Amos had rowed the boat out to the middle of the spillway, the bluff drawing closer with each stroke, when he heard the sound of movement somewhere behind him. His ears had grown attuned long ago to approaching footsteps, however distant. When he looked over his shoulder he saw the watchman standing on the dock, a tall figure in a hard hat and coveralls. Then the voice that had once come from up on the highway echoed out across the water, shattering the silent calm. “Halt where you are!” From forty yards away Amos couldn’t make out the features of the watchman’s face but he could see in the last indigo evening light the rifle the man was pointing. Perhaps the power company had discovered their dynamite missing after all. Perhaps they had been watching and waiting for Amos. In one swift motion he switched from the bow to the stern of the boat and began rowing backward toward the west abutment wall, still keeping as close to the dam’s spillway as he could manage, counting on the watchman not being skilled enough to shoot a moving target. “You better do what I told you, buddy!” the man shouted after him.
“You don’t want to pull that trigger,” Amos shouted back. “I’ve got a boatload of dynamite here.” But before the words were out of his mouth he heard the whine of a bullet passing close to his ear, ricocheting off the water between his boat and the dam. He saw another worker running down the grass embankment along the east abutment wall to join the first man on the dock. Amos realized that he wouldn’t make it to where the vulnerable seam met the bluff. Halfway there would have to be close enough. He was reaching into his trouser pocket for the corked glass bottle of matches when he heard another report. The next second he felt something like a great fist striking the left side of his body, fire ripping through his upper arm. The bottle flew from his hand as he fell backward. His head knocked against the boat and he caught a glimpse of the dam’s tower, its flags hanging two hundred feet above him. He took a stunned instant to collect his wits before scrabbling to his knees, the rowboat wobbling as he dragged up his struck arm. He looked ahead across the water and saw the two men on the dock, blurred through his tearing eye. His sleeve was soaked with blood but he felt no pain. Only dizziness.
The men would be rowing out in the other boat. He would have to think, as hard as it was to concentrate. He reached down between the seats of his own boat where the bundles of dynamite still rested, darker than the light wood of the bottom. As he fumbled them up by the detonating cord another bullet struck him in the chest on the right, near his shoulder. This time he flailed over the stern and splashed into the lake. His eye bulged in the swirling murk, his lungs already grasping to fill. He could see the bottom of the boat growing smaller as his coat, weighted with the ball-peen hammer, sank him fast. Beside the boat’s shadow on the surface of the lake, Amos noticed his hat bobbing. He had gotten years of use from the hat. He was seldom without it. Somehow the sight of it drifting away told him that he was dying. He had to use whatever time there was left to finish what he’d started. It took an almost inhuman act of will to wrestle out of his coat while sinking underwater. When he was finally shed of its weight he battled upward, swimming one-armed. He broke the surface with a gasp and hauled himself up by the side of the boat, nearly capsizing it, coughing bitter water. He couldn’t feel the wounds spurting warm blood inside his shirt. Balancing on the boat’s edge, too weak to hoist himself over inside, he reached down into the shallow well and managed with his arms to gather the three tethered bundles of dynamite from between the seats up under his chin. With his left hand he groped around the bottom until he located the bottle he’d dropped when the first bullet struck him. He ground his teeth as he pried at the cork then shook out a turpentine-treated matchstick. When he swiped the match against a patch of fairly dry-looking wood on the bow-side seat he had a moment of certainty that it wouldn’t flare alight. But with the other boat nearing, rocking the bloody waters with its oars, the match head burst into dancing flame.
As the second rowboat drew within yards of where Amos’s own still floated near the middle of the spillway with him clinging to its side, he touched the match to the long fuse trailing from the head of the railroad spike. He held the flame against the detonating cord with the strength draining out of him, sensing the watchman taking aim again.
When the blue flame began to travel down the wick Amos sucked in a breath that he would never exhale. He slipped back into the lake cradling the bundles of dynamite as the watchman’s bullet splintered the boat side not an inch above his skull. He had lost the hammer with his coat. He couldn’t attach the charges to the dam with the railroad spike. He’d have to sink them with his body, as close to its foundation as he could get before they exploded. He’d have to press the dynamite against the concrete with his chest. He didn’t need to swim much. The dam was a yard from the boat. He held out his injured arm until his hand bumped the wall.
Amos’s blood flowed out in ribbons as the impounded waters of the river Long Man flowed back into him. But he would drown before he bled to death. He knew the feeling from his veiled memories of being cast into a flood. He kept his eye open for as long as he could to see the dam, his shoulder grazing its concrete as he sank down its length toward the foundation, hugging the first bundle of charges in his numbing arms, the other two tangled in his legs, dangling knotted to the lit detonating cord. The flame went on traveling down the reinforced fuse, harder to drown than a man. Outside the halo of the wick’s burning trail the lake was as black as the night outside Beulah’s cabin in winter, as cold as the fallen snow. As he curled himself around the dynamite and turned to press it with his bleeding chest against the wall, Amos’s last conscious thought was of the promise he was breaking to the woman who had loved him like a mother. Not of bringing down the dam or any of his reasons for trying. His eye was still open when the blast shot a glaring fireball along the wall but he didn’t see it. His soul was released into the water a moment before his ashes. His life, begun with a lie, had ended with one.
AUGUST 3, 1936
Outside of Clinchfield Regional Hospital, Sam Washburn sat in his car. The hospital was a brick building shaded by oaks, situated on a rise overlooking the small but industrialized town. It was on the other side of Whitehall County, about forty miles from the Walker farm. Washburn had relocated several families to Clinchfield. He could see the lights of the knitting mill, workers pulling the graveyard shift. Farther off was the mountain he’d come across before sundown, following Dr. Brock’s Buick. Nobody would have noticed if Washburn had turned and gone back to Knoxville once he delivered Gracie Dodson to the doctor’s office, but it hadn’t occurred to him. He wasn’t thinking as he rushed toward Whitehall County with a dying child in his backseat. What happened when they arrived was a blur. There were others in the waiting room but the woman at the desk took one look at the child and led them down a hallway. The doctor, old but not doddering, came out to meet them. He took charge right away when Annie Clyde held the child out to him with helpless eyes. Washburn shouldn’t have followed them but he felt swept along. When he saw that he was in the way he stepped out to the hall again but stood there looking in at the examining room. Dr. Brock took the child to a white enameled table under a floor lamp. He handed Annie Clyde the soiled suit coat, which she clutched to her breast as if it still held her daughter, then went to his instrument cabinet. When he lifted the child’s lids and shined his light into her eyes she stirred and fussed. Washburn raised his hands to his head, looking for his fedora to take off, but it was lost in the hayfield. Then he paced circles until Dr. Brock came out with the child in his arms to tell the receptionist he was driving the family to the hospital.