The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  Miranda swallowed, an old stirring in her chest and stomach, part nightmare, part memory. A wide muddy shore at the edge of a lake where deadfalls bobbed like coffins and a wall of thorns protected some dark place, where she had found a baby breathing that should not have been. Great footfalls in the damp and tangled night.

  “I hear it, too,” Iskra said, a sudden smile curling at the edges of her sunken mouth, a smile Miranda had only seen a few times in all the years she had known the old woman. Once at Sabbath House, the night Littlefish was born. The smile of a woman with secrets. A woman who was not anyone’s Baba, who had never spooned Miranda cabbage soup when she was sick or baked seeded bread so warm and soft.

  “Something’s waking up,” the witch said. “Out there.”

  Cicadas drummed like a current in the earth.

  “The leshii,” Iskra said.

  Leshii. A word to Miranda like the harsh, bone-quaking chills she had awakened to, the cottonmouth’s venom still in her veins. What the old woman’s ancient people had called their forest spirits, though here, it was no Grandfather Hunter, no Uncle Tree, but a queen, the witch said, no true word in any tongue for such unnameable power. A name Iskra had always invoked when eleven-year-old Miranda had asked hard questions like: What happened out there that night? What happened to my father? Always, first, that secretive smile, the curl of a dying spider’s legs, then: You will have to ask the leshii, Myshka, should you ever see her wandering these woods.

  Miranda’s answer: I will.

  She looked out at the trees, thick with shadow and insects singing in the late-day light. Above, a set of wind chimes fashioned out of the hollow bones of birds rustled.

  The metal spoon, Miranda saw, was empty. The flies were gone.

  She set a half-shucked ear back in the bowl, wiped her hands on her jeans. “I’m going after him,” she said. She took her quiver from beside the door and buckled the leather strap across her torso. She picked up her bow and slipped it over her head and set out along the path behind the cabin, following her brother’s trail up the hill, past the bathhouse and the boy’s shed, past the goat pen, and into the woods.

  The old woman’s smile faded. She spat over the rail.

  Went on rocking. Went on cutting corn.

  THE HEART

  Miranda went into the trees at the top of the ridge behind the cabin and came out at the edge of the shallow gorge that cut through the island. Some dozen feet below the tree line, the gray and white striated rock curved above an emerald inlet, where tufts of sweet flag and purple-blooming spiderwort grew along the water’s edge. She saw the boy’s trail in the dirt: wide, loping tracks where he had crossed the gorge and gone up into the trees. She picked her way across and stood at the top of the ridge to catch her breath. Below, the inlet widened around a bend to collect in a clear deep cistern enclosed by a wall of limestone. Here, when he was six and she seventeen, she had taught the boy to swim. Nature had gifted him the webs, the scales. All he’d lacked was the courage to dive in, and Miranda had seen to that, standing in the shoulder-deep water with arms open: I will catch you; I will keep you; I will never let you go. Knowing, of course, one day he would stray too far from Iskra’s island, maybe chance across a hunter and his son, or a bootlegger at his still. Or even some lost, turned-out congregant from Sabbath House, living off the land. For, though the old woman’s island was a secret place, a hidden pocket in the lining of the world, its borders were easily crossed. And what then? she wondered. Would they see a boy? A monster? Would they raise a hand, or a gun?

  She passed the boy’s tree, where the land sloped sharply down to the bayou. There, across the water, she spied the boy’s flat bark, banked among the beds of water willow.

  At the water’s edge, she set her bow and quiver in the grass and dug a hole in the loose dark soil with her fingers. She took the grub from her shirt pocket, put it in the hole, and covered it. She stood and shed her shoes and clothes. There were four arrows in her quiver. She fired them all in quick succession across the water, into the ground. Then stuffed her clothes and shoes deep inside her quiver, judged the weight of it, and threw it across, landing it safely on the opposite bank. Finally, she slipped her bow across her torso and dove naked into the bayou.

  She came up halfway across and saw the head of something small and reptile break the surface, then vanish. She climbed dripping onto a bank of moss. Dried herself with her shirt, then dressed quickly and snatched up her arrows and set off into the woods, where she made only a halfhearted search for the boy’s sign. She knew his habits, his trails. He would go to the black oak at the center of the meadow.

