by Amy Greene
“I should have figured you wouldn’t let her out by herself,” Silver stammered on. “I don’t know nothing about children.” She hesitated again, shaking her head. “Gracie didn’t want me to take him. Said Rusty was her dog. I knew I shouldn’t take him without telling you, but I thought I had to get it over with.” It had felt too late somehow to abandon her course, so she’d turned her back to Gracie and unchained the dog. Once the rope was around his neck she’d set out pulling him across the field, wind rippling the weeds. When she’d looked over her shoulder Gracie was behind her, watching with a somber face. “She followed me as far as the apple tree. I stopped and told her to get to the house but she wouldn’t.” Silver paused once more, gathering herself to finish. “I looked back when I got to the woods and she was still there. I figured she’d be all right in her own yard. I never dreamed anything would happen to her.” What Silver didn’t tell Annie Clyde was how she had waved to the child with her left hand as she stood at the verge of the pines, grappling with the rope in her right. How she had said good-bye to Gracie knowing it was the last time she would ever see her, but not that it might be the last time anybody ever saw her again.
“You have Rusty?” Annie Clyde asked. Her forehead was clammy. Her fever had broken.
Silver blew out a breath. “If I gave him back to you yesterday I would have had to tell on myself and Amos both. Just because he was hanging around don’t mean he’s to blame. Gracie wouldn’t have wandered off if I’d knocked on the door. Or made sure she went back to the house before I took the dog home with me. I put him in the shed, up at the still where Granddaddy used to keep his watchdogs. It was nighttime before anybody came and told me Gracie was gone.”
“Gracie,” Annie Clyde whispered, tears dropping from her reddened lids.
Silver reached to thumb the wetness from her niece’s cheek. “I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to look you in the face again after this, Annie Clyde,” she said. “As much as I care for you. I’ll turn your dog loose, but I won’t be bringing him back. I know that dog can find his way.”
Annie Clyde tried to push up on her elbows and they gave out. “But where’s Gracie?”
“No,” Silver said. “I don’t know where Gracie’s at. You’re mixed up, Annie Clyde.” She was selfishly glad for the medicine muddling her niece’s head. She didn’t want to hear what the girl might say if she had her faculties. She captured Annie Clyde’s hand, the delicate fingers so much like her sister’s. So much like her own. Then she heard a creak and leapt up like she’d been caught stealing. She turned to see James Dodson leaning against the wall, the room filled with a reek of moonshine but not from the jar by the bed. His hair was mussed, his clothes disheveled.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Silver was startled by her own anger. “Your wife’s sick. How come you had to leave her?”
“I didn’t leave her,” James said. “I was in the barn.”
“Where’s your aunt and uncle?”
James squinted down at Annie Clyde. “I asked you what’s going on.”
“She’s got blood poisoning,” Silver snapped. “She stepped on a locust thorn. Her fever’s broke, but if it comes back don’t you wait until morning to get her to the doctor. That medicine is bitter, but make her drink some more if she wakes up hurting. And don’t let her get out of the bed, either.” When Silver stopped her mouth was dry, having talked more on this night than she had in a decade. A weariness came over her. She couldn’t tell it again, what she had told Annie Clyde. Not to this man who had sought to take what remained of her sister away from her again. They stood across from each other in the lamplight, James blinking at her with bloodshot eyes. Then she pushed past him, the whiskey fumes enough to sting her nose, and ran down the stairs.
She escaped out the wide-open door into the endless rain and went around the side of the house, splashing up darts of water. Thistles lashed her legs as she cut through the hayfield, as she tripped over what had blown down on her way to the foot of the mountain. Once again she followed the familiar ridges up to the still. She was shaking as she approached the shed and paused under its eave, burrs falling from the chinquapin onto the roof. She reached to touch the splintery boards, drew close to press her ear against the side of the building. After a second there came a whimpering. Then scratching where the warped boards met the packed dirt. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the rough wood. There was nothing left to do but let him go.
