“No,” the man begged.
Ellard stared at Amos’s battered face over the barrel of the revolver. Amos looked back at him steadily. “I’ve been itching to kill you going on forty years,” Ellard said. “I’ll do it, Amos.”
“I know you pretty well after that long,” Amos said. “You’re all talk.”
“What about me?” James broke in, letting go of Annie Clyde. “You reckon I’m all talk?” He stepped forward, his auburn hair and ruddy skin bright in the dreary cinder-block basement. He was a head taller and twenty years younger than Ellard or the constable. Beulah didn’t see what either one of them could do if he rushed the jail cell bars and got his hands on Amos again.
Amos’s eye stayed on Ellard and the gun. “No,” he said. “But I think you’re beat.”
Splotches bloomed in James’s cheeks. “You just keep on thinking that way.”
Beulah felt panic overtaking her. Threatening the power company man wouldn’t stop James Dodson from finishing what he’d started in the Hankins woods. She doubted James would care much if Amos cut off the power company man’s fine blond head. But Amos was ignoring the danger. “I’ve been shot at before,” he told Ellard. “As long as I can remember, people have been trying to get rid of me. You won’t be the one to do it.” Then he shifted his shining eye back to Annie Clyde. “Go ahead and put the blame on me, if it makes you feel better.”
“Please, son,” Beulah pleaded. “Turn him loose.” There was a charged pause. She could hear the breathing of those around her. The power company man’s eyes darted about in search of rescue but nobody moved. Then without warning Amos let go, giving the man a shove. He took in a whoop of air and staggered out of Amos’s reach, falling then scuttling to his feet. Even in that moment Beulah knew Amos hadn’t released the man because she told him to do it. He did nothing unless it suited him. He let the power company man go for the same reason he would never have hurt Gracie Dodson. Amos was not a murderer, no matter what they thought of him.
As dark settled over the valley Silver Ledford plodded down the winding mountainside. She carried no light through the trees but over the years she had learned not to need one, feeling her way along the ridges. She was headed to Beulah Kesterson’s cabin after having spent an hour in the woods a mile above her shack. She’d meant to make sure no lawman or searcher had stumbled across the still, though it would have been nigh impossible. Plum had taught her that trails led the law to a man’s whiskey so she never took the same path twice in a row. She’d approached from downstream, the water rushing engorged. She knelt to inspect the concealing laurel she’d piled and it seemed undisturbed. There were no footprints in the clay of the bank save those of minks and raccoons. She moved the bushy limbs, drops spraying from the leaves, and found the still pot unmolested. After a while she got up again and looked into the foggy woods to the right of the stream. Over there she could see the outline of the shed leaning under a chinquapin tree, leaves and spiked burrs littering its tin roof. Like her grandfather before her, she stored sugar, sweet oil and mash barrels inside. But now the shed held more than that. She had wanted to move toward it but her feet were rooted for a long time. Her eyes wouldn’t blink. They filled with rain. For most of her life Silver had kept her own counsel. But as she stood there immobile, Beulah had come to her mind. She knew she had to see the old woman, if she couldn’t see Amos.
When it was still early morning Silver had gone into the canebrakes other searchers avoided, the briar thickets that tore scarlet lines in their arms. Disturbing nests of copperheads heaped over with leaves, probing with her fingers into the slick nooks of the riverbank on the other side of the dam and drawing them out catfish-bitten. She had scouted the Hankins pasture and the bracken across the fence, knowing Amos made his camp somewhere close. She’d tried to crawl into the laurel, twigs snagging her hair, but not even a child Gracie’s size could have forced her way in. Then at around eleven o’clock, coming down the bank in front of the Walker farm, she was stopped by Ellard Moody. While she was trapped in a car with him the old loss had threatened to surface. If she drew pictures, she could have sketched his boyhood face from memory. It was once that dear to her, freckled and serious with sad brown eyes. His body lean with muscle, his head full of cowlicks the color of maple sap. Decades had passed since her summer with Ellard but she could still feel his lips forming her name against her ear. Sometimes she would go to the river and remember lying there with him, the sun lighting his smooth brow above her, minnows swimming over and between their skins. When the wind mimicked the wail of a baby she looked around as if she might have had some other life with Ellard that she’d somehow forgotten. Theirs would have been a girl with eyes like flakes of moon. If she fretted, Silver would have held her. If she got cold, Silver would have stoked the fire. If food was scarce, Silver would have given her portion. If colored leaves were ankle deep, Silver would have swished through them with her.
Ellard had treated Silver like something precious. But when Amos came back to Yuneetah at the end of that summer, three years after he left for the first time on a northbound boxcar, Silver was drawn right back to him. She had tried not to think about Amos when she closed her eyes, but she tossed and turned all night in her bed. Knowing he was down the hollow at Beulah’s she burned herself lighting the fire at breakfast. At dinnertime she scorched the beans. She cared for Ellard but she didn’t belong with him. She had thought while she was caught up in his arms that she might always be with him, that she might even marry him. Then Amos came back tossing shale at her window and the pull she felt toward him was stronger than ever. She found herself choosing to go off with Amos when she had agreed to wait for Ellard down at the river with her fishing pole. Amos would come to her with a bucket for blackberry picking and she would follow him into the canes to sit on the trunk of a fallen chestnut, to gorge together until their bellies swelled. Silver spoke her mind more to Amos than to anybody. But that late September she didn’t tell him about the illness she’d begun to feel in the mornings.
Silver should have been more careful during her time with Ellard. It didn’t occur to her until she grew sick how foolish they had been. Though she told herself the blood would come any day, she was worried. She tried to keep even farther away from her grandmother during those months but one evening as she sat with Mildred at the kitchen table not eating her supper, she felt the old woman’s eyes on her. She got up and rushed outside for some air, trying to settle her stomach. When she came back inside with an armload of kindling, the coals were glowing under the kettle. Mildred pulled out a chair for her to sit. She took the kettle off the fire and poured its scalding contents into a cup. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing?” she spat, thrusting the cup into Silver’s hand. “Just like your mama.” Silver stared into the swirling pennyroyal dregs. She knew it would make her trouble go away, but in that moment she hated her grandmother more than ever. Even as she drained the cup in one searing gulp.
For almost three decades Silver had kept that secret from Ellard Moody. Now she was keeping another one. But she hadn’t lied to him about where she was headed when she got out of his car this morning. She’d gone straight across the road to the Walker farm and up to the porch where a group of men in slickers were drinking coffee. She recognized one of them without remembering his name. Someone she had gone to third grade with until she quit, one of the boys that had chucked rocks at her in the school yard. He told her that Annie Clyde wasn’t home, his mean eyes calling her all the names his mouth used to thirty-five years ago. Silver wanted to wait for her niece but not with the man’s eyes on her. Not inside with the women either. She knew what they thought of her. She went around to the barn where she could rest within earshot of the house, lying on her side in the scattered hay of a stall. Sometime later she heard tires churning and realized she’d been asleep. She scrambled up shedding straw and went to the side of the house. A group of men were pushing a pickup truck out of the bog of the yard. The farm had emptied over the course of the afternoon. When the truck was gone only the Packard remained. Silver knocked on the kitchen door and James’s aunt opened it. Her face was severe, strands escaping the knot at her nape. Silver asked for Annie Clyde and the woman said, “She’s down at the jail. I reckon they got Amos.” Without hesitation Silver turned and fled for town.