Washburn’s shoes squeaked again on the tiles as he passed other doors closed or ajar to show glimpses of convalescing patients inside, one man with his leg in a pulley. He nodded to a woman shuffling along in a robe and slippers, holding to the rail on the wall. When he went by the waiting room, having almost made it to the stairwell at the end of the hall, a short man in suspenders came out holding a stenographer’s pad and a pencil. “Sam Washburn?” he asked.
Washburn thought of lying, but it wasn’t in him. “Yes.”
“I’m with the Knoxville News Sentinel,” the man said. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
“It’s after midnight,” Washburn said. “I doubt you’ll be making your deadline.”
The man rubbed at his eye with the knuckle of the hand holding the pencil. It looked red and irritated. “I’ve been all over the place tonight, trying to find somebody that knows what’s going on in Yuneetah,” he said. “The sheriff has all of the roads into town blocked off.”
Washburn looked over the shorter man’s head toward the stairwell, wanting to get away. “I’ve been here with the family all night. I haven’t been through Yuneetah since this morning.”
“Do you know if the explosion at the dam and the missing child are related in any way?”
Washburn frowned at the reporter. “What happened to the dam?”
“Somebody blew a hole in it, is what happened. Aren’t you with the TVA?”
Washburn blinked at him, trying to picture the structure as he’d last seen it when he visited the site, wearing a hard hat as he stood on the riverbank. Trying to imagine what must be going on at the offices where he’d spent much of the last two years. It all seemed distant. “I don’t know anything about the dam,” Washburn said. He passed a hand over his unshaved face. “But I can tell you about the child. Her name is Mary Grace Dodson. They call her Gracie.” He paused, watching the reporter scribble on his pad. “Every newspaper in the country will be wanting to know her name,” he said. “You’d do well to get it right.” Then Washburn took his coat on down the hall, his blue eyes focused straight ahead.
JULY 31, 1937
She’d seen the explosion from the ridge last summer. She had gone back up there from the courthouse unable to face the shack where she once lived with Mary. On that lonesome evening Silver would have taken even the company of her grandmother. But there was only her niece’s dog. He lay panting beside her on the ledge where she sat with her knees gathered up when the blast came not long after sundown, a flash then a thunderclap that she felt in her chest. She leapt to her feet and the dog began to bark. Near the bottom of the spillway slant she saw a plume spouting, then a sooty billow charging out into the river and the trees on both shores. Behind that gush of smoke and silt the impounded waters came crashing. Silver could hear the rending sounds of what the unleashed river took with it, churning out of its banks around the bend, roiling with saplings and rubble. Then from the gorge a cloud rose against the evening sky, hiding the site and the bluffs from view. In the aftermath of all that there came an ominous silence. When the cloud settled in the tops of the trees Silver saw that the blast had made its own wind through the pass, blowing leaves and wisps of smoke as darkness claimed the valley again. She saw as well from her perch on the limestone ledge, with her limbs locked and her eyes staring out of their sockets, that the two-hundred-foot concrete wall of the dam was still standing.
The weather this July had been different than last. There was a drought instead of rain. Silver’s cornstalks were husks, her cucumbers shriveled. Her green beans never came up at all. The withered leaves of the trees topping the bluffs were tattered and bug-bitten since the locusts and beetles had been driven up from the valley to higher ground. As parched as the land was on the mountain, below it was all covered with water. Silver had gone to the market a week after the blast and bought a newspaper. She’d traded mink hides for coffee and had a nickel left over. She could decipher enough to understand. Maybe one of the charges had failed to detonate, or Amos hadn’t placed them right. There had been a crack made, a leak spraying lake water over into the river, swelling it out of its banks. There was damage done but not enough to derail the power company for long. Silver had wanted to see the crack up close but while the repair was under way nobody was allowed within a mile of the site. The freight trucks returned, the calling men on scaffolds, the clang of machinery. When the grit settled again for the last time the lake went on spreading. Now at dusk down there at the dam the lights came on. She could see them shining out of the charred and broken treetops with their own cold beauty to rival the stars and the moon.
She didn’t want to think Amos died for nothing. Maybe he was sending a message to those who thought they owned everything. Or to the people of Yuneetah who always turned their heads. They couldn’t look away from him now. The story of the man who blew a hole in the dam and the little girl resurrected from the ground made the newspapers not just in Knoxville but all over the country. Amos hadn’t meant to bring the wall down. He had only wanted to be heard.
Amos had left behind no body and so it was easy for Silver to imagine him going on out there somewhere, as he had always gone on. But no. He and Mary, the two people that had known her best, both were dead. The dog was her only companion. He didn’t hold it against her that she’d kept him penned up in the shed last summer. He hadn’t left her side since he followed her from the Walker farm to the courthouse after watching the government man drive off with his owners. It had taken Silver a while to get used to him and his needs, nosing at her hands to be petted. She’d resisted at first but finally allowed him to sniff and then to lick her fingers. Soon she’d begun to stroke his head, to study his lively brown eyes. She had come to depend on his presence. She used her voice more often with the dog around, talking and singing to him while she worked up at the still. She was supposed to keep him only until the Dodsons got settled somewhere. Now she hoped if they ever came back it would be to visit and not to take him.
Other than the dog, Silver had the mountain to herself. For a year she’d kept away from Beulah Kesterson, unable to bear her grief. She hadn’t visited the cabin but she saw Beulah once. Silver was pulling weeds from around Mary’s headstone last fall when Beulah came up the hollow footpath leading a nanny goat with a bell around its neck. Silver figured she’d bought it to have milk through winter. She stood at the graveyard gate and watched Beulah pass but in the end she didn’t call out. Beulah’s eyes were on her feet, her hair unbraided and unwashed. Losing Amos had nearly done her in. But it was a favorable sign, that Beulah seemed prepared to survive.
Silver hadn’t spoken to Ellard Moody either since the day Gracie was found, the day she’d turned Amos loose. But she knew Ellard had moved back into the frame house where he used to live with his parents. He’d been improving the place. Curtains had gone up in the windows. The lot was mown, humped with piles of milkweed-fluffed grasses. She had walked down to see it last September, taking a shortcut through the blackberry canes, stopping at the edge of the woods when she saw smoke threading up from the chimney. She’d figured Ellard was inside cooking his supper. There were a few banty hens scratching in the dirt around Ellard’s porch and she wondered if he had fixed up the coop where they once lay together. She’d seen his flannel shirt hanging on the clothesline and wondered what he would do if she took it down and carried it in to him. One day Silver thought she might approach the door and knock. Or maybe she never would. Ellard could have come up the mountain to see her anytime in all of these decades.