The Tangled Bridge

by Rhodi Hawk

  He took her hand and placed a kind of necklace in it. A long leather thong, with a click beetle carved into tupelo wood hanging as a pendant. The big false eyes stared like a voodoo doll. Strange, yes, but strangely beautiful.

  “Gaston, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Here, let me tie it for you.”

  He put it around her throat and pulled it snug, cutting away the leather tails. “You can’t take it off while you’re there.”

  She looked at him, puzzled. “Why not?”

  “It’s tricky over there. Look, I got one, too. Cut the ends off for me.”

  He produced another necklace just like the one he’d given her and tied it around his own throat in a permanent knot. She accepted the knife and fumbled to cut off the crude leather tails.

  He looked at her then, gazing at her for a long moment, then he swallowed and nodded as if answering a question.

  “Right. Now we gotta get.”

  * * *

  WHAT MADELEINE WASN’T EXPECTING, what she couldn’t possibly have conceived, was that Gaston would not take her outside to some boat or byway or high ground trail. Instead he led her down, straight down, deep into the trunk of the cypress.

  He lifted a cutout of wood that had blended in as the floor of the tree hollow, and he slipped down into a kind of chamber below. Briar mist rolled up to her, silver and cool.

  She realized Gaston must use this little chamber for storage to keep the animals out of his stash of food. It smelled like salted herring in there, which might have repulsed her at any other time but under the circumstances, having been in starvation mode for so long, she felt the urge to leap down in there and hoard the salted fish to herself.

  “Well come on,” Gaston said.

  She hesitated above the hole; roots and bits of rotted wood pointed downward to a shimmer of reflection deep below where bayou water had leaked in—like the inside of a bog pitcher plant.

  He must have seen the expression on her face, because he said, “Yes, this here’s a trap alright. But not for you.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s like I done said, where we goin ain’t so much gonna hide us as make it tough to follow.”

  She took a deep breath. Gaston seemed trustworthy. And he’d pretty much saved her life. Still, she had little defense left if he turned rogue. She looked at him and swallowed. There seemed no choice but to follow, and so she climbed in and he replaced the hidden hatch.

  Now the only light came from the briar. She felt strangely exhilarated, as though while her body was feeling all the more dragged down with each moment, her spirit was shedding a dead weight and was anxious to run free. Like above, the inside of the chamber was covered in carvings, many so old that they’d weathered into the wood, which made them difficult to decipher without careful inspection. There were also wooden crates and chests, one of which must have contained the salted fish.

  They had to slide-climb down on their backs, the opening growing narrower as they descended. A sudden change of temperature indicated they were below water level. The air tasted like river bottom. Now there was only enough room to admit one person at a time, and Gaston was sliding down just ahead. Sounds of his body going into water. She got the sense that going down was much easier than climbing back up.

  “Ah, to see a nice hidey slide,” came Severin’s voice.

  She was creeping down from above, and the thorns had curled in to form a tunnel along the inside shaft of the tree. Severin moved face-first, climbing hand over hand along the thorns like a funnel spider.

  Madeleine’s body was going slack; her grip insufficient to stabilize her descent. So hard to keep alert. Loose, rotted wood dislodged beneath her feet and showered down in a series of splashes.

  “Take it easy!” Gaston said.

  “We—we won’t be able to get back up!”

  And with those words, the stinging thornflies emerged from below. They seemed to have sprung from the water.

  But the thornflies were supposed to exist in the briar only. Had she transcended?

  Gaston gripped her hand and yanked her down into the pool. “I said, take it easy.”

  Madeleine’s feet hit a slippery bottom and she would have fallen altogether were it not for Gaston’s grip. He was out of breath, not from exertion—it seemed more from anticipation. Water sloshed up and around them, the basin so narrow that the combined body displacement caused the level to rise to their chests. He had one hand around her wrist and the other atop her head. A child preacher about to baptize a new servant of God. The circumference of space had grown so narrow Madeleine could no longer raise her elbows to full expanse. A drowning chamber.

