The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  ARROW AND CROSS

  The girl sat in the narrow window seat, knees drawn to her chest, turning the boy’s arrowhead between her fingers. Outside, all across the bottoms, trees were lost in a silver curtain of rain. She lifted her shirttail, traced a finger over the old scars, every one the expulsion of some awful memory—the cruel snare of Ma’am’s tongue, a man’s cloying scent smothering, her own hair in bundles at her feet. Cigarettes hissing against flesh. Laughter, cruel and cold. And all the other terrors, not her own. Betrayals, despair. Loss so deep and bottomless. Ends so violent. Now she found a patch of skin, just above her belly button. She thought of the boy, bleeding in the dirt. Was he dead now? She pressed the tip of his arrow into flesh, watched the blood bloom beneath it like a flower. She waited. But there was no release, no separation from herself, only sudden hot tears and a burn in her belly.

  In the hall, a key slid into the lock and turned it. The bedroom door opened and the girl pulled down her shirt and thrust the arrowhead beneath her thigh. The preacher, who had slipped a fresh shirt over his scarred chest, closed the door softly behind him. He put the key back in his pocket. The girl only stared at him, her expression blank.

  “What do you see?” Cotton said.

  The girl made no reply. She saw many things. She saw a snake in a man’s suit. A devil whose reach was short but cruel. A man surrounded by walls that had snuffed souls. She saw a razor and a dove and the true reason she was here: the preacher, his wife, and she, all together in a terrible dark place.

  “Death,” she finally said. Her voice was not angry. Her voice was not afraid.

  Absently, he touched his pocket, the outline of something there, some implement.

  The razor, she thought. But he will not do it now. No, it will happen somewhere else.

  The girl had tried to see her own death. But it was like peering into a deep black lake at night: perfect silence, nothing more. Again, she thought of the boy. With him, there had been no end, only the present. Only the peace of his company, the pleasure of his eyes, and that great open channel to the life of his world. She could never cut these things out of her, she realized.

  The preacher sat down on the window seat beside her, grimacing with old aches made new by the morning’s exertions, a bit of blood seeping through the fresh white linen of his shirt, and he saw in the pane what she had breathed on the glass and drawn there, earlier, an arrow, pointing toward the horizon, where the smoke from the old woman’s cabin had ceased to curl. He breathed on the glass himself and made a cross.

  The girl wondered what power this symbol held over him. Just a fading shape in glass, soon to be unseen, forgotten? Or was it somehow his wife, a fading god behind glass? Or an awful beacon, shining out like a lighthouse in a storm, one he had fixed his rudder for, lashing himself to the wheel, her to the bow? Maybe it was all of these things.

  “‘And the sun shall hide its face,’” he said, looking out at the sky. “The Book of Revelations.”

  She drew her knees to her chest.

  “Every page a promise of fire.”

  She thought of the old woman on the steps of the cabin, burned. The boy, sprawled in the dirt. His sister, still out there somewhere. The girl could feel her, another kind of beacon, maybe, not like the boy, but Miranda had lived here so long, surely some of the magic of this place had touched her, too.

  She held on to this hope, clutched it to her breast.

  But she remembered the old preacher’s vision, too, the one she had glimpsed so briefly at the cabin, like a bad seed sprouting poison shoots.

  A dove, a straight razor.

  Two glass coffins.

  They both gazed out the window, arrow and cross and the world beyond all washing away.

  THE LAND WILL TELL YOU A STORY

  The rain kept on, and the water began to rise throughout the bottoms. Whirlpools formed amid the cypress trees, all manner of creatures taking to the air, to the trees, to higher ground.

  The currents surged and carried a weary Miranda in her johnboat back to Iskra’s dock, which was slowly disappearing in the rising water. In the wind, several of the bottles in the old cypress had torn loose and dropped into the bayou. Miranda tied off. Hiram’s skull and spinal column and rib cage lay in the bottom of the boat in half an inch of muddy water, the rain having rinsed away nature’s gore from the bones. These Miranda took up as she climbed onto the dock, skull and vertebrae clacking like wooden blocks.

