The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Mom and Dad

  … what’s past is prologue …

  —The Tempest

  Now, Myshka, I will tell you the truth. Let my voice bury my words deep inside you. Before the sun sets, I will tell you secrets you have longed to know. For I was a girl once, too, and like you, I have known sorrows so great there are no words to account for them.

  I

  In a Certain Kingdom, in a Certain Land

  It was after midnight when the boatman and his daughter brought the witch out of Sabbath House and back onto the river. Old Iskra sat astride the johnboat’s center plank, wearing a head scarf and a man’s baggy britches damp with blood, their iron reek lost to the night-fragrant honeysuckle that bowered the banks of the Prosper. In her lap: a bread bowl, wide and deep and packed with dried eucalyptus sprigs and clods of red earth broken around a small, still form covered by a white pillowcase. The pillowcase, like the old woman’s clothes, stained red.

  They angled off-river at the mouth of a bayou and were soon enclosed by the teeming wall of night. Cries of owls, a roar of bullfrogs, the wet slopping of beaver among the stobs. Miranda Crabtree faced into the wind, lighting Hiram’s way with the Eveready spot mounted on the bow. The spotlight shined on branches closing in, cypress skirts scraping like dry, bony fingers along the johnboat’s hull. Spiders in the trees, their webs gleaming silver. A cottonmouth moccasin churning in the shallows. Miranda held up arms to guard her ears and cheeks from the branches, thinking of Alice down the rabbit hole, one small door opening upon another, and another, each door smaller than the last.

  “Push through!” the old witch cried.

  Branches screeching over metal, they did, the boatman breaking off fistfuls of dead cypress limbs until the boat slipped free onto the wide stage of a lake. Here, Hiram cut the motor and they drifted in a stump field, a preternatural silence descending over frog and cricket and owl, as if the little boat had somehow passed into the inner, sacred temple of the night itself.

  To the west, purple lightning rolled thunderless in the cage of the sky.

  In the water were the twisted, eerie shapes of deadfalls. They broke the surface like coffins bobbing in flooded graves.

  “What is this place?” Miranda asked, angling her light all around.

  But no one answered.

  Ahead, a wide muddy bank stretched before a stand of trees, tall and close, and when the boat had nosed to a stop in the silt, the old witch got up with a pop of bones, stepped over the side, and staggered off along the path of the light, bowl in her arms. Her shadow long and reaching.

  Hiram brought up a shotgun and a smaller flashlight from behind the stern seat. Miranda knew the double-barrel to be her grandfather’s, the only gun Hiram had ever owned. She had never seen him fire it. They were bowhunters, the Crabtrees. Always had been.

  “She needs me to go with her,” he said. “You stay put.”

  “But—”

  He stepped out of the boat into the mud and came around to the bow, where Miranda could see his face in the light. Long and narrow, sadness in his very bones, it seemed, the first touches of gray at his temples. Drops of moisture swirled thick in the light between them.

  “Stay,” he said. “The light will guide us back.”

  He took her chin in hand and brushed her cheek with his knuckles and told her he loved her. This frightened Miranda, for these were not words Hiram Crabtree often said. They struck her now like a kind of incantation against something, some evil he had yet to fathom. He kissed the back of her hand, beard rough against her skin. He said he would be back. He promised. “Leave that light shining,” he said, and then he left her, following the witch’s humped form into the trees. Their deep tracks welling up with water, as if the land itself were erasing them.

  * * *

  The spring night grew hushed save for the the far-off mutter of the coming storm, which had been threatening since twilight, black clouds like a fleet of warships making ready to cannonade the land with fire, water, wind, and ice.

