by Amy Greene
“I’m not going tomorrow, if they try to make us,” she murmured, drifting off deeper into sleep. “I can’t leave Gracie. If she’s alive or if she’s dead, I’m taking her with me.”
James smoothed her hair. “I’ll stand behind you this time,” he said, but she didn’t hear.
Buttoning his shirt on the way downstairs, his other bruised hand stiff on the banister, James felt like he was choking. He didn’t want to but he was already thinking of the people he’d have to tell that Gracie was gone for good. Dale Hankins. His sister across the mountain, the one he still pictured as a toddler chewing on a stalk of sugarcane. Her white-blond hair so much like the soft-blossomed tufts of cotton they plucked with sacks strapped to their small shoulders, the dried bristles at the ends of the plants making stinging cuts on their fingers. Dora was there the last time the river took somebody away from him. Dora stood with him at their mother’s bedside after she died giving birth to a stillborn baby, staring down at the mattress soaked with more blood than it seemed a woman’s body could hold. But this time James was alone. Disbelief washed over him, that any of this was happening. Last summer he and Annie Clyde were hoeing in the garden with Gracie at their feet, at dusk with the first stars out and a ghost of moon hovering. Their life on the farm had been for the most part happy. He could see that now. When it was all over. There was seldom more than a few cents in James’s pocket and their clothes were washed thin, but they hadn’t missed what they didn’t have. They’d always managed to keep Gracie’s belly full, even if it was with beans and pone bread instead of meat. When there were only vegetables from the garden, Annie Clyde fixed a meal of cabbage, peppers and tomatoes. They were poor but Gracie didn’t know it. Now she was lost and Annie Clyde was burning alive.
When he went outside the glare of the sun blinded him. The sky looked bluer, the corn down at the road greener than he remembered. He could hear running water but the spring was too far away, at the verge of the hollow. In the night the lake must have crossed the last hillock of the Hankins pasture, spilling off the edge of the bank into the roadside gully. Whether the road was washed out or not, he wouldn’t be going anywhere if he couldn’t find somebody to help him push his Model A out of the slough. He should have had it towed out with a tractor before the other men went home but he didn’t think of that. The truck was the last thing on his mind yesterday. He lowered himself to the top step to put on his muddy boots. Out of habit he had left them on the porch last night to keep from tracking dirt through the house. He was about to get up when he heard a thump from beneath him. He frowned and peered between the cracks in the steps. As he bent over, something dashed out from under the porch. He jumped up, catching himself on the railing. When he saw it, he didn’t understand at first. There was a red dog with a white patch on its chest standing in the yard where the snowball bushes drooped. Its tail wagged as it looked at James, waiting for him to move. When James came down the steps with leaden feet the dog ran to him, dancing a circle around his boots. James sank to his knees, thinking it couldn’t be Rusty. It must be some other coonhound that looked the same. But once James pinned the dog down and held it still, he felt like the wind had been knocked out of him again.
For too long James knelt in the grass unable to get up. Rusty went on lapping at his face, lunging and twisting in his arms, soiling his shirtfront. He fumbled his stiff fingers over Rusty’s coat, scabbed with burrs and beggar’s-lice, searching for clues to where the dog had been. He tried to shout for Annie Clyde but his voice was gone. He couldn’t think what it meant that Gracie’s dog was not dead, not drowned in the lake. He was about to take the dog around the house and call his wife’s name under the bedroom window when he spotted something stark against the grass. Something he realized Rusty must have dragged from under the porch and through the yard. It appeared to be a bone, but after all James had seen his eyes might be playing tricks. He crawled across the ground for a closer look, water seeping into his trouser knees. It was long and balled like a fist at one end. He had been right. It was a bone. But not a human one.
James picked the bone up in both hands to inspect it, hefty with thick orange mud caking its porous marrow. Then he dropped it as though it had seared his palms.
