by Amy Greene
“What direction was they headed?”
“South. Over into Whitehall County.”
“Taking her to the doctor. Sit tight and I’ll be back as soon as I know something.”
“Wait,” she said, before he could leave. “What about Amos?”
Ellard stopped. In the stillness he heard the constable’s voice, the crackle of static. “Let me ask you something, Silver. What put you in such a rush to get here? Was it Gracie or Amos?”
Silver looked away. Ellard had never wanted to slap a woman before but his hand itched now to meet with her cheek, to strike some color into it. He could even imagine how the print of his fingers would appear there as stripes. “I reckon I ought to let him go. Just take your word.”
“You think I’d lie to you about a thing like this?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you’d do for him,” Ellard said. But as quick as the old fire flamed up it died out of him. It was suddenly meaningless. It occurred to him that if he and Silver stayed here long enough the flood would wash them out, float them up like the curtain hems and the papers on his desk. In those few seconds he pictured how the shine of the window would look through murky water, lighting Silver’s waxen face riven with lines. A clutch of bubbles purling up from the slits of her nostrils like unstrung pearls. Both of them swimming in the coils of her black hair, in the rags of her calico dress. If they didn’t move they would both be buried underneath the lake. Whether they moved or not, they would both be forgotten with the rest of Yuneetah. Even Gracie. The dam would stand in memory, but not of their individual lives. Only of a moment in history. Ellard’s arm felt like lead as he reached for the doorknob. Then he dropped it when he heard the constable’s brisk footsteps approaching, resounding on the tile.
Ellard’s eyes remained on Silver as the constable knocked on the door and opened it without waiting to be invited into the office. “A call came in from my boys over at Whitehall County,” he said, all of his previous weariness gone. “Gracie Dodson has been found.”
“That’s what this woman is telling me,” Ellard said. “Who reported it to them?”
“I reckon it was Dr. Brock’s nurse.”
“What did they say about her condition?”
“They didn’t have a whole lot of information. Her mama and daddy brung her in. I reckon the doctor has done took them on to the hospital in Clinchfield.”
“I better head out there,” Ellard said.
“What about your prisoner?” the constable asked.
Silver raised her face to Ellard. A greenfly had entered with her and it buzzed between them. Ellard spoke more to Silver than to the constable. “I don’t reckon we can hold him.”
“You want me to turn him loose?” the constable asked.
“Naw,” Ellard said. “If you will, get on the radio and see what else you can find out.”
When the constable left the room Ellard went to his desk, strewn with paperwork from the power company. He opened the right-hand drawer with a key on an iron ring inside, took the key out and placed it on the desktop before Silver. As she stared down at the key he got up and went to the wall behind the door where Amos’s peacoat hung from a hook beside his own rain slicker, as though Amos was a guest and not a prisoner. On the floor beside Ellard’s rubber boots was the drifter’s bedroll. He hefted it under his arm, then took the coat from the hook. He carried them both to Silver, shoving the drifter’s things into her lap. “Here. You let him go. I can’t hold him, but I can’t be the one that turns him loose. I’ll let it be on your hands, since you think so well of him.” When Silver said nothing Ellard gritted his teeth. “There ain’t no telling what he’s done before and what he’ll do after this. You know that, don’t you? You know it and you don’t care.”
Silver blinked at the key on the desk, then up at Ellard. “Don’t be like this,” she said.
“I don’t know how to be any other way.”
“I don’t either. That’s been our problem, ain’t it?”
Ellard glanced out the window and saw the hound sniffing at the tires of his car. Amos was still down there in the bowels of the building. Ellard considered going downstairs to question him further but in the end he had nothing more to say to Amos. As there was nothing more to say to Silver Ledford now. “Should I wait on you in the car?” he asked her.
“No,” she said, looking so ill that he thought she might need a doctor herself. “I’ve got to watch after Gracie’s dog. But you come up and tell me how she is as soon as you get back.”
