The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  IT’S IN THE MOUTH

  On the return, she cut the motor and drifted off the river into a cypress grove where the shallow water was thick with duckweed, clumps of little white flowers blooming in hollow stumps. Cypress trees stretching tall and cathedral-like into the morning mist. The world graying up. As if bewitched, the girl slept on beneath the brightly colored blanket. Miranda put her a few years older than Littlefish. Her face was sallow, her frame small. A streak of soot across her forehead. Her hair was short, cut close to the scalp. She smelled like smoke and something else, something sick. Miranda moved to the center seat and lifted the edge of the serape. She pushed up the girl’s sleeve. At the elbow, the needle marks, like fairy footprints, the most recent still pearled with blood. Below these, all the way down to the wrist, a faded latticework of scars.

  The ice in the Styrofoam chest shifted.

  Miranda covered the child and drew the cooler between her feet. She took Hiram’s Old Timer pocketknife from his tackle box. She slit the tape and opened the lid, which came free with a shriek.

  No.

  NO.

  Cook’s head peered up from inside a clear plastic bag printed with a blue polar bear and tied at the top with a twist-tie. His eyes had rolled up in his skull. His beard was matted red. An inch or so of blood had settled in the bottom of the bag. It beaded and sluiced in the folds of the plastic.

  She gripped the gunwale, stared down at her sneakers, the cuffs of her jeans rolled above the ankles. Every detail of her skin—the veins beneath the surface carrying blood to her toes; the mole above her ankle and the mosquito perched beside it sucking life; her knuckles scabbed over where she had punched the mercantile’s floor hours earlier—all in stark contrast to the white foam box, where death bobbed like an oversized cork.

  Somewhere close, an owl hooted in a tree.

  Miranda forced herself to look at Cook’s head.

  She saw something, a tight bundle of plastic, rubber-banded. Wedging his mouth open.

  She closed the lid, the humid morning crawling wetly inside her shirt. For the longest time, she sat unmoving. Staring at PREACHER on the lid of the chest.

  At some point—she wasn’t sure when, or for how long—the chatter of a motor rose over birdsong from the river. Not a welcomed sound, but she was strangely grateful for it, grateful to look away and fix her attention on anything but the cooler.

  Back out beyond the trees, the boat passed on.

  The girl stirred. The blanket fell away as she rolled onto her side and curled fetal and moaned and opened her mouth. A spasm rolled up from her belly, and Miranda had just realized what was happening when it happened. The girl vomited into the bottom of the boat. Bile and some colorless gob, oatmeal or baby food. Brief and sour-smelling. Her eyes were open, and she was shivering. A crescent of vomit on her cheek.

  Miranda slipped over the center seat to where the girl lay. She reached to wipe the vomit from her cheek, and the girl flinched and drew into a tight ball.

  “It’s okay,” Miranda said. She reached out again.

  Touched the girl’s cheek.

  Later, she could only think of it as a sudden breach, as a fish breaks the glassy surface of the water in the late evening purple: the entrance of a bold, beautiful presence, large and all-encompassing. It leaped up between them when Miranda’s fingers touched the girl’s skin and the girl’s eyes flicked toward her, met hers, sharing an awareness—of what, Miranda did not know. In an instant, time had collapsed and all the rest of her days shuttered forward to the end, and they were melancholy and not without grief. A waking vision of herself, her age unknowable. She wore jeans and sneakers and one of Hiram’s old shirts, as she so often did, was drifting to sleep beneath the spreading boughs of an oak, its knuckled bark scored by lightning. Bow and quiver at her side, quiver empty. And with this, an undercurrent of warmth, of goodness, a heartbeat strong and steady. Familiar.

  Miranda fell back, gasping.

  The girl locked eyes a moment longer, then was swept away by a drugged blankness, her eyes rolling up as she continued to shake.

  Miranda felt weak, old snakebite on her arm buzzing, nerves alight.

  She felt a tear slip down her cheek. She wiped it, then covered the child and cranked the motor. She eased out of the trees and back onto the river.

