The Boatman's Daughter

by Andy Davidson

  How unworthy I proved, he thought.

  At the head of the casket, he turned a key in a lock. The key was stubborn, and when it finally clicked, the casket gave a hiss, and the lid’s tongue popped free from the body’s groove, breaking the seal and releasing the moldered stench of old bones and death. Cotton raised the lid with a grunt. It was heavy glass. The two caskets had been made by a company out of state and shipped here in the winter of 1963. Cotton reached into the coffin to caress the near hairless skull of his wife. “I’ve brought you someone,” he said. He scooped up the heavy boy, whose struggles only tightened his bonds. “Look here,” he said, holding the child up like a great fish he had caught in the bayou. “He’s come back to us, after all these years.”

  He spilled the boy out of his arms into the coffin.

  The boy’s weight crunched Lena Cotton’s dry bones.

  The preacher closed the lid and locked it.

  HER BROTHER’S TRAIL

  She bypassed the dock and drove the boat straight through the water grass and lodged it like an arrow in the bank. Armed with bow and shaft, she stepped onto the land and walked the edge of the property, which was deathly still in the twilight. She nocked an arrow behind the first shotgun house and went low around the empty building. At the corner of the porch, she took a view of the lane and the house across the way. She heard only the distant, alien cry of the cicadas.

  Blackened panes from her vision: the greenhouse. She moved quickly across the road and through the open door into the dim shaft of light. Right away she saw the constable’s body sprawled in the gravel, half hidden by the thick growth of the plants. A machete near his hand. She felt nothing at the sight of him save the cataloguing of his absence, the great amount of blood he had spilled in leaving.

  With the end of her bow, she broke out four, five panes of glass, to let in more light.

  Now she saw the overturned table, the indentations on the floor where its legs had stood. Beneath it, rocks and earth displaced in the shape of a boy who had been terrified. She touched the metal pipe that had pulled slightly away from the brick, saw the scrapes the handcuffs—missing from Charlie Riddle’s belt—had made as Littlefish had struggled violently against them. A little silver key lay in the gravel beside Riddle. She stuffed it in her jeans pocket.

  She saw her brother’s blood on the brick foundation, a few stray hairs from his head stuck there. The furrows where he had been dragged toward the open door. Blood on the door, and more hair, where his head had banged on the way out.

  The blood not yet tacky.

  Outside the greenhouse, she saw the trail, stalks of weed broken, the long grass bending away, toward the woods.

  The old burned church.

  Miranda heard the heavy shuffle of wings. Above, vultures circled in the gray sky. There were more perched in the oaks overhead like ghoulish celebrants. Miranda moved through the grass toward a spot where three of the birds were shuffling.

  It is not him. It is not him. It is not my brother.

  It was not.

  It was John Avery.

  She raised her bow and let fly the arrow. It struck the largest bird in the breast. Two more took flight, though they didn’t go far. One landed in the lower reaches of a tree. The other perched on the dilapidated porch railing of Sabbath House. The bird she had killed lay at Avery’s feet. She knelt beside him, saw where the birds had eaten his eyes. His lips. Part of his tongue. Miranda saw the hole in his denim shirt, too, the wound that had killed him.

  She rolled him over, hoping it might keep the vultures from the rest of his face.

  She made for the furrow in the grass, her brother’s trail.

  Into the trees. Where the sign became a furrow of pine needles, broken branches, an old man’s bare footprints.

  She did not look back.

  SHADOW AND ROOT AND STONE

  The crypt door was open and issued a cool, dank air. Miranda went down, down. She slogged through a wide puddle of water from the day’s rainfall, then stepped quietly onto dry stones. Things skittered along the walls and ceiling above. Ahead, the chamber widened into a vault where lantern light danced. She listened. Heard the preacher’s strong baritone as he sang.

  “‘O, a better day is dawning, a day that knows no night…’”

  His voice sputtered strangely, full of air and something else, something wet.

  Miranda drew an arrow, nocked it.

  “‘When all sorrow shall be banished and every wrong made right…’”

  She put tension on her arrow.

  “‘God will take away all fear, wipe away our every tear…’”

  She stepped into the vault.

