The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  The boat’s engine cut out. Miranda tossed a rope and caught the lowest rung of a crudely nailed ladder at the end of the dock. Avery tied the rope off to a piling. She handed up the paper sack from the Igloo and waited. He counted the cash, produced a much thinner fold of bills from his own shirt pocket. This she did not count but stuffed into her hip pocket. She passed the empty Igloo up the ladder. “You look like hell,” she said.

  “Handsome Charlie wants to talk,” Avery said and hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

  She looked up the gravel lane from the dock, to where a white Plymouth cruiser was parked in the shade of a blood-red crepe myrtle, blue bubble light on the roof. A fat man in a hat filled the passenger’s seat, blob-like, a thin line of cigarette smoke curling through the cracked window.

  “Why?”

  Avery shrugged. “He doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “Cook’s gone squirrelly.”

  “Squirrelly how?”

  She shrugged. “Squirrelly. Says tell you watch out for yourself. Says you’ll know what it means.”

  Avery’s mouth tightened. “Well,” he said, after a moment. He cut his eyes to the Plymouth. “He wants to talk.”

  Miranda looked from the Plymouth to the inlet, the river beyond. Avery watched the muscle in her jaw work.

  Behind the dark glass of the Plymouth’s passenger window, the cherry of the fat man’s cigarette flared.

  “He knows where to find me,” she finally said.

  “He won’t like that.”

  But Avery’s voice was lost in the cough of the motor and she was gone, quick as she had come, wake rolling back beneath the dock.

  When she was out of sight, he walked the sack of money up to the Plymouth, dragging the empty Igloo over the gravel. The passenger’s window cranked low, revealing the immense dark shape of Constable Charlie Riddle, two chins and a black satin eye patch beneath a badged fedora, the brim extra-wide, neck fat beneath his shorn hairline like two rolls of quarters. Riddle took the sack from Avery and thumbed the bills, lips moving around his cigarette as he counted softly to himself.

  Riddle’s deputy, Robert Alvin, sat behind the wheel, rail-thin and fanning at flies.

  “She said—”

  Riddle held up a hand, still counting. Satisfied, he opened the Plymouth’s glove box and shoved the sack in among paper napkins, a spare set of handcuffs, a citation pad. A single pair of white cotton panties dropped out like a bird fleeing a cage.

  “She said if you want to see her, you know where to find her.”

  Riddle tucked the garment back in, had to slam the box twice before the latch caught.

  “Teia and I are leaving tomorrow,” Avery said. “First light. We’re taking Grace, we’re walking out. We’re done, Charlie.”

  “Walking out,” Riddle laughed. “Just stick out your thumbs when you hit the highway and fly, eh? Where y’all headed?”

  “Anywhere but here.”

  “Well.” Riddle flicked ash out the window. “Just remember, John-boy, you can light out with nothing in your pockets or you can light out with pockets full. Which you rather?”

  Avery thought of Grace. “How long?” he said.

  “Another day, two tops.”

  “Cook may have split on us. You can’t ferry dope if there’s no one to take delivery.”

  “Who says they ain’t? Maybe I made me some new friends.”

  “You never had a friend in your life, Charlie.”

  Riddle smiled, shrugged. “Figger of speech.”

  “You owe me three grand for the last six months. I know you’ve got it. You’ve been helping yourself to my share ever run. Last two, I got nothing at all. I have to pay the Crabtree girl, I have to gas up the generators to keep the grow lights burning, I have to buy fucking epoxy to patch the pipes when the goddamn toilets won’t flush—”

  “How much you say I owe?”

  “Three thousand.”

  “See, that’s funny, I thought it was two. Or was it one?”

  Avery said nothing.

  “Don’t be sore, John. Just make sure the last of that dope’s in jars and ready to go by tonight. Then you head on back over to yon shack and crawl in bed with that long-legged wife, right next to that pretty baby, and just drift on off to dreamland for a spell. I wrap this whole thing up, you’ll get everything you’re owed, you and the missus. I promise. And that’ll be the end of Billy and Lena Cotton’s grand experiment here on the Prosper, once and for all. How’s that sound?”

