Doubled over, thinking he might vomit, he remembered his burlap sack.
He had left it on the floor of the church.
Blood pounding between his temples, the sound of his own breath so great, he did not hear the car careening around the curve—rocks popping and skewing beneath its tires—until it was too late.
* * *
In the stillness after the dust had settled, the white Plymouth having disappeared around the curve and into the compound gates, John Avery stepped from the trees over the ditch and stood, shoeless, on the roadscape, wearing only the fashioned skirt of Hiram Crabtree’s shirt. He had kept to the trees but followed the road, three, four miles, long and tiresome, and thrice he had sat and rested, back aching, legs trembling. Once, he fell asleep with his head against his chest and woke ashamed. At the sound of the car, he had hidden himself among the pines and watched as the white Plymouth passed, the fat constable slumped like bloody death behind the wheel.
In the ditch, a figure lay unmoving. A boy whose skin was mottled and cracked like the bed of a long dry river, strange pigmentation ranging from the color of stones to apricots to an almost iridescent sheen along his shoulders. The digits of his hands and feet were widely spaced, webbing between them. His face was lumpy, the line of his jaw crooked.
Gun in one hand, Avery took up a stick with the other and touched it to the bottom of the boy’s foot. When the boy did not move, he edged closer to see if he was breathing.
“John?”
Avery looked up.
His wife stood a dozen feet away, Grace in one arm, a burlap sack in the other. She came out of the woods, stepping over the low, rusted wire fence that bordered the trees. Her eyes moved over him: bare chest, bloodied feet. The gun in his hand.
“John?” she said again, a tremor in her voice.
The day was hot and quiet and still, and it seemed, for an instant, as if the world itself had ceased to spin.
THROUGH THE WHITE
Fog ahead, a breathing wall between the riverbanks, curling on itself, catlike.
The space between Miranda’s shoulders throbbed with heat. Her hands were raw and blistered. She stared at the fog through a curtain of wet hair and thought that whatever lay beyond must be the way. She had no other choice now; the land had given her none. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm and thrust the paddle into the water until the handle was slick with her own blood.
The johnboat slunk into the white.
The world behind and before and all around was erased, not even the sky above distinguishable.
Miranda ceased paddling when she felt the hull scraping stumps in shallow water, though she saw no trees, no bank, not even the bow of her ten-foot boat. She slumped, her stitched side a red, fevered mouth. The boat eased a few feet more, then hitched up against the stobs.
How long she sat there, like a woman out of time, swept into some eternal place, she did not know. The mist broke against her skin. She breathed it in, cool and damp.
She put her paddle out and took the depth of the water, which was barely ankle-deep. She stepped out, the boat wobbling beneath her. The water was warm. She stepped around cedar knobs and sprigs of green that grew out of white-oak stumps, their little branches bejeweled with dragonflies and wasps that flew away at her passing.
All around her, the world grew hushed.
She stopped to listen. Heard something moving in the water, but far away.
Soon, the silt bed beneath her feet became a muddy bank and she was sinking, step by step, until finally she pulled her left foot out of the muck and her sneaker was tugged free. She wobbled, kept her balance. Bent for her shoe.
Ahead, the fog peeled away, and she saw the trees, the wide muddy shore before them.
The skin of her snakebit arm began to itch, the old white scars to burn.
Standing atop a rise of red clay that sloped down from the edge of the tree line, looking implacably at her, was the white crane she had seen at the Landing and later the inlet to Sabbath House. Its undercarriage still grimed with black swamp mud. It lifted its leg and took a single, slow step, as if remembering how to walk, then disappeared into the trees.
Miranda took off her other shoe, tied both around her neck by the laces, and went after the bird.
