by Amy Greene
Amos’s blood flowed out in ribbons as the impounded waters of the river Long Man flowed back into him. But he would drown before he bled to death. He knew the feeling from his veiled memories of being cast into a flood. He kept his eye open for as long as he could to see the dam, his shoulder grazing its concrete as he sank down its length toward the foundation, hugging the first bundle of charges in his numbing arms, the other two tangled in his legs, dangling knotted to the lit detonating cord. The flame went on traveling down the reinforced fuse, harder to drown than a man. Outside the halo of the wick’s burning trail the lake was as black as the night outside Beulah’s cabin in winter, as cold as the fallen snow. As he curled himself around the dynamite and turned to press it with his bleeding chest against the wall, Amos’s last conscious thought was of the promise he was breaking to the woman who had loved him like a mother. Not of bringing down the dam or any of his reasons for trying. His eye was still open when the blast shot a glaring fireball along the wall but he didn’t see it. His soul was released into the water a moment before his ashes. His life, begun with a lie, had ended with one.
AUGUST 3, 1936
Outside of Clinchfield Regional Hospital, Sam Washburn sat in his car. The hospital was a brick building shaded by oaks, situated on a rise overlooking the small but industrialized town. It was on the other side of Whitehall County, about forty miles from the Walker farm. Washburn had relocated several families to Clinchfield. He could see the lights of the knitting mill, workers pulling the graveyard shift. Farther off was the mountain he’d come across before sundown, following Dr. Brock’s Buick. Nobody would have noticed if Washburn had turned and gone back to Knoxville once he delivered Gracie Dodson to the doctor’s office, but it hadn’t occurred to him. He wasn’t thinking as he rushed toward Whitehall County with a dying child in his backseat. What happened when they arrived was a blur. There were others in the waiting room but the woman at the desk took one look at the child and led them down a hallway. The doctor, old but not doddering, came out to meet them. He took charge right away when Annie Clyde held the child out to him with helpless eyes. Washburn shouldn’t have followed them but he felt swept along. When he saw that he was in the way he stepped out to the hall again but stood there looking in at the examining room. Dr. Brock took the child to a white enameled table under a floor lamp. He handed Annie Clyde the soiled suit coat, which she clutched to her breast as if it still held her daughter, then went to his instrument cabinet. When he lifted the child’s lids and shined his light into her eyes she stirred and fussed. Washburn raised his hands to his head, looking for his fedora to take off, but it was lost in the hayfield. Then he paced circles until Dr. Brock came out with the child in his arms to tell the receptionist he was driving the family to the hospital.
Washburn might have gone home then, but he needed to know Gracie Dodson was going to live. He needed to know that her mother would be treated. It was on the way across the mountain, when he was alone in the car smelling the dead leaves and dank earth the child had left in his backseat, that reality began to sink in. The whole way he clenched the steering wheel, fearing the doctor’s Buick would become a hearse before they got there. His only solace was that the other car kept moving on ahead of him, tires spitting gravel as it sped along the curving dirt road. There hadn’t been as much rain in the higher elevations, the worry of getting mired behind them. But the going was treacherous in places anyway. He worried more about rockslides and fallen trees, or that they might turn over and be spilled between the sourwood trunks down a plunging cliffside. As he kept his eyes on the shadow of Annie Clyde through the Buick’s back window, he kept reliving the events of the morning. James Dodson carrying his daughter out of the woods. The barking dog running before him and the child as if to herald their coming. Crashing through the hayfield with Annie Clyde, delirious from lack of wind. Handing his coat across the seat, seeing the child lying still in her mother’s lap, the clay mud hard to distinguish from blood.
