Amy Greene: Long Man

For now, he leaned back against the spruce with the bundles gathered into his lap. His coat scratched and caught on the rough bark as he tried to get comfortable. He was tired after having spent the night before tossing in pain on the jail cell bunk, but he kept alert. He listened for the watchman, thinking because it was Sunday and because of the excitement with the child the dam workers might not appear. But before half an hour had elapsed Amos heard echoing voices and carefully replaced the dynamite bundles in the spruce hollow. Then he padded through the coppery needles to the edge of the evergreens and stood there without breaking cover, observing the watchman’s shadow on the sand, the silhouette of his hatted head moving up on the dam’s pedestrian sidewalk. When Amos heard calling voices again from somewhere distant he knew there was more than one worker patrolling the site. But as the dark deepened the voices subsided and Amos’s mind quieted with them. He went back through the woods underneath the low boughs to the spruce and settled once again to rest against its scratchy bark. He wasn’t worried about the watchman. He wasn’t worried about the sheriff of Yuneetah finding him again either.

Ellard Moody had been afraid of Amos since they were boys. His face was sheepish even as a child, his timid eyes downcast, always tagging after the Ledford sisters. Amos used to lure Silver Ledford away from Ellard just to watch the other boy’s ears turning red. But as often as Amos goaded Ellard into anger, he had never once struck back. Ellard would stand aside and let Amos steal his marbles away from him, his slingshots and nickels, without putting up much of a fight. Now Ellard had given Yuneetah up to the TVA out of the same weakness. Amos had watched unsurprised as his boyhood neighbor grew into the kind of man who took what the government gave him. The kind who licked boots and did as he was told. When Ellard pointed his revolver in the courthouse basement yesterday Amos had seen over the barrel of the gun the knowledge in the sheriff’s eyes. Ellard knew he was a failure. Amos could do more for Yuneetah in the next few minutes than Ellard had in twenty years as sheriff. He had traveled this whole country unseen, but that was by choice. He could make thousands look at him if he wanted.

This afternoon Ellard couldn’t face Amos long enough to even turn him loose. He’d sent Silver Ledford to do his bidding. She said nothing as she rattled the key in the lock but Amos knew what it meant that she was there. She swung the door open wide and came inside where it was dim although the sun was shining on the rest of Yuneetah. She placed his bindle at his feet and examined his face, made speechless by the state he was in. Amos had no urge to touch Silver as he’d done in the past. But hers was the only companionship he missed sometimes on the road. When he saw lava rocks in New Mexico unlike anything they had found in the caves of Yuneetah. When he saw redwood trees too tall for either of them to have climbed. Silver had aged but he always remembered her as an almost feral child standing at the edge of Beulah’s yard staring at him with open curiosity. He remembered her swimming in the river with minnows flashing, caught in the snare of her hair. He remembered her exploring the abandoned iron mine with him, climbing up the buried grooves of a track to what was once the superintendent’s house, the windows broken and the front door gone. Together they had crawled underneath the clustered blooms of an overgrown lilac bush planted at the porch corner, and Silver had asked Amos if they could stay there forever. Hiding out from the ones in town below who considered them nothing.

Silver had been wilder as a girl, before her sister Mary ran off and left her alone. Amos supposed some of what had drawn him to Gracie Dodson that morning in the cornfield was her resemblance to his only friend. The child looked like Mary except through the eyes. There he had seen the curiosity she inherited from her great-aunt Silver. He had seen the Cherokee in her, as he did in her mother. They were remnants, shadows, of those who first lived on this river and gave it a name. Gracie Dodson, one last child occupying the land that was taken from them all, standing in the corn with a drop or two of Indian blood coursing through the threads of her veins. About to be purged by the same government, unaware in her innocence that her birthright was being stolen. Amos usually took something to remember the children he met in his travels but he’d felt compelled to give Gracie Dodson something instead. Now he saw looking through the branches at the lake spreading closer by the hour to the loam she had claimed with the print of her toes that a toy wasn’t enough. If the child had been found drowned or not at all Amos might have reached another conclusion. But it came to him now that the act he was about to commit would join them. She wouldn’t be told her own story without hearing Amos’s. If he taught her something of defiance maybe she wouldn’t change. He knew the risk he was taking. As he knew that he couldn’t stop the dam builders. They had plans to inundate hundreds of thousands of valley acres. His act was no more than an obstacle to their end result, but he wasn’t meant to grow old anyway. If he died blowing up one of their dams, they’d have to admit he had once been alive.

It had become impossible to shift to a more comfortable position against the tree for the ache in his ribs so Amos roused himself. He looked up at the emerging moon, thinking there was enough light to see by and enough dark to hide him. With caution he retrieved the bundles and carried them wrapped in detonating cord back to the edge of the evergreen woods. He waited there for a while longer listening to the reservoir lapping at the sand, until there was no other movement or sound in all of Yuneetah it seemed. When he finally headed on to the shore his boots gritted in a way that reminded him of snow and the winters he’d spent here. His fingers frozen around the axe handle as he chopped Beulah’s wood, his face baking in the heat as they roasted chestnuts so that it felt about to crack open. The same way it felt now for a different reason, his bruised bones chafing at his knuckle-split skin. He cradled the bundles in his arms like a newborn as he went, pulling his hat brim down to hide the glint of his eye just in case, although it was filled with blood. His peacoat over his dingy shirt, his trousers and boots so grimy they had ceased to be any color, he moved like smoke toward the dock near the dam.

Amos would have to launch out here in the open and row all the way across to the seam where the concrete met the bluff since there was no shore on the opposite side of the lake, nothing where the poplars and cottonwoods ended but cairns of rubble. He knelt on the dock, so recently built it smelled of raw lumber, glancing up at the dam to be sure the highway was still deserted. He placed the bundles in the well between the rowboat seats, checking to see that the oars were in the oarlocks. That the handle of the ball-peen hammer was tucked in one of his deep coat pockets, though he could feel its ten-pound weight. He lowered himself into the bow of the boat and cut it loose from the tie-off pin with his hunting knife, then eased into the water and rowed out in the shadow of the dam. He drew as close to the concrete wall as he could get, its face on the lake side striated with lines where the reservoir had risen and receded in the rain. The dip of Amos’s oars was nearly silent as he went along the stretch of the spillway, closing in on the west abutment wall. When he reached the other end he would lower the explosive charges knotted along their tether into the reservoir where he thought the rock seam was faultiest, maneuvering the rowboat so that the bundles came to rest at intervals along the sloping wall. Then he would hammer in the railroad spike to anchor the explosives where he wanted them. After the fuse was lit he’d row as fast and far as he could, gaining as much distance as possible from the blast. He hoped for enough time to scramble up the bluff and watch as the underwater explosion separated the lake bottom from the dam’s foundation, the water retreating then rushing back toward the fractured seam, a torrent of silt and river roaring unleashed through the chasm.