Amy Greene - Long Man

Annie Clyde didn’t look back as Yuneetah receded. At the steep rising mountains or the ponded cow pastures or the river glinting between the shade trees. At Joe Dixon’s store or Hardin Bluff School or the tumbled-down foundation stones of the churches. The thought of this day had once broken her heart. Now the death of the town seemed like nothing compared to the waning life she held in her arms. Let the lake have it. She had all that counted. She closed her eyes and inhaled the farmland smell of Whitehall County blowing through the car, replacing the graveyard stench of dirt, limestone and moss. Buffeting her hair and flapping the sleeves of Washburn’s suit coat. She clutched the bundle of Gracie to her chest and pretended they were somewhere else to keep from losing her mind. They were riding to the market in the bed of Dale Hankins’s pickup. She was leaning against the cab holding Gracie between her knees, loose straw flying all around them. Or they were on a hayride tucked in a musky horse blanket, the wagon bumping down the road under the harvest moon, passing the frosted fields with James’s arms around her and Gracie both, the scent of autumn crisp and smoky on their skins. She remembered her husband then. She cracked her fevered lids to see him slumped beside her on the seat. His hair tousled, his shirt torn ragged. Mud and bark caking his fingernails. Soaked to the hip from the tall weeds he’d parted to bring Gracie home. “James,” Annie Clyde rasped, and his eyes rolled toward her. She was overcome with love for him, even in the midst of all this. The one who gave her daughter back to her. At last she understood what he’d meant when he said he had worshipped her from the moment he saw her standing on the riverbank. “She won’t wake up,” Annie Clyde whispered, shaking Gracie a little, tears leaking down her face. James forced himself to smile. For her sake, like so much of what he had done. “She will,” he said, and Annie Clyde tried to believe him.

Around noon Ellard Moody found himself alone with the Deering child’s bones. The remains from the cave in the clearing had been brought to the courtroom where the light would be best. Despite the power company’s deadline, there were still pews behind the railing. Flags still flanked the judge’s bench. Chairs remained on the witness stand and the raised jury platform as if there might be a trial tomorrow. Not that many trials had taken place in Yuneetah. There hadn’t been enough crime to warrant building a courthouse until 1830. Before then the sheriff made do with a stockade on the riverbank. Many times Ellard had stood at the back of this room with his hands clasped in front of him and his revolver on his hip as men were sentenced for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace. He had broken up only one fight in the courtroom himself, a scuffle between the owner of Gilley’s Hotel and a bachelor who owed him rent. Only once had there been a gunshot fired in the courthouse during his tenure, and that was yesterday afternoon. Ellard supposed there wasn’t much history worth preserving here, but he hoped before the water flooded in that somebody would take away the old furnishings and the old portraits of white-headed circuit court judges lining the walls. It could all be used elsewhere, in a church or in some other county’s court. If not, at least one of the lawyer’s tables was serving a final purpose. It had been cleared of the water pitcher and the stacks of law books to make room for the Deering boy’s skeleton, arranged now in the pattern of a child on its scarred walnut top.

Most of the morning Ellard had been there with a professor of anthropology from the college in Knoxville and a serious young man that appeared to be his student. For hours Ellard had looked over their shoulders at the broken skull and the brittle rib fragments, listening as they pieced together a story he could have told them. Judging by the pelvis, the professor said, this was a male. No more than five years old given the length of the femur. In his brief lifetime he had suffered from rickets. Then his head had been dashed on the rocks of the riverbed. For at least a decade after that his bones had lain in a shallow limestone cave being gnawed at by animals and eroded by weather. But the professor didn’t say what a shame it was that this child had suffered and died. That somebody had lost a son. Ellard wished they’d seen Wayne Deering slogging through the floodwaters with one boot on, out of his mind with grief. He hated to hear them talking about this child’s life and death in the same offhand way they’d remarked on the condition of the roads in from Knoxville, but he was unwilling to leave one of his own alone in the hands of these strangers. From the time the professor and his student had arrived in town this morning, Ellard had been out of temper. He couldn’t summon much friendliness toward them.

They had come as far as the courthouse then Ellard drove them down to the Hankins woods. He would have liked a preacher or at least an undertaker present to speak over the remains before they were disturbed but neither could be reached, so he had done the best he could by himself. He had stood at the foot of the bluff holding his hat in his hands, looking down at the leftover signs of a struggle. Furrows made in the spongy earth by feet digging and sliding as Ellard tried to grapple James off of Amos. Vines littered around the mouth of the cave. He had shut his eyes and bowed his head against the memory of the day before. Not just what had taken place between Amos and James Dodson, but the sight of the drifter sitting there unfazed beneath his shelter when Ellard and James found the camp, as if he was expecting them. It had taken all of Ellard’s willpower to match Amos’s maddening calm. Even when he was standing over the Deering child’s bones in the cave Ellard’s blood had begun to heat again, remembering the glint of mockery in Amos’s eye. After fumbling through the Lord’s Prayer he had turned his back and walked off.

While the college men huddled over the hole at the foot of the bluff with their sleeves rolled up, a tarp spread to receive the bones, Ellard went about his own business. In the cut-back laurel he found the axes, James’s thrown and his set aside forgotten. He had surveyed the drifter’s camp again, collapsing lumps of cook fire ash with his boot toe, crouching to examine the print of his own heel still marking the topsoil. He had knelt to retrieve the drifter’s belongings, untying the bindle and sorting through the chattel, finding nothing much besides pots and pans. A thick spool of rope. Matches kept dry in a corked glass bottle. A bolt cropper, surely used for thieving. A ball-peen hammer and some railroad spikes, Ellard supposed for building his shelters. His hat with the wilted brim and the buff-colored crown, the sweat-stained band. None of it told Ellard what Amos was doing in Yuneetah. Then Ellard had unfolded the drifter’s peacoat, smelling the road dust of his travels. Reaching into an inner pocket he had discovered a darned sock that looked like a fat snake, bulging with whatever was stuffed inside. Wary to put his hand in the sock Ellard had sat on the milk crate to upend and shake it out, a collection of objects dropping on the bedroll unfurled at his feet. A hair ribbon, tied into a bow. A Kewpie doll. A toy soldier. The items looked old and unlikely to belong to Gracie Dodson, as Amos appeared to have been carrying them for far longer than three days. Ellard had turned each seeming keepsake over in his hands, thinking dark thoughts, unable to fathom their meaning.

After taking Amos’s belongings out to the trunk of his car he went to the bluff and helped wrap the excavated bones in canvas. Back at the courthouse he watched as the professor and his student laid them out, determined to make sure they were handled with the proper respect. He had observed with his arms folded as they brushed away the dirt, as they measured and stood back to consider. After they’d finally packed up their tools they shook Ellard’s hand and went out. He supposed their business was done. They would go on back to Knoxville, write up their report about the Deering boy and think nothing more of him or Yuneetah. Now Ellard lingered in the courtroom standing over the lawyer’s table, trying to feel the right way after all his years of beating the bushes for the Deering child’s bones. It turned out that finding the boy changed little. Wayne Deering had still lost his son. Looking down at the bones Ellard wished for some memory of what they were like with skin on them. He had an image of a child with sandy hair and bowed legs running around his car when he went down to the hog farm, but that might have been any of the Deering brood. He remembered them swimming in the river that ran along the edge of the farm not realizing it could rise up and kill them as easily as it floated them on their backs in its shallows. Ellard hoped burying the child would bring some measure of comfort to his father. He didn’t know where the surviving Deerings had ended up, but Wayne would have to be notified.