Long Man Page 5

  There wasn’t much time to decide one way or another. She and Gracie were supposed to go north with James tomorrow. Two weeks ago he had come driving up in a Model A Ford, the radiator hissing steam. He’d sold their mules to buy it. When he stepped off the running board his eyes were lit up. He grabbed Annie Clyde and kissed her. But his excitement had worn off fast. So far the old stake-bed truck had given him nothing but trouble. He was gone now to see a man in Sevier County about fixing the radiator. Annie Clyde would just as soon he took it to the junkyard. He claimed they needed it to haul their belongings but there wasn’t much left to move. In the front room there were curtains and a rocking chair. In the kitchen there was the pine table her father made before she was born, before his first wife died of rheumatic fever. Like the maple bed upstairs that he’d built for her mother when they got married. Mary Walker had passed away in February of 1933 from a cancer of the womb. She died in that bed, during a winter so cold Annie Clyde saw her mother’s last breath. Nothing else remained but stray wisps of cobweb.

  James had wanted to leave Yuneetah long before the dam gave him a way out. Annie Clyde knew how hard the farming had been on him. She knew how much he hated the river after he lost his father to a flood. She knew how reserved she was and that her silence must have been lonesome for him. It was possible she hadn’t told him often enough how much she loved him. In the beginning of their marriage, Annie Clyde’s need for James would sometimes smother her. She would watch the front window for him to come in from the fields and rush out to meet him. But after she saw that handbill during their first autumn together, things were different for her. It was an advertisement for factory work up north. She was sewing a tear in his shirtsleeve and noticed it in his breast pocket. She thought it was a matchbook but found a square of paper instead. She unfolded and read it as he sat across the fireplace from her, drowsing in his chair. She would rather have found a love letter from a woman. “What’s this?” she asked. James opened his eyes and what she saw in them tightened her chest. He looked like he had been caught. “I never asked you to change your plans for me,” she said, holding the handbill out to him. “You made your own choice.” He swore to her then that it meant nothing, that he wouldn’t dream of leaving her to take care of her mother and the farm alone. “I don’t even know why I picked that up,” he said. But Annie Clyde knew, whether he did or not. She wouldn’t let herself watch for James out the window anymore, though her longing was as smothering as ever.

  She had seen him for the first time one summer when he worked pulling tobacco for her father. He was eating his dinner under a tree, cutting off pieces of pear and feeding himself with the blade of his knife. He still insisted he saw her first, being baptized in the river. Annie Clyde was raised in the Free Will Baptist Church and James’s uncle was a Methodist minister, but sometimes the congregations joined for special services. He claimed to have worshipped her from the minute he laid eyes on her, standing on the bank with her dress molded to her skin and strands of hair plastered to her face like drawings of vines. But they had met a year before the baptism, when she was sixteen and he eighteen. He had a ruddy look about him, like clay. He smelled of it when he came in from the field. She remembered his auburn hair rumpled and his long legs crossed in front of him. Later he came into the yard for a drink and she brought him the dipper. He thanked her and went on. By the time he came looking for her after the baptism, she had forgotten about him. Her thoughts were scattered then. After decades of farming, Clyde Walker was giving out. Most mornings he couldn’t get up. Annie Clyde had prayed on her knees at the revival for her father to get better, but he only weakened. After he died the neighbors brought casseroles, cakes and pies. When the food was gone, Annie Clyde’s mother sent her to return the dishes. James found her breaking them against a tree with blood running down her fingers. He took her by the shoulders and led her to the river to wash her gashes. “My daddy’s dead, too,” he said, lowering himself down on the bank beside her. His hands were calming on her shoulders. He left them there until she was ready to stand. Before getting up she looked into his face and finally remembered him sitting under a tree, eating a pear with the blade of his knife.

