by Taylor Brown
On another evening hunt, he comes face-to-face with the Indian king, who is enjoying a leisurely walk down the trails of his realm, accompanied by one of his wives and their retinue. Le Moyne’s duty is to record that which he witnesses, drawings and paintings for his king across the sea. This he does, sketching the scene of Saturiwa’s evening walk. There is the great war-chief adorned in his own cloak of deerskin, his long hair trussed atop his head, his every step attended by two servants with palm-frond fans, a third who holds the tail of his cloak so that it might not be sullied upon the earth. There is the wife trailing just behind, she and her maidservants long-haired and strong-legged, draped only in silky green moss that does little to hide their womanly features, their heavy-swollen breasts and the dark wedge of their nethers.
The chief nods his head to the white men respectfully, and they return the gesture. There is no translator among their party this evening, but the chief make signs to congratulate them on the deer they have felled. The women stand back from the men, their eyes dark and shining, their lips dusky and plump as wine grapes. On the walk back to the fort, one of Le Moyne’s companions elbows him in the ribs.
“You saw the fruit of the land, Le Moyne, yes? Heavy-swelled and ripe, I say, over hips so wide they might birth a corsair’s crew.”
“You are in error, Francois,” says another of the party. “A navy, I say, those hips could.”
“And with such handholds,” says a third, “one might accomplish the task par-derrière, as any good sailor should.”
“What say you, monk? Would you partake of the dark fruit?”
Le Moyne looks from one grinning face to another, hard men who have journeyed long months at sea, under leathering sun and cold winds, where a sharp tongue is more prized than any good knife.
He shrugs. “Bien sûr. It is fruit of an equal color once pierced, no?”
The men fall to laughing on every side of him—truly fall—rolling around in the black dirt and leaves, holding their bellies, tears streaming from their faces. Their sharp-pointed mustaches are nearly upturned in delight. Le Moyne knows he will have to kneel this night and pray for forgiveness, for glorifying such sins of the flesh, but he is happy for closer friends than only his God high above.
7
Darien, Georgia, 1975
Annabelle Mackintosh sits on her porch watching the moon shadows stir in the yard. She is nursing a final highball, unable to sleep, her pale skin glistening with whiskey sweat. At least the stinging film keeps the bugs at bay. The porch screen was torn earlier in the night, the work of the careless men with whom her careless husband drinks, who leer and stumble and grope her at will. He is passed out facedown in bed now, snoring wetly, and she can think of worse things than him not waking up.
This is McIntosh County, Georgia, and she is born of the Direct Descendants, the families who can trace their ancestry in unbroken blood to the Scottish Highlanders who founded the town in 1736. These families are the keepers of tradition in the county, the elite who carry the same surnames as the Highland warriors chosen by the founder of Georgia, General James Oglethorpe, to hold this outpost against Spanish Florida. He chose them for their hardiness, their fierceness in battle. They fought in the Battle of Bloody Marsh, so named for what they made of a Spanish invasion force, and they survived decades of disease and hurricanes and musket balls to keep the town of Darien alive at the river’s mouth.
Annabelle had been groomed for success—her father a doctor, her mother a socialite—and she had the striking looks that were needed, too. The long slender limbs, milk-pale and shapely, and the fiery red curls that crouched halolike on her shoulders, red-gold in the sun. Big eyes, clear and blue, and freckles like blood-flecked bone. She looked a warrior princess, which frightened and buckled softer men, and she had a weakness that perhaps the women in her clan once had, too: hard and rough men, mean-made with callused hands, who might have held swords in centuries past. Men who more often hold wrenches or tire irons in this day, or guns or hammers or heavy-equipment controls. Not the gold-nib fountain pens her mother had hoped for, for contract signings or prescriptions. Certainly not those.
Barlow Pegram, dead-drunk in their marriage bed, got her pregnant at nineteen, doing it with her debutante dress hiked up in the back of his ’71 Chevy Chevelle SS. She wanted it that night, every panicked thrust, no thought of diminished dreams or what might come. The baby didn’t survive but she did, married already to a man who loved only Chevrolet muscle and Evan Williams and Waylon Jennings and his own lost red-diamond glory, centerfield for the state winners in times long ago. He liked what she had red-bushed between her legs, too, but only, it seemed, when his own body could not rise to meet it.
So fat is he now, bloated on bourbon and hush puppies, she wonders when he last saw that whiskey-weak disappointment between his legs. She is trapped here, she thinks, marooned on a tin-roofed island set on the edge of the continent, lording her legion of roaches and swamp rats and drunks. The porch screen might as well be iron-knit. She leans her head against the rocker, wondering how she might claw her way out of this place, to Atlanta or Charlotte or New York, her checkerboard past swiped clean, her life made equal to her name.
She drifts, hearing what must be the crackle-pop of lightning in the distance, a coming storm. She is nearly asleep when she hears a snap in the yard. She opens her eyes to see a bent figure slinking across the grass before her. She is up in an instant, the single-barrel shotgun snagged from the corner where it leans, the porch door kicked wide as she comes down the steps, cocking the rabbit-ear back.
