Читать книгу Fall Line - Joe Samuel Starnes - Страница 6

This dog Percy is there when the dawn breaks, running beside the river and then turning away, through the woods and up the hill, leaves crushing under his feet, his path worn more than ten years, stopping to smell the holes where the chipmunks burrow out of sight when he trots by. His fur is black and his paws black and even his tongue black, the blackest of all chows, but he is only half chow and half mutt like the backwoods country dogs that roam the woods around the old lady’s home. His black eyes are steady and see the earth up close in the bridge between light and darkness enshrouded in a cool mist from the Oogasula. Drops of dew sparkle on the evergreens and silvery and bluish reflections dance on the clear water gurgling on the banks and streaming in the middle, small white caps breaking in the slow bend of the river.

He runs up through the woods, farther away from the smell of the cold river water and through the lower hardwoods and into the pine thicket up the hill where the new shortleaf pines begin, growing every day, a few feet each year, their rough bark trunks shooting out of the red clay and yearning for the blue sky. He noses the fresh pine needles that cover the ground like a blanket before he crosses back into the hardwoods and digs in the old stumps, sniffing for the chipmunks down in their holes. He imagines their brown fur with the black stripe punctuated with white dots curled into a tight dusty ball. He can smell the chipmunks clearly, can hear their pitched little grunts and squeals. He growls softly at them, his fangs showing. He runs on and smells the scent of rabbits and a possum and the big hole where the groundhog nests. He is on the lookout for squirrels, the flying one in particular, but they are nowhere to be seen. The old man had taught him when he was a pup to stay after the squirrels and to tree them and to bark and point up with his nose, until he could come along with his shotgun. The old man had become more and more wrinkled until he was carried off in a box a long time ago, and had missed a lot of squirrels Percy had scared up. Percy runs on, keeping his nose to the ground but his eyes look up in case the squirrels appear along the break of blue sky between the pines and oaks and yellow poplars. The image of the flying squirrel coasting like a bird from tree limb to tree limb with his four paws spread and his fur like a cape is etched in Percy’s mind. He watches for the squirrel and dreams about him when he naps.

He crosses into an open field, the land that had been the forest before men with roaring saws cleared the trees, sawing them down to stumps and hauling off the wood down the narrow logging roads. He stops and pees on the stump where the possum hides and then runs over and sprays another stream on the holes burrowed by the chipmunks. He sniffs the fresh sap, hardening in the dry sun, and runs off from the cleared land and up a hill covered in hardwoods.

The woods on the hill still have salt licks where a few deer used to gather this time of year, but he knows only to go there when he can’t smell metal and gunsmoke and the drift of cigarettes or hear the slow deep voices of men, hunched in deer stands they nailed up with makeshift ladders, rungs made of small boards hammered onto the bark of the tree trunks. He sniffs the ground and smells where deer have been out in the early morning, their urine and feces fresh in the dew-covered brown leaves. He darts his eyes around but the whitetails are nowhere to be seen.

Percy pauses. There are no woodsmen out today, a good day for hunting, unseasonably warm and dry, but no hunters have been out for at least a month, not since the trees in the wide valley were cut. There are no lowing cows to listen for either. When he was younger he often crossed the hill into the pastures and chased the cows, scaring the clumsy herd into fits of mooing and clomping. He had heard the cows up until a month ago, but the sound of the herd and the farmers and their dogs are long gone from the low fields farther down the bend of the river. In days past when chasing cows he might fight with the farm dogs, a pack of lab mixes that were big and strong but soft and scared of him, two of them no match for his chow anger. He had put his teeth in their clean hides many times and he had picked up a few wounds from them. He’d twice caught a little birdshot from the farmer’s .410, the second time enough to keep him away from the dumb cows and the domesticated dogs for good, even if the man was using a shotgun he’d seen only little boys carry.

At the end of his romps he goes down to the river and runs along its edge, sniffing out the water and scaring frogs off the bank, their long legs slingshotting them out with a splash. He’d eaten a small frog when he was a pup and got sick and felt the legs kicking and moving all the way down his throat and into his belly. He was ill for three days. But he still likes to sniff out the frogs and scare them into the water, sometimes jumping in after them and paddling with his head above the surface, his black eyes alive with the chase, the smell of river water, the cool breaking of it on his fur, his paws paddling against and across the current. Also in summer he looks for snakes in the flat shoals and tries to catch them, snatching their long bodies up with his teeth, getting one right in the middle lengthwise and shaking it ferociously, all fur and fury and growling, beating it on the ground wildly until it quits hissing and wriggling. Once he had seen a dog that used to run with him get bit on the nose by a rattler. The dog’s head swelled up and it went back in a briar patch and took three days to die, moaning and whimpering in the tangled vines. Percy has never been bitten by a snake and still tries to catch them. He has lashed many cottonmouths to death, although he has not caught one this year and now it is too late, the warm season passed and the frogs and snakes all sleeping in their holes until the days get longer and warmer. Even so, he checks the riverbank every day for snakes and frogs. The cold-blooded creatures are sneaky and he looks out for them year-round.

He expects the old lady to come out into the woods with him like she does once a year about this time and cut down a red cedar and drag it back to the house and dress it up with ribbons and gold balls and then feed him ham, but lately all she has done is sit on the porch and gaze out across the woods, muttering to herself. It seems there will be no decorated tree in the house this season, but he watches for her in the woods every day. He still misses the old man, pocket full of treats, rubbing Percy’s belly until his back paws twitched this way and that.

He ends his route as he does every morning, with a traipse along about half a mile of river, backtracking his early run, eyes alert for beavers or water rats along the bank and spying the water for a fish or turtle at which he could bark. He doesn’t run as hard or bark as loud or growl as ferociously as he once did. After his run he goes home and curls up under the porch and nestles there with his paws in the air and rubs his back on the ground, and then drifts off into a nap. He kicks his legs in his sleep, dreaming of the flying squirrel and snakes and chasing deer, the whitetails flashing as they splash into the river, the river he has known all his life.

Elmer Blizzard gazed across the land he might be the last to ever see. He took a long drag on a cigarette and flipped the butt onto the ground and stamped it under his heel. Up the hill from the river in a clearing used for a cow pasture stood an ancient oak, its bare branches stretching high into the clear sky like they were reaching for something, hopeful even after hundreds of years of nothing, while waiting in the cresting field. Sherman himself had stopped for a smoke under that tree when the Yankees burned a swath through here ninety-one years ago. Wouldn’t be long till the lake would come and that old tree would be nothing but deadwood where catfish would gather if Georgia Power and the government’s plan played out correctly.

He reached into the back of his britches and pulled out his .38 revolver and aimed at a bobtail squirrel in the neck of a tree, pulling back on the trigger and firing three times at the varmint. It shrieked and scurried down the trunk and across the ground. Elmer pulled the trigger a fourth time but he had used his last bullet so the empty chamber clicked hollowly. He put the gun back in his britches and scowled at the squirrel as it dashed away.

He turned to take in the landscape. Down the slope the river streamed through the gully, narrow but deeper in the cut of red clay between gently rolling hills. Pulpwooders had clear-cut all the pines where the lake would go, leaving only a field of stumps, but most of the hardwoods they left behind. Across the river and further up, sapling pines took over and stretched a long way back, the new trees courtesy of the Georgia-Pacific Plywood Company. Lake must not be going that high over there, Elmer figured, and that’ll be beyond the shoreline.

It was December but the sun was warm and the brown grass rustled in the easy wind. The road where he’d parked curved down toward the Oogasula and ran parallel and close to the water for about fifty yards before it veered back the other direction in a lazy curve, a mirror image of the river’s course. He ambled down to the water’s edge where he stood in plain view of old Mrs. McNulty’s house, the little shack across the road from the kudzu-covered junkyard situated in a flat low spot at the bend in the river. From about a hundred yards away he could see her, squatting on her porch by an antique bathtub, fooling with something under it, her back to him. She was a big-boned woman who carried herself proud, her posture like that of an old Indian chief, her hair dark despite her age. She’d been living in the house without electricity or running water as long as he could remember, that tub sitting out front the whole time. A black chow came hesitantly out from under the porch and stood next to her, his wide tongue hanging from his mouth. The dog looked at Elmer and then back at her.

Elmer turned to face the river, unzipped his fly, pulled it out and peed into the current. “Big water’s coming,” Elmer said. A long golden stream arched through the air and glittered in the sunlight before splashing in the water. “Yep,” he continued, looking back at Mrs. McNulty’s shack, not opening his lips very wide when he spoke but still speaking loudly in a scratchy drawl, “the power company gonna flood you out, honey pie.”

He zipped up and spat, the little white gob floating on the surface like a water bug until it submerged in a riffle about twenty feet away. “Big water’s sure nuff coming.”

Mrs. McNulty didn’t turn to look at Elmer until he was up on the top step, the board creaking like it always had. He was a little man, wiry, 150 pounds at most, so it didn’t squeak much. Wasn’t any point in fixing it now, that old step, all those years of being loose. She’d let all those things go when Ralph died. Ralph never was a finisher anyhow. He had been promising to do something about the bathtub he had brought home and abandoned on the porch a generation ago. The tub was chipped and dirty and it was packed full of rags and shoeboxes containing car parts, mainly door handles and hood ornaments. All the things Ralph had left behind.

“Hey, Elmer,” she said, regarding him cautiously but friendly—she’d heard stories and knew he wasn’t a deputy anymore. “What you shooting at over there?”

“Hey . . . Mrs. McNulty. Aw, just an old squirrel. I figure I’d get him ’fore he drowns.”

“My old dog here is scared to death of guns. Didn’t you hear him whining?”

Elmer looked at the dog, sitting next to Mrs. McNulty.

“No, ma’am. He looks all right to me. I know he’s seen guns before.”

“But that don’t mean he likes ’em.”

“Well, I’m sorry if I disturbed him.”

He glanced around her yard and then down toward the river. “What you still doing out here? They want everybody out today. Paper said you got to clear out by sunset.”

“Yeah, I know it.” She was still squatting by the tub. “I’m just trying to figure how I can get the feet off this thing.”

“You worried it’s gonna up and run away?” He spat off the porch into one of the wild hydrangeas alongside Mrs. McNulty’s steps.

“Now that I’d like to see,” she said. “Who knows what’s gonna happen when that water comes? This old tub just might try to run.”

She laughed, a hacking chuckle, and continued, gesturing across the road to the vine-choked junkyard.

“Man from the state said all these cars will make this part of the lake one of the best fishing spots in the whole mess. Sumpin’ about the fish wanting somewheres to hide.”

“Yeah, I reckon they right,” Elmer said, turning to look at the leaf-covered old cars dating back to the beginning of automobiles—Model A’s and T’s and old trucks, a tractor here and there, a Stanley Steamer, all rusting away. “How long ago did Mr. McNulty start hauling vehicles out here?”

