She lowered her head and rushed out the door. With a full stomach she descended the steps into the showering rain, afternoon sun shining through it. She thought as she hurried across the clearing toward the woods that there was no telling what had happened at the house while she was gone. She even allowed herself a flicker of hope that Gracie would be there when she got back. The deluge had washed a rut down the steepness of the lot and she skirted around it, through the locust trees at the edge of Beulah’s property, seeking what shelter they afforded. Before she’d made it far from the cabin there came a stabbing in her foot, so sharp that she cried out. She dropped the rifle and sat down on the watery ground. She lifted the foot and found in its sole the biggest locust thorn she’d ever seen. Her feet bottoms were leathered from more than twenty summers spent barefoot, but not tough enough it seemed. She bit her lip, steeling herself to pull the thorn out. But when she did, its point stayed behind, broken off inside her. She considered trying to dig it out, but it was in too deep and she’d already been at Beulah’s longer than she planned. She would have to leave it there embedded. She’d have to carry it home with her.
At noon James Dodson was back in the Hankins pasture. The sun was struggling to come out and in this poor light the lake looked like a slab of soapstone. He’d ended up here again after searching through the night with the others, some he had worked shoulder to shoulder with tending crops, raising barns and digging drainage ditches along the roads. They had come upon Long Man everywhere it was spread. They’d sloshed into abandoned houses where the river stood knee deep, washed into front rooms papered with newsprint, over fireplace hearths blacked by decades of cooking. Then James had followed the other men back to the fields along the former riverbed. He had gone with them over the bleached stones of the shore calling for Gracie, his old neighbors righting him whenever he stumbled, giving him sups from their canteens. When the canteens were dry they made their way to the reservoir to refill them, James crouched on a boulder staring into the pitchy water. It had come to him as he knelt there that with each passing hour his chances lessened of finding Gracie alive. He’d realized then that he couldn’t bear to be the one who found Gracie dead. He used to think farming had broken him, but he was wrong. This was what broken felt like, and there was no coming out of it whole.
Now James didn’t know how long he’d been standing here at the edge of this water. After a decade of avoiding the river, despising and cursing it, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the shore. He listened close for his father’s voice in the flood as he used to think he could hear it, but whatever had once spoken to him was gone. There were no answers for him in this part of the pasture where the reservoir had come far enough to cover the Hankins family graveyard, not even the top of a headstone visible. Two months ago he had helped with the removal of Dale’s kin, a hearse parked in the pasture to take away pine boxes filled with generations of Hankinses. He’d found beneath an unmarked stone the skeleton of an infant wrapped in a blanket turned to rags after long years in the ground, its bones delicate as periwinkles. The undertaker and the pastor of the Baptist church had been there, sober in dark suits with both hands clasped before them. James had stood there gripping a spade handle, the markers of opened graves littered around him, earthen walls writhing with grubs and tunneling beetles, not knowing how soon the remains of his own child would be on his mind.
His uncle Wallace had tried at some point to talk him away, had taken him by the shoulders and begged him to get some rest. Looking back into Wallace’s wearied eyes, James saw that his mother’s brother had grown old. His hair snowy under a rain hood, his hands twisted with rheumatism. It was plain that Wallace needed to rest himself. But James couldn’t go back to the farm with his uncle. He wanted to lie down and close his eyes but he couldn’t enter that house without his daughter inside. It seemed that Gracie had called him to the lake. If he heard any voice in the water now it was hers saying, “Daddy.” He had sent his uncle away alone. Though Wallace had raised James from a young age, he had never been James’s father. Once Earl Dodson died James had felt on his own. He took paying work wherever he could find it, pulling tobacco and threshing wheat, chopping sugarcane and plowing gardens for ten cents an hour. One summer he worked with the iceman, riding in his Model T to the plant in Whitehall County early each morning, helping him load the truck, covering the ice with canvas to slow its melting. He had stayed at the parsonage with his sister Dora when all he wanted was to forget Tennessee. Like he would stay now at the water’s edge, where he felt as though Gracie had led him.
The only one James needed with him besides his daughter was Annie Clyde. He looked down the shore like she might be coming to him. He was used to seeing her from far off, doing chores. Beating rugs, airing out feather beds, scouring windows with newspaper. Even when they worked together she stood apart from him, digging potatoes or hoeing corn at the other end of the field. From a distance he appreciated her most, naked under the few dresses she owned. The red gingham with a tiny hole at the armpit, the flowered one with a bit of tattered lace at the collar, the blue one she wore to their wedding. If the sun was shining right he could see her skin through them. He needed her to lean on, like the time he twisted his ankle in a snake hole and she shored him up all the way to the house with her bone-thin but solid self. They should have been together. Though she was around somewhere he hadn’t seen her all night. She felt as lost to him as Gracie.
James knew why his wife was staying away from him and the lake. She was convinced the drifter was to blame for Gracie’s disappearance. Riding away from the courthouse after midnight in the backseat of some volunteer’s Studebaker James had heard the man behind the wheel talking about Amos, saying the sheriff had instructed the searchers to keep their eyes open for him. James had spoken up although his voice by that time was no more than a croak and told those in the car that the only one they needed to keep an eye open for was Gracie. He didn’t want their attention divided. James had been seeing Amos since he was a boy. Once when he was riding to town in the wagon bed on a pile of logs he and his father meant to sell, Amos stood in the ditch to let them pass. James couldn’t take his eyes off the drifter’s ruined face. When he turned around to stare Amos tipped his hat. Back when James’s mother was alive she complained if Amos cut through their cotton on his way to somewhere else. But Earl would say, “Why, he ain’t bothering nothing.” James didn’t hold the drifter’s strangeness against him any more than his father had. As a child he was curious but once he was grown he didn’t look twice if he saw Amos on the road. The last time they crossed paths, he and Annie Clyde were just married. James was about to dump the ash bucket over the fence and nearly ran into Amos, found himself looking into the pit of an eye socket. Amos tipped his hat again and said good morning. Then he climbed over the fence and walked up the slope into the hollow. James hadn’t liked seeing Amos on the farm that day. But if the searchers came across the drifter’s camp somewhere in Yuneetah, he didn’t expect they would find Gracie there.