Amy Greene - Long Man

When Mary started leaving Silver behind, Amos was her friend. He sought her company, tossing chips of shale at her window to call her out. She would go with him collecting rocks and periwinkles along the river, standing still together when fawns came out of the bluff oaks to drink. One night during a meteor shower they climbed to the mountaintop, stars streaking close enough to catch them on fire. He showed her all of the town’s hiding places. The caves where men escaped from the Home Guard during the Civil War. The foundation stones of a burned-down tavern where there had been a battle with many soldiers killed inside. One summer he led her across the Whitehall County line to an abandoned iron mine up in the hills. They went several miles down a cart trail used by mules to pull the ore then followed an old railbed until the woods thinned enough for them to see the tipple. They stood inside the shaft’s lower entrance, fifty feet high with chalked arrows marking the ore veins. Outside the upper shaft they watched the cool air of the mine turn to steam as it met the heat outside. They ventured a long way down the deep tunnels, curving out of sight into nothingness. They peered into the broken windows of the superintendent’s house, once painted white with cheerful blue trim, and Silver had wished to live there with Amos until she died. Never to go back to Yuneetah and her hateful grandmother.

As much as Silver loved her sister she felt kin to Amos in a way that went deeper than blood. Every few years since he left on a train he had come back to visit her. She might get home from picking blackberries and find him leaning against her door with his hat brim shading his eye socket. He would greet her as though days and not years had passed. Then he’d ask for a bite to eat and she’d bring him whatever she had. When he was full he would get up without a word to see what needed fixing around her place. In winter he chopped firewood. In summer he hacked down the honeysuckle burying the side of her shack. When the work was done he might camp for a night in her woods. He would build his fire and she’d sit with him awhile. She would look at him through the rolling smoke and he would look back, mouth corners lifting. She’d remember other fires they built together as children in the caves where they hunted for mica, feldspar and quartz. Where they drew in the ash with their fingers and wrote their names on the craggy walls. She would meet his eye as she seldom did anyone else’s and a heat that had nothing to do with the fire would rise up from her belly. She tried to contain such feelings. It was hard on her, though. With his hat off and his hair black as oil tucked behind his ears he looked naked. She always went to him first, sometimes crawling, getting her hands and knees sooty. He wouldn’t touch her otherwise. She’d slip her dress off her shoulders, reach for his hand and put it where she wanted it. Then he would lay her down so close to the flames that cinders lit on her forehead, that the ends of her hair were singed. She might feel ashamed of herself once he was gone, and even more unwanted, but for some reason she had no pride when it came to Amos.

Though Silver had a kind of love for Amos she’d seen the other side of him. He hadn’t turned his cruelty on her, but she’d been witness to it. There was a thoughtful anger he harbored, patient like all else about him. The summer before he first left Yuneetah, Buck Shelton had accused him of stopping up his well with rocks. Shelton was a gambler and a drunkard with more than one enemy, but somehow he was convinced that Amos was the culprit. He probably figured he could thrash a young boy easier than he could a grown man. When Shelton came up the mountain to buy whiskey Silver had heard him cussing Amos, swearing to Plum that he was going to stripe the boy with a switch. After he sobered up he’d gone to the sheriff, but Beulah had slipped Amos out the side door when they came up the hollow looking for him. Silver had forgotten all about the incident until twenty-five years later, when Shelton’s back field caught fire. She had watched it burn from her ridge near the mountaintop, able to see miles of the valley when the trees were bare in autumn. As she stood there on the cool limestone ledge Amos appeared beside her, the only creature that could sneak up on her. She hadn’t seen him in months but he made no greeting. Just lingered at her side smoking a cigarette. “I never stopped up any well,” he said at last. He was a liar but Silver believed he was mostly honest with her. She looked at the ember of his cigarette tip and then back at the other smoke below, knowing without having to ask that he’d used the blazing sedge like a match as he walked out of the field.

Silver had taught herself not to think of Amos while he was away but when she was younger she used to wonder as she drifted to sleep what other fires he had set elsewhere. What other, worse trouble he might have caused. She supposed he should have been locked up long ago. But she couldn’t imagine him caged. Now she looked into the corn tossing behind the split-rail fence, unable to see the house with Annie Clyde and Gracie alone inside. She had known Amos for almost forty years but that didn’t mean she fully trusted him. This would be the time for him to settle any business left unfinished in Yuneetah. She couldn’t think of anything he might hold against the Dodsons but she wasn’t fool enough to believe he would leave her family alone on her account either. She rubbed a knuckle across her split lips, tasting blood and dirt. Then she heard the racket of James Dodson’s truck coming again and felt far more burdened than she had started out this morning. Before James appeared around the curve Silver hoisted herself over the fence into the field, pulling the sack across the top rail behind her. She receded into the corn as the Model A Ford approached, the plants shaking in the wind and the blackbirds scolding each other in the fencerow. She didn’t want to ever come out. She might stand there among the living stalks until she became one of them. Until the lake came at last to drown her with them.

Near one o’clock James Dodson had parked his truck alongside the road, less than a mile from home. He had set out early to Sevierville and been gone for hours. His back ached and his head pounded. What stopped him was the absence of Dale Hankins’s house from the field where it had stood for at least a century. As Dale told it, the Hankins patriarch had built the house himself. He dragged from the river on a sledge the same kind of rocks that could be found in cemeteries all over the valley marking graves of men, women and children the floods had swept away. Each time James ate Sunday dinner there it seemed he could smell brackish water in the walls. It wasn’t unusual to come upon houses torn down in Yuneetah these days, but Dale’s wasn’t being demolished. James thought he was seeing things. He rubbed his eyes and got out of the truck, knowing that he risked never getting it started again. He climbed stiff-legged up the bank and paused at the fence, seeing in his mind what used to be there. Dale’s homeplace standing alone in the flat pasture looking stranded, cattle grazing near the porch with nothing to keep them out of the yard. Dale had farmed this plot since he was a boy, a hundred acres of bottomland on the river. Now the livestock had gone to slaughter and the house had disappeared.

James ducked between the barbed strands of the fence and swished through the weeds, knee high without cows to crop them. He hadn’t gone far when he saw it. A rugged gash at least sixty feet wide and almost as deep cleaved the pasture in two. A chasm had opened up in Dale’s field. It must have swallowed the house whole. James stood still. He could almost hear the groan as he pictured it listing and then heaving into the abyss, joists splitting and floorboards popping, sending up a column of sand. He guessed the ground had sunk under the weight of standing rainwater. All over Yuneetah the land was eroding, groundwater causing depressions like bowls, soil over cavernous bedrock collapsing. The same caves underlay the Walker farm. James had noticed some of the fence posts slumping. They were lucky to be getting out of town unscathed. Everybody else was already gone. James hadn’t passed a soul on the way in, save for Annie Clyde’s aunt with a sack full of trumpet weed along the ditch, and Silver lived above the taking line. They were cutting it too close for James’s comfort, leaving just before the August 3 deadline the power company had given them, but he was thankful they were finally going. He moved as near to the edge as he dared and looked into the red clay pit piled with rubble. On top of the busted rock, warped tin collected rain. Glass shards reflected the sun behind a knot of clouds. At least Dale and his family were safe in Detroit. They had left Yuneetah months ago.