“It’s been near forty years, I guess.”

“Yeah, I wonder what he’d think of this. I guess this part of the lake’ll be fifty feet deep down here in the gully. And I bet the top of that old oak tree will be sticking up through the surface of the water.”

“I wonder why they didn’t cut it down, like they did all those pines?”

“Ain’t no telling,” Elmer said.

Mrs. McNulty put her hand on the tub and looked toward the river beyond the junkyard.

“You think that dam is really gonna fill up the land, like they say it is?”

Elmer spat again. Her hydrangeas were getting wet.

“Aw . . . hell, naw,” he said. “I don’t think those damn fools know what they’re doing.” Elmer spat one more time. “You think it’s gonna take, this big lake here?”

“I don’t know, Elmer. I don’t know. The first I heard about it a few years back, it didn’t make a dadgum bit of sense to me. I thought they was all talk. Then, last year, they came around with a five-hundred-dollar check and court papers. Didn’t give me no choice. It was then I started to believe. They say it’s progress. I guess you can’t stop it . . .”

“Shit,” Elmer said, not caring if he cussed in front of her. He knew she’d heard uglier, all but two of her children either in prison or the crazy house or dead or worse—run off up north. She put her hands on the end of the tub and stood up out of her crouch. At her full height she was six inches taller than him. She brushed her black bangs from her forehead.

“Progress,” Elmer said, taking a step back. “Monkeying with the land God made ain’t progress. It’s just plain craziness if you ask me. God didn’t build no lake here.”

“Old Percy and I here would tend to agree with you.” The dog’s fur was thick and dusty, and she leaned down and scratched under his chin. “Don’t we, boy?” She patted him on the head and looked up at Elmer.

“What brings you out this way?”

“Aw, I’m working for the sumbitches. The power company. On their scout crew. They want to find anything of value they can sell before it ends up on the bottom of the lake.”

“Well, I guess I better get these claw feet off and take ’em with me before you do.”

“Shoot. I ain’t gonna take ’em from you. They ain’t worth that much. But I’ll help you get ’em off. You’re going to have to flip this thing over if you ever gonna get ’em loose.”

“Yeah. I reckon you’re right.”

She picked up several of the shoeboxes full of car parts stored in the tub and set them against the wall of the house. Her gray robe fell open and he was glad to see she had a housedress on under it. Elmer helped her clean out the tub, dumping rags in a pile. When it was empty, she moved around to the end and gripped the lip of the tub with one hand on the side and one on the end.

“Elmer, you get the other side there and we’ll flip it this way,” she said, gesturing toward the house.

He nodded but looked unsure.

“This thing is cast iron, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, but we can get it.”

She weighed at least fifty pounds more than he did and had strong arms and legs and a sturdy back from years of hauling things around a junkyard.

“Got it?” she said.

“Yep.”

They turned it over. The rusty tub lay on its rim like a dead pig, belly up, its claw feet extending stiffly into the air. Elmer studied the bottom of the tub, caked with spider webs and dirt. Each foot had a screw hidden in the soles.

“All you need now is a screwdriver to get the bolts loose,” Elmer said.

“Lemmee see where it is. Come help me look.”

He followed her into the front room of the shack. The house was as messy as any he had ever seen, and he remembered his mama talking about the McNultys being good people but sorry housekeepers. Car parts were everywhere: a carburetor on the mantel, a tire rim on a love seat, pistons on the dining room table, half of an engine block on the floor.

She gestured toward the kitchen.

“Let’s look in these drawers.”

Elmer opened a drawer in the cabinet near the door and shuffled through a clump of butter knives and ice picks and spark plugs and hood ornaments and car door handles, the small metals clanging softly—everything but the tool they needed. Mrs. McNulty made a loud racket shaking a drawer near the washbasin.

“Hah. Got it,” she said, holding up a screwdriver for him to see. She led him back to the porch. She crouched and began to loosen the screws within the claw feet. Elmer offered to help but she shook her head no.

He watched her for a few minutes until that eternal feeling of boredom came over him. He got tired of company right quick, couldn’t stand to share a moment with anyone for too long. The five years he was married liked to have about killed him.

“Mrs. McNulty, I’ve got to get on back to work, I guess.”

“What’s that, Elmer?” She was still preoccupied with the feet. She had one foot loose and was working on the second.

He hustled his balls with his left hand.

“I said, I got to get on back to work.”

“Why don’t you have you a seat?” She turned and gestured to two rocking chairs on the other end of the porch.

“Naw, I gotta go.”

“All right,” she said, still not looking up. “Thank you for helping me hoist this old thing.”

He inventoried her yard. She didn’t have a car or truck and none of the vehicles in the junkyard had cranked in decades.

“Where you headed this evening?”

“What?”

“I said, where you headed this evening?”

She looked up at him directly like the idea of leaving the house had not even crossed her mind.

“You got to go somewhere,” he said. “They shutting the floodgates tonight. The big water’s coming.”

He hustled his balls again. He was dying to get away from her and be by himself in the woods, having a smoke and listening to the birds chirping and the squirrels rooting around there one last time. He couldn’t stand to be on the porch with her another minute.

She looked at him as though she had never seen him before.

“I guess one of your daughters is gonna come get you, ain’t they?” He was nodding his head yes, answering his own question.

She nodded, though she looked like she didn’t understand. The nod was good enough for Elmer. He had to go.

“All right, Mrs. McNulty. I’ll see you in town sometime. Don’t stay out here too late. The lake’s a coming.”

He turned on the porch and went down, the top step squeaking like a half-drowned bird.

“Bye . . . Elmer. You come back now, you heah?” she said weakly. But he was already down the steps and didn’t hear.

Elmer got to the Magnolia Restaurant about the same time his uncle pulled up in his shiny police car, a big black Buick Century with white doors emblazoned with a star that announced Sheriff Lloyd Finley from three city blocks or a long bend in a country road away. Elmer didn’t like to eat out in public with everyone in town stopping to speak to the sheriff and look down on their plates, but he had been summoned by his uncle and had no choice.

“Mornin’, Elmer.” His uncle extended his thick hand for a shake, his grip warm and strong.

Elmer clasped his hand and let go as quickly as he could. “Hey, Lloyd.”

“Son, it’s always good to see you.”

Elmer didn’t say anything but he held the door for his Uncle Lloyd, his girth in the taupe uniform beneath a white sheriff’s hat filling the doorway. He was glad not to get another lecture about his need for a stronger handshake. He stood behind as his uncle surveyed the Magnolia, choosing a table in the back of the narrow greasy spoon, full with smells of fried sausage and cigarettes. He led Elmer down the aisle between the booths and the counter. Warm steam from pancake batter rose from the griddle and fogged the backsplash. Forks and knives on china and spoons tinkling in coffee cups slowed for a minute, as did the disorganized babble of voices, while everyone paused to see them pass. The sheriff nodded and spoke hello and mornin’ to everyone, from the judge eating his waffle to the busboy with his dishrag. Elmer kept his eyes on the floor and spoke to no one, focusing instead on the black-and-white checkered pattern in the tile beneath his feet.

He slid into the seat facing the back wall while the sheriff stood for a moment studying the tables and the counter, his expression a mix of smile, smirk, and scowl, ready for whoever confronted him, child or criminal or college professor. Lloyd took off his hat and eased himself into the booth as the waitress whisked by and dropped off menus and cups of coffee. Elmer dumped a load of sugar in his cup and stirred it with a teaspoon. He stared at the black coffee and without looking up he knew his uncle was staring him down.

“Son, how you been?”

“I’m fine, Lloyd, fine. How ’bout you?”

“I tell you what. I ain’t never been so busy with all these folks coming into town. Ain’t no telling how many.”

“Yeah. I been seeing it in the paper.”

“It’s the biggest thing ever happened ’round here.”

Elmer said nothing. Lloyd took a sip of his coffee and set it down. They were quiet for a moment before Lloyd spoke.

“Did you see that new Ford out there? That pink and white one, the new Crown Vic Skyliner?”

“Naw,” Elmer said.

“You oughta take a look at it. Sharp as a tack. It’s the Guvnah’s. First one like it I’ve seen.”

“Pink and white? Sounds like a little girl’s car to me.”

“Nope. It’s a cool ride. It has this green glass roof that lets the sun in.”

“That old man’s a fool. He’s just showing his ass with that car.”

“Aw, Elmer. It ain’t like that. Aubrey just likes to have some fun, that’s all.”

Elmer took a long sip of coffee and turned around and looked at the front door before swiveling back to Lloyd’s gaze.

“I hadn’t seen you around in a while, son. You been working?”

“Every day. Out in the field.”

“How’s that going?”

“It’s all right.”

“Is today your last day?”

“Reckon so.”

“What, uh . . . what you got planned?”

“Nothing, right now. Something’ll come along.”

“I hear Callaway is hiring.”

“I ain’t gonna be a linthead, Lloyd.”

“It pays pretty good. Pretty damn good. You oughta think about it.”

Elmer said nothing.

“If you don’t want to do that, you know Otey always needs help at the sawmill.”

“I sure as hell don’t want no part of that.”

Lloyd looked at Elmer and sighed.

“Well . . . Elmer, son . . . what you gonna do? Ain’t nothing else ’round here. Lest you want to go back to school.”

“Naw. Eleven years was enough.”

Elmer checked his watch, avoided Lloyd’s eyes.

“Son, you got to do something.”

Elmer shrugged and moved his lips like he was going to speak but stayed quiet. He set the teaspoon down and looked at the menu. He knew what he wanted to order but studied the options anyway.

Lloyd sat up straight and leaned forward over the table.

“I warned you—did I not?—that that prison farm woman was trouble. You and she can say it was love, but the law says otherwise.”

“I ain’t the one said it was love.”

“Well, son, I didn’t think it was neither. I can’t believe they didn’t make me fire you the second time, much less the first. It ain’t like the good old days when I was a boy. Them days is gone. A man can’t get away with nothin’ no more.”

His uncle exhaled a long slow breath and sat back. “I know you’ve had a hard time of it, son.”

Elmer looked straight into Lloyd’s fixed stare.

“You all right?” Lloyd asked. “Is it bothering you?”

“I’m fine, Lloyd. I don’t never think about it.”

“You’d let me know, if things get to troubling you, wouldn’t you?”

Elmer averted his eyes but nodded yes.

The waitress stopped by and they ordered. Elmer asked for biscuits and gravy, sausage, and grits, and the sheriff chose country ham, scrambled eggs, grits, and biscuits. She turned and the sheriff watched her go back down the aisle and behind the counter.

He winked at Elmer. “I think she’s looking good, don’t you? Putting on a little weight.”

Elmer nodded and fingered the cigarettes in his pocket but decided to wait to smoke until after he ate.

“You ever hear from Sherry?”

“Nope,” Elmer said. “Not in a few years.”

