by Amy Greene
When the four of them came together in the middle of the field Annie Clyde reached for her child. “Give her to me!” she demanded, but James kept on running like she wasn’t there.
“Where was she?” Washburn asked. “Is she breathing?”
“Why isn’t she moving?” Annie Clyde shouted. “James!”
“I ain’t got the truck,” James panted as they ran.
“We can take my car,” Washburn flung back over his shoulder, racing on ahead, trampling a path through the sedge. Annie Clyde stumbled, trying to keep up. She didn’t want to hinder them, but she didn’t know how she’d survive if they drove off without her.
She caught up as Washburn was opening a back door for James and Gracie. Washburn waited for her with his arm outstretched. She climbed in after James, bumping her head without feeling it. Washburn slammed the door behind her, catching her dress tail. She tore it loose and moved to take her child, cold and painted with orange mud. For the first time since Gracie was born, Annie Clyde didn’t want to look at her. The fear was too much. But she made herself study Gracie under the clay and blood as if it had been two years and not two days. She lifted her daughter, careful of her wounded head, and pressed an ear to her frail chest. She gathered up Gracie’s limp arms, buried her face in Gracie’s curls. Washburn swiveled to pass his suit coat across the seat, warm from his skin, and she used it to swaddle Gracie tight. She promised as Washburn reversed down the track to make Gracie an apple pie, to build her a rabbit hutch, to let her hold the baby chicks. Promising anything if she would only wake up. “Please, hurry,” Annie Clyde begged Washburn. She could feel Gracie’s spirit leaving her body faster than the car was moving.
Annie Clyde didn’t look back as Yuneetah receded. At the steep rising mountains or the ponded cow pastures or the river glinting between the shade trees. At Joe Dixon’s store or Hardin Bluff School or the tumbled-down foundation stones of the churches. The thought of this day had once broken her heart. Now the death of the town seemed like nothing compared to the waning life she held in her arms. Let the lake have it. She had all that counted. She closed her eyes and inhaled the farmland smell of Whitehall County blowing through the car, replacing the graveyard stench of dirt, limestone and moss. Buffeting her hair and flapping the sleeves of Washburn’s suit coat. She clutched the bundle of Gracie to her chest and pretended they were somewhere else to keep from losing her mind. They were riding to the market in the bed of Dale Hankins’s pickup. She was leaning against the cab holding Gracie between her knees, loose straw flying all around them. Or they were on a hayride tucked in a musky horse blanket, the wagon bumping down the road under the harvest moon, passing the frosted fields with James’s arms around her and Gracie both, the scent of autumn crisp and smoky on their skins. She remembered her husband then. She cracked her fevered lids to see him slumped beside her on the seat. His hair tousled, his shirt torn ragged. Mud and bark caking his fingernails. Soaked to the hip from the tall weeds he’d parted to bring Gracie home. “James,” Annie Clyde rasped, and his eyes rolled toward her. She was overcome with love for him, even in the midst of all this. The one who gave her daughter back to her. At last she understood what he’d meant when he said he had worshipped her from the moment he saw her standing on the riverbank. “She won’t wake up,” Annie Clyde whispered, shaking Gracie a little, tears leaking down her face. James forced himself to smile. For her sake, like so much of what he had done. “She will,” he said, and Annie Clyde tried to believe him.
