Amy Greene - Long Man

James remembered little of the night before. He’d insisted that Wallace and Verna go home and rest. Wallace had to get back to his congregation. He had a sermon to prepare. James meant to lie down and sleep with Annie Clyde. He had sworn to his aunt and uncle that he and Annie Clyde would be fine on their own until morning. But after they left James was overcome. He went out to the barn where he’d stashed a jar of Silver Ledford’s moonshine in the loft. Mary and Clyde Walker had been hard-shell Baptists who wouldn’t have a drop of liquor in their house. Out of respect to them Annie Clyde didn’t keep any herself, other than for medicine. James wasn’t much of a drinker, aside from taking a swig or two with Dale some evenings when their work was done. But last night he had drunk himself blind. James had a faint recollection of Annie Clyde’s aunt being here when he came back inside. The next thing he remembered was taking off his boots, unbuttoning his shirt and dropping it to the floor. Climbing into bed and curving himself around his wife, making a cocoon for her body. Now he lay with his arms around her waist, listening to the absence of drumming on the roof. “Annie Clyde,” he said into her hair, “it ain’t raining.” But she didn’t stir. He became aware of her heat under the cover, like an ember from the fireplace. It brought back what Silver had told him. That Annie Clyde had blood poisoning. James sat up with sudden alarm. He had slept with her, woke holding her, but someway he’d been too deep in his own misery to notice how bad off she was. James took his wife by the shoulder. “Annie Clyde,” he repeated over the thud of his heart. “Are you awake?”

“I think so,” she mumbled, without opening her eyes.

“Get up. It’s time to go to the doctor.”

She drew the sheet around her. “No. Somebody might come about Gracie.”

“Dammit, Annie Clyde,” James said.

“Why don’t you go get him? Bring him back here.”

“Sit up,” James ordered. “Take some of this medicine.”

“No,” she said again, sounding near tears. “It don’t help me.”

“You drink this and then we’re leaving.”

“Go on,” she said. “I just need to sleep.”

James thought then of his truck, still mired to the running boards. There was no way Annie Clyde could walk that far down the road. She was too ill even to be carried. He would have to push the truck out and go by himself. “At least let me change that dressing first,” he said.

He got out of bed and went to the washstand feeling warm himself, not with fever but with shame. After what happened in the courthouse he should have been more worried about Annie Clyde. Busting in wild-eyed with his rifle. James hadn’t even moved when they wrestled it away from her. Hadn’t flinched when she fired a shot into the wall, plaster showering down. He ripped another strip from the sheet for a clean bandage. He washed and wrapped his wife’s foot as well as he could. Then he knelt at her bedside. Her flushed face was turned aside, her hair dark against her neck. He might have thought her at peace if not for the line between her brows, if not for her thinness. She hadn’t been eating much, not just for the last two days but for the last two years. Each evening he watched her rake some of her supper onto Gracie’s plate. But as she lay there in the sunlight her beauty still moved him. He didn’t want to leave her. He wanted to put his aching head back down and sleep with her. He lifted her clammy hand and pressed it to his cheek. “Whatever you want when this is over, I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll live wherever you tell me.”

“I’m not going tomorrow, if they try to make us,” she murmured, drifting off deeper into sleep. “I can’t leave Gracie. If she’s alive or if she’s dead, I’m taking her with me.”

James smoothed her hair. “I’ll stand behind you this time,” he said, but she didn’t hear.

Buttoning his shirt on the way downstairs, his other bruised hand stiff on the banister, James felt like he was choking. He didn’t want to but he was already thinking of the people he’d have to tell that Gracie was gone for good. Dale Hankins. His sister across the mountain, the one he still pictured as a toddler chewing on a stalk of sugarcane. Her white-blond hair so much like the soft-blossomed tufts of cotton they plucked with sacks strapped to their small shoulders, the dried bristles at the ends of the plants making stinging cuts on their fingers. Dora was there the last time the river took somebody away from him. Dora stood with him at their mother’s bedside after she died giving birth to a stillborn baby, staring down at the mattress soaked with more blood than it seemed a woman’s body could hold. But this time James was alone. Disbelief washed over him, that any of this was happening. Last summer he and Annie Clyde were hoeing in the garden with Gracie at their feet, at dusk with the first stars out and a ghost of moon hovering. Their life on the farm had been for the most part happy. He could see that now. When it was all over. There was seldom more than a few cents in James’s pocket and their clothes were washed thin, but they hadn’t missed what they didn’t have. They’d always managed to keep Gracie’s belly full, even if it was with beans and pone bread instead of meat. When there were only vegetables from the garden, Annie Clyde fixed a meal of cabbage, peppers and tomatoes. They were poor but Gracie didn’t know it. Now she was lost and Annie Clyde was burning alive.

When he went outside the glare of the sun blinded him. The sky looked bluer, the corn down at the road greener than he remembered. He could hear running water but the spring was too far away, at the verge of the hollow. In the night the lake must have crossed the last hillock of the Hankins pasture, spilling off the edge of the bank into the roadside gully. Whether the road was washed out or not, he wouldn’t be going anywhere if he couldn’t find somebody to help him push his Model A out of the slough. He should have had it towed out with a tractor before the other men went home but he didn’t think of that. The truck was the last thing on his mind yesterday. He lowered himself to the top step to put on his muddy boots. Out of habit he had left them on the porch last night to keep from tracking dirt through the house. He was about to get up when he heard a thump from beneath him. He frowned and peered between the cracks in the steps. As he bent over, something dashed out from under the porch. He jumped up, catching himself on the railing. When he saw it, he didn’t understand at first. There was a red dog with a white patch on its chest standing in the yard where the snowball bushes drooped. Its tail wagged as it looked at James, waiting for him to move. When James came down the steps with leaden feet the dog ran to him, dancing a circle around his boots. James sank to his knees, thinking it couldn’t be Rusty. It must be some other coonhound that looked the same. But once James pinned the dog down and held it still, he felt like the wind had been knocked out of him again.

For too long James knelt in the grass unable to get up. Rusty went on lapping at his face, lunging and twisting in his arms, soiling his shirtfront. He fumbled his stiff fingers over Rusty’s coat, scabbed with burrs and beggar’s-lice, searching for clues to where the dog had been. He tried to shout for Annie Clyde but his voice was gone. He couldn’t think what it meant that Gracie’s dog was not dead, not drowned in the lake. He was about to take the dog around the house and call his wife’s name under the bedroom window when he spotted something stark against the grass. Something he realized Rusty must have dragged from under the porch and through the yard. It appeared to be a bone, but after all James had seen his eyes might be playing tricks. He crawled across the ground for a closer look, water seeping into his trouser knees. It was long and balled like a fist at one end. He had been right. It was a bone. But not a human one.