Beulah had been the first to look upon Gracie’s face, red and crumpled. She had been the one to sever the cord binding mother and child. She couldn’t bear to think of Gracie harmed. But wherever Gracie was, Amos had nothing to do with her absence. She was sure of that. It was true that he was a hard man to figure out. All the years he lived with Beulah there was a sort of fog rising off him, swirling up his legs and around his shoulders, issuing from his mouth. She didn’t lie to herself about Amos. She only tried not to think about the wrong he was doing out in the world. She didn’t want to know of his other sins. But he wouldn’t take an innocent child. He’d been one himself. Beulah couldn’t forget the condition he was in when she found him. There was a clearing by the river that only Yuneetah’s elders knew about. Any habitable dwelling ever built there was crept over with thornbushes and ground-cover vines, a shaggy overgrowth that draped down a bluff into a shaded glade. Beulah doubted even Dale Hankins knew of the spot and it was on his property. She hadn’t told anyone in town about it either. Mushroom hunters like her kept their secrets. Morels grew from early April to the beginning of May, and they usually didn’t come up in the same places each year. But in that clearing on Hankins’s land there was a dead chestnut tree with fat clusters of the spongy cones always sprouting from its base. It was hidden behind a laurel thicket but Beulah knew another way to get there. When she was more nimble, she used to climb down the bluff using tough strands of woodbine and creeper like rope. The day she found Amos, she was on her knees at the base of the chestnut with a burlap sack when she heard a sound that raised the hairs on her arms. It was a kind of keening, so mournful that she thought it was coming from a spirit. She followed the sound to a hole at the foot of the bluff and when she pulled back the vines there was a small boy in a cave, lying in a gruel of stagnant water. He turned his face to look up at her, his eyes wide blanks, his mouth open and that high-pitched noise coming out as if some other boy trapped inside him was making it. Beulah was frightened before her vision cleared and she saw him for what he was, an abandoned child.
She told the sheriff at the time about finding Amos but nobody claimed him. She was thankful because as strange as he was, he already felt like her son. He was as close to a child of her own as she’d ever have and she loved him like a mother would, even after he started vexing her. The tidiness of the house she kept seemed to provoke him somehow. The crockery stacked on the sideboard, the ladle hanging on a nail within reach of her hand, the preserves put away in the pie safe. Often he would take a jar of apple butter and dash it against the limestone slabs up to the cabin door, would hide her skinning knife or her iron skillet. At first she had encouraged Amos to play with the other children in the hollow, figuring a little boy like him shouldn’t spend all of his time with an old woman. She had hoped too that he might learn how to act from them. But often Ellard Moody or Mary Ledford would come running to tell on Amos for tossing their marbles into the weeds or kicking down the forts they built. As he grew up the neighbors began to complain that he slept in their barns, plundered their gardens or left the remains of his campfires smoldering in their fields. Rambling through town he would stomp down the tulips farmwives planted near the road. Beulah hadn’t known what to do about him.
She would turn to the bones, trying to understand. But on the subject of Amos the bones were silent. It took much thinking on her part, and much watching. It was the boy’s lies that baffled Beulah most. Every man, woman and child alive had lied at some time or another. Most lied because they wished to be something else than what they were, or because they had something to gain. Amos’s reasoning didn’t make sense to Beulah. More than once he owned up to something he couldn’t have done. Like the time Lee Hubbard came up the hollow looking for the muddy work boots he’d left on his stoop, swearing Amos stole them. Beulah said Amos was helping her in the garden and hadn’t left her side long enough to steal anything. But Amos stepped forward and said, “I took them. I took them and threw them off the bluff.” Beulah stared at her boy flabbergasted. Then she saw Lee Hubbard’s face turning plum, spittle gathering in his mouth corners. She had to stave Lee off with a hoe to keep him from whipping Amos. Once Lee Hubbard lost his wits, Amos got the upper hand. He took charge for a minute or two of the world he passed through nearly invisible. The people of Yuneetah noticed Amos only when he lied or got into meanness. They looked at him directly instead of turning their heads from his unsettling face, his glittering eyes that seldom blinked. It seemed to Beulah a child like Amos, left for dead by his mother and treated like a cur dog by his neighbors, might want to make a mark just to prove that he was alive. She almost couldn’t blame him. Beulah didn’t deny that Amos was a troublemaker. But she believed there was more goodness in him than ire.
There had been many times with Amos that rewarded her belief, peaceful days that reminded her of those spent with her mother. Even as a small boy he would rather work than play. He couldn’t stand to be idle and Beulah was the same way. When they ran out of chores they made up more for themselves. They kept busy stacking cordwood in the winter months, shucking corn and breaking beans in the summers, canning and making jam in the fall. At night he helped her darn stockings, patch their clothes and tat lace to trade at the general store. They kept bees and Beulah sold the honey to their neighbors, floating with pieces of comb. She and Amos had built the hives together one year out of scrap wood. Amos robbed the bees as if he belonged among them. They stung Beulah but never him, crawling sluggish over his face and arms. He had the steadiest hands she’d ever seen. She didn’t have to rely on the smithy to fix her tools or her cart when a wheel came off. Once during a chestnut blight Amos sawed down the diseased trees in danger of falling on her roof and then mixed batches of homemade dynamite to blast the rotten stumps. He wouldn’t say how he learned to make it, pouring nitric acid and glycerin in a bowl of oats to soak up the liquid. Only one as still and patient as he was could have kept from losing a finger. Beulah knew there would be trouble when she saw how Amos took to the dynamite, how his usually blank eyes kindled up with sparks when he handled it.
One night not long before Amos left on a boxcar Beulah noticed that he was gone from his pallet on the floor. She wasn’t alarmed because he had taken to sleeping outdoors. Even in winter he lay in the woods under a strand of hanging chimney smoke, covered with a mound of frost-etched leaves. When she called him to breakfast in the mornings he would bolt upright, the makings of his bed fluttering around him and catching in his hair. She got into her own bed that night and about the time her eyes slipped shut there came a bang that clattered her dishes. She sat up fast in the dark. At that hour sound carried for miles. When she went out the cabin door she could hear dogs barking all over Yuneetah. She turned and saw smoke above the treetops, but not from her chimney. She knew it was Amos. She only prayed that he hadn’t hurt himself or anybody else. She followed the smoke up the hollow, half certain she would find her son in pieces. The closer she got to the source of the smoke the stronger the night smelled of blasted earth. She walked under the scorched trees, over the showered-down bark, to a clearing where branches were burnt away. By the moon she saw a patch of seared ground. She knew that part of the woods, where one of the old homesteaders had left behind a root cellar dug into the mountainside, stacked limestone with a plank door. In its place was a mound of rubble, splintered boards still smoking. She stood at a distance and called Amos’s name, convinced he was buried under the pile. After a pause she heard a rustle in the thicket. He stepped out from behind a sapling to show himself. Beulah understood then why others were disturbed by the mask of his face. His eyes made her feel as if he knew her better than she did herself. Nobody had been harmed. For once she turned away like the rest of the town and went back down the hollow.