  At the cabin, she had to shoo vultures away from the old woman’s body. They amassed like a black choir in the dead, kudzu-choked trees, spreading their wings in the rain, a fine silver spray bouncing up from them. Several had fallen to eating Iskra’s softer parts—her eyes, her breasts, the insides of her thighs. They shuffled patiently to the edge of the yard. One was slow to abandon the unburned instep of Iskra’s left foot. Miranda cussed and kicked it, and it flapped away. Gently, she pulled the blanket of kudzu from the old woman’s body. This she laid on the ground and wrapped her father’s skull and spine and ribs in it. Then she took Iskra by the hands and dragged her away from the front porch steps and around the side of the house.

  She was out of breath when she got the body into the bathhouse. The door would not close. Its peg-lock was broken, the doorframe splintered. Outside, she saw the tracks that were Cotton’s and the boy’s and the girl’s, filling with rainwater. She remembered what Hiram had taught her about tracking: The land will tell you a story.

  Here was a story untelling itself.

  She fetched Hiram’s remains and brought these with her into the boy’s shed.

  She stood in the doorway for a time, staring at the ruins of the boy’s things.

  She had to go to him, save him—

  SLEEP, CHILD.

  The leshii’s voice, curling, writhing inside her skull.

  The rain beat down against the roof and sheeted against the window.

  Maybe just a while, she thought, bone-weary.

  She climbed into the boy’s hammock with Hiram’s bones clutched to her breast.

  YES, SLEEP. THERE WILL BE TIME. SLEEP NOW.

  Helpless not to, she closed her eyes.

  It was a mercy that she did not dream.

  RIDDLE AT THE WINDOW

  One hand grasping at the banister, Charlie Riddle hauled up from his slump against the foyer wall, bones in his leg and back grinding together like rocks. He had expected, by now, to be dead. To have closed his eye and slipped away, but for some reason he had not. He staggered across the hall and through the open parlor door, where some furniture was draped in old sheets. He made it to the dusty sideboard, where he filched from the cabinet a half-empty fifth of Wild Turkey. Through a window he watched the yard, the lane beyond brimming with puddles, all the oaks and magnolias and hydrangeas dripping. The late afternoon light indistinguishable from twilight, as whatever weird thing was happening happened outside in the sky. Between the dwarf’s greenhouse and the row of dilapidated shotgun houses, the constable saw his Plymouth in the grass. Poor Robert Alvin, dead in the trunk where Riddle had stuffed him after the fight was over, by now steamed like an oyster in the wet heat.

  Riddle laughed.

  Pain, instantly, in his ribs. His left leg a sack of glass. His right knee popping every step. Bruised ribs, right cheekbone cracked and swollen, nose split at the bridge. The way that one bastard had gone at him with a pipe, the old trouser snake would spit blood, if it worked at all.

  He grunted, drank some whiskey.

  Fucking savages, he thought. Fucking motherfucking savages. He’d sent one more to hell before the last two had him. With steel-toed boots and lengths of chain and knuckles of brass, they had him. He took a drink. Fuck em all. Let em come and kill whichever ones here I don’t fucking kill first.

  The Crabtree bitch.

  That fucking midget.

  Outside, Avery’s whore came out of the greenhouse, moving fast.

  Riddle watched her, his eye watering. He wiped at it and drank some mo
re.

  She went to the Plymouth—the front left fender dented, the hood crimped, the car’s ass low on its axle—leaned in through the shattered window, and snatched the Plymouth’s keys. She put them in her pocket, then returned to the greenhouse.

  “What y’all up to?” Riddle muttered through swollen lips.

  He watched the greenhouse and took another long, thirsty pull from the bottle. He remembered the curve, a thud against the fender. Blood in his eye, the tree slewing toward him. Then away, as he corrected.

  Upstairs, he heard the sound of bathwater running, the pipes in the walls of the old house gurgling.

