A moment when all her choices could be reversed, set right?
A day of unburdening.
A new life to begin for her, the boy, perhaps the girl, too.
If I do this, she thought, it will be like dropping a hornets’ nest with rocks. The only thing to do after is run.
She had tucked enough money away in the hidden spaces of the mercantile to live simply.
She looked at her brother, recalled the old witch’s words: The leshii has her plans. The boy is part of them. Always has been. To be a fly in the web of some dark god’s schemes, whatever those schemes might be.
But it’s not the boy’s burden, she thought.
And what of Charlie Riddle, who hated her so? He would kill her, if he could.
Soon, she thought, somewhere north, across the river, that one-eyed fat man would stand waiting at the end of Sabbath Dock, where some yet-to-be-revealed cargo needed moving along a dark river that ran ever on, its perils known to Miranda Crabtree since girlhood.
Smoke, the boy had dreamed.
Maybe, Miranda thought, a fire needs setting.
* * *
She left the children sleeping and backtrailed quickly in the dark. It was nearing midnight when she came out of the trees where the boy’s bark was banked. She took it across the bayou, tied it to a cedar branch, and skirted the northern edge of Iskra’s island, avoiding the old woman’s cabin, the old woman herself. She went through low pines over rock and scree and came to Iskra’s dock and from there took the johnboat back to the Landing, where she quickly changed into fresh jeans and a beige shirt that buttoned with faux-pearl snaps. In the bathroom mirror, she examined her face, her bruised throat. Her cheek, the slash marks from the bannik’s claws crusted over. She traced these with Mercurochrome, the effect not unlike warpaint. She cleaned her palm where the old woman’s knife had sliced her. She wrapped it in gauze. She moved on. From the hall closet she fetched a dozen more arrows for the Root recurve, as well as a brown leather arm guard, shooting glove, a pair of binoculars, and an empty canteen, which she filled at the kitchen sink. She grabbed a threadbare apron Hiram had worn behind his butcher’s counter for years. This she rolled and stuffed into her quiver. She took his Old Timer out of his tackle box, too, put it in her jeans pocket. She saw Cook’s gun, there in the clutter of old lead and tangled fishing line. Remembered how it felt, to draw it on the ramp, a cold, dead weight sapping her resolve. Useless. She locked the gun away in the tackle box and pushed it to the back of the closet floor. Standing up, she felt the hem of a flannel shirt brush the nape of her neck. She hesitated, then, on impulse, snatched it from the hanger and tied it round her waist. On her way out, she took a box of Diamond kitchen matches from a drawer and tucked these in her own shirt pocket. At the dock below, she took two spare gas canisters from the Alumacraft and filled them with gasoline from the pump.
In all, these preparations took less than fifteen minutes.
Once, she glanced up at the practice target across the water where it was nailed to the tree in the field, the bull’s-eye long gouged out. She heard Hiram’s voice clearly, as if he were standing on the dock some few feet behind. Be sure, he said. When you draw, be sure. And his old mantra: Shoot light. Shoot true. Shoot now.
She stepped into the Alumacraft and cranked the motor and jammed the throttle forward, loosing herself like an arrow into the dark.
INTERRUPTION
A quick, hard rap of knuckles against the edge of the fly screen. Avery sat up, naked atop the sheets. He touched Teia’s arm and she gave him a searching look. He pulled on his jeans and went barefoot through the narrow house and opened the door, butcher’s knife behind his back.
Riddle stood in the dark, a great bear of a shape.
“What’s going on?” Avery said.
“Need you,” Riddle said. “Get dressed. I’ll wait.”
Avery closed the door softly.
“What’s happening?” Teia said.
Avery stood behind the door, his head down. “Not sure.”
He put the knife in Teia’s hand. Said keep it close.
Then he dressed, moving quietly so as not to wake the baby.
IV
Final Run
CARGO
When Miranda saw the dwarf, her heart plummeted. Avery stood naked at the end of Sabbath Dock, hands cupping his genitals. Trembling before Riddle and his deputy and bleeding freely from a cut above his left eye. Stomach and knees pebbled with dirt and blood, as if he had been dragged over rock. Knuckle skin like apple pulp.
