The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  Alarmed at her fall, the old man shot up out of the tub.

  The boy. He’s alive. Someone is hurting him, but he’s alive.

  Scared, so scared, something awful happening—

  She closed her eyes, focused on the pain radiating out from her arm, her arm become the boy’s, into the dark of a shed … the boy’s shed? No, not a shed, but somewhere moist and dark, somewhere near … a smell: pungent, dank.

  The preacher loomed, naked, dripping.

  She reached deeper into the darkness, even as she shrank from the old man’s proffered hand.

  Miranda, she thought.

  A PROBLEM IN THE TRUNK

  Grace bundled in a light blanket at her breast, Teia crossed the lawn between the shotgun house and the Plymouth, carrying a heavy suitcase and two thick quilts pressed under her arm. When she opened the rear passenger’s door, she did not look at the front seat. It was a horror of flesh and blood drying, once-white vinyl shellacked red. Teia arranged the first quilt across the backseat and lay the wrapped and fretful baby on it. She spread the second quilt, doubled up, across the front.

  The rain had started up again, a needling.

  She fished in her pocket and plugged the key into the trunk and opened it.

  She gasped.

  The constable’s deputy lay inside, a twisted crimson mess.

  Teia felt the shakes beginning in her arms, threatening to spread down her legs, up her spine, to her teeth. She set her jaw and reached into the trunk and took one of the deputy’s boots and tried to drag him out, but the boot pulled free and she fell backward onto the grass, landing hard on her rump. She tossed the boot aside. Was about to try again when she heard something smash inside the greenhouse.

  The door stood open wide, Teia saw.

  She listened, heard only the steady chug of the generator out back.

  Fear coiled in her gut.

  She folded the deputy’s long leg back into the trunk and slammed it. She got behind the wheel, started the motor, and eased the car over the lane, parked it in the grass. Left it running, big engine rumbling and popping, and went inside the greenhouse.

  READY

  Miranda woke in the hammock to the sight of Hiram’s skull, jawless, against her breast. His eye sockets rimmed in mud. His ribs reached around her, as if to comfort. Her clothes were dry and crusted, stiff against her. Her hair thick and matted. Through the window she could tell it was still light outside, the skies roiling with fast-moving clouds, the eclipse having passed dreamlike while she slept. Thunder shook the little shed.

  “We’re getting near the end,” a voice said.

  Miranda started and saw the girl sitting cross-legged on the floor in Miranda’s old T-shirt and jeans. She was reading, an open book in her lap, taken from the heap on the floor.

  Miranda pushed out of the hammock, left her father’s remains cradled there.

  The girl flipped a page. She did not look up. “I’m with the old preacher who calls himself Father. I’m helping him get ready. But I like it better here. It’s nice here.”

  Miranda went stiff-legged and sore toward the boy’s table, leaned against it. A coffee can of Crayolas toppled, crayons spilling and rolling to the edge of the table, some dropping into the dirt.

  “Get ready for what?” Miranda managed.

  “His ritual,” the girl said. “You have a ritual, too. Boiling water. The witch’s finger.” She closed her book and stared over Miranda’s shoulder, out the window, where small droplets of rain had begun to patter against the glass. “I like rain,” she said.

  “I do, too,” Miranda said, but the girl kept talking as if she had not heard.

  “Boiling water, the witch’s finger. A jar, broken. The chickens got that.”

  “Got what?” Miranda’s throat dry as dust.

  “The chickens are fighting over it. It was in the jar because the woods and the worms took it and the green lady kept it all this time, safe in the dirt like your daddy’s bones, and when the time was right she gave it back to the old witch. The woods took it and the green lady gave it back, just like she gave the old preacher back his razor. She knew he’d need it and she knew you’d need what’s in the jar and the old witch kept it safe in the cupboard, but now the chickens have it. It was in the jar and the jar is broken, the chickens have it. The jar is broken. Broken jar. Boiling water. The witch’s finger. And blood. Blood and the words. You have to say the words—”

  “What words?” Miranda said.

