Amy Greene - Long Man

Now it was past noon and Silver had remained in the middle of the road for too long looking after James Dodson’s truck, the cotton sack full but light on her shoulder. Even with the day overcast she could feel August breathing on her. It had another look, its own kind of heat. On the way out of the pasture she’d seen the first henbit stalks tipped with clusters of the seed that would spread them. The end of summer was near and then autumn. But this season the stinkbugs and crickets wouldn’t come into the houses for warmth. No leaves would blow down the road on the fall winds, no apples would harden under the frost. Pawpaws would go to ruin at the bottom of the lake with nobody around to taste the sweet mash of their middles. Silver used to think she wanted nothing more than to be left alone like this. Nothing more than room to breathe. Until she was twelve, six Ledfords had lived in the shack near the mountaintop. Silver and her sister Mary. Her parents, Esther and Jeremiah. Her grandparents Plum and Mildred. Before Plum moved his family to Tennessee from Kentucky he and Mildred had eight boys, but Silver never knew her uncles. The Ledford sons had taken off as soon as they came of age. Only Silver’s father returned home with his fortune unfound. He’d brought Silver’s mother with him, already big with Mary.

As close as the Ledfords had lived in their shack, they’d seldom touched. Silver wasn’t beaten or cared for either one. She learned not to seek attention after she woke with the croup and tried to climb onto her hateful grandmother’s lap, slopping the old woman’s coffee over the rim of her cup. Mildred had called Silver a clumsy ox with more contempt in her voice than any grandchild deserved. Not long after that Silver had lost a front tooth and tried to show her father while he was skinning a squirrel. She held out her palm wanting him to take it or at least to look at it, a piece of her fallen off, but without glancing up he just told her to get along. So she closed her fingers into a fist and ran into the woods to throw the tooth down, kicking pine duff over it. Her father had been silent and morose and she’d been somewhat afraid of him. But she’d liked peeking out at him through the front window as he came back from hunting in the dark. His skin polished by the lantern shine, black hair running over his shoulders. Plum used to say Jeremiah took after his Cherokee grandmother that had lived on the reservation in North Carolina. Mildred had called Jeremiah trifling because he would sit in the tree stand with his rifle for hours letting deer pass beneath him, staring off at the distant hills. Silver was too young then to understand her father’s discontent, but now she felt for him. Even though he’d seemed to feel nothing for her.

Silver didn’t miss her father much when he was gone. Not like her mother. Her best memory was of sitting beside Esther Ledford on the edge of the doorsill looking up at the sky, Esther reaching into her pocket and giving Silver a chunk of fool’s gold. “It might be good luck,” she said, pressing it into Silver’s palm. From what Silver recalled her mother was slim with straw-colored braids wound at her nape. She kept a valise brought from wherever Silver’s father had found her, full of fancy dresses. Sometimes Esther put them on, though she had nowhere to wear them. She’d strap her heeled shoes onto Silver’s feet and laugh as her daughter stumbled around in them. Back then Silver believed what her mother told her when they went seining in the river at night, dragging the fishing net along between them as they waded out toward the deeper reaches. “Look at that reflection the moon makes on the water. Prettiest thing I ever seen, until you was born. That’s how come I named you Silver. You was the most precious thing in the world to me.”

But Silver’s worst memory was of her mother as well, Esther drinking down a cup of pennyroyal tea with Mildred standing by to make sure she took every drop. At the time Silver didn’t know what Mildred meant when she said, “We don’t need no more mouths to feed around here.” That afternoon Silver had found her mother lying abed and clutching her belly. When Silver asked what was wrong Esther wept in pain, tears soaking her dress collar. Knowing now what pennyroyal tea was for, Silver guessed she and Mary would have had more siblings if Mildred had allowed them to live. A few months after drinking down that cup Esther woke Silver and Mary with the brush of her lips on their foreheads. “Me and your daddy’s got to go away,” she told them. “See about a job of work. We’ll be back after you soon as we can.” But they never came back to Yuneetah, or wrote to say where they went. Silver knew it was Mildred they were leaving behind, but neither she nor Mary had been reason enough for her parents to stay.

Once Silver’s mother was gone, she clung to her sister. Silver was younger by two years and followed Mary everywhere. They played together from morning until evening, chasing each other through the woods, scuffing up leaves to hear the brittle stir of them. They spent whole days on the riverbank, hiding from each other in the rushes and skipping stones, making cane poles to fish with. They walked the dirt road to the schoolhouse holding hands in the cool of the mornings, a strip of grass up its middle like the brush of a mane. The other children looked sidelong at Silver’s burlap sack dresses, the snags of hair down her back. They would play with Mary but not with her. She quit after the third grade, but Mary went on until the eighth. Silver couldn’t say when she and Mary first turned over and slept with their backs to each other. They grew farther apart as their legs grew longer. Then when Mary turned fifteen she went to work for Clyde Walker. His wife had died in the winter from rheumatic fever and he needed a girl to help with the household chores. Silver noticed how much time her sister was spending on the Walker farm, not coming home until after dark, but she didn’t want to believe it when Mary announced she was getting married. She asked Mary what she wanted with a man thirty years her senior and Mary said there was nobody kinder alive than Clyde Walker. Once Mary left the mountain she didn’t come back, even to visit. Just like their parents. Mildred claimed she had got above her raising, thought she was too good for them. But Mary hadn’t got above. She had got away.

After Plum passed on and Mary took up with Clyde Walker, Silver was alone with her grandmother. She couldn’t see how her lighthearted grandfather had ended up married to such a shrewish woman. Before Plum died Mildred was always harping on him about the farm the Ledfords had in Kentucky before he went to jail for bootlegging, a two-story house with a stocked pond and strawberry fields. Silver figured that farm was what Mildred had wanted with Plum in the first place, but when he was caught by the revenuers he’d mortgaged it to pay his legal bills. After he was convicted he lost his land. Mildred claimed she would have left him then if not for the baby she was carrying. She hadn’t uttered a kind word to him within Silver’s hearing, but he’d always seemed more amused by her than anything. Silver vowed that she wouldn’t be cowed by the old woman either. They went weeks without speaking, Silver spending most of her time making moonshine. When the still was frozen into the stream bed under clumps of snow-drifted laurel she ignored Mildred as best she could. She stared into the fire until shadows crept across the floor and up the room corners, drafts sending dervishes of dust like whisking tails across the floorboards. She’d watch the flames dwindle to glowing coals until the sound of her own clacking teeth brought her around. Then she’d get up with blued toes and gather enough wood to burn through the night. Those winters Silver slept under buckskins, the only covering that held in her heat once the fire died. It seemed the memories of deer transferred into her dreams as she moved through the woods with no voice in them, as she swam across the river at sunset parting the water with herself. She slept and dreamed the hours away, waiting for the thaw when she could go back up to the still. Until finally one spring the old woman died and Silver buried her in the hollow graveyard where the ground was darkened by the maples pushing against the fence. She stood under the leaves tossing dirt on her grandmother’s casket until someone took the shovel from her. Then she went back to making moonshine and had been at it ever since. Her business hadn’t waned until the dam gates closed. Customers kept coming to her back door, trading hanks of salt pork, cured hides and strings of squirrel for something to make their heads feel lighter. But even if nobody bought her moonshine, Silver would go on making it.