Now, as they often did in times of trouble, Beulah’s fingers crept to the pouch her mother had given her. An inheritance passed down through generations of the women in her family, come across the ocean with the first of them to settle in the hollow. Her mother had given her the bones when she started dreaming. Before each flood she would dream of a fish, the same middling-sized bass, washed up and gasping for air. She would wet the bed she shared with her mother and they would get up to change both their nightgowns. They would sit by the lamp together and wait for the rain to start, wait to see how many would drown. It was around the same time that Beulah began to bleed. The night the blood came her mother showed her how to catch it in rags pinned to her bloomers. Then she reached under the bed, the same one Beulah still slept in, and pulled out a tarnished snuff tin. She opened the tin and took from it the brown pouch. Everything they had was old, tattered and frayed, but the pouch was older. Beulah’s mother stroked her unbound hair as she told Beulah how it was with Kesterson women. There was something in their makeup, or something ordained by God, that they would have daughters. If a son was born, like the twin that had come with Beulah, he seldom drew breath. Once in a while one of these daughters saw things most others couldn’t. She led Beulah back then to this same table but with a different cloth and told her what to do. For the first time Beulah upended the pouch and spilled out the bones. When she could make nothing of them she was abashed, for herself and for her mother who might have felt like a fool. She said, “I can’t see anything.” Her mother said, “You will.” Beulah asked, “How do you know?” Her mother said, “I just do.” Not because she had second sight herself, but because a mother has faith in her child.
Beulah guessed there was no use in repenting what she’d done for Amos. She had lied for him, as her mother would have for her, as Annie Clyde would for Gracie. She meant to stand behind him. She was afraid for him and the little girl both. She didn’t like what she’d seen in Annie Clyde’s eyes. The cabin was dim and she raised up to light the wick of the lamp, casting her shadow across the table and the ceiling. Then she lifted the pouch from her bosom, loosened the neck and spilled what was inside. The bones were stained with age and worn shiny from handling, their scattering muffled by the flowered cloth. It was hard to tell what kind of living thing they’d come from. If Beulah’s mother knew, she never said. Beulah moved her fingers across them. After puzzling over the pattern they made, she grew discouraged. For a while she saw nothing, like that first time. But after staring longer it seemed they had knitted themselves into a ring. As she studied the circle, a shining bead formed in the center on the tablecloth. Then another and another, drops drawing together. She thought it was blood, like that long-ago blossom on the dingy cotton of her underclothes. It had been ages since she bled that way, at least thirty years, but she remembered what it looked like. It took only a second to realize that she was wrong. It was water. More and more of it. Clear and gleaming, the faded tablecloth flowers magnified under the beads before they soaked in. For a choking instant Beulah’s mouth and nose filled with its mineral coldness. Then the water was gone and she could breathe. She stared until her eyes blurred out of focus. When she blinked the bones went back to being scattered, the tablecloth dry again. She gathered them into the pouch and went to her bed in the corner. She lay on her side listening to the rain, looking at the gray light pressing against the window glass and falling on the floor, at the showers driven by the wind under the door. Annie Clyde and James were out searching in this storm and she hadn’t asked them inside. Sometimes she felt like in eighty-five years she had learned nothing. Had grown no wiser than that child who bled and was given the bones. She was tireder than ever, but no sleep came to her.
At dusk of the same day Sheriff Ellard Moody drove toward the ink-stained sky glimpsed between rashes of wet leaves. He gripped the wheel and leaned close to the windshield, squinting through the flood down the glass, the weak shine of the headlamps doing little to light the curves ahead. So far he had been able to skirt the sloughs in the road winding deeper into Yuneetah but he didn’t know how much longer he could. From the corner of his eye he watched the man huddled against the car door, his face a pallid smear above the collar of the slicker Ellard had given him back at the courthouse. James Dodson’s truck had gotten stuck somewhere along the ditch. After he gave up trying to push it out of the mire he’d walked the rest of the way to the town square. When he came banging on the locked courthouse doors, Ellard had taken one look at him and seen the direness of the situation. James had refused at first to come inside but his teeth were chattering so that Ellard couldn’t understand a word he was saying until he’d warmed up some by the coal grate. Once Ellard heard a child was missing he’d got on the shortwave and roused the constable over in Whitehall County. Before this evening he’d been glad that most of Yuneetah had moved on without giving him trouble, but now he wished for the townspeople back. He would have to count on outside help to round up a search party, if they could make it across the county line at all in such foul weather without becoming mired as James had done.
Now as they were on their way to the Walker farm, James seemed unwilling or unable to speak anymore. Ellard was acquainted with him through Dale Hankins. They had once spent a winter night in Dale’s barn with their breath smoking, helping him turn a calf. After hours of labor, it had come out of the heifer steaming and fallen in a bundle on the hay with sealed-shut eyes and the umbilicus stringing from its underside. James was the kind of young man others respected, friendly and hardworking, raised right by his aunt and uncle. Ellard used to watch James walking down the road with Annie Clyde on their way to church, riding the little girl on his shoulders. Whatever struggles the Dodsons had farming, come Sunday it didn’t show on their faces. He hated to see that same smiling man in such miserable shape tonight. Ellard left James alone for the moment. There would be time for questioning later, after he took a look around.
More than anything, Ellard dreaded seeing Annie Clyde Dodson. He figured she would be even worse off than her husband. As a child he’d roamed the hollow with her aunt and her mother. He’d watched Annie Clyde grow up and had a fondness for her, though their relations had been complicated of late with her holding out against the power company. She had treated Ellard with reserve as the deadline for her removal drew closer, not knowing she would have been evicted weeks ago if he hadn’t held up the process. He’d done everything he could to keep the government from taking action, determined to avoid driving out to the farm with handcuffs in his back pocket. When the eviction paperwork came to him, he claimed it was shoddy and sent it back to the offices in Knoxville. He told the ones in charge that he couldn’t enforce evictions in good conscience until they proved their documents were in proper and legal order. Ellard had made enemies for Annie Clyde’s sake, but in his experience those with power often abused it.