Riddle loomed, a cigarette burning between his lips, his thick fingers looped on either side of his buckle. Sky above him flung with stars. Fedora cocked, he smiled wolfishly at Miranda as her boat drew near.
Avery would not look at her.
Miranda sat unmoving at the stern, a tremor of fury working its way out from her center.
The Alumacraft bumped against the dock. The gentle lap of the water against the hull was the loudest sound they heard.
“Hidy, little sister,” Riddle said. He noted the bruise-work on her throat, the cuts on her cheek. “You tangle with a bear?”
“What is this?” Miranda said, standing slowly.
Tenderly, Riddle touched Avery’s shoulder. “John, what is this?”
Avery, through a split lip: “It’s the way it’s gonna be.”
The constable’s smile widened. “Tonight, your boat’s a basket, little sister. And this here is the Baby Moses.”
Avery kept his eyes on the planks of the dock.
Riddle flicked his cigarette into the water. “We’re selling the secret recipe, you might say.”
Miranda eyed the Root and its arrows, strapped inside the gunwale, felt Hiram’s knife in her pocket. The grip of Riddle’s pistol was smeared with John Avery’s blood and a sprig of hair.
Are you fast enough?
To do it now, right now, to hell with the plan?
And if she failed, would she even hear the shot that pitched her back into the murky water, or would failure belong to the fat man, failure to register the arrow that had buried itself in his throat?
His hand already on his pistol above her, the boat rocking beneath her, she made the odds and didn’t like them. So she swallowed thickly and tossed the rope, and Riddle looped it around a pillar.
“Help him down, girl. Don’t worry, he won’t bite. He’s cool as a cucumber now, ain’t you, boy.”
Miranda did not move.
Riddle’s deputy cast an embarrassed look at his long feet.
Avery turned his back to Miranda before letting go of his manhood. She looked away as he descended the ladder. On the third rung, he slipped, feet and legs shaking so. Near the bottom, he stopped and clung there, ugly red welts across his shoulders, as if from a strapping.
Miranda reached for him.
“Don’t touch me,” he said.
Riddle laughed as the dwarf stepped awkwardly into the boat. He collapsed on the center seat, facing the bow. “Like I said, John,” the fat man called down. “Don’t you worry none about that pretty wife and baby. A promise is a promise. Besides, they family, ain’t they, Robert Alvin.”
“You say so,” Robert Alvin said.
“See y’all later.” Riddle slipped the boat’s rope from the dock.
Miranda reached for the starter as the men went walking away.
Right now. How easy.
Arrows in their backs.
But she did not.
She wanted it all too badly to work. The way she wanted it to work.
Avery sat with his head down.
She glanced at Hiram’s shirt, wrapped around her waist, untied it, and tossed it onto the seat.
He gathered it, clutched it in a tight wad in his lap.
Behind them, Miranda heard the Plymouth’s engine rumble. She yanked the starter.
They eased away.
AT THE CAMP
The boy woke. The night was thinner now, the sky to the east warming. The fire wa
s all but dead; he could have put his hand into the ashes. He had dreamed again, fleeting. A single white dove, dead in grass. Blood on its breast. The hot wind of a forest fire raging. Trees like fish bones dripping flame in great orange gouts: the woods behind Baba’s cabin, burning.
Sister was gone, only a plugged canteen tossed beneath her canvas tent. The leaves inside had not been slept on.
He touched the girl on the shoulder, and she came awake instantly.
He signed at her, saying that Sister had left, that he was in charge. Her expression blank.
He did not know Sister’s mind, only knew she was protecting them from something. The girl, he figured, was in trouble. Somehow, her trouble was now their trouble—his, Baba’s, Sister’s. Sister had brought them into the woods like two children in a fairy tale. He had a book of fairy tales, the spine mended with silver duct tape because it had fallen apart, he had read it so much. Children in fairy tales were always alone in the woods.