  Severin said, “Asleep, to sleep, beneath the brine.”

  “We ain’t got no choice, not any,” Gaston was saying. “Your river devil here?”

  Madeleine nodded beneath his hand.

  Gaston gripped her tighter. “Mine, too. Not much time. You gonna have to hold your breath a good long while, alright?”

  Fear clenched her chest, but she nodded again, unable to speak.

  He lowered his voice as though someone were listening. “On the other side, don’t talk to a soul. Don’t look directly at’m. We ghosts over there, you understand? We ghosts now.”

  “No!”

  Madeleine jerked from him, but he was already pushing her head down. Down into the water. Where before her feet had caught hold on a slope, they were now sliding down, her legs pumping in a reverse bicycle motion. Gaston held her tight and was pushing and pulling her deeper than seemed possible on the inside of a tree trunk. Down into the black, waterlogged soil.

  forty-six

  BAYOU BOUILLON, 1927

  PATRICE WAS IN THE water for a very long time. She could feel her lungs contort. The shadow river must have somehow merged with the Mississippi and taken them all. She had a distant sense that she had told it to do so.

  But when she broke the water’s surface she was nowhere near the ferry dock. Not physically, or through the bramble. She didn’t know where she was. She realized she was not in the briar because it was dark—no briar light. An actual sky existed somewhere above. But there were no stars, only the wink of torchères somewhere to her right. Her shoes were gone and the water felt soothing against her bare feet.

  She realized she was clutching something to her bosom—Francois’ Bible. It seemed such an absurd and frivolous possession after having lost so much.

  Arms around her waist pulling her through the water. She could see only a flash of black skin over her shoulder before he was saying, “Hold onto this,” and placing her hand on a raft.

  “Ferrar?” she said, relieved at the sound of his voice.

  That she could actually hear him. That he was there.

  She walked her elbows along the wooden surface and swung her leg up and onto it. Francois’ raft. But Francois wasn’t there. Nor was Trigger. Nor the dead man nor the vulture. Just the raft.

  “Hey give me a hand, will ya?” Trigger’s voice somewhere nearby in the darkness.

  “Stay put,” Ferrar said to her, and swam away in the direction of Trigger’s voice.

  Patrice looked over her shoulder to where the flames of those torchères wavered above water, a halo of insects buzzing in the light. She could see little else.

  And she thought, That’s what has become important, that space between that firelight.

  She stared at the dark gaps in between. There came a strange, detached sense of seeing herself, as though a different part of her was watching Patrice look at the vacant spaces instead of looking at the safe torchlight.

  They were in Bayou Bouillon, of course. It seemed odd that she had been trying to pretend she didn’t know where she was.

  Ferrar and Trigger were swimming back to the raft, and between them, a listless body she could not see.

  “Oh, Francois!” She reached down and helped pull him onto the raft while Trigger and Ferrar pushed him from behind.

  Francois still had
a measure of strength left in him. He made his arms push against the raft instead of slumping in a heap.

  “You really are alive,” Patrice said, her hands cradling Francois’ head.

  Even in the darkness she could see that his face was all wrong. That disgusting bird had been real, not just briar. Francois said not a word and she couldn’t tell the extent of his consciousness. She held onto him while Trigger and Ferrar swam the raft in the direction of the torchères.

  * * *

  THEY SPENT THE NIGHT in a one-room shack floating over the bayou. The shack didn’t rock but it did turn from side to side in lazy arcs. Patrice tended Francois by wrapping his eye in strips of woven cotton that Ferrar brought her. The room was illuminated by candlelight, a kindness on Patrice because dear Francois’ face had undergone such brutality. His eye and part of his lip were missing. Cuts and sores and dry, salt-burned skin. It seemed she had his wounds cleaned and wrapped all too soon, because afterward she could do nothing further but allow him to sleep. There had been no needle and thread to sew him. Just wrappings.

  Ferrar had left them alone in the shack for the night.

