The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  She put the hat back on and closed the book and got up and went to the boy’s worktable.

  She picked up a rusty spring. Put it down. Picked up an arrowhead and slid her thumb along the edge.

  A thin well of blood.

  Littlefish sprang to her side, plucked the blade from her hand.

  She put her thumb in her mouth. “Sharper than a razor,” she said.

  The boy slashed one index finger across the other.

  “Sharp.” She nodded.

  He grinned, happy she understood, and made the motion again.

  She turned her thumb in the light that shined through the little window. The cut was not deep.

  The boy led her out of the shed to show her his garden.

  AIM

  Miranda let the arrow rack out of focus, saw the old woman’s center beyond. The center was all that mattered. Beneath apron and blouse and breast, a heart beating. Crying out, perhaps, to be stopped. From the heart down to the hands, knotted in the old woman’s lap, the arrow drifted. Hiram is dead, the boy is alive. Madness, too deep to fathom. A slit in the boy’s throat, resolved in Miranda’s memory as a trick of light and shadow. But no trick. Billy Cotton had torn his child from his wife’s bosom and cut the boy’s throat and you, you worked for him, all these years, the man who would have killed your brother … Miranda remembered him on the stairs, something in his hands dripping red, and now she imagined a similar mouth opening in her father’s throat, made by the witch’s knife. She flashed on Hiram trussed up from the black oak in the meadow. Had it been like that? Her father strung up like a kill in some cold, alien bog? I have no father because of this woman and I have a brother because I have no father. I never knew Cora and I did not know Hiram long enough to know him as I might now had he lived and here is this woman I thought I knew but I look at her and see only a collection of strange and ancient parts, but I know the boy and the boy is good and true and I love him and he was born from horrors and you can’t change that any more than you can change your birth because all of us come from cracked eggs and nests of thorns.

  She increased her pull, let the broadhead swim back into focus, let it drift now to the old woman’s eye.

  Unflinching strength. This, Hiram had taught her.

  To flay the skin from the beast and wear the coat it makes.

  This same strength, the old witch possessed. It had guided her hand over Hiram’s throat.

  Miranda’s arm began to tremble.

  The boy, the girl: two strands entangled with her own, bright colors among others dull and lusterless.

  What terrors the girl must know, to peer into a person and see the whole of her.

  We are the choices we make.

  She glanced down at the shotgun shell set upright on the table.

  Miranda made her choice.

  NO SHELTER HERE

  A peal of childish laughter from the garden out back, even as the cabin seemed to groan all around the boatman’s daughter and the witch, the boards flexing furiously.

  “Be still, house,” Iskra said. “I am not shot yet.”

  The cabin quieted.

  “Well,” the old woman said. “Is this it?”

  Miranda said nothing.

  The old woman pressed her lips together and made a fist in her lap.

  Miranda released the arrow.

  * * *

  The shadow of the half-empty liquor bottle had changed places on the table, moving with the sun. The hollowed-out Bible lay open beside it. The arrow Miranda had shot was lodged in the center of the old woman’s table, split into two pieces on either side of it: the red wax casing of the shotgun shell.

  The witch seemed to Miranda like a campfire burned low, nothing left but coals and ash. She sat quietly while the children played outside, the girl’s laughter carrying. Miranda had gone to the window to watch them, and through the glass she saw the girl following Littlefish through his garden, clouds of gnats drifting in their wake. The boy darted behind a tomato stalk belled with empty tin cans. The girl wore his coonskin cap and carried a comic book and ran between the plants.

  Iskra pushed back from the table, trembling, and walked their jelly-jar glasses to the sink, a weave in her gait now, one foot dragging. The old woman leaned against the sink, as if for support.

  Outside, Littlefish pointed at a ring of cobalt bottles set over sticks, the bottles heliographing in the sun. He spoke with his hands, and the girl listened, though she did not understand.

  “They aren’t safe here, are they,” Miranda said.

