The Boatman's Daughter Read online

  She had a sudden urge to taste the black licorice they kept in jars to sell. Catfish bait, the old-timers who came to the mercantile called it.

  Oh, Daddy, where are you, I am sorry, Daddy, so sorry I was not clever …

  The rain was hard and cold and numbing.

  Then, from the dark recesses of the trees behind her, a terrible rumble, the boughs overhead thrashing. From the forest all around a cracking, a rending, as trees tore free from the earth and hurled themselves to the ground, and a wind blasted the cold rain sideways so that it seemed the breath of a huge thing was blowing over Miranda, and with the wind came a bright piney scent of fresh resin that stung her nostrils, and yes, something massive, something dark and horned and snarling and impossible, emerging now from the trees—

  Not real, it’s not real

  —to lift her up in its terrible, rough-bark hand, entwining vines around arm and waist and leg, setting her afoot and nudging her over wet ground, stomach turning, hair wet against her scalp, and a fever burning in her arm and head.

  Feeling had returned to her leg, she realized, the burning from the black sludge subsided, so she staggered off, soaked through, the baby against her breast chilled and silent.

  Eventually there was a light, a pinhole in the darkness, and at first she thought it was the light to bring her over to another land, to the place her mother, Cora Crabtree, had gone long ago, when Miranda was only four. But it was not. She looked around and saw she stood mired in the muddy shore, where her footprints, like Hiram’s, like the old witch’s, were filled with water and led back to the place where the johnboat was lodged in the mud, Eveready spot still shining from the bow.

  To guide us back.

  But she saw no boatman in the lightning, no witch in its glare, and her left arm was hot and hard like a length of stovewood despite the cold, cold rain. She spoke her father’s name. A whimper. Tears. Retching. Vomit. She collapsed in the mud, lay over on her back and let the baby rest atop her, right hand cupped around its weakly pulsing fontanel.

  Out of the dark, into the weak beam of the boat light, a stooped shape came, small and hunched and peering down. Smooth chin and black eyes glittering within a head scarf. In one hand, Hiram Crabtree’s shotgun, in the other an empty, bloody bread bowl.

  Thunder, the whole world booming.

  I’m only eleven, Miranda thought, fading. I don’t want to die—

  She felt the baby’s weight against her, its faint warmth a promise.

  She closed her eyes. Darkness took her.

  * * *

  The storm poured down ruin upon the land. Indeed, it was a storm the people of Nash County, Arkansas, would remember for years to come. It raged like a thing alive. On the outskirts of the defunct sawmill town of Mylan, the painted women of the Pink Motel stood watching the rain like forgotten sentries from their open doorways, the night’s business washed away. They smoked cigarettes and hugged themselves as hailstones broke like bullets against the weed-split parking lot. The older women turned away, shut their doors, drew curtains. The young remained watchful, restless, eyes fixed, perhaps, on the position of some faraway star they had long looked to, now obscured by the storm. Miles south, where the land became a warren of gravel roads twisting back upon themselves, where the sandy banks of the Prosper gave way to stumps and sloughs, bottom dwellers came out onto the porches of shanties, long-limbed men in overalls and rail-thin women in cotton shifts. Children not clothed at all. They watched the rain pour from the eaves of their tin roofs to wear away the mud below and saw in this the promise of their own slow annihilation, their fates tied inextricably to the land they or some long-lost forebear had claimed.

  And finally, along the river’s edge, the congregants of Sabbath House, numbering no more than a dozen souls, this clutch of ragged youth sheltering not from the raging heavens but from the terror that was their mad, lost preacher Billy Cotton, who even now sat soaked in the blood of his dead wife and child in the old manse across the lane. Their numbers ever dwindling since the madness had first bloomed in the old man years past, they huddled in the little row of shotgun houses as the wind howled and pine branches cracked and fell to lodge like unexploded bombs in the earth. They prayed, some of them. Others wept. Come the morning, surely they would all be gone.

