James shook his head. “No. She’s mine.” But he stopped and bent over, gulping.
“Don’t you want to see?” Amos asked.
“Shut your mouth,” Ellard shouted at Amos.
It took every ounce of James’s will to look down. There was a fissure at the foot of the bluff, something he took at first for an animal burrow. On closer inspection, he saw that it was a shallow limestone cave, the kind that honeycombed the valley floor. He let out a chuff of breath and lowered himself to his hands and knees. From that position he realized he would have to stretch flat on his belly to see what was inside. That close to the spongy topsoil the smell of it choked him. Bugs crawled into his collar, tickling his neck. He braced himself and turned his head to peer in the hole. For an instant in the grainy light he saw not the corpse he dreaded but Gracie as he remembered her, asleep on the floor of the cave as she would have been in her crib. But when his vision cleared what he saw was the skeleton of a child. Blackened leaves had sifted down through the shroud of woodbine to drift all around it, rotting in a scum of stagnant water. Some of the ribs were missing, carried off by animals. Milk teeth were gone from the jawbone. The small, tea-stained skull was broken, bashed in on one side. James scrambled backward in the litter of chopped-away vines and pushed himself up onto his knees. He retched but nothing came out. “That’s not Gracie,” he heard himself saying, but in his heart he felt that it was.
Not long after two o’clock, Beulah Kesterson went to the washstand and splashed her face. She ran a comb through her long ivory hair and braided it. She put on her best smock, the one she wore to funerals, then strained to bend and tie her shoes. After covering her braid with a head scarf, she crossed to the door with Annie Clyde Dodson still on her mind. The girl seemed to have aged a decade since yesterday. Her eyes had been like holes, her hair snarled, her dress soiled. In the past when Beulah couldn’t help those who came to have the bones read she sent them away without false hope. But she’d never been asked to look for a missing child. Others had disappeared after the floods but they were found, besides the Deering boy. Beulah imagined it would be even worse left wondering like this than knowing Gracie was dead. She felt she had to do something for Annie Clyde but she hadn’t meant to lie to her again. The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. She claimed to have seen the little girl alive, when in truth the bones had showed her nothing. Beulah told Annie Clyde what she wanted to hear because she had witnessed too much suffering. She couldn’t take any more of it. But maybe one last lie made no difference. Maybe there was nothing else Annie Clyde Dodson would have believed.
Then Ellard Moody had pecked on the door while Annie Clyde was still sleeping in Beulah’s bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had more than one visitor in the same day. Under other circumstances her spirits would have lifted to see Ellard. His parents had been good neighbors and he was always a respectful boy. He’d spent many afternoons playing under the shade trees around her cabin. Sometimes in the winters after Amos left, Beulah would pay Ellard a dime to bust kindling for her. She had watched him grow into a fine man over the years. When she opened the door she was troubled to see him looking nearly as bad off as Annie Clyde, standing on her steps slump-shouldered in the pouring rain. Each line of his face was a crack under iron-colored stubble, his drooping eyes red-rimmed. She knew what he came for and what she had to do, as much as it pained her. She told Ellard about Amos’s hiding place in the clearing only to protect him. She had seen a desperation close to madness in Annie Clyde Dodson. She wouldn’t have betrayed her son for any other reason than to save him. Not just from Annie Clyde, but from himself. After talking with Amos in the shed yesterday morning she’d come away certain of what he was planning. Something he might not live through. What troubled Beulah most was that Amos didn’t seem to care whether he got out of Yuneetah in one piece or not. She needed to make sure he understood her reasoning. She was headed out to tell him herself.
Beulah stepped into the storm, the sun still trying to break through the clouds. The rain was slackening but not over. She’d seen it pour weeks at a time on the valley. If it didn’t let up the search would be impossible to continue. Soon the lake would reach the main road. There would be no getting in or out. It wasn’t just the child slipping farther away every minute. It was all of Yuneetah. She hurried down the hollow, past the graveyard and the Walker farm. At the end of the track she turned north, catching winks of water between the roadside trees. She used to go to the shoals on the first of March each season to see the river unthawing, a ritual that meant winter was over. In the cold months she dreamed of its damp slate smell, its eroding banks studded with oval rocks washed smooth as glass. Like the Cherokees, Beulah thought the river might be speaking to her. She wondered if the bones passed down to her had come from some strange fish caught in its waters. If it wasn’t Long Man whispering to her about the people that lived along its shores, communicating in some way much older than hers, from before language. As close as the people of Yuneetah had lived to it, having fished from and drunk of and swam through its waters, maybe they too could have heard the truths it told if they’d listened closer.
But the river as Beulah knew it was gone. She moved on from what it was becoming, a flood seeping into her shoes and wetting her rolled-down stockings. About two miles from the Walker farm she came to a truck mired along the shoulder to its running boards. She recognized James Dodson’s Model A Ford and stopped to see if he was close by. She listened for the searchers she’d heard calling through the night but their voices had abated. A little farther down the road she met a party of men walking and they tipped their hats at her. She could read the defeat in their postures. She knew how much they wanted to find the child alive, especially the townspeople who had returned from other counties. She understood what it would have meant to them. Now the search had become one last disappointment. She’d seen the same thing in Ellard’s long face. He had given up on finding Gracie, maybe even before he started looking for her. At least Beulah had helped him in some small way, though she doubted he would get much satisfaction from Amos. She ducked her head as she rushed past the Hankins property and the thorny wood where her son would be arrested, if he wasn’t already locked up in the courthouse basement. He had been content camping there, close enough to the river that when it left its banks all manner of useful junk washed up and got snared in the vines at the foot of the bluff. Amos might have hidden there comfortably until the lake flooded him out if not for Beulah.
She kept her eyes on the road as she passed the demolished and burned-down houses of Yuneetah. Seeing the destruction she felt the souls of those who built the town from its foundation and died within its boundaries. The settlers who wasted away from starvation and disease, the Rebel and Union soldiers, the farmers who dropped in the boiling heat of cotton fields and tobacco rows, the mothers who died in the sweat of childbed fever, the elders who went in their sleep at the end of long lives with loved ones holding their hands. It was the last time she’d travel this way, her last trip to town. But Amos mattered more to her than anything else right now. She was out of breath before she made it to the square, her legs and back aching. When she reached the courthouse and saw that the sheriff wasn’t parked out front she went up the broad steps and heaved herself down to wait under the portico. The sidewalk was deserted besides a car and two trucks alongside the curb, bathed shiny with the overcast sun lighting their beaded cabs. Beulah could remember when the town had no sidewalks. When the square was made of dirt, a rain like this had turned it into a hoof-printed sump, the horses people rode then wearing crusty mud boots. She hadn’t been here since spring, before everybody cleared out. She’d gone into McCormick’s to see some of her neighbors off, having birthed them and their babies. She sat at the counter and with a nickel of her dwindling savings ordered a piece of cherry pie. Now the cafe’s plate-glass window was broken. She looked out at the neat buildings lined up in a row, red brick with white-painted moldings, awnings darkening their boarded facades. Sitting there in her funeral dress, saddened by the emptiness of the main street, she began to fear something had gone wrong. She prayed she’d done the right thing by turning Amos in.