Around noon Ellard Moody found himself alone with the Deering child’s bones. The remains from the cave in the clearing had been brought to the courtroom where the light would be best. Despite the power company’s deadline, there were still pews behind the railing. Flags still flanked the judge’s bench. Chairs remained on the witness stand and the raised jury platform as if there might be a trial tomorrow. Not that many trials had taken place in Yuneetah. There hadn’t been enough crime to warrant building a courthouse until 1830. Before then the sheriff made do with a stockade on the riverbank. Many times Ellard had stood at the back of this room with his hands clasped in front of him and his revolver on his hip as men were sentenced for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace. He had broken up only one fight in the courtroom himself, a scuffle between the owner of Gilley’s Hotel and a bachelor who owed him rent. Only once had there been a gunshot fired in the courthouse during his tenure, and that was yesterday afternoon. Ellard supposed there wasn’t much history worth preserving here, but he hoped before the water flooded in that somebody would take away the old furnishings and the old portraits of white-headed circuit court judges lining the walls. It could all be used elsewhere, in a church or in some other county’s court. If not, at least one of the lawyer’s tables was serving a final purpose. It had been cleared of the water pitcher and the stacks of law books to make room for the Deering boy’s skeleton, arranged now in the pattern of a child on its scarred walnut top.
Most of the morning Ellard had been there with a professor of anthropology from the college in Knoxville and a serious young man that appeared to be his student. For hours Ellard had looked over their shoulders at the broken skull and the brittle rib fragments, listening as they pieced together a story he could have told them. Judging by the pelvis, the professor said, this was a male. No more than five years old given the length of the femur. In his brief lifetime he had suffered from rickets. Then his head had been dashed on the rocks of the riverbed. For at least a decade after that his bones had lain in a shallow limestone cave being gnawed at by animals and eroded by weather. But the professor didn’t say what a shame it was that this child had suffered and died. That somebody had lost a son. Ellard wished they’d seen Wayne Deering slogging through the floodwaters with one boot on, out of his mind with grief. He hated to hear them talking about this child’s life and death in the same offhand way they’d remarked on the condition of the roads in from Knoxville, but he was unwilling to leave one of his own alone in the hands of these strangers. From the time the professor and his student had arrived in town this morning, Ellard had been out of temper. He couldn’t summon much friendliness toward them.
They had come as far as the courthouse then Ellard drove them down to the Hankins woods. He would have liked a preacher or at least an undertaker present to speak over the remains before they were disturbed but neither could be reached, so he had done the best he could by himself. He had stood at the foot of the bluff holding his hat in his hands, looking down at the leftover signs of a struggle. Furrows made in the spongy earth by feet digging and sliding as Ellard tried to grapple James off of Amos. Vines littered around the mouth of the cave. He had shut his eyes and bowed his head against the memory of the day before. Not just what had taken place between Amos and James Dodson, but the sight of the drifter sitting there unfazed beneath his shelter when Ellard and James found the camp, as if he was expecting them. It had taken all of Ellard’s willpower to match Amos’s maddening calm. Even when he was standing over the Deering child’s bones in the cave Ellard’s blood had begun to heat again, remembering the glint of mockery in Amos’s eye. After fumbling through the Lord’s Prayer he had turned his back and walked off.
While the college men huddled over the hole at the foot of the bluff with their sleeves rolled up, a tarp spread to receive the bones, Ellard went about his own business. In the cut-back laurel he found the axes, James’s thrown and his set aside forgotten. He had surveyed the drifter’s camp again, collapsing lumps of cook fire ash with his boot toe, crouching to examine the print of his own heel still marking the topsoil. He had knelt to retrieve the drifter’s belongings, untying the bindle and sorting through the chattel, finding nothing much besides pots and pans. A thick spool of rope. Matches kept dry in a corked glass bottle. A bolt cropper, surely used for thieving. A ball-peen hammer and some railroad spikes, Ellard supposed for building his shelters. His hat with the wilted brim and the buff-colored crown, the sweat-stained band. None of it told Ellard what Amos
was doing in Yuneetah. Then Ellard had unfolded the drifter’s peacoat, smelling the road dust of his travels. Reaching into an inner pocket he had discovered a darned sock that looked like a fat snake, bulging with whatever was stuffed inside. Wary to put his hand in the sock Ellard had sat on the milk crate to upend and shake it out, a collection of objects dropping on the bedroll unfurled at his feet. A hair ribbon, tied into a bow. A Kewpie doll. A toy soldier. The items looked old and unlikely to belong to Gracie Dodson, as Amos appeared to have been carrying them for far longer than three days. Ellard had turned each seeming keepsake over in his hands, thinking dark thoughts, unable to fathom their meaning.
