The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  Cotton reared back his blade to strike.

  “Meantime,” the old witch said, “you go fuck yourself.”

  She began to laugh. A laugh that quickly rose in pitch and became an old crone’s cackle, as blood and spit and tobacco flew from her mouth.

  The preacher went at the old woman with the machete, just as he had gone at the brush of her beautiful isle. When he was through, the blade was red and dripping and the blood was running through the cracks in the planks and pattering on the ground beneath the porch, and the fire inside the cabin was roaring.

  Cotton limped around the side of the cabin, singing as he went. He sang even louder and brighter than before, as if now he were a man on a military march, and again the old cancer pain in his back and groin subsided, a validation of his efforts. God’s hand at work.

  He walked up the crooked, root-thick path between the cabin and the outhouse. In its pen at the top of the hill, the old woman’s goat stuttered and tramped. Before this, a little shed where Cotton saw a garden in the tall grass, with its multitude of strange contraptions, colored bits of glass on string.

  “‘The way of the cross leads home,’” he sang.

  He went to the shed, kicked open the door, and was shocked to discover the room of a child—no ordinary child, but a child of nature! Pelts on the wall. A knife on a table. A quiver of arrows and a bow leaned upright in the corner. He thought of the Crabtree girl, but knew, somehow, this was not her room. It was a boy’s space, had a boy’s musty smell, and beneath that something else, a kind of fishy tang. He saw the books, too, on their low pine shelves. He knelt and ran his hand over the spines with a sense of wonder. Something about the room felt familiar, as if it had been a place he had visited before. But it was not, and this made it seem like a trick or a snare or a lie. He tipped the books, one by one, from the shelf. Then, fury blazing in his chest like a pine torch, he kicked the bookshelves flat. He tore comic books in half. He upended the table beneath the window and put one dark shoe in the middle of the bow, snapping it. The arrows he took up and broke over his knee, one and two at a time. When it was done, he righted his hat, which had gone cockeyed on his head, and went out into the sunlight, where the old woman’s cabin was still burning, and the girl was yet to be found.

  * * *

  Littlefish watched through the cracks of the bathhouse wall as the old man from his nightmares passed by on his way up the hill. Blood-soaked and threadbare, he limped like Baba’s old scarecrow come to life, and Littlefish was sore afraid. Directly, he heard a commotion from his shed and knew the old man had gone inside. He wrung his hands around his three-pronged frog-gigging stick, grabbed from behind his shed as he came out of the woods at a low trot. Now he heard the roar of the cabin blazing, heart pine exploding. Go, he told himself. Go find Baba. Help her! But he could not. Fear rooted him in the shadows, and it was a very long while before the sound of things smashing and breaking ceased. When it finally did, the boy heard the old man call out in a ragged voice: “I am thy Father Hen, little chick! Harken to my wing!”

  Father?

  Littlefish knew this word, knew it well from books he had read, and what he knew of fathers—that they were good, strong men who protected children—made this man’s use of the word seem like a terrible lie. He thought of the girl, her arms around his neck as they had crossed the bayou. The giant butterfly. Her shimmer. Her touch a strange new warmth, like and not like Sister’s.

  Surely, she was not his child, not this awful man’s, no, she was good, she was—

  “Little chick? Where are you?”

  Footsteps, coming back this way, the tall man’s thin silhouette passing outside the bathhouse. Humming. His black shoes covered in dust just visible through the crack beneath the door, where he stopped.

  Littlefish moved quickly, before the door handle had turned. He shoved his stick into the rafters and ascended the wall studs in two quick steps, putting one webbed foot on the crossbeam of the frame. He reached up to the rafter and threw his feet up and wrapped his legs around the beam. Now he hung upside down above the door. Hooking his elbow around the beam, with his other hand reaching his stick out of the rafters, the boy was poised to strike.

  The bathhouse door opened.

  The Father Hen stood black against the fire.

  “Little chick?” he said.