  Miranda walked quietly, enjoying the woods, which were gloomy with the day’s long light. High up and far away, a whip-poor-will gave out its lonesome call. After a while, she came out of the trees into a field of knee-high grass, where butterflies were having at the last pink blooms of summer’s fleabane. At the center of the clearing: the black oak, a gnarled giant with wide, low-hanging limbs. She scanned the other trees at the edge of the clearing for the boy, didn’t see him.

  Movement in the oak caught her eye.

  Hanging by his ankles from the lowest branch was a man, the grass stained red beneath him. The meadow rippled in a soft, warm breeze. The body spun gently at the end of the rope, and Miranda saw the face of her father, Hiram Crabtree.

  She felt a falling away inside her, like a shelf of rock collapsing.

  The boatman wore the same shirt, jeans, and boots he had worn the last night she had seen him alive, thighs and knees mud-smeared. His arms hung down straight. A slit beneath his jaw like a frown, his face otherwise expressionless, save the empty, stupid gaze of the dead. An arrow protruded from his chest, just above the heart. Fletching the same light gray of the arrows Miranda carried even now in her quiver—

  No, she said, or thought she said, unaware that her fingers, despite her bow in one hand, were moving in sign, the way she had taught Littlefish to speak. She forgot to breathe. She grew light-headed and sat down in the grass. The sun, low behind the oak, lit Hiram’s corpse in a nimbus of gold.

  Littlefish, suddenly, in silhouette above her.

  Miranda stared up at him blankly.

  The boy was bending down, setting his bow on the ground.

  You okay? he signed.

  She gripped his arm and pointed over his shoulder at the tree.

  Man? she managed to sign, hands quaking. See?

  Littlefish glanced over his shoulder. Man? he said. Then shook his head. Doe, he said.

  Doe.

  She looked up. It was a deer. The boy had shot an arrow through its heart and slid a rope through the tendons of its legs to haul it up and cut its throat. Even now, it bled out on the bright green grass.

  Miranda pushed up slowly from the ground. Her legs shook. “I don’t—” she said, but that was all she said.

  Curious, worried, Littlefish watched her.

  She forced a dry-throated laugh in defiance of the hot tears that sprang into her eyes and shook her head. She went to the doe where it hung. She touched the arrow that had felled it, its shaft buried in the chest.

  Miranda looked around, saw the story of his kill. He had climbed the oak and waited, and the doe had wandered into the long grass to graze; the boy had taken her with a shot that was easily fifty or sixty yards; she saw the depression in the grass, the blood trail where he had dragged her from the tree line to the oak at the center of the meadow. Miranda marveled at the distance, the precision. The boy was pure instinct. She, a gap shooter, judged her elevation by the space between the tip of her arrow at full draw and her target. Every shot Miranda made was a calculation, whereas the boy’s were riddles.

  She ran one hand along the flank of the deer, its fur stiff like the bristles of a paintbrush. Good shot, she said.

  He broke into a smile, and his smile was brilliant and warm.

  Instantly she felt better.

  “You shouldn’t leave it in, though.” She gripped the
arrow lodged in the doe’s breast and tore it free. The broadhead was a razor, one of a set she had given him for his birthday last spring.

  Show me how it’s done, she signed.

  The sky bled vermilion as the boy drew a skinning knife from his belt of squirrel and rabbit pelts and began the work of dressing. When he hesitated, she took his hand and guided the blade to the groin. He put the knife into the deer, cut down through the rib cage, and slowly the deer came open. Littlefish buried his arms to the elbows inside the animal. Out came the viscera. He dropped it in a heap, plunged back in.

  Miranda watched him. He was beautiful. Her love for him frightened her.

  “Baba says you’re not sleeping,” she said. “Want to talk about it?”

  He shook his head. The deer gave a squelch as he drew his arms out.

  “Why not?”

  No words, he signed, hands bloody.

  “Make them?”