AUGUST 2, 1936
By the first light of morning the rain had stopped. When the sun rose it twinkled on the surface of the water standing everywhere like thousands of eyes coming open. It was dawn of the third day, but Rusty had come down the mountain when it was still dark. For a long time he had been pent up, lying shivering on the packed earth. Nosing at blankets that still held the scent of other dogs, faint but present enough to vex him. He had been left a pone of burnt bread but he wouldn’t eat or drink. Whenever he heard movement he had barked to be let out. He had paced and scratched but nobody came. When the shed door opened at last he wasted no time. As lonely as he’d been he didn’t greet the one who turned him loose. He ran down the ridges on his way back home. But when he came to the woods behind the Walker farm he slowed down. He could tell Gracie had been there. So had others with blood like hers, left in flecks on the ferns and briars. He was sidetracked by the blackbirds that had reemerged after the storm to forage, rustling in multitudes as if the dark lake had already come to fill the woods. After he flushed them away he went on looking for Gracie with his nose to the ground. He missed her. She fed him biscuits and clover and sometimes sticks. She let him lick her eyes and mouth. She rolled with him on the ground. She tried to ride on his back. They knew each other’s smells and tastes and sounds.
In the night his keen ears had heard, apart from the rain, a distant crying. It might have been the gobble of wild turkeys or the chitter of weasels but it might have been otherwise. He went on through the pines with his broad head lowered, moving toward the source of the sound.
In a dream she heard Rusty whining and digging, crumbs of red clay sifting down on her eyes. She couldn’t open them anymore. There were pictures in her hurting head of the dog and the woman going into the pines where she couldn’t see them. She had waited near the apple tree, hanging back because she knew she shouldn’t follow. She thought the woman might scold her. But she wanted to see what they were doing in the woods. Spore caps of moss sprouted on rotten log backs with dotted tips like swarms of green gnats. Pokeberry shed its poisonous seeds like polished black beads. She looked up and tried to make out the high tops of the trees shifting in the wind, their slender trunks and leafy branches moving in a circular motion like dancing. They were too tall, swaying back and forth, creaking in a secretive way that almost scared her. They made her feel like she was up there clinging to their tips. One of the trees had fallen near the foot of the mountain. She had seen it with her mama. She wanted to climb on it like before but she couldn’t without help. She squatted and picked at the bark, skinned in places to reveal the lighter meat of the beech’s insides. Some of the tree’s limbs had broken in the fall, making splinters. There were crumbled chunks of shale and limestone washed white from the rain scattered all around. Gracie picked some up and dropped them in the pockets sewn onto her flour sack dress.
Then she wandered to the end of the trunk where the root ball arched above her head, thatched with sod ripped from the forest floor. It looked to her like an umbrella made of twisted roots. Some were braided pigtails and some coiled bedsprings, some claw fingers laced together. She squatted once again in the leaves plastering the ground and peered into the shadows between where the bowed roots parted. But she might never have crawled inside if not for a glimmer in the darkness. Just enough light penetrating the gloom under the umbrella to bounce off something shiny. Enough to make her curious. She found where the hanging roots were raised a little off the ground and got down on her belly. She reached for the shi
ny thing but her arm wasn’t that long. She gave up and tried wriggling underneath. Her dress rucked up as she slid on the orange mud into someplace her mama or daddy wouldn’t fit. Later they would search around the fallen beech, would even shine their lanterns on the tangled root ball, without ever knowing.
Gracie’s face brightened when saw what was glinting. It was the present the man gave her in the cornfield. She’d forgotten him and the toy both until that moment. Because she was three she didn’t wonder how or why the tin top had ended up under a tree. She couldn’t have known that her mama tossed it there a few hours ago. She scooted in farther, as she often burrowed into snowball bushes. She tried to get up on her knees but the arched roof of the root cavern was too low. She was reaching to pick up the toy when the mud began to shift beneath her weight.
