The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  He reached out and threw the tall rack of funny books over as he passed.

  It gave him no small thrill when she took a quick step back, then another, and came up hard against the wall between a Coke machine and a stand of potato chips.

  Charlie Riddle shoved into the narrow space with her, close enough to feel her breath, fast and shallow. He raised the heavy Schofield and drew its warm barrel along her cheek. He moved it down her throat, traced the hollow of her clavicle, the curve of a breast.

  “You’re trespassing,” she said, waver in her voice.

  Riddle mashed the pistol’s barrel hard into her stomach. He liked the way it made her face turn down. He felt a stirring beneath his belt, where nothing had stirred for years. Not for her, anyway. Not since the night he’d stumbled out of them woods, one eye less.

  “You and me,” he breathed, popping sweat, “we got business, little sister.”

  She swallowed.

  “I declare,” he said. “Hear that midget talk, you’re a by-God Amazon.”

  The pistol climbed beneath her shirt, inching breastward.

  “Me, I don’t see it. Then again, this old eye ain’t what it used to be.” With his free hand, he lifted the patch from his face and seated it on his head, and as the pistol nudged the nipple of her left breast, Miranda Crabtree stared unflinchingly into the fleshy red cave where Charlie Riddle’s eye should have been, and into that cave, she spat.

  The constable’s leer wilted at the corners, drawn down by the flood tide of memory, the screaming, the pain, earthworms squelching beneath him as he fell in the leaves, the little bitch running for all she was worth. His lips peeled back into a snarl. He yanked the pistol from beneath her shirt and spun it in his grip. He drove the butt into her gut and stepped back as she dropped to all fours. He holstered his firearm, wiped her spit from his orbit, and slipped his patch back in place. He smoothed his hair where the patch had mussed it, the scent of Brylcreem strong.

  Easy does it, Charlie-boy, he warned himself. Easy does it.

  He took a PayDay from a box near the register while she lay retching, heaving, gasping. He opened it and took a bite. Chewed. Spoke through a mouthful of candy: “You got two more trips upriver. One tonight, one tomorrow. Last two, and that means forever. After tomorrow, you can run wild out there in them woods drenched in blood and howl with wolves, for all I care. But you don’t show at that dock tonight, I’m coming back here. And I hate coming here, girl.” Riddle spat a mouthful of peanuts and caramel on the floor. He tossed the rest of the PayDay with it and dug between his teeth. He reached into his pocket and took out a quarter and snapped the coin down by the register. “For the candy.”

  He left.

  ROODING

  Beyond the remnants of the door, the world was a jagged rectangle of black. Outside, the cicadas carried on their huge, nightmare chorus. Moths fluttered at the walls. Gun smoke lingered in the air. On the floor, Miranda pushed herself up on shaking arms, made a fist, and drove her knuckles hard into the old pine planks. New pain blazed up like a fresh-logged fire. The tremors fled. She sat back against the clapboard wall, skin split across the middle and fourth knuckles of her hand. A smear of blood and grit.

  Out of the night, a white crane stepped ghostlike through the smashed door. Its feathers wet and speckled with mud. It peered at Miranda with bright gold eyes, unblinking. It took one step deeper into the room, then snapped a moth from the air, dropped a turd on the floor, and went back onto the porch.

  Sweat-soaked and ripe with the wild, iron reek of the deer, Miranda picked herself up and walked outside. She scanned the yard, but the crane was gone.

  Kicking broken glass from the porch, she went down the embankment to the dock and fetched her father’s green metal tackle box from the boat. She took it along the grassy slope, past Hiram’s old work shed, his pickup parked alongside it, three flat tires and a trash-tree threading through the engine block. Snatching a beer bottle from the weeds, she went into the trees at the edge of the property, then down to the water’s edge, where the embankment rose up steeply. She jammed the bottle into the soft dirt of the embankment wall and stepped back until her heels touched lapping water. She set the tackle box down and opened it and took out Cook’s Smith & Wesson. Assumed a stance by instinct, legs apart. She cracked her neck and sighted down the barrel of the gun. She cocked the hammer, didn’t care for the harsh metal click. She fired. The gun bucked, deafening. The bottle blew apart. The night was hushed, shocked into silence. She fired again. A pop of dirt and glass. She fired a third time, not really aiming, and the bullet bounced and struck the water.

