She ran back up the ridge, through gorge and woods, past the ruin of the cabin where old Iskra lay in her funeral vines, hens pecking around her blistered head. She ran down the hill and through the woods to the dock, where the boat that had carried her father to his doom was moored. She forced all thoughts of grief and despair from her mind save one: the face of the boy, crude and ill-shaped and the one thing she loved most. The only real magic she had ever practiced.
TEIA GOES TO CHURCH
Teia left the shotgun house walking, Grace in her arms, to the iron gates. There she stood, looking down the gravel county road, as if peering into the gullet of the world even as it made ready to swallow her. Across the road, behind chain-link, the windowless Holy Day Church sat like a brooding, mindless thing.
She spoke, none but Grace and the wind to hear. “Where the hell you’d go, John?”
Inside, the church was close and dark and hot. The choir loft behind the pulpit was littered with hymnals and empty music stands, a drum set featuring a bass someone had put a sledge through. Secondhand microphones and amplifiers thick with dust. The great wooden cross torn from the wall and hurled down the aisle, scattering chairs. The shape of it still visible on the paneling, like a picture unhung after years.
Teia propped open the front doors to let in light and air and sat down in a metal folding chair near the back. She sat for a long time in the musty silence, Grace a counterweight in her arms.
She fixed her gaze on the absence of the cross.
If I were to beg you, she prayed, what would I beg for? All the old salvations? To know where they took him? Where’s my John?
At the back of the room, at either end of the altar, twin doors stood ajar on darkness. John had told her of a time when Billy and Lena Cotton’s lost children had streamed through those doors, service after service, some in tears, others sagging with relief, all with heads cast down at the wasted lives they’d led. Scrawny boys and round-bellied girls, needle marks on their arms. Back there, in a windowless room, they made their confessions to emerge with holy purpose writ on hungry faces.
Back when Avery himself had still believed, dressed in a vest and polished boots, a striped tie and hair like a lion’s mane. He’d showed her a picture once, when he was high. They’d laughed at it, made love.
Sweat dripped from her brow. She wiped it.
I was never hungry for you. Only him.
She came to Sabbath House a runaway junkie, lifted by a dwarf out of a pile of cardboard on Beech Street in Texarkana. Two years homeless and hungry, her hair falling out. No family to speak of, no one to love her. Except John Avery. Before he had even known her, he had loved her, little more than a sack of bones, an open wound of need. And maybe she had loved him, too, from the moment their hands touched and she felt his strength. When together they walked to a shelter three blocks down, where she was fed and bathed and clothed and given a concrete room and a mattress and a bedpan and the means by which to heal herself. Long nights of shrieking visions, sweating, fingernails raking flesh, the moon like death’s sickle outside a small, narrow window. When it was over and the door opened, it was John Avery who opened it.
And so she came to this barren place, no better prospects. By then it was years after Lena Cotton had died. The old preacher a recluse, a rumor. And Charlie Riddle, well, he was no different than a hundred pimps and pushers Teia had known, something stolen in his pocket, ready to sell. John told her stories of better times, when the church was full without room for standing and a choir played instruments of brass and wood and they all sang hymns and lifted hands together in praise, but Teia never saw it, never heard it. After one year, she begged him to leave, to shed this place with its ghosts and rot.
“Where would we go?” he said. “What’s out there for us?”
“Don’t you see that preacher for what he is?”
“I’ve always seen him for what he is.”
“These men ain’t good to you,” she said.
“They need me.”
“They use you. They ain’t good people.”
“Neither am I,” he said.
She stared up at the shape of the cross. John gave me walls, a roof. A bed of my own and love to warm it. What’d you ever give?
Quietly, yet hopeful, she had saved. Not much, a ten here, a twenty there. Most everything John earned growing dope for the preacher and Riddle he put back into their coffers, just to keep the lights running. She kept what little she could in a plastic bag in the bottom of a rice jar in the cupboard. Then came Grace, and just like that: the money vanished. Every day that passed, they needed more.