Before she had time to fear a hole opened up. The ground collapsed and swallowed her. Either the fallen tree had created the hole or the weakened cave ceiling had caused the tree to fall. It didn’t matter. Gracie dropped four feet. It wasn’t too far. It was more how she landed, hitting her head and biting her tongue almost in two, mounds of clay piling on top of her. From below the hole was a source of pearly light that limned the moss dusting the limestone walls, narrow like a chimney stack. If Gracie had been able to move farther in, she would have found a blocked passage to another deeper and wider cave, one her daddy had used as a grave for his horse. On the first day and night Gracie didn’t wake at all. On the second day she cried and tried to call for her mama but her tongue was too big. Her head hurt too much. There was just enough space for her to lie in a knot with her knees drawn up to her chin. When rainwater ran down the narrow chimney stack of the mossy cave walls there was no room to get away. By the third morning she was lying in a puddle. She was cold and dreamed the stove had gone out. She was hungry and dreamed her mama was boiling oats. She wanted to go home and dreamed of the farm between the hills, cloud shadows passing over the fields. She dreamed of waving a stick with Rusty chasing her. She dreamed of other animals she had seen. Going across the road with her daddy where there was a ruddy calf in a pen with a leaky, pale pink nose. Going with her mama into the moldy shade of the springhouse and finding a mink curved around the butter crock. Stalking blackbirds that descended on the field like a funeral train. Running after them when they lifted off all together, the apples in her dress pockets bouncing against her knees.
More than anything she wanted her mama and daddy. It was them she dreamed of most. Riding on her daddy’s shoulders to church in her blue dress with tiny pink rosebuds. Him lifting her onto the wagon seat and showing her a garter snake he had found in the weeds. Walking out to the field with her mama to take him his dinner in a basket. Taking him water in hot weather, the cool smell of the earthen jug as she carried it across the baking furrows making her wish she was small enough to crawl inside. Lying in her crib pulled up close to her mama’s side of the bed, falling asleep with their hands clasped through the wooden slats. Getting an earache and nestling into the feather mattress between them, her mama pouring warm sweet oil into her ears. Sometimes she woke first and lay listening to them breathe. When it thundered she would seek out one of them to be rocked. When she got sick or stung, got a splinter or a tick, they held and kissed her. There had been no time before this when she cried and wasn’t comforted.
For two days Gracie had been by herself in the cave, buried under an avalanche of mud that dried to thick scales then cracked and fell off when she stirred. Her eyes were gummed shut by the matted blood from her scalp. When she finally struggled them open, she came out of a twilight state into a near darkness. Sometimes she turned her face to sip the water collecting in the craters of the cave floor, the same rain that filled the reservoir keeping her alive, but the effort hurt her bitten tongue. She had stopped crying for her mama, too, because her own voice ached her head. When light fell into the hole at dawn of that third day she rolled over in her sleep, trying to get warm. But she couldn’t wake up, even when Rusty barked. When he failed to force his shoulders through the roots he dug around the trunk, nosing deep enough to unearth some of the horse’s bones, already excavated and strewn about by other animals over the years. But as hard as Rusty tried he couldn’t get to Gracie. He scrambled among the roots and clods and rocks whimpering, too far from the house to be heard. By then it was Sunday and almost all of the searchers had gone home to church. Tomorrow they would go back to their jobs in factories and knitting mills, tobacco fields and logging camps. Yuneetah was empty again. Lying unfound, Gracie stopped moving. As the hours passed she opened her eyes less and less to look for her mama and daddy. She felt less and less like rolling over into the light filtering through the hole. She had lost the will to suck at the lukewarm water that came from the sky. She was too weak to cry anymore. Even one day was too long for a child to lie buried in the ground, given up for dead.
