“Nope,” Robert Alvin said.
“Talking like she ain’t part of this family no more.”
“What about Cook?” Miranda said. “He was family.”
“Weren’t mine.”
Sweat dripped in Miranda’s eye.
“Come on, now,” Riddle said. “Where’s that little gal?”
Robert Alvin spoke: “We’ll take her and be on about our business, Miranda, we swear.”
Riddle fixed the thin man with a stare. “Robert Alvin, you are a sore upon my ass.”
“Got nothing for you,” she said.
The fat man’s humor darkened. He put his hand to the butt of his pistol.
Miranda drew the arrow a little tighter. The bow creaked. “I’ll talk to Avery,” she said.
Riddle shook his head, spat his cigarette, and unhurriedly drew his pistol.
Miranda’s bolt slashed air and shattered the Plymouth’s headlight, inches from the constable’s knee. Her second arrow was nocked and ready before the first had finished quivering in the metal.
Robert Alvin rose slowly from where he’d ducked behind the driver’s door.
“The dock,” Miranda said from behind full-draw. “I’ll talk with Avery first. Then I’ll talk with the preacher.”
Riddle, who had not moved an inch, smiled. “Little sister, I think I’ll let you.” He holstered the Schofield and backed toward the passenger’s door. “And good luck to you.” He folded his bulk back into the car, and Robert Alvin cranked the engine and backed away, arrow still lodged in the headlamp, a great wounded beast she had no need to track, for she knew its lair.
When the car was out of sight, its dusty wake billowing, Miranda lowered her bow.
She went and got the hammer and nailed the boards over the goddamn door again.
BILLY COTTON
Half an hour later, she met Avery at Sabbath Dock, and there she showed him what was in the Styrofoam chest. Miranda watched his face when the lid came off. A grimace that turned to shock, his color draining. Seconds passed into a long quiet. There was something fragile, almost tender, in the way the dwarf regarded what was there. Something inside John Avery teetered on the edge of a precipice.
He led her into the dense pine thicket behind Sabbath House, where the land began to rise from the river, Miranda carrying the cooler. They walked until the trees thinned and they came to a high place Miranda had never been before, where the grass and spiny thistle grew almost as tall as the dwarf. In half shadow atop the hill were the stone ruins of a very old church. Only its facade remained. Little pines grew between cracks in the spires, a slatted window high above the broken doors. In back, tombstones studded the ground. Beyond the tree line, the stone wall that encircled the vast acreage of the property stood eight feet high.
At the base of the church, set into a hollow at the bottom of the hill where a wall of jasmine had all but claimed it, was the granite maw of an iron-shut crypt.
It was here, seated on a stone bench before the crypt’s gate, that they found the mad preacher, Billy Cotton.
Out of a lined, white-whiskered face his eyes shone bright and hungry. He sat with head cocked at the sky as if tuning in some heavenly frequency. He straightened and turned as they rounded the corner of the hollow, moving one hand over the black leather Bible that lay on the bench beside him. His feet were bare, toes curled in the dewy grass. A pair of wing tips tucked beneath the bench. Rocks and bits of twig and burr inside them.
When he spoke, his voice was deep, resonant. “Hello, Miranda,” he said.
She set the chest in the grass before him.
“‘Preacher,’” he read. “For me?” He made a show of sitting forward eagerly on the edge of the bench.
He opened the lid and peered into the cooler. He grunted. Lifted the bag and twirled the twist-tie free and took out Cook’s head. The preacher peered up through the stump of the neck as if inspecting some broken artifact unearthed. His fingernails were long and sharp, little crescents of dirt beneath them.
Liar, Miranda thought. Fake.
John Avery set his eyes on the highest spire of the church.
Cotton sat back on the bench, let the head rest on his lap, twining his hands in its hair so that it seemed engaged in some parody of an obscene act. Lifting his own head to the sky, which did not diminish the effect. “Good old Cook. I never knew him. John knew him, though, didn’t you, John?”
Avery’s eyes, hard, angry, shifted from the church to the preacher. “He was my friend.”
