by Taylor Brown
“Bald eagle,” says Lawton, pointing.
It perches high in a leafless cypress, a white raptor in a dark frock. It watches them with glowering yellow eyes, head spiked like a Mohawk’s.
“He don’t look real approving of us,” says Hunter.
“Trying to decide if we’re too heavy to carry off.”
“You know Ben Franklin thought the national bird should of been the turkey.”
“Shit,” says Lawton. “Turkey’s for eating.”
“He said the turkey was a courageous bird. Said a turkey wouldn’t hesitate attacking a grenadier of the British Guards, he came into your farmyard with a red coat on.”
Lawton sniffs. “Maybe so. But I don’t see whistle-dicked Hitler or the Emperor of Japan being much afraid of boys with turkeys on their sleeves.”
“You got a point there.”
Lawton shakes his head. “Turkeys, shit. Sometimes I think I need to get you on some kind of federal watchlist.”
“You could do that?”
Lawton shrugs. “Hell, I don’t know. When they call us in, it ain’t usually to put somebody on a list, you know? It’s to cross them off of one.”
They paddle on, the sun now big before them. It glares down like the eye of a hawk. Hunter can feel its power rising as it climbs. He thinks of the river it sees, the river it saw, the scrolled language of its becoming laid bare from on high. He wonders if it sees ice melting under its gaze, rivers swelling, the tide of the world risen darkly like the old man believes. Man has made for himself such perches, he knows. His airplanes first, like brutal birds in the sky, and now his satellites that float endlessly, invisibly, through the heavens, watching the Earth like gods. The world unsuspecting from that angle, its secrets revealed. The houses of bad men hidden in jungles and mountains, map-pinned for men like Lawton to visit in the night. The tracts of timber cut away by this company or that, never to regrow, the wetlands that shrink year on year. The mysterious wedge of terrain that Hunter found in a satellite photo of the river while looking for the place his father’s boat was found. The old French fort, perhaps, rumored to lurk upon the river’s banks, peopled with the ghosts of colonists and conquerors.
How he would like to find it.
But there are so many places the satellites cannot find. Depths unpierced by even the sun, that reflect only its white-fired eye. He dips his paddle in the current, as if he might swirl clarity out of its darkness, but the river closes quickly around the blade, like blood into a wound.
They pass Old Hell Bight, the deadly kink that ended many a timber raft, and they curl through Sister Pine Round and on past Sister Pine Drift. The mist has burned off the river, and the earth ticks with heat. Up ahead is Miller Lake, a narrow slough. A large johnboat is plowing upriver, olive-hulled, riding on a white mustache of wake. There are four men hunched on the thwarts, the boat mounded with gear. Hunter sees Lawton straighten out of the corner of his eye. The boat cuts hard into the mouth of the slough, bow high, casting a high angle of spray as it turns.
Lawton starts toward that side of the river.
“What are you doing?”
The boat disappears into the trees.
“Teaching some manners,” says Lawton.
17
Fort Caroline, August 1564
The men are hungry, the mountains far, and Le Moyne hears more whispering in the nights now. Men huddling at their fires, speaking only of far-off places, escape. In daylight many have taken to wearing their swords wherever they go, toting their arquebuses to the most menial of tasks. Saturiwa’s ambassadors emerge from the woods less and less often, it seems. They bear turkey and deer and weir-caught fish, gifts that look pretty upon their shoulders but do little to fill the bellies of so many men. They say their stores of corn are mostly used up, traded already for French knives and sickles and trinkets. Saturiwa sends his apologies.
The previous month, Le Moyne and La Caille returned from Saturiwa’s village with nothing but tales of the savage king’s fury, his bulbed eyes and bared teeth. His anger at the French. Their mission, in fact, had been to secure some of Saturiwa’s prisoners as a bridge of good faith with Utina, king in the west, who might lead the French to the treasures of the Apalatci mountains.
