She guessed part of her hadn’t believed August would ever come, but now it was upon her. She couldn’t fathom what it would be like in Michigan. She pictured a house on a square of balding grass near a curb, the dirty color of winter slush. James going off in the early mornings to a factory where he would work behind a welder’s mask, sucking in and blowing out the suffocating heat of his own breath, leaving her and Gracie alone. She hadn’t even told Gracie they were leaving. She didn’t know how to explain it to a three-year-old. But these last few days she’d been thinking, wondering if she could make it farming on her own. Forty acres was too much, but ten she might be able to manage. Maybe she should have taken the house in Whitehall County the relocation man had offered to show her, less than twelve miles away. She’d felt it didn’t matter how close she lived to her farm. It would still be underwater. James had accused her of being stubborn and selfish but she listened to him more than he thought. He said change was coming whether she wanted it or not. Neither of them had grown up with much, but these past several years were the leanest they’d ever known. He said she ought to be thankful that Gracie might have it easier someday. He said farming killed their parents. But at least the years Mary and Clyde Walker had were spent where they belonged, on their own land. Annie Clyde couldn’t bear to think of Gracie not knowing the closeness to God she had found in this valley. For the first time since Gracie’s birth, Annie Clyde wasn’t sure what was best for her child.
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.