Silver huddled against the door, leaning her head on the misted window. Water had already begun to spread on the upholstery under her legs. “I’m on my way to see her now.”
“What about Amos? You ain’t seen him, have you?”
She turned farther away. “I been looking for him myself.”
“I got every lawman that would come here tracking him, but I bet you’d beat them all.”
“Amos don’t leave no tracks,” Silver muttered. “Not even for me to find him.”
“Amos is a human being, Silver. He can be caught. He’s just quicker and quieter than the average individual. Except maybe for you. I thought you might know the best place to look.”
Silver hugged herself, shivering. “I don’t know him as well as you think I do, Ellard.”
“You two seem awful close to me.”
“Anyhow I’d say Amos is long gone.”
“I figure you’ve seen him, though.”
“What if he ain’t done nothing wrong?”
“He never does no wrong, according to you and Beulah Kesterson.”
“I ain’t like the rest of you,” she said. “Blaming everything on him.” Even with her expression hidden behind her hair, Ellard could see the set of her jaw. “You been looking for an excuse to hang Amos going on forty years. All you been waiting for is a good enough reason.”
“That’s your sister’s grandbaby,” Ellard said. “You ought to be handing me the rope.”
Silver whipped her head around. “Don’t talk to me about my people.”
“I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt,” he went on. “Far back as we go. But if you ain’t telling me something, I’ll throw you and Amos both in jail. See how you like him then.”
She turned back to the window. “Amos is a lot of things, but he don’t bother children.”
“How do you know that?”
She didn’t answer.
“He’s up to something, or he wouldn’t be here. He needs to be put away.”
“I wouldn’t want to keep nothing from you that might help you find Gracie,” Silver said finally. “But I wouldn’t want to get Amos hung for something he didn’t do either.”
Ellard sighed. “It’s as bad to let a guilty man go as it is to hang an innocent one.”
She bowed her face, hiding it again. “I ain’t saying I’d let him go. I’d just have to look him in the eye before I made up my mind if he did anything wrong. Yours is done made up.”
Ellard studied the blurry windshield. “Surely you wouldn’t protect him over your kin.”
Silver shut her mouth tight, no sound but rain. Then Ellard was shocked when she opened the door and sprang from the car. He lunged across the empty seat where she had been. “Hold it.”
“I’m going to see Annie Clyde,” she shouted without looking back.
“I ain’t done with you,” he called after her. “Don’t stray too far.”
Ellard knew he shouldn’t let Silver get away but his temples were throbbing. He needed to collect himself. He shut the passenger door and leaned back in the seat, her woodsy smell still in the car with him. Most of the time he was careful not to think about Silver. About that day he’d found her under the shade trees along the river without her dress on, painted from head to toe in mud, hair plastered down with it. She’d seemed like part of the bank, as if she was growing up out of it. Back then she wasn’t a liar but Amos might have turned her into one. He had some kind of hold over her. She saw some appeal to him that nobody else in Yuneetah did. When Ellard, Silver and Mary had played together as children they would turn around and find Amos spying on them from the thicket. Or they might be catching minnows and tadpoles in a coffee can when Amos would come out of nowhere and kneel on the bank beside them. He would splash his hands in the water to scare away the fish and pull the claws off the crawdads they had been baiting with worms. After a while his eyes would meet Silver’s and she would walk off into the trees with him, leaving Ellard and Mary alone. It gnawed at Ellard how they seemed to belong together, both tall and lanky with hair the color of the shadows they passed through. Ellard would have liked to bloody Amos’s nose, to fight him as he sometimes did other boys in the school yard, but Amos had never raised his fists first. It wasn’t in Ellard’s nature to start a fight, so he stood back and watched as Amos stole Silver away from him again and again.
Both Ledford sisters were lovely to look at, but Silver was the loveliest to Ellard. In those days most girls wore their hair in plaits, but Silver kept hers unbound. It poured like mountain water down her back, into her eyes, over her shoulders. She was hard to catch when they played tag, hard to find when they played hide-and-seek. She could fit herself into any crevice or hole. Once she’d hidden from Ellard in a junked stovepipe. She didn’t talk much and when she did her words were gruff, but he recognized her bluster for what it was. She might have fooled Amos and Mary but Ellard saw tender skin underneath the shell she had grown over years of mistreatment. Sometimes he heard Silver mimicking the birds, blowing through her thumbs to answer a bobwhite. He had come upon her peeping in at a praying mantis she’d caught in the trap of her fingers. Sometimes she hummed or whistled if she thought nobody was paying attention.
It was only after Mary got married that Ellard had Silver to himself. Amos had been gone for three years by then. Silver seemed lost without her sister, wandering around with bewildered eyes. At that time her grandfather had already drunk himself to death and she lived alone with her grandmother. Ellard didn’t care what made Silver turn to him. For one summer when he was seventeen and she was fifteen they walked the back roads and ridges of Yuneetah alone. Crossing meadows on the way to the river with their cane poles he would pluck the frilled petals off a daisy and give her the yolk at the center. He would find red cardinal feathers in the grass and tuck them behind her ears. He wanted her to have the color she was missing in her drab shack on the mountaintop. Whatever was bright in a landscape of putty gray, faded green, smoky blue.
One hazy afternoon at the end of June, Ellard left his chores and went up the mountain to see if Silver wanted to go swimming. When he found that she wasn’t at home he headed to the shoals alone, undressing on his way to a part of the river where the water was broad and the current was tame, where willows bowed shedding yellowy leaves. Entering the deep shade naked he saw a flash of motion before he reached the edge of the shore. Silver was hunkered on the bank several feet downriver, camouflaged by the silt she had slathered on against the mosquitoes and the burning sun. She looked at him, eyes glittering coals in her smeared face. When she rose up Ellard couldn’t keep from rushing to her. He took in her clotted hair, her pointed breasts, the fork of her legs. As she stood on the bank bare as the day she was born Ellard saw the last plates of her shell fall away. Nothing could have stopped him then from pulling her slippery into his arms, kissing her so hard that their teeth clashed together. He was trembling as he lifted her up, as her thighs closed around his hips. Though Ellard felt everything it was almost like watching himself.
Once they’d turned themselves loose, they couldn’t get enough of each other. Silver would find Ellard in the henhouse gathering eggs and they’d lie down in the patterns the chickens had scratched. They would roll in spruce needles under the trees until their sweating flesh was pasted with them, motes dancing around Silver’s head as the sun sank behind the mountains. But that whole summer, some part of Ellard was miserable waiting for it to end. Looking back he understood. All those warm months he felt like he’d just been borrowing Silver. When Amos showed up that September, back for the first time in three years, it was almost like Ellard had been expecting him. He’d been nailing down a piece of roof tin that had come loose in a storm for his mother when he spotted a figure heading up the hollow footpath with a bedroll under one arm, bending to drink from the trickling spring. He had grown taller, his hair longer, but he moved with the same stealth. When he lifted his face dripping from the spring Ellard could tell there was something altered about it, could see the void where his hat shaded an empty eye socket. But Ellard never doubted it was Amos. He didn’t come down the ladder. He watched Amos disappear up the path, his own eyes watering. Maybe Ellard wouldn’t have wanted Silver as much if she hadn’t preferred his enemy. Maybe his hatred for Amos had made his love for her burn hotter. Whatever the reason, the fire took ages to go out. It was years before Ellard could think of Silver without longing and only as something that had once happened to him.