And now the warmth in Fish’s stomach turned hot, uncomfortable, and he wanted it out of there.
“Hey turtle turtle,” Bread said, talking to the painter and giggling with his spoon in his hand.
“Bread, I don’t feel good,” Fish said, and put his spoon down and moved instinctively toward the side of the raft. He was so lightheaded he needed to place a hand on the deck to steady himself. He crawled to the edge. Overhead, the sky had turned a deep gray. Fish felt a prick of rain on his neck.
Bread’s giggling stopped. “Fish?” he asked. There was uncertainty in Bread’s voice. Something bad was happening in his stomach too.
A stiff breeze rose up and rippled the water, spun the raft. The heat in Fish’s stomach moved higher, into his throat, until he couldn’t hold it any longer. His vomit splashed in the river. He heaved until his stomach was empty, and when he heard Bread being sick off the other side of the raft, he got sick some more himself.
Fish stared at his reflection in the rippled water as the first crack of lightning ripped overhead. Fat raindrops began to fall. Fish washed his face with a handful of river water, rinsed his mouth, and spat. Bread lay with his head draped over the far side of the raft. The rain darkened the cedar logs and made the boys’ shirts stick to their backs. They were too sick to pitch the tarp. The coals in the galley hissed. Fish heard Bread groan through the heavy patter of rain and thought again of that baying bear cub. Fish thought of his mom, too, making him a sandwich in the kitchen. He missed her fiercely. Fear came. He felt something awfully bad was coming. Where was he? No one knew where he was.
On the sodden deck, the painter turtle emerged from its shell just long enough to paddle toward the edge of the raft. It dropped into the water like a gently kicked stone, wildness and loneliness in the ripple it left. Fish crouched in the raindrops and shivered. He knew it somehow—things were about to get worse.
Fourteen
TIFFANY PADDLED THE CANOE BY HERSELF NOW. SHE PAUSED and let it glide through the black water for a stroke as she zipped the collar of her rain jacket to her chin. It was midday, but the sun had disappeared behind a thick bank of slate-colored clouds. A cool breeze came from the north, where the clouds looked darkest. Tiffany heard thunder downriver.
“How am I doing?” she asked.
Miranda smiled from where she reclined against the bow, facing backward. “You’re an old salt,” she said.
Tiffany didn’t feel like an old salt, but after the rapids, this smooth water winding through cedar forest and cattails was cake. Miranda’s wrist was in bad shape. It had swollen as thick as her forearm. She winced if she tried to make a fist. When it first became clear it would be up to Tiffany to paddle them out, she wondered aloud if they should portage back upstream instead. She was pretty confident she could drag the canoe above the rapids by herself if it was emptied of gear. Miranda shook her head at the idea, said the easiest way was to go downstream to Ironsford, even though it was farther away. Tiffany hesitated. She recalled a line from Robert Frost, the best way out is always through. True enough, but there was a lot of talk about madness in that poem too. Tiffany relented. They’d been back in the canoe for five or six hours now.
Tiffany put her blade in the water and pulled. She was learning to feather it, keep it in the river, which was a whole lot better than constantly switching sides and dripping water across all of the gear. They were wet enough from the rapids.
“How’s your wrist?” Tiffany asked.
Miranda had elevated her arm on the gunwale and wrapped her wrist in a wet handkerchief. Tiffany didn’t know how often she should ask about it. Miranda lifted the handkerchief and peeked at her wrist. It was bruising. She tested her fingers, made a loose claw of a fist. “The same,” she said. She dipped the handkerchief in the water, squeezed out the excess, and reapplied the cold compress.
“Do you want to stop awhile?” Tiffany’s back was fatigued from paddling and sitting. Her clothes were still very damp from their swim. During the past half hour, she’d daydreamed about standing next to a warm fire with a warm tin of food to eat, some coffee perhaps. And she wanted Miranda to stop and eat too. Her face had grown pale. She had darkening circles beneath her eyes, the fire in them smothered by restlessness.
Miranda sat up slowly, held her wrist in her lap. She looked downstream, at the river and then up at the sky. The headwind from the north had picked up, but it wasn’t yet strong enough to make the paddling impossible.