“Damn.”

Elmer turned to look back to the counter and the griddle behind to see if their food might be coming out.

Lloyd asked, “You want me to try to fix you up with one of these young gals I know down in Macon? They’ll be a lot of women in town today for the barbecue . . . and the party at Coach Hilliard’s.”

Elmer shook his head no. He finished off the last of his coffee and turned and looked down the aisle, gesturing to the waitress with his cup. She raised one finger to indicate she’d be there in a minute.

Elmer then saw State Senator Aubrey Terrell walk in the front door. Terrell was tall and had a high silver shock of hair parted on the side above his dark horn-rimmed glasses. He wore a dark blue suit with a bright red tie. He started shaking hands with everyone, working his way through the tables and down the counter. He walked stiffly like he wore a truss. His voice was smooth and slow as he complimented the women on how good they looked and asked the men how they were doing, telling them he was glad to see them and that they’d soon have a lake to go fishing and water skiing if they so desired, not to mention cheap electricity.

Elmer turned back around and stared into the sugary bottom of his cup. The sheriff was watching Terrell work his way down the aisle. Elmer could hear the senator having a discussion with the judge three booths away, something about valuable lakefront lots.

He lost track of his eavesdropping when the waitress set their plates and a cold butter dish on their table and refilled their coffees. Elmer cut a chunk of butter and slathered it on his grits, mashing it with his fork to melt it more quickly. The sheriff, who had not taken his eyes off the state senator, slid from the booth and stood.

“Guvnah, it’s good to see you this mornin’.”

The sharp scent of aftershave preceded the senator, whom Elmer saw move into his peripheral vision and shake hands with his uncle in a vigorous hold. Elmer took a bite of grits.

“Lloyd, how in the heck are you, boy? You keeping everybody straight?”

“It ain’t easy, but I’ll die tryin’.”

“Boy, I know that.”

“That’s a fine new car you got out there, Guvnah. Mighty fine.”

“Well, it’s an old man’s indulgence. But it rides mighty sweet. I’ll have to take you out for a ride in it sometime soon, Lloyd.”

“Anytime, Guvnah, anytime.”

Elmer cut a large piece of the biscuit and sausage and ran it through the thick gravy and put it in his mouth. His uncle turned his way.

“Guvnah, you know my nephew here.”

“Of course, of course. How are you doing, Elmer?”

Elmer put down his fork and turned in his seat and held out his hand to shake with the senator.

“Yes sir,” he said, speaking as best he could with his mouth full. “I’m doing fine.”

Lloyd said, “Elmer has been working for the power company. If you hear of any jobs, you let us know.”

Terrell tilted his head back and put his hand on his chin, moving his fingers as though he had a beard he was pulling. “Oh, that’s right, I still think of Elmer as a deputy. Well, let me see . . . Come up front and see me this afternoon out at the dam. I’ll introduce you around. There’ll be a lot of folks down from Atlanta that could help you out.”

Elmer didn’t say anything. He was half-turned toward the senator but his eyes were watching his food cool off, the little wafts of steam reducing by the second.

Lloyd said, “Thank you, Guvnah. We’ll do it. I’ll be there. Elmer will get out there, too. Won’t you, Elmer?”

“Yes, sir,” Elmer said, taking another bite but not looking his way.

“Well, alrighty then,” Terrell said. “I’m going to let y’all get back to your breakfast before it gets cold. Good seeing you Lloyd . . . Elmer.”

Elmer half-waved his left hand as he took a sip of coffee. The sheriff gave the senator another vigorous handshake and got a healthy backslap in return.

“Thank you, Guvnah. We appreciate all you do for us.”

“I do the best I can.”

The state senator walked back to the front of the restaurant and sat in a booth with two lawyers who had been waiting for him. The sheriff sat down and attacked his food, but the ham and biscuit in his mouth didn’t quell his angry whisper.

“Goddamn, Elmer, what’s wrong with you, son? I can’t do everything for you. You got to make an effort.”

Elmer scowled and leaned toward his uncle.

“Why you call him ‘Guvnah?’ Ole Talmadge beat him like a stray dog.”

“Son, you know everybody ’round here calls him Guvnah.”

“Might as well call me sheriff.” Elmer smiled a little at his own joke and would have scratched himself and spit had he not been sitting down and eating. “And I wonder who he stole from to buy that car?”

His uncle shook his head from side to side and let out another long sigh. He looked straight at Elmer, but Elmer spoke before Lloyd could, his eyes intense, his hand gripping his fork in the way he would hold a hammer.

“Goddammit Lloyd, that sumbitch took our land. Your parents’ land, my mama’s land. I don’t see why I got to act like he didn’t. He flat out stole it.”

“That was a long time ago, Elmer. He did me and Billy and your mama a favor.”

“A favor, shit. He favored a lot of dirt farmers right up the ass, didn’t he? Then acted like he was our best friend. Most of the poor sumbitches believed him. I believed him for a long time, too.”

“Elmer, it’s not that way. It cost him something. He saved a lot of farmers ’round here from going to jail.”

“Mama always said that giving up our land is what killed granddaddy and grandmama.”

“They was old, Elmer, had lived hard lives. At least they died in the homeplace, not some old nigger shack. Aubrey’s a good Christian. He did us a favor by not kicking us all out in the road.”

“And doing us all favors made his ass rich. Helped him to take over the bank, helped him to get elected.”

“He was already in the state house by then.”

“That don’t matter nohow. Goddammit, Lloyd, it’s about our land. He took it, and now look what he’s done with it. I’m supposed to be happy about that?”

Lloyd shifted in his seat and leaned forward over the table.

“Elmer, son, it was the big’un. I know that your mama and Billy could’ve done worse, they could’ve lost everything. They never had to work in the factory. Your daddy could have gone to jail.”

“My daddy might as well have ended up in the jailhouse.”

“I ain’t saying Billy wasn’t sorry, Elmer. He was sorry—is sorry—and your mama would probably have been better off if she’d never seen him . . . but the Guvnah don’t have nothing to do with his being sorry.”

“I don’t see what loyalty you got to the old sumbitch, Lloyd.”

“The Guvnah has supported me all along. I was a young man, only thirty, when I got elected.”

“Lloyd, everybody knows he ran you against old Rasmussen ’cause Rasmussen didn’t let him get away with drinking liquor and gambling and screwing half the women in this county. Like you do, Lloyd.”

“Elmer, don’t you go there with me. Not today. I know you are in a bad place, but there ain’t no cause to be mean. Brother Frank says every time somebody’s being ugly, it’s because they are hurting inside . . . and I know you are hurtin’. But I ain’t gonna ’low it. I ain’t. You hear me?”

“Don’t quote no uppity preacher to me. You know what you oughta do, Lloyd? Go out and see your family’s land one last time and say goodbye to Finley Shoals. You and your girls are the only Finleys left. You oughta take them out there and see what they lost. See the little crossroads that was once theirs, before it all goes down to the bottom of the lake. Maybe if you thought of it that way, you’d want to shoot that old sumbitch like I do, instead of giving him a goddamn gold medal.”

“Elmer, keep your voice down, boy. You just talking again.”

“I want to give the sumbitch some medals, all right, some metal from my gun, right in his ass.”

“Elmer, hush now. You can’t go around saying you are going to shoot somebody. I’ve heard you say it before. I know you just talking, you angry, but you ain’t going to do anything of the sort . . . Go on home, cool off for a while. Think about things. He’ll help you out if you just let him. He pulled some strings to help me keep you on as long as he could, until it got to where he couldn’t do anything else.”

“Shit. I don’t believe ’at for a minute. He’ll help me only if he can help himself.”

“Well, it’s the only help you gonna get, boy. The only help you gonna get. You better take it. Your mama would tell you the same thing if she was here. You family, son, I love you. I’m telling you that you better see things different. He’s your best ticket to something new, a job, your future.”

Elmer said nothing, avoiding eye contact with Lloyd.

“Son, I wish I knew what to say to you. You going to go out there this evening to this thing, ain’t you? Wear your suit and a tie. You’ll be there?”

Elmer cut another piece of gravy-soaked biscuit with his fork and put it in his mouth.

“Well, son, won’t you? This is the best chance you gonna have.”

Elmer chewed and swallowed. He looked up at his uncle’s red face, then back down at his plate.

“C’mon, now, son. You look good in that blue dress suit of yours. Just for a little while, this afternoon.”

Elmer set the fork tines down on the edge of his plate, listening to his uncle’s labored breathing.

“I ain’t going to promise you nothin’,” he said, “but I’ll think about it.”

Downtown Lymanville on Thursday morning was slow, more than half the parking spaces empty. Silver aluminum stars with glittery tassels hung from the creosote-covered light posts above the street-side trees, bare gingkoes and crape myrtles dormant in the late fall as winter waited to begin. Elmer lit a cigarette and walked down Lyman Avenue and then turned right on Main Street toward the women’s college, passing storefronts: the five and dime, the bank, the pool hall still dark, Woolworth’s, the movie house, the Piggly Wiggly across from the courthouse. He finished the butt and tossed it on the ground.

He sulked along the street for a ways and then turned and went back up Main Street for a block and then left onto Lyman Avenue and crossed it and went up the high steps and into the Feed-and-Seed. He shut the screen door behind him and the smell of fertilizer and phosphorus rose up on him something powerful and phosphorous, the odorous promise of high corn and fat red tomatoes and world-record turnips. The store had dim lights and the smell in the air was like a relic of the last century; the old hardwood floors were clean but long worn and had not seen a coat of varnish in Elmer’s lifetime. Exposed brick on the inside walls showed sloppy masonry from a bygone era. Four men, two gray and two bald, all in glasses and overalls, sat around a checkerboard on a wooden barrel near the front. They looked up at him and nodded. Mr. Worthington, the bald store owner who was the oldest and the only fat one, spoke.

“Mornin’, Elmer.”

“Mornin’.”

“Something I can help you with today?”

“Naw sir. Just looking.”

“Okay. Make yourself at home.”

Elmer walked down the fertilizer aisle, stacked high with fifty-pound bags of phosphate dug up from deep in the ground in central Florida then crushed and burned before being bagged and shipped to farmers. The high strong chemical smell was oddly pleasing, the hard whiff Elmer could smell in his nose and eyes. His eyes watered slightly and he paused and rubbed his hands on his lids to clear his vision. He blinked a few times and moved slowly on down the aisle.

Hoes and shovels and pickaxes and posthole diggers and adzes hung on the rear wall. He turned and walked back down the middle aisle where red and white and blue bags of Jazz feeds for cows and chickens were stacked high on the sturdy blue metal shelves. He paused and studied on a bag of Red Heart dog food but moved on toward the front of the store where the men played checkers. He turned by them and walked down the last aisle where the seed was kept, its shelves empty except for some unsold bags of turnip seed from the previous growing season. In three months the shelves would fill up with seed for beans, peas, corn, tomatoes, okra, squash, potatoes and all other manner of vegetables, but now the aisle lay in wait for winter to do its cold business.

