But when the door swung in on the front room, its darkened walls papered with vines, Silver couldn’t go in. She hadn’t been here since Mary died. She leaned on the doorjamb, looking into the shine of the oil lamp perched on the fireplace mantel. Aside from the lamp the mantel was bare, cleared of the china figurines that had belonged to her sister. There was an oval of paler wallpaper where a tinted portrait of Mary and Clyde used to hang. The house was silent, not even settling. Then Silver heard a whispery sound. A ragged intake of breath. With a start she turned her head. There was someone sitting on the shadowed bottom stair. For one disoriented instant she thought it was Gracie. But stepping through the doorway she realized that it was her niece instead. “Annie Clyde?” Silver asked, kneeling before her. What she saw sped up her heart. The lamp was running low on oil but she could tell anyhow that the girl was in trouble. Annie Clyde’s eyes were glazed over. There was heat coming off her in waves. “Where is everybody?”
“Gone,” Annie Clyde said, her voice a scratch. “They have babies of their own.”
“Come on. Let’s get you in the bed.”
Annie Clyde shook her head. “I can’t get up.”
“You’re all right,” Silver said, willing it to be true.
“No,” Annie Clyde said. “It’s my foot.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I stepped on a locust thorn.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
Silver took hold of Annie Clyde’s foot. It was wrapped in a discolored bandage, stained with seepage. She untied the wrapping and saw that the foot was bloated, red and hot to the touch with streaks of infection climbing up the ankle. “Oh,” she breathed. “I believe you’ve got blood poisoning, Annie Clyde. We can’t fool around with that. As run-down as you are, it’s hit you hard. I better go to the road and see if I can find somebody that’ll take you to the doctor.”
Annie Clyde shook her head again. “I have to be here when Gracie gets back.”
“You need medicine,” Silver insisted. “Just let me go down to the road.”
Annie Clyde reached out and clutched Silver’s wrist. “Don’t leave me.”
Silver stared down at her niece’s burning fingers. “Then let’s cool you off some.”
“I can’t walk,” Annie Clyde said.
Silver looked around as if for some kind of help but she and Annie Clyde were alone in the stillness of the house. Being taller and sturdier than Annie Clyde, Silver stooped and picked her niece up without much effort, like the girl child she might have had. Annie Clyde was light on the way up the stairs, a bundle of rags. Silver remembered the way to Mary’s upper bedroom but she watched her step with only the sallow shine from the front room to guide her. After lowering Annie Clyde to the feather mattress she ripped off a length of the sheet to make a fresh bandage, working almost in the dark. She went to the washstand in the corner, a cloth draped on the side of its flowered porcelain bowl. Annie Clyde closed her eyes as Silver swabbed her face, her throat, her wrists. Silver thought her niece was dozing, hair spread out and arms limp at her sides. Then Annie Clyde said with her eyes still shut, “I told her she’d be the death of me.”
Silver dropped the washcloth back into the flowered bowl. “You ain’t dying,” she said, too loudly in the quiet room. “All you need is medicine. I’ll see if I can find something here.”
“No,” Annie Clyde said. “Stay with me.”
Silver felt the prick of tears. She felt all the years she had lived alone, every stick of wood she had chopped and pail of water she had toted, every winter she had lasted through, every night with the woods pressing in around the weak flicker of her light. “Close your eyes,” she said.
When Annie Clyde obeyed Silver hurried down the stairs, taking the lamp with her into the kitchen. In there the walls were sooty from the woodstove, the mildewed curtains hanging limp. She found nothing much in the larder besides a sack of meal and a stack of newspapers for lighting cook fires. She flung open the cupboard doors, loose on their rusty hinges. Finally she yanked back the skirt under the sink basin and found what she had been rummaging for. An old bootleg jar of her own chartered whiskey, half gone from many seasons of treating croups and fevers. She remembered this batch by the beryl-colored glass. Dandelion, horsetail, nettle and birch leaves. She went back upstairs with the lamp in one hand and the medicine in the other, the risers groaning under her shoes. She paused in the doorway watching Annie Clyde breathe. She was reminded too much of the night Mary died, when she came into this same room with her teeth rattling in the February cold. Only now it was too hot. She put down the lamp on the bedside table and opened the window. Then she went to the bed and sat on the edge. “Here,” she said, propping the back of Annie Clyde’s head to let her drink. “Take you a few sups of this.”
Annie Clyde grimaced but didn’t protest, although the whiskey was strong. At Silver’s urging, she took several long gulps before falling back on the pillows. As Annie Clyde rested Silver listened to the weather outside. Studying her own distorted reflection in the windowpanes she began to talk, not knowing at first what would come out. “I won’t ask you to forgive me,” she said. “For none of this.” She stole a glance at Annie Clyde. The girl’s eyes were open but they seemed unfocused. “I hope you’re listening to me. Because I don’t believe I can tell it twice.”
Annie Clyde moistened her parched lips but didn’t speak.
“I seen Amos out here yesterday, not much after dinnertime. I didn’t say nothing to you or Ellard because I didn’t think Amos took Gracie. I still don’t think so. I ain’t saying I trust him all the way, but I don’t believe he would bother a child.” Silver hesitated. “He’s been a friend to me. I was frightened of what might happen to him if I said he was hanging around your house.”
Annie Clyde’s brow furrowed. “You saw Amos?” she asked, her speech whiskey-thick.
“Yes. But that ain’t the worst of it.” Silver tried to swallow down a thickness in her own throat. “I saw Gracie, too. I guess I was the last one to see her.” Silver shut her mouth but the words were already out. “I reckon it was about two o’clock. I decided to go ahead and take the dog, so I didn’t have to be around when you left.” She tried to remember it right. She’d walked out of the cornfield flustered after her run-in with Amos, knowing she didn’t have the will to come back down the mountain tomorrow and see the Dodsons off. She’d passed James’s Model A Ford at the end of the track and pressed on to the front door. She’d rapped on the wood but the wind had carried her knock away. When nobody came she’d gone around to the side. Her hair had been whipping as she stood on the stoop but she could still hear raised voices from the kitchen. “I meant to tell you I was taking the dog but it sounded like you was fussing with your husband,” Silver said. “I wanted no part of that. You never asked me a favor before and I wanted to do it, but my nerves was all to pieces. I went back down the steps not hardly knowing if I was coming or going. I was fixing to give up and head home, until I seen her.” Gracie. Standing under the elm where the dog was tied, reaching up to catch the blowing leaves, chattering to him like he was another child. Silver would have gone on up the mountain, no matter how much it hurt to come back the next morning as they loaded their truck, if Gracie hadn’t been there looking so much like Mary. She thought it might kill her to see her sister’s granddaughter leaving Yuneetah.