At word of Saturiwa’s denial, Laudonnière swelled up red, his chest puffed like a cockerel’s. He ordered a company of twenty of his best arquebusiers to march behind him to the village. They sat themselves in the chief’s great hall, the tapers of their guns fuming in the room of skins and horns. The chief surrendered his prisoners to them, having but little choice.
The day they returned, Le Moyne was on the riverbank, sketching, hoping as always for the river beast to show itself. A raptor slashed and wheeled overhead, whirling and sighting for prey, whipping its black fork of tail back and forth across the river. Le Moyne was watching, trying to decipher what message the inked blades of wing might be scrawling against the sky, when the cloudy dome exploded, slashed in silver light, and the earth shook as if struck.
Le Moyne leapt to his feet, running with gun throttled and satchel flapping. Surely it was a Spanish attack, the thunder of enemy cannon. Instead, he found his countrymen amassed on the walls without armor or guns, slack-jawed as a fire rose along the seaward horizon. It was the marsh burning, the green-brown plains and islands of brush. The flames spread so fast that birds burst from their roosts in ragged parabola, tumbling scorched and blackened from the air, and white clouds of egrets churned under dark boulders of smoke. Deer leapt from burning islands of scrub, darting in panic, some flinging themselves into the river. An alligator pulled under a splashing fawn.
It burned for three days, a smoke so rich it stung the eyes. They wore rags and strips of fabric tied over their faces like brigands, yet many fell ill, hacking and coughing a black filth from their lungs. Those who ventured downriver found the waters strewn with thousands of dead fish, their bellies risen like boils upon the river’s skin, and the alligators cruised in the middle of the channels where it was coolest. A stench fell over everything, that of death proceeding in the sun. It reeked like an evil in the land, and Le Moyne saw fear in the eyes of many, such as he had not seen in this new country.
On the third day, La Caille stood beside him on a small hill above the fort, staring down at the blackened waste to the east.
“What do you think, Le Moyne, a stroke of lightning as our leader believes?”
Le Moyne shook his head. “I have heard of a bolt striking when there is no storm, but not to cause such devastation. It is almost as if a part of the heavens came down, one of the stars fallen from its perch.”
La Caille pulled on the sharp point of his beard.
“A good theory, I suppose, except that it fell during the day.”
Le Moyne looked in the direction of Saturiwa’s village.
“Then perhaps a piece of the sun.”
* * *
At the beginning of September, a sail in the river, flying upon its topmast the standard of France. It is a corsair captained by a man called Bourdet, fresh from raiding merchant vessels in the Antilles. His men are of ruddy complexion, well fed and quick to laugh, and they bring ashore casks of wine and loaves of good hard bread. They wear crossed short swords, and golden trophies are draped from their napes and wrists, even the lowliest of them so adorned. Their faces burn demonlike over the night fires, their red tongues loosing stories of profit among the green jewels of the Caribbean islands, the words falling into the open mouths of their countrymen like food to the hungry.
Le Moyne and La Caille lie awake in their hut, in this fortress of whispers.
“Do you think Utina will lead us to the Apalatci, in truth?”
La Caille sighs. “I know he wishes our arquebuses to speak against his enemies, whoever they may be.”
“Perhaps it will not matter.” Le Moyne juts his head to the fort beyond the walls of their hut. “I fear the Apalatci have spread their glow to the sea. The men grow restless. All this talk of
the islands.”
La Caille nods. “Indeed. Perhaps it should not be a surprise. I have heard the islands of the Caribbean are but the peaks of great mountains born out of the depths.”
Le Moyne rolls onto his elbow. “They do not float?”
“No, man. They are parts of ranges like those upon the land. This is why they appear to us in chains upon the sea. Who knows what treasures their peaks might hold?”
“Merde. You had best keep this to yourself, La Caille.”
“I intend to.”
