Amy Greene - Long Man

Both Ledford sisters were lovely to look at, but Silver was the loveliest to Ellard. In those days most girls wore their hair in plaits, but Silver kept hers unbound. It poured like mountain water down her back, into her eyes, over her shoulders. She was hard to catch when they played tag, hard to find when they played hide-and-seek. She could fit herself into any crevice or hole. Once she’d hidden from Ellard in a junked stovepipe. She didn’t talk much and when she did her words were gruff, but he recognized her bluster for what it was. She might have fooled Amos and Mary but Ellard saw tender skin underneath the shell she had grown over years of mistreatment. Sometimes he heard Silver mimicking the birds, blowing through her thumbs to answer a bobwhite. He had come upon her peeping in at a praying mantis she’d caught in the trap of her fingers. Sometimes she hummed or whistled if she thought nobody was paying attention.

It was only after Mary got married that Ellard had Silver to himself. Amos had been gone for three years by then. Silver seemed lost without her sister, wandering around with bewildered eyes. At that time her grandfather had already drunk himself to death and she lived alone with her grandmother. Ellard didn’t care what made Silver turn to him. For one summer when he was seventeen and she was fifteen they walked the back roads and ridges of Yuneetah alone. Crossing meadows on the way to the river with their cane poles he would pluck the frilled petals off a daisy and give her the yolk at the center. He would find red cardinal feathers in the grass and tuck them behind her ears. He wanted her to have the color she was missing in her drab shack on the mountaintop. Whatever was bright in a landscape of putty gray, faded green, smoky blue.

One hazy afternoon at the end of June, Ellard left his chores and went up the mountain to see if Silver wanted to go swimming. When he found that she wasn’t at home he headed to the shoals alone, undressing on his way to a part of the river where the water was broad and the current was tame, where willows bowed shedding yellowy leaves. Entering the deep shade naked he saw a flash of motion before he reached the edge of the shore. Silver was hunkered on the bank several feet downriver, camouflaged by the silt she had slathered on against the mosquitoes and the burning sun. She looked at him, eyes glittering coals in her smeared face. When she rose up Ellard couldn’t keep from rushing to her. He took in her clotted hair, her pointed breasts, the fork of her legs. As she stood on the bank bare as the day she was born Ellard saw the last plates of her shell fall away. Nothing could have stopped him then from pulling her slippery into his arms, kissing her so hard that their teeth clashed together. He was trembling as he lifted her up, as her thighs closed around his hips. Though Ellard felt everything it was almost like watching himself.

Once they’d turned themselves loose, they couldn’t get enough of each other. Silver would find Ellard in the henhouse gathering eggs and they’d lie down in the patterns the chickens had scratched. They would roll in spruce needles under the trees until their sweating flesh was pasted with them, motes dancing around Silver’s head as the sun sank behind the mountains. But that whole summer, some part of Ellard was miserable waiting for it to end. Looking back he understood. All those warm months he felt like he’d just been borrowing Silver. When Amos showed up that September, back for the first time in three years, it was almost like Ellard had been expecting him. He’d been nailing down a piece of roof tin that had come loose in a storm for his mother when he spotted a figure heading up the hollow footpath with a bedroll under one arm, bending to drink from the trickling spring. He had grown taller, his hair longer, but he moved with the same stealth. When he lifted his face dripping from the spring Ellard could tell there was something altered about it, could see the void where his hat shaded an empty eye socket. But Ellard never doubted it was Amos. He didn’t come down the ladder. He watched Amos disappear up the path, his own eyes watering. Maybe Ellard wouldn’t have wanted Silver as much if she hadn’t preferred his enemy. Maybe his hatred for Amos had made his love for her burn hotter. Whatever the reason, the fire took ages to go out. It was years before Ellard could think of Silver without longing and only as something that had once happened to him.

Now Ellard wondered if Amos still had a hold over Silver. He looked at the damp she’d left on the seat, the same shape her hair used to make when she lay on the ground underneath him. He put his hand on the upholstery and pressed but nothing seeped up. She knew something she wasn’t saying. He would talk to her again if he hadn’t found Gracie or Amos by this afternoon. The constable had gone to see Beulah Kesterson last night and gotten nowhere with her either. It was time for Ellard to pay Beulah a visit himself. He pulled his revolver from its holster, popped out the cylinder, emptied the bullets into his hand then reloaded them. As he sat behind the wheel of the sheriff’s car the lake broadened and deepened across the bank in the Hankins pasture, overtaking the tasseled weeds in uneven ponds, touching the lowest wires of the fence still tufted with hanks of bovine hair. Rising over any scrap of sacking snagged from a child’s home-sewn dress hem. Swirling up any pattered bead of red. Drifting off any wisp of hair. Washing away every remaining shred of anyone’s child, not just the one he was searching for. Erasing the footprints of those living along with those dead, those moved on to inhabit other towns along with those lost forever. Too soon no sign would remain of any child ever torn from its mother.

That midmorning Annie Clyde Dodson wound up back in the cornfield where she’d started, as if she might find Gracie and Rusty waiting again at the end of a row. She didn’t know what hour it was but when she looked up the sun was higher behind rafts of cloud. After all night without sleep she felt lost on her own land. As she wandered between the stalks calling her daughter’s name she dreamed on her feet, remembering how she’d sat yesterday on the bottom porch step plucking chicken feathers and looking out at this field, corn swaying in the uneasiness before the windstorm. Earlier going into the musty gloom of the coop, singing to soothe the rooster. He had perched on an empty nesting box, manure hardened on the rotting straw, waiting for her. Once the rooster was plucked she had meant to ride Gracie among these rows in the wheelbarrow, collecting roasting ears for their dinner. She had told Gracie to stay on the porch, left the front door propped open with an iron long enough to put the carcass in the basin and get the flour. From the kitchen she had heard Rusty barking and gone through the dim hall toward the lit doorway. She had watched the dog running into the field with Gracie behind him. Then the corn had swallowed Gracie up and she couldn’t see her anymore. That was where everything had gone wrong. Now she slapped aside the stalks spraying drops, shouting for her daughter. There was no answer. Not even Rusty barking to say there was someone in the field who didn’t belong. This time there was only water standing at the end of the row. Instead of Gracie, a formless puddle.

But Annie Clyde felt in her bones that Gracie was somewhere close. The reservoir was filling, the floodwaters spreading. If they didn’t find her quick she might be drowned with the rest of the town. Annie Clyde couldn’t stop imagining Gracie wrapped in algae, sinking into a darkness with no bottom. Last night after James left with the sheriff she had waited in the house until she could take it no longer. She had gone back out and searched the roadside pines alone while the others were down at the water. She’d known even as she ran to the river at dawn when she heard clamoring voices that it wasn’t Gracie. No matter what the men believed, or what her husband believed. It made her wonder how much James loved Gracie if he could give up on her. Then she thought of the day Gracie was born, when he bent over the swaddled bundle of her to kiss the tips of her matchstick fingers. She thought of him carrying Gracie on his shoulders to church, handsome in suspenders and a hat with a striped band. But a man’s love, a father’s love, must be different than a mother’s. She’d seen his eyes before he went to the water last night. He was mourning already. She remembered the remark he made weeks ago about Gracie running off into the lake. She’d wanted to kill him when he said that. Now she wanted to kill herself. She might have done it already, if she didn’t believe Gracie was still alive.