The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  “How will I know it’s safe?”

  “I won’t be dead.”

  He put one bare foot against the transom, bracing himself, one hand on the starter cord. The big shirt hung around him.

  “Count ten, then go.”

  Miranda disappeared into the screen and scrub that littered the slope, rocks dislodging, clattering behind her.

  He counted ten. He pulled.

  The engine cracked the morning’s silence, but it did not catch.

  “Shit,” he hissed.

  He pulled again. And again.

  Sweat burst across his brow and he thought: It’s no good. They would be discovered before their plan was even in motion, and John Avery saw the future that lay ahead: a lifetime in bondage to terrible men of terrible purpose. His wife and daughter fed to the wet moist earth of the bottoms, fat Charlie Riddle whistling as he shoveled them under.

  He prayed, as people long bereft of belief will pray, the belief having lain dormant, awaiting some moment of terror such as this to germinate it, to bring forth a shoot so delicate and small and dear.

  Dear God, John Avery prayed, let it work. Dear God.

  He pulled.

  Some muscle or tendon screamed in his arm, but the engine caught and spat and all thought and pain and resurrected belief fled in a rush of adrenaline.

  He steadied himself as the boat leaped forward, then goosed the throttle, and the Alumacraft left the shadow of the trestle and shot across the bend toward the boat ramp, where the men who killed Cook were pointing in the boat’s direction, calling out to one another.

  Raising their guns.

  Avery jumped from the boat. Was swallowed by mist and water.

  * * *

  Miranda charged up the slope to the top of the bridge, heedless of the briars and nettles that tore at her legs. She came out of the brush breathless, to her right the bridge spanning the river, to her left the rails stretching away between pine ridges in the moonlight. She clambered over the rock-strewn berm and up onto the trestle, where the ties were spaced inches apart and she could feel the wind blowing up from the emptiness between them. Crouching low, moving quickly, smell of gasoline and tar thick in her nostrils. At the center of the trestle, she stood astride two ties with a clear view of the river below and the ramp.

  The Alumacraft—empty now, save two spent canisters of gasoline—came chugging out from beneath the bridge, slewing right of the boat ramp, headed for a thick nest of tangled honeysuckle along the riverbank.

  Two of the four men had fanned out along the bank toward the water, pistols drawn and trained on the boat. The giant and his partner remained at the top of the ramp, watching.

  Miranda propped her three doused arrows on the rail at her feet. There she crouched, and from her shirt pocket took the box of kitchen matches and struck one, cupping the flame with her hand.

  The men along the bank were shouting orders at the empty boat.

  She touched the match to the first arrow and the flame shot across to the other two. She dropped the match and stood and nocked the first arrow. She brought it back to half draw, then full, heat from the flames blistering the knuckles of her bow hand, Iskra’s cut in her palm opening up in her glove, beneath the gauze. She drew a bead on the Alumacraft, which had now run aground among the shore brush just downriver from the ramp, where it sputtered and churned like a child’s forgotten toy in a bath.

  The two riders moved through the brush toward the boat, breaking branches and shoving into tangles of honeysuckle and pasture weed and sow thistle.

  Miranda glanced at the big man and his partner at the top of the ramp. The small, sharp-toothed man’s gaze was on the boat below, the men approaching it.

  The giant was looking directly at Miranda, smiling within the dark folds of his hood.

  Blood ran freely beneath the bandage that wrapped her palm, into her shooting glove. It trickled down her wrist, along her arm.

  She let the arrow go, knowing immediately: a miss.

  The shaft cut a flaming arc across the river and guttered with a whisper just short of the boat’s stern.

  Miranda bent and took up the second arrow.

  The giant let out a cry, a high trill. He pointed to the bridge.

  The men in the brush looked, saw. Raised their pistols.

  Miranda drew to her anchor point, felt the feather against the corner of her mouth, and this time the pain in her hand did not matter and the blood was not a distraction and she did not waver at the moment of release. The arrow struck the boat and the gasoline went up, threw lashings of fire over the boat, the water, the low scrub trees along the bank. The man nearest the Alumacraft caught a wash of flame and his gun went off and the other man behind him flew backward into the brush, struck. The first man’s legs grew tangled in the kudzu. On fire, he fell.

