She thought then for the first time that day of her aunt Silver. From the hollow there was a shortcut to Silver’s house, a path twisting around and along the ridges. She still felt a need to see her aunt, the only blood kin she had left besides Gracie. She pictured Silver’s hands, the part that resembled her mother most. If Annie Clyde could see them, the delicate fingers with chapped knuckles, she might breathe easier. But Silver hadn’t come and Annie Clyde didn’t know if she could make it much farther on her wobbling legs. It was a long climb. Silver used to visit the farm on occasion but Mary never went to her sister’s high shack. She told Annie Clyde it was lonesome up there, and scary at night. In the winter if Clyde took a sled up the mountain to haul in firewood Mary would ask him to see about Silver. “She’s liable to freeze to death and we’d never know it,” she’d say. Annie Clyde had gathered that Mary and Silver were close as children, strange as it was to think of her aunt being close to anyone. Silver would stay away from the farm for months then reappear out of nowhere to help Mary with the chores, both silent as they scrubbed laundry or did the canning or made lye soap. When Mary died Silver hadn’t attended the funeral at the Free Will Baptist church, but Annie Clyde understood. Silver didn’t seem to belong there among the townspeople. She belonged on the mountaintop by herself. Annie Clyde wasn’t offended by Silver’s absence now either. She empathized with her aunt in a way that others couldn’t. If she got a second wind she’d head up the mountain later. She knew Silver and Amos once played together in the hollow. But Annie Clyde couldn’t dwell on that. She concentrated on making it to Beulah Kesterson’s first. There was a chance it would all end there.
Annie Clyde pushed herself away from the cemetery gate and continued up the slope with weeds brushing her shins, the rifle on her shoulder. She would have come this way last night if the Whitehall County constable hadn’t been roaming around. She had wanted to see Beulah alone, and now these woods were empty. The ground roughened the higher she climbed, shale hidden in the thinning grasses. It made her feel sick to follow the same footpath she and James had taken yesterday afternoon looking for Gracie but she kept going. When Beulah’s place came into view she paused once more at the edge of the lot to rest against a locust tree. She was struck by the cabin’s stillness. In fair weather the old woman usually sat outside in a lattice chair, the bareness around it splotched with the snuff she dipped. Annie Clyde’s mother used to send her after medicine. Mary and Beulah were friends. Some winters when Annie Clyde was a child Beulah helped the Walkers butcher hogs in exchange for meat. Clyde would shoot the sow and stick its throat. Mary and Beulah would tie ropes around its legs and drag it to the scalding boards. They would take turns scraping its hide then hang the carcass up, warm blood seeping into the frozen ground as snow dusted their mackinaws. They would work into the night, packing hams and shoulders in salt in the smokehouse. Then Mary and Beulah would cook a late supper of pork. Annie Clyde liked the meal but for days afterward she had nightmares about the slaughter. Someway she associated that bloodletting with Beulah and the pouch around her neck.
To this day, Annie Clyde was afraid of the old woman’s fortune-telling bones. She’d seen them once, when she was eleven and went up the hollow after a poultice for hornet stings. She had knocked down the hornets’ nest under the barn eave with a rock and stirred them up. Her whole face had been swollen tight and red when the wasps were through with her. On that sunny morning the plank door of Beulah’s cabin was propped open and Annie Clyde had mounted the rock steps to rap on it. When there was no answer she’d peered inside and discovered Beulah stooped over a table studying the aged bones scattered across it, stained and configured into odd shapes. Beulah had looked up, startled by Annie Clyde’s knocking. Whatever she had seen in the bones must have been harrowing because her face was the color of parchment. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated behind her pointed glasses. Annie Clyde had turned and run off. When Mary asked why she was back without a poultice for her stings, she had refused to speak of what happened.