  Miranda looked down at the gun. A thing apart from her. Outside of her.

  Like Riddle’s pistol, jabbing at her belly, poking at her breast.

  Suddenly the air was cooler and the leaves on the trees were brittle and brown, not green, and it was not tonight, but an autumn twilight, nine years past, and she was not twenty-one but twelve going on thirteen, leggy and rawboned, about to learn that life was a series of ceaseless struggles against ceaseless currents.

  Gun in hand, she felt her gorge rise. She bent, retched into the sandy bank.

  Behind her, the river ran on, smooth as black glass.

  * * *

  She remembered odd details, fragments: how the autumn night fell like a door slammed by the wind. Climbing the bank into the trees at a place stairstepped with roots. She wore cutoffs, a T-shirt. A duffel slung across her shoulders, contents heavy, clanking. Deep in the thicket, she dropped to a knee in the moist leaves, set her flashlight on the ground, and unslung the bag. She drew out a ten-pound length of iron and set it beside the light. Hammered a fat wooden stake into the ground. She remembered the hungry, jagged sound the iron made when scraped over the stake. Rust flaked on her palms, the muscles in her arms steady quivering. She’d rummaged an empty coffee can from the duffel as, all at once, fat brown worms came boiling out of the earth. Hiram’s voice in her head, teaching her: They wriggle up. You pluck the big ones.

  Rooding: a summoning through pressure, violence.

  When the can was full, she wiped her brow, smearing dirt on her forehead.

  Charlie Riddle, silent as a wraith, stepped out from behind a tree.

  The flashlight beam caught the scuffed, square toes of his cowboy boots.

  He was younger and slimmer, possessed of both eyes.

  He reached a stray night crawler out of the leaves. Plopped the worm into the can and took her flashlight and stood, shining the light in her eyes.

  There were words, first. She remembered that. Something about truancy, the school, and she said something back, something smart, defiant, how his fingers were always in her till. She kept her chin up, drove a knife through every word. But he took a step closer, just one step, and the light between them diminished so that the glow was confined to the space between their bodies, the dark beyond them menacing and deep. Treetops like skeleton arms above them.

  She did not move. She remembered this: how she could not move.

  He touched her, caressed her cheek—

  She slung the can of earthworms in his face and ran, but she fell. Maybe her foot snagged the rooding stake. She couldn’t be sure. She went sprawling in the leaves and Riddle fell atop her, driving the breath right out of her. He wrenched her onto her back, pinned her by the wrists. The flashlight flew from his hand, sent a bar of light across a log. She heaved and twisted, felt his knee between her thighs, forcing her legs apart. The smell of him all coconut and heat and he was saying things, things about her mother, things about Miranda, but she was not listening, only trying to breathe, and when his iron grip on her hand loosened as he fumbled at the button of his jeans, she shot her hand out and drove her thumb hard into Charlie Riddle’s left eye.

  She remembered the feel of it, like a moist ball of worms.

  Her thumb sinking past the knuckle.

  Riddle screaming, louder than she ever thought a man could scream.

  And someh
ow she was up and staggering, trying to run, no breath to run with, stumbling down the slope to the river’s edge, following it by the light of the harvest moon. Beneath the back porch overhang, balancing over the gangplank to the floating dock, and dragging the old johnboat into the water and tugging the starter. Tears streaking her face, whole body quaking, she aimed the boat upriver and goosed the throttle.

  Some time later—how long, who could say?—she cut the motor and drifted, let the current spin her around.

  She felt something wet and sticky in her fist.

  She opened her hand.

  The constable’s eye, cornflower-blue, stared up at her in jellied halves.

  She flung the pieces in the river, and the river carried them away.

  * * *

  Miranda sat in the sand, Cook’s pistol between her feet, watching the current roll blackly on. She touched her stomach beneath her blood-stiff shirt, felt the bruise already forming. By morning, it would take the vague shape of Charlie Riddle’s pistol grip. Days from now, she would feel it still, memory and pain become one, as they did.