At the end of the aisle in the far back corner of the store he looked in a locked glass case with a selection of shotguns and pistols for sale, and next to that an open shelf of boxes of ammunition for everything from .410s to .45s. Mr. Worthington was a connoisseur of guns and known for his fine selection of weaponry. Elmer sorted through the boxes, mostly .22 bullets, and picked up a carton of 20-gauge shells, buckshot, and then one of the only two remaining boxes of bullets for a .38. He paused for a minute and set the shells down and looked into his wallet and then took inventory in his mind of what he had at home in the way of firepower. He put the shotgun shells back neatly into place and went up the feed aisle with the overpriced bullets. At the front of the store he walked to the cash register and held the box high so Mr. Worthington could see.

The store owner excused himself from checkers and went around behind the counter and rang up the sale, the bell clanging and the drawer popping open and the numbers 1-5-0 flashing white in the encased glass on the faded brass register. Elmer counted out the last two dollar bills from his wallet.

“I do thank you, Elmer.” Mr. Worthington handed him two quarters. “You need a bag?”

Elmer shook his head no and took the dense box of bullets squarely in his right hand and cocked his fist into his side. He paused to look at the three old men waiting for Mr. Worthington’s return to the checkerboard. He had known all of them his entire life, one-time farmers turned into go-getters. When the day ended and the mill whistle blew and their wives got off work, they would up and go get her.

He nodded a goodbye to them and walked out into the brightening sun, careful not to slam the screen door. He was going down the steps when behind him he heard a thin voice at the checkerboard make a wisecrack, something about a “deputy dawg,” and then high laughter from their dry throats. He paused on the steps and glared down the street but did not turn around. He had half a mind to go back and ask them what was so goddamned funny, but he knew better than to fuss with the old plowboys. He went on down the steps and across the street.

Elmer crossed the intersection of Lyman and Main at the top of the low hill downtown and looked south to where the courthouse stood, the enormous cedar on the lawn decorated with giant gold balls and four-foot candy canes and wide red ribbons. Friday would be the Christmas parade. He would be sure to steer clear of that.

He walked back to his pickup truck, a lightweight Chevrolet 3100 with a silver grille backed by the sloping blue fenders and hood. He’d bought it brand new five years ago, but the once shiny blue paint and chrome had lost its luster and the shifter wasn’t always dependable. He kept an axe handle in the front stanchion hole for prying the linkage loose when it stuck and the three-speed transmission wouldn’t budge. The wooden club was also handy if some farmer’s cows got out in the road and needed a prod.

He got in and slammed the door and slid the bullets under the seat, next to his revolver. He turned the key in the ignition and pressed the starter button on the floorboard. The engine cranked and he sat for a second letting it idle. He looked in the glove compartment and found a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes. He smacked the pack on his palm and ripped it open and pulled a cigarette out and put it in his lips and lit it with the old Zippo that had been his daddy’s, monogrammed W.E.B. He inhaled and laid the pack and the lighter on the gray dashboard.

He thought about running back into the Magnolia for another cup of coffee to go but he didn’t want to have to speak to anyone again, especially Lymanville’s beloved Guvnah. He decided to brew some at home.

He backed out of the parking space and drove toward his house but changed his mind about the coffee. He turned and looped around the main block of the courthouse and the women’s college and headed out toward the dam north of town. He’d heard about all the manmade lakes up along the Tennessee River where women in swimsuits water-skied in packs, sometimes in two-high formations like cheerleaders at high school football games. He had seen pictures of the Miss Guntersville Lake contestants in the newspaper that he had not been able to believe. Sherry was off up that way somewhere he had heard, and even though she had the body for it, he doubted she wore one of those revealing swimsuits. At least he hoped she didn’t.

He pulled away from downtown on the hardtop two-lane Aubrey Terrell had gotten the state to pave all the way to Atlanta. North Highway the new signs called it. Elmer passed the lumberyard and the road off to the sawmill and the footings where the new school was going to go, but the outskirts of town thinned out fast after that, nothing but shacks and fields of dry brown cornstalks and new growths of shortleaf pine from forests that had been clear-cut a few years before. The black road ran sleek under his tires, making a whisking sound on the clean asphalt. The freshly painted center stripe shone a bright yellow.

Up ahead on his right in a long slow curve he saw the Witcher boy at his family’s boiled peanut stand under a pinewood lean-to, the roof pitched with hay. Elmer pulled off to the side of the road and parked on the shoulder about ten yards shy of the boy. He turned off the engine and studied the sootblack kettle hung over a fire of hickory and birch wood. The boy, no more than eight or nine, wore dirty overalls and a work shirt that was too big for him. He was alone, standing on his tiptoes, dipping a big spoon into the boiling water.

Elmer slammed the truck door and walked around the hood of his Chevy but the boy still didn’t look up.

“Hey, son.”

The boy didn’t say anything but gave Elmer a sideways glance, the way a cat turns its head when coming out of a nap. He had a skinny neck and pointed ears and his towhead was shaved down to a thin buzzcut. His eye slits were narrow, almost Chinese-looking.

Elmer asked, “Your name’s Walker, ain’t it? Just like your daddy’s?”

The boy nodded and stared at his feet and spoke a very faint, “Yessir.”

“How’s your daddy doing?”

Walker Witcher Jr. shrugged, his eyes still at his feet, the water boiling before him.

“He’s all right.”

Elmer looked into the kettle, the roiling water letting off steam and the rotation of the wet peanuts jostling like popcorn in a popper.

“How much you get for ’em?”

“Small bags is a quarter, big’uns fifty cent.”

“Gimme a small one.”

The boy got a paper sack and snapped it open with one jerk of his wrist. He dipped a ladle deep down into the kettle, his dark eyes peering into the bubbling surface of the water. He pulled out a full scoop and tilted it over the ground and the excess water poured out and then dribbled until he was satisfied and he dumped the peanuts into the sack. The brown paper soaked through and darkened with water. He held the bag out to Elmer.

“Thank you, son.”

Elmer gave him a quarter and the boy examined it and put it in the bib pouch of his overalls. He looked back at Elmer as though he was going to say something but didn’t.

“You going to be busy out here today, I bet,” Elmer said. “All these people heading up to the dam this evening. Is your daddy out there doing the barbecue?”

“Yessir. They had some hogs on all night.”

“Well, I guess that’ll make for some good eatin’.”

Elmer looked around and pawed his foot in the dirt. The little boy picked up a black metal lid that was next to the fire and stood and placed it over the kettle.

“Well, thank you for the goobers. I best be getting on.”

The little boy didn’t say anything.

Elmer opened his truck door and set the peanuts down in the seat next to him and cranked up the engine and pulled off. He drove slowly, watching in his rearview mirror as the little boy sat down on the shoulder of the road and stared blankly at the edge of the new highway.

He drove further north and the road pressed slightly west. He put a few peanuts in his mouth and worked them around, spitting the softened salty shells out of the window and swallowing the slimy delicious meat. He was reaching into the sack for another handful when he saw a red Buick Roadmaster convertible with the top down parked off to the side. A man in a suit and tie was out of the car and talking to the man in the driver’s seat.

Elmer put more peanuts in his mouth and pressed the gas to pass but the man standing outside stepped to the edge of the highway and waved his arms at him to stop. Elmer slowed down and pulled over beyond them on the shoulder. He left the motor running and reached beneath his seat for his .38 and six bullets from the carton. He clicked open the cylinder and loaded the cartridges and snapped it shut. He placed the gun on the seat next to him behind the bag of the boiled peanuts.

“Hello,” the man yelled.

Elmer, working the nuts between his molars, watched in the side mirror as the man in the car got out and slammed the shiny red door. The men were dressed identically in dark suits and red ties, and walked together up to his truck.

“Thank you, sir, for stopping,” said the man who had waved and yelled. “We need some guidance.”

Elmer spat the shells out the window that landed near their polished black dress shoes. The men took a step back and looked at each other. They were about his age and their ties had snow-white Coca-Cola logos on them. The first man took off his suit coat and revealed red suspenders, these also emblazoned with the Coca-Cola script.

“Hello, sir, this is Stan and I’m Howell,” the first man said. He held his soft clean hand up as though to reach into the window to shake, but Elmer ignored it. His voice was like those Elmer had heard on newsreels. “We are down here today from Atlanta for the dam dedication.”

“You workin’ for the state?”

“Oh, no,” Howell said, and he looked at Stan and they laughed, “not quite. We are employees of the Coca-Cola Corporation.”

They glanced down at the logos on their ties as though Elmer had not seen. Elmer looked at the logos and then back at their faces.

“You must be doing it for the free clothing.”

Howell looked down at his tie and then at Stan’s. They laughed again.

“Well,” he said, “that’s a good one, I guess you could say that . . . Really, though, we are guests of the governor and he said we could hang signs along the way to the dam. There’s expected to be a big crowd out here this afternoon. Our maps, however—”

“Signs? What kind of signs?”

“Coca-Cola signs. Banners, really.”

“You got them in the trunk of your car?”

“Oh, no,” Howell laughed and again looked to Stan, whose smirk was heavy on his clean white chubby face. “A man in a truck hangs them. We just put up markers for the best placement.”

“You got to get permission from the sheriff to post anything in Achena County.”

“Well,” Howell’s voice took on a deeper tone and he raised his shoulders, “I do not believe that your sheriff would disagree with the gov-er-nor on this issue.”

“I reckon you’d just have to ask him to know for sure. You can hang monkeys from the trees out here for all I care. I don’t give a damn what you do. I got to get on down the road.”

Elmer shifted into first and the truck began to roll. He reached for more peanuts.

“Wait, please. We need directions. Can you help us?”

Elmer revved the gas but pressed the clutch in as the men walked along to move with him and the truck rolled to a slow halt. Their faces held perpetual grins.

“Could you please tell us if we are on the right road to the dam, and how to get there?”

Elmer pulled his hand out of the peanut sack, lifted his finger to point, and was about to describe the directions when Stan stepped up beside Howell and cut him off.

“And also tell us”—Stan’s voice was strong Yankee, guttural and fast—“if there’s a half-decent golf course out this way.”

Elmer grunted, a half-laugh. He spat out the window and started to reach for his gun, but instead put both hands on the wheel and popped the clutch. The tires growled and spewed pebbles back behind as he took off and left them there staring at his truck as he headed on up the road.

Elmer sped up the two-lane, passing a pulpwood truck carrying a load of cut pines down to the sawmill. He ate several handfuls of peanuts and spat the shells out the window and watched the side mirror as they trailed and flickered in the headwind. He passed the turnoff for the new road to the dam without even slowing down, pressing ahead to the northwest. He drove by the turnoff for Finley Shoals Road where he had been out this morning to see Mrs. McNulty and kept on until he got to the first turn off down toward Ridleyville and Fish Creek. The dirt road was dry and rutted from the heavy rains back in August, but still no road scraper had run over it. He put it in second gear and rolled it slowly along the dirt road that declined all the way down to Fish Creek, a tributary to the Oogasula.