  * * *

  Inside the manse, the old preacher sat unmoving on the stairs, even as a great oak bent and crashed into the western wall, shattering glass and stoving in the copper-sheeted roof. Billy Cotton’s mouth was dry, his tongue like sandpaper. His heart ticked steady as a clock. The object in his bloody hands—what the boatman’s curious daughter had not seen—was a pearl-inlaid straight razor, closed. Outside, the wind roared like a great cyclone come to funnel the old preacher up and away, and now as the water began to strike him he looked up through the hole at the sky above and saw lightning crack like God’s own judgment of his sins. And so he stood and went down the steps with his razor in hand, down the gravel lane and out onto the rickety dock that jutted over the stagnant water that flowed off the Prosper, where the boatman had brought the witch to deliver his child, and the child had been a monster, an abomination Cotton had held aloft by the ankle to show it to the twisted, pain-ravaged face of its mother, who would have loved it had she lived, because how could she not, this woman he had once given his heart to, whose pity and voice had moved mountains, and so the razor flashed in the gleaming light from the bedside lamp, and the old witch watched him draw it sharply, quickly. And did nothing, because she knew, as he did, that it was monstrous, this thing, this child that was not a child. And now, here, at the end of the dock, he closed up the razor that had been his since the days of his youth in a Galveston orphanage and hurled it into the water and fell to his knees and began to weep, great racking sobs, and soon he lay prostrate, bereft, a wailing banshee slicked in blood and rain, and after a while he curled up on his side and slept there on the boards, and soon the storm abated, and the air grew fresh and cool, and the dark rose up in a chorus of frog song.

  II

  First Run

  UPRIVER

  Cook hunkered at the bottom of the ramp, let his fingers play in the slow-moving Texas water. Downstream, just beyond where the river became Arkansas, a train traversed a trestle bridge, tearing through the last lingering rag of night. He could almost read the graffiti on the boxcars. The sound of it put him in mind of an old song, something about a baby in a suitcase, thrown from a train, the woman who raised it. In forty-nine years of life, Cook had never ridden a train, and the woman who had raised him was long dead. He scratched his beard. Put his fingers back in the moving water, liked the feel of it flowing on, the river indifferent to his presence. The world needed nothing of him to keep on spinning.

  He checked his watch: 5:12 a.m.

  The train had been gone only a few minutes when he heard, downriver, the Crabtree girl’s boat.

  He trudged back up the short ramp, over corrugated and broken concrete, to where his Shovelhead was parked. The road leading into the clearing was old gravel, long disused and grown over with Bahia grass. On a patch of ground where the grass was worn were the long-ashed bones of a fire. The woods beyond the clearing dark yet, the only light a blue mercury-vapor lamp shining at the edge of the trees. Cook took two longnecks from his saddlebag and popped each with a bottle opener on his key chain. Down the ramp, he saw her, rounding the bend in her Alumacraft, the trestle long and dark above. Cook lifted a hand, and she raised her own. She pointed at the old flat barge tethered along the bank, just up from the ramp. He walked down to it, through shin-high weeds, toes of his boots getting damp with dew.

  The barge had been there as long as Cook could remember, rotting but never sinking. Parts strewn across the deck as if the vessel were mid-repairs when abandoned: a rusted inboard engine, gaskets, water pump and solenoid, all beyond good use.

  The girl tied the Alumacraft to a starboard cleat.

  Cook waited, holding the beers in one hand behind his back, as
if they were flowers.

  She bent to pick up her blue Igloo cooler and was about to board the barge when she saw his hand, hidden. She tensed. He held out the beers, waggled the bottles. She gave him a look and set her Igloo onto the barge and came aboard.

  They sat cross-legged against the wheelhouse with its busted windows and graffitied walls, drinking, listening to the slow current of the Prosper, the distant whir of Whitman Dam four miles upriver. Beyond the dam the lake, and beyond the lake a hundred more miles of greenish brown water running south from northeast Texas like a scar on the land, cut eons ago when fossils were fish and the whole of the country was a Jurassic sea where great behemoths swam. Now, birdsong in the maples and oaks and beeches, the day coming alive.