Annie Clyde hadn’t wanted Beulah to birth Gracie. She would have sent James after the doctor in Whitehall County if not for her mother. Not long before Mary breathed her last, she’d put a hand on Annie Clyde’s rounded belly and said, “Go to Miss Beulah when your time comes. If it wasn’t for her, you wouldn’t be in this world.” It was only then that Mary told Annie Clyde how before she was born there had been three other babies lost. Beulah had seen how Mary was suffering and come down the hollow one morning with a tea made from partridgeberry to strengthen her womb. Within a few weeks Mary was expecting, and for the first time the baby had thrived. She had trusted Beulah over any doctor ever since, and even gone to the old woman first when the cancer began to make her ill. But Beulah had said to Mary with sorrowful eyes, “Honey, there ain’t much I can do for you this time.” After her mother’s burial Annie Clyde had explored the graveyard to see if she could find her older siblings. There were no names carved on the markers Clyde had fashioned from rocks turned up by the tines of his plow. She pictured him coming with a spade and the babies wrapped in rags or tiny enough to fit in shoe boxes, digging in the shadiest corner where the flowering arms of a dogwood tree shed its blooms. Annie Clyde had brushed the leaves from the flat limestone tablets and lowered herself to sit among them, heavy with Gracie by then. She’d thought how if not for Beulah Kesterson her tiny bones might be under another rock next to theirs. She had known then she would honor her mother’s wish.
On the day Gracie was born, she was sitting up in bed when James rose at first light. She told him the baby was coming but when he started after Beulah she put out a hand to stop him. “It’s not time. I’ll let you know.” A little after noon when the pains got closer together she gave in and went to the chicken coop where he was checking nesting boxes, as much as she dreaded seeing the old woman. While he was gone she waited at the window watching the whirling March snow flurries, lacy skeins blowing across the yard. When she heard the front door open and steps groaning up the stairs, she hopped into bed as if she’d been caught at something. James came in with Beulah behind him. He took Annie Clyde’s hand as Beulah unwound her shawl. Then she went to the window and cracked it enough to let in the crisp air. She turned to James and said, “Go fix you some coffee. This is woman’s business.” When James kissed Annie Clyde and headed for the door she reached for his sleeve, afraid to be alone with Beulah. By the time Gracie was ready to be born it was dark. Beulah scrubbed her hands and examined Annie Clyde under the lamp, moths circling up its glass chimney, the night so hushed Annie Clyde believed she could hear the papery rub of their wings. She was careful to look away from the pouch around the old woman’s neck, into the unlit corners of the room. As Gracie came she stared into the lamp so hard the flame made a stamp on her vision, giving birth in the same bed her mother died in. It wasn’t a difficult labor. The pains were distant. When she looked at her newborn for the first time, she felt grief over anything. She should have been happy but she couldn’t help missing her mother, left alone to share the birth of her baby with somebody she’d always feared.
Now as she stood at the edge of the clearing leaning on the rifle like a crutch, looking at Beulah’s dilapidated cabin, she supposed among all the other reasons Beulah made a foul taste in her mouth there had always been Amos. For as long as she could remember she had known about the one-eyed man, whose marred face she saw up close for the first time in the hayfield during early autumn. Her father and the neighbors were out that morning with the hay baler, the valley flooded not with water but with mist the bluish gray tint her newborn daughter’s eyes would be ten years later. Wandering among the haystacks she stopped to pull out a straw to chew on. When she looked up, Amos was under the apple tree watching her as if he had never not been there, dew glimmering on his shoulders. Annie Clyde felt like they were the last ones alive, the sound of the baler and the voices of the farmhands far away. Then Amos asked if she’d fetch him a drink and her paralysis broke. She ran through the door into the kitchen where her mother was cooking and panted that Amos was out in the field. Mary didn’t look up from the biscuit dough she was rolling but told Annie Clyde through tight lips, “You keep to the house. He can get his own water.” Annie Clyde understood then there was more wrong with Amos than a missing eye. That night in her bed she imagined him standing in front of this cabin looking down on the farm, thinking of her. It was possible he was hiding here now but she doubted him being that careless. Beulah probably had a notion where he was, though. If the old woman was keeping a secret, Annie Clyde intended to make her tell it. She wouldn’t let herself think of Beulah stooped over those odd-shaped fortune-telling bones. She wouldn’t ask if there was such a thing as second sight.