“You’re hell-bound in half a second,” she says. “What you doing on my property?”
The man freezes, eyeing her over his shoulder. Slowly he turns around. He is shirtless, his torso dark-inked and mud-slick, and there is not an ounce of anything wasted in his body. Hard little muscles push right up against his skin like they might bust out. Annabelle has to lower the barrel slightly, just for a better look.
“I was just out for a walk is all.” He clears his throat. “Got lost.”
“You must think I got nothing in my head but red moss, same as out.”
“I know what it is you got in that scattergun.”
“What’s that?”
“Birdshot. It ain’t but a four-ten snake-gun. A pest-shooter.”
“But it’ll make a mess of you at this range, now won’t it?”
He scratches his chin, looking down the barrel of the gun.
“It might.”
“What kind of trouble is it you’re in?”
“The personal kind.”
“And here I was thinking I might could help you out. Be a good Christian and that.”
“It ain’t nothing you want to know about,” he says. “I just need to get along.”
He starts to go. She calls after him.
“They’re going to catch you pretty easy, looking like you do. You’d stand a better chance cleaned up.”
He stops and eyes her again, suspicious.
“You offering?”
Annabelle lowers the shotgun.
“Maybe.” She licks her lips. “You got something in it for me?”
8
Altamaha River, Day 1
They don’t stop for lunch, letting the river float them as they eat peanut butter and banana sandwiches. From now on, their meals will be from pouches or cans. Hunter tilts his head back, chewing, and closes his eyes. The sun feels good on his face, a cure for the glaring fluorescents of campus. Sometimes he sits in the classroom, listening as the lecturer drones on, and wonders where Lawton is at that very moment, shawled in some mountain cave or black-finned in a jungle river, streaking down-arrowed through the sky, breathing the purest oxygen through a hose, his salvation a silken sheet folded on his back.
He wondered the same when his father was still alive, whether the man’s nets were swallowing up anything as he dragged them those long days through the darkness, if they would bring him anything that might make hi
m unharden a moment, a smile breaking the hard cast of his face. He’d lost his first boat before they were ever born. No one knew quite how, though there were whispers of him trawling the open waters for things he shouldn’t have sought.
Square grouper.
According to their mother, he never fully recovered from that. He went upriver, disappeared for weeks, and came back a different man—a man who’d commanded a patrol boat in the brown waters of the Mekong Delta, now forced to swab the decks of others’ boats. A man hard-made, full of shadow and thunder. They never knew him any other way.
Hunter feels something cross his face—a shadow—and opens his eyes. A flight of white ibises low against the sky, wading birds with long-curved bills and ink-tipped wings, their reddish feet pointed like divers’. Now more of them, white wedges crossing like bombers overhead. Cold dark forms race across the river, curling over him, his brother. Shadows. And Hunter feels a strange urge to dart and hide, like prey, like the crabs and crawfish that surely scuttle for shelter beneath his boat. He feels spotted—by what he isn’t sure. They are far from paved roads and shopping marts, from the steel and glass and brick that pronounces their species’ dominion over the land.
They pass Cole Eddy and Doe Eddy, little inlets cut upstream in the river’s bends, and they enter the Narrows, the treacherous section where the river races between funneled banks, wheeling through tight rounds and sharp kinks that smashed timber rafts in years past. The logs splitting between the raftmen’s feet, the dark vents swallowing them up. Their broken bodies found downriver, crushed soft as meal sacks. Dead trees—snags—reach clawlike from the river here, waving white-daggered in the current, and there are hidden shoals at every bend. Ahead is Hannah’s Island, where their father would never stop. There is a large bald cypress on the island’s bank, lightning-scarred, a pale gash scorched black at its heart.
“Found out what Daddy had against the place,” says Hunter.
Lawton slows his paddling. He’s put on a pair of angular sunglasses, like a centerfielder might wear. One eyebrow lifts over the wings of lens.
“You planning to spill this information, or sit on it like a hen?”
“I didn’t know if you’d care.”
“It’s about Daddy, isn’t it?”
“Back in the Civil War, a group of Confederate militia was camping out there. They’d brought a woman with them. Some say she was a prostitute, others say a homesteader forced to the job. Either way, they had her again and again, all night. It was so many of them, so many times, it killed her. Some people say she’s still out there, pink-skinned like a scalded pig, smoke pouring out her wounds. They say bad shit happens to anybody who stops there.”
“Motherfuckers,” says Lawton. He shakes his head. “What I could of done with a single platoon back then. Where’d you hear this?”
“Book I read.”
“For class or on your own?”
“My own. Been reading up on the river.”
“Look at you. What about the Altamaha-ha? You learn anything on that?”
Hunter nods. “Some. Indians told the early explorers about a giant snakelike creature in the river. Said it bellowed and hissed. That’s the earliest we know of anything that sounds like it.”
“That’s long back.”
Hunter nods. “Schooner captain in the 1830s reported seeing a creature seventy feet long, big around as a sugar hogshead, mouth like a crocodile. Then sightings all the way up through the eighties, nineties.”
Lawton pulls on his beard.
“Huh.”
