by Amy Greene
“Do you know if the explosion at the dam and the missing child are related in any way?”
Washburn frowned at the reporter. “What happened to the dam?”
“Somebody blew a hole in it, is what happened. Aren’t you with the TVA?”
Washburn blinked at him, trying to picture the structure as he’d last seen it when he visited the site, wearing a hard hat as he stood on the riverbank. Trying to imagine what must be going on at the offices where he’d spent much of the last two years. It all seemed distant. “I don’t know anything about the dam,” Washburn said. He passed a hand over his unshaved face. “But I can tell you about the child. Her name is Mary Grace Dodson. They call her Gracie.” He paused, watching the reporter scribble on his pad. “Every newspaper in the country will be wanting to know her name,” he said. “You’d do well to get it right.” Then Washburn took his coat on down the hall, his blue eyes focused straight ahead.
JULY 31, 1937
She’d seen the explosion from the ridge last summer. She had gone back up there from the courthouse unable to face the shack where she once lived with Mary. On that lonesome evening Silver would have taken even the company of her grandmother. But there was only her niece’s dog. He lay panting beside her on the ledge where she sat with her knees gathered up when the blast came not long after sundown, a flash then a thunderclap that she felt in her chest. She leapt to her feet and the dog began to bark. Near the bottom of the spillway slant she saw a plume spouting, then a sooty billow charging out into the river and the trees on both shores. Behind that gush of smoke and silt the impounded waters came crashing. Silver could hear the rending sounds of what the unleashed river took with it, churning out of its banks around the bend, roiling with saplings and rubble. Then from the gorge a cloud rose against the evening sky, hiding the site and the bluffs from view. In the aftermath of all that there came an ominous silence. When the cloud settled in the tops of the trees Silver saw that the blast had made its own wind through the pass, blowing leaves and wisps of smoke as darkness claimed the valley again. She saw as well from her perch on the limestone ledge, with her limbs locked and her eyes staring out of their sockets, that the two-hundred-foot concrete wall of the dam was still standing.
The weather this July had been different than last. There was a drought instead of rain. Silver’s cornstalks were husks, her cucumbers shriveled. Her green beans never came up at all. The withered leaves of the trees topping the bluffs were tattered and bug-bitten since the locusts and beetles had been driven up from the valley to higher ground. As parched as the land was on the mountain, below it was all covered with water. Silver had gone to the market a week after the blast and bought a newspaper. She’d traded mink hides for coffee and had a nickel left over. She could decipher enough to understand. Maybe one of the charges had failed to detonate, or Amos hadn’t placed them right. There had been a crack made, a leak spraying lake water over into the river, swelling it out of its banks. There was damage done but not enough to derail the power company for long. Silver had wanted to see the crack up close but while the repair was under way nobody was allowed within a mile of the site. The freight trucks returned, the calling men on scaffolds, the clang of machinery. When the grit settled again for the last time the lake went on spreading. Now at dusk down there at the dam the lights came on. She could see them shining out of the charred and broken treetops with their own cold beauty to rival the stars and the moon.
She didn’t want to think Amos died for nothing. Maybe he was sending a message to those who thought they owned everything. Or to the people of Yuneetah who always turned their heads. They couldn’t look away from him now. The story of the man who blew a hole in the dam and the little girl resurrected from the ground made the newspapers not just in Knoxville but all over the country. Amos hadn’t meant to bring the wall down. He had only wanted to be heard.
Amos had left behind no body and so it was easy for Silver to imagine him going on out there somewhere, as he had always gone on. But no. He and Mary, the two people that had known her best, both were dead. The dog was her only companion. He didn’t hold it against her that she’d kept him penned up in the shed last summer. He hadn’t left her side since he followed her from the Walker farm to the courthouse after watching the government man drive off with his owners. It had taken Silver a while to get used to him and his needs, nosing at her hands to be petted. She’d resisted at first but finally allowed him to sniff and then to lick her fingers. Soon she’d begun to stroke his head, to study his lively brown eyes. She had come to depend on his presence. She used her voice more often with the dog around, talking and singing to him while she worked up at the still. She was supposed to keep him only until the Dodsons got settled somewhere. Now she hoped if they ever came back it would be to visit and not to take him.
Other than the dog, Silver had the mountain to herself. For a year she’d kept away from Beulah Kesterson, unable to bear her grief. She hadn’t visited the cabin but she saw Beulah once. Silver was pulling weeds from around Mary’s headstone last fall when Beulah came up the hollow footpath leading a nanny goat with a bell around its neck. Silver figured she’d bought it to have milk through winter. She stood at the graveyard gate and watched Beulah pass but in the end she didn’t call out. Beulah’s eyes were on her feet, her hair unbraided and unwashed. Losing Amos had nearly done her in. But it was a favorable sign, that Beulah seemed prepared to survive.