  Miranda snatched up the third arrow from the rail and drew and shot.

  The bolt struck the fallen man dead center.

  On the boat ramp, the small man tossed his shotgun in the grass and took a pistol from the rear waistband of his jeans. Before Miranda could get a fresh arrow from her quiver, he fired. The bullet glanced off the iron rail at her feet, driving a sliver of something hot and metal across her shin. She did not waver. She nocked a fourth arrow. The flames from the burning boat and scrub lit her target. She drew. She released. The arrow struck the small, sharp-toothed man in his heart. He dropped to his knees and rolled down the ramp, the shaft of the arrow snapping in two beneath his weight.

  The giant ran for the Bronco at the edge of the trees.

  Miranda drew a fifth time, and it was in the midst of drawing that she felt the first vibrations beneath her. Light bloomed around her, her shadow stretching long on the rails and the ties.

  The train that came from the south gave out its first long bellow.

  Stupid, oh God, the train, how could you forget the train—

  Miranda searched out her target across the water.

  Took three breaths.

  Shoot light—

  The giant had made it to the Bronco’s door. The truck’s dome light flared on a high-powered rifle on a rack in the rear window. The big man’s hands closing around it—

  Shoot true—

  The train’s white eye bearing down—

  Shoot now.

  She let fly, but the arrow only glanced off the pickup’s hood.

  The giant smashed the dome light with his fist and slid across the seat, pushing open the passenger’s door and propping the rifle’s barrel on the open windowsill.

  The train bathed her in light, a perfect target.

  Miranda gauged the distance and knew she couldn’t make it to either end of the bridge. She would be shot, or she would trip and fall and the wheels of the train would separate her like the bannik’s saw and send her in pieces to the river below. So she tossed the Root over the side of the trestle and followed after it.

  The rifle cracked.

  The train blew past overhead.

  She plummeted.

  Down. Down.

  Down.

  She hit the water.

  THE LORD’S BUSINESS

  The sun had just cracked the eastern sky when Cotton’s skiff drew nigh the old weathered dock. He emerged from a narrow channel, bare-chested and bloody, half the bottoms mapped upon his flesh, and before him lay the old witch’s island, crowned in mist where it rose out of the murky bayou. Beside the dock, an old dead cypress festooned with all colors and sizes and shapes of bottles. Hung by strings or set neck down over the ends of branches. Clinking softly. Some held webs and spiders, others darker, mold-furred things. Cotton swayed when he stood, then tied his skiff to the dock and clambered over loose and rotten wood onto land. He pulled his jacket over bare skin, set his hat on his head, and followed a well-worn path carpeted in leaves and needles until it became sumac and saw briars. Hacking and slashing with the gut-hook machete.

  When his breath was with him, he sang. Loud and clear to drive away the linger
ing shadows. With each rise and fall of the blade came a phrase, a verse, hymns of blood that cleansed the soul. Up and down came the machete. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth. Up, down, up, down, and when the trees had no more to give, he burst through into a clearing, panting through a grin in the knee-high grass, dark trousers and suit sleeves covered in beggar lice. The shack stood like some homely crown on a brow of red dirt and vine. An old withered figure on the porch. Right out of his dream, save the sun. Cotton threw his arms wide and bellowed up the hill, filling his voice with all the fury he could muster: “Grandmother of the Bog!”

  On her porch, the old woman sat rocking, implacable in her regard. She picked up a tin spit can from the boards beside her chair and spat a stream of brown tobacco. She set the can back on the boards. Across the knees of her apron, like the ready hammer of a Roman soldier, lay the long black length of Hiram Crabtree’s twenty-gauge double barrel.

  Cotton moved slowly up the hill, smiling broadly through the old familiar pain returning to his bowels and hips, his kidneys. He sang a few more verses until he reached the top of the rise, where he put his boot to a chicken that had come out with three others from beneath the porch to pluck at the scant grass.

