The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  Somewhere in the woods, a mourning dove cooed, and its mate answered.

  “At long last,” the preacher said. “We’ll be a family. You, me, our little lost dove.”

  Signs and wonders, this summer morning.

  There, in the sunlight, sweat drying on his back, Billy Cotton sat cradling the torn bird in his lap and wept.

  LITTLEFISH

  Meanwhile, across the Prosper, hidden deep in the green folds of the old witch’s island, the boy Littlefish slept and dreamed. High above the ground in his lookout, rough pine bark at his back, a small picture book with a cracked spine spread over his stomach. In his dream, he walked down a wide dirt path shaded by the large, reaching arms of oak trees, and at the end of this path was a gate, and beyond the gate a road, and beyond the road a brick building set back on a little hill, low and square, no windows, only a metal door painted fading yellow. A red steel tower topped by a wooden cross rose above this building like the steeple of a church. The boy saw the vague shapes of houses, fuzzy, as if rain had washed them out like chalk on a rock, and another structure, too, a great glass building where plants and vines grew wild all around it. From the woods came the sudden yammer of cicadas. The day began to darken. A man stood before the yellow door, tall and thin and dressed in a black hat and black coat, and he held in his hand a blade, long and curved, and in the sky the moon was overtaking the sun, and purple clouds came billowing out of the dark, full of lightning and terror, as the world slid askew. The boy knew he had to go to this man, to this building, though he did not want to. He had taken a single step when a blue spear of lightning flew earthward and struck the red tower, sent snakes of electricity writhing along the steel. They lashed the tips of nearby trees and set them afire, and the man in black came striding down the hill, swinging his blade, and the boy turned to run, breathless, as everything burned, the fire spreading faster and faster, and when he reached the river, the river was thick with snakes. Coiled along the bank, they waited for him, pink mouths open. So he turned inland, found a pine tree, began to climb, higher and higher. But the man in black was below him, climbing after him, calling out in a funny, singsong way, and the boy seized on a weak branch and the branch was not a branch but a cottonmouth snake, and he fell. Down, down, down, cracking through sap-sticky branches, into the smoke, into the fire—

  Littlefish jerked awake.

  He pushed his wide, webbed hands against the wooden platform beneath him, felt it there, sturdy, strong. Across the river, the tip of the red metal tower stood just visible among the treetops, its wooden cross and strange collection of bones lashed there reaching for a still-blue sky. Below, the bayou curled like a reptile sunning itself on the earth.

  Safe, he thought. Safe.

  The book slid from his stomach into his lap as he sat up. It was Sister’s, or had been when she was small. On its cover was a town: streets and houses, a barbershop, police station, hospital, school. He knew these words because Sister had taught them to him, had taught him to say them with his hands. He traced a finger over the cover: This Is Where I Live. He sounded each word in his head, but the voice he heard was not his, for he had never heard his own voice, just as he had never seen a barbershop or a police station outside of books. The voice he heard was Sister’s. It was like the platform. Strong. It would not break.

  He quickly opened the book to a page where a man in a black suit and white collar stood smiling, behind him a church with a steeple.

  He knew the words church and steeple from the rhyme Sister had taught him when he was little, taking his hands in hers and showing him how to fold them: here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors, here are the people. Only his hands couldn’t fold because of the webs between his fingers, so his church always came up empty. Secretly, he had always imagined another verse to the rhyme, every time he put his hands together: here is the church, here is the steeple, I am not like other people. For Sister’s church was always full, six rosy people seated and ready to do whatever it was people did in a church. On this subject, his book was vague, but a church seemed to be a happy place.

  Unlike the building in his dream.

  He remembered when he had seen the red tower for the first time. Two years ago, when he and Sister had built his lookout. He had asked her then what it was, and she had told him, after a long quiet, that it used to be a church.

  “But now it’s nothing. It’s a ruin.”

  What’s a ruin? he had signed.

  “A place that shouldn’t exist anymore,” she said.

  If it used to be a church, where are the people now?

  “Try not to speak while we’re working up here,” she said, a nail between her lips. “You’ll fall.”