Had she thought of leaving him? Once, maybe, when the baby was yet a seed unsprouted in her belly. Sabbath House, for any and every reason she could imagine, was no place to raise a baby. She knew about the girls at the Pink Motel, the mystery of Lena Cotton’s affair. But the thought of life without John Avery was somehow worse, like opening your door onto an empty, howling plain.
Five years of her life had already passed at Sabbath House, when Grace was born. She was twenty-seven. After the baby, every knock on their door became a dread. Every payment Riddle had skipped: a promise of numbered days. Lately, between her ears, she heard a fierce roar like rain pouring on a metal roof, drowning all voices save her own: Get out.
Now, sitting in the sanctuary, smell of mold in the air, Teia looked up at the dingy ceiling panels and the wall where once a cross had hung and saw cruelty and despair and a great black appetite for human hearts.
To that absence, she said: “I don’t beg, you hear? But I want my John back, you heartless bastard. You owe me that. Bring him back to me. You do that and I swear, any man who blocks our way, I will kill that man where he stands. Yes, I will.”
She looked down at her daughter, sleeping in her arms, and there, in the soft round contours of her face, Teia Avery found her husband. She began to cry.
LOST
At Iskra’s dock, the johnboat’s motor refused to start. Miranda sat trembling, staring at the Evinrude in disbelief. She checked the shifter, the fuel tank. The vent was not clogged. She tightened the hose clamp, gave it three hard whacks with the boat paddle. Ripped the starter cord. It came to life, belching smoke. She lit out up the bayou, for Sabbath House, for the red tower. For Littlefish. The dock and the old witch’s bottle tree disappearing behind her.
For a while, sunlight broke through the gray clouds and splintered among the trees, where a white mist was woven. The banks rose up, tangled with tree roots, the bottoms stretching away for miles in all directions. She passed the familiar bones of a pine struck by lightning, covered over with limbs and bracken that had risen with the river long ago and snagged there. Soon after, the bayou would narrow, the woods would thicken, and the water would open suddenly onto the river via an almost invisible slip in the trees.
But none of this happened.
The trees thickened, yes, and the way ahead grew narrow, but here was a bend Miranda did not know, a tree she had never seen.
Suddenly the engine’s roar seemed to fade away, though the boat sped on.
She heard the low hoot of an owl deep in the woods. The susurrus of the trees, the trickle of water. Gray clouds like autumn leaves driven by the wind …
A memory, sudden and strange. Looking back at her father from the bow, where she perched like their very own maiden of the mast. Pretending they had struck out not for a fishing hole in the bottoms, but for the very mouth of the Prosper itself, which would, in turn, give way to a larger, wider river, and then another even wider, until finally they would make the ocean, where the currents ran in all directions, and the sky and the water reached for each other but never touched. The two of them drifting into the great wide world to find everything they had ever lost. Out there, perhaps, waiting for them on the shore of some island where horses ran wild, was Cora. Barefoot in the gray sand. Miranda knowing that one day she would look over her shoulder from the bow and he would not be there, the boatman, like her mothe
r, like all parents, claimed by the coming of a slow, inevitable end, the ultimate consequence of growing up, getting old.
But it had not happened that way …
The low, steady drone of the Evinrude gave way to the high, electric buzz of the cicadas, singing out from the canopy-dark. The two sounds merging into a weird, alien pitch that seemed to bore into the very center of her.
Beneath it, something else: the crack of tree branches.
Something moving in the woods …
So many times she had set out into the bottoms to find his body, boating deeper into the bayou from Iskra’s island, and every time she had come back filthy and bug-bitten and scraped empty as a slit fish, the land slowly and surely hollowing her out like an old stump at the mercy of time. One day, she had thought, long ago, she would be old and brittle, and she would break apart like the logs in the woods that crumbled by the handful, spilling little black beetles. Funny thing, to feel that way when you’re just a girl, not even thirteen, fifteen, then twenty-one—
The trees on either side of the bayou began to sway, to bend, the land itself conspiring, cracking.
