Then she wandered to the end of the trunk where the root ball arched above her head, thatched with sod ripped from the forest floor. It looked to her like an umbrella made of twisted roots. Some were braided pigtails and some coiled bedsprings, some claw fingers laced together. She squatted once again in the leaves plastering the ground and peered into the shadows between where the bowed roots parted. But she might never have crawled inside if not for a glimmer in the darkness. Just enough light penetrating the gloom under the umbrella to bounce off something shiny. Enough to make her curious. She found where the hanging roots were raised a little off the ground and got down on her belly. She reached for the shiny thing but her arm wasn’t that long. She gave up and tried wriggling underneath. Her dress rucked up as she slid on the orange mud into someplace her mama or daddy wouldn’t fit. Later they would search around the fallen beech, would even shine their lanterns on the tangled root ball, without ever knowing.
Gracie’s face brightened when saw what was glinting. It was the present the man gave her in the cornfield. She’d forgotten him and the toy both until that moment. Because she was three she didn’t wonder how or why the tin top had ended up under a tree. She couldn’t have known that her mama tossed it there a few hours ago. She scooted in farther, as she often burrowed into snowball bushes. She tried to get up on her knees but the arched roof of the root cavern was too low. She was reaching to pick up the toy when the mud began to shift beneath her weight.
Before she had time to fear a hole opened up. The ground collapsed and swallowed her. Either the fallen tree had created the hole or the weakened cave ceiling had caused the tree to fall. It didn’t matter. Gracie dropped four feet. It wasn’t too far. It was more how she landed, hitting her head and biting her tongue almost in two, mounds of clay piling on top of her. From below the hole was a source of pearly light that limned the moss dusting the limestone walls, narrow like a chimney stack. If Gracie had been able to move farther in, she would have found a blocked passage to another deeper and wider cave, one her daddy had used as a grave for his horse. On the first day and night Gracie didn’t wake at all. On the second day she cried and tried to call for her mama but her tongue was too big. Her head hurt too much. There was just enough space for her to lie in a knot with her knees drawn up to her chin. When rainwater ran down the narrow chimney stack of the mossy cave walls there was no room to get away. By the third morning she was lying in a puddle. She was cold and dreamed the stove had gone out. She was hungry and dreamed her mama was boiling oats. She wanted to go home and dreamed of the farm between the hills, cloud shadows passing over the fields. She dreamed of waving a stick with Rusty chasing her. She dreamed of other animals she had seen. Going across the road with her daddy where there was a ruddy calf in a pen with a leaky, pale pink nose. Going with her mama into the moldy shade of the springhouse and finding a mink curved around the butter crock. Stalking blackbirds that descended on the field like a funeral train. Running after them when they lifted off all together, the apples in her dress pockets bouncing against her knees.
More than anything she wanted her mama and daddy. It was them she dreamed of most. Riding on her daddy’s shoulders to church in her blue dress with tiny pink rosebuds. Him lifting her onto the wagon seat and showing her a garter snake he had found in the weeds. Walking out to the field with her mama to take him his dinner in a basket. Taking him water in hot weather, the cool smell of the earthen jug as she carried it across the baking furrows making her wish she was small enough to crawl inside. Lying in her crib pulled up close to her mama’s side of the bed, falling asleep with their hands clasped through the wooden slats. Getting an earache and nestling into the feather mattress between them, her mama pouring warm sweet oil into her ears. Sometimes she woke first and lay listening to them breathe. When it thundered she would seek out one of them to be rocked. When she got sick or stung, got a splinter or a tick, they held and kissed her. There had been no time before this when she cried and wasn’t comforted.
