Long Man Read online

  While the townspeople hadn’t liked Amos, they’d tolerated him out of respect for Beulah. But when he came back several years later with a puckered web of scar tissue where his right eye used to be, his foreignness was too much for them. Meeting him on the road they might nod in greeting or even stop to ask where he’d been, but they never stood long in the shadow he cast before him, as if his return portended bad weather or death. If anyone had asked what they wanted to know, he would have told them. He had lost his right eye fighting with another man in a boxcar. All day the man had huddled in the corner sleeping or pretending to sleep on a pallet of grain sacks. As the sun lowered and a rind of moon appeared over the hilltops blurring past, Amos had let the rocking train and the smell of the trackside meadows through the open door put him to sleep. The man had crawled out of the dark and set upon him before he had a chance to pull the weapon he’d made from a rag-wrapped bottle shard out of his coat pocket. They had struggled until they both were winded, the man’s rancid breath puffing in grunts between the brown stumps of his teeth. If Amos hadn’t been caught by surprise, he wouldn’t have been overpowered. He would have thrust the glass into the grizzled wattles of the man’s neck and felt the man’s hot blood pumping over his fingers. Amos never knew what the man was after. Rather than let the man have whatever it was, he’d leapt from the train and tumbled down an embankment into a gully. When he’d lurched to his feet, there was a branch protruding from his eye socket. He wasn’t alarmed once he knew he would live. He had no particular attachment to his right eye. But he did have some attachment to Yuneetah, and to its people, whether they knew it or not.

  Now Amos had walked a fair distance without seeing a single one of them, or any other living thing, as if even the squirrels and wild turkeys had cleared out. He’d come to Joe Dixon’s store ahead on the left, a weathered shack plastered with signs advertising Red Seal lye, Royal Crown cola and Clabber Girl baking powder. On the last Saturday of each month he and Beulah would leave the hollow to trade, pulling the lace she tatted and the medicines she made behind them in a wooden cart. As Amos neared he saw the door propped open and followed a worn footpath to the porch, the leaf-littered steps groaning as he climbed them, the door creaking when he pushed it the rest of the way open. He went in and stood for a while. All the familiar clutter was gone. No straw brooms hanging from the ceiling, no penny candy filling the glass bins of the counter, no shelves lined with sundries. He had never seen the place empty. There was usually someone sitting on a carbide barrel paring his fingernails. Joe Dixon leaning back in a straight chair, his big belly straining at the buttons of his shirt. Joe would sometimes offer Amos a cold drink in hopes of getting rid of him. The wind picked up, scattering leaves over the threshold and across the gritty planks of the floor. Amos glanced around. The cooler was still there against one wall. He approached it and lifted the lid. There was nothing inside but mildew. After a second he closed it back. He shifted his bindle and went out again.

  Back on the road nothing stirred but him and the river, its current still rushing as it spread into a lake. Anywhere he went in the town he could hear water running. Beulah had told him Yuneetah was the white man’s corruption of an Indian word for the spirit of the river. She said the Cherokees who once lived on its shores had called it Long Man, with his head in the mountains and his feet in the lowlands. The river had surely seen and heard all that had happened in the place it flowed through. It must have noticed too those who had lived for so long on its banks moving off one by one. With the young leaving and the old getting buried, all the river was to them would be forgotten. Even the spirit the Cherokees worshipped had been defeated by the men who built dams, harnessed to run their machinery. Amos had vowed long ago not to give them the sweat of his brow. He wouldn’t submit to the ones in charge, who would have his hair shorn and his offending eye socket covered with a patch. He wouldn’t become a thing they could use, as they’d figured out how to use the river’s power. It sighed hidden behind a bank topped with shade trees, roots snarled like witch’s hair in the dampish brown dirt. That bank dirt had looked so good to him when he was a boy that he’d dug out a clot and held it in his mouth. His first impulse had been to spit out the bitterness but as it melted on his tongue other tastes had come, of lichen and peat moss and rain. He had swallowed and carried it around for a while, to see what would happen. Nothing did, he thought at the time. But maybe his insides had formed around it.