“He was,” Cotton said. He tossed the head back into the cooler. It made a wet plop. “This is a love offering from Charlie Riddle.”
Avery clenched his fists. “Riddle ordered this?”
“Charlie’s ways ain’t the sweetest.”
“You let him do this?”
“See to your friend, brother.”
A vein throbbed in John Avery’s temple. His eyes darted to a rock in the grass. Big enough to crack the preacher’s skull.
Miranda spoke his name, softly. He closed his eyes and expelled a great, shuddering breath. His fists unclenched. Without a word, he picked up the Styrofoam lid and set it back in place and took the cooler by its molded handle and dragged it away from Cotton, through the grass, the head sloshing inside. He stood with his back to the preacher and Miranda, and there, among the purple stalks, he lit an old joint from his shirt pocket and smoked.
Miranda took the plastic-wrapped vial of liquid from her jeans and tossed it at Cotton’s bare feet.
“What’s that?” he said, bright eyes fixed on her. His smile was quick, ingratiating.
A mask, she thought.
“It was in the mouth,” she said.
“And the rest?”
“Who is she?”
“The girl?” He laughed. “Why, she’s my child.”
Down below, Avery turned.
Miranda, whose arms and limbs had flooded with adrenaline the moment she saw the old preacher seated on the bench, felt suddenly empty, as if the fight had all drained out of her at once. Shock, confusion, even horror: all manifested in the nigh-imperceptible tightening of her jaw.
Avery drew close enough to hear.
“She was our miracle,” Cotton said, voice dropping low, though still measured in a kind of preacher’s cadence. A man humbled, brought low by great trials and tribulations. “We tried for so long, we had begun to lose hope. Then, one winter, on a cold, cold night, God saw fit to change our fortunes.” He stared at the vial between his toes for a moment, then bent to pick it up, grunting as he did, and this seemed, to Miranda, the first break in his performance. A grimace of pain as he moved. He sat up, breathed in, breathed out. Said softly: “I sent her away when she was born. I was wrong to do that.”
He noticed Avery below, listening. He tucked the drug away in his jacket pocket and stood, and suddenly he was pale, faltering. He put a trembling hand in the small of his back. Wincing. In that instant, the whole performance collapsed, and Miranda saw the man for what he was, every bit his age, more frailty than fright about him. He straightened with a kind of insect-like precision, but when he took a step toward Miranda, his left leg seemed to give. She took a step back, and he went past her, limping slowly up the hill toward the church. She thought of wood eaten away by termites, holding its shape yet somehow reduced. He did not look back.
Though he beckoned her, over his shoulder, with a crooked finger.
Avery wandered deeper into the long grass, away from the cooler, the crypt, the shadow of the church. Merging with the landscape.
Miranda went up the hill. In back of the church, burned oak pews were given over to nature, saplings where once a sanctuary had stood. She found the preacher kneeling near a heap of dirt, the dirt grown over with weeds, clumps of yellow toadflax blooming. He took up a stick, drew a circle in the earth.
“It was struck by lightning,” he said over his shoulder. “Long before Lena and I bought the property. Maybe over a hundred years, it’s been here, th
is holy, rotting place. Lena, she found it. One of her walks. She loved to come out here and walk among the trees. It was her idea, to be buried here. In its cold, black crypt.”
A warm breeze soughed among the pines.
The old preacher’s voice had lost its fervor. Found a tremor.
“Lately, I come out here most ever day,” he said. “Some nights I sleep down there. Just to be near.”
He drew a line down from the circle, arms, legs. Picked a sprig of toadflax from the mound. He placed it over the circle he had drawn, then laid another beside it, and another.
“Lee wanted things I could not give her. Happiness beyond measure…”
Miranda looked at the drawing he had made: a stick figure of a girl, sprigs of yellow toadflax for hair.
“Oh, for the early days,” he said. “Cadillac years, Lee called them. Once, that old house overflowed with the children of Lena’s flock, and I marshaled for their joy a little brass band, a parade. Can you picture it?”