Now he got out of the car and leaned against the hood to have a cigarette before going back inside to ask about the Dodsons. He had spent too much time in this Dodge coupe, a company car, traveling back and forth to Yuneetah. The wear and tear showed in the lit parking lot. The fenders dinged by rocks, the doors scratched by crowding branches. He knew that he had been sitting out here for too long, but he’d grown claustrophobic in the waiting room on the second floor of the hospital, a parlor lined with straight chairs and hard mahogany benches pushed against the damask-papered walls. The duty nurse had reached over Washburn’s head to pull a shade against the glare of the evening sun but it was still too hot. When he realized that he was famished he had left the hospital to find his supper. In a diner on Main Street where the wainscoting was shiny with cooking grease he sat at the counter to have a hamburger and a cup of coffee. Beside him sat a mother and her two children, a baby in overalls and a girl in a flour sack dress climbing on the stools. They looked no different than the people of Yuneetah, but the electric pendant lights hanging over their heads and the number of cars passing outside the plate-glass window, the sign above the silver coffeepot advertising Blatz beer on tap, told Washburn he’d come out of the valley town ringed in mountains and into the rest of the world.
After supper he had gone back up to the second floor and seen the hallway lined with people, the waiting room crowded. At first he didn’t understand. Then he recognized one of the men sitting there, Ruble Williams. His was one of the first families relocated. He had gone to work here at the knitting mill. He must have come straight to the hospital after his shift. There was still lint in his hair. Washburn approached Ruble and learned that he was a distant cousin of James Dodson’s aunt. She was sitting in the corner with her husband, fanning herself with a magazine. Ruble had heard about the child from them. Looking around Washburn saw more familiar faces. He’d sat in their front rooms and kitchens asking them questions, taking notes about them for his report. They must have arrived by the car and truck load while he was gone, traveling from wherever the dam had scattered them to see proof of a resurrection from the graveyard of their drowning town. Even those who hadn’t helped with the search, those unable to bear the prospect of the child’s death, had come seeking evidence of her life. “The sheriff was here for a little while,” Ruble said, half startling Washburn. “But a deputy came and got him. Sounded like he said something happened to the dam. I ain’t the only one heard it.” Washburn thought of calling in to the office. He wondered what could have gone wrong, maybe a leak, but in the end found himself too tired to care. There was nowhere to sit so he’d returned to the car.
He had slept for a while behind the wheel. For as long as Gracie Dodson was missing, he hadn’t rested. When he did sleep he woke in the middle of the night from dreams of her wandering a wilderness road crying for her mother or forgotten in an orphanage among other unclaimed children. That’s why he went back to Yuneetah, even after what had happened at the courthouse. Thinking about it, Washburn felt his tender windpipe. He shouldn’t have taken Annie Clyde where the drifter was being held. But he had been invited by James Dodson’s aunt to wait in the kitchen. He was drinking coffee at the table when Annie Clyde came limping through the door. After the aunt repeated what some of the searchers told her, that they’d seen Ellard Moody on the road with the drifter in the back of the sheriff’s car, Annie Clyde took off on her swelling foot. Washburn couldn’t allow her to walk five miles through the rain in her condition. But now he couldn’t forget the man in the cell with a pit where an eye should have been. The man’s arm had been strong for one so gaunt, his wiry muscle like iron. It made Washburn sick with humiliation to remember. He’d vowed when he left the courthouse that he’d never return to Yuneetah. But he woke up this morning and the first thought he had was of Annie Clyde Dodson standing in her kitchen doorway streaming water, alone in her conviction that her child was alive.
Washburn pulled out his pocket watch and realized it was after midnight on the third of
August, the day of the deadline. The day he had been dreading as he sat in his cubicle at the TVA offices staring down at a pile of paperwork and wondering what he was going to do about the Dodson woman. He couldn’t have dreamed a month ago where he would end up during this first hour. Sitting in a hospital parking lot in Clinchfield. Finally he tossed the butt of his cigarette into the weeds and crossed the pavement to the building. He took the stairs to the second floor again and saw that the waiting room had cleared besides James Dodson’s aunt and uncle. The aunt slept on her husband’s shoulder, the uncle’s head reclined and his fingers laced across his suit vest. Washburn wanted to ask about the child but didn’t disturb them. He was about to look for a nurse when one appeared in the doorway in her peaked hat and starched uniform dress. “Are you Sam Washburn?” she asked. When he nodded she said, “Mrs. Dodson has been asking for you. She’s a stubborn one. But it’s past visiting hours, so be quick.”