Silver hadn’t spoken to Ellard Moody either since the day Gracie was found, the day she’d turned Amos loose. But she knew Ellard had moved back into the frame house where he used to live with his parents. He’d been improving the place. Curtains had gone up in the windows. The lot was mown, humped with piles of milkweed-fluffed grasses. She had walked down to see it last September, taking a shortcut through the blackberry canes, stopping at the edge of the woods when she saw smoke threading up from the chimney. She’d figured Ellard was inside cooking his supper. There were a few banty hens scratching in the dirt around Ellard’s porch and she wondered if he had fixed up the coop where they once lay together. She’d seen his flannel shirt hanging on the clothesline and wondered what he would do if she took it down and carried it in to him. One day Silver thought she might approach the door and knock. Or maybe she never would. Ellard could have come up the mountain to see her anytime in all of these decades.
Not too long afterward Silver and the dog had set out elsewhere. She’d seen James Dodson at the end of August, when he came back to the Walker farm for the rest of their belongings, before the water had washed out the main road in from Whitehall County. He told her where he and Annie Clyde and Gracie were moving, the name of the road they would live on. He said Ellard had found them a farm about twenty miles from Yuneetah, a community somewhere between Whitehall County and Clinchfield called Caney Fork. It seemed Ellard had a first cousin who’d decided to sell his fifteen acres and take up coal mining in West Virginia. When James told Silver the Dodsons were staying in the valley after all, he’d looked resigned. There wasn’t much light in his eyes. Even his hair didn’t seem as bright. He’d given up the chance to have a different life with his wife and child in a northern city. But at least he still had them.
Last October Silver had traveled out to that farm in Caney Fork Ellard had found for the Dodsons. She’d told her niece that she didn’t think she could look her in the face again. She had believed her own words when she said them. She hadn’t even gone to the hospital where she knew Gracie was recovering. But as the weeks passed with both Amos and Mary dead all Silver could think about was Annie Clyde and Gracie, alive only twenty miles south of Yuneetah. She had to see them at least once more. She and the dog had made it most of ten miles on foot, then the other ten a friendly man stopped to let them ride in the back of his Willys truck. Something she would never have done a year ago. All things changed it seemed, even Silver.
On the road to the house crimson leaves fluttered around her. The fields were flaxen with rolled hay. The
re was enough frost in the air to wear her shawl. She stopped at the post fence around the lot when she saw the name on the mailbox, as the dog went on through the open gate. The house was smaller than their old one but the paint was fresh, shutters the same color as the rusty roof. Leaves littered its peak and drifted around the chimney, swaying down from a hackberry tree. Through a front window she saw a lightbulb burning. Then she was caught off guard when Annie Clyde came around the side of the house with Gracie, the child lugging a bucket of water. Annie Clyde halted at the porch corner, her smile faltering. With her eyes on Silver she took the bucket as the dog ran to lick the child’s face. If Gracie had any scars outside or in, Silver couldn’t see them from the road. She let out a breath she’d been holding for months it seemed when she heard Gracie laughing. She braced herself before passing through the gate and across the yard. Annie Clyde watched Silver come to the side of the porch, her expression hard to read. “Hey, Silver,” she said. “Did you walk all the way out here?” Silver knew then that Annie Clyde would pretend to have forgotten their conversation that night in Mary’s bedroom. They would both pretend. Silver could have wept. “Not all the way,” she said.
Annie Clyde gave Silver a drink of water from the bucket and once she’d drained the dipper they went out to see the lay of the land. Gracie went with them but didn’t acknowledge Silver. She might have remembered Silver taking her dog, or she might have grown more shy of strangers. She had gotten bigger in the short time since Silver saw her last. Her legs were too long for her dress. Her hair was longer, too, dark curls piled on her shoulders like Annie Clyde’s. But she must have still been a handful for her mother. There were scrapes on her shins, dirt on her knees, as if she’d been exploring her new place. The plot was flatter than what the Dodsons had farmed in Yuneetah, sloping gently behind the house to a stream that trickled through a tract of bur oaks separating their property from a neighbor’s. Annie Clyde showed off her garden and the field where she was thinking of growing tobacco. She could farm fifteen acres by herself while James worked at the steam plant that had opened up on the river in Whitehall County. Even as she spoke to Silver of these things her hazel eyes followed the child, letting Gracie roam but keeping track of her. When they got to the stream Gracie crouched, wetting her shoes and the seat of her bloomers, where the edge of the bank shone yellowish with mica like the shoals of the river. Gracie picked up a piece of the fool’s gold that always reminded Silver of her mother and of playing in the water with Mary. “I found this,” she said, holding it up to shimmer in the sun.
“Me and your granny had a jar full of that,” Silver said. “You didn’t know her.”
