On this morning it wasn’t Amos that James couldn’t take his eyes off. It was the boats floating out on the water, there on the horizon since sunrise. They were musseling boats and James had been seeing them since he was a child growing up on the river, the same as he had always seen the drifter. Homemade skiffs with boards at bow and stern on each side, notched at the tops to hold iron bars with strings of dangling scrap nails for hooks. Fishermen would drop the bars into the water and drag them across the mussel bed, then draw them in with shells hanging from the strings. As the sheriff organized the boats James couldn’t comprehend why the men would be out musseling. It was several minutes before it dawned on him that they weren’t dragging the lake for mussels. They were dragging the lake for his daughter. When he understood the wind rushed out of him as if he’d been hit. He had wanted to shout at them, to swim out and tell them they were wrong. But he knew that they weren’t. James couldn’t stop believing the river had taken Gracie, like it took his father away from him when he was twelve years old.
The Knoxville newspaper had called the flood that claimed Earl Dodson the May Tide. James’s aunt Verna had saved the clipping for him. The house the Dodsons rented was set so close to the river that when it was high James and Dora could lean out the rear window and trail their fingers in it. That night when the water came up to their doorstep they felt more awe than fear, until it began to leak inside. Earl gathered Dora onto his hip and hoisted James up under the arms. They sloshed through the rising water in the front room and out the door, plunging into the flood. As far as James could see the land was covered with roaring water. He could feel the current trying to sweep him away. He could hear his father grunting as he battled toward the higher ground of the ridge alongside the house. When Earl had made it through the rapids with both children still in his grasp he pushed them uphill ahead of him. At the top he paused, looking down on the flood and the hog lot. James knew what his father was thinking. He’d been counting on that sow to feed them through winter. Earl ordered James and Dora not to move. Then he lowered himself back down the ridge. James stood under the sycamore watching Earl wade into the flood, his head a black spot. Earl had almost made it to the hog pen before he lost his footing, the blot of his hair disappearing underwater. James kept on looking, straining to see through the lashing rain, but his father never resurfaced. After what must have been hours he sank down under the sycamore and took Dora into his arms. When the May Tide was over nine other lives had been lost and the body of Wayne Deering’s son was never found. It was a chilly spring. All that night James and Dora huddled shaking on the ridge, too shocked to speak. They watched straw stacks and barn doors rush down the river until their landlord found them.
Not long before he married Annie Clyde, James saw again that riverside shack where he and Dora had lived on the cotton farm. He’d found himself in the vicinity, helping one of the church deacons round up beeves for the stock barn. The house was wide open and caked with clay, the doors and windows missing. It looked like a corpse with a gaping mouth and sightless eyes. James stood outside staring into the rooms, unable to cross the threshold, grateful for having been spared. Now he thought he might have been better off if he had drowned with his father that night. He was still looking at the musseling boats floating over the stones of the Hankins family graveyard, at the men leaned over the sides with their grappling hooks, when he felt a firm hand on his shoulder. He thought it would be his uncle again. When he turned he was startled to see Ellard Moody. He tried to gauge the sheriff’s hangdog face but it was long and mournful as usual. There was no telling what kind of news Ellard had brought. James opened his mouth, feeling outside of himself, trying to work up the courage to ask. He hadn’t spoken in hours. When the words came they were almost too rough to discern. “Did you find anything?”
“No,” Ellard said. “But I been to Beulah Kesterson’s.” James noticed that Ellard held something in each hand. At first he thought the sheriff had brought his useless rifle back, the one he’d sent to the house with Wallace, tired of lugging it around. Then he blinked his blurry eyes and realized that what the sheriff had brought him was an axe. “I sent the constable to see her last night but she wouldn’t tell him nothing,” Ellard continued. “So I decided to go back and try her myself. Looks like Beulah’s had a change of heart. She’s done told me where Amos is at.”
“How come?” James asked, still out of sorts.
“On account of your wife.”
“What’s Annie Clyde got to do with it?”
“I reckon Annie Clyde went up there and scared some sense into Beulah. She wants me to find him before your wife does, is what she told me. She thinks he might be safer locked up.” Ellard paused, squinting out at the bobbing skiffs on the lake. “I ain’t seen him yet, though.”
“Why not?”
“This may not be the smartest thing I ever done, James, but I think you’ve got a right to come with me. If you want to, that is. I believe you can keep your head or I wouldn’t offer.”
James closed his eyes for a second. “We better stop at the house and tell Annie Clyde.”
“I don’t know about that.” Ellard paused again. “She ain’t home nohow.”
“You mean Annie Clyde?”
Ellard nodded. “I seen her sleeping up at Beulah’s.”
“Sleeping?”
“Listen, we ought to move before Amos does.”
James rubbed his grizzled face. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go find him.”
Ellard inclined his head toward the other end of the pasture, where the thick woods steamed with mist. He held up the axes, their blades whetted. “Beulah claimed he makes his camp over yonder. Said you go about half a mile through the thicket and come to a clearing.”
“Across the fence? That ain’t nothing but a laurel hell. Can’t nobody camp over there.”
Ellard looked at James without saying what they both knew. If anybody could, it was Amos. James had seen some of the deputies from elsewhere poking around the thicket but he doubted they had ventured far into it, with the poison ivy and copperheads. James and Dale hadn’t even tried to penetrate the laurel whenever they went hunting on the other side of the fence. Only rabbits and squirrels and songbirds lived in it, nothing worth shooting at. He and Dale had preferred bigger game. Pheasants, deer, wild turkeys. Dale had talked over the years about having the laurel cleared but never got around to it before the TVA came to town.
“You sure you want to come with me?” Ellard asked.
“I know I don’t want to stand around here no more,” James said.
Ellard passed James an axe. “If he ain’t lit out by now, we’ll give him a surprise.”
“People say he can’t be tracked,” James said, hefting the handle. “Like he’s a spook.”
“Well, he ain’t a spook. Otherwise he’d have two eyes instead of one. It might be tricky keeping quiet in them briars but we can slip up on him. Pay no mind to the nonsense.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” James said. “Come on, if we’re going.”
James and Ellard set out across the field, ragweed soaking their pant legs to the knees. When they reached the other end they straddled the fence, the mesh of the tree canopy shielding them like an umbrella. A fecund odor rose up from the swamp between the close trunks. The deeper in they walked, the wilder the growth became. Soon they were traipsing through the nettles foot by foot, tearing the bushes aside with their hands. They had the axes but neither of them was prepared for the laurel hell when they came to it, their way blocked by a dense tract of shrubbery stretching what looked like miles in every direction, crowded branches twelve feet high blocking out what little sun there was shining. Hunters and trappers had been known to get lost trying to hack through lesser laurel hells than this one. Though James was sure they were wasting their time he started chopping anyway because his wife would have wanted him to, rooting out a tunnel for himself as Gracie used to do in the snowball bushes on the farm.