Leaving the cabin again with an apron tied around her waist she made her careful way down the steps, taking them one at a time, then ambled across the yard in her mannish brogans and set off down the hollow. On the footpath she flushed a baby rabbit out of the briars. It went skittering off into the graveyard, its cottontail flashing between the pickets and disappearing into the grass behind them. Beulah half expected when she turned her head that way to see Clyde and Mary Walker standing at the fence. Beckoning her over to whisper into her ear what had become of the grandchild they would never hold. She could almost make them out, Mary still slim with the black curls she had kept until the end. Clyde tall and sunburnt. Beulah would have welcomed such a visitation. But there were only sugar maple trees standing against the fence, shedding the last raindrops. Once the graveyard was underwater Beulah wouldn’t even be able to see the headstones of her old friends.
As she picked her way down the slope she consoled herself with the thought that after this she wouldn’t leave her cabin again for a long time. The blisters on her heels had reopened and her breathing pained her chest. The musseling pan tapped against her aching leg as she limped through the springing grasshoppers down to the track dividing the hollow from the Walker farm. On the way to the road she took care not to twist her ankle, avoiding clods of tire-churned earth and the divots they left, filled with rain. When she glanced at the house and the land it looked vacant. A hawk was circling over the cornfield. A sumac vine with reddening leaves was winding up the fieldstone chimney. The townspeople had given up searching for Gracie Dodson. As the end of this hard decade approached she guessed they dared not hope a little girl declared dead in their minds would be found alive. Beulah couldn’t judge her neighbors. These days she knew too well how a person’s belief could waver. She looked over her shoulder. There wasn’t much of a breeze but she heard a sound carrying across the hayfield, a lonesome creaking. The ropes of Gracie’s swing in the apple tree. Annie Clyde and James were gone as sure as the child was, and the dog that used to come out from under the porch wagging his tail to greet Beulah when she went picking strawberries in the field. She had another intuition, more like sadness than a premonition, that none of them would come back to this place. The last holdout had given in. The last farm was abandoned. There was no turning back from the course Yuneetah had been set on. Standing there on Annie Clyde’s land Beulah could almost feel the forward motion. She had seen and lived through so much but eighty-five years still seemed short to her. It seemed like just the other day she was out in that smokehouse with Mary, packing pork shoulders in salt. Time was unmerciful. She’d always known it, but today the vacant Walker homestead was her proof.
Beulah went out past the cornfield then paused in the middle of the road with a hand on her hip. The Whitehall County line and the mussel bed past the dam were off to the right but she turned for a moment in the opposite direction, where she could see lake water running off the steps of the bank into the gully. Farther down she could see more water through the scratched lenses of her glasses, part of the roadway washed out. Even farther on than that, beyond the sparkling slough, she believed she saw movement. There was a bobbing head coming around the bend. Her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, but she thought it was a man. Tall and reed thin, black-haired with a bindle on his shoulder. The late summer trees gathered behind him, crowded up against the ditch as if to watch him come. As if to see what Beulah’s face would do when she recognized him. Her heart lifted, not only to realize that Ellard had turned her son loose. In that instant it came to her what Amos’s appearance must mean. Gracie Dodson had surely been found alive. If she had been drowned, if her bones were broken, Amos would have been blamed. Beulah hadn’t wanted to agree with Silver Ledford last night but she knew that it was true.
Amos took his time meeting Beulah and she savored every moment until he reached her. For as long as her son remained obscured behind the afternoon heat rising up from the road and the glare of the sun on her glasses, she could feel relieved. It was only when he closed the distance in front of the Dodsons’ cornfield that she was saddened again by his battered face. It looked worse than yesterday. The split cheekbone, the bloody lips. But underneath the bruises he was much like the boy she had found in the woods, even with a missing eye and whiskers. She reached for his coat sleeve, needing to touch him. “They found her,” he said.
“I figured as much.”
“Your bones told you?”
“No, you told me. If she wasn’t found, you wouldn’t be standing here. Was she—”
“Alive.”
“Praise Jesus,” Beulah said. “Is she going to be all right?”
“I thought you’d be able to tell me that.” His eye settled on her bare neck where the frayed pouch used to hang. She couldn’t put anything past him. “Where are they anyway?”
“I got no more use for them,” she said.
“I guess you’ve renounced the old ways. Like the rest of the town.”
She waved her hand. “I ain’t renounced nothing. I reckon a body can have it both ways.”
Amos looked toward the mountain where her cabin was nestled. “How long until they string their power lines up the hollow? Did you divine that before you gave up your bones?”
Beulah looked with him. “I don’t know. Might be nice to have me a washing machine. One of them electric stoves.” She shook his sleeve, changing the subject. “Did you eat yet?”
Amos glanced at the musseling pan. “You must know the answer to that at least.”
“Let’s see if we can dig us up some dinner then,” she said.
Without another word they turned toward Whitehall County. Walking beside Amos as if nothing had happened was bittersweet. It occurred to Beulah that love was so often a burden. She knew it was the last time she would ever be with her son, whichever one of them departed first. She tried to push off the weight of her sadness and appreciate his silent companionship. If she didn’t look at him she could pretend his shoulder was level with hers as they went along, like back in the days when they’d lived together, before he stood two heads taller than her. She could pretend the sound of trickling water was Long Man from some time before and not the power company’s lake running off the banks. When a blackbird burst out of the pines and flew off ahead of them toward the dam she tried not to see it as a portent. She tried not to remember droplets seeping up through her tablecloth, flowers magnified in a circle of bones. She thought how confounding it was that this dark man beside her had been the light of her life. She thought how the Lord’s ways were mysterious and there was no use in questioning them. She’d learned to accept His unfathomable nature, the same way she had quit trying to understand Amos. But she couldn’t quit trying to protect him. She couldn’t ever quit praying that her son would outlive her.
They went past where the dam brooded in the woods without looking that way or mentioning its presence, but Beulah was glad when it was behind them. They kept on until they could see the river between the trunks then took the road a piece more before heading down to the water. She carried her pan to the river’s edge, searching for the mussel bed she had found with her mother back when she was young. Amos went ahead of her with his hat off to fill like a bowl. When he bent over stiffly Beulah could see his soreness, but he didn’t let on. They dug side by side, cold water swirling into Beulah’s shoes. Though they had come almost a mile from the dam its flagged tower rose above the distant sycamore and bluff oak trees. When Amos found a large shell with an iridescent blue sheen he dropped it into her pan, still prone to unexpected acts of kindness. After a while, he took out a pocketknife to hunt for pearls. “Mammy said people used to come in droves to go pearling,” Beulah told him, taking her own shucking knife from her apron. “These days you can’t hardly find any, but back then some man collected two hundred dollars’ worth in a week’s time. Bought hisself a farm.” Amos seemed to listen as she prattled on, talking to hide her mounting unease. She had the same feeling here with him that the vacant Walker house gave her. As relieved as she was in that first moment to see him released from jail, she had to remember the reason she’d turned him in. She knew his mind was moving beneath his stillness. After working a minute longer she looked into his hat. “I believe you got them all.”