  James had begun to visit once a week. She felt obliged to offer him food they didn’t have, to sit with him on the porch and make small talk. When he asked to help with the chores, she was too beaten to protest. Annie Clyde and her mother had struggled to run the farm by themselves. Getting up before dawn to make a fire and heading out with the milk pails. Feeding the chickens, gathering the eggs, weeding the garden. Hauling water in from the springhouse and ashes out from the stove. Hoeing corn, digging potatoes and chopping wood. By then Annie Clyde had dropped out of school to work in the fields. Sometimes she leaned on the plow handles, tears dripping off her face to salt the cracked ground. She learned to be relieved on Saturdays when James came riding to the farm on his horse with his sleeves rolled up. Then one morning James tied Ranger, letting him crop the roadside clover, and loitered at the fence rather than going straight to work. Annie Clyde went down the path to see what he wanted, hair and shoulders dusted with pollen from the bottom weeds she’d spent all morning hacking down. When she reached the fence, James opened his mouth but closed it again, whatever he meant to say forgotten. He stood there by the road in silence, studying her face. Then he asked if she would like to go for a ride with him. She was about to say she didn’t have time to fool around, but found herself looking into his earnest eyes, the delicate blue of bird eggs. He leaned in close, arms folded on the fence post, and kissed her. It was out of weariness that she finally surrendered to James. But there was a sweetness in it. When he pulled back she hadn’t wanted him to stop.

  Annie Clyde’s mother never asked her to marry James, but she spoke of what a dependable husband he would make. It was plain to Annie Clyde what her mother wanted. Mary was growing thin, her flesh stretched like onionskin over her bones. She hardly resembled the beauty Annie Clyde had seen in pictures, dressed up in gloves and a hat with her lips painted red, coiffed head lowered against the sun. Annie Clyde couldn’t run the farm on her own, and Mary wanted someone to take care of her daughter when she was gone. By the summer of 1932, Annie Clyde knew her mother wouldn’t last much longer. When James proposed one day as she stood over the kitchen woodstove, using the last of their cornmeal to make a bite to eat for him, she couldn’t resist leaning against his strong arms. A few months later, on her wedding day, she tried not to show her doubts. Mary had become too feeble to leave the house. She watched from the bed as Annie Clyde pinned a pillbox hat to her hair. She offered to button Annie Clyde’s gloves for her at the wrists. Somehow Annie Clyde had managed to keep her hands steady as she held them out. But she was helpless to still them when James’s uncle the Methodist minister came to drive her to the church in his black Packard. It was August and the fields were turning golden, the sky cloudless over the spire. Across a pasture was the white parsonage where James had lived with his aunt and uncle after his parents died. Soon they would both be orphans. It was the one thing they would always have in common. Standing outside the double doors of the church holding a bunch of wildflowers, Annie Clyde felt light-headed. Just before entering the vestibule she looked up to see a grackle on the peak of the roof and it heartened her some. She took off the pillbox hat and tossed it into the rhododendrons beside the steps. She shook her hair down and went inside. As the pianist played the wedding march, she fixed her eyes on James at the end of the aisle in an ill-fitting suit, his hair slicked down and combed back. He looked like a little boy. She released a breath and went to him, making up her mind to love him however she could.

  Annie Clyde had come to feel closer to her husband. If she found him bent washing his face at the basin and pressed her cheek against the flesh of his back, it seemed that any worry she had would be erased. In their bed at night, under quilts in winter or naked on top of the sheets in summer, he explored even the inside of her mouth with his fingers. She tasted the bi
tterness of his shaving soap. His caught breath filled the cup of her ear. Once when she was big with Gracie, he pushed her dress up over her thighs and stomach, over the mounds of her breasts. She raised her arms for him to take it off and they looked together, James propped on his elbow. They took in her taut navel, her darkened nipples, her swollen ankles. He placed his hand on the round of her womb and the baby’s foot or fist rose to meet it. But Annie Clyde wasn’t the only one whose body had changed. During her pregnancy she cared for her mother while James ran the farm alone. He would leave the house before dawn with a bucket of cold dinner and stay gone until suppertime. He butchered the hog, chopped down trees for wood, spent whole days in the corncrib shelling or carrying boxes of kernels to the mill to be ground. While she had gained weight, he had lost some. There were new shadows under his eyes, new skinned places across his knuckles, a spider bite on his forearm from a black widow hiding in the woodpile. She thought how it must have hurt him and tears rolled from her eye corners toward her ears. James asked, “Why are you crying?” She said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Look at you. How beautiful you are.” She had held on to him, unable to tell his warmth from her own, not wanting the night to be over.

