He smiled. “There’s at least two or three left.”
“Well,” she said. “Let’s cook some of these up. Then you better get on down the road.”
She thought at first that he was going to ignore her. But finally he responded without looking up from the mussels. “I told you. I’ll head out after I’ve finished my business.”
Beulah shifted in the boats of her shoes, reached out of habit for her discarded pouch. “I need you to listen to what I’m telling you for once,” she said. “You can’t go on doing wrong, Amos. One of these days you’ll answer for it.”
He pried open a mussel with his knife, plucked out a grain of pearl and slipped it into his pocket. “I have no problem with that,” he said. “As long as the same rule applies to everybody.”
“This river will always be here. It’ll keep on running, no matter how they dam it up.”
“I’ve been all over the country. I’ve seen how it is. Once the electric power and the factories come around, nobody in this valley will remember what the river gave them.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “This river’s underneath their skin. They won’t forget.”
“They think they’re saved,” he said. “But a hundred dams wouldn’t fix this mess.”
“Well. I’ve lived a lot longer than you, Amos. Good times always come around again.” Beulah paused, standing on the shoals where they had dug when he was a boy without the dam watching them through the trees. “Promise me, son,” she said, looking downstream and then into his eye, its white turned crimson. “Promise you won’t do nothing else to get yourself hurt.”
Amos regarded Beulah, studied her face. His own face was no longer blank. Everything he had seen and done seemed written there. She guessed she had never been certain before then if he loved her back. “I promise,” he said. Beulah’s breath came ragged but she willed away her tears. They went back to the mussels, working on for a spell in silence besides the running river. Finally she noticed that Amos had cracked open a dripping shell. He stood gazing down into it.
“What is it?” she asked. “Did you cut yourself?” He tipped the big shell to one side, until something that Beulah couldn’t see rolled into his palm. She put down her musseling pan and went to him. He held out his hand. There was a good-sized pearl in it, misshapen and gritty. “They laws,” she said, as he held it aloft in the sun. Then he turned and offered it to her.
“Here,” he said.
Beulah stepped back. “What?”
“Take it.”
“Lord, Amos. Have you lost your mind?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“There ain’t no telling how much that’s worth. You take it to a druggist somewhere and he’ll send it off to New York for you. Why, you could live off of that for a long time.”
Amos shook his head. “It’s for you.”
“I don’t need it. You’re the one without a home.”
He stepped closer. “I want you to have it.”
“What for, Amos?”
“Please. Take it.”
It occurred to her that since she’d found Amos he had never asked her to do anything. She held out her hand and accepted the pearl. She lifted it to her nose to smell the river that formed it. “See,” Beulah said. “I told you things’ll get better. I don’t need bones to show me that.”
It was almost sunset when Amos made his way back downstream to the dam. After Beulah left him at the riverside he lingered over the remains of their cook fire, smoke still rolling from the sodden kindling they’d used. He slouched over the guttering flames prodding with a stick at the charred mussel shells in a ring of stones until the shadows of the hemlocks behind him stretched out long on the rocky shore. Then he put on his hat, hoisted up his bindle and faded into the trees. He walked through the shade a mile or so until he came out again on the hillside where only yesterday at dawn he had scouted the dam and its buildings from the east. He knew he’d be exposed in the open for several minutes as he emerged from the hardwoods at the top of the slope and went across the closed highway’s pavement, then skidded down an embankment on the lake side of the dam and followed the sand a ways before receding again into a peninsula of evergreens. It took him some time but not much to find the ancient spruce he was looking for, its roots twisting up from a pile of needles. There was a hollow near its base and he got on his knees to reach into the knotty depths. Yesterday morning, after leaving Beulah’s shed with her bolt cropper and a burlap sack, he’d made a stop on the way to his camp in the clearing.
If the cinder-block hut in the woods along the stone wall marking the boundaries of the watershed had been empty when Amos broke the padlock he might have left Yuneetah already. But the hut wasn’t empty. There had been enough light when he pushed in the door. He had stood in the opening with the rain pouring off the corrugated eave above him, running downhill and away from the hut, built off the ground to keep its contents dry. Against the block walls he’d found sacks of cement, digging implements, and stacks upon stacks of rectangular wooden boxes with a maker’s label stamped on their sides. From the cobwebs he deduced that the building hadn’t been entered in weeks, perhaps a month. Amos had stepped inside the stale shadows and opened the hinged lid of a box on top. Yellow sticks, cylinders lying end to end. He recognized this brand of plastic explosive from his time blasting tunnels through mountains. The TVA had set off these charges to loosen tons of rock from the riverbed. They drilled holes, a hundred or more, then blew them clean with compressed air. They rammed a stick into each hole, pouring sand in and tamping it down. Then they wired the fuses into a central switch. He inspected the sticks to make sure they weren’t sweating. Unless dynamite was frozen then thawed or stored in the heat, it wasn’t all that unstable. It required a detonator to go off, unlike in the old days when pure nitroglycerin was used for blasting. Amos had carried dynamite by hand many times, working in coal mines and on road crews. But as he filled Beulah’s burlap sack with explosives, he transferred them with the same care he’d first learned to take as a powder monkey at a quarry.
Yesterday morning he had made two trips from the cinder-block hut to this hollow spruce he’d discovered along the lakeshore. Then he’d covered his footprints, rearranged the boxes and slung the broken padlock far out across the reservoir where it sank without making much of a splash. Amos assumed the watchman didn’t come up the trail along the watershed often. He had found no tracks but his own. Now he hoped the power company hadn’t discovered thirty sticks of their dynamite missing, as he eased out what was stashed in the spruce. The burlap sack was damp but the explosives inside were waterproof. Besides the sack, there were two more bundles of dynamite knotted along a length of the detonating cord he’d brought out of Nebraska. He had made a second bundle from his undershirt and a third from a mildewed blanket. He had tied one end of the detonating cord to the head of a railroad spike found lying corroded with rust along the tracks, leaving some of the cord trailing as a fuse. He would drive the spike into the concrete of the dam with a ball-peen hammer he’d stolen from a blacksmith shed. The hammering might draw attention, but by then it would be nearly over. The chain of charges would explode almost in unison after he lit the fuse. In his trouser pocket he kept a small corked glass bottle of wooden matches. He had dipped the match heads in turpentine, which would keep them water resistant for months. But he’d sealed them in the bottle to be certain. The fuse was reinforced as well, coated in olive drab plastic. Even soaked it would detonate, as long as there was a dry end to ignite. Even underwater the wick would burn. Soon after sundown Amos could place the three bundles in one of the two rowboats tied to the dock near the dam if he chose. Though he’d made preparations he hadn’t decided to carry out his plan. There was light left in the sky. He would know in the haziness before nightfall, after bats had begun to dive around the dam’s tower.