But then the sharp voice of a woman called out from somewhere close. Amos froze and stood listening with his ear tilted. He could hear someone coming toward them through the field, shaking the corn. “Gracie!” she shouted, and whatever spell Amos had managed to cast over the child was broken. She shied away from him, widening the space between them again, her toes printing the furrowed earth in her wake. The hound’s barking would lead the woman straight to them. Amos had time to make himself scarce but he decided to stay and have a look at her. When she finally burst out of the stalks into the row she was too concerned with the child at first to see him standing there. “Gracie,” she panted. “Don’t you scare me like that.” Then she followed the growling dog’s gaze, still fixed on Amos, and snatched the child back by the arm. After she’d taken an instant to collect herself, her face hardened. She glared at Amos with recognition. Everyone in Yuneetah had seen him at least once. “What are you doing out here?” she demanded.
He reached up to break off an ear of corn. “Helping myself to some dinner.”
The woman clutched the child against her legs. “You’re trespassing.”
He slipped the corn into his pocket and took her in, the thin smock hanging at her knees, the white feather clinging to her shoulder, the flour on her hands. She must have been frying chicken. He knew her, even as long as it had been since he’d seen her. She was the daughter of the farmer and his second wife, a woman from the hollow that Amos had played with as a boy. The last time he visited the apple tree the farmer’s daughter was an awkward girl wandering among the haystacks behind the barn, chewing on straws, letting ladybugs crawl over her knuckles. He remembered asking her to fetch him a drink but she had run off and not come back with it. “I believe I knew your mama,” he said. “We used to swim in the river together.”
She went on glaring at him. “You didn’t know my mama.”
“You look like her.” He glanced at the child. “You and your little girl both.”
“Get off my property,” she said.
He tipped back his hat to see her better. “Why are you still here? The water will be at your doorstep before you know it.”
Her face flushed. “You got yourself some dinner. Now go on.”
Amos kept still. “If you’re waiting on a fair price for your land, you might as well move. They don’t have to give you one.”
She backed away with the child. “My husband’s at the barn. If I holler, he’ll come with his gun.” Amos could tell that she was lying. Her husband was nowhere around.
“Your land is worthless to them,” he went on. “So are you and your little girl.”
The woman had begun to tremble, unable to bluff any longer. In that moment he felt kin to both of them, standing close as the storm moved in, their bodies patterned by the same shade. He glanced again at the child, still holding the kaleidoscope top. Thunder rolled, cornstalks bent and shuffled as if waiting to see what would happen. At last Amos stepped forward until he was close enough to count the beats of the young woman’s pulse in her neck. When he reached out to pluck the feather from her shoulder, she flinched as if he had struck her. He closed his fingers around it and took up his bindle. That’s when the dog lunged snapping at his shins. Amos felt the bite of the hound’s teeth but he didn’t let on. He backed down the row without a sound, keeping his eye on the woman’s face. When he reached the fence he raised himself up on the bottom rail, pausing as if he might change his mind. Then he turned and climbed over into the road, leaving the woman and her child alone, in a field that would soon lie hundreds of feet underwater.
At half past eleven o’clock on that morning, three days before Annie Clyde Dodson was to be forced off her land, she ran through the corn with her daughter on her hip. Gracie clung tight with her legs locked around Annie Clyde’s waist, the dog rushing ahead of them toward the house. Above, the sky looked like a bruised skin barely holding back the rain. The wind blew Annie Clyde’s dress up and whirled through the trees, shaking the cornstalks like something chasing her. As if Amos had only fooled her into thinking he was gone. She didn’t let herself look back until they emerged from the corn. When she saw nothing besides the green field behind her she stopped running but still hurried around the side of the house with Gracie jostling in her arms. Standing at the bottom of the stoop she threw open the kitchen door with a bang, letting in the stormy gloom, and set Gracie inside on the linoleum. “You stand still while I tend to Rusty,” she said, smoothing the tangled curls out of her daughter’s face. “I’ll be right back.” She turned around to catch the dog by the scruff of his neck and led him to the elm tree shading the barn lot. She meant to tether him by the chain wrapped around the base of the trunk. She hated to do it, but she would feel better with him tied close to the house in case the drifter came into the yard.
She was fumbling with the chain when the blackbirds flocked down on the hayfield behind the barn. They came in the hundreds, rustling through the weeds and roosting in the apple tree, milling over the winey fruit underneath. It was the wind that brought them. Her father used to say storms bothered birds’ ears and made them fly close to the ground. The rain hadn’t started, but it soon would. Water stood ankle deep in the grass, mist hanging over the valley and ringing the crests of the mountains. It had been raining all spring and summer. Now she had something else to worry about. As soon as she saw the blackbirds she knew that she couldn’t hold Rusty. He was still strung up from what had happened in the corn, hackles raised and tail high. He gave a sudden lurch and Annie Clyde lost her grip on him. She snatched after him but he was too quick. She watched helpless, a hand to her forehead, as he dashed off barking. Then she glanced over her shoulder at the house. There was a plucked chicken in the basin and apples to be peeled for the last pie she would make Gracie. The last one from their tree. She’d meant to bring in a few roasting ears as well before Gracie took off. She was always running away like that, tagging after the dog. “I swear,” Annie Clyde would tell her. “You’ll be the death of me.” But at night she smiled to reach in Gracie’s pockets and find the treasures she’d wandered off to collect. Forked twigs, buttercups, crawdad claws, rocks of all kinds. Annie Clyde cursed Rusty under her breath. Any other time she would have let him alone. But her husband James was gone off to Sevierville and there was no telling when he’d get home. The dog was the only protector she and Gracie had.
She headed back to the kitchen door, tripping up the stoop. Gracie was still holding the tin top the drifter had given her. Annie Clyde’s stomach turned at the sight of it, but there was no time to throw it away. She swung Gracie onto her hip again and went running with her, out past the elm and the charred trash barrels standing amid puddles floating with cinders, inside them heaps of ash wetted to gray lumps from the storms. As she cut through the blowing hayfield weeds the blackbirds lifted off together in a train the way they had landed. Rusty gave chase, tracking the rash they made across the overcast sky. By the time Annie Clyde and Gracie reached the apple tree Rusty had disappeared into the woods at the end of the field. She put Gracie down among the fallen fruits, pecked and streaked with droppings. She whistled and Gracie shouted for Rusty but he wouldn’t come, not even to the one he loved most.