He got to his feet and ran in a lurch around the house toward the barn. Somewhere inside there was a mattock with a dull chopping blade and a split ash handle, so worn he wouldn’t have taken it to Detroit. Just like on the day that Gracie went missing, he paused and stood panting in the barn opening, the eave plinking above his head. His eyes skated over the near emptiness, knowing he had seen it but not sure where. The feed buckets still hung from the brassy wall planks, sun streaming between them. The rafters were still lined with swallow nests, abandoned and crumbling. He went into the first stall, heaving a dusty crate out of his path, the dog shying from the racket. The mattock was propped in the stall corner, the digging end of its head buried in chaff. He grabbed it by the handle, flashing back to yesterday when he’d chopped through the laurel with Ellard’s axe, the blisters bursting to raw flesh again. He tore out of the barn and into the field with Rusty loping in front of him. He could hear the dog’s barking and his own tortured breathing, his boots stomping up rainwater. But that was all far away. The hayfield seemed a mile long stretching out before him, the mountain swelling high and shady at the other end, the beaded weeds clashing as Rusty dove through them, his red tail waving over the purpled tips.
When James finally reached the woods it seemed the hour had changed from morning to gloaming. Bugs swarmed in shafts of golden light, mosquitoes hovered over marshes lying flat and still between the trunks. The peepers and cicadas had come back out, snake doctors buzzing in darts and swoops. James didn’t feel the gnats in his eye corners. He didn’t bother to blink them out, or slap at the sweat bees teasing his ears. Near certain that he was running toward his daughter’s death, for as long as she had been missing, he barreled forward anyway. By the time he heard freshets trickling down the mountain his breath was sobbing, his legs giving out. When he reached the place where his horse Ranger was buried he came to a halt, the mattock hanging at his side. He must have seen the beech across the grave, must have clambered over it as he looked for Gracie. But this whole time, from the second he held the horse bone in his palms, as he crashed through the thicket, he was picturing the cave as he and Dale had left it after they filled it in. A slick pit that Gracie could have slipped into and gotten stuck. Drowning not in the lake but in the wagonload of dirt he had dumped himself. James had been this way more than once with the other searchers, shouting Gracie’s name over the rain until they lost their voices, and never once considered the ground could have swallowed her up like it did Dale’s house.
Catching his breath with his hands on his knees, James noticed that Rusty had been digging around the beech trunk. Ferns were disturbed, white horse bones scattered. But the truth didn’t dawn on him until the dog raced to the end of the trunk and began to burrow again, spraying dirt with his hindquarters raised and his nose hidden under the scaly roots. James straightened and took off after Rusty to where the root ball bowed scraping the softened ground. Thinking his little girl’s name but too winded to call it, he dropped to his knees and shoved the dog aside. There was no way a grown man could shoulder through the tangle. Rusty had made progress, but the trough he’d dug wasn’t deep enough for James. His first instinct was to make a trench for himself using the shovel end of the mattock. He worked for what felt like too long before attempting to wriggle under the roots, his face printing the mud and his nostrils plugging with it. But James couldn’t force his way in. He backed out and groped for the mattock, raised it high and began to hack at the sod-thatched root ball. Chopping with the pick end, guttural breaths wrenching from his throat, pulp flying into his mouth, the cuts Amos’s teeth had made on his knuckles bleeding. He cleaved and severed until slivers were lying everywhere, the mangled roots flayed back. Then Rusty rushed into the cavern the roots had once made and stood in
the rubble, barking so hard that foam flew from his jaws. With the morning sun penetrating the leaves overhead, James saw the same thing the dog did. There was an opening in the packed earth. Something like the groundhog holes he found along the fencerows bordering the farm. Too much like the last hole he had looked in. He dropped the mattock and stretched out flat once more, bars of light striping his filthy shirt. He slid forward until he was near enough to peer inside. But this time he didn’t see a child’s skull on the floor of a cave. He saw nothing, blinded by tears and sweat. When he rubbed his eyes he still couldn’t see. There wasn’t enough light.