After taking Amos’s belongings out to the trunk of his car he went to the bluff and helped wrap the excavated bones in canvas. Back at the courthouse he watched as the professor and his student laid them out, determined to make sure they were handled with the proper respect. He had observed with his arms folded as they brushed away the dirt, as they measured and stood back to consider. After they’d finally packed up their tools they shook Ellard’s hand and went out. He supposed their business was done. They would go on back to Knoxville, write up their report about the Deering boy and think nothing more of him or Yuneetah. Now Ellard lingered in the courtroom standing over the lawyer’s table, trying to feel the right way after all his years of beating the bushes for the Deering child’s bones. It turned out that finding the boy changed little. Wayne Deering had still lost his son. Looking down at the bones Ellard wished for some memory of what they were like with skin on them. He had an image of a child with sandy hair and bowed legs running around his car when he went down to the hog farm, but that might have been any of the Deering brood. He remembered them swimming in the river that ran along the edge of the farm not realizing it could rise up and kill them as easily as it floated them on their backs in its shallows. Ellard hoped burying the child would bring some measure of comfort to his father. He didn’t know where the surviving Deerings had ended up, but Wayne would have to be notified.
Thinking of all that needed doing before the day was over Ellard passed out of the courtroom for the last time, casting one final look up at the balcony as though someone might be watching, heels scuffing the oak floor that had gone all these months unpolished. The one lawman around this morning besides Ellard was the Whitehall County constable, but he and Ellard went way back. They had always come to each other’s aid when and however they could. As Ellard went through the lobby on the way to his office he nodded to the constable sitting at the counter behind the box of the shortwave, twisting the knobs and producing static, the dials glowing amber. The constable yawned into his fist, rubbed the back of his neck where his dark hair was clipped close. Ellard thought about telling him to take a break, maybe even to go on home. Yesterday had aged both of them. He could see it in the bags under the constable’s eyes and could feel it in his own joints. But he needed what help he could get.
Other than the constable, only Sam Washburn had returned to the courthouse after the events of yesterday afternoon. Ellard had meant to see if Washburn needed medical attention once Amos was subdued and the Dodsons were led away, but the boy had disappeared. Then earlier he had been waiting on the bench in the vestibule when Ellard arrived back at the courthouse with the college men. As Washburn rose to greet Ellard they didn’t mention what had happened down in the basement, or the shallow cut under the boy’s chin, although Washburn’s presence spoke something of his grit. He told Ellard he had met with the director of the TVA first thing this morning. If Gracie was still missing tomorrow, a drawdown would be ordered. Ellard found this concession somewhat hard to believe after how their meeting with Harville had gone but he saw no reason to doubt Washburn’s word. He supposed the boy knew better than he did how to deal with his own kind. When Washburn told Ellard he was headed to the Walker farm, Ellard said he would drive out directly to see the Dodsons himself, but he knew they’d be in good hands until he got there. It was his way of thanking Washburn for coming back to Yuneetah when others hadn’t. Their eyes locked and Ellard thought they understood each other.
Now Ellard stepped into his office and closed the door behind him, shutting out the static from the radio. He considered all the hours he’d spent in this long room, drafty enough in the winter to wear a coat and hot enough in July to sweat through his shirt because of the tall window overlooking the square. He glanced at the portrait on the wall of his predecessor. Twenty years he’d spent here, and this was the end. He wondered if the man in the picture over the desk would have appreciated more the gravity of this moment. If he would have done better by the town in its last days. Right now Ellard felt as wrung out and empty as the street beyond the window. He had never been more ready to head back up the hollow to his childhood home.