“I hate to lose time,” Miranda said, turning back toward Tiffany. “It looks like we’ll run into that storm within an hour. We could take out then.”
Tiffany nodded and repositioned herself on the stern seat. She found that by shifting her weight every so often, she could convince her legs they weren’t completely numb.
“Sure,” she said, though she wasn’t, “but maybe—”
Miranda waited for the rest of the sentence. “Maybe what?” she asked, a bit too tersely.
Tiffany shook her head. She eyed the storm clouds. They’d been rising into the sky pretty steadily. She didn’t make a habit of watching storms roll in, but her gut told her the storm would be upon them soon. She wondered about Miranda’s judgment. The woman had great reason to make rash decisions. Tiffany took another stroke, and knew she might need to take the lead in other ways too. She felt it.
“I was just thinking it’d be good to have a camp already set up before the rain hits—pitch a tarp or something, get some dry wood.” Her damp jeans made her legs itch. The thought of getting drenched again in a rainstorm sounded downright awful.
Miranda looked downstream at the clouds again, careful of her wrist as she turned. “Just a shower at worst,” she said. “We’ll have time.”
They rounded a bend, and the river opened up into a web of broad channels separated by low-lying islands. Cattails and red dogwood rose up in mounds. Here and there, an island was marked by a sickly tree doing its best to grow between floods and droughts. Tiffany steered them into a center channel, which seemed the most reasonable choice, though they were soon separated from the mainland by sloughs and islands. She looked at the clouds, paddled in silence for ten or fifteen minutes. Already the clouds had doubled in height. They didn’t look like a featureless bank of gray anymore. Tiffany watched the greenish wall of thundercloud roll over itself like a wheel. It filled the horizon, its uppermost regions shaved off and smeared southward by wind. Tiffany cringed as the clouds lit up in a crash of thunder.
“Miranda, I’m taking us out of the river.” The breeze grew stiff, making it difficult to keep the canoe on center. Tiffany had to point the bow directly into it or be pushed off course. It took a lot of muscle to bring it back to midchannel.
Miranda sat up straighter in the canoe, and Tiffany noticed impatience in her eyes as she looked at the clouds, the islands. “There’s no shelter here,” Miranda said. “Let’s get through this.”
Tiffany bit her tongue. They could have sheltered in that nice stand of cedar a mile back when she first suggested it. About a half mile farther on, forest rose up on the far side of the floodplain. That meant higher ground, drier land, something to hide beneath. Tiffany took an angry stroke in its direction, but a stiff wind swept the river before her and swung the bow of the canoe askew. Tiffany pried hard against the water and managed to nose the boat back. The surface rippled in swaths. The wind blew the canoe upriver about as forcefully as the current pushed it down. Even with the canoe pointed into the wind, their forward progress was next to nothing. Cattails rattled. A lightning bolt cracked across the face of the thundercloud. The canoe rumbled. Tiffany felt a raindrop hit her eye.
“I’m turning back to the woods,” she said.
Miranda shook her head in disgust. “It’s more than twice the distance. It’s best to keep going.”
“Miranda, I cannot paddle into this wind! Have you noticed we’re not moving anymore?”
“I can help,” Miranda said, and turned awkwardly in her seat to face downriv
er. To avoid using her bad hand, she leaned on her forearm as she turned and nearly tipped the canoe. Tiffany pried the water to keep the bow facing straight, cussed under her breath. Lightning struck, and the report of thunder was so loud, she nearly lost her grip on her paddle. It was like a cannon blast. More rain hit Tiffany’s face now. She squinted at the mountains of thunderclouds. Framed beneath them lay the whipping cattails and the figure of Miranda in the bow, digging fruitlessly at the rippled water with a paddle she held in one hand, her other hand clutched against her stomach. She didn’t look strong anymore. Not here. Not crippled like that with the storm so large before her. Miranda looked desperate, pathetic even. The wind blew harder. Tiffany braced and pried. Another lightning bolt shot across the face of the cloud. She pulled hard against the water with a few forward strokes. The canoe made no progress at all.
“Miranda, I’m turning back!” she said, more forcefully than she meant to.