Though he feared widening the hole with his hands might send more mud collapsing in, he had no choice but to furrow back the loamy earth with his fingers. He kept shoveling handfuls until there was enough room for him to lean inside, until there was enough light to make out a hump at the bottom of the burrow. It looked like a mound of clay. But as more sun filtered into the well of the cave, more of his child was revealed to him. Like the day she was born, pulling back the blanket to discover one part of her at a time so as not to make all of her cold. He rubbed his eyes to clear them again. Gracie was down there. Lying in a knot on her side. Knees drawn up and chin tucked. Under the mud he saw her dirty dress. Her dark curls. Her feet, small and creased. Not much bigger now than when he kissed them for the first time. But unlike that first time, her toes were blue instead of pink. A near-crippling dread came over James. He thrust his arm inside the cave to the shoulder, grasping with desperation. He could feel how chilly it was down there where his daughter had lain for two days and nights without him. She was too still. She should have been shivering. He couldn’t let her lie there any longer unmoving. If he could just snag the hem of her dress. If he could graze one curl of her hair. If he could touch her anywhere. He pushed in deeper, arm swiping, holding his breath until it burst out in frustration as his fingers skimmed nothing besides the dank air. But when he backed out of the hole some he found that his shoulders had forged its mouth wider, flooding the cave with more light.
Now James could see the side of Gracie’s face, blotched with dried red blooms. He could see the gash on her forehead clotting beneath the matted clumps of her hair. She looked like a doll carved from wax. Nothing like the child he last saw eating apple pie with her hands in the kitchen. Gracie wasn’t far below him. But he didn’t know if she was really there in the cave with him at all, or in some other place where he could never reach her. As lost to him as she had been when he opened his eyes this morning. James’s will failed him. The strength ran out of his arm. It dangled there useless. That’s when Annie Clyde’s words came back to him as though she spoke into his ear. No matter what, alive or dead, James had to give Gracie back to her mother. “Please Jesus,” he whispered, his tendons stretching taut. His whole self strained toward his child. He needed to widen the hole, to dig and shovel more with the mattock, but getting up would be too much like leaving her. He couldn’t let her out of his sight. Rusty barked and paced somewhere behind him, treading over and over his outstretched legs, his scrabbling boots. Dirt crumbs sifted and water trickled down the crags of the narrow cave walls. But to James everything had stopped. He was so close. When his fingertips made contact at last, just a brush against the sole of her foot, sparks rocketed up his arm. “Gracie,” he said, but she didn’t respond. “Gracie,” he crooned to her as he used to when she slept in her crib, when he tickled the bottoms of her feet to rouse her. “Gracie,” he pleaded, beginning to weep. “Wake up.” And down there in the pit, struggling against the blood that crusted it shut, his daughter’s eye fluttered open.
Annie Clyde Dodson had been asleep for what might have been minutes or days. By the light in the room she guessed it to be around nine but the clock she’d always kept near the bed was packed away in a crate. She had been dreaming that James was gone out to harvest the corn before the water took it. Standing in the box wagon holding the reins, opening the shucks with his peg, scooping corn into the crib with the neighbors that helped him each season. But then the dream of James merged into another one, of Rusty ranging the hills, poking his nose into burrows and dens to sniff the musk other animals had left behind, exploring thickets and caverns and shadowed breaches between plunging rock faces where his barking echoed off the cool walls. The sound had seemed to come from outside of Annie Clyde’s sleep. It seemed to have been the thing that woke her. She pushed herself up on her elbows and listened, then rested back on the pillows. She had vague memories of Silver sitting on the edge of the bed. Some of what her aunt said came back to her. But Annie Clyde couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t dreamed Silver and Rusty both. There was nobody in the room with her now. When she sat up the walls spun. She held her sweaty head until her dizziness passed. Then she lowered herself off the bed, crying out from the pain in her foot. She steeled herself before limping to the window to see the elm where the dog had been tethered. He still wasn’t there, but the barking had been so real.