  CHOICES

  Later, Miranda took an old Zero bar from Hiram’s tackle box and held it out across the length of the boat, keeping one hand on the tiller. The girl’s eyes remained fixed on the blue morning sky, had been for the last mile of the river, open but glazed, empty. After a moment, Miranda split the wrapper and ate the candy herself. The wind had tugged the serape from the girl’s chest. Small as she was in her child’s pajamas, she was not without the first hints of adolescence.

  They rounded the last bend before Sabbath House, and the high, crumbling stone wall of the property rose from the water’s edge. The wall disappeared into the trees. Ahead, Miranda could see the inlet.

  Without knowing she was going to do it, she cut the motor and drifted. Listened to the silence of the morning, a few birdcalls, mist on the water burning away as the sun crested the trees. She looked at the girl, felt a sudden terror seize her heart. In a single morning, she had lost control of everything, the way ahead no longer hers. She felt the boat tugged sideways by the current. The bank ahead awash in golden light.

  In the water weeds there, just this side of the inlet, standing perfectly still, a white whooping crane with black-tipped wings watched the Alumacraft spin. Miranda met its gaze, knowing it was the same bird she had seen at the Landing the night before. Again, it stood upon a threshold: the inlet to Sabbath House. There are places we belong, it seemed to say. Places we don’t.

  Places, perhaps, yet to be discovered.

  She thought of Charlie Riddle, Billy Cotton, men who would take possession of this child, a girl dirty and drugged and not much younger than Miranda herself when she had gone to work for them. She remembered the preacher and John Avery in her living room, laying out their plan, asking their favors, assuring her of the money she would make. All part of God’s plan for the greater good of His kingdom, Cotton said, and she, telling him she had no use for gods and their kingdoms. Suspecting, from the old man’s sly smile, that he didn’t, either. But cash, she said, just fourteen years old, that she could use. To keep a roof over her head and the electricity turned on to cool the bait. To keep an old witch in tobacco and a secret baby healthy. Outside, in the heat, waiting by the car, one-eyed Charlie Riddle, grown fatter. Chewing a toothpick, waving at flies. Miranda at the window, one hand parting her mother’s homemade curtain. “Just keep that man away from me,” she said.

  The preacher’s promise: “He won’t bother you again.”

  If all these years had taught Miranda anything, it was this: Sabbath House had no use for innocence. Here, the early blush of womanhood would befoul like clear water after the first fish is gutted. And there was something unusual about this child, some truth—perhaps beautiful, perhaps terrible—Miranda had yet to grasp. If the old preacher wanted her, it was for no good reason at all.

  The crane watched as the Alumacraft drifted on past the inlet, where, beyond the cypress breaks, unseen to her and her to them, the dwarf and the constable waited.

  Miranda ripped the engine and throttled up. She looked back over her shoulder and the crane was gone.

  The Landing lay one mile south.

  You need a plan, she thought.

  The boat sped on.

  WHAT THE GIRL SAW, ON THE PROSPER

  Her mind muddled, river dizzying as it rushed past. Heart pounding, too, for there was something large and black and horrible chasing them. She saw it in the distant blue sky, behind the woman at the boat’s tiller, a black cloud with tendrils coiling earthward, a monstrous hole with teeth, come to gnash them, swallow them, spit them out in pieces.

  She had seen it before, not so long ago, above the trailers in the field where the rooms were red and the
sad women worked behind shut doors. A monster in need of banishment by the light of something sweet and soft and good. The women in those dark red rooms had none of that, and so they had not seen it coiling for them. Waiting to devour.

  But she had.

  Over the giant’s shoulder as he carried her away, kicking, crying, trailers burning and the women screaming. Visions jolting through her like currents: flames on a river, a wicked curved blade, the giant’s face painted in blood. A dark specter of pain and suffering, spreading over the treetops of a wide, green land.

  Then the man with the sharp teeth jammed the needle into her arm, and after that: nothing. Until—

  The woman.

