* * *
Early fall, Iskra’s island. The kudzu turning brown, dying on the vine. Miranda drove the last of the framing nails and dropped the hammer on the plywood subfloor. Down the hill, Littlefish came out of the woods, carrying a stack of two-by-fours on each shoulder. Miranda waved, but the boy had no free arms to wave back. Instead, he smiled.
The girl sat on the platform and tapped nails with swift, sure strokes into the plywood. She had put on weight and wore clothes that fit, and her skin—so pale before—had browned and freckled. Her hair grew long in thick yellow curls.
“Hey,” Miranda said, when Littlefish had dropped the lumber at the lip of the hill. She signed: Lunch.
The boy nodded, and the girl signed her agreement: Hungry.
Whatever strange magic brought her, Miranda thought, whatever nightmares she suffered elsewhere, she will grow up here a girl. She will live in the light.
They took cheese sandwiches wrapped in foil from a cooler and sat near the graves in the shade of the black oak’s branches, the sky above a warming blue. Highest on the slope, Iskra’s spot: a bundle of eucalyptus branches bound with twine, fresh mint growing atop the recently turned earth. Below these, the others, all bearing some marker the boy and the girl had made of sticks and flotsam they had pulled from the river. Hiram’s headstone nothing more than a single arrow driven into the dirt. Cora Crabtree’s the same cedarwood marker from the Landing, bearing her name, her birth, her death. Miranda herself had dug up the grave and brought Cora’s body here, to this place. The last of her old life set right.
A breeze tipped tin cans against one another in the boy’s garden.
To Miranda, the sound was like the pleasant company of a new spirit. She wondered if any such magic lingered. Boards creaking in the still afternoons, laughter on a breeze that was soft and kind.
She had been inside the bathhouse once, after midnight, while the boy and girl slept on the floor of the unfinished cabin, the stars their blanket. She carried a lantern and sat on the bench. She did not light the fire or carry water. Instead, she sat and waited and listened. She heard only the boy snoring out on the pine planks. Long after she was gone, she supposed, the vine growing up the hill would cover everything here: the cabin, the boy’s garden, the graves, this bathhouse. It would creep over the hill and the toolshed and climb the boy’s tall tree and choke the canyon, too, and the mystery and magic of this place would be forgotten, consumed by the green, which of late had returned to its long, easy slumber, no giants in the trees, no whispers in the woods. The cicadas all expired, evidence of their passing the husks they left in bark and wall and leaf.
Forgetting, Miranda thought, is a kind of protecting.
The girl sat cross-legged against a length of root that curled around her, reading a comic book as she ate her sandwich.
Miranda knew that Littlefish had been pestering her to choose a name. She wondered what it would be.
The boy set his sandwich on his knee. He swept his arm to indicate the cabin, the girl, the hilltop, a fresh crop of toadflax blooming yellow where the fire had scorched. Clouds massing like great white frigates in the sky.
Beautiful, he signed.
I am not the boatman’s daughter, she thought. I am not the witch’s child. I am not the leshii’s slave. I am no one’s but his and hers, and they are mine.
Home, Miranda said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of books helped me write The Boatman’s Daughter, among them W. F. Ryan’s The Bathhouse at Midnight, Norbert Guterman’s translation of Russian Fairy Tales by Aleksandr Afanas’ev, and The Archer’s Bible by Fred Bear. Any dedicated student of Russian folklore will know that I’ve taken certain liberties with the term leshii, which is absolutely a masculine deity, but we call our gods and goddesses by the words that fit. Their true names are beyond language, beyond gender. I like to think that an old witch who’s had her fill of crazy preachers conjures a certain power in “misusing” the word.
I’m forever grateful to the good people at MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who believed in the novel and helped to make it the best it could be. Thanks especially to my editor, Daphne Durham, and her assistant, Lydia Zoells. They’re a crack team. To Sara Wood and Abby Kagan, for a truly beautiful book, and to Naomi Huffman, Chloe Texier-Rose, Jeff Seroy, Emily Bell, and Sean McDonald, as well as the scads of people I’ve yet to meet whose hard work and dedication have somehow touched this project: many, many thanks.
Of Elizabeth Copps, my agent, and the great team at Maria Carvainis, what can I say that I haven’t already said? All writers should be so lucky.
To the women who read early drafts of Miranda’s story—Crystal, Genie, Kelly, and Dana—thank you for your wisdom, insight, and patience.
To Mom and Dad, who used to take me fishing when I was a kid, even though I mostly just sat in the car and read comic books: thank you. For so many reasons I can’t even begin to list here, this book is dedicated to you, with all my love.
And finally, to Crystal, my first and best reader: every word’s for you. I love you.
ALSO BY ANDY DAVIDSON
In the Valley of the Sun
A Note About the Author
Andy Davidson holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi. His debut novel, In the Valley of the Sun, was nominated for the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel, This Is Horror’s 2017 Novel of the Year, and the 2018 Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award. Born and raised in Arkansas, he now makes his home in Georgia with his wife and a bunch of cats. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
I. In a Certain Kingdom, in a Certain Land
II. First Run
Upriver
Sabbath House
Signs and Wonders
Littlefish
The Language of Family
The Heart
Crabtree Landing
Rooding
Digging
In the Land of Spain
III. Second Run
In his Tree, Littlefish Dreaming
The Trade Tonight
It’s in the Mouth
Choices
What the Girl Saw, on the Prosper
Faith
Arrangements
Billy Cotton
Not the Least Among Them
Licorice
I Used to be Handsome
Bathhouse
Bannik
Sunlight
Hand in Hand
Secrets
Sharp
Aim
No Shelter Here
All There Is
Into the Woods
Interruption
IV. Final Run
Cargo
At the Camp
Avery and Miranda
Cotton on the River
The Men Who Killed Cook
Safe
Trestle and Fire and Water
The Lord’s Business
The Girl, in a Tower
The Blood-Sprinkled Way
Miranda and the Giant
Iskra’s Path
A By-God Devil
A Cold Camp
Ice Cream
V. Revelations
The Nature of Friendship
Wall
Miranda at the Cabin
Teia Goes to Church
Lost
The Father Hen’s House
Through the White
The Greenhouse
The Edge of the Abyss
Tremors and Eclipse
Rock and Tree and Monster
Fault
Miranda in the Tree
Arrow and Cross
The Land Will Tell You a Story
Riddle at the Window
Cotton Takes a Bath
The Plan
The Constable Investigates
Alive
A Problem in the Trunk
Ready
Reach
Avery
Ritual
Teia in Trouble
In the Master Bath
Look and See
The Constable, Screaming
What Miranda Saw
Go
Last Breath
The Boy, Not Alone
To the River, to the End
Lena
Her Brother’s Trail
Shadow and Root and Stone
Fire and Flood
VI. After the Flood
Acknowledgments
Also by Andy Davidson
A Note About the Author
Copyright
MCD × FSG Originals
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2020 by Andy Davidson
All rights reserved
First edition, 2020
Branch illustration (detail) by iStock.com/stevezmina1
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72094-0
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