  He took another swig.

  COTTON TAKES A BATH

  The preacher grimaced with pain on the edge of the cast-iron tub. He ran the water, tested the heat with his fingers. The girl sat quietly in the wicker chair beneath the window at the foot of the tub, her bare feet just brushing the checked tiles.

  Cotton turned off the bathwater and began working the buttons of his shirt, slowly. He folded the fabric back from his chest as if it were the slit skin of a fish. His chest was broad and hairy, old white scars crisscrossing the soft flesh of his belly. Above these, the fresh, scabbed wounds that made the crooked shapes of the river, the bayou.

  The girl sat forward on the edge of her chair and stared at his belly in wonder. “You did that to yourself?” she said.

  “Pain,” he said, “has long been my god.”

  The faucet dripped loudly in the silence.

  THE PLAN

  Inside the greenhouse, the hot, humid air sweet with the scent of Avery’s plants, Teia took a knee in the gravel beside the boy. He had come awake a while ago but had not moved save to draw himself up beneath the table and shiver, every now and then casting a fearful glance like a cornered stray cat. Avery cracked open the revolver and spun the ball. Five bullets, the hammer chamber empty. He pushed it shut. Outside, the rain had let up, though drops of water still played a beat on the panes overhead.

  “John,” Teia said.

  Avery tucked Cook’s gun into the front of his jeans, lifting his shirt out and over it.

  “John,” she said again. All anger in her voice had fled. She was plaintive, tired. “Why don’t we go? Right now. The baby’s here, I got these keys, let’s just go.” She saw that he saw her eyes, wet and pleading, and she saw how hard it was for him to refuse her, but he did. Stubbornly, he did.

  “Miranda and I, we started something this morning,” he said. “I have to finish it.”

  Teia stared at the moist floor where tiny clover had sprouted between the rocks. She slumped beneath the nigh-unbearable weight of the next few minutes. Nearby, the baby kicked atop her blanket in the gravel between two big tractor tires of dope. And now, she thought, he will ask me to say it all again, so that he can be sure I am sure. He was standing and she was sitting and his somber eyes were leveled at hers. He touched her chin, tilted it up.

  “Tell me,” he said. “The plan.”

  “You go to the house,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I take Grace, get the suitcase from the bedroom.”

  “Then to the car.”

  “I put the baby and the suitcase in the car.”

  “And?”

  “Then the boy.”

  “And?”

  “Start the car and wait.”

  “That’s right. And how long will I be?”

  Quietly, Teia said, “Not long.”

  “That’s right,” he said, and he cupped her cheek.

  She took his hand away from her face, enclosed it in hers. “Let’s just leave. Something terrible will happen if you go into that house, I—”

  “The plan,” he said, voice calm. “You have to go.”

  So goddamn calm. “John—”

  “Now, Teia.”

  She saw it in his eyes, the look he sometimes got: steely, faraway. The look of a man who had spent his entire life looking up at others while they looked over him, beyond him. The look of a man who finally meant to be seen. She kissed him, one last plea. “You have to go,” he said.

  She wiped her eyes and gathered up the baby. She held Grace in one arm and edged the door open. The rain had all but stopped and the day was steamy. She glanced back once, crossing the grass, and saw Avery slip through the crack in the door and circle left, around the greenhouse to approach Sabbath House unseen from the rear.

  THE CONSTABLE INVESTIGATES

  Riddle went walking when Avery’s whore left the greenhouse with the baby in her arms. Out the front door of Sabbath House and down the sagging steps he went. The rain kicked up again, fat drops that dampened the blood on his khaki shirt. Teia Avery had gone into the last shotgun house. Riddle made a fractured line for the greenhouse, bottle of whiskey stoppered in hand. He wandered wide, into the lane, bumped against the Plymouth’s trunk, rapping twice on the metal with his left hand and chuckling. Then he staggered back across the road to the greenhouse, where the door was cracked just a smidge.

  He yanked it open, went inside.