  Avery looked to the heavy iron gates of the compound at the end of the lane. They stood open. Across the gravel county road, surrounded by chain-link, was the low, windowless brick building that had once been Holy Day Church. In back of the church, a red steel broadcast tower, at the pinnacle of which was a wooden cross lashed to the metal with rope. Nailed to the cross, in a grim parody of the crucifixion: the long-rotted corpse of a white whooping crane, its six-foot wingspan all bone save for a few last shreds of flesh and feather. Gourdlike skull and scissor bill turned up toward heaven, eyes empty hollows. Avery didn’t know who had put it there, or why, but he felt no particular horror at the sight of it anymore, only the weariness of time and failure. “It sounds too good to be true,” he said.

  The fat constable smiled, flicked his cigarette past the dwarf into the lane. “Get some shut-eye,” he said. He tipped his hat, cranked up his window.

  Avery stepped back as the car rumbled away.

  Sabbath House cast its horned shadow over an unkempt lawn thick with yellow-blooming dandelions as Avery made his way up the lane that bisected the property, dragging the Igloo behind him. Past the paint-flecked shotgun houses on his right, bare gray board showing through like exposed bone, the porches of three fallen away with rot. All dank and empty now, save the one nearest the gates, where Avery’s wife and infant daughter slept on through the morning heat. Here, the porch was swept clean and the two-seater swing that hung from eyebolts in the haint-blue ceiling was free of widow webs and wasp nests.

  The greenhouse—his greenhouse, John Avery’s and no one else’s—stood on an open patch of ground across the lane, about fifty yards east of Sabbath House. It was iron-framed, Victorian, like so much else on the vast, wooded property: a resurrected ruin. Who had built it, some rich plantation wife? Possessed of an urge to grow something that was hers and hers alone? It had stirred him, this wreck, when he’d first laid eyes on it at nineteen, himself a new addition to the Cottons’ upstart ministry. The brick foundation crumbling, panes missing in the gables. These, Avery had covered with blue plastic. The glass he had blacked out with aerosol paint, every inch of it. Purpose conjured from neglect. A forgotten thing remade. The dwarf’s own story told in glass and paint and steel and the careful cultivation of new life.

  He pulled a cinder block out of the weeds, stood on it, and unlocked the padlocked door with a single key that he wore around his neck on a length of knotted rawhide.

  Inside, the plants grew three and four abreast in old tractor tires and wooden boxes and plastic five-gallon buckets. Those nearest the front were low and dense and pruned, while those at the back stretched six, seven feet high. Fluorescent lights hung on chains above them, backed by tin pie plates that made them look like flying saucers. He could hear the sound of the generator out back, chugging away, the lights above always burning. Avery shoved the empty Igloo against the wall and climbed onto a step stool and stood at a workbench scattered with cured buds and stray papers. He took up a bud and mashed it between his fingers and rolled it, tacking and licking the paper.

  We were a whole community of fools, he thought. Me, not the least among them.

  He sat on the gravel floor of the greenhouse, beneath the tallest trees, and smoked.

  Later, weary, thickheaded and high, the sun climbing behind the trees, he crossed the lane to the last shotgun house. He tromped up the porch steps and went in through a ragged screen door, into the living room, where there was a couch with a busted spring and a ratty
wingback chair, beside it an end table and an orange glass lamp with a dented shade. Through the kitchen, where the empty icebox stood open, a vaguely sour smell emanating from inside, palmetto bugs fleeing over peeling linoleum before him, and into the bedroom, which was small and cramped, a mattress sagging in an iron frame. Knotholes in the walls through which daylight peered. He climbed into bed beside Teia and lay atop the covers in his clothes. The baby lay beneath the single sheet, molded to the curve of her mother’s belly, mother and daughter both naked in the humid morn. In the window, a box fan blasted warm air. Teia lay between Avery and the baby, she a foot taller than his four-seven, her dark skin damp with sweat. “I love you,” she murmured, voice thick with waking.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Her eyes didn’t open. “What time is it?”

  “Early. Go back to sleep.” He squeezed her hand.

  Avery soon fell asleep and dreamed of a menacing figure in black, limping to and fro in a slanting room high above the ones he loved.