  Maybe, he thought now, it was a church for people like me. A church that does not look like a church, for people who do not look like people.

  He rummaged in a knothole above his head, where he stowed bits of things he had found in the river: a sprig of fishing line with hooks tangled in it; a rusted tin can with a hole punched through the center; a little white ball no bigger than a plastic bobber, strange dimples on its surface. A wooden pencil box he had found along the riverbank, mired in a clump of mud and grass. A faint paper image peeling from its top: a girl in a red cloak with a basket, a wolf standing upright on crooked legs. The wolf wore a man’s coat with big wide buttons and smiled, teeth sharp. Littlefish took four colored pencils out of the box. With these, he began to color on the page that was opened to the church: first the red, then the black, holding the yellow in his teeth. He pushed his tongue through his lips, switching out colors, pressing so hard against the page that he snapped the orange pigment.

  For a while, he sat looking at what he had done to Sister’s book, trying to comprehend the mystery of it.

  Here is the church, here is the steeple—

  Suddenly, like the bark of a crow, crying his name in her strange tongue, Baba’s voice: “Rybka! Rybka!”

  Littlefish put the box and pencils back in the knothole. He tucked the book in the front waistband of a thin pair of dime-store jeans he had outgrown by several inches, then swung deftly over the edge of the platform to the boards he and Sister had nailed up and down the pine’s trunk. Down he went, bare-chested, quick, his scaly skin very near the color and texture of the tree itself. He hit the ground running on wide bare feet, heedless of the pine needles and roots that jabbed the webs between his toes.

  He came out of the trees to the rim of a small limestone gorge that carved the island in two, a channel at the bottom where duckweed and water grasses grew and there were pools deep enough for swimming. The gray shale walls were stairstepped by time and water and studded with pines that grew at odd angles, and the boy leaped nimbly among these, descending one side and ascending the other.

  He ran down the slope and out of the trees and past the goat pen with its one white goat chewing cud. Past the little toolshed where he kept his pelts and skinning knives, his bow and arrows, his comic books. Past Baba’s bathhouse with its spiders and forever smoky damp smell.

  Past his own garden, where squash and beans and corn and okra and tomatoes and strawberries grew tall and thick and lush, as if the soil itself approved of his efforts. All manner of tin-can contraptions and bottle chimes and odd homemade bric-a-brac lodged around the perimeter to ward away rabbits and deer, though no animal had ever ventured into his rows. They had eaten their fill of the clover and the kudzu blossoms and the occasional flowers Sister had planted over the years, but never a single leaf had been harmed in Littlefish’s garden.

  Baba stood at the edge of the yard, short and round and impatient, brown chickens coming out from the shadows beneath the stilted porch to cluck at the old woman’s feet. She scattered feed from her apron and chick-chick-chicked at the hens. She looked up at the gasping boy and said, “Sister.”

  At the bottom of the hill, he saw her, carrying a cardboard box packed with goods.

  The boy set off down the red-dirt path through the
kudzu.

  The old woman flapped the rest of her feed to the ground and kicked a rooster from the steps.

  THE LANGUAGE OF FAMILY

  Miranda walked out of the trees into the clearing, carrying on her shoulder a cardboard box packed with cans of beans, sauerkraut, coffee, tobacco, sacks of flour and sugar. A long hunting bow and a quiver of arrows slung on her back. The boy came running out to meet her, down the steep, kudzu-tangled slope from the cabin into the grass, where he threw his huge paddle-arms around Miranda, squeezing. She cupped the back of his head, his face at her stomach. The smell of him strong and fishy, alive and good. He smiled up at her. His teeth small and crooked. She handed him the box and watched him go nimbly up the path. She followed, using the lower limb of her bow as a walking stick.

  Old Iskra sat in her rocking chair on the porch, killing flies with a wire swatter and tipping their corpses into a bent metal spoon nailed to the railing. She did this with the greatest of care. She wore a long apron over a housedress, a man’s muddy boots. Her thin, silver hair tied up in a blue rag. Eyes narrow and dark. As Miranda and the boy came onto the porch, the old woman shot a jet of chewing tobacco into a metal can packed with kudzu leaves. “Bring the corn,” she said to the boy.