In his dream, the woods were burning because Baba’s cabin was burning.
We should stay put, he thought.
I will never leave you, she promised. And yet: she was gone, and now they were alone in the woods. Sister had taken them away from Baba’s cabin, which meant Baba’s cabin was not safe.
But Baba was alone at the cabin.
Fire, he thought. Everything on fire.
The girl watched him, some recognition of his tortured thoughts gleaming faintly in her eyes. “I’ll follow you,” she said.
Littlefish remembered the sight of himself through her eyes, strong and brilliant and beautiful. He grabbed the canteen Sister had left beneath the canvas tent and kicked dirt over the fire. He took the girl by the hand and pulled her to her feet.
We go back, he signed, then drew his new friend away from the ashes of the camp and into the dark.
AVERY AND MIRANDA
A few miles out from Sabbath House, Miranda cut the engine and angled off the river, and there she and John Avery—now wearing Hiram’s old shirt like a nightgown thrice his size—drifted in dark, still water among the trees.
Up the inlet, something large broke the surface of the water and rolled.
“I need to tell you,” Miranda said. “These men who want you, I aim to kill them tonight.”
At this, Avery made a half turn on the seat. “I’m sure Charlie Riddle means for them to kill you first,” he said.
Miranda chewed her lip. “Just makes it easier, then.”
“I guess so.”
“I need to know you won’t get in my way.”
He turned his back again. His words were slow, measured. Pointed. “If you try, and you fail, Charlie Riddle will kill my family. He will shoot my wife and smash my baby’s head beneath his boot like a gourd. Do you understand?”
“Say I give you over, don’t kill anyone,” Miranda said. “You think Charlie Riddle won’t do those things?”
Avery’s silence was heavy and clear.
“You and me served evil men long enough, John Avery,” Miranda said. “It’s about time we served something else.”
COTTON ON THE RIVER
In the hours before dawn, kerosene lantern in one hand, gut-hook machete in the other, Billy Cotton walked down the gravel lane from the manse and stood where Sabbath Dock met grass. Acclimating his eyes to the moonless night and listening, for a time, to the frog and insect roar of the wilderness. He took a deep breath of fetid air, then set the lantern and machete on the boards. Nearby, a ten-foot aluminum skiff lay facedown in a stand of cattails. Cotton dragged it out of the weeds and turned it over to empty it of dead leaves. A copperhead spilled out from behind the stern and shot away into the water. He righted the boat, hung his lantern by a tenpenny nail from the bow, then used the paddle to push the boat into the water. The old preacher stepped in at the stern, and by lantern light made for the river.
As the little boat neared the end of the inlet, his back already quivering with the strain of paddling, Cotton felt a stirring in his chest, an unseen hand dragging nails inside his skin. It is happening, he thought, just as Lena promised. He set his paddle dripping at his feet and unbuttoned his shirt. Touched his chest, drew back fingers wet with blood. He took off his suit coat, then his shirt, folded both, and laid them on the center seat. He stood, snagged the lantern from the bow, and swung it close. Saw, just below his collarbone, a thin line of blood, running south. He watched it, touched one finger to it, even as the blood seemed to congeal and hang. Pain now, the burn of opened skin.
The boat wobbled beneath him. He sat back with the lantern, kept it close.
Ahead, the inlet flowed into the river.
Pain, the ghost had promised, speaking in his head yester morn as she walked boldly into the ruins of the church, unseen to the Crabtree girl or John Avery. Or any of creation, save Billy Cotton. Her voice a thousand bees drumming in a hive.
Pain … will show you … the way.
More burning now, fierce and sudden. It sent him to his feet in the boat, crying out. He swung the lantern near enough to feel its heat singeing the hairs that grew thick as a forest on his chest, and now the line of blood curved left, and Billy Cotton opened his mouth to scream, but when the blood turned suddenly above his heart and ceased its flow once more, the scream lodged in his throat. A left turn below the clavicle, then three sharp bends.
A map, he thought, with a kind of wonder. A map of pain.