“You can stay here and wait for me,” Ellard said. “Unless you’re going off with him.”
“I’ll be around, Ellard,” Silver said. “Like I always have been.” Then she took the key and Amos’s possessions to the door, so tall her head nearly touched the frame. Ellard sat on the edge of his desk and looked across at her with the grayed roll of the bindle in her arms, past her shoulder the notice board tacked with papers as flimsy as their lives still seemed to him. He took in her paleness, the dark hair that spilled down her back almost to her waist. He didn’t try to close the distance between them as he once did on the riverbank. He had Silver for a summer when he was seventeen and he guessed that would have to do him. But he would think later that letting her go didn’t mean she never belonged to him. Nothing could change what was already done. The past at least was permanent. Whatever there was to come for himself and the neighbors he’d served and protected for twenty years, whatever lives and places they moved on to, he had known them in this one. As he’d known Silver Ledford in a way that nobody else ever could. The thought would comfort Ellard some when he’d remember how she turned her back on him with the bindle in her arms. How she left him there as she had done before and went to Amos.
At one o’clock Beulah Kesterson sat in the slat chair she kept beside the front door with her shoes off to let her blisters dry in the sun. Her legs and feet still ached from walking to town and back yesterday. It was hard to figure how she had traveled ten miles a day with her mother when they were peddling. She lifted her face to the breeze. As high over the valley as she lived, she could smell the river. It made her think about musseling. When her mother was alive they called it toe digging, pulling the shells from the riverbed silt to collect in their pans, taking turns with the good shucking knife. Sometimes they would boil the mussels in a smoke-blacked pot on the shore when they stopped to rest beside the river on their peddling rounds. The best mussel bed they’d found was now on the other side of the dam. It was past dinnertime and Beulah’s stomach was empty. She hoped Amos wasn’t hungry down at the jail. They had gone musseling together often when he was a child. The lassitude of the work had suited his patient nature. She had a notion to take him a pan of mussels right now, worn out as she felt. Even without her fortune-telling bones, she still had her intuition. She hadn’t escaped her inheritance. She supposed the discernment was like her blood, unseen but there inside her, a thing that could die only when she did. If she went to the courthouse Ellard Moody would let her in. She was the one who birthed him. He owed her some respect. She looked down at the bunions on her feet, the weeping blisters, and knew that she had to go in spite of them. She heaved herself from her chair, put on her shoes then went inside to find her musseling pan and her shucking knife.
Leaving the cabin again with an apron tied around her waist she made her careful way down the steps, taking them one at a time, then ambled across the yard in her mannish brogans and set off down the hollow. On the footpath she flushed a baby rabbit out of the briars. It went skittering off into the graveyard, its cottontail flashing between the pickets and disappearing into the grass behind them. Beulah half expected when she turned her head that way to see Clyde and Mary Walker standing at the fence. Beckoning her over to whisper into her ear what had become of the grandchild they would never hold. She could almost make them out, Mary still slim with the black curls she had kept until the end. Clyde tall and sunburnt. Beulah would have welcomed such a visitation. But there
were only sugar maple trees standing against the fence, shedding the last raindrops. Once the graveyard was underwater Beulah wouldn’t even be able to see the headstones of her old friends.
