It was a woman named Beulah Kesterson who took him in when he was a child. She found him one morning while she was out gathering morels. She was not old back then, her braid not yet the ivory it would turn. She looked at him in thoughtful silence, her mouth sunken over her gums. When she leaned down at last to take his hand, the pouch of fortune-telling bones she wore on a string around her neck dangled before his eyes. She led him to her cabin and scrubbed his ears, trimmed his unruly hair, boiled cornmeal mush in a kettle over the fireplace cinders and set the bowl in his hands to warm them. She called him Amos, after a twin brother that died when she was born. Though he looked old enough to talk he wouldn’t speak to her. When he finally did a few months later, the first words out of his mouth were a lie. He had stood watching a neighbor’s coonhound dig up Beulah’s cucumber seedlings and then waited for her to come out to the garden. She leaned on her hoe and said in disgust, “I wish they’d tie that blamed dog.” Amos looked up into her face and told her, “I did it.” Her eyebrows lifted some at the sound of his voice. When she recovered from the shock of hearing him speak, she asked what for. He couldn’t answer. Then she inspected his hands and saw no crumbs of dirt. When she asked why he wanted to lie on himself, he couldn’t answer that either. He’d been a liar ever since.
Amos had stayed with Beulah Kesterson for as long as he could stand it. But a roof, even one with holes, was like a coffin lid over him. At night he’d lie awake with his eyes moving over the cabin’s fissured logs, its moldy chinking, the rotting beams of the rafters showing bright coins of moon. In the daytime he’d stand in the shadows beside the hearth as Beulah cast her bones over a flowered tablecloth for the townspeople of Yuneetah, divining the paths their futures would take. Most often they were amorous young girls with chewed bottom lips, but once a wife had brought her sick husband in a horse-drawn cart and led him into the cabin leaning on her shoulder. He looked like a walking skeleton and Beulah said with her hand on the woman’s back, “You and me both know I got no reason to cast these bones.” The woman crumpled to the cabin floor and wept out loud as her husband looked on, his lips cracked and lids leaking viscous fluid. Beulah sent them away with a powder she had ground from herbs. When Amos asked if it would save him, she said, “No, it won’t.” After that he began roaming to escape Yuneetah’s troubles, through blackberry thickets and laurel hells, down cow paths and cliffside trails. By around thirteen he knew every inch of the town to its farthest reaches. He’d explored the clefts of the mountains and the creases of the valley. He had followed the riverbank into Whitehall County. One day he knew it was time to find out whatever there was beyond the hills.
While the townspeople hadn’t liked Amos, they’d tolerated him out of respect for Beulah. But when he came back several years later with a puckered web of scar tissue where his right eye used to be, his foreignness was too much for them. Meeting him on the road they might nod in greeting or even stop to ask where he’d been, but they never stood long in the shadow he cast before him, as if his return portended bad weather or death. If anyone had asked what they wanted to know, he would have told them. He had lost his right eye fighting with another man in a boxcar. All day the man had huddled in the corner sleeping or pretending to sleep on a pallet of grain sacks. As the sun lowered and a rind of moon appeared over the hilltops blurring past, Amos had let the rocking train and the smell of the trackside meadows through the open door put him to sleep. The man had crawled out of the dark and set upon him before he had a chance to pull the weapon he’d made from a rag-wrapped bottle shard out of his coat pocket. They had struggled until they both were winded, the man’s rancid breath puffing in grunts between the brown stumps of his teeth. If Amos hadn’t been caught by surprise, he wouldn’t have been overpowered. He would have thrust the glass into the grizzled wattles of the man’s neck and felt the man’s hot blood pumping over his fingers. Amos never knew what the man was after. Rather than let the man have whatever it was, he’d leapt from the train and tumbled down an embankment into a gully. When he’d lurched to his feet, there was a branch protruding from his eye socket. He wasn’t alarmed once he knew he would live. He had no particular attachment to his right eye. But he did have some attachment to Yuneetah, and to its people, whether they knew it or not.
Now Amos had walked a fair distance without seeing a single one of them, or any other living thing, as if even the squirrels and wild turkeys had cleared out. He’d come to Joe Dixon’s store ahead on the left, a weathered shack plastered with signs advertising Red Seal lye, Royal Crown cola and Clabber Girl baking powder. On the last Saturday of each month he and Beulah would leave the hollow to trade, pulling the lace she tatted and the medicines she made behind them in a wooden cart. As Amos neared he saw the door propped open and followed a worn footpath to the porch, the leaf-littered steps groaning as he climbed them, the door creaking when he pushed it the rest of the way open. He went in and stood for a while. All the familiar clutter was gone. No straw brooms hanging from the ceiling, no penny candy filling the glass bins of the counter, no shelves lined with sundries. He had never seen the place empty. There was usually someone sitting on a carbide barrel paring his fingernails. Joe Dixon leaning back in a straight chair, his big belly straining at the buttons of his shirt. Joe would sometimes offer Amos a cold drink in hopes of getting rid of him. The wind picked up, scattering leaves over the threshold and across the gritty planks of the floor. Amos glanced around. The cooler was still there against one wall. He approached it and lifted the lid. There was nothing inside but mildew. After a second he closed it back. He shifted his bindle and went out again.
Back on the road nothing stirred but him and the river, its current still rushing as it spread into a lake. Anywhere he went in the town he could hear water running. Beulah had told him Yuneetah was the white man’s corruption of an Indian word for the spirit of the river. She said the Cherokees who once lived on its shores had called it Long Man, with his head in the mountains and his feet in the lowlands. The river had surely seen and heard all that had happened in the place it flowed through. It must have noticed too those who had lived for so long on its banks moving off one by one. With the young leaving and the old getting buried, all the river was to them would be forgotten. Even the spirit the Cherokees worshipped had been defeated by the men who built dams, harnessed to run their machinery. Amos had vowed long ago not to give them the sweat of his brow. He wouldn’t submit to the ones in charge, who would have his hair shorn and his offending eye socket covered with a patch. He wouldn’t become a thing they could use, as they’d figured out how to use the river’s power. It sighed hidden behind a bank topped with shade trees, roots snarled like witch’s hair in the dampish brown dirt. That bank dirt had looked so good to him when he was a boy that he’d dug out a clot and held it in his mouth. His first impulse had been to spit out the bitterness but as it melted on his tongue other tastes had come, of lichen and peat moss and rain. He had swallowed and carried it around for a while, to see what would happen. Nothing did, he thought at the time. But maybe his insides had formed around it.