  SIGNS AND WONDERS

  Far behind Sabbath House, deeper in the blue pine woods than any congregant had ever been, on a slight rise at the center of a clearing, stood the burned-out shell of a forgotten stone chapel, its buttresses holding fast to the earth like the wings of a crippled dragon. Here, in a cold black crypt beneath the church, the old dying preacher Billy Cotton dreamed of a girl, darting among the woods, a child of twelve in a white dress soiled with river mud. A faerie creature. Cotton chased after her, and the trees grew thick and tangled and great rotten trunks surged up from the moist floor, roots and spiderwebs and shaggy leprous birches. A clearing at the base of a hill, where the child stopped, waiting. Holding out her hand. He took it. The moon shone on kudzu vine growing up the rise. A dark old shack at the summit. From beneath a stilted porch, carried by the wind, the oily reek of fish.

  “Your hour’s near,” the girl said, her fingers twined in Cotton’s, so soft, so warm.

  He came awake.

  It took a moment to remember where he was. Curled fetal and naked on stone between two coffins made of opal glass, each on a concrete pedestal three feet off the floor. The one to his left was empty. The other, sealed for a decade, held the dry husk of Billy Cotton’s wife, her remains wrapped in folds of gold and purple silk. A small bronze placard at her feet, engraved:

  LENA BOWEN COTTON

  1936–1968

  Mother of Many, Servant of God

  A kerosene lamp burned low on the floor, Cotton’s dark suit coat and pants and white shirt and red suspenders folded neatly beside it. He sat up, and just this simple motion lit the warrens of his bowels and groin afire. By the time he stood, he was slicked with sweat, pain like a dull coring knife working at the base of his tailbone. He slipped on his pants with no small effort and, shirtless, took up the lamp and followed the flame out of the crypt to the iron door at the end of the tunnel, which opened heavily onto the morning.

  Birds sang as he stood bleary-eyed, beard shabby and uneven, bald pate spotted. Old white scars of expiation crisscrossing his belly, layer upon layer. Inflicted in the days and weeks and months after his Lena had died, most made with a sliver of broken glass right here in this dank place, where he had prayed over her corpse for forty days and forty nights, begging God’s forgiveness for the pain he had caused her. Forty days on bended knee, forty nights on cold stone.

  This morning, Cotton stood on the threshold of the crypt and felt the urge to piss but couldn’t because the cancer in his prostate had metastasized—the word used by the doctor who had examined him three months past, the same doctor Cotton and Charlie Riddle had bribed to cut loose babies and cure diseases, back when they’d started running whores out at the Pink Motel. An old sawbones with a penchant for whiskey, he’d come to the manse and snapped on a rubber glove, then presented Cotton with the findings over a stiff drink. He left a pamphlet, half a dozen pill bottles. Cotton took the pills for a few weeks, but not for a while now. He had decided: he would not die in some chemical fog; rather, he would endure all the petty indignities and pains until he could make his exit on his own terms. Those terms in execution now.

  Cock in hand, straining, popping sweat.

  God damn it—

  And that was when he saw it, in a slant of morning sunlight, among the crabgrass: a dove. Pure white, unblemished, save the head, which was all but severed from the trunk. Stuck in the body, like a piece of candy into a plastic Easter egg: the pearl-inlaid handle of a straight razor.

  The old preacher tucked his thin, gray penis back in his trousers. He stepped over the threshold and into the light and bent to pick up the bird. The head lolled. Ants crawled out of its neck. He brushed at them and saw that the razor actually grew out of the bird, like some kind of—

  cancerous

  —tumor.

  Cotton pulled the razor free. A wet, tearing sound. He dropped the bird. The razor’s mechanism was rusted, caked with river mud and algae. He pried open the blade and the sun gleamed along a sliver of steel yet sharp. It might have been any razor, except it wasn’t. Cotton knew this blade. He had carried it in a boot when he was young, then later in a hatband, and, finally, as a grown man, in his pocket. He had carried it almost forty years, until the night his Lena died, when he’d used it on that, that thing—

  He felt a presence, a cold breath at his neck that stirred the hairs. Slowly, he turned.