  Miranda took the box from Littlefish and went into the cabin. A large, open room, dim and musty, the only furniture a kitchen table and chairs, an old rocker by a window. A wicker basket full of broken kindling by the stone hearth of a boxwood stove. Walls of rough-cut pine. In the kitchen, she pushed through a curtain of oyster shells strung on fishing line and pulled a string to light the pantry, a musty, narrow space that smelled of cedarwood. Chickens clucked under the floorboards as she unpacked the box and set the cans with labels facing out among the jars of pickled vegetables and dried roots, weeds and wild herbs. Other jars, on higher shelves, were furred with dust, their contents plump and strange.

  Back on the porch, Miranda unslung her bow and quiver and set these against the cabin wall. Littlefish was spreading ears of corn from two five-gallon buckets on the boards at Iskra’s feet, the old woman sitting on the edge of her chair. “Get a sheet, get a sheet,” she fussed, then hollered after him to bring Sister a knife.

  The boy went into the cabin, screen door slapping behind him.

  Miranda sat in the rocking chair beside Iskra’s.

  The old woman killed another fly, eased it into the spoon.

  “Does it eat them?” Miranda asked.

  Iskra’s spit can shook as she reached it from the floor. “A house spirit does not eat.”

  “What, then?”

  The old woman waved a hand, impatient. “The spirit watches over me and the boy and I offer it flies. What do I care what it does with them?” She drew a short, sturdy blade from a hidden pocket in her apron. Over the years, Miranda had seen the knife gut fish, peel potatoes, cut rope. The blade never dulled.

  Littlefish returned with a paring knife and a white sheet tucked under his arm. The knife he gave to Miranda, and the sheet he spread on the planks between the two women. He upended the buckets of corn onto the sheet and gathered ears into a wide kitchen bowl, which he gave to Miranda. She touched his arm, said with her hands: Look in my quiver.

  He did. Inside were three rolled comic books.

  “You spoil him,” Iskra said.

  Sitting on the porch steps, the boy opened the first book to a storm-swept ocean, a monstrous sea beast breaching the surface. Astride its back, mouth open in a savage cry, eyes huge and white and wild, a bare-chested barbarian, plunging a sword into the creature’s neck. The boy turned the page, bit his thumb, and a memory, sudden and strong, blew over Miranda like a wind: she, sitting where he sat now, every evening at dusk, a girl of eleven nursing a baby with goat’s milk through a homemade nipple, cheesecloth stretched over a jelly jar. Burping him in her arms, the rough texture of his skin. That long dark summer, she had surrendered her heart completely.

  “Boy,” Iskra said roughly.

  Miranda jerked as if the old woman had set a hook in her.

  “Go hunt. We need meat. Read your funny books later.”

  “I’ll go with him,” Miranda said, setting her bowl out of her lap.

  “Stay,” Iskra ordered, stacking ears in the lap of her apron. Her hands gnarled. “I cannot do this by myself.”

  Miranda signed at Littlefish: I’ll be here when you get back.

  The boy tucked his comics behind his picture book in the waist of his jeans and disappeared around the side of the cabin.

  “He stinks to God and back,” Iskra muttered. “Having him indoors in the summer…”

  “I like the way he smells,” Miranda said.

  “Every night, he comes tromping in to sleep on the floor, curls up in front of the stove like a dog.”

  “He isn’t sleeping in his tree? What’s wrong?”

  Iskra shrugged, spat in her can. “Bad dreams, maybe. Ask him yourself.”

  After that, they worked quietly, cutting and shucking corn. Topping each ear, peeling back the husks to pluck the silks, Miranda’s blade crunching through the cobs. Their chairs made a warm, wooden sound as they rocked. It was a rhythm they had fallen into over the years: in place of words some task, and out of the silent motions of that task—the shelling of fresh peas, the gutting of fish—the old woman and Miranda had fashioned the peculiar language of family.

