When Ellard went back downstairs James was waiting for him at the front door. “Let’s go,” he said. Ellard didn’t have to ask where he meant. But before they left Annie Clyde spoke up from behind them, her voice a husk. “James.” They turned around and she was standing there in her still-soaked dress. In one hand she held James’s hat, in the other a Winchester rifle. James took the hat and put it on his head. He hesitated before reaching for the gun. Annie Clyde thrust it into his hands. “If he’s got her, I want you to kill him.” Ellard studied Annie Clyde’s haggard face. Without a word James took the rifle and went out the door. Ellard followed, boots thumping across the porch planks and down the steps toward whatever waited.
AUGUST 1, 1936
When the sun was barely up and Amos felt confident any workman or watchman left in the bunkhouse was asleep or just rising, he went out on the dam spanning the gorge where the river valley narrowed. There was a road running across the top of the mammoth structure, a two-lane highway with double yellow lines. Looking west he could see the road crooking out of sight around the humped mountainsides, blasted by the power company. When it was open it would connect this part of the valley to US 25 and Knoxville. Along the deserted highway there ran a pedestrian sidewalk. Amos trailed his fingers down its metal railing, overlaid in places with a sticky netting of cobwebs. He paused when he came to the middle of the dam where a concrete tower loomed over his head with two flags hanging limp from a pole, one American and the other blue with a white TVA emblem. Inside the tower an elevator shaft led down to the powerhouse, its locked steel door scratched and grimed with dirt. From two hundred feet high Amos could see, far in the distance, the rain-pocked water curving away between the forested hills. Leaning over with both hands on the railing he could look straight down the slant of the algae-stained spillway and see the dam doing its work, white water sluicing into the river below. He could see the tile roof of the powerhouse and its reflection rippling on the outflow, the framework of the transformer pad like a cage of prison bars on the bank. He supposed the design of the dam and the buildings was meant to be modern but they reminded him of a penitentiary.
Amos had watched the dam site all night, camped in the trees at the edge of the cliff on the west side. Up there the limestone was so sheer and wet that he had to crouch on an incline clinging to saplings. He was perched there for so long that his leaking boots had given him trench foot and his fingers had shriveled like those of the dead. A salamander had shinnied up his arm and hung by its spatulate toes to his coat shoulder. Rainwater had run off his brow to pool in the curve of his eye socket. For now the site was as vacant as the town but at dusk yesterday a watchman in a slicker had patrolled the perimeter of the chain-link fence surrounding the transformer pad and the paved path along the bank up to the powerhouse. After midnight when Amos was certain the watchman was gone he had scrambled down, showering pebbles before him, to look up close at the waters in the dark. On the downstream side of the dam there was no shore to stand on, nothing but an edging of bleached rocks crowded with poplar, cottonwood and elderberry trees. On the reservoir side peninsulas of red sand peeked from beneath the skirts of thick evergreens. The lake was much deeper and bluer than the river, rilled with waves. Looking out across the water from the bluff Amos had seen two rowboats lined up for use by the workers, painted orange with numbers stenciled on their sides, anchored by tie-off pins to a small dock.
Now that there was more light, Amos turned and walked through the misty rain down the double yellow lines of the highway. He went back across the dam and through the fog over to the east side where he stood atop a rolling hill among a sparse copse of hardwoods with power wires strung between them. From this vantage point he had a side view of the transformer pad and beyond it the low powerhouse set on the riverbed with its rows of reflective windows, its great generators connected to the turbine inside the dam. He followed the slope downward along the east abutment wall where the concrete met the grass, tar hardened in patches and rivets bleeding rust down its slanted face. At the bottom of the slope he hunkered for a while behind a crop of milkweed, studying the transformers through the chain-link fence, the chalky white metal of the framework bars. Then Amos went around the transformer pad and picked his way over the rock rubble of the shore until the river entered his boots. He craned his neck to see the dam’s tower from below, a castle turret with its drooping flags. He left his bindle and waded out, icy water riding up his legs, toward the bluff where he’d spent the night. He went farther across the foggy river, drawing closer to the dam, battling the outflow until his toes bumped the cement edge of the spillway. He stepped up onto it, the thunderous spray cascading over his boots, and inched forward to where the west abutment wall joined the cliffside. The seam was drifted with trailing scarves of scattered leaves, almost hidden by vines. Amos probed among them, parting the strands enough to see several snaking chinks. Settling like this wouldn’t affect the structure but he figured the TVA was worried about leaks anyway, wondering if their unproven dam would hold as fast as the reservoir was backing up. Whatever their concerns they’d keep them quiet. They wouldn’t draw unwelcome attention to their business in Yuneetah. In this same spot on the other side the structure would be most vulnerable, where it clung to the weak limestone. This was a gravity dam. It would have to be struck at the base to cause a breach near the bottom. Then the pressure of the water the wall held back would sweep it away, releasing the surging lake.
Amos knew as much because he understood explosives. If he had been born for anything, it was to handle dynamite. He had the steady hands it took. Once he’d worked as a powder monkey at a gravel quarry, the first job he found after leaving Yuneetah. His duty was to bring tools and explosives to the other men. Eventually they saw how fearless he was in spite of his young age and let him insert the fuses in the dynamite, punching holes in the cylindrical sticks with crimpers. Then for a time after the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1925 was passed, bringing with it rest areas and filling stations and eyesore bridges of steel, Amos had blasted tunnels in mountainsides to make room for the roads. He’d watched as motorcars caught on and blacktop reached deeper into the backwoods, cutting down whatever was in the way, sickened by what he saw. It used to be that he could walk a trail with deer grazing in open fields on both sides of him, plovers leading chicks through the bracken. These days traffic was running the plovers off and killing the deer. The bird nests Amos used to plunder gone. The gullies he once slept in fouled with roadkill. But however much he hated road building he sought the work out wherever he could find it. If he put himself in the right situations, sometimes an opportunity arose to hinder the government’s progress. It was then a matter of deciding whether or not to take it.
Yesterday before sunset after his camp was made, his guinea hen eggs boiled and eaten, the dog bite on his shin cleaned and wrapped with a strip torn from his shirt, Amos walked southeast until he saw a gap in the trees near the Whitehall County line where he knew the dam would be. Because there was still some daylight he avoided the site itself and ventured down an access road to the dormitories where the workmen used to be housed. He climbed the embankment alongside the dam into the woods where he discovered a stone wall marking the boundaries of the watershed. He followed the wall to a cinder-block hut with a padlocked door and stood contemplating it. When he pried a heavy rock from the mud and tried to smash the pendulous lock, the rock broke to pieces in his hands. But there were other ways to open it. There might be nothing inside but he was willing to wager there had been dynamite left after blasting the dam’s foundation. He wasn’t impatient to find out. He had learned to wait and see. He made decisions when the time came and not before, his actions dictated by what his instincts told him in the moment. If he discovered a shed full of explosives behind the door he might turn and walk away from them. But standing there he felt the opposition that had been inside him since his first memories of consciousness, thrusting like a fist under his breastbone, to all forms of government and hierarchy and authority. His resistance to all those who tried to keep him out with their locks.