He came to the bottom of a long crest and saw the rickety wooden bridge over the creek. The Washingtons were out with cane poles hanging off the railings and along the banks beneath it. Their smooth ebony faces looked up to him in surprise. The youngest man, Maurice, picked up a small bottle from near his feet and hid it in his overalls pocket. The three men all scrunched to the bridge railing to let his truck get by. Instead Elmer stopped the truck just shy of the bridge in the road and turned the motor off. He moved the sack of peanuts and slid his revolver under the seat with the box of bullets.

He got out and surveyed the Washingtons’ set up. The old man with the gray beard and two of his grown grandsons were on the bridge and down beneath it their sons—the old man’s great-grandchildren—were in the buttonbush along the river’s edge. All Elmer could see of the three boys were the tops of their dark heads and their hands holding onto the ten-foot poles protruding from the shrubby undergrowth along the creek’s edge.

“Y’all catching anything?”

“Not yet,” the senior Washington said. “But it’s early and that sun will soon be shining on this water.”

“That water’s gonna warm ’em up, huh, make ’em hungry?”

“Yes, sir, deputy. That’s what we’re hopin’.”

Elmer smiled at the old man but did not make eye contact with his two grandsons, Maurice and Lemon, nor did they look at him. Elmer figured they were still seeing him with that badge and gun on his belt, the scowl he put on whenever he had to go into the juke joint for a cutting or a shooting. Uncle Lloyd had put their daddy, the old man’s son, in Reidsville for life for stabbing a man about ten years back, the week Elmer had gotten home from the war, a month after it ended in mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maurice and Lemon stared down the end of the cane poles resting on the wooden railing and the lines disappearing into the creek. Elmer had no plans to disabuse them of their notion he was still with the sheriff’s office.

Elmer took the pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and shook one loose and put it between his lips. He lit up and studied the old man in overalls and a tattered hunting jacket and a homemade skullcap knitted together of maroon wool.

“Would y’all like one?” Elmer said, gesturing with the pack.

“I b’lieve I do,” the old man said.

“Here you go, Mister Washington.” Elmer popped open the Zippo and lit the old man’s cigarette. The smoke paused in the air and then blew southward, the direction of the stream.

“Maurice, Lemon, what about you?”

Both men cut their eyes to him quick and then back to their cane poles. Maurice, the oldest and tallest of the two brothers, grunted an affirmative and moved toward Elmer and reached and took a cigarette from him. Elmer flicked the lighter and held the flame toward Maurice but he waved him away and pulled a pack of matches from his overalls pocket and lit it himself.

“Lemon?” Elmer said, but Lemon just shook his head and said, “Naw.”

The old man said, “Thank you. We ’preciate it.”

Elmer turned and looked back up the north side of the stream, the water running slowly along flat shoals out of the wild growth. A willow tree in the banks about one hundred feet up towered over the smaller hardwoods, its lithe branches catching a higher breeze and trembling for a second.

Elmer turned to the old man and asked, “Is y’all’s place in the flood plain?”

“The what?” the old man said.

“The flood plain. Where the lake’s gonna go. You ain’t too far from the river back in there, are you?”

“What you mean? It s’posed to come a big rain?”

“No, sir, the state and power company is damming up the river—tonight. All the low spots around it are going to be under water, for good, ’cording to the government. Has anybody from the power company been out there to see you?”

“Well, no, we haven’t heard from nobody.”

“Have you seen that dam they built up there? It’s the biggest piece of concrete in this part of Georgia.”

“For electricity, right?”

“Yeah, but it’s going to turn this half of the county into a lake. I guess you must be on a dry spot, or they’d moved you out by now. But I thought for sure Ridleyville’d be under water.”

Down below the bridge there was a scurrying in the brush. One of the boys yelled, “Pull ’im out.” The cane pole with the taut line shot straight up from the river and the biggest boy, about twelve, lifted it up and a foot-long bass, glistening green and silver and white, dangled at the end of the line. The second brother, about ten, grabbed the bass and pulled the hook out of its mouth and held it up for the men on the bridge to see.

“That’s a good ’un, Tyrone,” Maurice said. “About two pounds, I bet. String ’im up.”

The old man chuckled, a rumbling laugh like a big cat’s purr. Elmer and the men watched for a while as the boys ran a long piece of twine through the fish’s gills and tied it to the low thick branch of a shrub and tossed the tethered bass in the water and then rebaited the hook with earthworms from an old shoebox. The sun was warming on the bridge and the blue water flowed serenely under the wooden trestle.

“I guess I best be getting on,” Elmer said. “Y’all keep an eye on that river tonight. The power company says they know right where this lake will go and where it will flood and where it won’t, but I don’t see how somebody with a piece of paper and a little metal tool no bigger than a stapler can predict it.”

“Yes, sir, deputy. And don’t worry, we got these boys in school. We just giving them a day out ’fore it gets too cold to fish.”

Elmer paused and looked over the bridge at the boys. The oldest one was easing the cane pole back out over the water, propping it on the low branch of a swamp dogwood.

“You do that, now, you hear.” He nodded to each, speaking their names in the rhythm he’d say goodbye, but only the old man acknowledged his farewell.

Elmer got in his truck and turned the key in the ignition and pressed the starter button that cranked up the engine, but when he tried to put it into gear the column linkage stuck and he couldn’t shift it out of neutral.

“Goddammit,” he said under his breath, his face turning flush.

The men on the bridge had leaned tight against the railing to let him pass and were watching him curiously. The old man seemed to want to ask him a question but Elmer ignored him.

Elmer turned off the engine and got out and pulled the axe handle from the stanchion hole. He opened the hood and stood with his feet on the front bumper and leaned up over the engine and jammed the point of the handle into the linkage connectors and knocked them loose.

He stepped down and slammed the hood and dropped the axe handle back into its rightful slot. He got in and started the engine and popped it into first gear and sped over the wooden bridge, shifting into second as he passed the Washingtons, waving a curt goodbye without looking back.

He went farther up Fish Creek Road, the dirt ruts widening out and rising after the creek. He drove into a stretch of older pines and tried to figure where the lake would go. Maybe the chainsaws hadn’t gotten all the trees, but he knew the greedy bastards were too smart to drown their own forests. Where most men saw pine trees, some saw fat bank accounts, a fine car and a big-breasted woman waiting for them in the Imperial Hotel on Peachtree Street.

He looped around a back road to the north so he wouldn’t have to pass back by the Washingtons. He got on the highway and then drove south for about ten miles until he started to get close to town. He came up on Dam Road, the new one they’d cut when construction started three years ago. It was freshly paved and marked with a big new sign announcing Georgia Power Company: Lake Terrell Dam on a white background. He turned off on the two-lane with red dirt shoulders a few yards wide, driving about a mile until he saw two Cadillacs coming up fast behind him. Soon the first one was riding his bumper. He immediately pulled off into a short driveway leading to a fenced pasture. He stopped in front of the locked iron gate and watched in his rearview mirror as the Cadillacs passed by, all black and shiny and full of men in suits. One of the men had on a military dress uniform of some sort, Army perhaps, but Elmer couldn’t get that good of a look at it as they zoomed behind him, sleek and fast on the smooth road.

He took his eyes off the mirror and looked at the pasture ahead, busy with cows going about the business of eating grass and drinking water from an old bathtub set out in the middle of the field. Old bathtubs made good troughs for the cows once the drains were plugged up to catch rain. Maybe he could give Mrs. McNulty a dollar for that old tub of hers and sell it for more to one of these farmers with the fields full of cows that had been herded out of the low pastures that were soon to be lake bottom. He smiled sideways and spat out the window. It would be funny if some of the farmers had it wrong and their cows ended up drowning and floating in the lake, all bloated and stinky and their eyes glossed over and their waterlogged hides ridden with maggots and worms. Especially if it was some of Aubrey Terrell’s cows. He shifted in his seat and scratched his nuts, then tapped another cigarette out of the pack and lit it. He inhaled deep and let the smoke glide out around him like a cloud as he dropped the column into reverse.

He drove back to North Highway and turned right, passing three pulpwood trucks with cut sections of chained-down logs. He turned onto Finley Shoals Road and drove on past Drowning Creek Road about a mile until he turned left onto a year-old logging road scraped out through a thicket of sapling oaks and yellow poplars. He drove up a hill, the terrain changing from flat clay to rocky, the small trees giving way to an open field that had been clear-cut of pine trees and the road diverted around a six-foot high wall of granite boulders. Trees grew sideways and up from the low cliff. He remembered learning in middle school that this had been the coastline millions of years ago, back when dinosaurs and woolly mammoths had roamed the Earth, pterodactyls flying overhead.

He followed the logging road around the boulders and stopped and turned off the engine and left the blue Chevy smack dab in the center of the one-lane road amidst a thicket. No one would be able to get by his truck but no one was going to be back in here today, and if they were, they shouldn’t be. He got his revolver from under the seat and stuck it in the back of his britches.

He walked along the ridge of rocks until he passed into a swale and came up on the river where it broke over the shoals. Boulders spanned the river, stopping anyone trying to get upstream in a rowboat or a raft. Hardwoods grew along the riverbanks, including a few grand willows whose long leaf-covered branches drooped ceremoniously onto the grass below.

Elmer climbed up an incline to the top of a granite boulder that stood almost six feet above the water’s edge. He stood there watching the river for a while and then lit a cigarette and stepped onto the next boulder, following the narrow path across the river on the top of exposed rocks, water flowing through channels cut between the stones. He held his cigarette in his lips and raised his hands out to his sides to keep his balance. A few of the boulders were wet and slick where the river flowed over them and he almost slipped at one point, the worn heels of his old brogans not getting much traction on the wet stones. Almost to the bank of the far side, two boulders were a good three feet apart. He squatted on the rock at the gap and looked downstream at the swirling water where it picked up speed as the land sloped downhill.

He finished the cigarette and turned north and flicked the butt upstream into the water and watched the white speck bob and sink and rise again, making a path between two boulders. It dropped down the mini-waterfall and disappeared but then bobbed up, like he’d seen those river jumpers from Niagara Falls do on the newsreels back when he went to the movies, back before the war when he didn’t mind the company of others. His eyes followed the cigarette butt until it shrank, too small to see in the flattening water.

He noticed that the water smelled fresh, clearer here before it slipped down across the fall line and muddied with the loamier soil, and the temperature felt cooler in the midst of the wet boulders. He leaned down and cupped his hands and drank from the splashing current, swallowing several handfuls, splashing some on his face.