Silver glanced over then and caught Annie Clyde’s attention. They didn’t say it but Silver knew they were both thinking about that February night they’d sat up together watching the person they both loved most in the world pass out of it. After a while they started back to the house without speaking, the dog leaping alongside Gracie, chasing the stick she held high over her head. When they got to the porch Silver and Annie Clyde sat down on the steps as the child and the dog went off romping. Silver looked out across the yard toward the road and the loblolly pines on the other side, these not hiding Long Man behind them. A panel truck passed by and the driver raised his hand to Annie Clyde. Silver could see sitting close to her niece on the porch that her eyes had dimmed somewhat, like her husband’s. But she had put on weight and there was no way to tell that her foot was ever afflicted. Silver noticed, too, the small hole in the toe of one of the girl’s shoes. The fraying hem of her shift. Electricity couldn’t put right everything wrong in this valley. Silver could have told the Dodsons that much if they’d asked her opinion. They would still struggle, but she guessed they’d make it together. Not alone, like her. Silver bit her lip, reluctant to say why she’d come, but considering how devoted the dog and the child remained to each other she had no choice. “I figured she’d be missing Rusty by now,” Silver told Annie Clyde. Hearing his name, the dog left Gracie and loped over to Silver wagging his tail, nudging his nose into her lap. Silver took his head in her hands and scratched his ears.
After a moment Annie Clyde said, “Maybe you can keep him.”
Silver’s fingers stopped scratching. “What about Gracie?”
Annie Clyde looked at her daughter in the yard, plucking buttercups from the browning grass. “She’ll have some company,” Annie Clyde said. She took Silver’s hand and placed it on the warmth of her belly. “I’m not far along, but I can tell.”
Silver left soon after that, unable to think or know how to feel about what Annie Clyde had told her. About this coming baby whose voice she wouldn’t hear drifting up to her from the farm. A child she might never lay eyes on. Now that she was satisfied her kin were all right she wouldn’t have cause to travel again. She’d go back up the mountain and live out her days, content to see no more of the countryside than what was visible from the ridge. It was late October and dark fell early. As she walked back along the dusty roads meandering out of Caney Fork lights came on in the houses. There was one made of river rock set closer to the path and Silver peered into its window when she stopped to dig a pebble out of her shoe. Through the parted curtains she saw a framed portrait of Franklin Roosevelt hanging over a mantelpiece. She wondered if this family had come from Yuneetah, forced off their land like the Dodsons. Silver hadn’t seen James that afternoon. He was gone to work at the steam plant. But she imagined he might hang up such a picture if his wife would allow it. Maybe one of these days Annie Clyde would be willing to let him. Once Silver had dumped out the pebble jabbing her foot sole, she went on. The dog ranged ahead or lagged behind, sniffing the corpse of a mole or snapping at the gypsy moths that fluttered up from the weedy ditches. But he always came back to her side.
That autumn Silver and the dog watched from the ridge overlooking the valley as the water came to drown her niece’s farm. It felt to Silver as though somebody ought to bear witness. She and Rusty were the only ones who saw it come. It advanced over the fields laid out in patches of green from pale to the near black of the hemlocks, crossing abandoned property lines marked off with stone or rail fences. It moved in falls and fingers and ponds giving back the sun, pouring into the basin between the bluffs topped with pines. Each evening it drew a little closer, until it sampled the crumbles of soil between the corn rows and the long grasses of the yard. It went sucking lead from the painted porch steps and sliding underneath where the dog used to pant in the cool dirt. Stripping off scales of peeling clapboard as it rose up the outer walls onto the porch where a pair of boots were left. These the current lifted, laces floating among the white specks of the snowball bushes as it entered through the cracked front door. Stealing inside like an intruder with a whine of corroded hinges. Swirling over the threshold and washing into the front room across the floorboards smudged by decades of brogans hauling eggs in from the coop and buckets from the spring. Lapping over the ashy hearth of the fireplace and up the chimney. Seeping into the wallpaper and flooding the stairs, trailing the banisters with strands of algae. Overflowing the upper room of the house where one had died and another was born, carp swimming between the maple bedposts. Streaming out the kitchen door and across the back lot past the shading elm, rushing in to fill the barn stalls. Leaking into the knotholes of the smokehouse boards, trickling through the hayfield weeds to climb the bark of the apple tree with a few last fruits clinging to its limbs. Until the still and fathomless depths of the lake covered all forty of the Walker farm’s acres. Until there was nothing left to see but miles and miles of blue.
Acknowledgments
Much appreciation to Robin Desser, Leigh Feldman, Stephanie Perryman, Terri Beth Miller, Sara Sparkes Hill, Carl Greene, Silas House, Jill McCorkle and Joe Schuster. Special thanks to my beloveds, Adam, Emma and Taylor Greene.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amy Greene is the author of the national best-seller Bloodroot. She was born and raised in the foothills of East Tennessee
’s Smoky Mountains, where she lives with her husband and two children.
Other titles by Amy Green available in eBook format:
Bloodroot • 978-0-307-59308-5
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