  The boy hesitated, then stuck his knife in the dead animal’s flank. He brought his hands together and worked his fingers without looking at Miranda, as if talking to himself. Flies buzzed around him, crawled on the animal’s hide. She caught the words red and fire and afraid. Finally, he threw his hands apart, let his long arms fall at his sides, and just shook his head. Then went back to the deer. Working behind the sternum at something stubborn, and when he took his hands out, his arms red, Miranda saw that he was holding something small and round, a perfect arrow-shaped wound in its center. Smiling, he held it out to her.

  It was the heart.

  CRABTREE LANDING

  The white Plymouth was parked on the shoulder of the gravel turnaround at Crabtree Landing. Across the way, the mercantile where Miranda lived was dark. Beyond the trees and power lines, the sun was spreading like a burst yolk. Constable Charlie Riddle leaned against the front right fender of the car and held his cigarette near his mouth, his elbow tucked close against his bulk. He rubbed, absently, the silk eye patch that covered his left orbit. His fingers were thick, nicotine-yellowed, his face grizzled and jowly. Behind the wheel, his deputy—Robert Alvin, a man so thin he might have been a series of fitted pipes beneath his jeans and shirt—sat cracking roasted peanuts out of a paper bag. He held a bottled Coke between his knees and thumbed the nuts one by one down the bottle’s neck. The afternoon had passed slowly, the radio squawking from time to time. Bees buzzing in clumps of yellow ragwort all around the property. Now the sun was on its way out, and the sweat crawled more slowly down Riddle’s back, his khaki shirt dried with it, stains below his shoulders like ugly wings.

  Fly-fly away, the fat constable thought. From here, this long, hot afternoon spent prowling around the doors and windows of a place he had avoided for the better part of a decade. From everywhere else: the town of Mylan, the county of Nash. The state of goddamned Arkansas. Let his ugly wings carry him up into the clouds like a storybook faerie, deposit him somewhere beside a clear and rocky stream, where no man knew his name. A land without preachers and churches and dwarfs. Where the food was steak and potatoes every day and the only women were the ones you paid and there was always a piano playing and the smell of horse. Riddle touched the Schofield pistol on his hip and wondered if he might yet be a law-bringer, not -breaker. Would he slip his bonds of servitude to lesser men, crackpots and midgets, dopers and fools?

  By God, Charlie Riddle was in a mood. The heat and the waiting had put him there. He was hungry and cranky and felt the first misgivings of a head-buster coming on. Old feelings, too, astir in his belly. He stared at the gravestones beneath the tall spreading sweetgum by the river, both cut from cedarwood, the man’s more crudely than the woman’s. He stared at Cora Crabtree’s name, burned into the wood. He did not like these feelings. It would be better to be far from here.

  The Landing. Always at the edges of his thoughts.

  He looked down at his gut, unable to see his belt buckle below it. Then at the dense pine thicket, northwest of the store. Touched his eye patch. Recalled stumbling out of those piney woods a night long past, jelly of his eye on his cheek.

  Oh yes, I am in a goddamned state.

  The Landing, like Sabbath House upriver, was a stake driven through the bedrock of Charlie Riddle’s life, and he, like a dog in some bottom dweller’s dirt yard, was hitched to that stake by an invisible chain, his small, well-trod orbit thick with flies and the smell of his own shit. He had lost so much of himself here. His eye was drawn to the sweetgum at the corner of the store, where the graves of Hiram and Cora Crabtree lay in the switching evening shadows. Ah, Cora. He fanned the air as if to shoo a fly. Goddamn you, Cora. And damn her, too. Ain’t no amount of even to be got with you Crabtree bitches.

  When Riddle heard the bright pitch of an outboard from downriver, he tossed his butt in the gravel, unpinned his star from his breast, and dropped it through the Plymouth’s passenger window.

  Robert Alvin stirred from his peanuts.

  “Stay put,” Riddle said.

  He walked across the grass and around the mercantile, its paint peeling to the gray board. The Landing’s rear porch was built on stilts in the water, fixed like a balcony to the second story. Just beyond the overhang of the porch, a floating dock bobbed on a raft of old whitewalls jellied with frog eggs. Riddle sidestepped down the steep embankment to the water’s edge. Stood amid a tangle of kudzu, breathing hard, right hand on the Schofield. The sound of the motor grew louder, and soon the johnboat appeared from around the tight horseshoe bend of the last oxbow before the Landing.