  As the pines on either side of him turned to acres of farmland, he looked toward the southeast edge of town where the dam would be. He’d heard about it last winter while working alongside another drifter at a tobacco warehouse in North Carolina. Neither of them wore gloves and it had been so cold that when they put down the steel hooks they were using to unload tobacco baskets the hide was ripped from their hands. At the end of a week the other man had said he was moving on. There’s a dam going up in Tennessee, he’d said, a place called Yuneetah. Amos’s head had risen from his work. His chest had constricted around his heart. He had dropped the steel hook to the warehouse floor and walked out into the spitting snow in search of a newspaper. In the warmth of a brick library outside of Asheville he had read all about the Tennessee Valley Authority and their plans to inundate his hometown while the librarian watched him with fearful eyes from her circulation desk. He had ruminated on this knowledge for a while, days becoming weeks as he moved through alleys and dumps with home on his mind, avoiding whatever light there was, electric or lantern or carbide, not letting even the flames of the barrel he warmed himself over play on his face. He’d decided to wait until most of the town was evacuated before returning. Soon enough he would find the dam. He would stand before it and take its measure.

  Amos rounded a bend and the Walker farmhouse appeared as if out of nowhere. Behind the house there was an apple tree that he used to visit as a child. In springtime when the leaves were full he liked to hide under the tree until the farmer caught him, lying on a bed of white blossoms with more drifts floating down on top of him. In late summer he would sit among the fallen apples as yellow jackets bored holes in them, eating until his stomach ached. Now he was heading toward fifty with threads of white in his hair, still craving sour juice down his chin. He was old considering the miles he had wandered for the most part on foot, across the country from one shore to the other. Then up into Canada and down into Mexico. Most of the men he had traveled and labored and grifted with were dead. Shot, stabbed, beaten and hung. One he had known since he hopped his first train was stoned to death in Boston during the trolley strike of 1910. Lately Amos’s days felt loaned out to him. He had begun to wonder if he was meant to have lived this long. He’d begun to ask himself what to do with this cheated time, even before he learned about the dam. Yuneetah’s passing only made him more certain that his own was coming.

  But he predicted the woman who’d raised him would remain in the hollow for many years after he and the town were gone. Beside the farm Beulah’s cabin was tucked high in the woods, above the taking line. He could get to her by crossing a weedy track dividing the farm from the mountain. It was a long climb between tall, slender tree trunks to reach her place. When he closed his eye he could see it, having leaned there so long, through the bitter winters with snow piled to its windowsills and the warm months with rainstorms curling back its rusted roof tin. Saplings and bushes had mostly claimed back the gap where it stood, thatches of ironweed trailing up to the door. Amos thought how many times he had come and gone from that place, the ground still bald in patches from his passing feet, even though he hadn’t slept there in ages. Some nights he would stand listening to the thump of walnuts falling in the dark outside the circle of shine made by Beulah’s oil lamp. When morning came he would collect them for her, lumpy and specked and pale velvet green. He would bring them to her as payment for something he couldn’t name.

  Beulah would welcome him back with a meal if he climbed up the hollow. She always did whenever he returned to Yuneetah. But behind the
split-rail fence marking the boundaries of the Walker farm rows of corn rustled in the hot wind. He put his boot on the bottom rail and looked into the stalks, already tasting roasting ears. It was unfortunate for them that they hadn’t got their crop sold before they were relocated, but their loss was his gain. He knew something of the ones who had lived here before the town was evacuated. The last he heard, the daughter of the white-haired farmer who gave him apples had married a Dodson from Whitehall County and they had struggled to live off the rocky soil she inherited. But it looked as though their corn had fared well this season, lush from all the rain. Amos paused as he straddled the fence, thinking he might hear something. Maybe the call of a bobwhite or the yowl of a roving tomcat. He tried to see the farmhouse over the tasseled stalks but only its upper story was visible. After listening a moment more he climbed down into the dappled shade of the rows where it was somewhat cooler, water seeping up from the soaked loam around the edges of his boots. Looking down the row he took off his hat to smooth back his hair, the blades of the stalks drooping over his head. Then he heard another high noise coming from the direction of the house. This time it was unmistakable, the shriek of a child. But in fear or delight, it was hard to tell which.