  MIRANDA AND THE GIANT

  Moments passed, though it seemed hours later when she broke the surface of the river near the barge and bobbed in the water, arms flailing for purchase along the old boat’s hull. The Root trailed in two pieces behind her, the bowstring tangled around her arm. The world a distant roar in her ears. Her shoulder came up against the port bow and she grabbed the chain anchoring the barge to the shore, most of it underwater and slick with river slime and frog jelly. For a handful of breaths, she clung to the chain like a thing washed up in the tide of a flood, lungs burning.

  The sun rising behind the trees now.

  The roar in her ears the roar of the dam upriver.

  Miranda closed her eyes.

  Unconsciousness like arms enfolding her.

  No.

  Pain in her left side, bright and burning. Her quiver was gone, her arrows with it. Above, she heard the deck wood groan. She bore down on the chain with her weight, shrugging free of the flotsam of her bow. She reached up out of the water for the lip of the barge, steadying herself, and found she was looking up into the black bored eye of a rifle.

  The giant, who had descended the boat ramp in great long strides, loomed above her, the steel toe of one boot very near her fingers. He peered down at Miranda from behind the scope of the gun.

  Water dripping from her chin, she laughed. She could not help herself. Holding fast to the barge, she let go the chain in the water and pulled the knife from her pocket. When she lifted the blade out of the water, opened and ready, she saw the big man smile.

  “Good for you,” he said. He took three steps back from the edge of the barge and set his rifle stock-down against what was left of the pilothouse.

  Miranda pulled herself onto the barge. She stood, slowly. Allowed no weight on her right leg, lest it buckle. Shifting her weight to the left, gritting her teeth against the pain in her side.

  “You’re tough as hell, Does-It-Matter,” the giant said.

  The barge swayed beneath their feet.

  Miranda took one halting step. Two. Went down on hands and knees.

  Her left side bleeding freely.

  Shirt hiked up, she could see the wound, a red slice along her ribs. The work of an arrow, she realized, in her fall to the river. One of several that had tumbled free of her quiver must have cut her in the water when she struck.

  “Pitiful girl,” the giant said. He came toward her.

  When he was within striking distance, she swung the knife, but he stepped back easily and caught her wrist, squeezing. The knife dropped to the deck. With his other hand—his big, wide hand—he hauled her up by the throat and held her before him in the air, brought her to his eye level, her sneakers clearing the barge by a good three, four inches. The muscles in his arm straining, quivering, rippling. Tightening, as he squeezed. She clawed at his wrist, old pain become new in her throat, and he, gently, and with a kind of patience, closed his free hand about hers and pushed it away.

  Behind the big man, a small shadow crawled wet and dripping and naked out of the river, onto the concrete boat ramp, moving quickly through the grass and onto the barge. Snatching up a rusted, three-bladed propeller and raising it above his head.

  Miranda’s vision blackened.

  With a fierce cry, John Avery brought the prop down into the big man’s hip.

  The giant’s leg buckled.

  Air rushed into Miranda’s lungs as she was dropped to the deck.

  The giant whirled on Avery, who had already shoved himself back against the pilothouse, beside the rifle.

  The big man threw the propeller into the river.

  Avery grappled with the r
ifle, long and unwieldy in his arms.

  The giant smacked the gun away and caught Avery by the ears and lifted him fully from the deck. Avery seized the man’s arms to support his weight lest his ears be ripped off. He hung naked, face a grimace of pain, a scream rending, as the big man began to squeeze the dwarf’s head between his hands.

  Miranda grabbed her father’s pocketknife where it had fallen on the deck and lunged. Her lunge was weak, and the short steel blade glanced off the giant’s coat and folded, slicing the knuckle of her index finger. The giant threw his weight into her, sent her sprawling. Still, he held the dwarf between his hands, and still, he squeezed.

  Miranda snapped the knife blade back into the locked position, got to her feet, and plunged it fast and hard into the big man’s right shoulder, buried it to the hilt, then drew the knife down with all her weight, through leather, sweatshirt, tissue.

  The giant yelped once, harsh, like a wounded animal.

  Avery fell against the pilothouse.

