Amy Greene - Long Man

Annie Clyde had been bathed herself, dressed in a clean hospital gown. She was propped on the pillows, her hair loose on the linen. Washburn reached again to take off his missing hat as he moved to the bedside. Then his wingtip shoe squeaked on the tile and James Dodson started, straightening in the armchair. Washburn froze in his tracks. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry. Should I come back later? Tomorrow?”

“That’s all right,” James Dodson said, getting up. Someone, Washburn supposed his uncle, had loaned him clean clothes. His arms strained at the seams of his shirtsleeves. The two men contemplated each other, neither knowing what to say. James opened his mouth, perhaps to offer some word of gratitude for driving them to the doctor’s office yesterday, but Washburn hoped that he wouldn’t try. Finally they turned from each other toward the bed where Annie Clyde lay asleep with the child. “You can go ahead and wake my wife up. She’s been waiting for you,” James Dodson said. His eyes lingered a moment longer on his daughter, probably making sure she still breathed. “I believe I’ll step out and see if I can find a cup of coffee. Can I bring you some?”

“No, thank you,” Washburn said. “I won’t stay long.”

After James Dodson left the room, Washburn went around the bed. There was no other armchair near the window but he would have been uncomfortable sitting down anyway. He felt stiff, as if they were in church and not a hospital room. When he put his hand on the iron bed rail Annie Clyde opened her eyes. She smiled some when she saw him. Washburn had known that her face must hold expressions other than the fierceness she’d turned on him, but it took him aback nonetheless. She was pale and emaciated but he could still see in her the intimidating woman he’d met with a Winchester rifle propped in her reach. If she had seemed for a second to be made of water that first time Washburn saw her, this time she seemed made of light.

“Mr. Washburn,” Annie Clyde said. “I’m glad you’re still here.”

“I had to see your daughter,” he said, tearing his eyes away from her to look at the child. Maybe he had wanted more than believed Gracie Dodson to be alive but here she was, given back to her mother. It was a memory he would turn to in times of doubt, the two of them lying joined almost like one person. It would become his faith, that such things could and did happen.

“She’s doing better,” Annie Clyde said. “She’s been trying to get up and see out the window.” She paused, stroking the child’s curls above the bandage. “The nurse offered to bring a crib in here but I told them I’d just keep her in the bed with me. I couldn’t let go of her.”

Washburn cleared his throat, feeling hoarse. “I’ll bet they couldn’t have made you.”

Annie Clyde looked back up into Washburn’s eyes, her smile still there but altered, tempered. “She won’t even remember this. But I don’t know when I’ll ever get over it.”

“Me, either,” Washburn said. Then he had to turn his head away. He saw himself and the Dodsons reflected in the window glass and felt so out of place there that he knew he ought to be going. He stared through his reflection at the twinkling town, the streets two stories below overhung with power lines. No wonder the child wanted to look out. She had never seen electricity. That was another thing she wouldn’t remember from her first three years. How black the night could get in Yuneetah, especially in winter, when he’d stayed too late after supper with one of the families. Annie Clyde wasn’t made for electric light, despite how the lamp glow lit up her face. She might never get used to it. But her daughter would know nothing else.

Washburn was about to excuse himself from the room when he felt a feathery touch, a plucking at his finger on the bed rail. He turned from the window to see that the child’s frail hand, the one with the tube attached and feeding water into her veins, had moved on top of his own. She was awake now, her head still lying on her mother’s heart, her eye open under the bandage, glassy and peaked but also curious. Annie Clyde laughed a little. “She likes your ring.”

Washburn looked down at it, the topaz stone gleaming, the band engraved with the year of his graduation from college. Nineteen thirty-three, the same year the child was born. Washburn thought of his father, who once came out with a lantern to save him from a flood. When he was small he used to be drawn to the glimmer of his father’s wedding band. “Watch,” Washburn said. He tugged off the class ring and spun it on the tray table across Annie Clyde’s legs, a golden blur, until it wobbled to a stop and fell still with a clatter. The child watched as if witnessing a magic trick. After a moment Washburn took the ring from the tray and slipped it into the child’s warm hand. “She can keep it,” he told Annie Clyde.

“No, no,” Annie Clyde said. “That’s not necessary.”

“I want you to have it,” he said. “For her to have it, I mean.”

Annie Clyde studied Washburn. “She can’t thank you herself, so I’ll have to.”

This time Washburn held Annie Clyde’s gaze. He wanted to remember the alignment of her features. He wanted to remember how it had felt when she leaned on him, her heat branding his arm. He would never see her again, but he might never stop thinking about her. What she had done to him was hard to sort out. When he returned from their first meeting he’d gone up to his room over the coffeehouse and thrown open the windows to let in the noise of the city, trying to shake the dust of Yuneetah off his shoes. But her presence had clung to him as if she’d followed him home. Something had shifted in him as he stood on Annie Clyde Dodson’s porch, though he didn’t know it a month ago. He went there to convince her to leave and somehow she convinced him instead. The removals were forcible evictions no matter how politely the TVA was going about them. He hadn’t really seen the people of Yuneetah, had concentrated more on his notes about them, until Annie Clyde made him look at her. He hadn’t listened to those he thought he was helping until she made him hear. Now he didn’t know what he thought anymore. Maybe the chief was right. He was too young for a job this big. “I’d better let you sleep, Mrs. Dodson,” he said.

But when he started away she stopped him. “Wait, Mr. Washburn,” she said. “Your coat.”

Annie Clyde glanced to the table by the bed and Washburn saw his suit coat folded there. When he picked it up dried clots of dirt pattered to the floor. “I’m afraid it’s ruined,” she said.

Washburn looked down at the coat, drew it to his stomach. “No,” he said, his voice tight. “It’s not.” He hesitated then crossed the room and went out, shutting the door softly behind him.

Washburn’s shoes squeaked again on the tiles as he passed other doors closed or ajar to show glimpses of convalescing patients inside, one man with his leg in a pulley. He nodded to a woman shuffling along in a robe and slippers, holding to the rail on the wall. When he went by the waiting room, having almost made it to the stairwell at the end of the hall, a short man in suspenders came out holding a stenographer’s pad and a pencil. “Sam Washburn?” he asked.

Washburn thought of lying, but it wasn’t in him. “Yes.”

“I’m with the Knoxville News Sentinel, ” the man said. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

“It’s after midnight,” Washburn said. “I doubt you’ll be making your deadline.”

The man rubbed at his eye with the knuckle of the hand holding the pencil. It looked red and irritated. “I’ve been all over the place tonight, trying to find somebody that knows what’s going on in Yuneetah,” he said. “The sheriff has all of the roads into town blocked off.”