  Amos liked children. He admired their wildness. Even in the low places he kept to they could be found. The sons of junkmen scrambling over humps of refuse and around the hulls of wrecked cars. The daughters of tar-paper shack dwellers dragging naked baby dolls along backwoods railroad tracks. In a Cleveland switchyard he had come upon an old hobo beating a young boy senseless even after he fell limp. Amos had twisted the hobo’s fingers out of joint until they could no longer close into fists. The last child Amos had seen was on his way out of Oklahoma. For days all that he’d passed was coated with soot blown off the plains. When he came to the first stretch of green grass the ditch in front of it was lined with dust-streaked jalopies. In the field below the road there had been a caravan in a circle of tents and a rickety carousel, its circus colors turned dusky. He’d stepped across the ditch and walked down among the migrant families looking for some reminder of happiness. He saw the little girl outside one of the tents holding a sign with a painted white hand, advertising palm readings for twenty-five cents. He went on, lifting anything useful from the tables of wares, but on his way back to the road he came across the seer’s tent again. This time he found the little girl spinning a tin top in a patch of dirt. She looked up at him with trusting eyes. Nobody cared enough to be watching.

  Now the corn was parting at the end of the row and he waited for whoever was coming. While his hearing was keen, his eyesight was poor. He couldn’t make out what rushed toward him from a distance, until it began to bark. It was a redbone hound, young and gangling, drawn to his stench of rotten wool and wind-scoured stone, the dewy earth he slept on. Like every drifter, Amos hated dogs. He retreated backward between the stalks, their leaves brushing his shoulders. The big hound advanced on him growling, hunkered down with its hackles raised. He had nearly reached the rail fence and was prepared to vault over it when a child came running after the dog. She was small, no more than three or four, wearing a flour sack dress with tousled curls in her eyes. Once she saw what her dog had cornered, not a rabbit or a groundhog but a man, she stopped in her tracks. The redbone hound went on growling. Her mouth opened but nothing came out of it. The last child left in Yuneetah. As they studied one another the clouds that had been gathering all forenoon moved over the cornfield. She seemed more curious than afraid, so he took a step forward. Ignoring the dog, Amos reached into his coat. He pulled out the tin top, a starburst of faded kaleidoscope colors radiating from its knob, gold dulled to brass, blue gone grayish, red aged to flesh, and held it out to her. Without much hesitation she crossed the short distance separating them as the dog barked harder to warn her off. Amos passed the top down into her hands as if performing a sacred rite. She accepted it with the same graveness.

  But then the sharp voice of a woman called out from somewhere close. Amos froze and stood listening with his ear tilted. He could hear someone coming toward them through the field, shaking the corn. “Gracie!” she shouted, and whatever spell Amos had managed to cast over the child was broken. She shied away from him, widening the space between them again, her toes printing the furrowed earth in her wake. The hound’s barking would lead the woman straight to them. Amos had time to make himself scarce but he decided to stay and have a look at her. When she finally burst out of the stalks into the row she was too concerned with the child at first to see him standing there. “Gracie,” she panted. “Don’t you scare me like that.” Then she followed the growling dog’s gaze, still fixed on Amos, and snatched the child back by the arm. After she’d taken an instant to collect herself, her face hardened. She glared at Amos with recognition. Everyone in Yuneetah had seen him at least once. “What are you doing out here?” she demanded.

  He reached up to break off an ear of corn. “Helping myself to some dinner.”

  The woman clutched the child against her legs. “You’re trespassing.”

  He slipped the corn into his pocket and took her in, the thin smock hanging at her knees, the white feather clinging to her shoulder, the flour on her hands. She must have been frying chicken. He knew her, even as long as it had been since he’d seen her. She was the daughter of the farmer and his second wife, a woman from the hollow that Amos had played with as a boy. The last time he visited the apple tree the farmer’s daughter was an awkward girl wandering among the haystacks behind the barn, chewing on straws, letting ladybugs crawl over her knuckles. He remembered asking her to fetch him a drink but she had run off and not come back with it. “I believe I knew your mama,” he said. “We used to swim in the river together.”