  She emerged from the long dark throat of the tunnel, blurred, then resolving into a delicate frame clad in a white dress long and flowing and trimmed in pearls, light tulle across bare, pale shoulders. She was elfin, golden hair pulled back in a graceful bun. A gossamer veil covered her face. A red-leather Bible clasped at her breast like a bouquet of roses. She did not smile. She did not move. She simply stared. A breeze blew through the hollow and chilled the sweat on Cotton’s bare back, but it did not stir a single fold of Lena Cotton’s wedding dress.

  “Lee?” the preacher said.

  She made no answer, stepping from the shadows of the crypt to stop the blood in his veins. A cruel smile stretching her mouth as she remembered, perhaps, a long-ago night when he threw her across the bed and forced himself, enraged, engorged, upon her. Or the last night of her life, nine months later, when Cotton bade her watch as he held aloft her boy, took out his razor—

  Her eyes shifted downward, to the pearl-inlaid handle. Her features melting like wax. She opened her mouth behind her veil and roared the mad electric shriek of an insect horde. It fell on the old preacher like a wall and claimed his skull with its horrid frequency, canceling all consciousness in an instant and leaving in its place a single image: the baby’s throat, opening beneath the blade, Cotton’s other hand closed around a tiny, reptilian ankle. The weight of the child—no more than a bag of onions—lessening as the blood pattered on the frayed Oriental rug. A sick squirming in the old preacher’s gut at the forced vision of it now, that grotesque issue of his good seed sprouted in her faithless womb—

  He fell against the doorframe. “No, Lena—”

  Cotton slid down the wall, felt his heart slowing in his chest.

  “Monstrous—” he gasped, though his breath had all but left him.

  Lena took a step toward him, hem of her gown ragged and moldering.

  Her voice in his head now, a slow rasp: I … was … robbed …

  Another step closer, fingers dry and flaking like autumn leaves where they clasped the Bible to her chest. Reaching for him, for his heart.

  So much … you robbed me of …

  Her jaw distended, opened. Inside: a boiling black mass of nature, beetles and ants and flies. Swarming-crawling-sailing-hatching out of Lena Cotton’s face. Pouring out from behind her veil in a black mass, spilling down her white dress. Not his wife’s face behind the veil but a thing of green and blue iridescence now, hand a reaching claw.

  Paralyzed, trembling, the old preacher willed his own hand to move, even as hers closed about his face, enveloping him in the stink of moldering ear
th.

  You took him … Billy … you took them both …

  Slowly, he turned the razor’s open blade against his thigh, and it cut as if just set to the strop, parting fabric, parting flesh. A sting, a sudden well of blood.

  Then clarity.

  Gasping, Cotton fell backward into the dewy grass.

  Pain in his hips and groin, springing hot.

  When his breath had returned, he struggled up on his elbows, then folded the blade and put it in his pocket. Pressed the heel of his hand against his bleeding leg and hauled himself up by the crypt door. Sweat-slicked, he limped over to the old stone bench and sat. He picked up the dove from the grass. Grunting in pain as he shifted. He fitted the dove back together, then looked into the maw of the crypt, where the sunlight penetrated only so far before a black curtain fell.

  What killed you, Lee? Cotton thought. The horror of what came out of you, or what I did to it? Or was it an accumulation of horrors, borne all the long years you lay your head upon this hollow breast? For the boy was not the first child he had taken from Lena Bowen Cotton.

  He remembered his dream, the girl in the woods.

  Sent away when I was filled with fury and hate— No, he thought. No more of that. That evil has passed. All my evil is passing away, yes. Passing away, Lena.

  “I’m bringing her home,” he called suddenly, into the darkness. A new calm or clarity, pushing away all fear. “Avery’s man Cook, he wouldn’t bring her. Wouldn’t do what needed doing. But Charlie Riddle, he’s set things in motion. By morning, she’ll be here. As for the other one…” He touched the razor in his pocket. “It was never meant to be.”

  No answer came from the crypt. Perhaps she was gone. Perhaps she had never been there and he was finally, truly mad.

  “We’ll be together, Lee, you’ll see.”

  His voice echoed flatly down the tunnel.

  “What was it you used to say to those kids, in the pulpit? ‘A promise unbreakable.’ That’s what I’m making you.”