Excerpt from Long Man

In the summer of 1936 there was one woman left on the mountaintop where the river’s headwaters formed in rocks ages old and shining with mica, the sediment washing down to tinge its shoals yellow-brown. Most others with her last name had died or moved on decades ago. Though darkness came to her high place first she could climb to this limestone ridge overlooking the cornfields and see daytime lingering in the valley town below. She would stand shielding her eyes until her legs tired. Then she would lower herself to the rocky edge and take off her brogans to rub her sore feet. She would watch with her knees gathered up as the last light mellowed into dusk, falling down the piney bluffs. Before half of the homesteads were razed the lowering sun would stain the tin roofs of houses and barns, deepening the rust to oxblood. Gilding wheat sheaves and tobacco rows, shading red clay furrows. Last summer she might have heard a farmer calling in his cows. She might have heard workers on scaffolds calling to each other over the rumble of cranes and bulldozers, steam shovels gouging the cliffside above the river and dumping out rocks to be crushed for the cement mixer. But now there was only stillness and silence besides the tree frogs singing as twilight drifted toward night. This time next year if she came up here looking for a little more light she would see only miles of endless blue lake.

Long before most of them were run off their land the woman’s neighbors in the valley had stopped seeing her, even when she came down among them. But she kept an eye on them. Looking to the southeast she could see the dam out near the Whitehall County line. It stood over two hundred feet high but from up here it seemed small, wedged between shoulders of limestone with the river wending downstream through the forested humps of the foothills to its base. Standing on the riverbank she had to crane her neck to take it in. From there it was grand enough to steal her breath. Though the woman’s hair was still dark, her face unwrinkled except at the eye corners, the dam made her feel old. The Methodist preacher claimed it went against nature but there was nothing he or anybody else could do to stop it. It took two years to build, billows of grit from tunneling and excavating bitter in her mouth and dynamite rocking the ground under her feet when she walked to the market. Freight trucks, tractors and the axe men of the clearance crews blocked the road. Behind the power company’s concrete wall, on the upstream side of the river, the water was rising to form a reservoir that would drown the town of Yuneetah.

The woman eavesdropped on the talk of her neighbors. They said it would take a year or longer for the whole town to disappear. But this spring there had been heavy rainfall and the lake was swelling faster than expected. Since the dam gates closed on April 30, water had already moved into the kitchen gardens of the houses nearest the site, soaking into their foundations, tasting the minerals in the boulders settlers had hauled with oxen down from the bluffs in 1786. Soon the growing lake would spread over grassy hillocks dotted with clover and the chicory edging the roadsides. By the end of the year lagoons would be made from clefts in the mountains. Fish would swim in dens once inhabited by foxes. The reservoir would eventually reach sixteen miles wide, spilling across the lowlands the town had occupied since two brothers put up a lean-to shed along the riverbank to trade with the Cherokees and a settlement sprang up around it. The water would keep flooding backward from the base of the dam over acres of farmland and timber, over the Baptist church nestled in a copse of pines, over the Methodist church with its neat white parsonage, over the post office and the druggist’s and Gilley’s Hotel...