  The woman in the boat had touched her—Miranda, Miranda is her name—and the girl had seen the woman’s life as God must see the earth, a transparent jewel suspended in darkness. The whole cast of characters, the whole long history of everything rooted in the wet soil of the swamps, a terrible long night that had become a nexus in time for this woman, an island at the center of her ocean, a bread bowl and two shotgun blasts in the dark and a father lost and a girl, searching, searching, always searching, her heart a hollowed-out place where secrets could be hidden and found.

  One of those secrets: a boy.

  Strange and magical and good.

  A facet of the jewel, a glimmer of bright green in all that darkness.

  Behind them, though, that coiling cloud. Following, until finally it peeled away to glide wraithlike over the moss-thick trees and swamps, to disappear into the folds of time and wait, biding its own to strike.

  The girl shut her eyes, drifted off in an empty fog.

  FAITH

  Leaning against the weathered dock rail, sleeves rolled past his meaty elbows, Charlie Riddle flipped a quarter in a dull, lazy way. When the boat motor had faded, he held up the coin between his thumb and index finger. “I win,” he said to Avery, who stood at the end of the dock, bleary-eyed. Riddle pushed the coin into his pocket and jingled it with his keys. “Told you she’d do it. Motored right on by. It’s what killed this place to begin with, you ask me. Women turning soft. Women get soft, they’ll pull the pin on the whole damn thing. Trace it all back to that, I swear.”

  “That’s how you see it?”

  “It is.”

  “I don’t guess it matters now.”

  Riddle looked at Avery as if considering something, then tipped his sweat-stained fedora back on thinning hair and took the quarter out of his pocket and flipped it at the dwarf and Avery caught it against his chest.

  “You keep that, John. Consider it the first of all that back pay. Days to come, you might need a little faith in your pocket. Bout what it’s worth around here.” Riddle winked, lumbered off for his car beneath the crepe myrtles.

  Avery closed his fist around the quarter in his hand. He looked out at the inlet, the river beyond. The drone of the girl’s motor fading.

  He put the quarter in his pocket.

  ARRANGEMENTS

  At the Landing, Miranda lifted the girl out of the boat. The serape fell into the river, where it was carried off to snag in the brambles on the far bank. The girl slumped like a broken reed against the gas pump at the center of the dock. Miranda snapped her fingers in front of the child’s half-lidded eyes, got a sluggish reaction. She looked out at the river. Beyond the boat ramp, the pine thickets, and through the pines the road. Up the road: Sabbath House.

  Riddle would be coming. Quickly.

  Miranda ran out the plank that served as the gangway between the port side of the dock and the kudzu-draped bank beneath the porch overhang. She bent, lifted the girl’s arms around her neck, and gathered her up. She was scrawny, light. “Don’t you puke on me,” Miranda said, going carefully across the plank. She climbed the embankment and went around to the front.

  Boards, nailed over the door. She had forgotten.

  A string of profanity yanked out of her like a starter cord.

  She felt the girl’s arms tighten around her shoulders. A small, warm hand brushed her neck, and Miranda thought she felt a sudden breeze sweep over her, envelop her. She was momentarily dazzled by the flash of sunlight between leaves, as if she lay on her back looking up into the lower branches of the oak she had seen earlier in her vision, but as sudden as the sensation came it was gone, and once again she was standing on the Landing’s porch with a drugged girl in her arms. Her heartbeat had quickened, was slowing. She took deep, deliberate breaths.

  Miranda set the child down against the wall by the bagged-ice freezer, went out to the shed for a hammer, and came back and pried the boards loose. The door swung open, hung there from a single hinge, busted. She carried the girl across the threshold and teetered up the narrow, hidden stairs.

  She put the girl in her childhood bed, atop the covers. Miranda had not slept in this room in over five years. The unfinished chest of drawers and bureau still held a smattering of girlhood: a teddy bear, a porcelain clown holding a bunch of balloons, her only game trophy, a four-pound white perch, hanging above the iron-framed bed.