  More memories, as the day’s light grew long beyond the trees below, like fragments of a fevered dream: water carried from a well, poured over hot stones in a low, rough hut; heat and steam and lantern light dancing on the beams of the bathhouse above; Miranda, snakebit and thrashing and seizing on the slatted bench above the rocks, the hard, dry taste of a stick in her mouth; the witch beside her like a preacher at a river baptism, rough hands washing wounds with a cloth wrung from a cedar bucket; and words, words Miranda did not understand. Grunts and whispers. Comings and goings. All that long night.

  Her first clear memory, unbroken by delirium: waking on the floor near the boxwood stove, wrapped and sweating in a heap of buckskins. Her left arm swollen, bound in strips of cloth. Lamplight orange and oily, a lantern set in the middle of the table. She sat up, skins falling away. Felt her nakedness and drew them close. The old woman’s snores came from the open door of the bedroom, big and cracking like the felling of trees. Something moved in the bread bowl on the table, made a shadow-play on the wall in the lantern light: a little hand reaching, fingers spreading, and between each digit a soft, fan-shaped membrane like a tiny sail. She stood, pulling the buckskin around her, and the room pitched. Her left arm hot, unbendable. With her right, she gripped a chair for balance.

  The baby filled the oblong bowl. Its cheeks were round and ashen, its forehead lumpy, whole head a knob of misshapen clay. But the eyes that peered out from beneath that brow were focused, alert. Its webbed fingers clenched and unclenched, and Miranda, helpless not to, reached out and let it take hold of her right index finger. She felt something at its touch, a kind of transaction, a passage of some energy, from the baby to her, from her to the baby.

  The witch’s voice had startled her: “He is special.”

  Miranda turned to see the old woman standing in the bedroom doorway, wearing a thin, tea-colored housecoat.

  “Not to that preacher,” Miranda said.

  “No. Not to him.”

  “The mother, is she…?”

  “Dead.”

  Miranda swallowed, looked back at the child in the bowl. “Hiram?” She felt the hot tears sliding down her cheeks. “Is he…?”

  Miranda heard the boards creak, and she turned, thinking she would see the old woman advancing to offer some measure of comfort, a touch, a hug, a breast to lay her cheek upon, but instead she saw only the bedroom door close as the old witch retreated, the catch loud and final, as if the past itself were being shut away.

  * * *

  Miranda topped the last ear of corn in her bowl and gathered more from the sheet.

  Iskra sat forwar
d on the edge of her chair. She touched the small of her back, tensing. Hand atremble.

  “Baba?” Miranda said.

  Iskra shook her head. “Just fucking old.”

  Inside a husk, clinging to one of the still-green leaves, Miranda found a fat black grub. She plucked it free, her nails caked with dirt.

  “Good luck,” the old woman said, taking up another ear from the bucket. “Go fishing with it and you will catch something.”

  Miranda eased the worm into the breast pocket of her shirt—a western-style shirt that had belonged to Hiram, the edges of the cuffs and tail worn thin. She felt the tiny creature through the fabric, light as an acorn. She thumbed her blade against the tip of a stalk and drew the knife toward her. Husk and cob, flesh and bone. A rhythm to cut by, Iskra had taught her, a kind of blessing. Miranda studied the ear of corn in her hands. She had been working too hard at the silks. Her hands were damp with the juice of burst kernels, and suddenly the bright afternoon seemed less bright, and the distant woods seemed close and dangerous.

  She thought, strangely, of Cook. The gun he had offered. Locked away now in her father’s old tackle box.

  “Things are changing, on the river?” Iskra said quietly.

  And there it was, the old woman’s weird, startling ability to sense Miranda’s thoughts, like an invisible web woven to catch feelings, vibes, moods. You should be used to it by now, she thought. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Things are changing all over,” Iskra said, working the corn between her hands, but staring out over the porch railing and down the kudzu-draped hill to the tree line.

  “Changing how? What’s changing?”

  Iskra picked up her can from the boards and spat. She turned her dark eyes on Miranda. “The boy says he hears things, deep in the night.” She nodded to where the shaggy birches cast long afternoon shadows, the woods beyond dark and dense. “Crack and boom among the trees. Like a giant roaming the woods.”