Tired, she thought, eyes and limbs and heart as heavy as they’d ever been. So tired …
Her chin touched her chest—
* * *
She jerked awake and saw, too late, the cul-de-sac ahead, a cove speckled with a thousand late-blooming lily pads, each the size of a pie plate, some as big as hubcaps. She cut the motor, but she was already in them, and the propeller chewed the pads like twine. They tangled, choked the blades. The motor cut out and the boat was yanked to a halt.
Miranda spun gently between banks of sickly brown cypress trees, their branches forlorn with great beards of moss. Dragonflies swirled among the lily pads and little brown birds perched on the blooms to snap them up.
The air was oppressive, hot and still.
Miranda put her head in her hands, elbows on her knees. She sat like this for a while, and when the urge to scream and the urge to weep had passed, she looked up and around and turned on the seat to lift the Evinrude as far out of the water as she could. It hung halfway. She held it upright with one hand and with the other tried to reach down into the water and strip the pads from the prop.
The motor slipped from her grasp, splashed back into the water.
She yanked the cord and when the engine sputtered back to life, acrid exhaust pouring out, she reversed and the boat spun free, but she had overcompensated the throttle, and now more pads were tangling in the blades.
She cut the engine again. Pulled the motor out of the water and locked it off. She tore at the thick, rubbery stems until the blades were clear, then dropped the engine back into the water.
It would not start.
A dozen times she tried, standing in the boat, bracing her foot against the stern, ripping the cord until her arm burned and her side bled freely, and now she did cry out, let her voice echo back her frustration. Her panic startled some heavy-winged bird from a branch.
In the bottom of the boat lay a paddle.
Miranda locked off the motor, took up the paddle, and plunged it from starboard to port and back to starboard, heading back out of the cove, looking for a bend in the bayou where she had drifted off course, but there was no bend. There never had been. The water just … went on, straight and narrow, and now she was paddling against the current.
She stopped, looked over her shoulder.
The cove, the lily pads, had vanished.
The bayou behind her was the mirror image of what lay before.
She cussed under her breath. She had come northwest from the island, reversing the route she always took, nothing had changed … except it had. The whole damn landscape had just … changed.
She remembered all those long days walking the woods south of Iskra’s island, searching for Hiram, her sense of mounting desperation that each new turn had only worsened her odds, until finally she broke from the trees to find her boat where she’d moored it, though the path she’d returned by had never been the same, not once. Even when she’d tied a string to the boat, only to follow it back through different woods.
Behind her, she heard the creaking of wood, the whisper of leaves, the sudden snap of branches. These sounds like a kind of laughter now, mocking.
The way she had come was not the same as it had been. The bayou curved in the wrong direction. She was sure of it.
“What are you scared of?” she cried out to the trees. Her voice slapped back from the banks. “Are you scared of me?”
Sweat dripped in her eyes. She wiped them.
She scanned for the sun, but the sun had fled, disappeared behind thick gray clouds.
Wound in her side ablaze, soaked through in the wet summer heat, she paddled, and with each new stroke the space between her shoulders burned and her lungs grew hot and full. Maxi pads sodden, her hands raw and red, each stroke falling in time with the furious beating of her heart, and soon there was only the great red drum between her ears.
THE FATHER HEN’S HOUSE
Burlap sack over a shoulder, Littlefish had been trailing his webbed fingers along the brick—the wall had bent twice more through the piney woods—when he saw the road, and was drawn to it through the thinning pines. He had never seen a road before. He knew the word from his books. His hands were helpless not to make the sign for it when he saw it. He followed the wall along the road, the sun hot and beating down, the ditch full of bent aluminum cans and old faded plastic wrappers that spoke foreign symbols to the boy. After a while, atop a hill behind a chain-link fence, he came to a low building with no windows. Beside it the tall metal tower, and up, up, up at the top of the tower, the red cross and bird-skeleton he had long seen from his tree.