  “—say the words, just say the words. Look and see. Look and see. Look and see.”

  “Look and see,” Miranda whispered.

  “Look and see, look and see, look and see!” Her voice rose in pitch as she began to cry: “I’m in the bath with the old man, not with the boy, and he’s in trouble! He’s hurting him, a big man, he’s hurting him and he’s scared, why are you doing that, why, why are you hurting him, oh, please, don’t do that!”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t see, but you can! Look and see! Jar, water, finger, blood! Hurry!”

  Miranda threw open the door and ran into the rain to the smoldering wreck of Iskra’s cabin. Repeating in her head everything the girl had said: boiling water, the witch’s finger, a broken jar, blood.

  Look and see.

  REACH

  In the upstairs bath of Sabbath House, the girl opened her eyes where she lay on the floor. She had gone away, had split herself between here and … elsewhere. The old witch’s island. The boy’s shed. The ruins of the cabin. Only for an instant, though it had seemed an eternity.

  She felt dizzy, had to flatten both hands on the cool tile floor to still the swimming in her head.

  The preacher reached down to help her up, but she pushed his hand away with the back of her arm still safe in its sleeve. Tried to slow her breathing.

  The old man eased down into the tub and sat back and closed his eyes as if to wait, confident that the girl would recover from whatever fit had gripped her, would take up her sponge and resume the slow, mechanical circling of sponge over skin.

  The girl’s throat felt hoarse, scratchy, as if she’d been yelling. What had she done? She didn’t know, really. The boy’s pain had triggered it, a sudden leap across space, time. Picturing the world as that great, transparent jewel, her own face reflected in all facets of the diamond’s cut, and then, out of a hall of infinite mirrors, two more faces emerged, Sister and the boy toiling in their own mad nightmares, and the girl had simply reached out for one, fingers parting the diamond’s wall like water, and she had seen—

  She sat on the edge of the tub. Reached into the water and drew out the sponge and wrung it. Then resumed washing the old man’s chest, and soon the preacher began to hum his dreadful hymn.

  I reached, she thought. That’s what I did.

  And Miranda heard.

  In a moment, her heart had slowed, her breathing eased.

  AVERY

  Avery went up the back porch steps and through the unlocked door and kitchen and into the main foyer. There he stood listening for any sound. A smear of blood on the wall outside the parlor, where Avery half expected to find Charlie Riddle dead or dying. But the room was empty. He bit off a curse, having already imagined the satisfaction of pressing the gun barrel to the constable’s good eye, John Avery the dwarf standing tall over Constable Charlie Riddle for once. He listened again. Heard the soft baritone of the old preacher’s humming. Upstairs.

  Avery moved cautiously up the foyer staircase, one hand reaching above his head to steady himself along the banister. Ball of the heavy gun pressing cold against the bare flesh of his belly beneath his shirt. When he reached the top of the stairs, breathing fast and shallow, he saw the master bedroom door aslant, lamp glow spilling out. He could hear the old man humming softly of the sweet by and by.

  Avery stepped onto the landing and moved through a knife’s edge of light, sure that the sound of the creaking floor or his own heart pounding would betray him. Nei
ther did. He reached out, put his hand on the knob of the bedroom door, and hesitated.

  He thought of Cook.

  The way Cotton had reached without qualm into the Styrofoam box to take out Cook’s head and gaze up the stump of the neck like a boy peering up a doll’s dress.

  Avery took Cook’s pistol from his waist.

  He turned the doorknob and went into the bedroom.

  RITUAL

  The cabin’s roof and floor had collapsed and two hens and a rooster clucked and pecked in the exposed earth beneath the hut. Everything had a greasy, black smell. Soot ran the consistency of ink in the rain. She ducked a fallen beam, stepped over the remnants of a kitchen chair. The old woman’s bread bowl, scorched black. Only the iron stove and stone hearth and the pump in the kitchen sink—

  boiling water

  —remained intact.