  Instantly he smelled something powerfully rank, the stink of long-unwashed skin. Scant gray light cracked through blacked-out panes and sketched the shapes of the midget’s tall plants. Far back in the gloom the constable saw, on the packed gravel floor, drawing backward beneath the overhang of a wide potter’s table from which it had just been creeping out, another shape, small and odd. Two brown eyes.

  Riddle set his whiskey on a low table beside a spade, a rake, a hammer.

  Fishing a cigarette from the pack in his left breast pocket, he said, through swollen lips, “Who’s that?”

  No answer came back save the sound of breathing.

  Riddle put the cigarette between his lips. He took from his hip pocket a matchbook from Shifty’s Tavern, opened it, tore the match with his teeth, then slid the book between the thumb and index finger of his right hand—had to wedge it there, since the whole damn hand had stopped working—and struck the match. He followed the glow to the back of the greenhouse, where he found a creature cowering beneath a table, a freak-show thing if ever there was one. “I’ll be good goddamned,” he said.

  The match burned his fingers and he hissed and dropped it.

  He struck another, and by the match’s flame he let his eyes roam over the pebbled landscape of the boy’s skin. He stared, silent, in awe of the ugliness before him. And there was something else, wasn’t there? Something familiar about this boy.

  He took the whiskey from the table, bottle sloshing, and sat down abruptly in the gravel. The jolt popped something in his back. He set the bottle aside, and when it tipped and spilled out, all he said was, “Shit.” His head lolled, then righted itself, and he remembered the cigarette between his lips, which he had not yet lit. He went about the tedium of tearing a third match, the last in the book. He lit the cigarette. Tossed the book at the boy. His left hand fumbled in the dirt for the empty bottle, and when he found it, he got up on his hands and knees, wheezing, coughing wetly.

  Finally, he stood again. He held the bottle by the base at first, and then, staring at the boy, flipped it in his hand so that he held it by the neck. He pointed a finger and said, “I know you. You’re dead. I saw you carried off from here when you was a baby.”

  Riddle heard the sound of something wet pattering the dirt. Over the boy’s already ripe body-stink and the pungency of the plants themselves, he smelled it: piss.

  The constable blinked sluggishly. “Maybe you weren’t dead,” he said. “What’d that witch do, keep you?” He remembered what some of the old-timers who used to frequent the Landing had said about Miranda Crabtree, in the months and years after Hiram disappeared. The old witch raising her, teaching her the black arts. “Miranda Crabtree,” the constable said, and he watched the boy, whose eyes swiveled at the name to meet Riddle’s one.

  “Oh,” Riddle said. “I see.”

  He reached behind his back to his belt and, after a long while of trying, managed to unsnap his handcuffs.
He let the cuffs dangle from one hand, the bottle in the other. He staggered forward and reached beneath the table and the boy scrabbled like a cat, but the constable’s big hands found an ankle, a leg, and he held on. “Come on, now,” he said. “Come here. Come on. Come on, son.”

  Riddle got one bracelet around the boy’s wrist, then slapped the other around a segment of metal conduit bolted into the brick wall, which ended somewhere as a spigot.

  “I don’t know how you got here, but take my word for it, boy, you ain’t a-leavin.”

  Riddle swung the whiskey bottle and the boy threw up his free arm to ward off the blow. The bottle made a great WHUMP but did not break. Eyes and teeth clenched in pain and terror, the boy slumped, held his arm to his side.

  Atop the potter’s table, Riddle saw a pair of drop-forged pruning shears, their ends sharp. He dropped the bottle, took up the shears.

  “Let’s see them pretty brown eyes,” he said.

  ALIVE

  The girl was wringing water from a sponge to soap the old preacher’s back, careful not to touch his bare flesh with her own—I won’t touch him ever again, if I can help it, she thought—when something hard and unseen struck her left arm. She flew backward, slipped on wet tiles, and fell flat on her back. Dazed, arm blazing, she lay staring up at the high slatted ceiling, where black mold came creeping out between the boards.