  Then morning lit the curtains again, and the silence between them came back. It stretched out long at the breakfast table, with the kitchen still and Mary dying upstairs. In the evenings before Annie Clyde put out the lamps to save oil, she’d catch him drowsing again in his chair by the fire as she sewed buttons back on his shirts and feel as separate from him as she did from the dark outside. She’d think of the mountains brooding over the farm, the wind sweeping its forty acres. She wanted to talk to James, but they seldom knew what to say to each other. Annie Clyde saw her fault in it. She had always been one to keep to herself. Even as a baby she had wriggled out of Mary’s confining arms. When she started school she had made no friends. At first the girls and boys were drawn to her prettiness. Lined up in the mornings at the schoolhouse door, the boys had pulled her hair and the other girls had given her gifts of ribbons and peppermint. But her sullenness had finally driven them away. Annie Clyde didn’t know why she acted like she did. The others were the same as her in their flour sack dresses with nothing but pone bread for their dinner. All of them had toes poking out of holes in their shoes. There were no outcasts among them. Annie Clyde had made an outcast of herself. She would sit on the schoolhouse bench stiff and straight, too conscious of her sleeve touching the arm of another child.

  Gracie had changed things when she came along. Annie Clyde couldn’t have kept all to herself if she wanted to anymore. Gracie followed her everywhere, always talking and singing and romping with the dog. Always wanting Annie Clyde’s attention, showing her buckeyes and seedpods and bugs. Whatever Annie Clyde’s neighbors thought of her sullenness, they’d been drawn to Gracie. She never felt like part of the town, but her daughter was somehow. They would stand at their mailboxes and wave as she walked Gracie down the road to Joe Dixon’s, where the old men bought her sticks of horehound candy. At church the old women took her onto their laps. Gracie looked like Annie Clyde, but she was more like James on the inside. She had her father’s friendliness about her, his kind nature. Last year when Gracie was two they took her to a molasses-making at the Hankins farm across the road. Dale Hankins grew sorghum cane, his back field high with thin stalks, their ends tasseled umber with seeds. Before dark he would feed the stalks into a cane mill between steel rollers, the juice pouring into vats to be boiled. It took ten gallons of cane juice to make one of molasses. All the neighbors for miles gathered to gossip and tell stories, the little ones playing and the teenagers courting, the men leaning under the shade trees with their hats stacked on a post of the hog pen and their overalls still dusted with the work of the day. Once the moon rose and the cane juice was ready for boiling, Dale would bring out his guitar. It was tradition for some of the children to dance on the cane fodder scattering the ground. That night Gracie had thrown off her shoes and whirled barefoot to the strumming, dress flared out like a bell. She’d stomped and shook her curls as the whole town laughed and clapped. Annie Clyde had felt close to her neighbors. But then she’d noticed Beulah Kesterson with the pouch of bones around her neck, wrinkled face lurid in the firelight, watching Gracie without smiling. After that, the night was ruined for Annie Clyde. The old woman gave her an ill feeling.

  Now she looked at Gracie sitting on the back of the fallen beech and felt overcome with such loss that she had to shut her eyes. She had managed not to cry for two years and wouldn’t let herself break down now. This was like dreams she’d had as a child of her parents dying, without the relief of waking and knowing it wasn’t true. The wind rose again, blowing strands of hair across her face and fluttering the sleeves of her dress. She opened her eyes, too aware of a weight in her pocket. It was the tin top the drifter had given Gracie. It seemed to Annie Clyde in that moment like a threat or a curse. On impulse she pulled it out with disgust and tossed it while Gracie wasn’t looking into the shadows under the beech tree’s tortured roots. She felt somewhat better when she couldn’t see it anymore. She wiped her palms on the front of her dress then went to lift her daughter off the beech’s back, swung her up and held her close. Gracie’s slender arms came around Annie Clyde’s neck and they studied each other, their noses inches apart. Gracie’s eyes were the same as her grandmother Mary’s had been, wide brown with an amber shine to them. Gracie took a lock of Annie Clyde’s hair and twisted it up in her fingers, like she used to do when she was nursing. “Come on,” Annie Clyde said, pushing her nose against Gracie’s. “We better get Rusty to the house before he runs off and leaves us again.”

