JULY 31, 1936
Amos followed the river south twenty miles into Yuneetah, from a train yard in Knoxville. Sleeping on sacks in boxcars and under the struts of bridges he had dreamed of this valley, a green trough carved out between two mountain ranges, made of crumbling limestone ridges plunging into steep lowlands. For most of the way he’d kept to the woods, eating berries and making pine needle tea. At ten o’clock on that morning he crossed over the Sevier County line and picked a path down the snaky bluffs to the road. He could tell by the puddles there had been rain in the night. From the looks of the sky there would be more to come. Cloud banks were moving in from the west to blot out the sun, thunder gathering in their bellies. When he saw the first scattered houses on the edge of town, some tucked in the lee of the foothills and some nearer the road, it was already clear how things had changed. No rags flapped on the clotheslines. No plow mules cropped at the fields. Even the plank shack he passed with goats wrestling in its grassless dooryard seemed empty, their bleats startling in the humid stillness. These homes at the rim of the basin would be spared by the reservoir waters as they hadn’t been by decades of punishing weather, slumped on their pilings with their porches canted and their shutters unhung.
For the past seven years, hunger had driven families out of Yuneetah looking for work. It was the same all over the country. In California Amos had picked fruit alongside migrants run off their farms by bankers. In the Midwest where they’d come from their crops were buried under veils of windblown soil and their kin were dying of dust pneumonia, choking on gobs of plowed-up earth. Camping under the arch of a viaduct in New Orleans, he had watched one man stab another in the guts over a tin of sardines. The next day he’d returned to take the gabardine suit pants from the stiffening corpse, having learned enough in these lean times to leave nothing useful behind. He had come upon other men lying frozen in culverts and ditches, children trailing cotton sacks into fields at dawn, whole towns abandoned with the smokestacks of their shut-down factories cold outlines against the skies. He’d seen thousands waiting in line outside steel mill gates where two or three jobs were being offered. Those turned away took to the rails so the boxcars he’d once had to himself were now crowded with men. He had huddled among them in hobo jungles, eaten with them from trash bins behind restaurants and been sickened by the rat poison added to the scraps to keep them out. He had seen them arrested by the dozens for burglary, stealing milk off back stoops and crackers from the shelves of general stores. He had witnessed all manner of hardship since 1929. But what disturbed him most was to see, as he descended the steep slope into Yuneetah, what had become of the place he thought of as home.
Sometimes he stayed away for a few months, sometimes a few years. This time it had been five. Under other circumstances he wouldn’t have walked through the middle of town before dusk. Out of habit, he pulled down the brim of his hat to shade his face as he moved between the low buildings. The square was deserted, the only sound a metal signpost marking Gilley’s Hotel squeaking when the wind freshened. The hotel had been standing on the same patch of sod since the 1800s. Out front a trough that the owner had kept from those days for the townspeople who still got around by horse or mule was filled with rainwater. Brocade curtains still draped the windows, but the glass was dark. Back in spring the bachelors who rented rooms there would have been perched on the steps or slouched against the trunk of the oak at the porch corner, the smoke of their home-rolled cigarettes threading into the leaves. Across the way the courthouse loomed with its shining dome roof. For once Amos didn’t hurry past. Before he would have crossed to that side only during the evening, if no lamp was burning in the sheriff’s office. Now he went to the opposite sidewalk and stopped to linger on the wide courthouse lawn. After a moment he moved on, past the boarded-up cafe with no millworkers eating dinner at the counter, past the shuttered post office with the flag missing from its pole, past the shadowed blacksmith’s shed set back from the road in a thicket, past the closed gristmill’s roof glinting over the pines. Soon anything not torn down would be swamped. He had waited almost too long.
Amos kept moving until the town square was at his back and the hills closed in on both sides. He watched his boots as he walked, their soles coming untacked, making no footprints even in the softened wheel ruts he followed. He had learned to pass without leaving a trace. He was the sort decent men and women turned their heads from. He had a missing eye and his face was scrawled with whiskers. He was tall and gaunt with long black hair, lank on the shoulders of the peacoat he wore even in the heat of summer. On the streets he wandered crowds parted around him. For the most part he was left alone wherever he went, but traveling this familiar road he felt more at ease than anywhere else. He knew before long it would be a lake bottom, minnows darting in the grass up its middle. On the left he saw acres of stumps. Across a gully a tractor was mired in the mud near a stack of nail-spiked boards and a cellar hole filled with rainwater. One winter the widower who lived there had invited Amos in and given him coffee. But that was a decade ago. He stopped and spat on the tractor’s caked tires before pushing on.
Another half mile down the road he came to a field of sedge where the foundation of the Methodist church was tumbled in a heap. He imagined the congregation hauling their river rock sanctuary to higher ground and rebuilding it stone by stone. It would have been a painstaking task but he had lived among the people of Yuneetah long enough to know what they clung to in their war against the land and the floods. They might be willing to leave behind their dried-up farms but they would take their God with them. Amos hoped at least one of them had held out against the power company. His throat was parched and there was a gnawing in his stomach. Even those who watched him with mistrust from the corners of their eyes used to offer whatever they had to eat whenever he came around, turnips and pone bread and dippers of cool water. After another stretch of woods he came at last to a derelict cabin with a chimney mortared from hog’s hair and mud, the lot choked with milkweed. A guinea hen flapped up cackling at his approach, small and ring-tailed, but there was no other sign of life. He paused to hunt out its nest and found a clutch of eggs that he pocketed to boil when he finally made camp. He rested for a spell then shouldered his bindle and walked on. Each farm he passed looked more vacant than the last. The screen door on the Shelton place was off its hinges and their hounds were gone from under the porch. The Hubbards had left a hay mower corroding in their pasture. He wasn’t much surprised. He had met few others like himself, unafraid of the men in suits who ran everything.
The townspeople had always been wary of Amos. Nobody knew where he came from. He had only fragmented memories himself, of being cast into the river when he was four or five years old. Opening his eyes in the silt-swirling murk, gulping its bitterness, being borne on its current until he fetched up on the roots of a beech tree. He’d hauled himself onto the bank and staggered into a clearing where he fell in a heap at the foot of a bluff. Shivering he turned his head and saw a crack in the earth, half hidden by ground-cover vines. He discovered a hole leading into a shallow limestone cave and crawled inside. Then he waited to die in the stagnant gloom, looking up at the sun through ropes of woodbine, earthworms coiled like wet strands of flesh between his toes. When he didn’t die and emerged at last the worms came out with him, stuck to the backs of his legs. He might have thought he dreamed it all if he hadn’t gone searching for the clearing as an older boy. He’d hacked away the ground cover with a machete and found the cave buried under years of growth, littered with detritus the floods had washed in. Whenever he returned to Yuneetah he uncovered that cave again. Each time there was something of use the river had left him. Combs with broken teeth, twists of baling wire, splinters of barn board for kindling his fires. But there were some things washed up in the floods that he didn’t claim. Since time out of mind the river had been giving with one hand and taking away with the other. The remains of what had drowned, the bones it spat back out, he left undisturbed.