Washburn might have gone home then, but he needed to know Gracie Dodson was going to live. He needed to know that her mother would be treated. It was on the way across the mountain, when he was alone in the car smelling the dead leaves and dank earth the child had left in his backseat, that reality began to sink in. The whole way he clenched the steering wheel, fearing the doctor’s Buick would become a hearse before they got there. His only solace was that the other car kept moving on ahead of him, tires spitting gravel as it sped along the curving dirt road. There hadn’t been as much rain in the higher elevations, the worry of getting mired behind them. But the going was treacherous in places anyway. He worried more about rockslides and fallen trees, or that they might turn over and be spilled between the sourwood trunks down a plunging cliffside. As he kept his eyes on the shadow of Annie Clyde through the Buick’s back window, he kept reliving the events of the morning. James Dodson carrying his daughter out of the woods. The barking dog running before him and the child as if to herald their coming. Crashing through the hayfield with Annie Clyde, delirious from lack of wind. Handing his coat across the seat, seeing the child lying still in her mother’s lap, the clay mud hard to distinguish from blood.
Now he got out of the car and leaned against the hood to have a cigarette before going back inside to ask about the Dodsons. He had spent too much time in this Dodge coupe, a company car, traveling back and forth to Yuneetah. The wear and tear showed in the lit parking lot. The fenders dinged by rocks, the doors scratched by crowding branches. He knew that he had been sitting out here for too long, but he’d grown claustrophobic in the waiting room on the second floor of the hospital, a parlor lined with straight chairs and hard mahogany benches pushed against the damask-papered walls. The duty nurse had reached over Washburn’s head to pull a shade against the glare of the evening sun but it was still too hot. When he realized that he was famished he had left the hospital to find his supper. In a diner on Main Street where the wainscoting was shiny with cooking grease he sat at the counter to have a hamburger and a cup of coffee. Beside him sat a mother and her two children, a baby in overalls and a girl in a flour sack dress climbing on the stools. They looked no different than the people of Yuneetah, but the electric pendant lights hanging over their heads and the number of cars passing outside the plate-glass window, the sign above the silver coffeepot advertising Blatz beer on tap, told Washburn he’d come out of the valley town ringed in mountains and into the rest of the world.
After supper he had gone back up to the second floor and seen the hallway lined with people, the waiting room crowded. At first he didn’t understand. Then he recognized one of the men sitting there, Ruble Williams. His was one of the first families relocated. He had gone to work here at the knitting mill. He must have come straight to the hospital after his shift. There was still lint in his hair. Washburn approached Ruble and learned that he was a distant cousin of James Dodson’s aunt. She was sitting in the corner with her husband, fanning herself with a magazine. Ruble had heard about the child from them. Looking around Washburn saw more familiar faces. He’d sat in their front rooms and kitchens asking them questions, taking notes about them for his report. They must have arrived by the car and truck load while he was gone, traveling from wherever the dam had scattered them to see proof of a resurrection from the graveyard of their drowning town. Even those who hadn’t helped with the search, those unable to bear the prospect of the child’s death, had come seeking evidence of her life. “The sheriff was here for a little while,” Ruble said, half startling Washburn. “But a deputy came and got him. Sounded like he said something happened to the dam. I ain’t the only one heard it.” Washburn thought of calling in to the office. He wondered what could have gone wrong, maybe a leak, but in the end found himself too tired to care. There was nowhere to sit so he’d returned to the car.
He had slept for a while behind the wheel. For as long as Gracie Dodson was missing, he hadn’t rested. When he did sleep he woke in the middle of the night from dreams of her wandering a wilderness road crying for her mother or forgotten in an orphanage among other unclaimed children. That’s why he went back to Yuneetah, even after what had happened at the courthouse. Thinking about it, Washburn felt his tender windpipe. He shouldn’t have taken Annie Clyde where the drifter was being held. But he had been invited by James Dodson’s aunt to wait in the kitchen. He was drinking coffee at the table when Annie Clyde came limping through the door. After the aunt repeated what some of the searchers told her, that they’d seen Ellard Moody on the road with the drifter in the back of the sheriff’s car, Annie Clyde took off on her swelling foot. Washburn couldn’t allow her to walk five miles through the rain in her condition. But now he couldn’t forget the man in the cell with a pit where an eye should have been. The man’s arm had been strong for one so gaunt, his wiry muscle like iron. It made Washburn sick with humiliation to remember. He’d vowed when he left the courthouse that he’d never return to Yuneetah. But he woke up this morning and the first thought he had was of Annie Clyde Dodson standing in her kitchen doorway streaming water, alone in her conviction that her child was alive.
Washburn pulled out his pocket watch and realized it was after midnight on the third of August, the day of the deadline. The day he had been dreading as he sat in his cubicle at the TVA offices staring down at a pile of paperwork and wondering what he was going to do about the Dodson woman. He couldn’t have dreamed a month ago where he would end up during this first hour. Sitting in a hospital parking lot in Clinchfield. Finally he tossed the butt of his cigarette into the weeds and crossed the pavement to the building. He took the stairs to the second floor again and saw that the waiting room had cleared besides James Dodson’s aunt and uncle. The aunt slept on her husband’s shoulder, the uncle’s head reclined and his fingers laced across his suit vest. Washburn wanted to ask about the child but didn’t disturb them. He was about to look for a nurse when one appeared in the doorway in her peaked hat and starched uniform dress. “Are you Sam Washburn?” she asked. When he nodded she said, “Mrs. Dodson has been asking for you. She’s a stubborn one. But it’s past visiting hours, so be quick.”
She sent him down the hall where the Dodsons had been given a private room. He went with his hands shoved in his pockets to steady them, not taking them out until he reached the door. He rapped lightly. If Annie Clyde asked him in he didn’t hear. After a moment of uncertainty he stepped inside. There were two narrow beds in the room, the one nearest the door unoccupied and neatly made with a white blanket, a partition that could be pulled on a metal rod left undrawn. Between the beds James Dodson slept in an armchair with his chin on his breast. The electric lamp above the other bed was switched on, casting an amber circle on that side of the room. Washburn stepped out of the shadows into the light to make himself known. Annie Clyde was lying in the bed near the window, the flowery curtains open although it was dark outside. As he approached he noticed that her eyes were closed. There was a glass of water and a bowl of broth on a tray table across her legs, her bandaged foot elevated on a pillow. Tucked at her side, in the curve of her arm, was the child. Gracie Dodson slept with her lips parted, hugging her mother’s waist, her head resting on her mother’s thin chest. Washburn imagined it was soothing for her to hear Annie Clyde’s heart beating. She had been washed but he saw in the shine of the lamp each tiny fingernail traced with brick red clay, her curls dark against the gauze swathing her head wound. By the bed a stand with a metal hook held a bottle of clear fluid.