For two days Gracie had been by herself in the cave, buried under an avalanche of mud that dried to thick scales then cracked and fell off when she stirred. Her eyes were gummed shut by the matted blood from her scalp. When she finally struggled them open, she came out of a twilight state into a near darkness. Sometimes she turned her face to sip the water collecting in the craters of the cave floor, the same rain that filled the reservoir keeping her alive, but the effort hurt her bitten tongue. She had stopped crying for her mama, too, because her own voice ached her head. When light fell into the hole at dawn of that third day she rolled over in her sleep, trying to get warm. But she couldn’t wake up, even when Rusty barked. When he failed to force his shoulders through the roots he dug around the trunk, nosing deep enough to unearth some of the horse’s bones, already excavated and strewn about by other animals over the years. But as hard as Rusty tried he couldn’t get to Gracie. He scrambled among the roots and clods and rocks whimpering, too far from the house to be heard. By then it was Sunday and almost all of the searchers had gone home to church. Tomorrow they would go back to their jobs in factories and knitting mills, tobacco fields and logging camps. Yuneetah was empty again. Lying unfound, Gracie stopped moving. As the hours passed she opened her eyes less and less to look for her mama and daddy. She felt less and less like rolling over into the light filtering through the hole. She had lost the will to suck at the lukewarm water that came from the sky. She was too weak to cry anymore. Even one day was too long for a child to lie buried in the ground, given up for dead.
James Dodson opened his eyes at seven o’clock, having heard a sound in his sleep. His mouth was furred and foul-tasting. His hands were so swollen from the beating he’d given Amos that he could hardly open his fingers. His throbbing head was almost too weighted to lift. For an unclear moment after waking he thought he was taking a nap with his wife and child, like they did sometimes after Sunday dinner. It was good to sleep up there on summer afternoons, the bedroom shaded by the close trees. They could hear branches creaking if the window was open, a breeze puffing in the ruffled white curtains. When he blinked the blurriness from his eyes the first thing he saw was light reflected on the watermarked ceiling, low and slanted under the eave. Not as it looked grayed through storm clouds, but the golden yellow cast it had on fair mornings. Without the sound of rain, beating on the tin and ringing off the leaves, tapping his hat and his coat shoulders, James felt deaf. It took some amount of time for his eyes to readjust to the sun. He looked around the room at the wallpaper, faded green with paler roses. He looked at Gracie’s crib, whitewashed by Annie Clyde when she was still expecting, on the same day that she took a notion to paint all of the doors and windowsills and moldings in the house. He remembered her standing barefoot on sheets of newsprint, belly round beneath her apron. Seeing the crib brought the truth back. It was Sunday, but there had been no nap after church with his wife and child.
James remembered little of the night before. He’d insisted that Wallace and Verna go home and rest. Wallace had to get back to his congregation. He had a sermon to prepare. James meant to lie down and sleep with Annie Clyde. He had sworn to his aunt and uncle that he and Annie Clyde would be fine on their own until morning. But after they left James was overcome. He went out to the barn where he’d stashed a jar of Silver Ledford’s moonshine in the loft. Mary and Clyde Walker had been hard-shell Baptists who wouldn’t have a drop of liquor in their house. Out of respect to them Annie Clyde didn’t keep any herself, other than for medicine. James wasn’t much of a drinker, aside from taking a swig or two with Dale some evenings when their work was done. But last night he had drunk himself blind. James had a faint recollection of Annie Clyde’s aunt being here when he came back inside. The next thing he remembered was taking off his boots, unbuttoning his shirt and dropping it to the floor. Climbing into bed and curving himself around his wife, making a cocoon for her body. Now he lay with his arms around her waist, listening to the absence of drumming on the roof. “Annie Clyde,” he said into her hair, “it ain’t raining.” But she didn’t stir. He became aware of her heat under the cover, like an ember from the fireplace. It brought back what Silver had told him. That Annie Clyde had blood poisoning. James sat up with sudden alarm. He had slept with her, woke holding her, but someway he’d been too deep in his own misery to notice how bad off she was. James took his wife by the shoulder. “Annie Clyde,” he repeated over the thud of his heart. “Are you awake?”