Miranda remembered the night Littlefish was born, the remnants of Lena’s flock smoking fearfully between their shotgun houses. “No,” she said.
“She has Lena’s gift, you know. This child. She sees.”
“Sees what?”
“All ends,” Cotton said.
Miranda flashed on the vision of herself, asleep beneath the tree, her quiver empty. Despite the summer heat, she felt a chill work its way all along the length of her spine.
“Do you believe in God, Miranda?”
She did not answer.
“When I was younger,” Cotton said, “I never understood it. How a man could simply be washed clean of the past. A man is his past. Can he simply shed it, like a suit? Why would he? Why give up the thing you are, that all of nature conspired to make you? To split yourself. Ever after, you look into a mirror, and two men stare back.”
“I don’t care about belief,” Miranda said. “I care about trust.”
Cotton looked at her now. Eyes rimmed red. His voice was flat, hard. “Can I trust you, Miranda?”
She looked away.
Abruptly, he scrubbed his drawing and stood. The motion drew a sharp intake of breath, a pause to steady himself.
At that moment, a wind blew through the church, made the pine tops groan and creak. Something caught Cotton’s eye, drew it to the great oaken doors of the church, one of which hung askew, an archway of light and trees beyond. Suddenly the preacher went rigid. Miranda’s eyes darted from him to the doors.
Voice barely a whisper, Cotton said, “Do you see her?”
Miranda followed his gaze, saw nothing but the distant woods framed by the arch, through it the grass field at the bottom of the hill where John Avery waited.
Cotton lifted a hand, as if to cup the cheek of some invisible congregant drawing nigh. To the empty air, in a voice hushed with reverence, he said, “Oh, I wish you could see her. She’s so terrible. So beautiful.”
With his other hand, he drew a pearl-handled straight razor from his pocket and thumbed it open. “She’s eager for the end I’ve promised,” the old man said. “But I still have business with you, Miranda.”
Miranda took a step back.
The preacher’s blade flashed across the hollow of his upraised hand. The razor made a sound, sudden and sharp, not unlike an arrow shot from a bow. The preacher bent double, made a fist, and squeezed, and the blood ran down his wrist. He raised his fist above his head. Then stood upright and locked eyes on Miranda that were wide and gleaming through the pain. He splayed his fingers toward heaven, the slit in his palm coursing red.
“One last trip upriver, Miranda,” Cotton said. “Tonight. Charlie Riddle will be waiting for you at the dock. After which, by sunup, you will bring me what is rightfully mine.”
The preacher flung his arm down, spattering the toadflax with crimson.
Miranda turned and fled. Down the hill, past the crypt with its heavy iron door, into the long grass, past John Avery, who took up the cooler and tried to follow, dragging it behind, calling after her, but she did not stop, not until the trees were tall around her once again, the old mad preacher and all his devils far behind.
NOT THE LEAST AMONG THEM
Avery walked alone through the woods, caught up with her near the river’s edge. She stood staring out at the dark river passing, the trees on the far bank moving in the breeze. The day yet hot. He came dragging the foam cooler behind him, small and weary among the pines. When Miranda turned, he said, “Help me bury him.”
After a moment, she nodded.
Avery fetched a shovel from the greenhouse.
He chose a spot in the woods near the river, outside the confines of the crumbling boundary wall, where the soil was moist and a ring of wild hydrangeas grew, their petals white. A length of cross vine wound its way up the trunk of a beech tree, red, bell-like flowers in bloom.
He lit what was left of his joint and smoked it while Miranda dug the hole. She was tamping the soil and raking leaves over it with the shovel when the dwarf spoke. “I was hungry,” he muttered. “You gave me no meat. I was naked, you gave me no clothes.…” He stared at the freshly mounded grave.
“What?” Miranda said. She wiped her brow with her forearm.
“Something Lena said, day I met her. Long time ago. ‘You will not be the least among them, John Avery.’”
Silence fell between them. Avery’s thoughts turned inward like knives against himself.
Miranda broke it. “Is it true, what he said? The girl is his?”
“Yes. And no.”
“What does that mean?”