  Miranda lost her balance and caught herself on the chain between the deck rail posts, and there she hung. The giant step-staggered toward the gangplank and into the grass, thumping for the blade in his back. Leg bleeding through a ragged tear in his jeans where Avery had struck him with the prop. She watched him angle up the slope, tripping lightly over the edge of the ramp. Blood slicking his hands. The knife stayed in. He moved slowly, uncertain of each step on the rough, corrugated surface. Eventually he shambled out of sight over the top of the hill. Then came the sharp crackle of a motorcycle. The engine idled for a long time. Long enough that Miranda, who had risen to her knees on the barge, wondered if the giant had passed out on his seat. But then came the long stutter of acceleration, the big man’s bike roaring away, then fading.

  Avery had pulled himself into a tight ball against the pilothouse.

  The distant brush along the bank smoldered, among it the bodies of two men, one burned, a third dead on the ramp.

  It felt as if a wheel with many teeth were spinning inside Miranda. She hung her head over the side of the barge. She did not throw up, and when the feeling had passed, she knew that something else was there, in the hollow place the wheel had made, something solid and heavy. She moved away from the edge of the barge for fear of falling into the river, where she would sink like an anvil with this new and heavy thing inside her.

  She crawled to Avery. She touched his arm and met his eyes.

  She took up a long and rusted push-pole from among the detritus on the deck. Using it as a crutch, she pushed herself to her feet and went to the corpse on the ramp. She saw the small man’s filed teeth in the glimmer of the dying fire. The river lapped at his bootheels. She bent over the body and rifled through his vest pockets. Found a single Ford key on a rabbit’s-foot chain. This she pocketed. She pulled her arrow from his chest, tossed it into the water, and stripped the corpse of its T-shirt and tied it around her torso, binding her side.

  Avery came after her through the grass. He went to the next body, which lay facedown, and began tugging at the dead man’s leather jacket. He wrapped it around himself as best he could.

  Miranda glanced at the charred corpse tangled in the kudzu along the riverbank. The skin of the man’s cheeks was blackened, his lips fused to his teeth.

  Together, she and Avery stumbled up the ramp.

  A single Shovelhead remained beside the Bronco, a key dangling from the bike’s ignition. On the ground near it, where the other bike had been parked, she found her father’s knife, slick with the giant’s blood. She wiped it on her jeans and pocketed it.

  In the Bronco, Avery sat on the passenger’s seat, sooty and bloody in the leather jacket. Miranda put the key into the ignition and cranked it. She worked the clutch, put her foot on the brake, and grimaced at the burn in her leg and side. She jammed the gearshift and soon the river and the dead men were far behind them, and the long gravel road turned out onto state blacktop, and from there she wheeled back southeast, toward the Arkansas state line, beyond it Nash County, the Landing. Safety. At least, she thought, for a while.

  ISKRA’S PATH

  As the old witch lay dying, metal reek of her own blood thick in her nostrils, she remembered the path she had walked since emerging from the trees a lifetime ago, when she had first looked up and seen the long-abandoned cabin atop the hill. Her new home. How she pulled vines loose from the porch pillars and swept mice and spiders clear inside, later venturing on foot into town to trade for nails and boards. Her first goat earned by delivering some bottom dweller’s baby. She built fences, plowed a crude garden. Chopped wood. At fourteen, her hands were callused and raw. An old barn now a bathhouse, the stone hearth her own handiwork, each rock lugged up from the bottoms. The spirits were there, from the beginning. The cabin itself groaning pleasantly with each new board she laid. Every night the bannik woke her with its mad cackle.

  On her sixteenth birthday, the leshii came boldly into her dreams, a thing hungry and eager for a girl who knew magic, whose mother had known the same: old spells of the rich black earth, flame and water and blood. It drew her to a wide, muddy shore where the tree rose out of the mist and white bees spilled to hang in a cloak-like fire on arm and leg. There, it welcomed her.

  Years later, she would come to the tree again, would dig her fingers between the roots to close over something papery and soft, pieces of it breaking off in her hand. Brittle, dusty. “Is this it?” she cried. “How many babies have these hands pulled from fresh, pink wombs, even as mine shrivels like a honeyless comb?”