THE GREENHOUSE
The boy lay deeply unconscious among the thick growth of Avery’s plants. Teia wet a rag beneath a spigot that jutted from the brick foundation of the greenhouse and washed the lacerations along the boy’s left arm and leg, the flesh shredded finely where the car had grazed him. His arm was swollen at the elbow. She wrung the washcloth over the crusted puncture wounds in the boy’s shoulder, her gaze drawn back to his child’s face, his eyes closed beneath a heavy, crooked brow, flickering behind their lids. A strange, hypnotic beauty in the boy’s slow, steady breathing, his lips parted slightly. Avery, at her side, held Grace, Cook’s revolver on the gravel beside him. Teia reached for the first-aid kit she had brought from their bedroom closet, set atop a pile of fresh clothes for her husband.
The generator out back coughed and chugged, and the lights overhead flickered.
“Is it bad?” Avery said.
“Maybe only a sprain at the elbow,” Teia said. “He’s lucky. Some swelling here, on his side. Maybe a busted rib. These other wounds—wherever they came from—are deep. Could be on the way to infected.” She emptied a bottle of antiseptic over the wounds. Pressed them with a gauze pad. Blood seeped through. She taped a fresh pad in place.
Avery set the baby on a blanket and changed into a T-shirt and jeans while Teia worked. Pulling on his boots, he said, “We have to get the hell out of here, as soon as we get some things together—”
“Tell me where you’ve been,” Teia said harshly, still bent over the boy.
“Baby,” Avery said.
“You disappeared last night,” she said, tearing tape with her teeth. “I was scared. I was so scared, I thought you were dead, so you tell me—”
He went to her and dropped to his knees beside her. He touched her shoulder. “There’ll be time,” he said, “for explanations—”
But she pulled away, taped a final bandage over the boy’s leg.
Avery got up and picked up the baby and went to the greenhouse door and pulled a strip of electrical tape away from a blacked-out pane and looked out at the constable’s Plymouth, parked crookedly beneath the oaks. He held Grace and hummed softly, a lullaby or a hymn, the words long forgotten.
THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS
Torn from a deep, dreamless slumber, Billy Cotton sat up in bed.
“BUHHH…”
A man’s voice, hoarse and full of pain. Downstairs.
Cotton winced. It felt like someone was splitting stovewood over his skull. He lay in his trousers and shoes, the sheets beneath him dirty with leaves and blood. The gouge in his calf angry and throbbing. Wounds on his chest crusted red. The cancer sending up its own wretched howl from his hip.
“BUHHLEEE…”
The preacher rolled out of bed and limped shirtless out of the bedroom. At the top of the stairs, he put one hand on the newel post to steady himself and stopped, staring down at the grisly sight in the foyer.
At the bottom of the stairs, Charlie Riddle slumped against the wall, half upright. Beaten, it appeared, within an inch of his miserable life. A string of red drool ran from his chin onto the star above his flabby breast. He shouted again, unaware Cotton stood above him, staring down at the wreck he was.
The preacher came stiffly down the stairs, red suspenders flopping at his sides.
Riddle fell silent and turned his massive head, his one good eye rolling open in a lump of purple. “Licked em,” he spluttered through a bloody grin. “Licked em, Billy.”
“Did you,” Cotton said.
“Tonight … said they’ll come … kill us all, Billy, they’ll—”
“They’ll be too late, Charlie,” Cotton said. He stepped around the constable and onto the porch. Behind him, Riddle made mo
re noises, then fell silent, head slumped on his chest, which rose and fell yet. Cotton saw the Plymouth parked thirty, forty yards away, the driver’s door wide open.
He stepped over rotten boards and vines and sat down on the wide, sagging steps, pain lancing through him as if he’d set himself down onto a spike. He took off one shoe. The gold toe of his sock was torn. He smiled sadly at what a pauper he had become. He picked up a rock from the grass and considered it, then tossed it away. He had seen, days before, among the weeds, a green-glass soda bottle, webbed white inside, and this he found and smashed against the crumbling brick foundation of the house, a little brown spider spilling out of the neck, which he held in his hand. The spider fell among blades of grass high as Cotton’s ankles. It crossed a single shard of bottle to disappear forever into the forest of the yard. Cotton tossed the neck and took up the shard and tucked it deep in the toe of his shoe. Then he slid his foot back into the shoe. He pulled the shoe tight and laced it, and the sudden new pain was clear and bright and focus-bringing.
