The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  Her heels were blistering, the rubber soles of her brogans melting.

  She remembered, no, not a memory, or was it? Could it be happening all over again? Or was the vision still playing out, Lena Cotton yet to scream and let go of the old witch’s hand? Was there a choice yet before Iskra, one that would not end in bloodshed and grief?

  The old woman put her hands flat on the steps and pushed up, at once wet and heavy with blood yet weak from the lack of it.

  This was always your path …

  Iskra pushed herself over onto her back, her last great effort.

  All she saw was blue sky.

  There was never another choice …

  In this moment—no straight line between Lena Cotton’s hand and now; rather, time folded back upon itself, two moments touching across the years, the last decade of Iskra’s life merely a step across a threshold into the same small room she had left—the old witch summoned up one final memory.

  Miranda at seventeen and the boy six, sitting here, on the steps beneath the same blue sky, the girl shaping the boy’s fingers into words, teaching him a language Iskra would never know. Conjuring a magic far stronger than any the old woman or the house spirit or the bannik or even the leshii, perhaps, had ever wielded. Iskra had stood within its circle and without it, over the years, had been a part of this magic and, yet, apart from it. Jealous, yes, but also proud, proud that they had found it, forged it together. They had loved one another.

  A breeze like a breath blew gently over her, curled away the smoke, the ash, the scent of her own dying, and the woods and the wind and the creatures in the trees sang out their lament for Iskra Krupin.

  She closed her eyes.

  She died.

  A BY-GOD DEVIL

  Cotton stood at the bathhouse door, machete in hand. He peered into the gloom, into the corners, and stepped fully inside.

  Something struck him in the back with its full weight. The preacher feared for an instant he would flail headlong into the oven, where the last of a fire was dying, but he fell wide, crunching his shoulder against the rock. His machete skittered in the dirt.

  Something small and clawed and menacing—

  boy, monster, a by-God devil!

  —dropped down in the open door.

  A reek of fish.

  Pain in his left calf.

  A two-pronged gigging stick buried deep in the muscle!

  Cotton let out a screech and seized the shaft of the spear and yanked it free. He charged, and the monster-child-thing scuttled backward from his advance, tripping in the doorway and falling prostrate in the dirt, where, in the gray light of day, Cotton saw the thing in full, and it brought him up short and breathless.

  He saw Lena, pale and bloodied, the old witch lifting an abomination from crimson sheets. His razor flashing, his wife screaming. He had held it by its heel until the blood had all run out. The old witch’s arms trembling to take back the hideous blight. Lena, in his periphery, dead, too. And dead the thing had been, yes, as the old woman laid the pillowcase over it in her bowl, dead, dead, DEAD!

  So it could not be, this thing before him on the ground, which even now rolled over as Cotton limped from the bathhouse into light. “Thou art not of me,” the preacher said softly, prodding the creature with the gigging stick.

  It jerked away and opened its mouth as if to holler, but it made no sound. Its teeth small and jumbled.

  Cotton wrung the stick in his hands and struck the thing twice about the arms.

  It rolled over, covered its head, and Cotton reversed the stick and raised it high and drove the tines into the creature’s right shoulder, forcing it facedown into the dirt like a speared frog.

  Spittle flying: “Thou art not of me!”

  Sound of the cabin burning like a mighty wind as he ground the stick in the monster’s flesh.

  “Scream, devil! I want to hear you scream!”

  But it made no sound, no matter how hard he twisted. He cast about for his machete and instead saw a wood ax embedded in a nearby stump. He went to the ax and yanked it free and lay the blade against the creature’s neck.

  He raised the ax.

  * * *

  The girl saw the preacher from the cover of trees at the top of the ridge, ax upturned above his head. She knew him at once, though his chest was bare and bloody and his dark suit was tattered. The man was a living tendril of shadow.

  She edged through the branches, breathing hard, then saw the boy, sprawled beneath the ax.

  She opened her mouth to scream.

  “STOP!”

  Cotton whirled.

  The girl plunged out of the woods through the tall grass, knocking aside cans on string and bottles and little castles made of old scrap tin.

