Once the grander church was built Beulah kept at home on Sundays. It was too suffocating without the doors and windows open. Stained glass couldn’t be raised to let in butterflies. Beulah had a fine time talking to Jesus standing in front of her cabin looking into the woods anyway. She didn’t have to sit in a hot church house to be a Christian, and she could read enough to interpret the Scriptures for herself. Not that she was against the churches. They brought people together, gave them somewhere to go for fellowship on Sunday mornings away from the fields and factories. The people of Yuneetah were losing more than their property. They relied on each other. If a house was taken by a flood they rebuilt it. If a man got sick they worked his crops. If he died they rang the death bell and the whole town came to see what needed doing. It hurt them to part not knowing when or if they’d meet again. But grieved as they were, most had no bitterness about leaving. They believed they were doing it for their country, the same reason they signed up to fight in wars. It pained Beulah to see them going but she understood. She was eighty-five years old. Through the generations she had witnessed it again and again. What remained in the end was the rocks and the trees, the water running its course. To watch from her lonesome cabin made an ache in her chest, but there was just as much hope in it. Yuneetah might be dying out but those leaving on the road would surely take some of it along to the new places they settled. Even the river would go with them in the jars of water they took to pour in their radiators and dampen their parched throats. All the electric lights in the world couldn’t blind them enough to forget what they brought out and passed along to the babies she wouldn’t birth. Wherever they ended up, they’d still hear Long Man rushing in their sleep.
Beulah realized she’d been dozing only when she started awake again. She decided to allow herself a nap before clearing the dishes. Last night when she returned from her walk, her rest had been uneasy. She had dreamed all night of crossing the river. She hoped Fay Willet was wrong about what such dreaming meant. She hoped too as she got up from the table that the weather and her full stomach would lull her into an easier sleep this afternoon. But she halted halfway out of her chair. As much as she wanted to go to bed, she found herself unable to rise. That’s how it came over her sometimes, the knowing her mother claimed she was born with. It might be nothing more than a feeling that she shouldn’t lie down. Somehow she knew to be still and wait. She sat for several minutes looking at the door, half drowsing. When the sound came at last it was so faint that she wouldn’t have heard it if she hadn’t been listening. There were voices approaching the cabin and her fingers went to the pouch of bones around her neck. She tilted her head as the cries came closer and closer, trying to make out whose name they were calling. When a hammering finally came at the door her urge was to pretend she wasn’t home. She wanted nothing more than to climb into her bed and burrow under the blanket, but she brushed the biscuit crumbs from her dress front and went to open it. Annie Clyde Dodson was standing on the steps. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks and forehead, her face blanched white. Her husband James stood behind her looking shell-shocked, both of them huddled under the eave.
“Where is he?” Annie Clyde blurted out, her eyes glowing lamps in their sockets.
Beulah blinked behind her glasses. “Who do you mean?”
“Your boy, Amos,” James answered for his wife.
Beulah gaped at them, trying to think. She should have invited them to come inside but somehow she was afraid for them to cross her threshold, bringing the smell of the rain with them, tracking in leaves, slopping their trouble on her floor. She looked down at Annie Clyde’s mucky feet on the limestone slabs of the steps and felt ashamed of herself, but she still didn’t open the door wide enough for them to pass through. “Well, he’s not here—” she began.
Annie Clyde cut her off. “He was in my cornfield this morning.”
Beulah’s fingers went to the bones again. “What’s happened?”
For a moment she thought Annie Clyde might faint, leaning ashen against the doorframe. “He took her,” she said, and Beulah felt the color draining from her own face.
James put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “We can’t find Gracie. Have you seen her?”
“Where’s Amos?” Annie Clyde shouted over him, moving as if to push her way inside.
Beulah licked her lips. They were numb, but her words came out even. “I ain’t seen her, Annie Clyde. And Amos ain’t here.” She paused. “I know he ain’t been up to nothing, though. He’s been with me. He came straight up the holler from your place. Brought me some corn.”
James let out a breath. He seemed relieved, but Annie Clyde was still trying to see around Beulah into the cabin. “He’s been here with you?”
“Yes,” Beulah said. “About all day, but you know how Amos comes and goes. He took off again an hour or so ago.” She glanced away. “I might not see him for another five years.”
“You sure you ain’t seen Gracie?” James asked.
“No, honey,” Beulah told him, still watching his wife. “But I’ll keep my eyes open.”
“He’s here,” Annie Clyde said, looking at Beulah hard enough to make her fidget.
“Let’s go,” James said, taking his wife by the elbow. “We’re wasting time.”
Then they were gone from her steps as quick as they’d come. Beulah went to the front window and peeled back the lace curtain. She watched through the blurring rain as they searched the clearing. When they disappeared around the cabin she went to the window over the table and peered out but couldn’t see them anymore. She went back to her chair, lowering herself with a grunt, letting out the breath she’d held while they were at her door. She stared at the soiled dishes on the tabletop, her old heart laboring. If Annie Clyde had come in she might have noticed one plate, one cup. Beulah hadn’t seen Amos in five years. But she still loved him like a son.
Her mind went to Gracie Dodson and the day the little girl was born. She remembered it well because she had woke feeling puny. She used to be a stout woman but that morning she’d noticed herself shrinking. She had outlived the age at which her mother died but she wasn’t ready yet to lie down under the sassafras tree. She still feared death like a child. She supposed it was foolish to be so old and want so much to keep on living, but that’s how it was. So she’d rolled out of bed like it was any other day and carried on, wiping her handkerchief across her clammy brow again and again as she went about her chores. Around dinnertime she went behind the cabin to pick greens, all she could think of eating. The best place to find them in early March was along the spring, its edges brittle with ice left over from winter. She was looking on the bank when she came upon a crack in the ground. As she watched a nest of granddaddy longlegs boiled up from it, thousands upon thousands, and her own legs nearly gave out. She stumbled away without picking any greens, sure she’d seen an ill omen. On her way back to the cabin snow began to flurry in whorls, whitening the grass. Coming into the yard she could make out the shape of a man sitting on the steps and her dread deepened. But once she got closer she saw that it was James Dodson. He was a different man then than the one she had seen minutes ago, with clear blue eyes and high color in his cheeks, dots of snow in his auburn hair. She smiled because she knew what he wanted. Annie Clyde’s time had come. Just the sight of James perked Beulah up. If the child hadn’t been born on that particular day, she might have laid down and died like her mother. In a way, birthing Gracie Dodson had given her new life.