She was lingering at the fence, putting off the long walk up the track, when something dropped from above and landed at her feet. Her first confused thought was of the blackbirds. She half expected to find a pile of feathers in the damp grass. But when she crouched with the cotton sack trailing and her dress around her thighs what she discovered was an ear of sweet corn. Gnawed down to a few yellow-white kernels, fat to bursting and shining like pearls in the dimness. Silver rose and whirled around. When she saw the man across the road her backbone straightened. He was hunkered on one knee atop the bank overlooking the cornfield picking his teeth with a matchstick, staring across the tassels at the roof of Annie Clyde’s house. After a second he pitched the matchstick and shifted his stare onto Silver. She was overcome with a feeling like spiders crawling up her arms. He stood then, trampling wildflowers underneath his boots, the wind lifting the heavy tail of his peacoat. At the same time, some heaviness lifted from Silver. She hadn’t thought of Amos in years, but a part of her must have been waiting for him all along. She stayed put as he strode down the bank and stopped before her, his bindle on his shoulder. Up close, he smelled like moss and fungus. “How are you making it, Silver?” he asked.
She opened her mouth but could find no fitting answer. She studied him in silence, too moved to speak. She realized she’d given him up for dead years ago. It was a feat that he had managed to live this long. But she shouldn’t have doubted him. Amos was the only one who always came back. He was a force as sure and dangerous as the river. She took him in, her eyes starting at his worn boot toes, moving up the ragged legs of his gabardine trousers, resting at last on his lean face. Something came over Silver then. Maybe it was the day she’d spent out of sorts. Or the months spent feeling alone like never before. She reached out to lay her palm against his black-whiskered cheek. “You still look like yourself,” she told him. With her thumb she grazed over the scarring of his eye socket, a pocket of fever-hot flesh. “How come you don’t change?”
Amos didn’t flinch, but his fingers raised between them and closed around her wrist. He guided her hand back to her side and it hung there, burning. “I never saw the use in change.”
Silver swallowed a catch in her throat. “I guess you saw things are different around here.”
“But not you.” His attention turned to the cotton sack strapped on her shoulder, the wooden handle of her corn knife poking out among the trumpet weed umbels. “Still an outlaw.”
Silver felt herself smiling, her dry lips splitting in places. She touched the cuts as if to take her smile back, but Amos returned it. She glanced down again at the cuffs of his trousers, laden with muck from the ditch. He must have eaten his dinner in the gully, as she had hidden herself less than an hour earlier. But Amos was probably avoiding the sheriff and not James Dodson. She could have told him Ellard Moody was occupied with the power company, but she figured it would be better not to mention the sheriff’s name given her history with both men. “We got the place to ourselves now,” she said. “Ain’t that what we wanted when we was little?”
Amos’s smile vanished. “Seems so. They couldn’t get rid of us so they left it to us.”
Silver didn’t like the shadow that crossed his brow, the gleam that had come into his eye. She decided to change the subject. “Beulah’s still around, though. You headed up the holler?”
“And your niece,” Amos said, ignoring her question. “She’s still here.”
She thought of him up on the bank, staring across the corn. “You’ve seen Annie Clyde?”
“Not much of her,” he said. “She ran me off.”
“What are you doing out here, Amos?”
“Wondering if I can beat the rain up to Beulah’s.”
“I doubt it. You better find someplace to get in.”
“You better, too.”
“I don’t mind the rain,” she said.
“No,” he said, his one eye meeting hers. “You never did.”
Silver felt the burn in her palm spreading. “You can come up the mountain with me.”
He looked over his shoulder, toward the weedy bank. “I ought to be getting along.”
“Will you come directly? I got a lard can full of blackberries going to waste up yonder.”
Amos paused, gazing at her in a way that would later trouble her dreams. “I don’t know this time, Silver,” he said. Then he tipped his hat and walked off. She watched him go with loose-limbed grace up the bank, his lithe back moving away from her. Once he was out of sight she turned and braced herself on the fence rail. Since childhood Amos had had a way of shaking Silver up, muddling her senses. She suspected he had the same effect on other women in the far-off places he passed through, at least those unafraid to look at him for long. Silver had never feared Amos as most others did. From the time he was a foundling the townspeople of Yuneetah had turned their heads when Beulah Kesterson brought him along on her peddling rounds. He wasn’t an ugly boy. His face was almost too perfect. Like a mask, white and smooth as porcelain. Unlike the rest of Yuneetah, Silver couldn’t get her fill of Amos’s looks, even after his eye was lost. When they were children playing in the hollow he used to smile at her like they had a secret, as though she was complicit in his mischief. Ellard Moody was a sweeter boy, braiding willow crowns for Silver’s head and giving her his best marbles. But she had wanted Amos.
When Mary started leaving Silver behind, Amos was her friend. He sought her company, tossing chips of shale at her window to call her out. She would go with him collecting rocks and periwinkles along the river, standing still together when fawns came out of the bluff oaks to drink. One night during a meteor shower they climbed to the mountaintop, stars streaking close enough to catch them on fire. He showed her all of the town’s hiding places. The caves where men escaped from the Home Guard during the Civil War. The foundation stones of a burned-down tavern where there had been a battle with many soldiers killed inside. One summer he led her across the Whitehall County line to an abandoned iron mine up in the hills. They went several miles down a cart trail used by mules to pull the ore then followed an old railbed until the woods thinned enough for them to see the tipple. They stood inside the shaft’s lower entrance, fifty feet high with chalked arrows marking the ore veins. Outside the upper shaft they watched the cool air of the mine turn to steam as it met the heat outside. They ventured a long way down the deep tunnels, curving out of sight into nothingness. They peered into the broken windows of the superintendent’s house, once painted white with cheerful blue trim, and Silver had wished to live there with Amos until she died. Never to go back to Yuneetah and her hateful grandmother.
As much as Silver loved her sister she felt kin to Amos in a way that went deeper than blood. Every few years since he left on a train he had come back to visit her. She might get home from picking blackberries and find him leaning against her door with his hat brim shading his eye socket. He would greet her as though days and not years had passed. Then he’d ask for a bite to eat and she’d bring him whatever she had. When he was full he would get up without a word to see what needed fixing around her place. In winter he chopped firewood. In summer he hacked down the honeysuckle burying the side of her shack. When the work was done he might camp for a night in her woods. He would build his fire and she’d sit with him awhile. She would look at him through the rolling smoke and he would look back, mouth corners lifting. She’d remember other fires they built together as children in the caves where they hunted for mica, feldspar and quartz. Where they drew in the ash with their fingers and wrote their names on the craggy walls. She would meet his eye as she seldom did anyone else’s and a heat that had nothing to do with the fire would rise up from her belly. She tried to contain such feelings. It was hard on her, though. With his hat off and his hair black as oil tucked behind his ears he looked naked. She always went to him first, sometimes crawling, getting her hands and knees sooty. He wouldn’t touch her otherwise. She’d slip her dress off her shoulders, reach for his hand and put it where she wanted it. Then he would lay her down so close to the flames that cinders lit on her forehead, that the ends of her hair were singed. She might feel ashamed of herself once he was gone, and even more unwanted, but for some reason she had no pride when it came to Amos.