Amy Greene - Long Man

Then morning lit the curtains again, and the silence between them came back. It stretched out long at the breakfast table, with the kitchen still and Mary dying upstairs. In the evenings before Annie Clyde put out the lamps to save oil, she’d catch him drowsing again in his chair by the fire as she sewed buttons back on his shirts and feel as separate from him as she did from the dark outside. She’d think of the mountains brooding over the farm, the wind sweeping its forty acres. She wanted to talk to James, but they seldom knew what to say to each other. Annie Clyde saw her fault in it. She had always been one to keep to herself. Even as a baby she had wriggled out of Mary’s confining arms. When she started school she had made no friends. At first the girls and boys were drawn to her prettiness. Lined up in the mornings at the schoolhouse door, the boys had pulled her hair and the other girls had given her gifts of ribbons and peppermint. But her sullenness had finally driven them away. Annie Clyde didn’t know why she acted like she did. The others were the same as her in their flour sack dresses with nothing but pone bread for their dinner. All of them had toes poking out of holes in their shoes. There were no outcasts among them. Annie Clyde had made an outcast of herself. She would sit on the schoolhouse bench stiff and straight, too conscious of her sleeve touching the arm of another child.

Gracie had changed things when she came along. Annie Clyde couldn’t have kept all to herself if she wanted to anymore. Gracie followed her everywhere, always talking and singing and romping with the dog. Always wanting Annie Clyde’s attention, showing her buckeyes and seedpods and bugs. Whatever Annie Clyde’s neighbors thought of her sullenness, they’d been drawn to Gracie. She never felt like part of the town, but her daughter was somehow. They would stand at their mailboxes and wave as she walked Gracie down the road to Joe Dixon’s, where the old men bought her sticks of horehound candy. At church the old women took her onto their laps. Gracie looked like Annie Clyde, but she was more like James on the inside. She had her father’s friendliness about her, his kind nature. Last year when Gracie was two they took her to a molasses-making at the Hankins farm across the road. Dale Hankins grew sorghum cane, his back field high with thin stalks, their ends tasseled umber with seeds. Before dark he would feed the stalks into a cane mill between steel rollers, the juice pouring into vats to be boiled. It took ten gallons of cane juice to make one of molasses. All the neighbors for miles gathered to gossip and tell stories, the little ones playing and the teenagers courting, the men leaning under the shade trees with their hats stacked on a post of the hog pen and their overalls still dusted with the work of the day. Once the moon rose and the cane juice was ready for boiling, Dale would bring out his guitar. It was tradition for some of the children to dance on the cane fodder scattering the ground. That night Gracie had thrown off her shoes and whirled barefoot to the strumming, dress flared out like a bell. She’d stomped and shook her curls as the whole town laughed and clapped. Annie Clyde had felt close to her neighbors. But then she’d noticed Beulah Kesterson with the pouch of bones around her neck, wrinkled face lurid in the firelight, watching Gracie without smiling. After that, the night was ruined for Annie Clyde. The old woman gave her an ill feeling.

Now she looked at Gracie sitting on the back of the fallen beech and felt overcome with such loss that she had to shut her eyes. She had managed not to cry for two years and wouldn’t let herself break down now. This was like dreams she’d had as a child of her parents dying, without the relief of waking and knowing it wasn’t true. The wind rose again, blowing strands of hair across her face and fluttering the sleeves of her dress. She opened her eyes, too aware of a weight in her pocket. It was the tin top the drifter had given Gracie. It seemed to Annie Clyde in that moment like a threat or a curse. On impulse she pulled it out with disgust and tossed it while Gracie wasn’t looking into the shadows under the beech tree’s tortured roots. She felt somewhat better when she couldn’t see it anymore. She wiped her palms on the front of her dress then went to lift her daughter off the beech’s back, swung her up and held her close. Gracie’s slender arms came around Annie Clyde’s neck and they studied each other, their noses inches apart. Gracie’s eyes were the same as her grandmother Mary’s had been, wide brown with an amber shine to them. Gracie took a lock of Annie Clyde’s hair and twisted it up in her fingers, like she used to do when she was nursing. “Come on,” Annie Clyde said, pushing her nose against Gracie’s. “We better get Rusty to the house before he runs off and leaves us again.”