She sent him down the hall where the Dodsons had been given a private room. He went with his hands shoved in his pockets to steady them, not taking them out until he reached the door. He rapped lightly. If Annie Clyde asked him in he didn’t hear. After a moment of uncertainty he stepped inside. There were two narrow beds in the room, the one nearest the door unoccupied and neatly made with a white blanket, a partition that could be pulled on a metal rod left undrawn. Between the beds James Dodson slept in an armchair with his chin on his breast. The electric lamp above the other bed was switched on, casting an amber circle on that side of the room. Washburn stepped out of the shadows into the light to make himself known. Annie Clyde was lying in the bed near the window, the flowery curtains open although it was dark outside. As he approached he noticed that her eyes were closed. There was a glass of water and a bowl of broth on a tray table across her legs, her bandaged foot elevated on a pillow. Tucked at her side, in the curve of her arm, was the child. Gracie Dodson slept with her lips parted, hugging her mother’s waist, her head resting on her mother’s thin chest. Washburn imagined it was soothing for her to hear Annie Clyde’s heart beating. She had been washed but he saw in the shine of the lamp each tiny fingernail traced with brick red clay, her curls dark against the gauze swathing her head wound. By the bed a stand with a metal hook held a bottle of clear fluid.
Annie Clyde had been bathed herself, dressed in a clean hospital gown. She was propped on the pillows, her hair loose on the linen. Washburn reached again to take off his missing hat as he moved to the bedside. Then his wingtip shoe squeaked on the tile and James Dodson started, straightening in the armchair. Washburn froze in his tracks. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry. Should I come back later? Tomorrow?”
“That’s all right,” James Dodson said, getting up. Someone, Washburn supposed his uncle, had loaned him clean clothes. His arms strained at the seams of his shirtsleeves. The two men contemplated each other, neither knowing what to say. James opened his mouth, perhaps to offer some word of gratitude for driving them to the doctor’s office yesterday, but Washburn hoped that he wouldn’t try. Finally they turned from each other toward the bed where Annie Clyde lay asleep with the child. “You can go ahead and wake my wife up. She’s been waiting for you,” James Dodson said. His eyes lingered a moment longer on his daughter, probably making sure she still breathed. “I believe I’ll step out and see if I can find a cup of coffee. Can I bring you some?”
“No, thank you,” Washburn said. “I won’t stay long.”
After James Dodson left the room, Washburn went around the bed. There was no other armchair near the window but he would have been uncomfortable sitting down anyway. He felt stiff, as if they were in church and not a hospital room. When he put his hand on the iron bed rail Annie Clyde opened her eyes. She smiled some when she saw him. Washburn had known that her face must hold expressions other than the fierceness she’d turned on him, but it took him aback nonetheless. She was pale and emaciated but he could still see in her the intimidating woman he’d met with a Winchester rifle propped in her reach. If she had seemed for a second to be made of water that first time Washburn saw her, this time she seemed made of light.
“Mr. Washburn,” Annie Clyde said. “I’m glad you’re still here.”
“I had to see your daughter,” he said, tearing his eyes away from her to look at the child. Maybe he had wanted more than believed Gracie Dodson to be alive but here she was, given back to her mother. It was a memory he would turn to in times of doubt, the two of them lying joined almost like one person. It would become his faith, that such things could and did happen.
“She’s doing better,” Annie Clyde said. “She’s been trying to get up and see out the window.” She paused, stroking the child’s curls above the bandage. “The nurse offered to bring a crib in here but I told them I’d just keep her in the bed with me. I couldn’t let go of her.”
Washburn cleared his throat, feeling hoarse. “I’ll bet they couldn’t have made you.”
Annie Clyde looked back up into Washburn’s eyes, her smile still there but altered, tempered. “She won’t even remember this. But I don’t know when I’ll ever get over it.”