  Cotton lowered the ax. The head touched dirt and the handle slipped from his grasp. He caught the girl by the arm and pulled her close, so relieved to see her, but she beat her fists against him and cuffed his ear, knocking his hat from his head. The preacher staggered back. The girl ran for the boy, who lay trembling and afraid, gigging stick hooked in his shoulder. Cupping his ear, bending for his hat, the preacher saw the tenderness with which the girl knelt over the boy. He backed away to fetch his machete from the bathhouse, and when he returned, she had pulled the gigging stick free and tossed it aside. She saw the machete in Cotton’s hand and threw her body over the boy, eyes upturned fiercely, teeth bared. Cotton met her blue gaze and seemed, for a moment, to lose himself in it. In the memory of his vision: the cold stone floor of the crypt, the razor. Blood.

  The girl kissed the boy’s mottled, ugly cheek. Pressed her hand over the wound in his shoulder, and the boy relaxed, grew still. His eyes closed. “You leave him alone,” she said, not looking at the preacher. “I know why you want me, and you can have me. You can have me if you just leave him alone.”

  Cotton was dumbstruck.

  She kissed the boy again, on the crown of his head.

  She stood. Held out her hand.

  Cotton took it, haltingly, and the preacher’s head was suddenly full of light. So bright he had to shut his eyes against it. He dropped his machete, staggering as the light resolved into a book of Bible-thin pages and the pages were his mind and the girl’s dirty fingers went fluttering through them, as if searching out a passage. Settling, now, on a page, chapter and verse, numbers and letters all a jumble as the girl sussed them out, saw the truth of what the boy was to Cotton, what Cotton was to the boy, what he had done with his razor, and then the book slammed shut and the preacher stumbled backward, the air between them made blistering hot.

  The girl tore her hand away. “How could you do that?” she cried, eyes brimming, spilling clean trails down her face. “How could you? She loved him!”

  Benumbed, Cotton had no answer, and so he turned and walked away and waited near the corner of the burning cabin. After one last ministration to the boy, bending over him, whispering “I’m sorry” in his ear, she followed, though she did not take the preacher’s hand again. Cotton let her lead the way down the steep red-clay path through the kudzu. Partway down, he realized his machete lay in the dirt by the boy, where he had dropped it. He did not go back. Instead, like a child himself, he simply followed.

  Atop the hill, the witch’s cabin collapsed in flames, sending up a plume of smoke like a black hand grasping at heaven.

  The preacher and the child passed into the trees.

  A COLD CAMP

  Littlefish opened his eyes to a warm, dry wind blowing ash across his face. His shoulder hot and throbbing. Baba’s cabin smoldering. Only the old woman’s iron boxwood stove, one scant section of wood frame, and the porch pillars remained upright, the fire still glowing along the timber, the rest of the house a charred heap like the morning campfires he and Sister had kicked dirt over when he was younger.

  A cold camp means time to leave.

  Sister’s words.

  Why had she left them, if not to come back here, to protect Baba?

  He stood, wincing at
his shoulder wet with blood. His gigging stick lay near the edge of the cabin, tines of the fork flecked with bits of grass and dirt and flesh. Littlefish saw his cooler on the rear stoop, half melted, the fish he’d caught yesterday a heat-blistered soup. One window remained in its frame, the frame and box blackened.

  Beyond the window, on the porch steps, he saw the most terrible thing of all.

  The boy opened his mouth and gave out a silent cry, the cords in his neck straining with the effort. He charged through the smoldering wreckage of the house, hot boards leaping up beneath his feet, sparks firing only to wink out.

  The old woman’s dress and apron had burned away and her skin had burst where the heat had swelled her. Her white hair was all gone, her skull blackened, ears and lips melded with bone. Littlefish fell on his knees on the steps. He made frantic signs at her face, urging her to speak, to move, to breathe, but after a while he stopped. The old woman was dead. He wept silent tears. He smoothed his hands along the scraps of her apron, what had not burned away.