  The constable lifted a hand and the girl’s jaw set like concrete at the sight of him. She wore a man’s shirt, the sleeves rolled above her shoulders. The front of the shirt and the thighs of her jeans were smeared with blood.

  Riddle waited where he was until she drew alongside the dock and cut the motor.

  He ventured through the kudzu along the bank and walked into the shadow of the porch’s overhang. She ignored him, went about the business of tying off. He stepped carefully over old cinder blocks and broken glass bottles half buried in the red mud and watched, rightly, for snakes.

  “How do,” he said.

  The girl stood at the center of the dock, between it and Riddle a few feet of lapping water.

  She made no answer. Just fists at her sides.

  A right sour-looking twist these days. “What’s a-matter,” he said, “cat got your tongue?”

  The sun was gone.

  Across the river, a blue heron slid out of the sky and alighted in the water’s edge.

  Riddle put both hands on his gun belt, hooking his thumbs around his buckle. He eyed the boat tied to the dock. A bucket of fresh-shucked corn set at the bow. In the hull: a hunk of something bloody, wrapped in a bedsheet. “What you got there, little sister?”

  “Don’t call me that,” she said.

  “You best show me,” he said, and made a swirling motion with his hand as if to speed her along.

  She hunkered down, dragged the haunch of meat out of the boat, and threw it on the dock. Slipped the knot of twine and spread the sheet.

  He whistled, impressed with the size.

  She covered it, fetched out the bucket of corn. Her arms tanned and freckled and strong.

  Damn, but he still liked looking at her.

  “Where’s the rest of it? Some deer out there hobbling on three legs? Or you leave it for that witch? She cook it fore she eats it?”

  Miranda tied the sheet and shouldered the haunch and climbed the ladder made of soldered iron that reached from the floating dock to the Landing’s second-story porch. She climbed one-handed.

  Riddle stood beneath the overhang, thumbs in his pockets, watching as she disappeared up the ladder. Above, boards creaked and the porch door slammed.

  He picked his way back through the kudzu and climbed the embankment, stumbling once in the dark. He stood beside the house and watched the second-story windows, where no lights burned. He saw her at the nearest window, staring down from between the drapes. Taller and leaner tha
n the child she had once been, long legs dangling off a stool behind Hiram’s register. He’d come around once or twice a few years after Cora died. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, but God, those legs, even then. And how his badge had shone in those days, oh yes.

  You want my daddy?

  I just come for some candy. Got me a sweet tooth.

  How she’d twisted on that stool, in her little shorts, blouse knotted above her navel.

  Say, little sister, I ever tell you I knew your momma?

  Riddle went on around the house, hands on his belt. Robert Alvin started up the Plymouth, but Riddle raised five fingers at the deputy. He went whistling up the porch steps and opened the screen door and kicked the inner door open, splintering the frame, cracking glass. He strode into the store and looked around at the place. Shelves nearly empty, thick with dust. Cobwebs in every corner. Tins of saltines and sardines and potted meat stamped with dates likely long passed. Near the register: a wire spinner of comic books, the ones in the front all sun-faded. Shadows and motes, stale Moon Pies.

  Riddle drew his Schofield from its holster. He cocked the big antique pistol and drew down on the humming bait cooler along the wall. He fired. The bullet punched through the housing and the light beneath the sliding glass panels flickered. The compressor died with a rattle.

  The store was silent.

  At the back, light spilled down from the hidden stairwell, and the girl’s shadow angled across the floor from the top of the stairs.

  “Come on down here now. Let’s talk.”

  Her sneakers on the steps, each footfall a scuff.

  Riddle flicked the light switch near the ruined door.

  In its wire fixture on the ceiling, a single low-watt bulb stuttered to life.

  The small musty mercantile went thick with the gamy scent of her as she emerged, blood-smeared, from the stairs.

  Riddle took long, bold strides toward her, pistol in hand.

  Her spine straightened and the muscles in her arms tightened.