When James finally reached the woods it seemed the hour had changed from morning to gloaming. Bugs swarmed in shafts of golden light, mosquitoes hovered over marshes lying flat and still between the trunks. The peepers and cicadas had come back out, snake doctors buzzing in darts and swoops. James didn’t feel the gnats in his eye corners. He didn’t bother to blink them out, or slap at the sweat bees teasing his ears. Near certain that he was running toward his daughter’s death, for as long as she had been missing, he barreled forward anyway. By the time he heard freshets trickling down the mountain his breath was sobbing, his legs giving out. When he reached the place where his horse Ranger was buried he came to a halt, the mattock hanging at his side. He must have seen the beech across the grave, must have clambered over it as he looked for Gracie. But this whole time, from the second he held the horse bone in his palms, as he crashed through the thicket, he was picturing the cave as he and Dale had left it after they filled it in. A slick pit that Gracie could have slipped into and gotten stuck. Drowning not in the lake but in the wagonload of dirt he had dumped himself. James had been this way more than once with the other searchers, shouting Gracie’s name over the rain until they lost their voices, and never once considered the ground could have swallowed her up like it did Dale’s house.
Catching his breath with his hands on his knees, James noticed that Rusty had been digging around the beech trunk. Ferns were disturbed, white horse bones scattered. But the truth didn’t dawn on him until the dog raced to the end of the trunk and began to burrow again, spraying dirt with his hindquarters raised and his nose hidden under the scaly roots. James straightened and took off after Rusty to where the root ball bowed scraping the softened ground. Thinking his little girl’s name but too winded to call it, he dropped to his knees and shoved the dog aside. There was no way a grown man could shoulder through the tangle. Rusty had made progress, but the trough he’d dug wasn’t deep enough for James. His first instinct was to make a trench for himself using the shovel end of the mattock. He worked for what felt like too long before attempting to wriggle under the roots, his face printing the mud and his nostrils plugging with it. But James couldn’t force his way in. He backed out and groped for the mattock, raised it high and began to hack at the sod-thatched root ball. Chopping with the pick end, guttural breaths wrenching from his throat, pulp flying into his mouth, the cuts Amos’s teeth had made on his knuckles bleeding. He cleaved and severed until slivers were lying everywhere, the mangled roots flayed back. Then Rusty rushed into the cavern the roots had once made and stood in the rubble, barking so hard that foam flew from his jaws. With the morning sun penetrating the leaves overhead, James saw the same thing the dog did. There was an opening in the packed earth. Something like the groundhog holes he found along the fencerows bordering the farm. Too much like the last hole he had looked in. He dropped the mattock and stretched out flat once more, bars of light striping his filthy shirt. He slid forward until he was near enough to peer inside. But this time he didn’t see a child’s skull on the floor of a cave. He saw nothing, blinded by tears and sweat. When he rubbed his eyes he still couldn’t see. There wasn’t enough light.
Though he feared widening the hole with his hands might send more mud collapsing in, he had no choice but to furrow back the loamy earth with his fingers. He kept shoveling handfuls until there was enough room for him to lean inside, until there was enough light to make out a hump at the bottom of the burrow. It looked like a mound of clay. But as more sun filtered into the well of the cave, more of his child was revealed to him. Like the day she was born, pulling back the blanket to discover one part of her at a time so as not to make all of her cold. He rubbed his eyes to clear them again. Gracie was down there. Lying in a knot on her side. Knees drawn up and chin tucked. Under the mud he saw her dirty dress. Her dark curls. Her feet, small and creased. Not much bigger now than when he kissed them for the first time. But unlike that first time, her toes were blue instead of pink. A near-crippling dread came over James. He thrust his arm inside the cave to the shoulder, grasping with desperation. He could feel how chilly it was down there where his daughter had lain for two days and nights without him. She was too still. She should have been shivering. He couldn’t let her lie there any longer unmoving. If he could just snag the hem of her dress. If he could graze one curl of her hair. If he could touch her anywhere. He pushed in deeper, arm swiping, holding his breath until it burst out in frustration as his fingers skimmed nothing besides the dank air. But when he backed out of the hole some he found that his shoulders had forged its mouth wider, flooding the cave with more light.
Now James could see the side of Gracie’s face, blotched with dried red blooms. He could see the gash on her forehead clotting beneath the matted clumps of her hair. She looked like a doll carved from wax. Nothing like the child he last saw eating apple pie with her hands in the kitchen. Gracie wasn’t far below him. But he didn’t know if she was really there in the cave with him at all, or in some other place where he could never reach her. As lost to him as she had been when he opened his eyes this morning. James’s will failed him. The strength ran out of his arm. It dangled there useless. That’s when Annie Clyde’s words came back to him as though she spoke into his ear. No matter what, alive or dead, James had to give Gracie back to her mother. “Please Jesus,” he whispered, his tendons stretching taut. His whole self strained toward his child. He needed to widen the hole, to dig and shovel more with the mattock, but getting up would be too much like leaving her. He couldn’t let her out of his sight. Rusty barked and paced somewhere behind him, treading over and over his outstretched legs, his scrabbling boots. Dirt crumbs sifted and water trickled down the crags of the narrow cave walls. But to James everything had stopped. He was so close. When his fingertips made contact at last, just a brush against the sole of her foot, sparks rocketed up his arm. “Gracie,” he said, but she didn’t respond. “Gracie,” he crooned to her as he used to when she slept in her crib, when he tickled the bottoms of her feet to rouse her. “Gracie,” he pleaded, beginning to weep. “Wake up.” And down there in the pit, struggling against the blood that crusted it shut, his daughter’s eye fluttered open.
Annie Clyde Dodson had been asleep for what might have been minutes or days. By the light in the room she guessed it to be around nine but the clock she’d always kept near the bed was packed away in a crate. She had been dreaming that James was gone out to harvest the corn before the water took it. Standing in the box wagon holding the reins, opening the shucks with his peg, scooping corn into the crib with the neighbors that helped him each season. But then the dream of James merged into another one, of Rusty ranging the hills, poking his nose into burrows and dens to sniff the musk other animals had left behind, exploring thickets and caverns and shadowed breaches between plunging rock faces where his barking echoed off the cool walls. The sound had seemed to come from outside of Annie Clyde’s sleep. It seemed to have been the thing that woke her. She pushed herself up on her elbows and listened, then rested back on the pillows. She had vague memories of Silver sitting on the edge of the bed. Some of what her aunt said came back to her. But Annie Clyde couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t dreamed Silver and Rusty both. There was nobody in the room with her now. When she sat up the walls spun. She held her sweaty head until her dizziness passed. Then she lowered herself off the bed, crying out from the pain in her foot. She steeled herself before limping to the window to see the elm where the dog had been tethered. He still wasn’t there, but the barking had been so real.