Dale and James were often mistaken for brothers, with their same reddish hair, but they hadn’t met until James married Annie Clyde. Dale was the kind of man who offered his help before a neighbor had to ask for it. Like after what happened to James’s horse. His uncle Wallace had given him Ranger, already old, a Tennessee walker with a sorrel coat. In the months after James’s father died and he went to live at the parsonage beside the Methodist church, being with the horse had eased his mind as nothing else could. A tap of his booted heels would send Ranger trotting across creeks and pastureland, wind lifting James’s sweaty hair from his forehead. Some nights he slept in the barn under a blanket matted with hairs, lulled by the sound of the horse and the two plow mules snorting and pawing at their stalls. He’d dreamed back then of moving to Texas and working on a ranch breaking wild mustangs. He imagined how it would be to stand in a corral among their jostling necks, their muscled flanks, their high tails, the plumes of dust they kicked up settling over him. But as he grew into a man he saw how that couldn’t happen.
After James and Annie Clyde got married Ranger was the only thing he brought with him to her farm, the only thing worth having from his former life. When they were courting, each Saturday he’d ridden over the hills and down the back roads to visit her. One morning he galloped to the garden as she drudged in the loam on her knees. He dismounted and stood over her. She looked up but didn’t smile, as if he was bothering her in the middle of something important. He saw the lines around her hazel eyes that hours of toil in the sun had already hatched. “Get up,” he ordered and she frowned. “Come on, just for a little while.” She came to him at last, seeming doubtful even as he took hold of her hips and hoisted her up into the saddle. He climbed on behind her and walked Ranger up the hill where tobacco used to grow, past the pond yellowed with pollen and dimpled by the mouths of walleyed bass. They rode into the pines where there was only the clop of the horse’s hooves, the salty tang of Annie Clyde’s sweat. When she said, “I ought to be getting back,” James dug his heels into Ranger’s sides, urging him into a gallop again. Annie Clyde laughed then, carefree in a way that James seldom saw her.
Not long after Annie Clyde and James were married, Ranger stumbled in the rocky furrows of the farm’s lower field and broke his leg. On the morning it happened, Dale had come driving up to the fence to see if James and Annie Clyde wanted a ride to the market in Knoxville. He found James kneeling with his back to the field, unable to look at the horse. Ranger lay where he’d gone down, bloodshot eyes rolling. Dale asked what was wrong and James was ashamed to tell him. Dale looked toward the field, eyes squinted. He squirted tobacco juice between his teeth and said, “I lost mine the same way. The horse doctor put him down for me. I couldn’t do it myself.” He glanced at James. “I got my rifle in the truck.” James nodded once then dropped his eyes. When the shot came, he jumped as if the bullet had hit him instead. They hitched Ranger to Dale’s team and dragged him into the trees across the hayfield to a cave something like the sinkhole gaping now in Dale’s pasture, fifteen feet deep with roots coiling down its walls. James and Dale heaved the corpse into the hole then filled it up with a load of dirt. Afterward they drove the mules out of the woods and had a snort of moonshine. Ever since, they’d felt like kin.
It was the mutter of thunder that roused James to attention. If it started raining the truck might get stuck. He backed away from the edge of the sinkhole and headed for the road again, keeping an eye on the clouds as he crossed the pasture. The weeks of foul weather had unsettled him. It felt like Yuneetah’s last attempt to hold him back, to swallow him up as it had Dale’s house. But it might suit his wife, if it meant they could put off leaving. He dreaded now the coldness waiting at home. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t seen Annie Clyde being baptized that morning down at the river. He would have left Yuneetah before they met but obligation had kept him bound. He worked to support his sister Dora until she eloped and moved across the mountain, walking each morning to the rayon plant in Whitehall County, working twelve hours a day operating a spinning machine and coming home at dark reeking of the chemicals used to make the fiber. By then he was old compared to the boys he grew up with who settled down before they had whiskers. He didn’t intend to be tied down himself. Then he laid eyes on Annie Clyde Walker.
It wasn’t her looks. He’d seen prettier girls. His first love was a beauty with wheat-colored hair hanging to her waist, bottle green eyes and freckles sprinkling her tanned skin. He’d met her picking strawberries for a farmer near the river. They had kissed each other in a potting shed rich with the smell of river bottom soil. When she pulled him close her hair was sun-warm and dusty like the fur of barn kittens he’d nuzzled. Sometimes he thought he would have been better off marrying her. Annie Clyde was nothing like that guileless strawberry-picking girl. That’s why he’d wanted her. She had a mysteriousness that made him need to unravel her. He admired her smarts and her toughness. But he hated how weak she could make him. His uncle Wallace had tried to warn him before he proposed to Annie Clyde. “It’s hard to live with a quiet woman, James,” he had said. That was all, but they both knew what he meant. James’s aunt Verna had devoted most of her time to keeping a hushed and uncluttered household. She was a handsome woman who never raised her voice and laughed behind her hand. She wasn’t unkind but the silence of the parsonage became unnerving. James had kept busy outdoors, bringing in coal and digging potatoes, cutting the churchyard grass. Wallace wasn’t much of a talker himself. He’d seldom spoken to James or Dora, patting their heads once in a while and telling them they were fine children before going back to his theology books. Dora was too much younger than James to make a good companion, so he’d spent most of his boyhood craving conversation. Maybe it hadn’t been the wisest choice to pursue Annie Clyde, but wisdom had nothing to do with it. He had taken one look at her and known in his gut she was what he wanted.
The day James asked Annie Clyde to marry him, he had found her splitting wood behind the farmhouse. She lodged the axe in a stump and asked if she could fix him a cup of coffee. He sat in the front room waiting as she went into the kitchen to make it. Her mother was already sick by then, asleep in the upstairs bedroom, and the house was too still. It was taking Annie Clyde a long time and when he went into the kitchen to check on her, she was standing in the middle of the floor wringing her hands. “I thought we had coffee,” she said, her cheeks on fire with embarrassment. James went to the larder and saw little there besides a few shriveled potatoes and a sack of meal. “If you can wait a minute,” she said, reaching past him for the sack, “I’ll make you a bite to eat.” There were worms in the cornmeal but she picked them out and stood at the woodstove frying mush. He understood how it would have shamed her to offer him nothing.
For a while he watched her cook, mustering his courage. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something a long time,” he said, his voice loud in the still house. She didn’t turn around, bent over the iron skillet, but he saw her back stiffen. “I think you and me ought to get married.”
His heart didn’t beat until she spoke.
“Why is that?” she asked.
“Why is what?”
“Why should we get married?”
James thought for a second. “Well,” he said, “because I love you.”
Annie Clyde kept her eyes on the skillet. “I guess me and Mama are in a bind.”