  Trigger was leaning against the wall near the door with his eyes closed. She could tell he wasn’t sleeping and wasn’t going to sleep. Neither would she.

  * * *

  THE SUN HAD YET to rise, but the bird chatter on a distant shore told Patrice that dawn was near. She wanted to go out, find a water closet or at least a place where she could improvise one. She opened the door and found Ferrar sleeping just outside on the boardwalk.

  He leapt to his feet though his eyes were still half-closed. “Where you goin?”

  “I need to … walk around some.”

  She wasn’t sure why she didn’t just tell him what she really needed to do. Never thought anything of saying so around her sister or her brothers or anyone at Terrefleurs. But she couldn’t say it in front of Ferrar. Of course he knew she peed just like everyone else. But she didn’t want him thinking of her peeing.

  He’d caught on all the same. “Come on, little girl, I’ll show you where.”

  Her back went rigid on the “little girl” part.

  From behind her in the shack, Trigger said, “Me, too.”

  They walked along the boardwalk in silence, and when Patrice started to comment on the rows of shanties, Ferrar put a finger over his lips and shushed her. She looked around, uneasy, thinking of the moment in the briar when Trigger and Rosie had shushed because they knew mother was watching somehow. She wondered for whose benefit—or against whose awareness—Ferrar was shushing her right now.

  The entire cluster of boardwalk and shanties was floating over water. It seemed like such a precarious place, especially with the past year’s floods and the storms that must have blown through over the years. Patrice recalled the day Ferrar had told her of this place. He was lying there wounded, shot by their mother, and he told Patrice and the other children of the places he’d gone to hide along the coast, living like a pirate, running hooch for Maman to sell in New Orleans. It hadn’t occurred to Patrice that these hidden coves might harbor other pirates, too.

  The horizon had already gone from black to gray. She saw that land was nearby, but it formed a ring around the tiny settlement that was otherwise completely surrounded in water, save for one tiny island just large enough to support a willow tree. That’s where Ferrar was leading them now, to that willow. He stopped just shy of it but waved Patrice on. She looked over her shoulder at Ferrar and Trig as she stepped off the boardwalk onto the island. The willow roots snaked into a dome formation atop the soil so that it appeared the tree was clutching the island into existence lest it disintegrate into the water.

  She found a suitable place and relieved herself.

  After her, Trigger visited the willow, and Patrice stood in silence next to Ferrar.

  Little girl, he’d called her.

  * * *

  PATRICE AND FERRAR AND Trig were back in that floating shack, standing around the pallet where Francois lay. There was nowhere to sit besides the floor and they were all too stiff after last night to do anything but stand. No one brought up the question of how they might have gotten to Bayou Bouillon from the outskirts of New Orleans, and that was just fine.

  “Did you see the thing that took Gil away?” Trigger asked Ferrar.

  Patrice looked up. Was it possible that Ferrar might have seen the tar creature?

  But Ferrar said, “The thing? It was only a man. Lotta men lookin for trouble just after y’all came. But the one who got your brother, I’ve seen him before. Missin a hand.”

  “Missing a hand. Jacob Chapman? Did he hurt him?” Patrice asked.

  “No, just grabbed him and carried him off. I couldn’t stop him.”

  “Just a flesh-and-blood man,” Patrice said, and looked at Trig.

  Trigger was nodding. “It’s what I thought. When we first saw the tar devil it had come for Rosie there at Terrefleurs. But the stranger had, too. The Brute. I thought at the time that they were kinda the same. Figured the tar thing was just the stranger’s river devil.”

  “You’re saying they’re not related?”

  “Well I imagine they’re related, but it don’t mean they’re the same.”

  “Doesn’t.”

  “Lord almighty. It doesn’t. Just not sure how it figures together.”

  Patrice thought about this. “Mother knows if she sends a man after us we can defend ourselves with pigeonry.”

  “You can,” Trig said. “For the rest of us it’s hit and miss.”