“Me, either,” Washburn said. Then he had to turn his head away. He saw himself and the Dodsons reflected in the window glass and felt so out of place there that he knew he ought to be going. He stared through his reflection at the twinkling town, the streets two stories below overhung with power lines. No wonder the child wanted to look out. She had never seen electricity. That was another thing she wouldn’t remember from her first three years. How black the night could get in Yuneetah, especially in winter, when he’d stayed too late after supper with one of the families. Annie Clyde wasn’t made for electric light, despite how the lamp glow lit up her face. She might never get used to it. But her daughter would know nothing else.
Washburn was about to excuse himself from the room when he felt a feathery touch, a plucking at his finger on the bed rail. He turned from the window to see that the child’s frail hand, the one with the tube attached and feeding water into her veins, had moved on top of his own. She was awake now, her head still lying on her mother’s heart, her eye open under the bandage, glassy and peaked but also curious. Annie Clyde laughed a little. “She likes your ring.”
Washburn looked down at it, the topaz stone gleaming, the band engraved with the year of his graduation from college. Nineteen thirty-three, the same year the child was born. Washburn thought of his father, who once came out with a lantern to save him from a flood. When he was small he used to be drawn to the glimmer of his father’s wedding band. “Watch,” Washburn said. He tugged off the class ring and spun it on the tray table across Annie Clyde’s legs, a golden blur, until it wobbled to a stop and fell still with a clatter. The child watched as if witnessing a magic trick. After a moment Washburn took the ring from the tray and slipped it into the child’s warm hand. “She can keep it,” he told Annie Clyde.
“No, no,” Annie Clyde said. “That’s not necessary.”
“I want you to have it,” he said. “For her to have it, I mean.”
Annie Clyde studied Washburn. “She can’t thank you herself, so I’ll have to.”
This time Washburn held Annie Clyde’s gaze. He wanted to remember the alignment of her features. He wanted to remember how it had felt when she leaned on him, her heat branding his arm. He would never see her again, but he might never stop thinking about her. What she had done to him was hard to sort out. When he returned from their first meeting he’d gone up to his room over the coffeehouse and thrown open the windows to let in the noise of the city, trying to shake the dust of Yuneetah off his shoes. But her presence had clung to him as if she’d followed him home. Something had shifted in him as he stood on Annie Clyde Dodson’s porch, though he didn’t know it a month ago. He went there to convince her to leave and somehow she convinced him instead. The removals were forcible evictions no matter how politely the TVA was going about them. He hadn’t really seen the people of Yuneetah, had concentrated more on his notes abo
ut them, until Annie Clyde made him look at her. He hadn’t listened to those he thought he was helping until she made him hear. Now he didn’t know what he thought anymore. Maybe the chief was right. He was too young for a job this big. “I’d better let you sleep, Mrs. Dodson,” he said.
But when he started away she stopped him. “Wait, Mr. Washburn,” she said. “Your coat.”
Annie Clyde glanced to the table by the bed and Washburn saw his suit coat folded there. When he picked it up dried clots of dirt pattered to the floor. “I’m afraid it’s ruined,” she said.
Washburn looked down at the coat, drew it to his stomach. “No,” he said, his voice tight. “It’s not.” He hesitated then crossed the room and went out, shutting the door softly behind him.
Washburn’s shoes squeaked again on the tiles as he passed other doors closed or ajar to show glimpses of convalescing patients inside, one man with his leg in a pulley. He nodded to a woman shuffling along in a robe and slippers, holding to the rail on the wall. When he went by the waiting room, having almost made it to the stairwell at the end of the hall, a short man in suspenders came out holding a stenographer’s pad and a pencil. “Sam Washburn?” he asked.
Washburn thought of lying, but it wasn’t in him. “Yes.”
“I’m with the Knoxville News Sentinel,” the man said. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
“It’s after midnight,” Washburn said. “I doubt you’ll be making your deadline.”
The man rubbed at his eye with the knuckle of the hand holding the pencil. It looked red and irritated. “I’ve been all over the place tonight, trying to find somebody that knows what’s going on in Yuneetah,” he said. “The sheriff has all of the roads into town blocked off.”
Washburn looked over the shorter man’s head toward the stairwell, wanting to get away. “I’ve been here with the family all night. I haven’t been through Yuneetah since this morning.”