As she picked her way down the slope she consoled herself with the thought that after this she wouldn’t leave her cabin again for a long time. The blisters on her heels had reopened and her breathing pained her chest. The musseling pan tapped against her aching leg as she limped through the springing grasshoppers down to the track dividing the hollow from the Walker farm. On the way to the road she took care not to twist her ankle, avoiding clods of tire-churned earth and the divots they left, filled with rain. When she glanced at the house and the land it looked vacant. A hawk was circling over the cornfield. A sumac vine with reddening leaves was winding up the fieldstone chimney. The townspeople had given up searching for Gracie Dodson. As the end of this hard decade approached she guessed they dared not hope a little girl declared dead in their minds would be found alive. Beulah couldn’t judge her neighbors. These days she knew too well how a person’s belief could waver. She looked over her shoulder. There wasn’t much of a breeze but she heard a sound carrying across the hayfield, a lonesome creaking. The ropes of Gracie’s swing in the apple tree. Annie Clyde and James were gone as sure as the child was, and the dog that used to come out from under the porch wagging his tail to greet Beulah when she went picking strawberries in the field. She had another intuition, more like sadness than a premonition, that none of them would come back to this place. The last holdout had given in. The last farm was abandoned. There was no turning back from the course Yuneetah had been set on. Standing there on Annie Clyde’s land Beulah could almost feel the forward motion. She had seen and lived through so much but eighty-five years still seemed short to her. It seemed like just the other day she was out in that smokehouse with Mary, packing pork shoulders in salt. Time was unmerciful. She’d always known it, but today the vacant Walker homestead was her proof.
Beulah went out past the cornfield then paused in the middle of the road with a hand on her hip. The Whitehall County line and the mussel bed past the dam were off to the right but she turned for a moment in the opposite direction, where she could see lake water running off the steps of the bank into the gully. Farther down she could see more water through the scratched lenses of her glasses, part of the roadway washed out. Even farther on than that, beyond the sparkling slough, she believed she saw movement. There was a bobbing head coming around the bend. Her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, but she thought it was a man. Tall and reed thin, black-haired with a bindle on his shoulder. The late summer trees gathered behind him, crowded up against the ditch as if to watch him come. As if to see what Beulah’s face would do when she recognized him. Her heart lifted, not only to realize that Ellard had turned her son loose. In that instant it came to her what Amos’s appearance must mean. Gracie Dodson had surely been found alive. If she had been drowned, if her bones were broken, Amos would have been blamed. Beulah hadn’t wanted to agree with Silver Ledford last night but she knew that it was true.
Amos took his time meeting Beulah and she savored every moment until he reached her. For as long as her son remained obscured behind the afternoon heat rising up from the road and the glare of the sun on her glasses, she could feel relieved. It was only when he closed the distance in front of the Dodsons’ cornfield that she was saddened again by his battered face. It looked worse than yesterday. The split cheekbone, the bloody lips. But underneath the bruises he was much like the boy she had found in the woods, even with a missing eye and whiskers. She reached for his coat sleeve, needing to touch him. “They found her,” he said.
“I figured as much.”
“Your bones told you?”
“No, you told me. If she wasn’t found, you wouldn’t be standing here. Was she—”
“Alive.”
“Praise Jesus,” Beulah said. “Is she going to be all right?”
“I thought you’d be able to tell me that.” His eye settled on her bare neck where the frayed pouch used to hang. She couldn’t put anything past him. “Where are they anyway?”
“I got no more use for them,” she said.
“I guess you’ve renounced the old ways. Like the rest of the town.”
She waved her hand. “I ain’t renounced nothing. I reckon a body can have it both ways.”
Amos looked toward the mountain where her cabin was nestled. “How long until they string their power lines up the hollow? Did you divine that before you gave up your bones?”
Beulah looked with him. “I don’t know. Might be nice to have me a washing machine. One of them electric stoves.” She shook his sleeve, changing the subject. “Did you eat yet?”
Amos glanced at the musseling pan. “You must know the answer to that at least.”
“Let’s see if we can dig us up some dinner then,” she said.