He stood and measured the space with his eyes and then stretched his legs and made the short jump across the gap in the boulders. He walked to the river’s edge and headed up beneath a stand of oaks and poplars and red maples. From a dirt rise he could see through the thinning leaves of the hardwoods and could make out the shape of the dam, hulking and beige, the fresh concrete filling in the gap where the river ran between two sloping hills.

He went about half a mile in the low hardwoods, the leaves crunching under his feet, stopping only to push back the briars that hung across his path. His tooth that sometimes hurt began to bother him, an ache that came and went deep in his back right molar.

The hardwoods ended and he reached a narrow stand of small pines surviving on the edge of a field of stumps. He sat down beneath the few remaining trees that the pulpwooders had been too lazy to clear or hadn’t had time to get to and leaned back on his elbows. He pulled the revolver out of his britches and laid it on the ground and reclined even more, tossing away a few pine cones. The loose brown needles made for a comfortable bed.

He turned his head and looked at the bark of a pine tree only a few feet from his face, the intricate patterns of the bark busy with ants, the trunk like a hazy map of roads and rivers and plateaus and valleys, little towns and big knotted cities, and vast lands of open pastures and virgin forests. The bark of the tree looked like what he remembered of his view of the country the time the Navy flew him on an airplane, the ants sorting themselves into highways just like people.

He lay there for a while and smoked, looking at the tree bark, until the sun moved to an angle where it shone down on him and it warmed his shirt and pants. He stubbed out the butt of his cigarette and licked his finger and then wet the remaining smolder to make sure it was out, just like they had taught him to do with matches in his three-week stint as a Cub Scout, something he quit because he had gotten tired of his daddy ridiculing his little blue suit and funny hat. He tossed the extinguished butt into the pine needles and put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. He felt the sun on his eyelids and listened to the birds chirping and scraping the bark in the tree limbs above him, brown thrashers singing and blue jays anxiously calling. He heard the rustling of feathers and soft low clucking of quail and thought about flushing them out and shooting one or two, but a .38 revolver was no good for bird hunting. There was a time when he wouldn’t have dreamed of coming into the woods without his shotgun and taking back a few of the plump birds, but it had been a year at least since he had messed with the old 20-gauge pump he kept in the back of his closet. The shotgun had been his daddy’s. He had cleaned it and oiled it regularly but had not shot it in two hunting seasons.

He began to dream half-dreams of being a boy hunting in the woods alone with a .410 and then going home to his mama with a squirrel or a bird and her hugging him, his daddy being nowhere around and they liking it that way. Then the half-dreams became deep dreams, his fists uncoiled and his eyelids twitched and heavy sleep poured over and through him like a solid wall of water.

Percy was out again, his morning visit with the old lady and his first nap of the day behind him. He trotted through a field to the narrow road and followed it until he saw the empty blue pickup truck. He stopped and sniffed the tires, the smell of oil and gasoline heavy from the warm motor, a globular spot expanding in the dirt under the engine block. He peed on the left front wheel.

He ran on down the road until he cut his path through the hardwoods where the boulders began and the cliff was red clay and sandy over and around the boulders. Trees here grew at strange angles, some with two trunks and others joined together at branch level and some split apart at the top, crazy like the old lady’s hair got sometimes when no one had been to see her in the days and weeks when she stayed in the bed and didn’t speak and forgot to feed him. He got by on bugs and grass and whatever varmints, maybe a squirrel or even a rabbit, he could catch in the woods. He missed the old man and the hambones and biscuits he used to throw him after supper. He saw three gray and brown mutts from a distance and barked angrily at them as they ran away over a hill. Many a stray dog Percy had snarled at to keep away from the junkyard by the river, his home.

Percy went down from the road to his path through the brambles and leaves and fallen trees, trunks that had dropped sideways over time and sometimes were nudged by the hard winds of spring to lie horizontal and rot and become a home for snakes and lizards and even the occasional turtle if close enough to the water. He ran up on the boulders and looked downstream at the flow of the river and then tiptoed across. He had fallen off the boulders and into the water more than once in his younger days. The first time he had sucked water into his lungs and almost drowned. He had fought it with all his black chow fury and scrambled to the bank and coughed and gasped and rolled on the ground like a mad dog until he spewed up water and the pain stopped and he could breathe normally.

He didn’t go back to the river rocks for a few months after that first splash, but then one warm day the water had smelled fresh and clear on the spring breezes blowing up to the house and he trotted down there and stood at the edge, studying the boulders with his black eyes, his tongue hanging and his wet nostrils taking in all the scents of the fish and the turtles and the blooming flowers along the wide stream of water that never stopped moving. A few days of that and he was back on the boulders again, standing there looking across the water at the other side where birds skittered in the trees and squirrels and rabbits played under a canopy of branches and leaves. He could see cows in the distance, their existence on the other side of the river taunting him until it became his daily ritual once more to cross the river on the boulders. One rainy day he lost his footing and fell off the boulder into the water, this time banging his head, and when he came to he was down river, washed onto a shoal with the water lapping softly around him.

So today he crossed the river carefully, keeping to the middle of the rocks and taking short, sure steps until he reached the gap where he had to jump, an easy leap when he was a younger dog and still not a hard leap for him now, although he was very sure to jump plenty far enough from the one boulder to the next. He moved on across and jumped down from the last high rock onto the riverbank and ran along the edge for a ways, beneath a series of willows hanging long and sad over the edge of the water, and then to a stretch where the river was blocked with deadfalls of poplar and oak trunks that had not survived a twister that sprang up back in the summer and knocked over the trees like matchsticks, uprooting some and breaking others off at the base. He stopped and sniffed the roots of an old oak, the earthen hole holding rain water, the hoof prints of deer fresh in the dry red clay around the suspended root system, intricate and wild and mysterious above ground.

A squirrel surprised him, skipping from one of the decaying trunks hanging into the river and onto the bank and scurrying up a dogwood tree that was supple and had survived the fierce tornado in August, unlike the stiff and unforgiving trunks of the big hardwoods that had stood majestically but tumbled down in the big winds to lie dead and proud in the river. The squirrel screeched and its claws scraped on the bark as it climbed to the top and looked down at him, its bushy tail flicking in the sunlight and its eyes bulging. It wasn’t a flying squirrel so Percy let it be. He was getting too old to bark his lungs out at every varmint that crossed his path. Many a squirrel he had treed and waited out and crunched their fragile skulls and broken their pencil-thin necks between his teeth, but this one he let go. Squirrels were not meaty enough. Rabbits made for better eating.

He paused and let his eyes close for a minute and was tempted to trot back into the cut pines and curl there in the needles in the sunlight and nap when he heard yapping, a steady cry in the distance beyond the hill. He followed the yelps up a low rise to a narrow stretch of pines left standing near a clear-cut, the lonely stumps still oozing sap. He smelled the drift of cigarette smoke but ignored it and ran along the edge of the cleared forest to a new trail the pulpwooders had used to haul out the timber, a scratched-out path where longleaf pines had been dragged through clay and brown needles to the waiting trucks. The smell of young dogs rose in his nostrils and the sound of puppy cries got stronger. At the juncture of a dirt road plowed only a month ago, he followed his nose and ears to a side ditch. He stepped warily in their direction, eyes open for an angry mama dog to show up and protect her litter. But no dog appeared and he inched closer to the whines of the puppies. He looked down in a swirl of wiregrass and saw six skinny black and brown pups curled together, their eyes still closed and their attempts to walk on their feet shaky, their cries of thirst and hunger unanswered by their mama, who was nowhere near.

He put his nose into the squirming pile and they detected his warmth and yelped louder and suckled desperately at his nose, trampling on each other’s heads. He pulled back and watched them and then sniffed at the pile again, this time rousing them even more as they cried and whined with all of their young might. A damp warmth rose from their young bodies. Most of the pups were all black or mostly black with white streaks on their bellies and legs and paws, but one yellowish one that was solid in color and fatter than the other scrawny ones managed to crawl across Percy’s snout as he nuzzled them. It scratched his nose with a needle-like toenail. Percy shook his head and knocked the yellow dog to the ground beside the litter and barked loudly, the roar flattening the ears of the still-blind pups. He barked a few more times and then let out a low growl, a grumbling threat. They cowered and cried, holding their heads down between their front paws and their stumpy bodies squeezing together, helpless against his tirade. He stopped growling and turned and trotted off to explore in the direction of the cigarette smoke, fainter than it had been earlier. Maybe a man there had a hambone in his pocket. The whimpers of the pups faded as he ran away.

He crossed through the low valley, stopping to smell the fresh sap every now and then where the big trees had been felled and hauled off, leaving only two-foot high stumps and a mess of pine needles and cones and branches covering what had been the floor of the forest. The fresh pine oozings caused him to lose the odor of the cigarette smoke but he remembered where it came from and followed in the direction to the high edge of the valley.

He saw the man lying on his back beneath a small island of remaining trees. Percy took a wide arc and circled about fifty feet away, sniffing the man out. It was the same man who had been firing his gun at the squirrel this morning, the same man who had been to see the old lady and who had shuffled around on the porch with her and that tub, the same man who had smoked by the river and urinated into it and who spat regularly into the hydrangeas and who drove the big blue truck that was parked in the middle of the road across the river. Percy kept his distance from this man. His eyebrows worked in confusion over the man’s behavior and he looked back in the direction of the truck, an uncustomary place for someone to park. It also was odd for a man to nap flat on the ground beneath the trees. Usually men would sit half in a daze with a gun and watch for dove or quail or deer, perhaps sipping from a small bottle, but never stretching out to sleep. Percy couldn’t get his mind around the way people were acting, the changes in their routines. When he saw the man stir, moving his arm and beginning to raise his head, he hightailed it into the trees further up the hill and ran off and hid in the brush.

Elmer opened his eyes and raised his head and rubbed a stiff spot on the back of his neck. He detected movement and looked up the hill where small pines and briars and wayward shrubs grew thick. He reached for his revolver and aimed that direction, tensing his finger on the trigger, but he decided not to fire. He couldn’t see what was causing the faint rustling through the thicket, a scuffling sound that faded off into the stillness of what remained of the pine forest. He didn’t want to waste a bullet.

The forest here once had been the quietest place on earth in the daytime when the bugs and birds and squirrels were still, recumbent in their nests of straw and dirt, the longleaf pine trunks absorbing sound like a sponge takes up water, except the sound held in the trees forever. Now most of that pine was bound to be made into newspapers and paper plates and cardboard of all shapes, folding boxes and poster board, even the little tubes that toilet paper rolled around. How those trees went into those stinky factories and came out paper products he couldn’t understand. He and Sherry once had been down to Savannah near the ocean where the paper mills sat on the mouth of a tidal river. They smelled that rotten-egg stench until they couldn’t stand it anymore, rolling up the windows on a 98-degree day, his eyes burning, she holding her nose while he drove, cussing. All he knew about the tree business was that he wanted no part of it. Whatever he had learned was horrifying. A man falling into a wood chipper and coming out mangled like a sausage. A man drowning in a vat of sulfuric acid. Other men getting rich and building golf courses on the north side of Atlanta along that pretty road where they wouldn’t dare touch any of the majestic oak trees surrounding their homes that sat like palaces on the hills.