  WHAT USE IS A CHILD TO A LOVELESS BREAST, the leshii pronounced, its voice huge and ancient, TO A SELFISH HEART? YOU DO NOT LOVE.

  “I love,” old Iskra gasped on the porch, the cabin burning behind her. “I love…”

  Blood pooling beneath her, she stared up at the unpainted boards of the porch ceiling, a sheaf of plywood hanging free, inside a bird’s nest, flakes of eggshell. Black smoke billowing around it.

  I have seen this before, she thought.

  In the final moments of Lena Cotton’s life, when the preacher’s wife grasped Iskra’s hand, the last of the woman’s strength ebbing out on the bed. The strength of her grip startling, behind it some last reserve of self, and then, in a rush of blood to Iskra’s head, the vision: a torrent of black smoke, the bird’s nest, a slice of blue sky, a line of black ants upon a board. The last moments of Iskra Krupin’s life. Everything the old witch had ever feared—to lose her family, to die alone—all of it writ true in a headlong plummet that began at Lena Cotton’s bedside and ended here, on these dry steps, with the smells of smoke and her own blood choking her. And the rest of that awful night, too. All its horrors laid out in an instant, each moment a step to be taken toward some final end that was not hers to fathom. Leaving the bedroom with the dead child in her bowl, the boatman at her side, scattergun in hand, stepping lightly among the palms, unwitting escort to his own doom, both of them crawling through a narrow break in the wall.

  I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN YOU, WITCH.

  Words the leshii would speak as Iskra stood with Hana Krupin’s bread bowl in her arms, the spirit’s voice alive in every drop of moisture, every fiber of root, every speck of decay. A voice without sex, without end …

  Iskra began to crawl away from the blistering heat at her back, just as she had crawled through thorn and vine that night, pushing the bowl ahead of her. Blood bubbles popping between her lips, she crawled on her belly for the steps that led down into the yard, beyond them the kudzu yet green, the sky yet blue. She faltered when she saw, six steps below, a line of black ants crawling over the final step, and this was it: the last thing she had seen before Lena Cotton screamed, and the vision shattered like so much glass.

  Now here it was, that board, six planks below …

  No, not yet, not ready—

  Silence for a time, save the crackling of the cabin, and out of this the heavy tremble of the earth. Shaking the wind chimes made of bird bones. The air itself humming with curr
ent, as if some hideous dormant pendulum were finally on the verge of motion.

  WHAT HAVE YOU BROUGHT ME, WITCH?

  Lifting the bowl, her mother’s bowl, brought to this country across five great bodies of water, the last of Hana Krupin’s life across the sea save the secrets in her heart and the blood in her veins, this bowl that held the cold gray fulfillment of the leshii’s promise, a child for Iskra. The leshii’s cruel laughter shaking the ground. Tumbling the bowl from the altar and as the boatman dove to catch it, she arose, her great black shape unseen against the starless sky. Iskra recalled the cold steel of the shotgun’s twin triggers beneath her fingers, then the thunder, and finally the leshii’s voice: calling her closer, to the mound of earth and the hole where the demon’s vines had caught the boatman’s body and drew him up to hang above that unholy well of mud and sticks and bones. A flash of knife, and when the bowl was full, spilling blood like a dishpan, she set it down among the reeds and set the dead child back in it and hunkered to wait, to watch, as the boy began to breathe through the slit in his throat, to stir, and the old witch lifted him out of the bowl and lay the child on the moss and tumped over the bowl to spill the boatman’s congealing blood.

  Miranda’s beam swinging wildly through vines and thorns. Her small voice crying out, startling. Snake. Flight. The old witch searching the mist that wrapped them both. Vomiting, the boatman’s daughter, arm red and swollen, baby breathing and kicking weakly on her chest, and the old woman hesitating now. For the space of two breaths: one for the life she had known before that night and one for the life she would live ever after, its expiration already set …

  Both mine, great leshii?

  Silence.

  Both mine, the witch answered.

  Iskra opened her eyes, felt the hot wind of the cabin burning, lashing her back.