  Miranda dumped rainwater from a blackened enamel pot. She sloshed it full with fresh water from the pump and set it on the stove. She cast about for anything dry, but all the wood was damp. She remembered the bathhouse, where wood was stacked beneath the tin roof of the lean-to. She ran, her side thick and heavy but old in its hurt. She loaded up with as many dry lengths as she could carry, along with a handful of kindling from a pail, and all of this she stuffed into the belly of the boxwood stove back in the ruins of the cabin. She went to Iskra’s cupboard and rummaged through the drawers until she found a small box of matches. Inside, there were three.

  She struck one, and it snapped.

  She struck another, and it would not catch.

  She was about to try the third when she heard a commotion kick up among the hens.

  She followed the sound into what was left of the pantry, only one wall intact, all the shelves collapsed. The floor here in the narrow space had fallen in, and the joists jutted like the bones of a fish half eaten. Jars had burst and scorched with the heat. The wood made tumorous with fleshy, pulpy things burned black. Down below, in the space beneath the cabin, the chickens were flying at each other, beating their wings. She could see the scraps of a shattered jar, some long tendril of something in the dirt that they were fighting over. She dropped down between them and kicked them away—they fled into the shadows to cluck and fuss—and bent over their prize.

  At first it looked like an earthworm, a night crawler. But when she picked it up carefully by the tail and blew on it and brushed away the debris, holding it up to the dull late afternoon light, she saw that it was a squashed human eye, burst like a grape, hanging from a few last shreds of nerve, whatever the chickens had not managed to eat.

  A jar, broken.

  In the jelly of the eye, she saw a sliver of iris, cornflower-blue.

  The house shuddered around her. Wood rumbled against wood.

  She knew the eye at once. Remembered the sensation of her thumb pushing it deep into the socket, how it had given way, warm and wet, a squish, a pop. She remembered running with it, not even feeling it sticky and soft in two pieces in her hand until she was on the water, safe. She had dropped it in the johnboat’s wake. She remembered that. But here it was now, made whole again among the ruins of the witch’s cupboard. Bits of green-colored glass all around it.

  The bottle from her vision in the tree.

  She imagined Iskra’s old hands holding it beneath the bayou’s surface, a layer of rich dark silt sluicing in. Stoppering its murky contents on a high shelf in the pantry. A vessel still in want of its final filling, the constable’s plucked eye, which one day, week, or year was not there, and the next it was—returned by the river that had claimed it when Miranda threw it in. She imagined these things and knew that this was how it had all happened. She saw the eye growing, suspended in the jar’s silty womb like an otherworldly stalk.

  She tucked the eye and its tendril of nerve into her shirt pocket and pulled herself out of the hole in the floor—her hands squishing in black pantry goo—as all around her the charred bones of Iskra’s cabin began to shake and groan as if they were coming alive, as if the house itself were attempting to stand on the stilts that raised it above the sloped ground.

  In the pit of the living room, beneath the joists, the rooster beat its wings as if to warn something away.

  An iron poker fell with a clang, and the door of the heavy boxwood stove swung open.

  Miranda opened her pocket, peered in closer at the eye, like a hunk of frog jelly. Like the grub she had buried in the earth. Yesterday? The day before?

  Working quickly—

  boiling water

  —she crouched on her knees by the stove and struck the final match.

  It flared. She set it among the kindling. The kindling glowed, dimmed.

  “No, no, no,” she said. She blew on it.

  A stiff breeze blew up, as if something had drawn one last breath and sent it through the bones of the house, and a flame caught inside the stove.

  The rain seemed to cooperate, too, slackening to a random patter. She left the fire to blaze and went back to the bathhouse, where she knelt by Iskra’s corpse. She took the old woman’s filleting knife from her apron—the handle charred—and with hands that shook, put the blade against the witch’s right index finger. She grimaced and pressed the blade into blackened flesh. She cut at the joint. It was not unlike topping an ear of corn.

  Husk, blade, bone.