  Sister, oh, Sister, where were you?

  Littlefish went down the steps to the edge of the hill, where the kudzu crept and swayed in the breeze like a green surf rolling in and rolling back. He pulled lengths of vine and carried these back to the old woman’s body and laid them over her, covering her from feet to neck, and when he went to lay the last few scraps across her face, his rough cheeks wet with tears, he saw where the Father Hen’s blade had cleaved the old woman’s head. Littlefish placed the last of the vine over Baba’s face and kissed her forehead through the leaves; they still held the faint green taste of spring.

  In back of the cabin, he saw the Father Hen’s machete in the dirt. Crusted red.

  The girl. The Father Hen took her.

  The boy ran quickly up the path and into the woods, crossed the canyon to his tree. He climbed fast and hard. Between the ground and his lookout, he felt the wound in his shoulder tear anew. The platform was empty. He saw the words he had written on the boards: SAFE. STAY. He felt his strength go all at once, as if a hand had yanked a string to unravel him.

  Gone. Lost her.

  Over the trees, to the north, he saw the bird’s skeleton on the cross, mocking him.

  He thought of his book in his shed: This Is Where I Live. He had not shown the girl that book. How could he have explained or made sense of its pages to her, the things he had drawn?

  Here is the church, here is the steeple …

  What had the old man been singing?

  Something about a cross.

  The way of the cross leads home.

  With the red crayon from his pencil box in the pine tree’s knothole, he drew an arrow on the wood of the platform, pointing toward the red cross beyond the river. He went over and over it, until the crayon was blunt. She would see this. She would know.

  Sister. I am sorry. I cannot wait.

  He flew down the ladder to the ground, where a dizzy-making pain in his shoulder sent him to his knees, bent forward over the pine-needle carpet as if in prayer. When the pain had passed, he touched his wound and drew back a hand glistening red. With this hand, he grabbed hold of the lowermost rung on the ladder on the pine’s trunk to pull himself up, leaving a webbed, crimson print.

  He made his way slowly back to his shed, where he snatched an old burlap feed bag that hung from a four-inch steel nail. He saw his bow and arrows, broken against the wall. He rummaged through books and boards, the rubble of the Father Hen’s fury. He saw his spine-cracked picture book facedown on the floor beneath his desk and shoved it into his bag. He put on his belt of pelts and went out of his shed.

  Down the hill, the machete lay in the dirt. He picked it up and bagged it.

  Then he went back up the hill and past the goat pen, where the goat huddled in terror behind the milking shed.

  At his tree, he stopped. He saw his handprint there.

  He took the picture book from his bag. Flipped to the pages he had marked and colored upon waking from his dreams, then draped the book over his bloody handprint. As if working his own incantation, he made the sign of Sister, an L-shape thrust down from the jaw. Find this, Sister, he thought.

  He set out down the ridge, to where his bark was drawn and ready on the bank.

  ICE CREAM

  Miranda took the curve too fast and the Bronco slewed in the loose gravel, Avery clutching at the dash as they bounced over the wooden bridge that marked the last hundred yards to the Landing. Pine thickets stretched away on either side of the road, which ended ahead in a turnaround, the store just hidden by the trees on the left. Miranda slowed the truck to a crawl, easing onto the shoulder where they remained out of sight. She cut the big engine, and the hot motor ticked in the silence of the morning. Miranda got out and went at a funny lope through the grass and into the woods, keeping her weight off her right leg. The tree line broke at a clearing, within the clearing the store itself, the embankment sloping down to the river. Here, she crouched behind a rotten log and watched for a quarter hour. The front door of the Landing gaping wide where Riddle had twice destroyed it. The drive was empty. She heard nothing, save a woodpecker launching volleys against a nearby pine, until finally the Bronco’s door creaked on its dry hinge and Avery came softly through the woods to squat beside her, dead man’s leather jacket cinched by the sleeves around his waist. The cut above his eye had closed and purpled, and his lip was puffy and red.

  “It’s probably safe,” Avery said. “They won’t regroup so fast.”