“We can’t turn,” Miranda huffed. She looked doglike, wounded and mean, digging against the water, her hair tangled in the wind.
“We can’t go forward either, Miranda!”
There was no answer.
“Miranda!”
Miranda stopped paddling, gripped the gunwale, and faced Tiffany. She had fire in her eyes, but of a different sort. It wasn’t confidence. It was terror, anger, wildness. “My son,” she bellowed, “is not back in that tree line. He is forward, through that storm. And I will have my son and will have him now!”
Tiffany stopped paddling. A gust of wind whipped Miranda’s hair across her wild eyes, her panting breast. This was a different woman from the one she knew the previous night, who paddled in moonlight and spoke of walking in step with the spirit of God. Today Miranda’s sunken eyes had a demand in them. They were red and panicked. Tiffany felt a wave of fear move through the canoe and wash over her body. It felt physical, like a third presence, like the air had changed.
A bolt of lightning struck one of the forsaken trees on a nearby island, and the tree exploded in flame. Black branches shot into the river. Tiffany cowered, and even Miranda was jolted from her adamance. The air felt filled with static, and as both women ducked low in the boat, Tiffany watched the flames of the tree grow white and hot as they were breathed on by a wall of wind. Other trees on other islands bent in the same gust, the cattails flattened, and with the wind came a wall of rain that obscured the land and river like a curtain dragged across the earth. The curtain swallowed the burning tree. It swallowed the island. It swallowed the river between the island and the canoe, and like a horrible wet maw, it swallowed them as well.
“Hang on!” yelled Tiffany. Her voice was lost in the downpour.
The rain filled the air with the smell of mud and water. The bow of the canoe swung violently toward the left bank, nearly swamped as it spun and pitched back upstream. The canoe pushed broadside through the water. The rain stung, and the water around the canoe erupted with it. Tiffany pulled her hood tightly around her head. Around her knees in the bottom of the canoe, little white balls the size of dimes began to gather. She studied them a moment, confused. They stung her hands and pelted her jacket. They sounded like stones hitting the canoe. The wind wailed and the stones drummed. A hailstorm. One of the stones stung her squarely on her right hand, and she drew it in quickly toward her chest.
It was as if night had come in a moment. Peering out from beneath her hood, Tiffany could no longer see the river and islands upwind. Downwind, she could still make out fifty or sixty yards of water and a bit of sky beyond it. She made up her mind to try to work with the wind, to go with it and back to the trees. It wasn’t Miranda’s choice or her own anymore. The wind decided.
“Hang on!” she yelled again. Miranda sat on her knees, folded forward, her wrist cradled against her stomach. It was hard to discern, but Miranda’s back shuddered as if she was weeping. What surprised Tiffany most was the complete lack of pity she felt at that moment. She felt anger. Anger at the storm. Anger at Miranda. Anger at being out here at all on this rotten river.
Tiffany channeled it. She rose onto her knees, grasped her paddle, and pried hard on the left side of the canoe to point it straight downwind. She then pulled against the water with forward strokes, and the canoe sprang to life. The speed surprised her. The canoe skimmed upstream with the wind. Tiffany discovered it was her job to drag her paddle more often than to paddle forward. She didn’t need to propel the canoe. She only needed to attempt to steer it, like sledding as a kid, dragging this hand or that to keep straight. The wind pushed even harder. The water boiled with hailstones. A bright crack of lightning—the flash and the report were inseparable—filled the storm’s night. As it flashed, the cattails to Tiffany’s right and left were illuminated so brightly they looked made of paper, the color bleached from the world. Tiffany squinted beneath her hood. As fully as the lightning illuminated the river, the darkness overtook it, plunging the canoe into blackness and noise, leaving only the wind to give any sense of direction.
Tiffany clenched her teeth. She knew the tree line was there somewhere ahead of them, at the end of the marsh. Just keep it straight, blow with the wind, rudder it straight, rudder again. Eventually they’d blow out of the islands and hit a shoreline blanketed in cedar. Her only fear was being blown into one of the islands first and having to weather the entirety of this storm in a cattail marsh. She feared, too, being struck by lightning, but then reasoned that given the circumstances, it was up to the lightning to strike her dead if it wished to. She had no say in it. All but her paddle was out of her hands.