18
Darien, Georgia, 1987
Hiram Loggins stands at the helm of a boat all his own, a sixty-five-foot shrimp trawler powered by a rebuilt 12-71 Detroit diesel. It has been nearly a decade since his last boat was seized. This one is slightly longer, steel-hulled instead of wood, with a hydraulic winch and twin screws. He’s put everything he has into it, mortgaged to the hilt, his name on the paperwork even if the bank owns most of it. Before him are other boats, a long procession of them winding through the river. The Blessing of the Fleet. Their trawling booms are raised like drying wings, their white hulls glowing under the spring sun. They are passing beneath the gray hulk of the Darien bridge, their wakes bubbling, their names painted across their sterns: Baby Girl and Miss Brenda Jane, Lady Ava and Melissa Lynn. Women’s names, mostly, to remind the captains of what they have at home, why they spend the long nights at sea. On Hiram’s: Amelia-Jo II, named again after his mother.
He is married now—to Jo-Beth, the sweetheart he’s been with since before the war.
She is good and loyal and strong.
She is not the name of his boat.
He squeezes his right hand. The knuckles are swollen, purple. He still can’t make a fist. He was in the boatyard last week, the ship blocked for bottom-painting, when one of the crabbers stopped to let his eyes rove the white sweep of bow, like he might a woman’s curves. Hiram knew him from nights at the blockhouse cut-and-shoot bar off Highway 99. The man scratched his chin, gray-whiskered, like Hiram’s now is.
“Ain’t after that square grouper again, are you?” He chuckled. “Maybe you ought not of named her after your mother.”
It seemed too much a verdict, hailing a history he didn’t want his future to be. The symbols beneath his skin burned, like brands newly made, and he lit into the man with both fists, knocking him over a sawhorse table and into a pile of rotten nets. He stood over the crabber, his knuckles split and bleeding, and found an iron turnbuckle in his hand, raised to strike. After a moment he dropped it, thinking to apologize, but the words came as a thick gob of spit that smacked the pavement between his boots.
He lifts the busted hand to his mouth now and tears off the scab with his teeth, spitting it on the wheelhouse floor. He sucks at the raw place, tasting the metallic tang of the sea inside him. They say blood is red for the same reason as Georgia clay: iron. He has one of the boys take the helm and steps out onto the deck. The bridge is nearing, set like an arch to the sea. On it stands a white holy man in a black cassock, wild-haired, his dog collar yellowed under the Georgia sun. Father Uncle King, flyweight champion of the interservice competition in Vietnam. A chaplain. Hiram and he were boys together on the river, brothers in ways he would rather forget.
The man has his arms spread wide, reciting Psalms and verses, blessing each boat that passes beneath the shadow of the bridge. People say he knows his Bible by rote. Every word. He looks down upon Hiram’s boat as it nears, his voice booming:
“‘What is man? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet. All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field. The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.’”
Hiram doesn’t kid himself at having dominion. He knows his little wood-decked island could be overturned easy as a plaything if the sea saw fit, dashed in gray mountains capped with foam. Down there is a whole universe not his own, full of dark giants and white ghosts, alien as anything from outer space. But he lets the holy man’s words tumble over him, bless him, for he knows the power of this man’s faith, and this is the tradition among Hiram’s kind. He thinks of the glistening clouds of shrimp shooting through the depths, whole pulsing globes of them wild-caught in his nets. He thinks of his station rising atop those mounds of protein, his pockets heavied. His accounts paid. His prospects bright as the fresh coat of paint that covers his boat.
Uncle King is spread birdlike against the sun. Hiram closes his eyes and feels flecks of moisture dapple his face. Whether holy water or the man’s wet-flecked words, he isn’t sure.
“May God Almighty be upon this vessel, the Amelia-Jo II, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. May she prosper in her voyages and bear home safely all those who work upon her decks. May she be consecrated to righteous work.”
Hiram opens his eyes to see Uncle’s palm hovering high over him in blessing. A white worm of scar, knife-made, crosses its deepest crease. Seeing this, Hiram’s busted hand clenches closed despite the pain, a knot of fist he jams into the pocket of his overalls, hiding the boyhood scar that matches the holy man’s own. Shame rocks him. The thought of what he did, what he was forced to do on a spring day long ago … Those are times long gone, he tells himself. Dead. He forces himself to think of the future, the white flame of what he might still become.