  Hours before, when Hiram woke her, Miranda had been dreaming of stumbling through woods and brambles onto a path that brought her out of the trees and into a clearing, where the land sloped up to a hilltop draped in flowering kudzu, little white blossoms aglow in the moonlight. Cradled in her arms, a black bullhead catfish she had only just pulled slick and dead from the bayou. Atop the hill: the witch’s cabin on stilts, one yellow flame burning in a window. Miranda went up the crooked, red-mud path, up the wide board steps of the porch, and into the cabin, where the old witch stood waiting. She dropped the fish in the old woman’s bread bowl and the witch took her filleting knife from her apron and slit the fish’s belly. Miranda put her thumbs in the fish’s gills to lift it and the innards slopped out in a purple heap. The old witch slung the guts into her boxwood stove, where they hissed and popped in the fire, and the dead fish heaved in Miranda’s hands, came alive, began to scream. It screamed with the voice of a child.

  Then Hiram’s hand on her shoulder, shaking her.

  Now, in the johnboat, she was waiting. Chin in hand, elbow on her knee, just as she had sat waiting earlier that night on the porch steps of Sabbath House. They had fetched the witch from her cabin on the bayou, and from there upriver to that ugly, paintlorn manse.

  The front door of the plantation house stood open to let in the cool, blustery air. Last fall’s leaves skittered over the boards like giant palmetto bugs as, inside, the witch went about her ancient trade behind a shut bedroom door. Across the gravel lane, Hiram stood in the bald, root-gnarled yard of a low shotgun house, talking softly to a man who was not quite five feet tall. The little man listened intently, head down, hands in his pockets. Windows of the other five shacks that stood beneath the trees were lit, a few men smoking anxiously between the clapboard dwellings, just beyond the reach of their own bare-bulb porch lights. Vague, grown-up shapes to Miranda.

  Within the manse, a woman screamed, freezing every soul who heard.

  Another scream: the wail of something deep and true torn loose, lost to the dark.

  Hiram and the dwarf went charging past Miranda into the foyer, only to halt in shock at the foot of the stairs. Miranda pushed between them and saw an old man, all legs and elbows in black suit pants and a bloody white shirt, stagger out of the bedroom to sit like a broken toy at the top of the stairs. He clutched in his hands an object, something Miranda could not see, forearms red with blood up to his cuffs, which were rolled at the elbows. Miranda felt her father’s hand on her shoulder, and when she looked up she saw Hiram’s face gone pale as chalk. The little man to her right was stout and strong, but she glimpsed it on his face, too: horror.

  The witch came solemnly out of the bedroom. Carrying the bread bowl. She passed the old man on the stairs, whose eyes never strayed from whatever faraway place they had fixed.

  Blood dripping on the boards between his scuffe
d wing tip shoes.

  Hiram pushed Miranda toward the front door, and she glimpsed, off the foyer in the downstairs parlor, a man sitting on an antique sofa. He was young, slim, handsome, a lit cigarette between full lips and a glass of amber liquid in hand. He wore a gun, a badge.

  He winked a cornflower-blue eye as Miranda scooted past.

  * * *

  Now, in the johnboat. Waiting still, picking at a scab on her bare knee.

  Thunder boomed, closer.

  Straight ahead, a white whooping crane stepped out of the trees into the Eveready’s beam. It stood in the mud and seemed to glow, stark and bright and otherworldly against the black of the swamp. Miranda watched it, and it watched her. The spotlight’s beam like a tether between two worlds, Miranda’s and the bird’s. Something preternatural crept up her spine, raised gooseflesh on her arms.

  A slow, rolling rumble that wasn’t thunder came out of the trees, and the crane launched itself into the dark.

  The water in Hiram’s bootprints rippled, and Miranda felt the aluminum boat shudder.

  The distant trees swayed in their tops, though the air was heavy and still.

  Miranda’s heart pounding in her chest.

  Then, deep within the woods: a gunshot.

  It cracked the night in two.

  A second shot followed, reverberating huge and canyonlike.

  Miranda drew a single breath, then leaped from the boat. The mud yanked her down, but she struggled up and ran for the trees, forgetting that the Eveready at the bow shone only so far. In the woods, darkness reared up and closed her between its palms. She skidded to a halt.