“You know, the Highlanders that founded Darien were from the shores of Loch Ness. The county’s putting up a new billboard by the interstate with a picture on it, a smiling sea serpent, to draw in tourists. They’re rebranding, calling it ‘Altie.’”
“Bull-fucking-shit they are.”
“Like Nessie.” Hunter shrugs. “It’s probably just a monster sturgeon, or else a line of river otters surfacing.”
“Daddy always thought it was real.”
“He thought a lot of things.”
“Sure he did. But tell me this, you wanna stop on Hannah’s Island?”
Hunter looks at the dark banks sweeping past, the bare cypresses with their tangled crowns and bony knees. He thinks it would be a brave thing to stop, to defy somehow the powers their father believed in. The ones that didn’t save him. Still, he shakes his head.
“Hell no, I don’t.”
“I didn’t think so.” Lawton shivers. “They pay me to jump out airplanes for a living, but you couldn’t get me onto that island with a cherry-picker.”
“I never knew you to scare easy.”
The sun shines in Lawton’s sunglasses, a white star at the very bridge of his nose.
“That’s just because I was dumb. I didn’t know what was out there. And I never been too big on bad guys don’t respond to a double-tap.”
They continue on, the river accelerating yet faster beneath them, channeled as if through a sluice. The bends become sharp and unexpected, switchbacking like a mountain road, the current swirling over hidden shoals. Hunter can hardly imagine how men navigated rafts the size of basketball courts down these kinking, curling narrows. The pilots calling out bow white or bow injun to direct the sweep-hands, a harkening back to the days when whites only lived on the north side of the river, and it was all Indian land to the south.
It was blacks, mainly, who worked the rafts. At dusk their wordless hollers jumped from raft to raft, plaintive cries falling between the trees. Hunter read the adventures of Snake Sutton as a boy, the mythic raft-pilot of the Altamaha, white but raised by freed slaves, who tried to break into the Darien timber merchant society—a door heavy-barred even for a man so good with the maul and peavey and ax.
They paddle on, looping Little Water Oak Round as upon a giant carousel, the banks wheeling past, a heavy green alligator sunning itself like a prehistoric tank. They say you can never step into the same river twice, and Hunter knows the adage means that the waters you touch once you never will again. They’re gone, part of the sea or the clouds or the blood of beasts or men. But it isn’t just that, he knows. The shape of the river itself is in flux, the cycles of freeze and flood, erosion and deposition, reshaping its very course.
He once saw time-lapse footage of a river in Europe, taken as a satellite overflew it year after year. Over the course of a decade, it looked like nothing so much as a whisper of smoke, the bends swelling and curling and merging, the plume of an idle-held cigarette. Soon they will be to the bluff where you can stand and see Bug Suck Lake to the north, an oxbow where the river once ran, orphaned now like a scar in the earth, forgotten in the river’s new course. And yet so many things do remain, he thinks, such that they can be named and returned to—points and signs recognizable, even after so many years. Centuries. The bights and rounds, the sloughs and swifts, the river wriggling like a miles-long serpent in the earth, ever restless, the same as it always was.
Hunter looks at his brother. He is coasting, his paddle stilled, his thumb prodding the inside of his arm, pushing on the tattoo there.
“New ink?”
“What?”
“Frog on your forearm. It wasn’t there last Easter.”
Lawton looks down, as if seeing the tattoo for the first time.
“Yeah. Bone frog. Got it before my last deployment.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Mean?” Lawton looks at it, the tiny skeleton printed on the flesh of his arm. He clenches his fist and the frog jumps against the belly of muscle. “It’s just a brotherhood thing. Like I haven’t forgot all the ones before me. That didn’t make it. Some of the boys don’t like it. Think it’s bad luck.” Lawton shrugs. “The dead get under everybody’s skin. You’re full of shit you say they don’t.”
9
Fort Caroline, 1564
Apalatci. The word is upon every man’s lips, whispered like the name of a god. Apalatci. It haunts the fort, in the night-dreams of
men like a fever, a summons to rise and go west until the land rises up against the sky, jagged as wolf teeth.
“Is it true?” they ask. Always in the hours after nightfall, when truth can walk freely among them, swelled under the moon.
Le Moyne cannot but nod. It seems it is.
In the west is gold.
He was chosen to accompany a small-boat expedition sent upriver once the fort walls were raised. Three days ago he stood before the greatest tree of the land, a giant cypress that marked the boundary between the lands of Saturiwa, king of the coast, and the lands of Utina, king in the west. Rivals. Le Moyne and the others could only stare at the giant cypress, their jaws agape.
“Mon Dieu.”
It stood upon a broad knuckling of roots, each the size of a lesser tree. The trunk itself was as broad as the mortared turrets of the Loire Valley, towers built to keep watch over baileys and keeps, but the tree was so much taller than those works of stone. It raced skyward, the crown swirling high against the blue, like one of the helical flying machines of da Vinci, the Italian genius Le Moyne studied as a boy. Strange formations surrounded the tree, roots thrust from the earth like daggers or teeth. The French joined hands around the base. It took eight of them to encircle the tree. When the chain of arms fell away, the soldier next to Le Moyne stepped back, tugging on his beard.