The boat passes into the cool hollows of the bridge, where the swallows keep their nests, and he feels the songbirds on his shoulders tingle. He can only hope the holy man’s blessing is upon the boat and not its name. For what is painted along the stern is only that. Paint. It is not the boat’s true name, the one Hiram says only to himself, again and again: Annabelle.
19
Miller Lake, Day 2
It’s more slough than lake, narrow and straight as if man-dug. Hunter watches his brother work his paddle side to side, head bent, as if reading signs in the hull-cut surface. There is scarce sound but for the johnboat’s wake still lapping at the banks. Lawton’s sunglasses are pushed high on his head, his red-freckled arms bulged with pressure. The rudder of his boat yaws this way, that way, like the tail of a sea creature cruising the depths. He broadsides his kayak at the mouth of the small freshwater creek that feeds the slough. He looks back the way they came, then upstream, and nods for them to enter.
It’s immediately cooler, darker, the creek roofed in a tunnel of cypress and tupelo. Shards of light lie shivering on the waters, tree-shattered, and the world seems older, taller, its younger self left shining in the sun. The knees of cypress rise bony from the water, some knotted with toads, and they seem to grow only higher as they press upstream. Soon they’re as tall and twisted as blackthorn shillelaghs, gnarled and knobbed for clubbing skulls. The creek widens, and they paddle among cypress grown out of the water on every side, their bases furrowed like toe bones. These are virgin trees, Hunter realizes, a swamp of them hidden far up this creek, timber perhaps a thousand years old. He taps Lawton’s boat with his paddle.
“This is old-growth timber. They might be deadheaders.”
“Didn’t see a winch on their boat.”
“Could be using floats to pull them off the bottom.”
Hunter thinks of the deadheads buried like the bones of giants, hardwood logs now coveted for their centuries-old patina. They’re pulled out of the creek bottoms and sold for big money to custom furniture makers.
Lawton spits. “Last I known deadheading wasn’t legal. That changed since I was gone?”
“No.”
They find the johnboat beached on an island of molding leaves. It’s twenty feet long with a side console, painted factory green. The hull is empty, just a couple of heavy nylon bags mounded between the thwarts.
Lawton noses into the bank, lifts himself from the cockpit, and pulls his boat ashore. He stands at the edge of the johnboat and leans over t
he side, peering into the hollows, his left thumb hooked high on his vest. He unzips one of the bags, sniffs.
“I don’t like it.”
Hunter shores his boat. “What is it?”
Lawton has already started into the trees, and Hunter only has time to catch a glimpse of tangled electrical cords in the bag. The wet ground muffles their steps; they are surrounded by towers of cypress. Lawton stops and kneels. He comes up with the silver foil of a discarded candy bar wrapper. Three Musketeers. He crinkles it quietly in his hand, slips it into his pocket.
“People,” he says.
Other litter appears, a breadcrumb trail through the woods: an empty water bottle, a Tootsie Roll wrapper, a miniature comic from Bazooka gum. Lawton stoops to pick up each of these insults, silent, his neck swelled red. Soon they can hear voices sifting through the trees. They round a spiky thicket of palmetto and before them a stony colossus roars skyward from the earth, a cypress as giant-footed as a house, the root base knuckled and tapered like ten trunks grown all into a single primeval missile. Woody stalagmites, man-tall, stand like cloaked sentries on every side, and a dark cloud of vesper bats may or may not be hanging asleep in the tree’s hollows.
Below stands a clutch of men in rumpled khaki shirts, like tourists on safari. Two of them bear shoulder-fired video cameras; one holds a sound boom topped with fuzz. The fourth is pointing here and there, red-faced, his shirt soaked in dark teeth of sweat. He wears a floppy hat and knee-high rubber boots, his pants thigh-bulged like the riding breeches of an old general. The chest pocket of his shirt is packed full—Hunter can almost hear the crinkle of candy wrappers.