Lightning filled the air again, and Tiffany noticed how the channel narrowed, which meant they were making it out of the islands and back toward the woods. She pried angrily at the river. There were only a few hundred yards of open water, if she remembered correctly, and then they’d be back in the trees. The world snapped black again. Hail pounded. When the lightning came the next time, Tiffany saw no cattails at all. They were making progress. It wasn’t far now.
Tiffany nearly gave a yell of triumph, but the yell caught in her throat when two things happened simultaneously that she could hardly comprehend. First, she saw something approaching through the wall of rain. Second, Miranda was trying to stand in the boat.
The thing in the water looked square and low. It was too angular to be natural, and she’d seen no boulders before. The river here was just silt and shoreline. Lightning flashed and she saw it again, closer now, about fifteen yards away and blurred by hail. It appeared to be moving, not that Tiffany could gauge its progress, but she could clearly see what appeared to be a wake pushed in front of its bow. It looked like a whale, wide and square-lipped and rising to meet them. And before the approaching whale rose Miranda’s slim figure. Miranda stood to her full height, lifted her arms into the hail, and began rebuking the storm, rebuking everything.
“Miranda!” Tiffany cried, prying at the water.
There was no response, at least not to her, but then in the briefest pause of thunder, the words drifted back, terrifying in the blue and white flashes of light. The lonesome screams swirled like wind, lightning, hail. Miranda screamed again and again, her back curling with effort. She was a woman up against it, against forests and storms and rivers, and dead husbands and lost sons and a whole host of other demons and devils. Miranda damned all of it. She damned cattails, and hospital beds, and deserts, and flags. She damned herself. Maybe God too. Tiffany had it in her own heart before. Forsakenness. It comes from the deepest deep. Forsakenness is a woman standing in a hailstorm, or a tent at night, forsaking everything back.
And now this whale. Tiffany became aware of a different sort of noise in the wind. A growling or moaning. It immediately grew louder until the moan and growl overtook the sound of the storm and Miranda. Tiffany braced herself, clutched her paddle in the darkness and the noise. Whatever was coming, it was upon them. Miranda raged in the bow of the boat, her hands purple fists.
“Miranda, get down!”
L
ightning cracked again as a realization crystallized in Tiffany’s mind: the moan was a motor. The whale was a boat. And in the space of that realization all hope shattered in fear. There was no way the boat would see them in this downpour. Lightning illuminated the scene in a maze of flashes, and everything froze in strobes, still-frames. Within arm’s reach, a flat-bottomed boat raced into the wind. Its motor howled and warbled with strain. A bright white wake of water hung suspended in an arc over the gunwale of the canoe. A lone figure sat in the back of the boat, one hand pinning the throttle of the outboard motor, the other holding the hood of a rain poncho down over his eyes and face. The boatman didn’t even see them.
The world snapped black again, the canoe rolled across the wake, and Miranda went overboard with a percussive splash. The wave of river water, as cold as it was, felt warm in Tiffany’s lap. The growl of the motor swept past and filled the sodden air with the smell of hot exhaust. Without thinking, Tiffany found herself bailing the canoe with her paddle blade, shoveling water and hailstones out into the darkness. The canoe wallowed but was still floating. About three inches of gunwale remained above the surface.
“Help us!” she yelled to the boatman as loudly as she could. Hailstones stung her face, and she had to turn away from the wind. “Jerk!” she yelled into the sky, but it was no use. The boat was already out of sight, its wake of froth and exhaust winding away into the storm. Tiffany heard Miranda sputter and cough several yards off in the darkness, beating her way back to the canoe in her denim dress.
Not pausing, still shoveling, Tiffany had a thought, and was struck by the peculiarity and clarity of such a thought during this sort of moment. As she reached out and stroked toward Miranda, she felt something very odd, some warm presence, some sort of charm in the storm. As she paddled, she felt as if she was gathering blessing unto herself, like the coyote in her poem, stretched out in a desperate run toward its tribe, toward abundance, and pain too, and she felt that the more she paddled, the more she would gather. And she wanted to gather it, pull it all into her lap like the river and embrace it.
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