  “The preacher will find this place. The leshii will see to it. She will all but steer his boat. If he finds the girl, you see, he finds the boy, and that is what the leshii wants. So, no, they are not safe here.”

  “Damn your leshii,” Miranda said.

  “She is not mine. She is no one’s. To impede such magic—” Iskra made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “You might as well try and change the course of yon river.”

  Miranda looked out through the window, to the garden, where the children played. The bottoms, she thought. I’ll take them into the bottoms, hide them. They will not be hurt. I can see to that without bargains and magic.

  “Can you,” the old woman said, as if reading her thoughts.

  Miranda looked at the arrow in the table. Beyond this swamp, beyond these sweltering lands, there were other worlds. Places she could have gone. People she could have been. She felt them now, these other selves, stirring like ghosts in the grave of her soul. She had let too much of the past, of time and the river’s currents, shape her.

  She yanked her arrow from the table.

  Touched the razor-sharp edge of the broadhead.

  Blood welled up from her finger.

  “Go,” the old woman said. “There is no shelter here.”

  Miranda went.

  ALL THERE IS

  The sun set on a day that had seemed the longest in John Avery’s life. After Cook’s burial, he stayed in the greenhouse among his plants. Sometimes pacing, sometimes sitting. Once, sleeping. At the hottest part of the day, he had smoked the last few buds on his worktable, but the fears that plagued him did not dissolve, only morphed into a paranoid certainty that Charlie Riddle’s great fat bulk was lurking beyond the blackened windows. Doubts like drills boring around inside his skull. Stomach churning with fear for himself, his family, for Miranda. This third, final run Cotton had demanded. What cargo was left? All the ready dope was gone, ferried the night before. Nothing remained but the plants, and she couldn’t transport them by boat. What was Riddle not telling him? Miranda would be a fool to show up tonight. She was not a fool. But you are. You should have left already. After you buried Cook. Should have walked out of here right then with wife and child and never looked back. Money or no, infant or no. The world beyond these borders is hardly so cruel. So why can’t you leave this goddamned place?

  When he stepped out into the late evening dusk, the trees were black against a red sky, and the whole of the land seemed cauled with a membrane of blood. The dirge of the insects rang out from the trees, low, atavistic. He crossed the lane to the last inhabited shotgun house, went inside, and locked and barred the door. In the kitchen, he took a long butcher’s knife from a drawer and stood staring at his sallow face in the blade. He tucked the knife in the small of his back, didn’t like the feel of it, tried the front.

  “You cut it off, what good are you,” a voice said.

  There, in the bedroom doorway, was the woman he loved, wearing shorts and a sweat-stained tank top, one hand threaded through her close-cropped hair, the other scratching her chin. A smile at the corner of her mouth.

  Night fell, full and starless.

  * * *

  Later, she ran her fingers through his hair. She stood behind him by the small window in the rush of air coming from the box fan, his head touching just below her breasts. Holding Grace in his arms, Teia holding him. He fed the baby from a warmed bottle she had brought from the kitchen. The baby’
s mouth fastened tight to the nipple. They stood like that for a while, in the cool of the fan, together, and Avery was grateful for it, this small passage of time in which worry was shut out in the presence of their one remaining hope, this small round flame wavering in the dark. He felt the tug of his daughter’s feeding subside. He slipped the nipple and passed the bottle to Teia and threw the baby over his shoulder. Carried her around the room until she burped.

  Teia set the bottle on the bureau and dropped onto their bed, their sagging, creaky bed where she had given birth four months past, only John attending. We did this alone, he thought, looking down into his daughter’s face. Surely, we can do the rest.

  Teia crawled into the middle of the bed and sat in the depression that the weight of their bodies and worries had worn, her sleeveless T-shirt and thin boxers soaked through with summer sweat.

  The butcher’s knife on the nightstand, within easy reach.

