bottom stair. For one disoriented instant she thought it was Gracie. But stepping through the doorway she realized that it was her niece instead. “Annie Clyde?” Silver asked, kneeling before her. What she saw sped up her heart. The lamp was running low on oil but she could tell anyhow that the girl was in trouble. Annie Clyde’s eyes were glazed over. There was heat coming off her in waves. “Where is everybody?”
“Gone,” Annie Clyde said, her voice a scratch. “They have babies of their own.”
“Come on. Let’s get you in the bed.”
Annie Clyde shook her head. “I can’t get up.”
“You’re all right,” Silver said, willing it to be true.
“No,” Annie Clyde said. “It’s my foot.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I stepped on a locust thorn.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
Silver took hold of Annie Clyde’s foot. It was wrapped in a discolored bandage, stained with seepage. She untied the wrapping and saw that the foot was bloated, red and hot to the touch with streaks of infection climbing up the ankle. “Oh,” she breathed. “I believe you’ve got blood poisoning, Annie Clyde. We can’t fool around with that. As run-down as you are, it’s hit you hard. I better go to the road and see if I can find somebody that’ll take you to the doctor.”
Annie Clyde shook her head again. “I have to be here when Gracie gets back.”
“You need medicine,” Silver insisted. “Just let me go down to the road.”
Annie Clyde reached out and clutched Silver’s wrist. “Don’t leave me.”
Silver stared down at her niece’s burning fingers. “Then let’s cool you off some.”
“I can’t walk,” Annie Clyde said.
Silver looked around as if for some kind of help but she and Annie Clyde were alone in the stillness of the house. Being taller and sturdier than Annie Clyde, Silver stooped and picked her niece up without much effort, like the girl child she might have had. Annie Clyde was light on the way up the stairs, a bundle of rags. Silver remembered the way to Mary’s upper bedroom but she watched her step with only the sallow shine from the front room to guide her. After lowering Annie Clyde to the feather mattress she ripped off a length of the sheet to make a fresh bandage, working almost in the dark. She went to the washstand in the corner, a cloth draped on the side of its flowered porcelain bowl. Annie Clyde closed her eyes as Silver swabbed her face, her throat, her wrists. Silver thought her niece was dozing, hair spread out and arms limp at her sides. Then Annie Clyde said with her eyes still shut, “I told her she’d be the death of me.”
Silver dropped the washcloth back into the flowered bowl. “You ain’t dying,” she said, too loudly in the quiet room. “All you need is medicine. I’ll see if I can find something here.”
“No,” Annie Clyde said. “Stay with me.”
Silver felt the prick of tears. She felt all the years she had lived alone, every stick of wood she had chopped and pail of water she had toted, every winter she had lasted through, every night with the woods pressing in around the weak flicker of her light. “Close your eyes,” she said.
When Annie Clyde obeyed Silver hurried down the stairs, taking the lamp with her into the kitchen. In there the walls were sooty from the woodstove, the mildewed curtains hanging limp. She found nothing much in the larder besides a sack of meal and a stack of newspapers for lighting cook fires. She flung open the cupboard doors, loose on their rusty hinges. Finally she yanked back the skirt under the sink basin and found what she had been rummaging for. An old bootleg jar of her own chartered whiskey, half gone from many seasons of treating croups and fevers. She remembered this batch by the beryl-colored glass. Dandelion, horsetail, nettle and birch leaves. She went back upstairs with the lamp in one hand and the medicine in the other, the risers groaning under her shoes. She paused in the doorway watching Annie Clyde breathe. She was reminded too much of the night Mary died, when she came into this same room with her teeth rattling in the February cold. Only now it was too hot. She put down the lamp on the bedside table and opened the window. Then she went to the bed and sat on the edge. “Here,” she said, propping the back of Annie Clyde’s head to let her drink. “Take you a few sups of this.”
Annie Clyde grimaced but didn’t protest, although the whiskey was strong. At Silver’s urging, she took several long gulps before falling back on the pillows. As Annie Clyde rested Silver listened to the weather outside. Studying her own distorted reflection in the windowpanes she began to
talk, not knowing at first what would come out. “I won’t ask you to forgive me,” she said. “For none of this.” She stole a glance at Annie Clyde. The girl’s eyes were open but they seemed unfocused. “I hope you’re listening to me. Because I don’t believe I can tell it twice.”
Annie Clyde moistened her parched lips but didn’t speak.
“I seen Amos out here yesterday, not much after dinnertime. I didn’t say nothing to you or Ellard because I didn’t think Amos took Gracie. I still don’t think so. I ain’t saying I trust him all the way, but I don’t believe he would bother a child.” Silver hesitated. “He’s been a friend to me. I was frightened of what might happen to him if I said he was hanging around your house.”
Annie Clyde’s brow furrowed. “You saw Amos?” she asked, her speech whiskey-thick.
“Yes. But that ain’t the worst of it.” Silver tried to swallow down a thickness in her own throat. “I saw Gracie, too. I guess I was the last one to see her.” Silver shut her mouth but the words were already out. “I reckon it was about two o’clock. I decided to go ahead and take the dog, so I didn’t have to be around when you left.” She tried to remember it right. She’d walked out of the cornfield flustered after her run-in with Amos, knowing she didn’t have the will to come back down the mountain tomorrow and see the Dodsons off. She’d passed James’s Model A Ford at the end of the track and pressed on to the front door. She’d rapped on the wood but the wind had carried her knock away. When nobody came she’d gone around to the side. Her hair had been whipping as she stood on the stoop but she could still hear raised voices from the kitchen. “I meant to tell you I was taking the dog but it sounded like you was fussing with your husband,” Silver said. “I wanted no part of that. You never asked me a favor before and I wanted to do it, but my nerves was all to pieces. I went back down the steps not hardly knowing if I was coming or going. I was fixing to give up and head home, until I seen her.” Gracie. Standing under the elm where the dog was tied, reaching up to catch the blowing leaves, chattering to him like he was another child. Silver would have gone on up the mountain, no matter how much it hurt to come back the next morning as they loaded their truck, if Gracie hadn’t been there looking so much like Mary. She thought it might kill her to see her sister’s granddaughter leaving Yuneetah.