As the pines on either side of him turned to acres of farmland, he looked toward the southeast edge of town where the dam would be. He’d heard about it last winter while working alongside another drifter at a tobacco warehouse in North Carolina. Neither of them wore gloves and it had been so cold that when they put down the steel hooks they were using to unload tobacco baskets the hide was ripped from their hands. At the end of a week the other man had said he was moving on. There’s a dam going up in Tennessee, he’d said, a place called Yuneetah. Amos’s head had risen from his work. His chest had constricted around his heart. He had dropped the steel hook to the warehouse floor and walked out into the spitting snow in search of a newspaper. In the warmth of a brick library outside of Asheville he had read all about the Tennessee Valley Authority and their plans to inundate his hometown while the librarian watched him with fearful eyes from her circulation desk. He had ruminated on this knowledge for a while, days becoming weeks as he moved through alleys and dumps with home on his mind, avoiding whatever light there was, electric or lantern or carbide, not letting even the flames of the barrel he warmed himself over play on his face. He’d decided to wait until most of the town was evacuated before returning. Soon enough he would find the dam. He would stand before it and take its measure.
Amos rounded a bend and the Walker farmhouse appeared as if out of nowhere. Behind the house there was an apple tree that he used to visit as a child. In springtime when the leaves were full he liked to hide under the tree until the farmer caught him, lying on a bed of white blossoms with more drifts floating down on top of him. In late summer he would sit among the fallen apples as yellow jackets bored holes in them, eating until his stomach ached. Now he was heading toward fifty with threads of white in his hair, still craving sour juice down his chin. He was old considering the miles he had wandered for the most part on foot, across the country from one shore to the other. Then up into Canada and down into Mexico. Most of the men he had traveled and labored and grifted with were dead. Shot, stabbed, beaten and hung. One he had known since he hopped his first train was stoned to death in Boston during the trolley strike of 1910. Lately Amos’s days felt loaned out to him. He had begun to wonder if he was meant to have lived this long. He’d begun to ask himself what to do with this cheated time, even before he learned about the dam. Yuneetah’s passing only made him more certain that his own was coming.
But he predicted the woman who’d raised him would remain in the hollow for many years after he and the town were gone. Beside the farm Beulah’s cabin was tucked high in the woods, above the taking line. He could get to her by crossing a weedy track dividing the farm from the mountain. It was a long climb between tall, slender tree trunks to reach her place. When he closed his eye he could see it, having leaned there so long, through the bitter winters with snow piled to its windowsills and the warm months with rainstorms curling back its rusted roof tin. Saplings and bushes had mostly claimed back the gap where it stood, thatches of ironweed trailing up to the door. Amos thought how many times he had come and gone from that place, the ground still bald in patches from his passing feet, even though he hadn’t slept there in ages. Some nights he would stand listening to the thump of walnuts falling in the dark outside the circle of shine made by Beulah’s oil lamp. When morning came he would collect them for her, lumpy and specked and pale velvet green. He would bring them to her as payment for something he couldn’t name.
Beulah would welcome him back with a meal if he climbed up the hollow. She always did whenever he returned to Yuneetah. But behind the split-rail fence marking the boundaries of the Walker farm rows of corn rustled in the hot wind. He put his boot on the bottom rail and looked into the stalks, already tasting roasting ears. It was unfortunate for them that they hadn’t got their crop sold before they were relocated, but their loss was his gain. He knew something of the ones who had lived here before the town was evacuated. The last he heard, the daughter of the white-haired farmer who gave him apples had married a Dodson from Whitehall County and they had struggled to live off the rocky soil she inherited. But it looked as though their corn had fared well this season, lush from all the rain. Amos paused as he straddled the fence, thinking he might hear something. Maybe the call of a bobwhite or the yowl of a roving tomcat. He tried to see the farmhouse over the tasseled stalks but only its upper story was visible. After listening a moment more he climbed down into the dappled shade of the rows where it was somewhat cooler, water seeping up from the soaked loam around the edges of his boots. Looking down the row he took off his hat to smooth back his hair, the blades of the stalks drooping over his head. Then he heard another high noise coming from the direction of the house. This time it was unmistakable, the shriek of a child. But in fear or delight, it was hard to tell which.
Amos liked children. He admired their wildness. Even in the low places he kept to they could be found. The sons of junkmen scrambling over humps of refuse and around the hulls of wrecked cars. The daughters of tar-paper shack dwellers dragging naked baby dolls along backwoods railroad tracks. In a Cleveland switchyard he had come upon an old hobo beating a young boy senseless even after he fell limp. Amos had twisted the hobo’s fingers out of joint until they could no longer close into fists. The last child Amos had seen was on his way out of Oklahoma. For days all that he’d passed was coated with soot blown off the plains. When he came to the first stretch of green grass the ditch in front of it was lined with dust-streaked jalopies. In the field below the road there had been a caravan in a circle of tents and a rickety carousel, its circus colors turned dusky. He’d stepped across the ditch and walked down among the migrant families looking for some reminder of happiness. He saw the little girl outside one of the tents holding a sign with a painted white hand, advertising palm readings for twenty-five cents. He went on, lifting anything useful from the tables of wares, but on his way back to the road he came across the seer’s tent again. This time he found the little girl spinning a tin top in a patch of dirt. She looked up at him with trusting eyes. Nobody cared enough to be watching.
Now the corn was parting at the end of the row and he waited for whoever was coming. While his hearing was keen, his eyesight was poor. He couldn’t make out what rushed toward him from a distance, until it began to bark. It was a redbone hound, young and gangling, drawn to his stench of rotten wool and wind-scoured stone, the dewy earth he slept on. Like every drifter, Amos hated dogs. He retreated backward between the stalks, their leaves brushing his shoulders. The big hound advanced on him growling, hunkered down with its hackles raised. He had nearly reached the rail fence and was prepared to vault over it when a child came running after the dog. She was small, no more than three or four, wearing a flour sack dress with tousled curls in her eyes. Once she saw what her dog had cornered, not a rabbit or a groundhog but a man, she stopped in her tracks. The redbone hound went on growling. Her mouth opened but nothing came out of it. The last child left in Yuneetah. As they studied one another the clouds that had been gathering all forenoon moved over the cornfield. She seemed more curious than afraid, so he took a step forward. Ignoring the dog, Amos reached into his coat. He pulled out the tin top, a starburst of faded kaleidoscope colors radiating from its knob, gold dulled to brass, blue gone grayish, red aged to flesh, and held it out to her. Without much hesitation she crossed the short distance separating them as the dog barked harder to warn her off. Amos passed the top down into her hands as if performing a sacred rite. She accepted it with the same graveness.