A single tear formed in the corner of the preacher’s eye. He stretched out his arms and turned his face up to the starless void. He would have danced had the boat not already been pulled into the river’s current. He dropped onto his seat and took up his paddle, steadied the johnboat, and soon was passing Crabtree Landing and then the oxbows, and when his chest began to burn again, the blood to flow anew, he followed it, turning onto the narrow bayou, the way ahead all darkness save his lantern’s flame.
Shedding blood and tears now, he felt alive in the predawn dark, alive in a way he had not felt in a very long time.
Is this what belief feels like? he thought wildly, then took up a song, and though his voice was lost in the din of night creatures singing their own nocturnal gospel, Billy Cotton believed that his dead wife somewhere in the black heavens above heard his song and knew his heart and, yes, guided his boat on to that horrible isle where devils held captive her child.
He sang the only hymn he’d never forgotten, the one that Lena, in the early days of her ministry, their ministry, had loved to hear him sing.
“‘The way of the cross leads home, the way of the cross leads home…’”
For the way of the cross, the preacher thought, is pain.
Verse after verse, and with every plunge of paddle in the water, every new etch upon his flesh, the land opened up to him, enclosed him, swallowed him. A great expulsion in reverse: the devil sent forth into the snare of paradise.
“‘It is sweet to know, as I onward go…’”
* * *
“‘… that the way of the cross leads home.’”
Two months past.
Cotton sang softly as he blasted the shuddering Caddy west along I-30, passing into East Texas, through towns set down among the rolling fields like ramshackle markers. The Caddy made a clanking sound that got louder the faster he drove. Eventually, grass fields in every direction, he took an exit, then followed the state route for ten, fifteen miles. After that, a county road of rough blacktop that gave way to gravel. Through a wooded bottomland along the Red River, then out into a field, where three trailers clustered around a single oak tree.
He passed through a metal gate, thumped over a cattle guard. The trailers were two-toned, beige and brown, the windows silvered over with tinfoil. AC units hummed and dripped. The trailers had always reminded Cotton of roadside cemeteries he’d seen in Mississippi as a young man: a litter of tombstones beneath a few gnarled pecan trees at the edge of a bean field or a cotton patch. Small and insignificant, lost to memory and time. He parked in mud-rutted hardpan a
mong a handful of pickups.
He swept his beaverskin hat from the passenger’s seat onto his head and walked up the concrete steps of the first trailer and knocked. The wind blew strong and harsh and carried with it the creak of a tire swing rope, the wide, empty sound of nature.
It was a long time before the door opened. He heard a whispered, furtive conversation, the voices of women. But when the door cracked, hooked by a chain, it was a man’s eye staring out, hard and green. Thick fingers, a beard long and scruffy. Cotton didn’t know him. He smelled cigarettes and pot and something else, some rank, sinful funk. “I’m here to see the child,” the preacher said.
The man’s eyes traversed the whole of Billy Cotton. “No kids here,” he said.
Cotton caught the door, pushed against it. Said his name.
Silence. Then the chain slid free and the door opened, and the preacher walked into the gloom of the trailer.
He was told to wait, so wait he did. He sat in a gold recliner that rocked, gently. The doorman lumbered down a dimly lit hall to a closed door. He knocked, lightly, then went inside. Cotton looked around. A woman with black hair and red lips sat slumped and braless on a ratty antique divan on the opposite side of the room. She wore cotton underwear and a thin nightie, a pair of marabou heels. A window unit blasted cold air above her. Her eyes were closed, a line of saliva slicking her chin. Cotton stared at her for a while, then let his eyes move on to the bare pine-paneled walls, the lamps shaded in red silk.
A thin, ragged woman whose face might have once been pretty came out of the back, cinching a satin robe over nothing. Her feet were bare. She stood over Cotton, who sat politely with his hat in his lap. She lit a cigarette and eyed him. He eyed her back. He ran a hand through his hair as if to make himself presentable. She blew smoke. “Ain’t seen you in a while,” she said.
“Been a few years.”
“Lot more than a few. You come to take her back?”
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