  Silver Ledford heard the Model A Ford that belonged to James Dodson rounding the bend before she saw it. She knew it was her niece’s husband because the only other vehicle left in Yuneetah belonged to the sheriff and he had no purpose out this way. The Dodsons had been on her mind all morning. Now here came the truck that would drive the last of her people off to a city she couldn’t picture. Some man taking her niece away, as a man had taken away her sister. She stepped over into the ditch and stood in the marsh of it, tall and rail thin with black hair that had dulled to smoky gray over the forty-four years she’d spent for the most part alone. She kept still as though James wouldn’t see her if she didn’t move. But he did see her. He slowed the puttering truck and ducked his head to look at her through the cranked-down window. She feared he would offer her a ride because of the wind and the lowering sky. He seemed to consider it, but raised a hand to her instead and went on. She nodded to him once he was past. Then she climbed out of the ditch, the cotton sack strapped to her shoulder getting snagged on pricker bushes. She watched until the Model A swerved out of sight between the banks, high with spires of purple monkshood. For a while she lingered in the middle of the road, giving James time to get home, not wanting to catch up with him no matter how the weather threatened. Silver supposed all the years alone had made her this way. She’d forgotten how to do anything but hide from people.

  Last week Annie Clyde had come up the mountain to ask Silver a favor and brought the child with her. They found Silver picking cucumbers in the garden, a long plot out behind her shack crowded with cornstalks and ruffled with tomato vines. She saw their hound first, trotting along ahead of them. She turned her head to watch him go sniffing around the back lot. She liked animals but not the kind that begged for scraps. When she turned back Annie Clyde and Gracie were standing at the edge of the garden holding hands, the ancient firs that grew so towering up where Silver lived dark green behind them. Above them clouds scudded across the blue sky. Silver would remember them that way for as long as she lived. She had marked every detail. The loose threads at the hem of Gracie’s dress and the apples bulging its pockets, the residue of flour rubbed into the grain of its sacking. Annie Clyde’s hip bones poking at the thin cotton of her grayed shift, the briar scratches scabbing on her shins. By the time those scabs fell off the girl would b
e in some other place, this one growing more and more distant in her mind. Silver couldn’t stop staring at Annie Clyde’s legs. She kept her eyes fixed on them as the girl said her piece. It was easier than looking at her face. Though Silver wasn’t listening, she knew what her niece was talking about. The time had come. Annie Clyde and Gracie were leaving Yuneetah.

  Silver couldn’t see much of herself in either of them. Their bones were fine and she was rawboned. Their hair soft and hers bushy, their skin touched with Cherokee blood and hers with the hoarfrost of the winters she had survived up near the mountaintop. It was Mary they both resembled. She had been the town beauty up until she died. Annie Clyde had Mary’s same ripe lips and the same freckle on her collarbone. It was clear when Gracie came along that she too would inherit Mary’s looks. But there were other ways to be related. Silver hadn’t heard her niece’s voice until she was nearly grown. She was still unsure about the girl’s eye color, hard to tell through lowered lashes. Annie Clyde had stared off into the woods as she talked, at the top of Silver’s head or down at her toes digging into the loam. She didn’t like asking favors. She didn’t like talking at all. Silver could see that it took something out of her. “We’re leaving for Michigan next Saturday morning,” Annie Clyde had said, glancing in an uncertain way at the dog as he lapped from a puddle. “I was wondering if you’d take Rusty for a while. Just until we get settled. I reckon James’s uncle will sell his corn for him. He’ll be back down to get his money then.” Silver’s hands stilled in the cucumber vines. “You don’t have to take him now,” Annie Clyde rushed on. “You can wait until Saturday, before we head out. Or I’ll bring him up here to you.” Silver couldn’t answer at first, afraid if she opened her mouth her heart might spill out.

  Silver knew she had been no kind of aunt to Annie Clyde. She called on the Dodsons only to pick their apples or knock on their kitchen door and offer a jar of the chartered moonshine she made as medicine before winter set in. Most of the time she could put down her head and work through her days. But sometimes the child’s voice drifting up from the farm filled her with regret. She wanted to offer the Dodsons more than moonshine. She thought of asking forgiveness for her absence but didn’t trust herself to say the words right. She spoke to Annie Clyde no more than a few times a year. Sometimes Annie Clyde came up the mountain out of obligation, knowing if Silver stood on a rickety chair to string peppers and the legs gave out she could strike her head on the hearthstone. She could catch a fever and not recover, or break her leg out hunting and lie unfound until the crows picked her bones clean and the possums dragged them off. But all of those Silver loved most had left her alone in the end. Annie Clyde would be no different. Silver would watch her niece ride off down the road. When the truck was out of sight she’d go back through the hayfield and past the apple tree still laden with fruit, up the mountain moving over the stones and roots and ridges of a path her feet could have followed in the dead of night, back to the shack her grandfather built that she had always lived in. She would sit in front of her cold fireplace while down below the lake crept over the Walker farm until it disappeared.