  Naked, his back to Miranda, the preacher stood over the raised lid of a glass casket, setting something gently into it. Nearby, a second casket flickered with the lantern’s greasy flame.

  “‘You’ll be there…’” he sang.

  When he stepped away, Miranda saw that the girl lay in the casket, nestled among purple silk brocade.

  “‘I’ll be there…’”

  The preacher turned to the lantern on the floor, beside which he had set his straight razor. His skin hung loosely from his frame. His cheek, Miranda saw, was a gory red flap, blood sputtering through as he sang.

  “‘In that better day that’s dawning we’ll be there…’”

  A muffled thump came from the other casket, which was shut and locked.

  Inside, Littlefish was trussed up and struggling atop the bones of his mother’s corpse.

  A rage swept through Miranda Crabtree like a wind.

  Hunkered, opening his razor, Cotton froze at the creak of her string. He looked up slowly, squinting into the dark. His mutilated face registered no malice, no surprise, no emotion of any kind when she stepped out of shadow and into the dancing light. He glanced at the open coffin, the girl inside. His hand moved slowly away from the razor, out of sight behind the lantern.

  “Art thou a ghost, too, Miranda,” the old preacher said in a hushed voice, teeth shining through his torn cheek, “or are you flesh and blood?”

  “Don’t speak,” she said, aligning her broadhead.

  “Thank you for raising my son,” Billy Cotton said.

  Miranda’s aim faltered, briefly.

  She heard a metallic click, saw Cotton’s hand moving from behind the lantern, saw Cook’s black revolver gleaming orange in the light.

  The bolt struck the preacher in the chest, buried itself to the fletching just below the red raw curve of Iskra’s bayou. The whisper of the arrow’s passing made the lantern flame dip. The preacher dropped the pistol and sat back against the wall, pale legs splayed. A thin line of blood trickled from his mouth.

  Miranda dropped her bow and went to Lena’s casket. She pried at the lid until she saw the key. She turned it. The boy stared up at her from atop his mother’s corpse, eyes wet. She touched his head, kissed him. Dug in her jeans for the handcuff key she had found near the fat lawman’s corpse. She unlocked each of the boy’s wrists and the tension on the rope eased, leaving only his ankles bound. “Put your arms around me,” she said, and when he did, she lifted him out of the coffin and set his feet on the stone floor. He clung to her fiercely, shaking all over. She held him and whispered in his ear, “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  When the boy’s breathing had steadied, his tremors passed, she left him and went to where Cotton had fallen and brought back his razor and used it to cut the rope binding his ankles.

  Littlefish gripped the edge of the second coffin and stared at the girl inside.

  He leaned into the casket and kissed her gently on the cheek.

  Her eyes opened, briefly.

  From the wall came a gurgle, a sputter.

  Cotton sat with his back to the bricks, blood frothing around the arrow in his chest.

  Littlefish held out his hand, made a sign with the other.

  Miranda shook her head. “It’s done,” she said.

  He made the sign again, h
is other hand still open. Expectant.

  Remembering the torn page in his picture book, the minister’s throat slashed red, she put Billy Cotton’s straight razor in the boy’s webbed fingers. I have done the worst of it, she thought. He is saved from that. Whatever happens next is his to do.

  Littlefish limped toward the dying man, one leg dragging in a manner oddly reminiscent of the preacher’s. He stood over him and made a sign Miranda could not see. The lantern flame flickered in his eyes. He made the sign again.

  Cotton’s eyes rolled weakly in the boy’s direction.

  The boy held five fingers splayed above his head, his thumb touching the center of his forehead, a coxcomb shape. Veins ran like lightning through the tissue between the boy’s fingers.

  Father, Littlefish signed.

  He knelt and closed the preacher’s razor and put it in his hand, then closed the preacher’s fingers around the hilt. Cotton blinked and made a brief wet sound, like water leaving a drain. He shut his eyes.

  “Miranda?” The girl’s voice, slurred, as she eased up in the coffin. “Do you see?” Her drugged gaze on the crypt’s deep shadows. “Do you see her?”

  Miranda saw nothing but darkness.

  Littlefish looked, too, seemed to squint at something.