  After a while, she put the pistol away in Hiram’s tackle box and went back to the mercantile, where she stood outside in the glow of the front porch light, staring through the broken door, into a place that had not been a refuge for a very long time. There, on the floor, like visiting spirits, she and Hiram Crabtree sat ensconced in a fort of cardboard boxes. Hiram wore his apron, lifting cans out of the boxes and kissing them with a yellow price gun. He gave Miranda the priced cans to shelve and she moved the older stock to the front and turned them with the labels facing out, as he had taught her. A Crown portable by the register played Kitty Wells, who sang about honky-tonk angels. She saw old-timers, too, long-limbed and horn-rimmed, their sunburned necks. Among them: Hiram, a tray of fresh Colonial in his arms, sleeves rolled up, service tattoo just visible. The men asking him questions, casting lines like the fishermen they were, reeling in strange and useless facts and Hiram laughing with them, his head full of things not yet jettisoned from the time before the Landing: some bit of mathematical or musical arcana, the names of German composers, the shapes of the stars, the pictures they made. Hiram the only one of three brothers not killed in some war. Back from Korea, deaf in one ear at twenty-one. Drawn home by his father’s heart attack. Miranda wondered if he ever planned to stay away, to live overseas and play guitar on the streets like some half-deaf wonder.

  From the shattered bait cooler, which would cool no more thanks to Riddle’s bullet, Miranda took the last half dozen Styrofoam pints of worms, stacking them in her arms. She took them out to the edge of the trees and released them, dumping each pint on the ground, leaving the worms to sort their own fates among the dirt and leaves.

  She went back inside, pulling the fly-screen shut and latching it, telling herself she would fix the busted frame later. Now she only wanted to be rid of these clothes, the stink of blood. Upstairs, she went into the bathroom shared between the master bedroom and her childhood bedroom and sat on the edge of the cast-iron tub and ran the water until it was hot. She stoppered the drain to let it fill. She took off her shirt and shucked her jeans and underwear and eased into the tub, let the dirt that ringed her neck and ears loosen, float away, the muck of the day and night dissolve. Miranda put her big toe into the dripping faucet and watched the water run around it. There were calluses on her feet, her heels thick and white. Scratches on her shins. She draped a damp washcloth over her face and slunk down in the tub. Before the water in the bath had even begun to cool, she was asleep.

  DIGGING

  It was after eight o’clock when she wrapped herself in her father’s heavy robe and went into the kitchen, where she ate a cheese sandwich standing at the sink. In the living room, from the bookshelf beside the Victrola, she took down a slim family photo album and her father’s service annual and brought both with her into the master bedroom, where she lay on her side atop the covers and flipped through each from front to back. Looking for what, she did not know—a bulwark, perhaps, against the day’s bad memories. Some gentle segue into a few hours of dreamless sleep before the run.

  First, in the album, pictures of Crabtrees, sepia-toned pages of stern-faced men and women in suspenders and homemade dresses. She knew nothing about them save the names and dates penciled beside their photographs in the careful, elegant script of her mother’s hand. They had become, in her imagination, a cast of players whose lives were hard and grief-stricken, much like hers, and somehow this gave her comfort, that others of her blood had suffered the land. She moved on, past photographs of Cora in high school, books clutched against her sweater as she stood alongside a Ford tractor, then to a wedding photo of Cora and Hiram, her father’s hair long, the little church where they had married candlelit. Finally, near the end of the album, a picture of Miranda and Cora, the only one she knew to exist, taken scant months before she died: Miranda, age four, stood at the end of a pier, wearing a toddler’s overalls and a western shirt, the sleeves shoved up to the elbows. In one hand she held the handle of a cane fishing pole that lay on the pier. She was not smiling, only squinting into the morning sun. Behind her, crouching, Cora in a pair of pedal pushers and Keds, hair wrapped in a red bandanna. A minnow bucket beside them. Miranda wished she could remember what she could not: the sweet scents of honeysuckle and manure, the tang of carp discarded among the rocks. Birds picking at the meat. The wet flap of minnows in the dipper net. The brush of her mother’s hair against her cheek as she reached around her and showed her, patiently, how to set a hook in the wet doll’s eye of her bait.