James Dodson opened his eyes at seven o’clock, having heard a sound in his sleep. His mouth was furred and foul-tasting. His hands were so swollen from the beating he’d given Amos that he could hardly open his fingers. His throbbing head was almost too weighted to lift. For an unclear moment after waking he thought he was taking a nap with his wife and child, like they did sometimes after Sunday dinner. It was good to sleep up there on summer afternoons, the bedroom shaded by the close trees. They could hear branches creaking if the window was open, a breeze puffing in the ruffled white curtains. When he blinked the blurriness from his eyes the first thing he saw was light reflected on the watermarked ceiling, low and slanted under the eave. Not as it looked grayed through storm clouds, but the golden yellow cast it had on fair mornings. Without the sound of rain, beating on the tin and ringing off the leaves, tapping his hat and his coat shoulders, James felt deaf. It took some amount of time for his eyes to readjust to the sun. He looked around the room at the wallpaper, faded green with paler roses. He looked at Gracie’s crib, whitewashed by Annie Clyde when she was still expecting, on the same day that she took a notion to paint all of the doors and windowsills and moldings in the house. He remembered her standing barefoot on sheets of newsprint, belly round beneath her apron. Seeing the crib brought the truth back. It was Sunday, but there had been no nap after church with his wife and child.
James remembered little of the night before. He’d insisted that Wallace and Verna go home and rest. Wallace had to get back to his congregation. He had a sermon to prepare. James meant to lie down and sleep with Annie Clyde. He had sworn to his aunt and uncle that he and Annie Clyde would be fine on their own until morning. But after they left James was overcome. He went out to the barn where he’d stashed a jar of Silver Ledford’s moonshine in the loft. Mary and Clyde Walker had been hard-shell Baptists who wouldn’t have a drop of liquor in their house. Out of respect to them Annie Clyde didn’t keep any herself, other than for medicine. James wasn’t much of a drinker, aside from taking a swig or two with Dale some evenings when their work was done. But last night he had drunk himself blind. James had a faint recollection of Annie Clyde’s aunt being here when he came back inside. The next thing he remembered was taking off his boots, unbuttoning his shirt and dropping it to the floor. Climbing into bed and curving himself around his wife, making a cocoon for her body. Now he lay with his arms around her waist, listening to the absence of drumming on the roof. “Annie Clyde,” he said into her hair, “it ain’t raining.” But she didn’t stir. He became aware of her heat under the cover, like an ember from the fireplace. It brought back what Silver had told him. That Annie Clyde had blood poisoning. James sat up with sudden alarm. He had slept with her, woke holding her, but someway he’d been too deep in his own misery to notice how bad off she was. James took his wife by the shoulder. “Annie Clyde,” he repeated over the thud of his heart. “Are you awake?”
“I think so,” she mumbled, without opening her eyes.
“Get up. It’s time to go to the doctor.”
She drew the sheet around her. “No. Somebody might come about Graci
e.”
“Dammit, Annie Clyde,” James said.
“Why don’t you go get him? Bring him back here.”
“Sit up,” James ordered. “Take some of this medicine.”
“No,” she said again, sounding near tears. “It don’t help me.”
“You drink this and then we’re leaving.”
“Go on,” she said. “I just need to sleep.”
James thought then of his truck, still mired to the running boards. There was no way Annie Clyde could walk that far down the road. She was too ill even to be carried. He would have to push the truck out and go by himself. “At least let me change that dressing first,” he said.
He got out of bed and went to the washstand feeling warm himself, not with fever but with shame. After what happened in the courthouse he should have been more worried about Annie Clyde. Busting in wild-eyed with his rifle. James hadn’t even moved when they wrestled it away from her. Hadn’t flinched when she fired a shot into the wall, plaster showering down. He ripped another strip from the sheet for a clean bandage. He washed and wrapped his wife’s foot as well as he could. Then he knelt at her bedside. Her flushed face was turned aside, her hair dark against her neck. He might have thought her at peace if not for the line between her brows, if not for her thinness. She hadn’t been eating much, not just for the last two days but for the last two years. Each evening he watched her rake some of her supper onto Gracie’s plate. But as she lay there in the sunlight her beauty still moved him. He didn’t want to leave her. He wanted to put his aching head back down and sleep with her. He lifted her clammy hand and pressed it to his cheek. “Whatever you want when this is over, I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll live wherever you tell me.”