  “And now she figured out a way to follow us into the briar.”

  Ferrar said, “So she follows y’all in both worlds, at the same time.”

  Patrice nodded. “Yes, maybe.”

  Trigger said, “And she’s getting better at it. I had no trouble whuppin that tar devil that came after Rosie the first time. The second time it was so stealthy I never saw it until it was too late.

  “And then when it came for Gil, it was monstrous.”

  Patrice thought of all those years of practice. That was probably why she was so much better at pigeonry than her siblings—she’d been doing it for longer because she was older. Now in these months since they’d banished Maman from Terrefleurs, Maman had been perfecting some skills of her own.

  They stood in silence for a moment, thinking, and then they heard a voice outside. A man’s voice, deep, and … familiar. He sang:

  Every night

  When the sun goes in

  Every night

  When the sun goes in

  Trigger said what Patrice was thinking: “Francois?”

  But Francois was lying on the pallet at their feet.

  Every night

  When the sun goes in

  I hang down my head

  And mournful cry

  They all three moved for the door at once but Ferrar got there first. He didn’t open it. Instead, he blocked it.

  He said, “I told you, this place is full of ghosts.”

  “What’s going on out there?” Trigger asked.

  “It’s not easy to explain.”

  “Let us out,” Patrice said.

  She stared at Ferrar, ready to use pigeonry. But his face showed no opposition. No resistance of any kind. He was not holding them there to harm them.

  “I ask you to stay inside for a while. People here must keep to themselves. You’ll see what I mean in time.”

  “What time? How do you know we’ll stay here at all? We’re not in the briar now so there’s no reason. We can go after Rosie and Gil.”

  Ferrar looked pained. “I thought you’d been here before because I thought I saw you. There are … reflections.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. I know this for a fact, ma chère. You’ll probably understand it better than I do. But right now shouldn’t we think of a way to find young Gilbert and Marie-Rose?”

  The mention of her siblings caused a fresh burst of pain in her he
art. Trigger’s posture relented, too. Patrice hesitated but then stepped back from the door. She looked down at Francois on the pallet. He was sleeping. The other voice outside—the one that sounded like Francois, that sang his very song—had moved down the boardwalk and faded.

  “Rosie’s hidden from us, but we haven’t tried looking for Gil,” Patrice said.

  Trigger shook his head. “I did. Last night. They’re both plumb gone.”

  “What about Maman?” Patrice asked. “If we find Maman we’ll find Gil and Rosie.”

  “I looked for her, too.”

  He was quiet for a moment, staring past a gap in the wall where sunlight now penetrated, his jaw muscle tense. “I can think of one other way.”

  “What?”

  “I can let that tar devil take me to wherever the hell it goes.”

  Patrice stared at him, unable to believe he would even suggest it. “No.”

  “Just hear me—”

  “No!”

  Ferrar’s hand went to her shoulder. Patrice filled with fury so fast her body quaked. She had to get that idea out of Trigger’s head, right now, because once Trig got an idea like that—

  “Treesey, we don’t have a choice. Gil and Rosie might very well disappear forever. Forever. Are you hearin’ me? You think Maman gonna let’m go if she believes she has a prayer’s chance in hell of gettin briar skills out of them?”

  “Stop it!”

  Francois shifted in his sleep, bringing his knees up, and Patrice looked toward the door and thought of Marie-Rose hidden somewhere alone. Did she even know that Gil was there, too? Or did Maman have him taken somewhere else?

  Trigger was wearing a look that said he’d already made up his mind. “My flesh-and-blood body stays here the whole time. You can look after me. I’ll let the tar thing bring me to where the others are in the briar. Then I’ll find a way to get their minds out. You know I can do it.”

  Ferrar said to Trigger, “Your papa used to get lost in that place, if I recall. Sometimes for years on end.”

  “Yes,” Patrice said.

  But Trigger ignored them. “Once we get their minds out we’ll know where their bodies are. And then we’ll go get’m.”