JUNE 30, 1936
Sam Washburn had driven for miles without seeing a house, the gravel road turning to dirt as it snaked around the rugged bluffs. There had been rain in the night and freshets poured off the rock ledges. The nearness of the woods made him nervous. It was midmorning but dark pooled under the lowest boughs of the pines. Shadows fell across the passenger seat and shifted on the arm of his suit coat. Sometimes the sun showed in darts through holes in the leaves, but otherwise the gloom was impenetrable. When he caught a glimpse of movement through the dense trunks, he nearly veered into a ditch. Leaning closer to the windshield he saw a line of wild turkeys, running as if away from something. Washburn lived in Knoxville, in a tall brick building on a street grooved with trolley tracks, above a busy coffeehouse with pigeons roosting in the letters of its sign. He wasn’t born in the city, but he had grown used to it. In Knoxville, there had been electricity for over fifty years. Out here, privies leaned under dogwoods. Preserves lined root cellars dug into banks. Jars of milk cooled in springs. He’d been sent to Yuneetah before but not down this twisting back road, little more than a wagon trail, so narrow that branches of laurel and rhododendron scraped the roof and sides of his car. Washburn’s stomach was sour. He wasn’t looking forward to his task. He had come to talk a dangerous woman into giving up her land.
Washburn had read the reports. Her name was Annie Clyde Dodson. Last fall she’d ordered the appraiser to get off her farm and not come back until he was ready to give her what it was worth. He’d returned several times but she wouldn’t be satisfied. She seemed unconcerned about the rising waters, even with a child in the house. Washburn had grown up near the river, on the outskirts of Knoxville. His father raised cattle. Each spring the floods raged through, ripping trees from the banks by the roots and gashing welts in the earth. Many seasons his father’s calves were swept away. Once as a ten-year-old boy Washburn was walking back across the pasture from the barn when a storm came up out of nowhere, rain and hail beating down on his head. As he ran he saw the river rushing out of its banks toward him like something seeking vengeance. He fled from it with his arms pumping and his breath screaming in his throat, hail leaving red slashes across his cheeks. One stone had glanced off the bone under his eye and blacked it. He flung the feed bucket he was carrying aside and headed for the only tree he had a prayer of reaching, a tulip poplar with sturdy limbs. He dangled by one of them over the flood for an instant before finding purchase with his feet and lodging himself in the fork of the tree. He stayed there until evening waiting for the churning waters to recede, his house close enough that he could see the oil lamp burning in a front window as the sun lowered. Once the rain stopped his father came out with a lantern to find him. Surely Annie Clyde Dodson knew the river like he did. Washburn couldn’t see how anything she owned was worth the risk she was taking.
Her husband was said to be more reasonable, but it seemed he could do nothing with his wife. Before the dam gates closed she’d gone around knocking on doors, asking her neighbors to sign a petition to send their congressman. Most declined to write their names. They were glad to get out of debt and move on. Yuneetah had been drying up for decades. The timber was overcut, the rail beds washed out. After the Great War, crop prices dropped and never recovered. It wasn’t the dam that would kill the town. Yuneetah was already dead. Farmers had clung too long to the old ways. Planting on hillsides and letting fields lie fallow through winter, watching spring rains scour the topsoil away until nothing was left but a handful of limestone. As the woods thinned and pastures unrolled on both sides of the road, Washburn saw stretches of once grassy countryside furrowed with gullies of clay. Only as he drove closer to the riverbed did the land turn greener, where the floods had washed down rich settlings. The Dodson woman was the only holdout, a stubborn figure standing by the side of a grave, Washburn thought. He hadn’t met his predecessor, the caseworker she ran off with a gun. All Washburn knew of the man was that he’d been born in Yuneetah, but it must have made no difference to her. According to the report, she wouldn’t speak with him even on the porch. She kept a Winchester rifle propped within reach by the front door. The last time the other caseworker tried to visit she didn’t wait for him to leave his car. She came down the steps with the rifle pointed. She didn’t fire at him, but he wrote in his notes that he thought her capable of it. He refused to have any more dealings with her.
All the way down the road from Knoxville, Washburn had tried to think how he might handle Annie Clyde Dodson. What he might do if she pointed a rifle at him. He could picture her, like the other farmwives he’d met during his time in Yuneetah. Their skin toughened by field work, hands raw from the lye soap they made and washed with, hair the color of the dishwater they dumped out their kitchen doors. They had watched with hard eyes as Washburn appealed to the patriotism of their husbands, as he talked about the benefits of flood control and electric power. They had made their disapproval known without speaking it. If they hadn’t been taught since childhood to submit to their men, more of them might have taken up guns.
For months he’d sat with these people in their front rooms and drunk coffee at their kitchen tables. He had eaten with them at McCormick’s Cafe and smoked with them on the porch of Joe Dixon’s store. He was twenty-three and most of these men were younger with wives and broods of children to feed. He knew how his shaved face and neat hands must seem to them. His chief had told him to take off his class ring before his first trip to Yuneetah but there was no use in trying to hide his softness. No use in pretending he was anything like them. He still didn’t understand them, but he had found they appreciated forthrightness. Most of the time, all it took was respect to win them over. After a worker was killed by falling rock when the mountain was blasted for an access road, he saw how they looked with their brows knitted toward the southeast where the dam was going up. Whatever it was to them, a blessing or a curse, it represented the unknown. By then they had come to trust Washburn as much as they could. He was able to reassure them. It was a death. But it was the kind of death that had to come before a resurrection.