  Now the fire was roaring and the water was beginning to boil. She dropped Iskra’s finger into the water and took the gauze from her own hand, where Iskra had sliced her in the bathhouse the day before. But the wound had clotted. And the stitching in her side had held. So she made a new cut, drawing the blade over the palm of her left hand. She had bled so much, did she have any left?

  She dripped into the pot and wiped Iskra’s knife on her jeans and set it aside on the hearth.

  She stoked the fire.

  Boiling water.

  The witch’s finger.

  Blood.

  A jar, broken, and the words.

  Putting a hand over the constable’s eye in her pocket, she opened her mouth and started to speak, but she hitched, no idea what the words should be.

  She closed her eyes, and in her mind’s eye she saw the boy as she knew him, sunning himself along the bank or hopping out of a tree, bow and arrow in hand, smiling, warm.

  She moved her hand from the pocket of her shirt to her heart, and from there began to shape a word with her fingers, and then another word, and soon both hands were speaking, and the words were tumbling out silently, and she hoped they were as right and true as the arrows she and the boy had shot together, on hunting trips in the great green bottoms and all along the banks of the River Prosper.

  TEIA IN TROUBLE

  Teia took the butcher’s knife Avery had left on the nightstand out of the waist of her jeans. She stood in the greenhouse doorway, listening, but heard nothing over the sound of the generator. She moved quietly among the plants in their tractor tires, knife thrust out before her. In the back, the boy had drawn up into a sitting position beneath the potting shelf, his knees tight against his chest. At first she thought he was afraid of her, but then he jerked and shook his arms and she heard and saw the handcuffs, one of the boy’s hands secured to the water pipe anchored in the brick. She caught a whiff of ammonia.

  She heard a sound, hollow, like the plunk of an empty bottle against soft earth, and then she was on her hands and knees in the gravel and clover, a roaring in her ears that was not the generator.

  Someone loomed over her, weaved drunkenly. Held a pair of pruning shears and an empty whiskey bottle. The knife was kicked away, into the shadows beneath the plants. She felt a boot in her side, and all the air left her body.

  Her vision darkened. She rolled over.

  A shape above her, a giant, big and wide and reeking of tobacco and whiskey and something else, something red.

  IN THE MASTER BATH

  Avery went slowly through the preacher’s bedroom, which was sparse in its furnishings save the four-poster bed and a marble
-topped bedside table, on it the old man’s Bible, unfurled to the Gospels like a lazy, thoughtless maw. He held the pistol before him, never more aware of his stubby fingers, his awkward grip on a weapon made for bigger hands, the inevitable buck that might tear it away should he have to fire it.

  He pushed through the bathroom door and saw the preacher hunched forward in the claw-foot tub. Humming still. A girl sat on the edge behind him, soaping the old man’s back with a fat yellow sponge. She wore an oversized T-shirt and jeans, had rolled the sleeves of the T-shirt up to her shoulders, which were small white knobs.

  Avery stood there, gun in hand, and did not move.

  The girl looked up, saw him first. The sponge went still against the old man’s back. Her mouth tightened and her eyes shifted, slightly, to the gun.

  Cotton stopping humming. He cocked an ear over his shoulder, as if attuned to the very beating of the girl’s heart. He showed no surprise when he looked up, as if this were a betrayal he had long expected. He met Avery’s eyes, ignoring the gun. “John,” he said.

  Water sloshing in the bath.

  “Get up,” Avery said. “Now.”

  With marshaled dignity, the old preacher put his arms on the sides of the tub and raised himself, naked and dripping, from the bath. His left calf was swollen red from three raw punctures. His chest stitched with angry red cuts. As if someone had carved a map into the preacher’s chest. His arms shook and his legs quivered. A whorl of blood in the water.

  “Out.” Avery cocked the revolver.

  Cotton stepped out onto the tiles, holding fast to the edge of the tub.

  The girl, sponge clutched at her chest, backed away from the tub.

  “Where’s Riddle?”

  “Downstairs, last I saw him,” the old man said.