Amy Greene - Long Man

“All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

“You’ll go home, Mr. Washburn. If your vehicle’s stuck somebody will push you out.”

“If you’ll just give me a chance—”

“If you don’t get out of my way,” she said, “I’ll have to point my husband’s gun at you.”

Washburn held her gaze as long as he could. “I’ll be here when you get back,” he said.

“Get out of my way,” she ordered, and he stepped aside. She felt his blue eyes on her as she went down the steps and out of the yard, across the track toward the slope leading into the hollow. He called after her as she climbed over the split-rail fence marking the boundary of her property and she almost turned around. If she went back he would come with her and she wouldn’t be alone in this, even if he was only pretending to believe her. At least she wouldn’t be heading off to shoot a man and bring Gracie home by herself. At the last second though she came to her senses, pulled herself upright and squared her shoulders so Washburn could see her resolve. She kept moving ahead with only her husband’s Winchester rifle for company.

Halfway up the hillside weariness overtook her. She panted as she tripped on roots and rocks, skinning her knees and palms. By the time she reached the graveyard, a shady plot of grass bordered with white pickets, she was winded and had to lean on the gate. The cemetery was within a hair of the taking line. A few weeks ago James had offered to help move these graves for the power company. He would have dug her parents up and had them shipped by train to Michigan, but Annie Clyde was leaving her people to lie in peace. From where she stood she could see her father’s headstone. Sometimes she came to sit against it, comforted by the granite at her back, as firm and rough as his hands had been. It was easier there to remember how she took off her shoes to walk behind him as he plowed. To remember the rattle of the harness as he drove the mules, his soft voice urging them. Annie Clyde’s mother had saved for months to pay a stonecutter to carve Clyde Walker’s name on his marker. Now Mary’s grave was there beside her husband’s, too meager a headstone to cover the person she’d been. Annie Clyde would have given anything to talk to her parents. But they were gone and she was on her own.

She thought then for the first time that day of her aunt Silver. From the hollow there was a shortcut to Silver’s house, a path twisting around and along the ridges. She still felt a need to see her aunt, the only blood kin she had left besides Gracie. She pictured Silver’s hands, the part that resembled her mother most. If Annie Clyde could see them, the delicate fingers with chapped knuckles, she might breathe easier. But Silver hadn’t come and Annie Clyde didn’t know if she could make it much farther on her wobbling legs. It was a long climb. Silver used to visit the farm on occasion but Mary never went to her sister’s high shack. She told Annie Clyde it was lonesome up there, and scary at night. In the winter if Clyde took a sled up the mountain to haul in firewood Mary would ask him to see about Silver. “She’s liable to freeze to death and we’d never know it,” she’d say. Annie Clyde had gathered that Mary and Silver were close as children, strange as it was to think of her aunt being close to anyone. Silver would stay away from the farm for months then reappear out of nowhere to help Mary with the chores, both silent as they scrubbed laundry or did the canning or made lye soap. When Mary died Silver hadn’t attended the funeral at the Free Will Baptist church, but Annie Clyde understood. Silver didn’t seem to belong there among the townspeople. She belonged on the mountaintop by herself. Annie Clyde wasn’t offended by Silver’s absence now either. She empathized with her aunt in a way that others couldn’t. If she got a second wind she’d head up the mountain later. She knew Silver and Amos once played together in the hollow. But Annie Clyde couldn’t dwell on that. She concentrated on making it to Beulah Kesterson’s first. There was a chance it would all end there.

Annie Clyde pushed herself away from the cemetery gate and continued up the slope with weeds brushing her shins, the rifle on her shoulder. She would have come this way last night if the Whitehall County constable hadn’t been roaming around. She had wanted to see Beulah alone, and now these woods were empty. The ground roughened the higher she climbed, shale hidden in the thinning grasses. It made her feel sick to follow the same footpath she and James had taken yesterday afternoon looking for Gracie but she kept going. When Beulah’s place came into view she paused once more at the edge of the lot to rest against a locust tree. She was struck by the cabin’s stillness. In fair weather the old woman usually sat outside in a lattice chair, the bareness around it splotched with the snuff she dipped. Annie Clyde’s mother used to send her after medicine. Mary and Beulah were friends. Some winters when Annie Clyde was a child Beulah helped the Walkers butcher hogs in exchange for meat. Clyde would shoot the sow and stick its throat. Mary and Beulah would tie ropes around its legs and drag it to the scalding boards. They would take turns scraping its hide then hang the carcass up, warm blood seeping into the frozen ground as snow dusted their mackinaws. They would work into the night, packing hams and shoulders in salt in the smokehouse. Then Mary and Beulah would cook a late supper of pork. Annie Clyde liked the meal but for days afterward she had nightmares about the slaughter. Someway she associated that bloodletting with Beulah and the pouch around her neck.

To this day, Annie Clyde was afraid of the old woman’s fortune-telling bones. She’d seen them once, when she was eleven and went up the hollow after a poultice for hornet stings. She had knocked down the hornets’ nest under the barn eave with a rock and stirred them up. Her whole face had been swollen tight and red when the wasps were through with her. On that sunny morning the plank door of Beulah’s cabin was propped open and Annie Clyde had mounted the rock steps to rap on it. When there was no answer she’d peered inside and discovered Beulah stooped over a table studying the aged bones scattered across it, stained and configured into odd shapes. Beulah had looked up, startled by Annie Clyde’s knocking. Whatever she had seen in the bones must have been harrowing because her face was the color of parchment. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated behind her pointed glasses. Annie Clyde had turned and run off. When Mary asked why she was back without a poultice for her stings, she had refused to speak of what happened.

Annie Clyde hadn’t wanted Beulah to birth Gracie. She would have sent James after the doctor in Whitehall County if not for her mother. Not long before Mary breathed her last, she’d put a hand on Annie Clyde’s rounded belly and said, “Go to Miss Beulah when your time comes. If it wasn’t for her, you wouldn’t be in this world.” It was only then that Mary told Annie Clyde how before she was born there had been three other babies lost. Beulah had seen how Mary was suffering and come down the hollow one morning with a tea made from partridgeberry to strengthen her womb. Within a few weeks Mary was expecting, and for the first time the baby had thrived. She had trusted Beulah over any doctor ever since, and even gone to the old woman first when the cancer began to make her ill. But Beulah had said to Mary with sorrowful eyes, “Honey, there ain’t much I can do for you this time.” After her mother’s burial Annie Clyde had explored the graveyard to see if she could find her older siblings. There were no names carved on the markers Clyde had fashioned from rocks turned up by the tines of his plow. She pictured him coming with a spade and the babies wrapped in rags or tiny enough to fit in shoe boxes, digging in the shadiest corner where the flowering arms of a dogwood tree shed its blooms. Annie Clyde had brushed the leaves from the flat limestone tablets and lowered herself to sit among them, heavy with Gracie by then. She’d thought how if not for Beulah Kesterson her tiny bones might be under another rock next to theirs. She had known then she would honor her mother’s wish.