  Miranda put a hand on the girl’s arm. Brushed hair back from her forehead.

  “Look now,” the girl said.

  Miranda did, and there, in the shadows, white as chalk, was the woman who had danced with the boatman by lamplight. Lena Cotton stared from behind the veil of her wedding dress, and Miranda stared back, and for an instant it seemed that hers was a series of faces both strange and familiar, those of all the women rent by the violence of this house, last among them, perhaps, Miranda’s. And then there was no face at all, only shadow and root and stone.

  Miranda opened her arms and took the boy and the girl into them.

  And thus the long season of grief was ended.

  All fathers buried, all graves filled.

  FIRE AND FLOOD

  Night had fallen by the time they reached the boat at the water’s edge. Miranda laid the girl in the bottom, signed for Littlefish to stay with her.

  Where are you going? he asked her.

  “One last thing,” she said. “Won’t be long.”

  She took the fuel can and went to where John Avery’s corpse lay in the grass and gathered him into her arms and carried him down the lane and across the road. She walked up the steps to the Holy Day Church and went through the open metal doors. She took Avery into the church and swept aside the Bible and the praying hands on the table. Here she placed the corpse and doused it, along with the altar. She picked up the Bible and lay it across the dwarf’s chest. She took the box of matches she had brought from the mercantile out of her pocket.

  She lit the Bible first, and everything else caught quickly.

  By the time she reached the dock, black smoke and flames were pouring from the low, flat roof. Miranda pushed the boat into the water and leaped in with her brother and the girl. She brought them around and started the motor.

  Soon they came to Crabtree Landing.

  Miranda cut the motor and watched the Landing grow closer.

  She seemed to consider it, as if seeing it for the first time.

  She pulled Cook’s pistol out of the small of her back, where she had tucked it upon leaving the crypt. She threw it into the river.

  The river carried them on past the mercantile, the floating dock.

  She let it.

  Is that where you lived? the boy asked from the bow.

  No, she said.

  They drifted on.

  She started the motor again.

  * * *

  The rain came again in the night, hard, relentless. Thunder spooked livestock and the lightning forked to the ground and burst along the sky like scattered glass, made Nash County a kind of crucible. Upriver, the reservoir at Lake Whitman began to rise. The fissure in the earth wall ever-widening, until the banks that held the structure in place slid away, and the dam collapsed.

  A wall of water, thirty feet high, spilled through the bottoms.

  Sabbath Dock washed away as the water came welling up the inlet and the gravel lane, flooding the manse and shotgun houses. The windowless church smoldering in the rain, the crane high upon the cross dislodged by the hot winds that had roared up from below when the fire was raging. Only the cross remained, hanging askew.

  Out of the wet dark night, the bottom dwellers came. They came in boats, sodden, their eyes hollow, the men among them working tillers and paddles as the women clutched children and dogs, shivering and wet. A silent family of four in a long boat who had, on occasion, taken fish and game from Hiram Crabtree and his daughter, the youngest of them a boy in corduroy pants clutching a small rabbit-eared television.

  A Shovelhead crested a hill on the county road.

  The hooded giant sat astride his machine at the water’s rising edge, watching the people drag themselves in exodus onto dry ground. He touched the crow’s foot at his throat, then dismounted and helped a wiry boy and his mother land their boat, even held the nose of the vessel steady as the father came tromping out in soaked boots. The giant wore black jeans and a black T-shirt beneath his sweatshirt, a red rag around his head. He wore a leather scabbard on his thigh, in it the long curved bill of a hand scythe. The family froze when their light strayed to his face, grim and square and painted blood-red, black lines of the skull tattooed in his flesh giving him the appearance of a skinless ghoul. The bottom dwellers formed up together in the rain, trying not to look at him. They walked up the gravel road toward the highway. They did not look back. Later, they would tell themselves they had seen no one at all, or, if the man persisted in their dreams, let him be a kindly ghost in the story of this night, they said, some ferryman of the storm come to bear them onto dry land.

  The giant took the family’s boat, passing others as he followed the road, which was now a wide, fast-moving river between the trees. He navigated by the beam of a spot he had brought from his bike’s saddlebag. Soon he came to the burned-out Holy Day Church, across from it the iron gates to the compound. He went through these and slowly up the lane, the boughs of the oaks above close enough now to brush with the tips of his fingers.