Church, his hands spoke.
The building from his dream.
This is where he lives.
He crept from the cover of the trees, across the dry gully of pine needles and trash, and into the road. The gravel underfoot was warm. He closed his fingers around the fence. Imagined a section of it in his vegetable garden, bean vines growing around it. He thought of Baba, how she had laughed at his garden contraptions meant to scare crows and red-winged blackbirds, even as she reaped his harvest of blackberries and squash. Tears wet his eyes. He brushed them away.
The day was quiet.
Behind him, across the road, were twin iron gates, and through these he could see the big white rotting house. He wavered, briefly, thinking he could just turn around and go back to the river, back into the woods across the water, to the world he knew. It was not the same world now, but there were islands other than Iskra’s. He could camp, fish, hunt. Survive. Sister had showed him the right places, how to live in them. Little islands all throughout the bottoms, humped up out of the water like turtle shells. The boy knew all he needed to know to be another crawling, stalking thing among them.
After, he thought. After the girl is safe and it’s done.
He moved along the fence, walking his hands over the chain-link, until he came to the open gate. Beyond it, a path led up a small hill lined with cracked flagstones shot through by dandelions. It reminded him of Iskra’s hill, her cabin perched among the vines.
He went up the path and to the doors, which stood wide open as if to welcome him.
Here is the church, here is the steeple, open your hands …
The place was empty, dark, musty-smelling.
He went up the center aisle, leaving mudprints on the thin blue carpet and dragging his burlap sack behind him. At the front of the church, on the wall, was the shape of a cross, the cross itself hurled among the metal chairs, many of which had been knocked askew. He saw things he had no reference for: metal boxes on legs, round white kettles that looked like toadstools. The piano in the corner was coated in a skein of dust, and at the foot of the raised platform was a long, scratched table, the words DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME cut crudely into the wood and lacquered over. Atop the table, a pair of ceramic hands were clasped in pra
yer beside an arrangement of faded silk flowers, a big, heavy book open beneath them. Its pages thin as locust shells, their edges trimmed in gold, and the words were the tiniest print the boy had ever seen. Some of the words were red. He did not know them all, but he recognized a few.
… the way, the truth, the life …
He ran his mottled finger over the words.
… the Father …
Turning the page: branch, fire, burned.
Love. Life. Friends.
The girl was his friend.
Slowly, he closed his hand over the page and the sound the paper made as it crumpled was crisp, satisfying, like biting into a fresh apple. He tore the page from the book and let it fall, and it lay on the carpet at his feet like a broken-winged bird. Littlefish took the corner of another page and tore it. The sound was very loud in the near-cosmic silence of the church.
A voice from the dark spoke: “Don’t.”
Littlefish whirled.
A woman stood in the back, a baby in her arms.
“Please,” she said. Her voice was soft.
Littlefish bumped into the table, and the ceramic hands tipped over and rolled, but they did not break. The boy’s own hands fluttered before him, and he saw that the woman was following them with her eyes, but she did not understand. She opened her mouth as if to speak a question, but the question faltered on her lips. She had seen the webs between the boy’s fingers, and on the woman’s face Littlefish saw astonishment, even as she drew her baby tightly against her.
The boy fled along the outside aisle, knocking over dusty sprays of flowers. The woman called to him, stepping out of shadow, but Littlefish ignored her and rushed out into the muted gray light. He ran down the hill and into the trees. He ran without stopping for what seemed the longest time, until his legs and chest were burning, the bottoms of his feet scratched and bleeding. He ran until finally the trees parted and he found himself on the road once again, and there he stopped in the center of the gravel lane, in the sharp bend of a curve, gasping.
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