He stood up and tucked his pistol in the back of his britches and crossed straight through the valley of stumps, like low brown wooden gravestones in a cemetery blanketed with pine straw. He paused to watch small black beetles rushing around the globs of sap that were drying on the cut of the dead tree. He moved on through the chair-high remains of the longleaf pines until he came to an enormous stump, almost four feet across, a tree that had once been king of the forest with its green crown towering above the tree line. Perched atop the remaining stump sat a praying mantis, its long green front legs poised in sharp elbow bends and the bug’s angular head cocked in an air of wisdom as though it was saying grace over the perished pine.

Elmer studied the stump, a cut less than two weeks old. The stump had the angled shape of a pine felled by an axe and not the smooth hewn surface that most of the nearby trees had, zipped through by the engine-powered teeth of the blade. This tall tree had fought like a sumbitch, forcing perhaps a second larger chainsaw with a bigger motor than the first to be called in and the blade sharpened and pressed at an angle and the engine gunned until they shouted timber and it fell downhill in the direction of the Oogasula.

Elmer raised his heel and kicked at the top side of the stump and the praying mantis fluttered its green wings and buzzed away. Elmer watched its flight and then looked back at the top of the stump and the rings there, too many to count, at least one hundred, maybe twice that many. He fired a cigarette and tilted his head back and blew the smoke up, a cloud drifting in the air, stiller after the early morning breeze. The sun had crossed the eastern sky and hung at the top of its arc, not yet having begun its downslide toward the evening, bound for an early quitting time as the days became shorter. He took a few more puffs and then started out through the pine stump field toward the river.

Elmer crossed the boulders on the river and returned to his pickup. He stuck his pistol under the seat and cranked it and drove slowly up the one-lane dirt road, the ruts getting rockier as he climbed the slight hill away from the river into a wild thicket. He had driven half of a mile when he saw a Ford F-100 coming from the other direction, the truck a shiny red, the biggest model Ford had on the market, the grille of the truck like an enormous goofy grin and its hood rising high in a pronounced arch concealing a V-8 engine. He stopped but the Ford continued coming forward and then got close enough for Elmer to see Warren Higginbotham Jr.’s broad face behind the windshield, his meaty hands on the steering wheel. There was a woman with him, dark-haired and small, sitting low in the passenger seat, not his wife. Warren smiled when he saw it was Elmer, pulling the truck up so close that the bumpers almost touched before shifting it into neutral and turning it off. The Ford towered over the squat blue Chevy.

Warren opened his door and got out. Elmer stayed put, lighting another cigarette.

“Elll—merrr! I figured that was your truck.” Warren said everything loudly. “Boy, what in the hell you doing out here? You got me blocked in.”

Elmer did not smile or take the cigarette from his lips. He looked at the woman sitting low in Warren’s passenger seat. She was barely visible, only her eyes and forehead and a big mass of dark hair poofed out.

Elmer stepped out of the truck and Warren approached, his thick hand out for a shake. Standing six inches taller and weighing at least one hundred pounds more than Elmer, he wore an untucked starched white shirt with a straight collar, the top three buttons unfastened, and navy dress pants and polished black cowboy boots.

“Hey, Warren.”

“Good to see you, cousin.”

Warren’s grip was firm and he moved in with his left arm as though to scoop him up but Elmer escaped, extending the fire of his cigarette like a sharp sword and ducking behind the open truck door.

“S’that something the men in Atlanta do these days, Warren? Hug one another?”

“Damn, Elmer. It’s been a while. We are blood.”

“Blood?” He spat on the ground. “How is that again?”

“Aw, you know. Your grandma on your daddy’s side was a Higginbotham, a great-aunt to my daddy. That makes us second—or is it third?—cousins.”

“Next thing you gonna tell me is that I’m Aubrey Terrell’s love child.”

“He’s got some Higginbotham in him. Some of the same blood you got.”

“Yeah, and that’s Pocahontas, my long-lost twin sister, over there.” He pointed to Warren’s truck.

The smile dropped from Warren’s face. He turned and said, “You ain’t changed much.”

“What you expect? Grandpa Jones?”

“Naw, I shoulda figured. What are you doing out here?”

“Just scouting lake bottom for Georgia Power.”

Elmer took a long glance around at the brush and hardwoods, a mess of dogwoods and red maples that crowded the road.

“What are you doing out here, Warren? I ain’t seen you in five years or so, not since you left the sheriff’s office to go to Atlanta. Where is it you work again? A bank, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, I’ve been at the bank there five years now. It’s a good place.”

“A bank.” Elmer shook his head and spat.

“I’m just out here checking on my cows,” Warren said. Elmer looked back to the truck and the woman jerked her eyes away from his gaze. She had olive-colored skin and a sharp nose, was possibly Jewish, most likely from Atlanta or Columbus. He’d heard that the Jews had their own country clubs in the cities.

“You still got cows down in these parts?”

“Yeah, I been on up the hill there, checking on my old cow pasture, making sure there are none left, that they got ’em all moved.”

“Ain’t no pastures on this road. This is a logging road. Besides, I ain’t seen no cows down this way since early summer. They moved ’em all up along the new Dam Road.”

“S’that so? Well, just wanted to make sure one of mine doesn’t drown here in this lake. It’s something, ain’t it? Just flooding the land like this.”

“Some of this land used to be in my mama’s family, long time ago, before my daddy got smart and tried to be a bidness man.” Elmer hustled his balls and spat on the ground.

“That wasn’t a good time to be in business for anybody. Didn’t anybody make any money back then. ’Specially dirt farmers like your daddy.”

“Certainly not him. But I guess it wouldn’t pay to own the bottom of the lake these days, or maybe it would, shit, I don’t know. I guess old Aubrey’s doing all right with that farmland, selling it to the state for the lake. I reckon there’s good money in selling what used to be my mama’s land.”

“Shoot, the Guvnah’s done more good for this county than everybody else around here combined.”

“Shit.” Elmer said. “I wouldn’t trust that sumbitch as far as I can throw him.”

“You are wrong ’bout ’im, Elmer. I just stopped by and saw Uncle Lloyd and he said the Guvnah’s trying to help you.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Yeah, Lloyd said he’s probably going to help set you up with something if you’ll let him. Lloyd’s worried about you, Elmer. It don’t pay to be so hardheaded all the time.”

Elmer got into his truck. He put his hand on the open window to pull the door closed but Warren moved next to him and prevented his shutting it.

“Hold on, now, Elmer. I didn’t mean to piss you off. Hold on.”

Warren leaned toward Elmer and rested a big hand on his shoulder.

“After we are done out at the dam, you should come over to Coach Hilliard’s house. He’s having a party tonight and lots of folks will be in town. You can be my guest. Coach always has good liquor, and there’s gonna be a lot of women around, from all over the state.” Warren nodded his head back in the direction of his truck and raised his eyebrows. “Some fine young thangs.”

“You ain’t bringing your family down, I ’spect. Lloyd tells me you and Marilee got two young’uns.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Warren removed his hand from Elmer’s shoulder and stepped back, speaking lower. He looked at the truck and then back at Elmer. “Boys, three and six. They up in Atlanta with their mama. You’d be their cousin of some kind. You need to come up and see them. You’re family.”

Elmer spat on the ground near Warren’s boots and slammed his door. He cranked up his truck and looked Warren in the eye. “I ain’t shit,” he said, and shifted into reverse.

Elmer backed down the narrow road using the side mirrors as his guide until he found a clear spot wide enough to turn around, and then sped off with Warren’s Ford following. He watched the red truck in his rearview mirror and rode the gas hard, lashing out a batch of curses on Warren and his Jewess concubine, then Senator Aubrey Terrell and his Uncle Lloyd and their fondness for impure women and liquor and money and the love of their own images reflected in shiny glass. Elmer cut the wheel sharp as he turned left onto the pavement toward Finley Shoals, the place his great-grandfather had founded.

Elmer watched in his rearview as Warren stopped at the intersection with Finley Shoals Road and paused there before lurching slowly to the right and back toward Lymanville, dust trailing the tires of the F-100 as he exited the logging road. Elmer mashed the gas pedal even harder as the road flattened out, land where the longleaf pines had once grown high and pristine but were now clear-cut. Finley Shoals devoid of its trees was ugly and sad.

He slowed down as he got to the crossroads where the crumbling macadam of Finley Shoals Road met the red dirt of Sills Road. He sat there with the engine running, not a soul around the old general store that was catty-corner to where the church once stood. Across the street were a few clapboard houses with long porches running along the fronts and sides. All of the doorknobs were gone from the homes, and some of the doors, many of the windows busted and a few knocked out altogether. Some gutter troughs were hanging down and others completely gone. The old weathervane atop the store was missing, as was the sign and the red Coke cooler that had sat out front.

His homeplace was to the south, but he avoided looking in that direction. He knew he didn’t have the heart to go see it. He continued on toward the old gristmill at the very end of Finley Shoals Road on the banks of the Oogasula, only a quarter mile from the crossroads. He’d made this trip back as a boy when his daddy farmed and there was corn to be ground into grits. But his daddy had been gone a long time, twenty years, and the mill had been closed down almost ten. Finley Shoals’ mill was like most of the gristmills and the cotton gins in Achena County these days, empty sagging buildings along the rivers and creeks, ghostlike structures of dried, rotten boards popping loose from their framing. Only the sawmills still thrived.

He parked by the gristmill at the end of the road, the macadam ending about fifty yards from the river where the route took to dirt, weeds growing high in the path that had seen very few travelers as of late. Only the oncoming cool of winter kept the wide path from vanishing altogether. Wild privet had sprung up around the loading dock where once corn had been loaded in and then shipped back out as bags of grits.

He got out of his truck and walked through the brush and surveyed the dock before stepping up onto the old wooden planks. The boards creaked underfoot. He carefully checked his steps and tried to judge where the joists below provided for more support. The boards were dusty and dry and brittle. The broad slanted tin awning over the dock blocked out any sun and made it seem dark despite the early afternoon sunshine. The door to the mill was gone from its hinges but the room was very dim since the one window high above the floor had been boarded from the inside with a sheet of plywood. Only a slant of sunlight in the shape of the doorframe cut into the darkness.