  Shining his light, he saw the fat constable’s body caught in the broken panes of the greenhouse where the water had washed him half through and snagged him in the glass. A wide crack in his skull.

  He circled Sabbath House, the front doors of which stood open, water ever-climbing the wide foyer staircase. He brought the boat back to the porch and tied off to the railing and waded into the house, among the floating detritus of a meager life abandoned. In the foyer, a vulture lay upon the stairs, washed up by the storm. An arrow in its breast, the fletching a blue-gray. A smile traced his bone-white lips. “Does-it-Matter,” he said quietly. He went upstairs. Searched every room. The house was empty. From the porch, he gazed out at the row of six shotgun houses in the lightning, their vacant windows, their disappearing porches. All manner of trash and debris swirling past. A chicken coop. A coffee table. A length of board that might have been the painted side of someone’s barn.

  The giant nosed his boat gently up to the greenhouse, where he broke the windows with his hatchet and paddled in. He drifted among the stalk-tops of the last few plants, hacking and heaping them in the boat. He drew his craft alongside the outer wall and hacked, too, the fat cop’s head free of its body. He threw it in the bottom of the boat with the plants. No great satisfaction, but it would do.

  He steered into the lane beneath the oaks, where he cut his motor and drifted, listening.

  He heard only thunder at first, the patter of rain, the rush of water.

  He thought of the woman, wondered if she had set loose all this destruction, brought down nature’s wrath on this haunted place. She was strong. She was capable. It made him happy to think she had.

  From overhead, he heard a single sh
riek, like a baby’s cry.

  He shot his spot into the trees and saw a great gray barred owl, its eyes dark hollows, its face a skull.

  Still as death beneath his light.

  VI

  After the Flood

  Days later, neighbors were still rescuing neighbors—men and women caught unawares who had struggled onto rooftops, families separated in the dead of night when the water came rolling in, busting windows, collapsing walls. Boats trolled among the trees, voices calling out the names of those who had been lost and were not yet found. Waterlogged bodies drifted out, some snagged in trees. Others were found in hay fields miles from the river, when the water went down. Among them, caught up on a shelf of riprap near the highway, where a bridge passed over a creek, was a man in black leather, sharp teeth like a devil’s. An arrow broken in his chest.

  For years, people told stories about the things they saw.

  A white Bronco lodged in a house trailer like a missile.

  A tractor hanging by its front axle in an oak tree.

  An antique couch snagged in a deadfall.

  Six buzzards perched on the spinning corpse of a mule, riding it like a raft.

  Eating as they rode.

  One week later, Miranda returned to Crabtree Landing. She rounded the last oxbow and saw the damage and felt a strange lightness at what she beheld. Two supports beneath the rear of the store had crumbled and the whole back half of the place, including the upper porch, had broken off into the river and washed away, along with the floating dock. The wooden stairs rose up from the struts like the spine of a skinned thing. The Landing itself a skull without a jaw. The iron ladder still stood in the river but reached nowhere. Hiram’s work shed was gone, too. She banked the johnboat and climbed the embankment and went around to the front door, which the water had torn completely away. The store had flooded, and most of the shelves and what little stock was left were scattered across the floor, mired in a reeking sludge, the odd dead fish rotting in the summer heat. Miranda waded through this to the panel behind the counter, where she bent and reached up inside and took out from among the two-by-four frame a dozen plastic-wrapped packets of cash, one for every ferry to Cook since she was fourteen. No fortune, but enough. She climbed the stairs, aware of the sun on her cheeks as she did, balancing with one hand on the beadboard to her right. In the living room, she gathered her two remaining bows, her quivers, some clothes. She leafed through the pages of the slim picture album until she found the photograph at the pier off Lake Whitman, she and her mother. She took it out, then took the double-exposed photograph from Hiram’s war album. Wondering if Hiram had ever known Lena Cotton was pregnant. She pocketed both pictures and stood in her living room for the last time and looked around. No sounds came from downstairs—no crickets, no compressors. The mercantile was quiet. All the ghosts had fled.