  Cook stole glances at the girl in the graying light. Her profile was sharp and long, like the rest of her, scattershot freckles across nose and cheeks, a few acne scars like slash marks across her chin. Her jaw was hard and set. Dark hair pulled back, tidy but unwashed. Her eyes a murky gray-green. She had cut things out of herself to survive on the river, as a man cuts free a hook barbed deep in his flesh. There were words for what she did not lack: grit, mettle. What it took to carve up an animal, to cut through bone and strip skin and scoop viscera with bare hands, to wipe away sweat and leave behind a streak of blood. She did not lack these things.

  She’d see it coming, surely.

  The end.

  Perhaps already had.

  She caught him watching her. Fidgeted, then finished her beer in three long swallows and tossed the bottle over her shoulder, through the broken wheelhouse window. The bottle clipped a shard of glass and the sound of it breaking was loud and jarring. She got up, dusting the loose seat of her jeans, and made a business of ignoring Cook. Stepped back into her boat, checked her fuel. Picked up a metal can and tipped it into the motor’s tank.

  He drained his bottle, tossed it into the weeds along the shore, and tromped off the barge and up the ramp, back to the Shovelhead, where he fetched his bedroll with the money wrapped inside. By the time he returned, she was on the deck of the barge again, hands on the small of her back, stretching and staring at the distant silhouette of the railroad trestle. Cook took a knee by her cooler. He untied his roll and spread it on the deck. Tossed her the cash in a rolled lunch sack that lay at the bedroll’s center like the meat of a nut. Her lips moved silently as she counted it. Cook peeled the duct tape from around the Igloo’s lid and took out the dope and laid it all in a row on the roll: eight pint canning jars, stuffed full and sealed. These he rolled in a serape, then rolled the serape into the sleeping bag.

  When he was done, the girl dropped the paper sack into the Igloo and closed it and made to pick up the cooler.

  “Wait,” Cook said. He reached out, took her wrist gently.

  She jerked back, studied him.

  Searching, he knew, for some clue she had overlooked these last seven years, since the very first run. Any truth that could hurt or trap her. Cost her something she was not willing to pay. He held up his hands, palms out, an apology.

  She just stood there, looking at him. Suspicious as a cat.

  “I’ve got something else for you,” he said.

  Wanting to add: It’s all been leading here, ever night since the first, when you were fourteen and came piloting that big boat alone.

  He reached to the small of his back and brought out a pistol from his waistband.

  She froze.

  He flipped it, held it out flat on his palm like an offering between them.

  “Smith and Wesson snub-nose,” he said. “Good close up, if it comes to it.”

  She stared at him, unreadable as stone.

  “Take it,” he said. “Learn to use it. Bring it next time. Keep it out of sight, but you bring it, hear?”

  “Why?” she said, making no move to take the gun.

  He set the revolver down on the barge between them and cinched each end of his bedroll with a rawhide cord. “Because,” he said quietly. “Maybe one day the man says do this one particular thing for the preacher and I say no, it ain’t the kind of thing I do. I truck in dope, that’s all. A man trucks in innocence—” He swallowed. Shook his head. “They put you under for things like that. If I’d known they’d ask me to, maybe I never would have…”

  He lapsed, staring off into the river, which flowed quietly on, implacable.

  “Gets you thinking,” he said, more to himself now than her. “What are you willing to do? Where’s the end of it?”

  A muscle in her jaw ticked. She looked away.

  Cook stood and shouldered his roll. He left the pistol on the rusted metal deck of the barge. “They’ll ask you to make another run,” he said. “Maybe one more, maybe two, I don’t know. It’s the last one you best worry about, savvy?”

  The dawn had almost fully broken around them.

  Her answer was barely audible, but Cook heard it. He always heard her, no matter how low she spoke, and she was in the habit of speaking very low.

  “Crabtrees don’t use guns,” she said. She took the Igloo and hopped from the barge into her boat, leaving the pistol on the deck.

  So he picked it up and did something that he had not done in all the time he had known her. He called her by name, and just speaking the word was enough to turn her head, if only for a moment, but it was a moment that would hang between them forever, so long as one of them lived. The morning mist curling up from the river like wood shavings. “Miranda,” he called, and when she turned, he tossed her the gun.