Annie Clyde left the window and went out of the bedroom, descended the stairs with her head still swimming and her bad foot lifted, the sheeting bandage already stained through. On her way down, the shine through the crevices of the front door hurt her eyes. The rain was over. The lake would stop rising. She could find Gracie if the power company left her alone. All she needed was time. She stopped to breathe, leaning against the banister, before hobbling on to the kitchen. Crossing the linoleum was enough to sap what remained of Annie Clyde’s strength, but she was determined. She didn’t bother looking for her shoes. The damage was done. Her foot was too swollen. It throbbed with her pulse as she concentrated on moving forward. The closer she got to the door, the more convinced she became that the dog’s barking hadn’t been a dream. Finally she pushed the door open, shielding her eyes from the glaring sun, and hopped down the stoop.
If Annie Clyde had gone out the front door she would have seen paw prints around the porch steps. She would have discovered the horse bone where her husband dropped it. But in the side yard, where it seemed the barking came from, there was no evidence of Rusty. She turned her head toward the barn her father had repainted red not long before he died, now a dulled maroon, and took some uncertain steps out into the grass. She wanted to whistle but didn’t have the breath. The farm was silent besides the cicadas and bullfrogs, farther off the running water. Then she heard a bang from behind her. A car door slamming. She pivoted around, wincing at the pain shooting through her foot. The Dodge coupe she had come to recognize was parked at the end of the track. It must have been there all along. She waited as Washburn came through the sweet clover to reach her. From a distance he looked more composed than the last time she saw him, in a clean suit and tie with his dark blond hair combed neat again, a feather in the band of his fedora. When he got close she saw the cut under his chin. She remembered blood running down his neck into his collar. She felt none of her former anger, seeing the government man back again. She was almost too distracted to acknowledge him at all. “I thought nobody was home,” Washburn said. Then he paused to scrutinize her face. “You’re unwell, Mrs. Dodson.”
“My husband went after the doctor.”
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“I heard barking out here.”
Washburn glanced around the yard, then over her head toward the hayfield. “I got ahold of a man in Clinchfield with bloodhounds. I wasn’t expecting him until this afternoon, though.”
“Shh,” she said. “Listen.”
“How long has your husband been gone?”
“Do you hear that? That’s Rusty’s bark.”
“I believe you need to sit down, Mrs. Dodson.”
“Silver told me last night. I thought I was dreaming.”
Washburn looked to the kitchen door and the cement steps Annie Clyde’s father had poured when she was a child, the neglected geraniums of her mother’s flower beds growing up against them. His arm came around her waist but she wouldn’t let him lead her to the stoop. She’d heard again
what she had been listening for since she made it outside. It was the sound from her dream. A high yelping that echoed across the emptiness of Yuneetah. It was how Rusty sounded when he saw a snake or cornered a muskrat at the spring. When he found a drifter in the cornfield. The way he warned her that something was wrong. “I know you heard it that time,” she said to Washburn. He opened his mouth to answer but she raised a hand to hush him again. When another string of barks drifted across the field she grabbed his arm for leverage to turn around, both of them staring in that direction. Then Annie Clyde took off, bad foot forgotten.
As she dodged past the barn and thrashed into the hayfield, Washburn hurried to match her stride, his arm around her waist again. “Rusty!” She had made it as far as the apple tree when she saw the dog emerging from the pines. From fifty yards away Annie Clyde still recognized him. He rushed toward her through the long grasses, tongue flopping. If not for the press of Washburn’s fingers holding her up by the ribs she might have believed she was dreaming again.
Washburn’s voice broke her stupor, sharp as a slap. “Who is that?” he asked. She followed his eyes, staring across the weed tips. Her throat clenched shut, cutting off her breath.
Even as she watched him coming behind the dog, his auburn hair a blaze against the pines, she thought she might be seeing things. It was her husband. It was James. Then he was saying her name. “Annie Clyde!” His voice was as real as Rusty’s barking had been. He was carrying their daughter, bringing Gracie out of the woods. She lolled in his arms as he tried to run with her. Legs dangling like when he used to scoop her sleeping from a nest of hay at the end of a summer evening spent working in the barn. Annie Clyde was paralyzed at first. Washburn had to yank her forward, wading out to James and Gracie with her foot bandage unraveling.