That autumn Silver and the dog watched from the ridge overlooking the valley as the water came to drown her niece’s farm. It felt to Silver as though somebody ought to bear witness. She and Rusty were the only ones who saw it come. It advanced over the fields laid out in patches of green from pale to the near black of the hemlocks, crossing abandoned property lines marked off with stone or rail fences. It moved in falls and fingers and ponds giving back the sun, pouring into the basin between the bluffs topped with pines. Each evening it drew a little closer, until it sampled the crumbles of soil between the corn rows and the long grasses of the yard. It went sucking lead from the painted porch steps and sliding underneath where the dog used to pant in the cool dirt. Stripping off scales of peeling clapboard as it rose up the outer walls onto the porch where a pair of boots were left. These the current lifted, laces floating among the white specks of the snowball bushes as it entered through the cracked front door. Stealing inside like an intruder with a whine of corroded hinges. Swirling over the threshold and washing into the front room across the floorboards smudged by decades of brogans hauling eggs in from the coop and buckets from the spring. Lapping over the ashy hearth of the fireplace and up the chimney. Seeping into the wallpaper and flooding the stairs, trailing the banisters with strands of algae. Overflowing the upper room of the house where one had died and another was born, carp swimming between the maple bedposts. Streaming out the kitchen door and across the back lot past the shading elm, rushing in to fill the barn stalls. Leaking into the knotholes of the smokehouse boards, trickling through the hayfield weeds to climb the bark of the apple tree with a few last fruits clinging to its limbs. Until the still and fathomless depths of the lake covered all forty of the Walker farm’s acres. Until there was nothing left to see but miles and miles of blue.
Acknowledgments
Much appreciation to Robin Desser, Leigh Feldman, Stephanie Perryman, Terri Beth Miller, Sara Sparkes Hill, Carl Greene, Silas House, Jill McCorkle and Joe Schuster. Special thanks to my beloveds, Adam, Emma and Taylor Greene.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amy Greene is the author of the national best-seller Bloodroot. She was born and raised in the foothills of East Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, where she lives with her husband and two children.