He went through the doorway into the mill’s large front warehouse room with the open ceiling reaching to the rafters and paused to let his eyes get adjusted. A strong smell he took to be a dead animal, or possibly shit from a dog or a coon or some other kind of varmint, rose up on him, odiferous like feces but also sharp and pungent, not unlike that of a skunk or stale urine in a neglected outhouse. Paper littered the floor, shreds of yellowed newspapers and magazines and feed sacks chewed by mice. Small round, dry turds dotted the floorboards. A hodgepodge of footwear was lined up neatly together in a corner. He paused a moment, studying on brogans with the soles gone, a pair of fisherman’s hip waders and three black Army boots without laces, the tongues hanging awry.

He crossed the cavernous room toward a closed door. He remembered it as the office where the mill boss kept the cashbox. He put one hand on the doorknob and another over his nose and mouth and pushed it open, a cloud of dust drifting down from the doorframe and another puffing up from the floor when the rusty hinges creaked and the door opened, cracking the tomblike seal. A powerful stench and the glare of sunshine rushed at him simultaneously. The rectangular little room had a source of light, a small window on the end, and he covered his eyes at the brightness and then looked down waist high to see the bottom of a man’s withered foot, toe bones protruding through black skin. He moved his hand down to cover his nose and mouth to keep from gagging at the smell and pushed the door wider and stood there and took in the decomposing body supine on an old metal table. He looked for only a second or two but the image etched in his head as though he’d gazed on it for an hour: the man had died in his overalls on top of a makeshift mattress of old sacks on the tabletop. His skin was molded black like a bad banana and was rotting away in patches revealing bones. What remained of his waist-length white beard was dry and yellowing and piled on his chest and fell down by his right side. One overall strap was loose but the other still fastened and he had one arm raised over his head but the other down by his side, the black deteriorating hand relaxed with long curling yellow fingernails. The man’s eyeballs were missing, either decayed or plucked out by a coon or a king snake, and his teeth were bared in a ghoulish grin where the lips had sagged and the face rotted to reveal part of his jawbone and skull. Elmer darted his eyes to the other side of the room where a metal folding chair faced the window and a four-foot high stack of Progressive Farmer magazines and Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogues stood piled neatly in the corner.

He turned and pulled the door shut. He walked swiftly across the dark main room and out, stepping lightly across the creaking floor of the dock and down through the wild privet to his truck parked in the low dry weeds at the dead end of Finley Shoals Road.

He squatted for a minute until his inhalations returned to normal, taking deep breaths of the fresh air. He stood and faced the river and leaned back against the right front fender of his truck and pulled a cigarette from his pocket and snapped open the Zippo and lit it and inhaled deep, holding the smoke and closing his eyes as he did.

It had been at least three, maybe even five years since he’d seen that old hermit, supposedly from Tennessee, who had taken up in the mill and lived there after it closed. If he had thought about him at all he had assumed he was long gone. Elmer remembered coming home after the war and seeing the man with the long beard walking into town with a goat on a leash to buy tobacco and newspapers. He heard stories from folks in Finley Shoals about the man swimming naked in the river and sunbathing in the rocks along the shoals, and that he never talked to anyone except his goat. While out in the patrol car Elmer had waved at him many times, and the man with his goat had waved begrudgingly back, but they had never spoken. The closest he’d ever been to him was today, finding his corpse.

Elmer smoked three cigarettes and turned as though to walk to the river’s edge to look down at where the big water-powered wheel had been, the hydraulic force that had spun the gears of the mill’s grist crusher, but he changed his mind. Finley Shoals’ mill wheel had been sold to an antiques collector up north earlier in the year and there was nothing left to see except the steel axle jutting out over the edge of the river. He got in and cranked his truck, turning around in a long circle in the wide dead end of the road. Holding the cigarette in his lips, steering with both hands, he drove slowly back down the road a quarter mile to the Finley Shoals crossroads.

He crossed over Sills Road and pulled off in the dirt lot next to where the Finley Shoals Baptist Church had been. Its sign, a six-foot high portable billboard purchased by a preacher about seven years ago for posting Bible verses and messages of his own making, was blank, all of the letters gone, as were the small tires used for hauling it behind a truck. Somebody had unscrewed the wheels and carried them off, leaving the sign for lake bottom.

The sanctuary was gone except for the busted foundation. About three months prior the county had tried to move the old A-frame structure on a wide flatbed, jamming supports of heavy beams underneath, lifting it with a giant crane from the sawmill and then tying it down with heavy ropes. It hadn’t gone far when the gables began to crack and the trusses broke loose and the roof ultimately gave way and the white clapboard structure collapsed on its side, just sagging right off the flatbed into the ditch, its insides chewed up by termites, more little bugs in one church than there were people in the world. The county left the remnants of the church on the side of the road, and after darkness fell scavengers on mules came by and busted up the plank boards for firewood they piled in a wagon. They tied ropes to some of the old heart of pine joists that were still solid beneath the thin coating of bug-gnawed rot and dragged the beams away.

Elmer parked in what had been the preacher’s spot. The foundation was cracked and littered with trash and broken wood from the process of ripping loose the sanctuary. A stand of pokeweed withered in the busted masonry beneath where the choir had sat.

He got out of the truck and slammed the door and walked around the church foundation into the violated burial ground. The coffins had been raised up and hauled away and the tombstones moved down to the dry ground near the dump, south and far from the impending lake. He saw a short-handled shovel in the weedy fringe that the chain gang must have left behind when they were digging up the graves. He picked it up, the metal flat head heavy and the wood handle starting to warp with weather. He pressed his heel on the blade and took a shallow stroke at the dry earth. The shovel was sturdy, worth keeping. He carried it over and set it down in the bed of his pickup.

He returned to the old graveyard, walking between the empty graves, about one hundred in all, past the Hawkins and Shepherds and McKibben plots, and, of course, the Finleys, his people. The dirt piles in the early afternoon sun were a rust-colored hue beside the rectangular holes in the red clay. Dents in the ground marked the earth where the oldest of the granite tombstones had sat for almost century and a half. Most of the grave markers had been moved, but at a small hole a short, cracked tombstone lay where it had fallen, grass growing up around the chiseled marble placard recording the life and death of a baby, dead in 1874, three months old. George Finley Jr. May he walk with Jesus in the valley. There had been a lot of dead babies in the old days. Elmer’s mama had lost two before he came along.

He walked over to his mother’s former grave. Elmer had not seen it since she had been dug up. He had visited the night before they exhumed her with the rest of all the Finley Shoals folks and carted them off down to the new cemetery built for those flooded out of their home burial grounds. He looked around for a flower to toss in the hole but it was December and nothing was blooming. The only colors in the landscape were the auburn leaves clinging to the red maples on the hill to the east and a touch of green in the patches of wiregrass. Everything within reach of the cemetery was barren or brown or weedy.

He heard a rumbling from across the cleared land and saw up Sills Road a pulpwood truck loaded with a stack of cut pine logs, its chains hanging and clanking, the engine groaning under the heavy weight. Dust kicked up at the sides of the truck as it motored toward the intersection of Finley Shoals and shifted into a lower gear and lurched as the clutch popped and the transmission caught hold and slowed it down, but strengthened the traction of the thick tires. A covey of quail near the side of the road in a grassy open spot took flight at the noise, scattering like brown specks over the blue-green horizon in the low southern sky. The truck driver slowed to watch the flapping fat birds. Elmer walked between the open graves to what had been the McKibben plot so he could get a look at the quail settling back down in the distance.

The truck came on and stopped near to the old graveyard, about fifty yards from where he was standing. The driver rolled down his window and waved at Elmer, gesturing for him.

“Hey, boy, come over here.” The man’s voice was gruff.

Elmer held his ground, just staring, while the man continued to summon him.

“Hey,” the man yelled and waved again.

Elmer didn’t answer.

The black-haired pulpwooder with leathery skin opened the truck door and climbed out and came around the front of the white cab, the engine idling rough. He was tall and had an enormous gut that hung down in a tucked white T-shirt like a sack over his belt, filling the shirt as tight as a water balloon that shook as he walked. His dark hair was slicked up high from his forehead in a pompadour and fiercely parted on one side.

Elmer stood and watched him come, his large fists clenched, his eyes set hard. The man walked to the edge of the graveyard and studied on it for a minute, as though surprised to see the ground pockmarked with holes. He walked as close as he could get to Elmer, about the distance of a baseball pitcher to home plate, without stepping onto the cemetery grounds. His rough skin had the look of a fresh-oiled baseball glove.

“Son, didn’t you see me waving at you?”

“Yessir, I saw you.”

“Well, why didn’t you come over to me?”

“Just didn’t.”

“You dumb, boy? Or is you a haint?”

“I ain’t nary of the two. I just don’t got to take no orders from you.”

“You what?”

“I ain’t being bossed by no pulpwooder in my own home.”

“You in the graveyard, you dumbass.”

Elmer extended his right arm rigid in front of him and let his middle finger point to the sky.

“Fuck you,” he said.

The man walked into the cemetery and came for Elmer, winding a fast path around the open graves. Elmer instantly regretted leaving his gun in his truck and considered rushing to it, but instead held his ground. He had never run from anyone. He clenched his fists and dug in his heels and the big man was soon on him, throwing a punch that glanced off Elmer’s forehead. The man was too tall for Elmer to punch squarely in the face so he slugged the man’s huge gut. It was like hitting a sack of feed and the man didn’t flinch but kept coming and punching and the weight of his body came behind it and pushed Elmer down onto the ground and the pulpwooder landed hard on top of him. The man smelled of sweat and coffee and pine trees and gasoline. Elmer scrabbled in the dirt to stay out of the two graves they were between but the big man was hitting him, alternating between gut blows and head blows that hurt like hell with the big slow lumps of the man’s fist, his girth pinning Elmer to the ground.

Elmer pushed at the man and surged as hard as he could to get loose, sliding to the side, but the man clung to him. The earth began to fall away and he and the man tumbled like an entwined couple six feet down into the hole, landing with a thud in the clumps of mud at the bottom of the empty grave where Waddie McKibben had rested for fifteen years. The blow of landing under the man in the empty grave knocked Elmer’s breath from him. His chest felt like it was being crushed and he desperately tried to breathe. The big man quit throwing punches and cussed a string of “goddamns” and “sumbitches” and stood and tried to climb out, a boot heel stepping hard on Elmer’s left elbow. On his first try the man stretched one leg up on the top edge of the grave and tried to leap out on his other leg but he fell back on top of Elmer, his ass landing on Elmer’s thighs, painful as hell, but somehow the hurt in his legs shocked his breath back into him. The man kept cussing and this time got better footing and hoisted one leg up on the rim of the grave and then groaned and yelled “shit” and pushed against the side with his other leg. He struggled until he cleared the edge and was out.

Elmer lay at the bottom of the grave, his head and stomach and legs hurting, the ground damp despite the recent dry spell, furious he didn’t have his gun. Elmer heard the man let loose another string of profanities in between groaning and wheezing to try and catch his breath. The man cussed for a while and breathed heavy and then fell into a coughing fit.