Amy Greene - Long Man

Silver should have been more careful during her time with Ellard. It didn’t occur to her until she grew sick how foolish they had been. Though she told herself the blood would come any day, she was worried. She tried to keep even farther away from her grandmother during those months but one evening as she sat with Mildred at the kitchen table not eating her supper, she felt the old woman’s eyes on her. She got up and rushed outside for some air, trying to settle her stomach. When she came back inside with an armload of kindling, the coals were glowing under the kettle. Mildred pulled out a chair for her to sit. She took the kettle off the fire and poured its scalding contents into a cup. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing?” she spat, thrusting the cup into Silver’s hand. “Just like your mama.” Silver stared into the swirling pennyroyal dregs. She knew it would make her trouble go away, but in that moment she hated her grandmother more than ever. Even as she drained the cup in one searing gulp.

For almost three decades Silver had kept that secret from Ellard Moody. Now she was keeping another one. But she hadn’t lied to him about where she was headed when she got out of his car this morning. She’d gone straight across the road to the Walker farm and up to the porch where a group of men in slickers were drinking coffee. She recognized one of them without remembering his name. Someone she had gone to third grade with until she quit, one of the boys that had chucked rocks at her in the school yard. He told her that Annie Clyde wasn’t home, his mean eyes calling her all the names his mouth used to thirty-five years ago. Silver wanted to wait for her niece but not with the man’s eyes on her. Not inside with the women either. She knew what they thought of her. She went around to the barn where she could rest within earshot of the house, lying on her side in the scattered hay of a stall. Sometime later she heard tires churning and realized she’d been asleep. She scrambled up shedding straw and went to the side of the house. A group of men were pushing a pickup truck out of the bog of the yard. The farm had emptied over the course of the afternoon. When the truck was gone only the Packard remained. Silver knocked on the kitchen door and James’s aunt opened it. Her face was severe, strands escaping the knot at her nape. Silver asked for Annie Clyde and the woman said, “She’s down at the jail. I reckon they got Amos.” Without hesitation Silver turned and fled for town.

She had arrived at the courthouse near dusk, the sky whorled with orange clouds. The rain had tapered enough for swifts to return to the clock tower, wheeling and swooping around the dome roof. Silver paused at the flagpole to catch her breath. She’d expected to see curious or perhaps angry searchers but the lawn was deserted, only a few vehicles at the curb. She’d thought they were leaving the farm to come to the courthouse but maybe Ellard had already run them off. He would probably send Silver away as well, but she meant to try. She was about to make for the courthouse doors when they burst open. A young fair-headed man came down the steps. Rushing across the lawn to the street he slid and pitched forward, skidding on his face. He lay there without getting up, his mouth plugged with the earth and grass and water of Yuneetah as if he was drowning in it. Silver was too astonished to go to him. Finally the young man picked himself up, coughing and wiping his face, then limped on to the curb and drove away. Silver wanted to run into the building and demand to know what had happened. But she forced herself to take care up the cobbled walk, treacherous with leaves. As she reached for the door a lawman with a badge pinned to his shirt was coming out of the building. “Nobody’s getting in here tonight,” he said. “You’ll have to come back in the morning.” Then he went down the steps to a car like Ellard’s, a gold star on its side. Silver paced back and forth for a while under the portico wringing her hands, thinking of begging Ellard to let her see Amos but knowing better.

Now she continued down the footpath winding around the side of the mountain until she saw a glow through the limbs clustered over the trail she was following, the only light visible for miles. The cabin in the clearing looked like a haven when she came upon it, sheltered by walnut trees and wild chokecherry bushes, a curl of chimney smoke hanging over the shakes of the roof. Silver tramped up the steps and pounded on the plank door. “It’s Silver Ledford,” she cried out. There was a long lapse although Silver knew Beulah was in there. When the old woman answered she sounded reluctant, like she would rather have hidden from her company.

“Come on in,” Beulah allowed.

Silver pushed open the door then poked her head inside, the blustery draft she brought with her riffling the calendar pages tacked over Beulah’s bed in the corner and swaying the bundled herbs in the rafters. Her eyes moved over the split-log walls, the fireplace with a heap of cinders spilled onto the hearth. She smelled cooking. When she turned her head the old woman was taking a jar from a pie safe. She crossed the threshold, her shoes tracking the floor. It had been years since she entered a home not her own. “I hate to bother you late like this,” she said.

“It ain’t no bother. I been gone all day. I’m just now getting done with supper.”

“I won’t stay long.”

“I got squirrel. Tastes pretty good if you ain’t had meat in a while.”

“Nothing wrong with squirrel,” Silver said. She looked down at herself, still wearing the liver-colored dress, her legs streaked with silt. But Beulah didn’t seem to mind her state.

“Here’s some apple butter, too.” She opened the jar she held in her hand, popping the seal. “This is the last of it, but I can’t think of no reason to save it.”

“Neither can I,” Silver said.

Beulah took down crockery from a shelf and a pan of biscuits from the sideboard. She dished what was left of her supper onto a plate and Silver’s mouth filled with water. She hadn’t eaten. Beulah pulled out a chair but Silver hunkered before the waning cook fire with her food as she did at home. Beulah sighed and took the seat herself. “I never saw such a day. Did you?”

Silver took a bite of the stringy meat. “Not that I remember.”

“I never dreamed I’d see you at my door neither.”

“It’s a strange time,” Silver said.

Beulah shook her head. “It surely is.” She watched as Silver gnawed the squirrel bones clean and tossed them one by one into the fireplace. “I reckon we’re the only ones left up here now. I’ve thought about coming to see you sometime. But you don’t seem to like visitors.”

Silver went on chewing, not saying what came into her mind. Amos was about the only visitor she ever had. She looked around the shadowy cabin and thought it was no wonder he had left. He couldn’t have stayed here. The room was too smothering and close. She pictured him in a jail cell and lost some of her appetite. She supposed the reason she hadn’t asked Beulah about Amos yet was that she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to know anymore. Then Beulah put her out of her misery. “Go ahead. You got such a cloud over you, it’s liable to rain in here.”

Silver choked down a last bite. “They wouldn’t let me in to see Amos.”

Beulah studied her lap. “Well. I seen him.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s alive, but I won’t say he’s all right.”

“I knew it,” Silver said. “Ellard would just as soon kill him as look at him.”

Beulah pulled a handkerchief from her apron. Her eyes when she took off her pointed glasses to dab them were small and naked. “I’m the one that turned him in.”