Then out of the corner of his eye he saw Silver Ledford rushing up the sidewalk, looking like the lone survivor of some disaster. Ellard knew she wasn’t coming to see him. He would meet her at the door and send her away but for a few seconds he allowed himself to observe her. Before yesterday, he hadn’t seen much of her in the last three decades. He would nod if he met her coming out of the store or drove by as she traveled down the road dragging her cotton sack through the pricker bushes. When he was younger he thought about her for days after encountering her. He turned the memory of her over in his mind in the night. When people teased that his apartment was too big for one man or said he needed a wife to cook for him, he grinned and lowered his head. There had been other women. He just hadn’t met one since Silver that he wanted to marry. As he grew older he was able to forget about her for long stretches. He would think he was over her until he heard somebody snickering in Joe Dixon’s or at McCormick’s Cafe as he ate his dinner, the ones who bought whiskey off Silver saying they had seen Amos up on the mountain. After all this time, he couldn’t stand to think about her with anybody else. Even now it galled Ellard to know she was here for Amos and not for him.
He was about to move from the window when he saw that Silver wasn’t coming by herself. There was a redbone coonhound trailing behind her, its nose to the ground. Ellard frowned, squinting through the flawed glass panes, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. It was the Dodsons’ dog, there was little question about it. As Silver left the pavement and started across the lawn it trotted through the grass at her heels. When she and the dog both disappeared from view of the window Ellard got moving. He was emerging from his office just as Silver was bursting into the vestibule, a shaft of sun falling in the door behind her. The dog halted at the threshold, stood on the top step looking in at the tile floor. Silver let the heavy door slam behind her and came farther inside, her feet leaving wet tracks. She tried to speak but didn’t seem to have enough wind. “What is it, Silver?” Ellard asked, his eyes searching her face.
“It’s Gracie,” she managed.
Ellard touched her shoulder. “Slow down and get your breath. Tell me from the start.”
“I was up on the ridge and heard the dog barking.”
“All right.”
“By the time I made it down the mountain Annie Clyde and James was getting in the car with some government man.” Silver took in a hitching breath. “They had Gracie with them.”
“You’re saying they found her?”
Silver nodded.
Ellard tried to organize his thoughts, his mind racing with questions. He didn’t know which to ask first. Finally he settled on the most important one. “Is she alive?”
“I think so. They was in a hurry.”
“Could you tell what kind of shape she was in?”
“She didn’t look well, from what I could make out.”
Ellard hesitated, searching Silver’s face again. “You don’t look too well either,” he said. “Come in here and have a seat.” She didn’t protest when he took her by the arm and led her through his office door to a chair in front of his desk, the same one James Dodson had been sitting in two days ago. She took several minutes to tell it all, in a f
ragmented way that Ellard, watching her lips so as not to miss a word, had trouble putting together. She’d been up on the ridge this morning when she heard the clamor. She tried to see off the ledge but couldn’t for the trees. The barking was coming from the woods and not the house. She thought the dog must be in a tangle with a coon or a skunk. She stayed where she was until she heard high voices mingled with the yelping. Then she made her way as fast as she could down the rocks, scrambling to reach the farm. But in the woods at the foot of the mountain where a beech tree was fallen she paused to absorb what she saw. The beech’s root ball was hacked to chunks, the mud around it ravaged. There was a hole in the ground underneath the tree, a narrow cave or burrow, but she hadn’t realized then that Gracie must have been inside it. When she ran out of the pines into the hayfield she found a path trampled through the weeds. She pursued James and Annie Clyde but was too late to catch them. Stopping at the side of the house with a stitch in her side, she saw James lowering himself with Gracie in his arms into the back of the government man’s car.
A hush fell over both of them. Ellard went on studying her for a while, the sun reflecting off the white plaster walls into his eyes. It took a minute for him to get it straight in his head, that Amos had never been involved. “What time did you see them?” Ellard asked at last.
“I don’t know. I went down the road after the car a piece. I tried to follow their tire tracks but I gave up. I’d say it took me about an hour to make it here walking. I couldn’t get a ride.”