  “What brings you, devil?” the old woman said.

  Cotton laughed. “Devil? Oh, grandmother, no. I come on the Lord’s business.” He reached up with his left hand—in the right dangled the machete—and removed his hat and held it over his bloody heart. “The Father Hen has come to call his little chicken home.”

  “You and your blackhearted God can kiss my ass, Billy Cotton,” the old woman said.

  “Now, grandmother, I will not stand for blasphemy.”

  “Walk back down that hill,” the old woman said, “or you will not be standing a-tall.” She closed one hand over the steel barrel of the gun and hauled it up and took it by the stock and stood.

  “You and that Crabtree gal have something that belongs to me.”

  The old woman leveled her aim at Cotton’s chest. “There is nothing here for the likes of you.”

  A silence passed between them, filled only by a set of wind chimes made from the bones of some small forest critter that clacked in the cool morning breeze.

  “Your whore goes to her death this morning.”

  “I will count to three.”

  “I am washed in the blood of the lamb. Are you?”

  “One.”

  “He is my deliverer. Who is yours?”

  “Two.”

  “Where is the child I seek?”

  The old woman did not speak the final count. She pulled the trigger. Braced against the blast and the sight of the white-haired man coming apart all in red, she gasped when all that issued from the shotgun was the dry click of a misfire.

  “Praise God,” Cotton said, and he went quickly up the steps and struck the old woman with the machete.

  She lurched beneath the blow, the blade passing through the meat of her left shoulder, cutting deep and lodging there like an ax in wood. The shotgun clattered to the porch and the old woman fell backward on the boards, knocking over her spit can, sending a wash of sweet-sick-smelling liquid across the planks.

  Cotton bent down and pulled the machete free, slinging the blade like a wet paintbrush that sent a fan of crimson across the wall of the hut. He did not feel the sudden hum in the boards beneath his feet, or, if he did, he mistook it, perhaps, for the slow, building current of the cicadas in the woods. Nor did he notice, as he fixed his mad, gleaming eyes on the old woman gasping, that the nails in the planks beneath his wing tips had begun to inch free of their boards, or that old Iskra’s blood dripping down the wall behind him had begun to sizzle. The old cabin trembling, gathering its rage.

  “Where is the child, grandmother?” he asked softly.

  THE GIRL, IN A TOWER

  Her clothes were still damp from the river when she woke.

  The boy—Littlefish—was gone.

  The dream had been there, waiting for him in the dark. It had hurled him out of sleep, this dream, sent him scrambling for the knothole where he kept his pencils, then over the side, down the tree, gone. The girl knew this because they had climbed to the top of the tree and plunged into sleep, exhausted, cradled in each other’s arms like children in a story, and his dream became hers. A new sensation, intimate and strange. What fearful things he wrestled with. She saw herself, standing in the clearing at the bottom of the old witch’s cabin, one hand in the hand of a man, a man in a black suit and a dark brimmed hat—the preacher, I remember him, I do—and next she woke to see the boy had scratched in the wood with his pencil an act of remembering, like the drawings in his picture book. I know so much about him. I saw the whole of him, the beautiful perfect whole.

  She sat with her back to the rough bark of the tree, drew her knees against her chest. She touched the rough planks, where a shape had been scratched, the shape of a girl. A little girl in a dress. Stick arms, stick legs, no face, only the grain of years-weathered wood. Yellow hair in big loops, made with a colored pencil. The girl ran a hand over her shorn scalp, wondering what the boy knew that she did not.

  From the right hip pocket of her jeans, she took out the arrowhead, swiped from the boy’s table in his shed. She held it by the stem, turned it before her, marveled at it. Like a snake’s head, fangs bared.

  Hair takes time to grow, she thought. Do I have time?

  A blue-tailed skink ran across her foot.

  She jerked her feet apart and saw, then, written in darker pencil on the wood, two words: SAFE. STAY. The letters large and crude and meant for her.