  Called for Hiram. Listened.

  Called again.

  Heart racing, blood pounding, shore and spotlight at her back, she ran.

  Lightning flashed at close intervals, lit the trees bright as day.

  She ran on, calling out until Hiram’s name was no longer a word, just a raw, ragged sound. She struck a tree, bounced, came up hard against another, and there she hung against the rough bark, gasping.

  More lightning, and in that staccato flash, the land sloped down to a maze of saw palms wrapped in shreds of mist. Beyond the maze, the undergrowth rose up in a tangled, briar-thick wall, impenetrable. Great thorny vines, woven tight as a bird’s nest.

  Shining deep within that nest, like a string she had followed from boat to forest, was the faint orange beam of a flashlight. Fixed and slanting across the ground. All but swallowed by the darkness.

  Miranda staggered into the saw palm maze, blades nicking her bare arms and legs. She felt the wisp of orb weavers against her cheeks, webs enshrouding her as they broke against her, as if nature were clothing her in itself, preparing her for some arcane ritual. When the fronds grew too close, she went down on hands and knees and crawled in the moist earth, and the light ahead grew stronger, closer. When she finally reached the undergrowth, she saw a kind of tunnel through it, just large enough for a fox or a boar—or a girl. She pressed her belly to the ground and worked elbows and hips and legs to worm through the thick tangle, aware a sound was coming out of her, some primal grunt that made her think she might vomit up the whole of her insides and there, in the sticky pink folds of stomach, would be a pile of stones, the source of this grunting, clacking noise. Finally, she came out where Hiram’s flashlight lay bereft in a clump of moss and pale, fleshy toadstools.

  “Daddy,” she was gasping, “Daddy.”

  The glass of the lens and the blue plastic housing crawled with bugs.

  Covered in mud and spider silk and tiny rivulets of blood, the squished remnants of a green-backed orb weaver stuck like a barrette in her dark hair, Miranda took up the light and got to her feet. She called again for Hiram, sweeping the beam over bare, bone-white trees, like great spears hurled down into the earth. Clumps of marshy reeds rising out of black pools that sheened in the light like oil. Narrow, mossy strips of earth among the pools.

  And something else, too, glimpsed in the lightning, just beyond the trees.

  Miranda went carefully alongside one of the pools that branched into a stream, black and thick. Moss along the bank festooned with brown toadstools and odd, star-shaped plants she had never seen the like of in all her trips hunting, fishing, trapping with Hiram. Sticks and clumps of bark were lodged in the stream and blackened, and at what appeared to be the widest, deepest point, her light caught the shape of something large and half submerged on its side. Brown feathers speckled black. An owl.

  The stream opened out into a kind of moat that circled a great wide clearing, and at the center of the clearing was the thing she had glimpsed in the lightning. A shape, huge and dark and shrouded in mist. Peering up at it, Miranda saw what looked like a head, two great horns, and two long ragged limbs ending in crooked fingers. She almost cried out, even took a step back. Then realized, in the rapid shutter of the lightning, that it was only a shelf of rock, atop it a tree, thick and twisted and dead, its trunk canting out at an angle that should have sent it tumbling from the ledge into the muck below.

  A bark-skinned log bridged the black moat that encircled the rock. Miranda crossed it, balancing as she went. Sweat soaked through her shirt, her underwear. The earth beyond the moat was spongy, soft, rich. She felt it sinking underfoot with every step. She went through clumps of reeds and grass and played her light up at the rock as she came into its shadow and saw a long branch reaching like an arm from the tree, and from this arm a thick vine dropped straight down like a plumb line into a mound of freshly turned black earth, at its center a hole, deep and dark. The opening big and wide as a tractor wheel.

  Among a stand of thin brown reeds at the base of the mound: the old witch’s bread bowl, drawn in blood, overturned. A pillowcase in the dirt.

