Amy Greene - Long Man

Now her father’s forty acres were quiet aside from the wind stirring the ropes of the swing hanging from one of the apple tree’s crooked branches. Gracie stood with yellow and green leaves fluttering down around her. She lifted her toe to scratch her ankle and Annie Clyde wondered if she would be able to tell her child someday. About the farm and the swing and how she looked in this moment, wearing the light blue dress with pink rosebuds that Annie Clyde had sewed for her. How she looked out from under her matted eyelashes with her nose running some. She seldom cried and Annie Clyde wondered if she might have bitten her tongue on their way through the hayfield. She knelt and wiped at Gracie’s upper lip. “Where does it hurt?” she asked.

After thinking for a second Gracie pointed to her knee. “Right here.”

Annie Clyde tried to smile. “That’s a scab. You got shook up, is all.” She paused to wave the gnats out of Gracie’s face, to make sure her voice wouldn’t break. “Did that man scare you?”

Gracie brought her thumb toward her mouth and Annie Clyde tugged it away. Gracie raised the top to show it without answering, the tarnished knob glinting. “Look,” she said.

“Can I have it?” Annie Clyde asked. When she reached for it, Gracie drew it closer.

They studied each other’s faces. “Rusty bit him,” Gracie said.

“Yes,” Annie Clyde said. “But he’s gone now.”

“Where did he go?”

Annie Clyde looked away, down at the fruit on the ground. “You want an apple?”

Gracie nodded, eyes wet.

“Let’s find you a good one.”

Annie Clyde pretended to sort through the fruit but she was rattled. Gracie squatted with her dress hem soaking up puddles, holding the top aloft in one hand. Annie Clyde was still trying to calm herself when she heard a loud crack from the woods at the end of the hayfield. She jumped up and turned in that direction, listening. Her first thought was not of the dog out there stalking blackbirds, but of Amos out there somehow spying on them. Within seconds another crack came, like a lightning strike. She waited with her eyes fixed on the trees for thunder. Then there was a pop and another, a string of them picking up speed. After that came a whoosh and a roaring crash. The treetops shivered, disturbed as though something monstrous had passed among them. In the wake of that sound there was nothing but the buffeting wind, even Gracie awed to silence. As Annie Clyde stared at the woods, she felt Gracie’s warm fingers creeping into her own. Annie Clyde looked down into her daughter’s upturned face. “We’re all right,” she said. “It was just another tree falling.” Gracie didn’t say anything back but Annie Clyde knew. They both needed the dog around to ease their minds. She decided it wouldn’t hurt to walk a piece into the woods. Sometimes the sky brooded all day before it opened up on Yuneetah. Sometimes the wind blew like this for hours before the first drops fell like slugs. Her father would have said the dam had disturbed the natural order of things. After listening another moment for thunder Annie Clyde and Gracie started across the hayfield, parting the coarse weeds with their legs.

At the end of the field they entered the shade, Annie Clyde watching the ferny ground for copperheads. In this dampness everything was growing. Liverwort sprouted on wet rocks, jewelweed poked up through brushwood, lichens wreathed south-facing trunks like chains of greenish ears. They called Rusty’s name as they went, the blackbirds he had been chasing settled in the branches overhead. Farther in they came to the thicket where Annie Clyde and James chopped wood, the standing rainwater around the stumps swirling with chips of sawdust. The trees there were so tall it made her dizzy to look up at their swaying tips. At the edge of the thicket, where freshets drained down from the ledges making gullies between the bases of the trunks, they discovered what had fallen. There was an old beech lying at the foot of the mountain.

Annie Clyde had seen more than one tree uprooted in all this foul weather. She had heard the rain every way that it fell, hard like drumming fingers, in sheets like a long sigh, in spates like pebbles tossed at the windows. When she crossed the road and went up the bank, she could see water glinting between the tree stumps. The river had already become a lake. As she watched it seemed to lie stagnant, but maybe it was biding its time until dark. Then it would move again. She could almost hear it seeking whatever there was outside its banks, searching fingers moving over gnarled root and scaly stump bark. Leaking between trunks and lapping at grasses, mussels clicking against each other and the scoured rocks of the shoals. She dreamed of it coming for her, black and rippling. She woke afraid it would be pooled around the porch steps, the rains bringing it closer and closer. Since spring a scent had been lingering in the eastern part of town where the woods and pastures were halved by the river. She smelled it in the house sometimes, algae and carp and decayed wood from long-ago boats run aground. When she opened her door it slipped in as if to scout her home before the lake came to fill her chimney flue with the opposite of fire.

It was the biggest trees that fell in all the wind and rain, the oaks and beeches and hickories, because of their shallow roots. It was harder for them to find purchase in Yuneetah’s soil, thin clay with limestone caves underneath. She guessed it was over four years ago that James had buried his horse in a deep cave back here and filled in the hole. A Tennessee walker named Ranger. Now the beech trunk lay over the horse’s grave as if to mark it. Just when she was about to whistle for the dog again, Annie Clyde heard the snap of a twig beneath the wind. She froze in her tracks, squeezing Gracie’s sweaty hand. “Rusty?” she called into the thicket across the fallen tree. There was a thrashing in the underbrush and she shouted again. “Rusty! Here, boy!” When a low shape shot out of the shadows around the beech’s root ball Annie Clyde stopped breathing, although she knew it was only the dog minding her at last. Rusty loped to Gracie’s side with his tail wagging, snout caked with clay the color of his coat. “Bad dog,” Gracie told him as he licked her chin. Annie Clyde remembered Gracie crouched in the dirt of Dale Hankins’s barn after his hound had whelped, the pup with a white patch on its chest tottering over to sniff her fingers. From the day Gracie started walking Rusty followed her everywhere, though James was the one who wanted him for a hunting dog and gave him his name. Annie Clyde didn’t know how to tell Gracie they’d have to leave him behind for a while if they moved.

Rusty must have lost interest in the blackbirds after the beech tree came crashing down. Annie Clyde could see where he had already dug around its trunk. Ferns crushed in the fall were disarranged, red clay turned. Annie Clyde could see, too, a white bone in the rich humus. Much like the trees, bones were being dislodged across the valley by weather and water, swept along as the lake moved toward the roads. Most of the dead had been exhumed and reinterred elsewhere, their surnames chalked on the lids of pine boxes as they rode in hearses to strange churchyards. But some had been left alone, those whose kin chose not to disturb them or victims whose grave sites were unknown. Those she imagined the overflow released from secret vaults of mud and crag and riverside root. Femurs sailing on eddies, skulls rising toward the surface seeking light after centuries buried, the unleashed river rushing in to fill burrows and trenches like mouths open to drink its alluvial silt. But this bone unearthed by the rain or uprooted by the fallen tree wasn’t human. It belonged to James’s horse. She used to ride double with her husband on Ranger’s back, his arms loose around her waist and holding the reins in her lap. He would rest his chin on her shoulder or she would lean her head against his chest as they ducked under bowers of twilit leaves in the cool of the evenings, forgetting whatever work they’d left undone.