  The baby burped and Avery passed her to Teia. Teia held her and began to croon a lullaby. When the child was sleeping, she put her down near the pillows and scooted to where Avery sat bare-chested with his back to her on the far corner of the bed, his shoulders slumped, his heavy head dipping. She put her hands on his shoulders. Began to knead them. “You got that big strong brow,” she said. “Holds all them big thoughts.” She kissed his ear. “Where you been hiding all day?”

  “Usual places,” he said.

  “You see the fat man today?”

  “Not since early. He’s been AWOL.”

  “Don’t feel right.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t really think he’s gonna pay us?”

  “Not likely.”

  “So we go in the morning.”

  “In the morning,” he said quietly.

  “Hey. What else?”

  “Nothing. It’s just funny—” He laughed. Not his usual warm laugh, but a harsher sound, the sound of his laughter turned against himself, the edge of a knife scraping stone.

  “What, baby?”

  He shook his head.

  “Tell me.”

  “I wanted to preach,” he said. “A long time ago. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Yours is a heart stowing secrets, John Avery.”

  A camp meeting in a field off a highway, a tent blazing light. A voice, booming, drew him from the dark and he slipped out of the womb of night and through the canvas and was reborn into a sea of souls raising hands. Down the sawdust-strewn aisle, he went like a man enthralled, dimly aware of eyes watching him, as they always did, to the platform, where there was room to stand below. The voice he heard from those dry dusty planks crying love and mercy was a woman’s. A siren in a dress of homespun cotton and a boy’s lace-up shoes, standing on an overturned apple crate and holding aloft a Bible and preaching into a silver microphone. She was small, but her voice was big, so big, and John Avery, sixteen years of age, looked back at all those people and saw that they, too, were wonderstruck. Up there, he thought, I could be big like her. Then: from the ranks of the first row of metal chairs, a woman with long dark hair streaked gray fell in some paroxysm, began to flop in the sawdust, and as the men around her stared, uncertain whether it was a fit or some religious ecstasy, the young girl on the platform leaped down and fell to her knees and lay hands on the woman and turned her face up to heaven and cried, “I see it! I see the sickness inside this woman, Lord! Black feelers and tendrils! Loose them, Father, loose them!” She began to wail in a gibberish tongue, and as the crowd closed around her and all laid hands on the woman’s twitching body, John Avery stood apart in awe, in terror.

  Teia had stopped kneading. She slipped off the bed and around him, to her knees on the wood floor. She put her hands over his, locked them in her grip.

  “Maybe I wasn’t good at God,” he said. “But I never meant for this, for any of this—”

  “Look at me, John Avery,” she said.

  He did.

  “Now, you keep them eyes on me, and you tell me what you know.”

  “Cook,” he said.

  “What about Cook?”

  He met her gaze. His eyes were wet. “Someone cut his head off.”

  Teia took her hands from her husband, slowly, and rocked back against the baseboard. She put her hands over her stomach.

  “There’s more,” he said.

  Behind them, the baby gave out a moan, then quieted.

  He told her what he knew. How the preacher had brought back Lena Cotton’s long-lost daughter. How Miranda had refused to give her up. He told her about the head in the Styrofoam cooler, how they buried it. How Miranda, tonight, was supposed to be here, at the dock, for one last run. “I think Riddle means to kill her,” Avery said. He wrung the covers at the end of the bed. “I can’t just wait it out. I can’t not help her. She’s smart, maybe she won’t show. I know we should have left already, I know, but I can’t just abandon her, I—”

  Quickly, Teia put her arms around him and pressed his face to her breasts. “You’re a good man, John,” she said. “But you remember us. We three, now, that’s all there is. You just keep us alive. Let these fools kill each other, but you keep us alive.”

  He began to sob, great hard sobs like fists pummeling Teia Avery’s chest, and she pressed him close, held him there in the cradle of her heart.