  “Caution can’t hurt,” Miranda said. She pulled herself to her feet by a low-hanging limb, bit off a whimper.

  “How is it?” Avery asked.

  “Sprain. Side’s worse. Needs sewing. I can’t really feel it anymore.”

  “I can sew,” he said. “Steady hands. I wish I had a gun.”

  Miranda’s mouth drew tight with pain. “Weapons are upstairs in the hall closet. Anyone in there, I go in the front, they’ll get me before I get them. So I’ll go in the back. You see me on the porch, come straight across. Don’t dawdle.”

  Avery gauged the distance through the long grass to the mercantile porch, then hunkered down to wait.

  Miranda crept along the tree line to the embankment and scrabbled down among the kudzu, red clay breaking loose beneath her sneakers. She hobbled along the water’s edge to the rear deck’s overhang, then balanced carefully along the gangplank to the floating dock. Slowly, quietly, she hauled herself up the ladder. Each shift pulling at the crusted wound in her side. Near the top, gasping, shaking, she listened. Heard only the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the freezer on the porch, so she climbed up and fell onto her back on the boards, where she lay long enough to catch her breath. Staring up at three wasps clinging to the surface of the nest beneath the porch eave.

  Miranda pulled herself to her feet by the railing and reached into her pocket for her father’s knife. She went through the back door into the house and checked the bedrooms and the bathrooms and, once satisfied she was alone, limped into the living room and took down Hiram’s Bear from the rack above the couch. To string the bow, she step-staggered through the string and bent the upper limb with both hands and pulled down to slip the string into its notch. Sweat popped on her scalp and along her forehead, and once again her side bled freely through the rag of the dead biker’s shirt.

  Miranda nocked an arrow from the hall closet and went to the steps that led down to the store. She took each one slowly, easing more and more weight onto her right leg now. By the time she reached the bottom, bringing her arrow to full draw, she was soaked through.

  The store was empty.

  She let the tension out of the bow. Steadied herself on the same wire rack where Charlie Riddle had gun-pressed her against the wall two nights past, then limped to the broken door and waved.

  Avery appeared out of the distant trees and cut a swath through the tall Johnsongrass.

  Dizzy, Miranda struggled back to the steps and started upstairs, determined not to
pass out until she had reached the hallway between the kitchen and the living room. At the top, she sat down on the step and dropped the bow and arrow and slumped against the beadboard.

  She faded.

  Avery’s voice brought her back: “What do I do?”

  “Sewing kit,” Miranda said. She pointed to a door. “Bedroom closet. Alcohol in the bath.”

  She pushed away from the wall and shoved the bow and arrow out of the way, then lay flat on the pine-board floor. She rolled over onto her right side when Avery returned with the kit and a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

  “Lift your arm, like this,” Avery said, and she crooked it over her head.

  With scissors from the kit, he cut her shirt from the wound.

  “There’s a gun,” Miranda said. “In the closet. In the tackle box. If I pass out.”

  Avery poured alcohol over her side.

  Miranda blew air through her lips.

  Avery took out a spool of navy thread, licked the thread, and sent it through the eye of a needle. He hesitated, only for an instant, when he saw the swell of her bare left breast.

  “What, goddamn you?” she said.

  “It’s just not the week I pictured,” he said.

  “Just get it done.”

  He took a deep breath and bent to the task.

  * * *

  When she woke, she was covered in a homemade afghan from her father’s bed. A pillow beneath her head. Avery stood at an open window in the living room, keeping watch on the road. He had fashioned a kilt from one of Hiram’s shirts and stood bare-chested in a billow of drapery. The cuts on his knees and face were cleaned. Cook’s pistol lay on the windowsill. Miranda sat up, and the afghan fell away. Her shirt hung in tatters. She drew the afghan to her chest and inspected her side, which was stiff, sore, and dry, bandaged with improvised wrappings of two maxi pads and medical tape. She saw Hiram’s Bear on the steps where she had dropped it. Clutching the afghan, she got to her feet in a series of slow, careful moves, the pain in her leg dull and tolerable now.