  And now the bright morning world they had shared grew dark, eclipsed by the thing she had seen earlier, gathering in the sky over the trees, where the old woman’s cabin stood, a black mass writhing and dripping long tarry arms toward the earth. Above the mobile homes in Texas, this same shape had coiled for three days, and on the fourth the bad men came and the last thing she thought, before the black smoke became her world, was this: He has sent for me. That crazy old preacher has sent for me. Just like he promised.

  And now, to this black and coiling shape, the boy, her friend, had run.

  SAFE, he had written on the wood. STAY.

  She thought of the boy’s comic book, the woman lashed to the tree, waiting on the green monster to save her.

  No.

  She put the arrowhead back in her pocket and crawled to the edge of the platform and rolled onto her belly and pushed her legs out into space, then lowered her body until her feet found a branch. Grabbing hold of the rough planks, she edged along until she reached the ladder. She closed one hand around a slat and put her foot on the next. She shut her eyes and pretended she was not a small and terrified creature clinging to a pine tree high above the ground.

  She stepped down one rung, found the rung below.

  And the next. And the next.

  THE BLOOD-SPRINKLED WAY

  The old woman lay on her back on the porch. She put her weight on the arm that was not ruined and forced herself to sit up, as best she could. Cotton left her and went into her hut. Inside, the light was dim, the morning sun having not yet penetrated the gloom. “Hello?” he called out, though he knew, from the settled silence of the house, that no one was here. He saw, on the table, a Bible, open to the Book of Psalms, the pages hollowed out in the crude shape of a bottle, and the bottle next to it, unmarked. He set his bloody machete on the table and unstoppered the bottle, gave it a sniff.

  In the old woman’s bedroom, he saw two unstruck matches near a candle on a straw-bottomed chair, and these he tucked into his hatband. He pulled her mattress and sheets from her bed and dragged them out to the living room, near the table.

  Behind him, a floorboard creaked.

  He looked around, saw no one.

  With a grunt, he ripped the wooden mantel free of the brick hearth.

  He took the bottle from the table and poured it over the mattress and mantel, which he then set afire with one of t
he matches from his hatband.

  He took up his machete from the table.

  The flames were licking and spreading when the front door of the cabin flew open and a fuselage of tiny missiles shot through the air and struck the old preacher. He staggered beneath the blows, each like the sting of a wasp. As the flames rose up behind him, he looked down and saw half a dozen two-inch nails lodged in a cluster, just below his right rib cage.

  Behind him, the rear door bucked in its frame.

  Machete in one hand, Cotton pulled nails free with the other. First one, then two, then three at once. He cried out, spittle spraying from his mouth.

  The window above the kitchen sink exploded.

  The preacher threw up his arms against the flying glass. Was yanked from his feet by a force unseen, then dragged across the planks toward the rear door, one leg thrust up to the empty air. The door flew open as he was hurled through it and slung sideways into the yard, where he rolled to a stop against the chopping stump, one pants leg hitched up to the knee. He lay on his stomach in the dirt, dazed, spine and groin shrieking, machete still clutched in his fist, beaverskin hat yet snug on his head.

  On the porch, the old woman had crawled to the rail and was drawing herself up, getting her feet beneath her. She left ribbons of blood on the wood.

  When she was half standing, leaning against a post, she felt the house spirit behind her.

  She felt its anger. Despair.

  Felt its love.

  “You go on, now,” she said. “Do not mind me.”

  Cotton came shambling-limping around the corner of the house, machete at his side, as smoke began to billow through the open front door. He came up the steps, grimed in dirt and blood, jacket sleeve torn at the shoulder seam. “Where is the child?” he asked a third time, as he laid the machete’s blade against the old woman’s cheek.

  Iskra spat on his shoe, a stream of brown slop that ran down her chin and dripped from her whiskers. “You will know fire, Preacher,” she said. “Hotter than any dreamt-up hell. Your chickens will answer”—she laughed—“before that fire is snuffed.”