  INTO THE WOODS

  They made camp when the last of the day’s light was gone and the moon was above the trees, and though Miranda had staked a canvas roll across a rope strung between two maples, the boy and girl slept out by the fire, crown to crown, each curled on their sides like two halves of the same shell. It surprised her, how fast they went down. She sat at the boy’s feet, torturing the campfire with a pine limb that left her palm sticky with sap.

  How quickly the boy and the girl had come to trust one another. So openly, so unlike Miranda’s own bond, hard-won over a lifetime. Teaching the boy his signs, starting with a few basic shapes Hiram had taught her, then moving on to illustrations in a book checked out from the Nash County Library, never returned. The boy, frustrated and unable to cry or scream when he did not understand. He’d struck her once, hands like mallets. She understood such bruises.

  But here was a blind trust she did not know, as if they had met each other already in some bygone time. Born of some weird energy passing between them, minds and spirits linked.

  Littlefish jerked out of sleep, bits of leaves clinging to his forearm and elbow.

  Miranda poked the fire. Dream? she asked.

  The firelight made shadows of her moving fingers.

  The boy’s eyes shone. Smoke, he said. Everywhere. Choking.

  “What was burning?” Miranda asked.

  Everything.

  She kicked up sparks with her stick, every spark a question.

  The only one that mattered: What will you do next?

  Are you leaving us? the boy asked.

  Why would you think that?

  He only shrugged.

  “I will never leave you.” She reached out and cupped the crown of the boy’s head, where his hair grew thick and long. She kissed him.

  He lay back down, burrowing into the leaves beside the girl, who still wore the boy’s coonskin cap.

  The Root bow and quiver leaned against a tree near the tent. Miranda moved away from the fire and took up the bow and ran her finger along the edge of the fiberglass, the wood beneath a rich cinnamon. Her hand, despite the cut the old witch had made in her palm, felt at ease in the grip, and the arrow rest was lightly scuffed where a thousand broadheads had rested. Over the years she had shot from trees, from blinds, standing and crouched—always in her sights a meal, a hide. She was nine the first time she killed a living thing. An armadillo, come trundling among Hiram’s worm garden, turning over cardboard and licking the worms that clung beneath as if they were delicacies. Miranda’s arrow had punctured the shell with a crunch like the collapse of a rotten log underfoot. The animal leaped into the air and ran. She found it at the river’s edge, on its s
ide, half in, half out of the shallow water. The arrow had punctured a lung and the creature lay kicking, gasping, bubbling. Miranda stared down at it and felt ashamed. She knew she should finish it, put another arrow through its heart. Its chest exposed, thick hair clinging wetly against the mottled skin. She did nothing, only stared down at the ringed tail and small ears and long snout, the black, wizened eyes. She did not cry. When the armadillo was dead, she picked it up by the tail and carried it into the woods and left it for the scavengers. She never told Hiram.

  By the fire, the boy was sound asleep.

  She touched the string of her bow, strummed it.

  It might be easier, killing men.

  Men were deserving in ways an armadillo, a deer, a boar were not.

  They mean to kill you, she thought. These men who killed Cook. If you go tonight, Riddle will send you to them with Cotton’s promise of one last run, and they will kill you.

  She thought of the long, vague time after her mother’s funeral, the sight of Hiram hammering fresh planks onto the floating dock, cigarette after cigarette hanging from his lips. Months of silence, no music in the house. A starving time. The heavy silence of the days at work in the store, punching the register before she even knew how numbers worked. The long somber reassurances of the old men buying bait, their shuffling away like the rustle of leaves.

  She remembered the day when that long time had finally dropped from his shoulders like the yoke it was: the day he had taught her to shoot his bow and her first bolt had punched through the center of the paper target and buried itself in the bark of a black walnut tree at the edge of the woods. She was seven. How the slightest of smiles had crossed his face, and there had followed between them a season of unburdening in their lives, whereupon all the reserves of love Hiram possessed, once thought poisoned, were sluiced over into her, and good memories began.

  Had she come to such a day herself?