From the west came an eruption of thunder, but when the ground began to shake, Billy Cotton realized it was not thunder at all.
It was the earth itself, starting to heave.
TREMORS AND ECLIPSE
In the greenhouse, a pair of garden shears slipped from their hook on the wall when the first of the tremors hit. A glass pane dropped from the ceiling and shattered among the plants. The fluorescent grow lights overhead flickered in the saucer pans, went dark. Came back. Teia clutched Grace against her, one hand cupping the baby’s head. After a while, the world was still. The low drone of the generator out back unwavering.
Avery sat with his back to the potting table they had tucked the boy under. The boy’s chest rose and fell slowly, and his breath came out in a high, soft whistle. His burlap sack was open at Avery’s feet. Avery held the bloody machete he had found in the sack, turning it in his hands.
Teia was looking at it, too. “Who is he, John? What is he?”
Avery slid the machete back into the sack and looked at the boy, remembering the night Lena Cotton died. The old witch’s bowl, his glimpse of what lay beneath that red-stained pillowcase as it passed. A small gray foot pushing out. Webs between its toes. Limp and lifeless.
A stronger tremor hit, and mortar dust shook loose from the brick foundation and a clay pot fell from the table and cracked in pieces on the ground.
Avery went to the front of the greenhouse and opened the door.
“Don’t…”
“It’s okay,” he said. He walked out beneath the oaks.
The light was strange. The shadows of the trees and the manse and the Plymouth all slanted at the right angles, but it was too dim for this time of day. The world had taken on a muted, filtered look, like the sun was beaming through a glass of dirty water. All along the gravel drive and the grass where he stood, the boughs of the oaks threw blurry, half-moon shadows. Gray clouds had walled up the sun, obscuring whatever mystery was happening.
Dread crept over Avery’s heart as the cicadas from the surrounding woods took up their evening chorus early.
Billy Cotton stood gazing up from the front yard of Sabbath House, as if some secret only he could read were written in the sky. He worked his hands up and down his red suspenders. Took no notice of Avery. After a moment, he limped back inside the house.
A third tremor hit. Dead limbs fell from the oaks, the whole world shuddering like a great iron ship firing its engines.
In the greenhouse, he found Grace safe in Teia’s lap.
“Maybe the world is ending,” he said. And tried to smile.
Teia looked up with dread at the glass overhead.
They sat quietly, fearing it was too late to do anything now, that some terrible machinery in the earth had been set in motion, wheels and gears and cogs grinding, and they were but silent players upon a shifting stage.
ROCK AND TREE AND MONSTER
The sky dimmed, edging toward darkness, though Miranda, near-delirious with exhaustion, had yet to notice. She had staggered free of the mud as the first of the tremors rumbled. She fell against a tree, waited on the creaking of the earth to subside. She wiped the mud from her feet with a handful of dead leaves, put her shoes on, and forged ahead, the crane still in sight, though always on the cusp of disappearing, flapping its black-tipped wings and shooting off, to land some distance farther.
It made a steady graceful line among the trees, all the way to the grove of saw palms, where it alighted beside a rotten log and put its bill in the earth to root for grubs.
The earth shook again.
Miranda remembered this place: undergrowth and briars dense, great long thorns growing among them. She froze, listening, for what she did not know. Her own voice, eleven years old, crying out her father’s name only to have it come echoing back, no answer?
The crane picked its way with ease among the palms. She followed, first through the maze, which bit and sliced, then on hands and knees through the undergrowth itself, her palms sore and blistered from paddling.
Her old tunnel waited ahead, still intact, if overgrown. New vines and thorns to claw and snare. At the end of it, a faint orange light.
The crane ducked and went through, as if it knew every chink in the forest’s armor.
Soaked in sweat and blood, Miranda crawled after it.
When she emerged from the tunnel, Hiram’s flashlight lay where she had dropped it ten years past. Burning still, the beam strong. As if no time had passed. She took it up and brushed bugs from the plastic housing.