  She moved on to Hiram’s service annual, which held pictures of men who all looked alike, sharp and solid in pressed khakis, standing row upon row and all wearing sun-scoured expressions. Behind them parking lots of heavy equipment, airfields scattered with jeeps and jets. She came to a circle drawn faintly in pencil around the head of a fourth-row enlistee. Hiram. Young and handsome. Cora’s handwriting in the margins.

  Here they were, she thought, two ghosts, side by side. Much like their graves beneath the sweetgum tree. Cora’s complete with coffin and bones in the shade. Hiram’s yet empty, never to be filled.

  She closed the service annual, and a loose photograph skated out from the back. Miranda plucked it from between the pages. She sat up on the bed.

  A color image, bordered white and double-exposed.

  The original picture was a scene she had no memory of or context for: Cora, in a tire swing that had once hung from the giant sweetgum, feet bare, dress pushed by the wind to her knees, caught mid-swing like some long-extinct creature in amber.

  The double exposure: Cora, again, in a blue dress, standing in the living room, electric Gone with the Wind lamps lit behind her. Her face obscured by her other face, the one in the tire swing, a kind of bright corona around her head. Some trick of light.

  Miranda had never seen this photograph before. She flipped to the back of the annual and saw where it had been stuck between two blank pages, never curated, never cared for.

  She thought of her father’s camera, shelved in the closet soon after Cora died. Still there now, empty as a robbed grave. As far as Miranda knew, it had never taken another photograph since the day Hiram set it there.

  What did it mean, that Hiram had stuck this picture in his annual, a book commemorating a past he never spoke of?

  Had this been the last true photograph of her mother?

  She tucked the picture back into the annual and set it and the album on the scuffed nightstand, next to a framed picture of Cora, young, sitting on the porch swing of a house Miranda did not know. Dark-haired, beautiful.

  Miranda drew the family quilt over her knees and switched off the light. Limbs heavy, stomach aching from the bruise of Charlie Riddle’s gun, she drew Hiram’s robe tight around her and imagined she lay in the shallow water of her own false grave. To bury herself, perchance to sleep and wake in a thousand years, when the horrible events of that summer had long passed from me
mory.

  She had worked the store, back then, day in, day out, keeping up appearances while search parties roamed inlets and byways. He’ll come back, she told people. Hiram would come home. Later: fried chicken and stewed corn and collard greens and purple-hull peas in Pyrex bowls, brought by the wives of the old men who came for bait and cigars and tackle, until finally the days became weeks and the weeks became months, and in August the ladies came for their bowls and the old men who still came for bait and beer asked after her like kindly grandfathers. She hated them for it. Hated them for believing that Hiram Crabtree was lost or drowned, when she knew something so much worse had happened.

  But what truth did she really know? Besides crying herself to sleep at night, or the grief and fear and uncertainty of what would happen when August ended and school came around and she was worn down to a dull and lusterless thing, not a girl anymore but a collection of bones shambling in the skin of a girl. And so, Hiram’s grave: an end to uncertainty, to her own secret trips, searching sunup to sundown the bottomlands beyond Iskra’s island, looking for a wide lake where deadfalls bobbed like coffins, a great rock and tree. Instead of finding: digging, beneath the gum tree with Hiram’s old trenching shovel until the water sloshed at her ankles and there were blisters like fisheyes on her palms and the walls were pocked with roots and clods and worms and there was only three feet of red clay separating Miranda from her mother’s coffin in the grave next door. The sun spread red by the time she finished. The grave where Hiram Crabtree would never lie.

  I’ll dig my own grave, she thought, nearing sleep now. I’ll dig so deep all the tears I’ve never shed will well up out of the ground and flood the river. And in that great flood, mayhap her father’s body would rise up from its true grave out in the vast, muddy wilds of this corner of Arkansas, or some other land she had yet to discover, and he would be hers again.