Amy Greene - Long Man

For a while he watched her cook, mustering his courage. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something a long time,” he said, his voice loud in the still house. She didn’t turn around, bent over the iron skillet, but he saw her back stiffen. “I think you and me ought to get married.”

His heart didn’t beat until she spoke.

“Why is that?” she asked.

“Why is what?”

“Why should we get married?”

James thought for a second. “Well,” he said, “because I love you.”

Annie Clyde kept her eyes on the skillet. “I guess me and Mama are in a bind.”

James crossed the kitchen and took her around the waist. He felt the strength of her, the firmness under her dress from months of wielding the axe and driving the plow and working the hoe. Her hands were rough, flecked with splinters, her face windburned and chapped by the sun, but she was still the loveliest thing in the world to him. He thought with sorrow how much living she had done at eighteen. Girls got married her age and younger, but in spite of the sheath of field muscle she’d put on like armor he could tell that she was afraid. She didn’t know if she was ready to be his wife. “That’s got nothing to do with it,” he said, putting his face in the back of her hair. “I’ve been crazy about you ever since I seen you. I can’t get along without you no more.”

Annie Clyde softened some against him. “You don’t need us to take care of.”

“I can do it. We could go up north. We’ll make out better up there.”

“You know I can’t leave Mama.”

“She can come with us.”

“She’s sick. And even if she wasn’t, she’d never leave here and neither would I.”

“Then we’ll make it farming, like our daddies did. But you’ll have to marry me.”

“You’ll hate me for keeping you here,” she said.

“Never,” he said. “I’d hate myself for letting you go.”

She turned around to look in his eyes, still seeming unsure. In the pause before she gave her answer, James’s breath came short. Sweat broke on his brow. “All right then,” she said at last.

Most things were disappointing when a man got them after wanting them for a long time, but Annie Clyde had not been. When he saw her nakedness on the day they were married by his uncle at the Methodist church, she was more perfect than he had ever pictured in his mind. She pulled off her powder blue dress in the daylight of their bedroom and stood before him in her slip. The window was open so that he could hear the chickens fussing in the barn lot, but the sound was distant enough not to matter. He took her in, hair piled in dark curls on her shoulders, the shape of her breasts under the thin satin fabric of her slip. Something happened to him then, a feeling of deliriousness sitting there on the end of the bed, like he was rising up out of his body. He had never loved anything as he did Annie Clyde. He had made his choice and tried to remember that when he imagined hacking his way through the endless corn to the road leading out of Yuneetah. He swallowed the gall that rose in his throat, choked down the rocks that broke his plow tines. He looked at his wife whose grace had once knocked the wind out of him on the riverbank and told himself he had no regrets. He thought back to the spring days when Gracie was newborn, going down at dawn to hear Annie Clyde humming over the squeak of the rocker, making a fire while she opened the curtains. She would stand swaying with Gracie at the window, talking about how the ground was thawing for the plow, how the shoots were pushing up through the winter bracken. That season out working James would look toward the house and see Annie Clyde watching him from the porch with Gracie in her arms. He was still desperate to have and keep her. Even with the tension between them since the power company came to town.

Annie Clyde was against the dam from the start. Not long after the first meeting the TVA held at Hardin Bluff School, a few locals were sent around with surveys. The man who knocked on the door said he had to know each family’s needs in order to prepare for relocating them. James looked at the questions, about where they got water and what their source of heat was, whether they had a phonograph or a sewing machine. The man was Annie Clyde’s old schoolteacher and when she came out he said how nice it was to see her. She snatched the papers from James’s hands and ordered the man off her porch. His ears turned red and he hurried away, too confounded to say anything back. After that, James knew she didn’t want him attending the town meetings the power company held, but somehow he couldn’t stay at home. He hadn’t felt that kind of hope since his father died. At the first meeting, a man in a necktie stood before the crowd gathered in the schoolroom to explain how electricity would bring the valley into modern times. He talked about how newspapers were a day late by the time they got to Yuneetah and their radios were battery-powered and most of them had no education past the eighth grade. He insulted the people and they left the schoolhouse angry. But James wasn’t deterred. He saw the opportunities. Electric power might attract factories to compete with the low-paying mills, and there would be plenty of work in Yuneetah once the dam building got under way.

Later, when there was a meeting at the Methodist church about moving the dead, he went without telling his wife. The man who spoke was a mechanical engineer from the college in Knoxville. There were hundreds of graves in churchyards and family cemeteries, some over a century old. He said they would need to identify the graves of their loved ones and sign removal permits, unless they wanted to leave them where they were undisturbed. The remains would be reburied at a place of the next of kin’s choosing. He and his men would have to supervise, but someone from the family could witness the removal unless there was risk of infection from contagious diseases. The undertaker, a man who had been a friend of James’s uncle, volunteered to preside over removals and graveside ceremonies for those who wanted him. After the meeting, James pulled him aside and offered to assist any way that he could. He remembered his father helping dig graves in the fall of 1918, when James was five and the influenza epidemic had reached the valley. James’s mother, who was expecting then the stillborn child that would kill her, had fretted that he would bring the sickness back to his family. But James’s father had told her, “I can’t stand to set here on my hands, Grace.” She had let him go, as scared as she was of the influenza. James only wished that Annie Clyde could understand him the same way. That she would consider what the dam must mean to him, especially after how he had lost his father.

Annie Clyde didn’t seem to care what it was like for James being so near the river, rising out of its banks across the road each time it rained. As hard as he had labored to wrest a living from the ground of Yuneetah, there had been an enmity between him and the river since he was twelve years old. In flooding season, people watched their homes rush away from the tops of the trees they had climbed to survive. When the water receded they went along the banks hunting up their dead. Sometimes it seemed James could hear his drowned father’s voice in the water, as if it had kept Earl Dodson’s spirit. He had never told Annie Clyde as much, but she held his hand tighter whenever there was a baptizing or a church picnic on the shore. He’d thought that his wife knew him better than anybody. After centuries of houses, livestock and bodies swept off in the floods, there had been a wall built to end them. James couldn’t be against such a thing, not even for her sake. Annie Clyde of all people should have understood how it was to lose family.