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 be 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.
As Silver pondered these things, Gracie came to kneel beside her in the garden dirt. While Gracie played in the loam, flies buzzing around them, Silver remembered the one time she had held the child. She’d seen Annie Clyde behind the house hanging sheets on the first warm day of spring, the farm smelling of turned earth and mown hay, on her way down the track to the road. Annie Clyde had waved Silver over. Gracie was crying in a basket at Annie Clyde’s feet and she asked Silver with pins in her mouth to take the baby for a minute. Silver was trying to recall what Gracie had felt like in her arms when the child lifted a woolly worm on the bridge of her finger and showed it to Silver. Silver tensed but held out her hand to let the worm pass from Gracie’s flesh to her own. They looked at each other as Annie Clyde looked down on their heads. Now Silver wanted that moment to be the last one she spent with her kin. She didn’t know if she could face the loss ahead of her even without seeing it happen before her eyes. She didn’t want to remember them riding off in James Dodson’s Model A Ford, its bed piled high with chattel. Their going no different than any of those other departures she had witnessed from her perch on the ridge.
Kneeling there with Gracie in the garden loam last week, Silver had agreed to take the dog. She couldn’t refuse. But even as they walked away from her, Annie Clyde leading Gracie by the hand and their coonhound loping after them, she didn’t want him. Not for any length of time. The only dogs she’d known were those her grandfather used to keep to guard his moonshine still. The last had been the meanest, a shepherd bitch that bit Silver if she got too close. She’d left a tin feed pan and some mildewed bedding up at the still for ages, in the shed where the bitch was put when she went into heat. Silver hadn’t had the heart to throw them out because they reminded her of her grandfather’s affection for dogs. She had none herself, but she owed her niece something. She felt bound to do the favor Annie Clyde had asked of her, as much as she dreaded it. If Silver could write she might have slipped off with the dog in the night and left a note under a rock on the stoop. She wasn’t supposed to take him until tomorrow. But if she did it now, she wouldn’t have to say good-bye to her people. She wouldn’t have to watch them leaving without her.