Without another word they turned toward Whitehall County. Walking beside Amos as if nothing had happened was bittersweet. It occurred to Beulah that love was so often a burden. She knew it was the last time she would ever be with her son, whichever one of them departed first. She tried to push off the weight of her sadness and appreciate his silent companionship. If she didn’t look at him she could pretend his shoulder was level with hers as they went along, like back in the days when they’d lived together, before he stood two heads taller than her. She could pretend the sound of trickling water was Long Man from some time before and not the power company’s lake running off the banks. When a blackbird burst out of the pines and flew off ahead of them toward the dam she tried not to see it as a portent. She tried not to remember droplets seeping up through her tablecloth, flowers magnified in a circle of bones. She thought how confounding it was that this dark man beside her had been the light of her life. She thought how the Lord’s ways were mysterious and there was no use in questioning them. She’d learned to accept His unfathomable nature, the same way she had quit trying to understand Amos. But she couldn’t quit trying to protect him. She couldn’t ever quit praying that her son would outlive her.
They went past where the dam brooded in the woods without looking that way or mentioning its presence, but Beulah was glad when it was behind them. They kept on until they could see the river between the trunks then took the road a piece more before heading down to the water. She carried her pan to the river’s edge, searching for the mussel bed she had found with her mother back when she was young. Amos went ahead of her with his hat off to fill like a bowl. When he bent over stiffly Beulah could see his soreness, but he didn’t let on. They dug side by side, cold water swirling into Beulah’s shoes. Though they had come almost a mile from the dam its flagged tower rose above the distant sycamore and bluff oak trees. When Amos found a large shell with an iridescent blue sheen he dropped it into her pan, still prone to unexpected acts of kindness. After a while, he took out a pocketknife to hunt for pearls. “Mammy said people used to come in droves to go pearling,” Beulah told him, taking her own shucking knife from her apron. “These days you can’t hardly find any, but back then some man collected two hundred dollars’ worth in a week’s time. Bought hisself a farm.” Amos seemed to listen as she prattled on, talking to hide her mounting unease. She had the same feeling here with him that the vacant Walker house gave her. As relieved as she was in that first moment to see him released from jail, she had to remember the reason she’d turned him in. She knew his mind was moving beneath his stillness. After working a minute longer she looked into his hat. “I believe you got them all.”
He smiled. “There’s at least two or three left.”
“Well,” she said. “Let’s cook some of these up. Then you better get on down the road.”
She thought at first that he was going to ignore her. But finally he responded without looking up from the mussels. “I told you. I’ll head out after I’ve finished my business.”
Beulah shifted in the boats of her shoes, reached out of habit for her discarded pouch. �
��I need you to listen to what I’m telling you for once,” she said. “You can’t go on doing wrong, Amos. One of these days you’ll answer for it.”
He pried open a mussel with his knife, plucked out a grain of pearl and slipped it into his pocket. “I have no problem with that,” he said. “As long as the same rule applies to everybody.”
“This river will always be here. It’ll keep on running, no matter how they dam it up.”
“I’ve been all over the country. I’ve seen how it is. Once the electric power and the factories come around, nobody in this valley will remember what the river gave them.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “This river’s underneath their skin. They won’t forget.”
“They think they’re saved,” he said. “But a hundred dams wouldn’t fix this mess.”
“Well. I’ve lived a lot longer than you, Amos. Good times always come around again.” Beulah paused, standing on the shoals where they had dug when he was a boy without the dam watching them through the trees. “Promise me, son,” she said, looking downstream and then into his eye, its white turned crimson. “Promise you won’t do nothing else to get yourself hurt.”
Amos regarded Beulah, studied her face. His own face was no longer blank. Everything he had seen and done seemed written there. She guessed she had never been certain before then if he loved her back. “I promise,” he said. Beulah’s breath came ragged but she willed away her tears. They went back to the mussels, working on for a spell in silence besides the running river. Finally she noticed that Amos had cracked open a dripping shell. He stood gazing down into it.
“What is it?” she asked. “Did you cut yourself?” He tipped the big shell to one side, until something that Beulah couldn’t see rolled into his palm. She put down her musseling pan and went to him. He held out his hand. There was a good-sized pearl in it, misshapen and gritty. “They laws,” she said, as he held it aloft in the sun. Then he turned and offered it to her.