  Miranda heard a snap in the dark, a squelch from near the rock.

  Eyes were on her, she could feel them.

  Bugs crawled over Hiram’s light.

  Her voice small and swallowed by the night: “Daddy?”

  She played the light over the distant rock, its cold surface shining back, a tangle of fat roots and vines like a fall of wet hair. Her beam caught something in the mud, a glint of brass. She went to it, bent, and plucked up the red wax casing of a shotgun shell. She touched it to her nose, smelled the acrid scent of gunpowder still fresh on it. She knocked bugs from the light and cast about for Hiram’s blood, a second shell, some track or sign.

  Nothing.

  She pushed the shell into the pocket of her shorts.

  A rustling, in the clump of grass near her feet.

  Miranda swung the light.

  Something round and red and raw lay in the moss, not far from the upended bowl. At first Miranda didn’t recognize it. Slicked with gore, more like a skinned rabbit than a baby. Its flesh a lifeless gray. She played the beam over arms and legs. They were mottled, rough and scaled, a long white worm of umbilicus twisted beneath it. Leaves clinging to a head of dark hair.

  Its belly heaved. Its mouth opened.

  For an instant, she did not move. Then she ran to it, dropped on her knees beside it.

  Below its chin, a wide slit bubbled fresh bright blood like a second mouth as the baby gulped and sucked air.

  She saw the pillowcase among the reeds and stooped for it, not looking where she was stepping. She splashed into a shallow pool of black liquid, thick and warm. It flooded her shoe, soaked her sock. Miranda gasped as her foot began to tingle, then to burn. Working quickly, ignoring her foot, she turned the pillowcase inside out and used a clean edge to press the wound at the baby’s throat. But now it seemed it was not a wound at all, for the blood wiped free and the flesh there, beneath the jaw, was whole.

  Had she imagined it? Some trick of shadow and gore?

  She wiped her hand on her shorts, snakes of adrenaline still in her fingers as she worked her thumb into the baby’s old-man palm and the digits parted. Between each digit was a thin membrane of skin, purple veins alight in the glow of Hiram’s flashlight.

  We
bbed—

  A sudden rustle from the reeds where she’d found the pillowcase.

  A whiplike blur, pink tissue and fang.

  She felt the sound: a tenpenny nail punching flesh.

  Shocked, she fell back on her haunches. Barely caught a glimpse of it, fat and long, the color of mud. A cottonmouth, corkscrewing away.

  … snake-bit, oh, oh, Daddy, no …

  … she grabbed the flashlight, shined it on her left forearm, saw the wound welling blood, the flesh already puffing …

  … stay calm, keep your heart rate down, the boat, the baby …

  One last clamor of thunder and the rain began to fall. Big fat drops, cold and stunning.

  Oh, oh no, Daddy, I’m sorry …

  Miranda staggered to her feet, picking up the baby in her right arm, holding the flashlight with her left, right foot gone numb from the sludge that slicked it, and set off back in the direction she had come.

  At the tunnel she fell to her knees, heart racing, sluicing venom, head fuzzy.

  The flashlight went tumbling. Lost.

  Crawling now, pushing through, slow, so slow, the numbness in her left arm reaching her shoulder, the tingling in her foot inching higher, into calf and thigh, her whole body assaulted, long thorns snagging her shirt and hair, and all the while the baby’s heart hammering against her own, a fish odor wafting up.

  Upright again, lurching—

  Left arm tight against her side, stumbling, sharp fronds slicing, right leg numb from the hip down now, oily black sludge burning skin—

  She fell.

  She lay on her back and the rain pelted her face, ran beneath her in tiny rivers.

  The fingers of her left hand swollen thick as corks.

  The baby lay at her small, girl’s breast. Alive but weak.

  You are going to die tonight, Miranda Crabtree thought, staring up at the dark boughs of the trees, where the lightning made jagged shapes and turned the trees into devils come to minister. This is your death.