Though Silver had a kind of love for Amos she’d seen the other side of him. He hadn’t turned his cruelty on her, but she’d been witness to it. There was a thoughtful anger he harbored, patient like all else about him. The summer before he first left Yuneetah, Buck Shelton had accused him of stopping up his well with rocks. Shelton was a gambler and a drunkard with more than one enemy, but somehow he was convinced that Amos was the culprit. He probably figured he could thrash a young boy easier than he could a grown man. When Shelton came up the mountain to buy whiskey Silver had heard him cussing Amos, swearing to Plum that he was going to stripe the boy with a switch. After he sobered up he’d gone to the sheriff, but Beulah had slipped Amos out the side door when they came up the hollow looking for him. Silver had forgotten all about the incident until twenty-five years later, when Shelton’s back field caught fire. She had watched it burn from her ridge near the mountaintop, able to see miles of the valley when the trees were bare in autumn. As she stood there on the cool limestone ledge Amos appeared beside her, the only creature that could sneak up on her. She hadn’t seen him in months but he made no greeting. Just lingered at her side smoking a cigarette. “I never stopped up any well,” he said at last. He was a liar but Silver believed he was mostly honest with her. She looked at the ember of his cigarette tip and then back at the other smoke below, knowing without having to ask that he’d used the blazing sedge like a match as he walked out of the field.
Silver had taught herself not to think of Amos while he was away but when she was younger she used to wonder as she drifted to sleep what other fires he had set elsewhere. What other, worse trouble he might have caused. She supposed he should have been locked up long ago. But she couldn’t imagine him caged. Now she looked into the corn tossing behind the split-rail fence, unable to see the house with Annie Clyde and Gracie alone inside. She had known Amos for almost forty years but that didn’t mean she fully trusted him. This would be the time for him to settle any business left unfinished in Yuneetah. She couldn’t think of anything he might hold against the Dodsons but she wasn’t fool enough to believe he would leave her family alone on her account either. She rubbed a knuckle across her split lips, tasting blood and dirt. Then she heard the racket of James Dodson’s truck coming again and felt far more burdened than she had started out this morning. Before James appeared around the curve Silver hoisted herself over the fence into the field, pulling the sack across the top rail behind her. She receded into the corn as the Model A Ford approached, the plants shaking in the wind and the blackbirds scolding each other in the fencerow. She didn’t want to ever come out. She might stand there among the living stalks until she became one of them. Until the lake came at last to drown her with them.
Near one o’clock James Dodson had parked his truck alongside the road, less than a mile from home. He had set out early to Sevierville and been gone for hours. His back ached and his head pounded. What stopped him was the absence of Dale Hankins’s house from the field where it had stood for at least a century. As Dale told it, the Hankins patriarch had built the house himself. He dragged from the river on a sledge the same kind of rocks that could be found in cemeteries all over the valley marking graves of men, women and children the floods had swept away. Each time James ate Sunday dinner there it seemed he could smell brackish water in the walls. It wasn’t unusual to come upon houses torn down in Yuneetah these days, but Dale’s wasn’t being demolished. James thought he was seeing things. He rubbed his eyes and got out of the truck, knowing that he risked never getting it started again. He climbed stiff-legged up the bank and paused at the fence, seeing in his mind what used to be there. Dale’s homeplace standing alone in the flat pasture looking stranded, cattle grazing near the porch with nothing to keep them out of the yard. Dale had farmed this plot since he was a boy, a hundred acres of bottomland on the river. Now the livestock had gone to slaughter and the house had disappeared.
James ducked between the barbed strands of the fence and swished through the weeds, knee high without cows to crop them. He hadn’t gone far when he saw it. A rugged gash at least sixty feet wide and almost as deep cleaved the pasture in two. A chasm had opened up in Dale’s field. It must have swallowed the house whole. James stood still. He could almost hear the groan as he pictured it listing and then heaving into the abyss, joists splitting and floorboards popping, sending up a column of sand. He guessed the ground had sunk under the weight of standing rainwater. All over Yuneetah the land was eroding, groundwater causing depressions like bowls, soil over cavernous bedrock collapsing. The same caves underlay the Walker farm. James had noticed some of the fence posts slumping. They were lucky to be getting out of town unscathed. Everybody else was already gone. James hadn’t passed a soul on the way in, save for Annie Clyde’s aunt with a sack full of trumpet weed along the ditch, and Silver lived above the taking line. They were cutting it too close for James’s comfort, leaving just before the August 3 deadline the power company had given them, but he was thankful they were finally going. He moved as near to the edge as he dared and looked into the red clay pit piled with rubble. On top of the busted rock, warped tin collected rain. Glass shards reflected the sun behind a knot of clouds. At least Dale and his family were safe in Detroit. They had left Yuneetah months ago.
James had known since he was a child that the valley belonged to the river and the weather, no matter what a man did to tame it. Dale had once confided to James that he felt the same way. It could beat a man down, trying to farm land not fit for row crops, each season losing some of what little he was able to grow to the floods. “I’m ready to get out of here,” Dale told James when the TVA came to town. “Everybody’s squalling, but I ain’t sorry. I’ll take what I can get and run. All I care about is my people. That’s all that’s worth anything, when it comes down to it.” They both knew that working in a steel mill would be no easier than farming. They would trade hot sun for a furnace, cracked earth for molten metal, a cloud of grit for a film of black soot. Neither of them knew exactly what to expect, moving off to live in a northern city. But at least there would be a paycheck at the end of each week. Now finally Dale had escaped Yuneetah and tomorrow James would follow him out. They would be neighbors again in Michigan.