  She went on glaring at him. “You didn’t know my mama.”

  “You look like her.” He glanced at the child. “You and your little girl both.”

  “Get off my property,” she said.

  He tipped back his hat to see her better. “Why are you still here? The water will be at your doorstep before you know it.”

  Her face flushed. “You got yourself some dinner. Now go on.”

  Amos kept still. “If you’re waiting on a fair price for your land, you might as well move. They don’t have to give you one.”

  She backed away with the child. “My husband’s at the barn. If I holler, he’ll come with his gun.” Amos could tell that she was lying. Her husband was nowhere around.

  “Your land is worthless to them,” he went on. “So are you and your little girl.”

  The woman had begun to tremble, unable to bluff any longer. In that moment he felt kin to both of them, standing close as the storm moved in, their bodies patterned by the same shade. He glanced again at the child, still holding the kaleidoscope top. Thunder rolled, cornstalks bent and shuffled as if waiting to see what would happen. At last Amos stepped forward until he was close enough to count the beats of the young woman’s pulse in her neck. When he reached out to pluck the feather from her shoulder, she flinched as if he had struck her. He closed his fingers around it and took up his bindle. That’s when the dog lunged snapping at his shins. Amos felt the bite of the hound’s teeth but he didn’t let on. He backed down the row without a sound, keeping his eye on the woman’s face. When he reached the fence he raised himself up on the bottom rail, pausing as if he might change his mind. Then he turned and climbed over into the road, leaving the woman and her child alone, in a field that would soon lie hundreds of feet underwater.

  At half past eleven o’clock on that morning, three days before Annie Clyde Dodson was to be forced off her land, she ran through the corn with her daughter on her hip. Gracie clung tight with her legs locked around Annie Clyde’s waist, the dog rushing ahead of them toward the house. Above, the sky looked like a bruised skin barely holding back the rain. The wind blew Annie Clyde’s dress up and whirled through the trees, shaking the cornstalks like something chasing her. As if Amos had only fooled her into think
ing he was gone. She didn’t let herself look back until they emerged from the corn. When she saw nothing besides the green field behind her she stopped running but still hurried around the side of the house with Gracie jostling in her arms. Standing at the bottom of the stoop she threw open the kitchen door with a bang, letting in the stormy gloom, and set Gracie inside on the linoleum. “You stand still while I tend to Rusty,” she said, smoothing the tangled curls out of her daughter’s face. “I’ll be right back.” She turned around to catch the dog by the scruff of his neck and led him to the elm tree shading the barn lot. She meant to tether him by the chain wrapped around the base of the trunk. She hated to do it, but she would feel better with him tied close to the house in case the drifter came into the yard.

  She was fumbling with the chain when the blackbirds flocked down on the hayfield behind the barn. They came in the hundreds, rustling through the weeds and roosting in the apple tree, milling over the winey fruit underneath. It was the wind that brought them. Her father used to say storms bothered birds’ ears and made them fly close to the ground. The rain hadn’t started, but it soon would. Water stood ankle deep in the grass, mist hanging over the valley and ringing the crests of the mountains. It had been raining all spring and summer. Now she had something else to worry about. As soon as she saw the blackbirds she knew that she couldn’t hold Rusty. He was still strung up from what had happened in the corn, hackles raised and tail high. He gave a sudden lurch and Annie Clyde lost her grip on him. She snatched after him but he was too quick. She watched helpless, a hand to her forehead, as he dashed off barking. Then she glanced over her shoulder at the house. There was a plucked chicken in the basin and apples to be peeled for the last pie she would make Gracie. The last one from their tree. She’d meant to bring in a few roasting ears as well before Gracie took off. She was always running away like that, tagging after the dog. “I swear,” Annie Clyde would tell her. “You’ll be the death of me.” But at night she smiled to reach in Gracie’s pockets and find the treasures she’d wandered off to collect. Forked twigs, buttercups, crawdad claws, rocks of all kinds. Annie Clyde cursed Rusty under her breath. Any other time she would have let him alone. But her husband James was gone off to Sevierville and there was no telling when he’d get home. The dog was the only protector she and Gracie had.