Playing the beam ahead, she walked on, into the weird forest of toothpick trees, where the streams of black viscous liquid congealed, past the dead owl still mired in the muck, perfectly preserved, over the log bridge, and into the vast, barren wetland, its borders staked by cypress trees that had long since shed their needles, their trunks and limbs a miserable gray.
I remember, she thought.
Strange reeds at the edges of black pools, their stalks a pale uncolor. The pools themselves stagnant. Weird brown fungi and yellow, star-shaped blossoms.
At the center of it all, ringed by a skirt of fog, the rock. Twice the size of old Iskra’s cabin and shaped, Miranda saw now, like a blacksmith’s anvil, half submerged, the horn canting upward. Atop the horn: the tree, a nightmarish chimney in mid-topple. Limbs outstretched like flailing arms. Roots spilling over the horn and hanging down like the wet, tangled hair of a drowned woman.
The crane stood at the base of the rock. It swung its long, periscope head in her direction and seemed to regard her with a kind of satisfaction, having finally brought her to this moment. The bird spread its wings, took to the air, and vanished into the trees. She aimed the light into the gloom where it had stood, saw the glint of brass she expected, the shotgun shell lodged there in the mud. Swinging the beam around, she saw, too, the clump of reeds where she had found Littlefish that night, bloody and heaving at the base of a mound of earth big as a tractor tire, now grown over with moss and vines and brambles and daubed with dead leaves and rotting wood and the bones of small animals—skull of a raccoon, leg of a fawn. The hole at the center remained, dark, wide, deep. The darkness there was an inky liquid of the same viscosity as that of the moat and the streams that tracked like veins from the center of this place. Its surface glistened, as if with starlight.
Something dripped into it.
She ran her beam up, and what hung there from the canted tree made her cry out.
Trussed up from a long, reaching limb, vine knotted around his ankles, jeans and shirt heavy with mud, was the body of her father, Hiram Crabtree. He wore the same shirt he had worn when she last saw him, his left shirt pocket unbuttoned, as always, to better slip his reading glasses in and out. A ragged hole in his stomach, a frown in his neck. Dripping red into the pool.
Miranda started for the mound, stopped when her sneaker crunched in the spongy earth. She lifted her shoe. Half buried in her footprint was a thing white and round and it r
eminded her, at first, of the grinning jawbone of a boar. She toed it out of the ground, shined the flashlight on it.
A claw. Easily the size of Hiram’s pocket knife.
A high trill sounded, somewhere in the dark. Followed by a low, wet clicking.
Miranda swung the light at the distant trees, saw nothing.
She turned the beam back to the vine that held her father’s corpse. She felt with her hand in her pocket, after her father’s Old Timer, but the knife was no longer there. Instead, her fingers closed around the same shotgun shell she had only just seen in the mud. Another phantom object. Tucked in her right hip pocket that long night past and lost, later, to the chaos. It lay bright red upon her palm now and still smelled of cordite as if just fired.
Two shells that night, she thought. But the old witch had only ejected one. The other, the one Iskra had set before her on the table yesterday, the shell must have remained in the barrel long after she’d fired its contents into Hiram’s back. She recalled now the sensation of eyes upon her, felt a preternatural sense of déjà vu, wondered if the old witch was yet alive and watching her from the shadows of the rock.
For a moment she teetered, the whole of it too big. Head spinning. She closed her eyes, bit the inside of her lip. Tasted blood. Swallowed. Breathed in, breathed out. Opened her eyes.
The rock loomed.
She tucked the shotgun shell into her pocket and moved closer, eyes locked on her father’s corpse.
The rock’s surface was damp, a fetid smell to it. Roots stood out from it, large and smooth and slick. Unlike any bark Miranda had ever seen in the bottoms. She closed her hand around one. It was warm and pulsed at her touch. She jerked away, then gathered her courage and touched it again, this time closing her fingers around it. It swelled in her palm. A low hum filled her head, a gentle tremor ran the length of her arm, and suddenly all the aches in her muscles were fading. Even the burn in her side, cooling. She took her hand away. Her blisters were gone.
The Boatman's Daughter Page 21