Amy Greene: Long Man

Last October Silver had traveled out to that farm in Caney Fork Ellard had found for the Dodsons. She’d told her niece that she didn’t think she could look her in the face again. She had believed her own words when she said them. She hadn’t even gone to the hospital where she knew Gracie was recovering. But as the weeks passed with both Amos and Mary dead all Silver could think about was Annie Clyde and Gracie, alive only twenty miles south of Yuneetah. She had to see them at least once more. She and the dog had made it most of ten miles on foot, then the other ten a friendly man stopped to let them ride in the back of his Willys truck. Something she would never have done a year ago. All things changed it seemed, even Silver.

On the road to the house crimson leaves fluttered around her. The fields were flaxen with rolled hay. There was enough frost in the air to wear her shawl. She stopped at the post fence around the lot when she saw the name on the mailbox, as the dog went on through the open gate. The house was smaller than their old one but the paint was fresh, shutters the same color as the rusty roof. Leaves littered its peak and drifted around the chimney, swaying down from a hackberry tree. Through a front window she saw a lightbulb burning. Then she was caught off guard when Annie Clyde came around the side of the house with Gracie, the child lugging a bucket of water. Annie Clyde halted at the porch corner, her smile faltering. With her eyes on Silver she took the bucket as the dog ran to lick the child’s face. If Gracie had any scars outside or in, Silver couldn’t see them from the road. She let out a breath she’d been holding for months it seemed when she heard Gracie laughing. She braced herself before passing through the gate and across the yard. Annie Clyde watched Silver come to the side of the porch, her expression hard to read. “Hey, Silver,” she said. “Did you walk all the way out here?” Silver knew then that Annie Clyde would pretend to have forgotten their conversation that night in Mary’s bedroom. They would both pretend. Silver could have wept. “Not all the way,” she said.

Annie Clyde gave Silver a drink of water from the bucket and once she’d drained the dipper they went out to see the lay of the land. Gracie went with them but didn’t acknowledge Silver. She might have remembered Silver taking her dog, or she might have grown more shy of strangers. She had gotten bigger in the short time since Silver saw her last. Her legs were too long for her dress. Her hair was longer, too, dark curls piled on her shoulders like Annie Clyde’s. But she must have still been a handful for her mother. There were scrapes on her shins, dirt on her knees, as if she’d been exploring her new place. The plot was flatter than what the Dodsons had farmed in Yuneetah, sloping gently behind the house to a stream that trickled through a tract of bur oaks separating their property from a neighbor’s. Annie Clyde showed off her garden and the field where she was thinking of growing tobacco. She could farm fifteen acres by herself while James worked at the steam plant that had opened up on the river in Whitehall County. Even as she spoke to Silver of these things her hazel eyes followed the child, letting Gracie roam but keeping track of her. When they got to the stream Gracie crouched, wetting her shoes and the seat of her bloomers, where the edge of the bank shone yellowish with mica like the shoals of the river. Gracie picked up a piece of the fool’s gold that always reminded Silver of her mother and of playing in the water with Mary. “I found this,” she said, holding it up to shimmer in the sun.

“Me and your granny had a jar full of that,” Silver said. “You didn’t know her.”

Silver glanced over then and caught Annie Clyde’s attention. They didn’t say it but Silver knew they were both thinking about that February night they’d sat up together watching the person they both loved most in the world pass out of it. After a while they started back to the house without speaking, the dog leaping alongside Gracie, chasing the stick she held high over her head. When they got to the porch Silver and Annie Clyde sat down on the steps as the child and the dog went off romping. Silver looked out across the yard toward the road and the loblolly pines on the other side, these not hiding Long Man behind them. A panel truck passed by and the driver raised his hand to Annie Clyde. Silver could see sitting close to her niece on the porch that her eyes had dimmed somewhat, like her husband’s. But she had put on weight and there was no way to tell that her foot was ever afflicted. Silver noticed, too, the small hole in the toe of one of the girl’s shoes. The fraying hem of her shift. Electricity couldn’t put right everything wrong in this valley. Silver could have told the Dodsons that much if they’d asked her opinion. They would still struggle, but she guessed they’d make it together. Not alone, like her. Silver bit her lip, reluctant to say why she’d come, but considering how devoted the dog and the child remained to each other she had no choice. “I figured she’d be missing Rusty by now,” Silver told Annie Clyde. Hearing his name, the dog left Gracie and loped over to Silver wagging his tail, nudging his nose into her lap. Silver took his head in her hands and scratched his ears.

After a moment Annie Clyde said, “Maybe you can keep him.”

Silver’s fingers stopped scratching. “What about Gracie?”

Annie Clyde looked at her daughter in the yard, plucking buttercups from the browning grass. “She’ll have some company,” Annie Clyde said. She took Silver’s hand and placed it on the warmth of her belly. “I’m not far along, but I can tell.”

Silver left soon after that, unable to think or know how to feel about what Annie Clyde had told her. About this coming baby whose voice she wouldn’t hear drifting up to her from the farm. A child she might never lay eyes on. Now that she was satisfied her kin were all right she wouldn’t have cause to travel again. She’d go back up the mountain and live out her days, content to see no more of the countryside than what was visible from the ridge. It was late October and dark fell early. As she walked back along the dusty roads meandering out of Caney Fork lights came on in the houses. There was one made of river rock set closer to the path and Silver peered into its window when she stopped to dig a pebble out of her shoe. Through the parted curtains she saw a framed portrait of Franklin Roosevelt hanging over a mantelpiece. She wondered if this family had come from Yuneetah, forced off their land like the Dodsons. Silver hadn’t seen James that afternoon. He was gone to work at the steam plant. But she imagined he might hang up such a picture if his wife would allow it. Maybe one of these days Annie Clyde would be willing to let him. Once Silver had dumped out the pebble jabbing her foot sole, she went on. The dog ranged ahead or lagged behind, sniffing the corpse of a mole or snapping at the gypsy moths that fluttered up from the weedy ditches. But he always came back to her side.

That autumn Silver and the dog watched from the ridge overlooking the valley as the water came to drown her niece’s farm. It felt to Silver as though somebody ought to bear witness. She and Rusty were the only ones who saw it come. It advanced over the fields laid out in patches of green from pale to the near black of the hemlocks, crossing abandoned property lines marked off with stone or rail fences. It moved in falls and fingers and ponds giving back the sun, pouring into the basin between the bluffs topped with pines. Each evening it drew a little closer, until it sampled the crumbles of soil between the corn rows and the long grasses of the yard. It went sucking lead from the painted porch steps and sliding underneath where the dog used to pant in the cool dirt. Stripping off scales of peeling clapboard as it rose up the outer walls onto the porch where a pair of boots were left. These the current lifted, laces floating among the white specks of the snowball bushes as it entered through the cracked front door. Stealing inside like an intruder with a whine of corroded hinges. Swirling over the threshold and washing into the front room across the floorboards smudged by decades of brogans hauling eggs in from the coop and buckets from the spring. Lapping over the ashy hearth of the fireplace and up the chimney. Seeping into the wallpaper and flooding the stairs, trailing the banisters with strands of algae. Overflowing the upper room of the house where one had died and another was born, carp swimming between the maple bedposts. Streaming out the kitchen door and across the back lot past the shading elm, rushing in to fill the barn stalls. Leaking into the knotholes of the smokehouse boards, trickling through the hayfield weeds to climb the bark of the apple tree with a few last fruits clinging to its limbs. Until the still and fathomless depths of the lake covered all forty of the Walker farm’s acres. Until there was nothing left to see but miles and miles of blue.