  She caught it, a reflex. Held it in both hands.

  He thought about what he might say next. He wanted to tell her what knowing her had meant, how every few months he grew restless not seeing her and did not know why. That she was a mystery and a magic in his life. But words like these had never come easy to Cook, so instead he just said, “Tell that dwarf to watch out for himself. We was friends. I reckon he’ll understand.”

  A shadow of something—doubt, fear—crossed her face. But it was gone, just as quickly as it came, and after it had passed she tossed the gun carelessly in the bottom of her boat. She whipped the Alumacraft around and aimed it back downriver, sparing him no look, no farewell, not even a wave. As if putting distance between them as quickly as possible might erase this new, mysterious line just drawn. A border to be crossed, and she, retreating from it.

  Least she took the gun, Cook thought. That’s something.

  He walked back up the ramp and stood at the top, listening, until the sound of her motor had faded.

  He had just kicked the Shovelhead to life—it snarled and spat—when a wave of loss so profound washed over him that he slumped on the seat. He looked one last time at the muddy river, where the only mystery left in his life had just disappeared, she, perhaps, fully ignorant of the empty wake her passing had left in his heart.

  He rode his bike out of the woods and down the long, straight gravel road, which ran parallel to the train tracks for a time, a field of grain sorghum stretching away on the left in the amber light of morning.

  Maybe I will buy myself a big silver Airstream and a truck to haul it, and I will head west. Way out west—

  Ahead, where gravel met asphalt, a white Bronco was turned crosswise, and two men clad in T-shirts and denim stood outside it. One—short, pale-skinned, bald—looked down the road at Cook through a pair of binoculars. The other—huge and hulking—held a scoped rifle. Cook slowed, had just enough time to register what he was seeing, then caught the puff of smoke from the barrel. He never heard the shot, but he felt the impact in his chest, like a metal fist driving him backward, separating him from his bike, his daydreams, his tether to the world. He hit the gravel on his back and the bike skidded into the long grass.

  Lying in the dirt, the taste of blood rising in his throat, he could not feel his body. He heard the pop of gravel under tire, heard doors slam.

  A voice said, “Dope’s no good. Got glass all in it.”

  He saw a giant dark shape blot ou
t the golden sky. In its hand a blade, long and curved and wicked. A scythe.

  “More where that came from,” the giant said, and raised his blade.

  Cook shut his eyes.

  SABBATH HOUSE

  The dwarf John Avery leaned against a piling at the end of Sabbath Dock, head downcast, boots angled sideways in the weary posture of a man turning life over between his soles. He wore a pair of unwashed jeans and a wrinkled plaid shirt, the tail of which was half untucked. A bird’s nest of hair held at bay with a crocheted sweatband of brown and green. Hollows beneath his eyes and the stink of old pot about him.

  He stood waiting, watching the narrow waterway ahead, a row of toothpick trees where white cranes perched to catch the rising sun. Behind him, a ragged line of sweetgum and pine, and beyond these: the great wreck of Sabbath House, laid bare in the dawn. Squares of cardboard in the still-broken western windows; shutters missing slats; peeling white porch columns strangled by saw briars. The roof a hodgepodge of tin nailed down over copper where the storm, ten years past, had torn half of it free. All manner of leaks inside, Avery knew. Cracking plaster and water stains and furring strips like ribs exposed. The weight of that house fell like a yoke across the dwarf’s shoulders. Shoulders that had borne far more burdens than nature had given them width or strength to bear.

  And yet. Here he was.

  At a quarter past seven, a small engine droned up the inlet that flowed off the Prosper River. Miranda Crabtree’s boat emerged out of the mist between a marshy strip of land and a stand of cedars. Tall and sinewy at the tiller, she wore a threadbare gray sweatshirt and dirt-pocked jeans rolled at the calves. The sleeves of the sweatshirt were torn off and her arms were hard and lean. Avery felt a familiar stirring at the sight of her, some feeling deep in his breast he’d never named for fear of speaking it aloud, either to the Crabtree girl in a moment of weakness, or in dreams, where he lay in bed beside his wife, who loved him far more than he deserved.