  Time against her, she went through the kitchen onto the second-story deck and down the soldered ladder to the dock. She removed the Styrofoam chest from the boat and brought it over the gangplank onto the bank. There, she sat back against the craggy earth and opened the cooler.

  Like a large melon in the water: Cook’s head.

  She shut her eyes.

  He was not your friend, she told herself. He thought he was, but he was not.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the head until it was not a head, just a thing in a bag, and then she opened Hiram’s knife and slit the bag and reached with a shaking hand into Cook’s mouth. First his lips, then his tongue brushed her knuckles, cold and rubbery. The roll of plastic she pulled out was about the size and shape of a rabbit’s-foot key chain, maybe a little smaller. She unsnapped the rubber band and unfolded the plastic, and at the center of the bundle was a small ampule of clear liquid.

  Miranda held it up to the light. Shook it. Remembered the barrel of the big man’s syringe.

  She put it in back in the plastic and put the plastic and the rubber band in her pocket. She reached into the chest and lifted out the bag containing Cook’s head and set this carefully in the kudzu. Then she emptied the melted ice into the river and set Cook’s head back inside, retied the bag with the twist-tie, and carried the cooler up the embankment. From the freezer on the front porch, Miranda pried a single six-pound bag of ice and broke it against the boards. She dumped the ice over the head and set the lid back in place. She put the chest inside the ice bin and slammed the door shut.

  Upstairs, the girl had rolled over in her sleep. Was sucking her thumb.

  Miranda gathered her up in the top spread and carried her downstairs into the mercantile, behind the counter. She set her in a bundle on the floor, then pressed a beadboard panel beneath the register. The panel slid in and to the right on tracks, revealing a large hidden compartment, big enough to accommodate several good-sized moonshine crates. Over the years, Miranda had stored her earnings here, bundles of cash wrapped in Saran wrap from a big spool on the empty meat counter. She tucked the girl into the space, near a jar of black licorice, and no sooner had she closed the panel than she heard a car turn onto Crabtree Road.

  She ran upstairs and snatched the Root from above the couch. From the closet she fetched a black leather quiver full of three-edged broadheads. She fastened the quiver around her torso and drew one arrow as she descended the stairs. Stepping through the broken front door, she stood in the long morning shade of the porch and set her arrow loosely at the nock point, just as the white Plymouth came rumbling out of the trees and up the drive to park slantwise in the tire-trampled earth. Miranda took a wide shooter’s stance.

  The dust settled. Riddle’s lanky deputy, Robert Alvin, opened the driver’s door and stood behind it, one boot cocked on the frame of the car, one elbow atop the window. He tipped his felt hat with his free hand. His right stayed out of
sight, behind the door.

  Charlie Riddle heaved out of the passenger’s seat. Came grunting around the hood and leaned against it, the car nosing groundwise beneath his weight. He wore a black tie, the tongue of which fell six inches above his gut. He saw Miranda’s bow and arrow and scratched the grizzled waddle beneath his chin. He was grinning.

  No one spoke.

  The morning sky a wash of blue, no clouds in sight.

  Miranda went to full draw, sighted her broadhead on the fat man’s badge. The motion was instant, practiced, calm.

  Riddle did not flinch in the slightest. He simply took a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and tapped one out and lit it with a thumb-struck match. “No call to be unfriendly,” he said, after a long drag.

  Miranda’s arrow diminished to a sharp, focused point before her eyes.

  “I had a bet with that midget,” Riddle said. “Told him you’d do just what you done. Cruise on by. I know you, girl. Ways that midget only wished he did.”

  “You don’t know much,” Miranda said. Her shooting arm shook, slightly.

  “Hard to hold it?”

  “Easier if I let it go.”

  Riddle laughed.

  Miranda said, “Tell Avery I’ll see the preacher directly. We’ll talk about the girl.”

  “You take the cake. I told you last night, John ain’t got no say-so in this.”

  “You ain’t got half the say-so you think, Charlie Riddle.”

  “Mercy sakes, Robert Alvin. You ever hear this girl talk so much? Don’t recollect I ever heard her say so many words in her whole life, you?”