“Yes, there was a girl. Once. But I swear I knew fuck-all about bringing her here—”
“When was she born?”
“Before…” He hesitated. “Before the other one. The one that didn’t live.”
“So, what, eleven, twelve years back?”
“Twelve. Billy sent the baby to a whorehouse he and Riddle run. Not the Pink, but another one, across the state line.”
“Why?”
“It was Lena’s child. But it wasn’t his. He wanted to hurt her.”
Avery took out his lighter, re-lit the nub of his joint.
“Did he?” Miranda said. “Hurt her?”
“Broke her in two,” Avery said.
In a tree nearby, a mourning dove called, and another answered.
Avery’s voice began to drift like curls of smoke as he spoke, his eyes glassing.
“She never would tell who the father was. It drove Billy crazy. That’s when it started: doors flung open in the middle of the night, there he’d be, just standing there, like a ghost. People got spooked, started talking about leaving. Most did, save the ones slinging dope for Riddle. After that came the sermons. Devils and whores and corrupted wombs. Everything she built, he tore it all down. Then she died. Everyone left. Everyone but us. We couldn’t, we—”
His voice hitched. He wiped his eyes.
“God help us, why’d we do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Have a daughter. Here, in this terrible place.”
Silence.
Nearby, the Prosper ran softly, surely.
Miranda let the shovel fall and set out through the trees.
She left John Avery standing alone by the grave in sun-dappled shadow.
LICORICE
The Landing came into view and Miranda saw the constable’s Plymouth kicking up a cloud of dust as it wheeled away from the gravel turnaround. She killed her engine and turned the rudder sharply, and the Alumacraft beached itself in the sand. She opened Hiram’s Old Timer knife and went at a quick run up the riverbank, behind the shed, and onto the front porch, where she found the door to the mercantile broken open once again, the boards she had nailed up prized free and tossed in the yard.
She slipped through the screen door, sneakers crunching over broken glass. It struck her like a punch in the gut: cans of beans, boxes of crackers, tins of meat, all ripped from shelves; paper kegs of oatmeal pu
nched open and spilled in heaps and trails like gunpowder; the floor around the bait cooler and the wall behind it alive with crickets where the wooden hopper in the corner had been smashed, the room full of their song. Glass of the old meat counter smashed to pieces, heaps of Saran wrap unribboned across the boards.
She flicked on the overhead bulb and threw up the leaf that blocked the register. She pressed the dull side of the blade against her thigh to close the knife, then knelt and gripped the beadboard panel and pushed in and to the right.
The girl shoved backward in the cabinet, chewing candy. A thin line of colored drool, like ink, ran down her chin. She sat wrapped in Miranda’s white childhood bedspread, clutching the jar of black licorice in her lap. Face round and frightened, two whips in her fist.
Miranda sat back on the floor. Aware of how careful she had to be now, how delicate.
The girl licked her lips. Her tongue was black.
Unreal, Miranda thought, that fate, this land, some force within it, had delivered unto her both of Lena Cotton’s lost children.
The right sleeve of the girl’s pajamas rode up to her elbow, exposing the scars, the needle stitching there.
She is poisoned, Miranda thought, thinking of her own arm now, the snakebite scars. That long, terrible night in old Iskra’s bathhouse.
Do you know who saved you, Myshka?
Red eyes in the steam.
The girl stared at her, chewing still, and Miranda stared back.
I USED TO BE HANDSOME
Riddle called Sabbath House from the pay phone in the back of Shifty’s Tavern out on the highway, three miles south of Mylan. He sat on a rickety stool, a rip in the seat taped with duct tape. The phone was near the toilets, the air ripe with someone’s morning shit.
The preacher picked up on the fourth ring. “Charlie,” he said, as if divining the caller.
“I didn’t get her, Billy.”
Silence on the line, followed by a low wet clicking sound, something weird and insect-like the old preacher did with his mouth. The sound of Billy Cotton thinking. It made Riddle antsy, this sound. All the years he’d known the preacher, he never once recalled the old man’s hesitation leading to anything good.
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