When the first men in dark suits and late-model sedans showed up in Yuneetah, Ellard had vowed to keep a close eye on how the Tennessee Valley Authority conducted their business. He was on Annie Clyde’s side. He still thought of her as a bashful child with her head down and her eyes on the ground. She had always been different than her mother, Mary Ledford Walker, a well-liked and outspoken woman. Annie Clyde was unsociable in a way that put her neighbors off. She was polite to them but nothing more. Ellard heard some of them wondering out loud where Annie Clyde came from, as cordial as both her parents had been. They weren’t thinking, as Ellard often did, about her aunt Silver Ledford who lived like a hermit on top of the mountain, coming down so seldom that he caught sight of her only once or twice a year. He knew what Annie Clyde’s neighbors would say about her now if they were around. She was warned about the water getting up. If she’d moved months ago she wouldn’t be in this fix. But Ellard was sorry for Annie Clyde, whether or not she’d brought this on herself. He was sorry for the whole town.
On his last birthday Ellard had turned forty-six but he looked older. His face was carved with furrows. His eyelids drooped, his hair was powdered with ash. For twenty years he had kept his vigil over Yuneetah. In 1929 he’d heard of men jumping off the tall buildings in New York City and seen things come to pass here at home that he would rather not have. Women pawned their wedding bands for a few dollars and men turned in their shoes for the price of a meal, until the pawnshop business dried up when there was nothing left to trade. Some had even begun to steal watermelons from gardens, laundry from clotheslines, eggs from henhouses. One night sitting in his apartment at the back of the courthouse Ellard had heard President Roosevelt talking on the radio about a social experiment involving the future lives and welfare of millions. Talking about an uneducated man living on a mountainside with his ten children, making twenty-five dollars in cash a year, who had been forgotten by the American people. Roosevelt spoke of giving that man a chance on better land, bringing him schools and industries and electric lights, stopping erosion and growing trees. But as an incident to all of that, he said, it was necessary to build some dams. It seemed to Ellard the president sounded too far away to know what he was talking about, but he hoped it was true. The people of Yuneetah needed help beyond what Ellard could give them.
For the most part Ellard believed he had done right by his hometown. Outsiders might have judged him for looking the other way when the moonshine runners came through from Kentucky and packed whiskey out by the carloads, but the next day he would see the bootleggers paying their druggist bills and settling up with Joe Dixon. Ellard had always put the well-being of his neighbors above any stranger’s idea of morality or justice. When the TVA showed up he decided it might be better for the town if he worked with the federal government rather than against them, regardless of his disdain. He only hoped the losses his people suffered were in their best interests, as Roosevelt had claimed on the radio. But whoever was responsible for the dam, God or the devil, it was out of Ellard’s hands. He meant to keep his badge on until the last soul was gone from Yuneetah. Then he would unpin it and head back up to his childhood house in the hollow. He would stand under the shade trees until it felt like he’d never left. He would clear away the leaves drifted against the door. He would sit on the unswept floorboards letting home sink back into him, listening to the crows cawing in the locusts and the bleat of Beulah Kesterson’s goats carried downhill. He would go squirrel hunting. He would see if he could make corn bread to taste like his mother’s or at least somewhat close, as hers was the best he’d ever put in his mouth. He would try to remember what he must have known once, what he guessed all of Yuneetah had forgot. How a fresh crewelwork of snow dressed even the dustiest of their farmyards. How leaves shaped like the hands of their babies sailed and turned on the eddies of the river. How an open meadow sounded when they stood still. How ripe plums tasted when they closed their eyes. How cucumbers smelled like summer. How lightning bugs made lanterns of their cupped palms. How it felt to come in from the cold to where a fire was built. These things they hadn’t lost. But, like Ellard, they had grown too weary to see them anymore.
Now the little Dodson girl was missing and there would be no rest for him after all, at least not tonight. He tried to remember when he last saw her. It must have been back in March, at Joe Dixon’s. It was chilly but warm enough for the door to be propped open. She was standing against it, her head not high as the handle, leaning there under a sign advertising the Hadacol Goodwill show. She was wearing a sweater buttoned over her belly and a gingham dress that showed her dimpled knees, grubby socks rolled down and scuffed shoes chalky from the gravel outside. Somebody had given her a bottle of orange drink and as she waited for her mother to pay at the counter she kept her mouth on the rim of it, looking at Ellard from under her lashes as if he might try to steal it from her, staring at his tall lankiness and his long mustache and the silver star on his lapel. “Hey, Fred,” he had teased, trying to look stern. After a while she had smiled at him around the soda pop bottle. “Is your name Fred?” he had asked, and she had shaken her mop of messy curls from side to side. When they left he watched them go down the steps, Annie Clyde carrying a parcel in one hand and Gracie swinging the other back and forth, prattling on about something only her mother could have understood. Just like Ellard, everybody in town got a kick out of Gracie Dodson. He thought of her at that last molasses making, dancing in the firelight. Nobody could take their eyes off her because she was hope right there in the middle of them. It was probably the last night they’d spend together in one place, but if they could believe it was all for her sake, they could bear it. If they could think about it like that. They were leaving behind their homes so things might be easier on Gracie someday than they had ever been on them. It was more than amusement that made them whoop and clap their hands. She was making everything all right, at least for the time being. They might have to start packing up their things in the morning, but in that moment they felt like it would all work out for the best.
Ellard intended to look for Gracie alive, but if she didn’t turn up by first light he could assume what had happened. She’d wandered off and drowned in the spreading lake, less than half a mile from the front door of her house and growing closer with each passing minute. He didn’t like to draw such a conclusion before he’d even reached the Walker farm or spoken to Annie Clyde, but it was where his mind went after the bleak decade he had lived through. After all he had seen. Just three months ago he’d gone out to talk with a man named Clabe Randall who was slow about moving. Clabe was a widower and lived in a brick house on a hill with musket balls embedded in its walls from the Revolutionary War. After his wife died he had stopped growing tobacco and sold off several acres of the pine timber on his farm. The timber had fetched a fair price and he was able to retire. Ellard had spent many afternoons listening to Clabe’s stories, sitting under the shade of the red oak in his yard. Clabe had spoken at length of his great-great-grandfather who built the house and of his grandmother who shot several Yankees to defend it. One afternoon Clabe had looked up at the red oak’s limbs and told Ellard, “This is a fine old tree. I had a swing here when I was a boy.” On the first of May, Ellard had parked at the road and gone up the hill into the clearing where Clabe’s brick house stood in the shade of the red oak. When he entered the lot he saw the grass cut and the flower beds tended, as if Clabe didn’t plan on going anywhere. The house was silent but he figured Clabe was tinkering in the barn. Then the breeze picked up and shivered the leaves and the hollyhocks in the garden. Ellard heard the creak of the rope before he saw Clabe Randall hanging from one of the red oak’s limbs. Perhaps the same one he’d swung from as a boy. Ellard approached and stood for a spell looking up at the swaying body before cutting it down, at the dried earth of Clabe’s land edging his boot heels. Ellard had seen the dead before. But he had never felt such sorrow as he did right then, not only for his friend but for the graveyard all of Yuneetah was soon to become.