Silver Ledford heard the Model A Ford that belonged to James Dodson rounding the bend before she saw it. She knew it was her niece’s husband because the only other vehicle left in Yuneetah belonged to the sheriff and he had no purpose out this way. The Dodsons had been on her mind all morning. Now here came the truck that would drive the last of her people off to a city she couldn’t picture. Some man taking her niece away, as a man had taken away her sister. She stepped over into the ditch and stood in the marsh of it, tall and rail thin with black hair that had dulled to smoky gray over the forty-four years she’d spent for the most part alone. She kept still as though James wouldn’t see her if she didn’t move. But he did see her. He slowed the puttering truck and ducked his head to look at her through the cranked-down window. She feared he would offer her a ride because of the wind and the lowering sky. He seemed to consider it, but raised a hand to her instead and went on. She nodded to him once he was past. Then she climbed out of the ditch, the cotton sack strapped to her shoulder getting snagged on pricker bushes. She watched until the Model A swerved out of sight between the banks, high with spires of purple monkshood. For a while she lingered in the middle of the road, giving James time to get home, not wanting to catch up with him no matter how the weather threatened. Silver supposed all the years alone had made her this way. She’d forgotten how to do anything but hide from people.

Last week Annie Clyde had come up the mountain to ask Silver a favor and brought the child with her. They found Silver picking cucumbers in the garden, a long plot out behind her shack crowded with cornstalks and ruffled with tomato vines. She saw their hound first, trotting along ahead of them. She turned her head to watch him go sniffing around the back lot. She liked animals but not the kind that begged for scraps. When she turned back Annie Clyde and Gracie were standing at the edge of the garden holding hands, the ancient firs that grew so towering up where Silver lived dark green behind them. Above them clouds scudded across the blue sky. Silver would remember them that way for as long as she lived. She had marked every detail. The loose threads at the hem of Gracie’s dress and the apples bulging its pockets, the residue of flour rubbed into the grain of its sacking. Annie Clyde’s hip bones poking at the thin cotton of her grayed shift, the briar scratches scabbing on her shins. By the time those scabs fell off the girl would be in some other place, this one growing more and more distant in her mind. Silver couldn’t stop staring at Annie Clyde’s legs. She kept her eyes fixed on them as the girl said her piece. It was easier than looking at her face. Though Silver wasn’t listening, she knew what her niece was talking about. The time had come. Annie Clyde and Gracie were leaving Yuneetah.

Silver couldn’t see much of herself in either of them. Their bones were fine and she was rawboned. Their hair soft and hers bushy, their skin touched with Cherokee blood and hers with the hoarfrost of the winters she had survived up near the mountaintop. It was Mary they both resembled. She had been the town beauty up until she died. Annie Clyde had Mary’s same ripe lips and the same freckle on her collarbone. It was clear when Gracie came along that she too would inherit Mary’s looks. But there were other ways to be related. Silver hadn’t heard her niece’s voice until she was nearly grown. She was still unsure about the girl’s eye color, hard to tell through lowered lashes. Annie Clyde had stared off into the woods as she talked, at the top of Silver’s head or down at her toes digging into the loam. She didn’t like asking favors. She didn’t like talking at all. Silver could see that it took something out of her. “We’re leaving for Michigan next Saturday morning,” Annie Clyde had said, glancing in an uncertain way at the dog as he lapped from a puddle. “I was wondering if you’d take Rusty for a while. Just until we get settled. I reckon James’s uncle will sell his corn for him. He’ll be back down to get his money then.” Silver’s hands stilled in the cucumber vines. “You don’t have to take him now,” Annie Clyde rushed on. “You can wait until Saturday, before we head out. Or I’ll bring him up here to you.” Silver couldn’t answer at first, afraid if she opened her mouth her heart might spill out.