The Boatman's Daughter: A Novel
3.5/5
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About this ebook
"Go read Andy Davidson’s lush nightmare, The Boatman’s Daughter. It put an arrow through my head and heart.” —Paul Tremblay, author of Growing Things
"Ample bloodshed is offset by beautiful prose . . . A stunning supernatural Southern Gothic." —Kirkus (starred)
Ever since her father was killed when she was just a child, Miranda Crabtree has kept her head down and her eyes up, ferrying contraband for a mad preacher and his declining band of followers to make ends meet and to protect an old witch and a secret child from harm.
But dark forces are at work in the bayou, both human and supernatural, conspiring to disrupt the rhythms of Miranda’s peculiar and precarious life. And when the preacher makes an unthinkable demand, it sets Miranda on a desperate, dangerous path, forcing her to consider what she is willing to sacrifice to keep her loved ones safe.
With the heady mythmaking of Neil Gaiman and the heartrending pacing of Joe Hill, Andy Davidson spins a thrilling tale of love and duty, of loss and discovery. The Boatman's Daughter is a gorgeous, horrifying novel, a journey into the dark corners of human nature, drawing our worst fears and temptations out into the light.
Andy Davidson
Andy Davidson is the Bram Stoker Award–nominated author of In the Valley of the Sun and The Boatman’s Daughter. Born and raised in Arkansas, he makes his home in Georgia, where he lives with his wife, Crystal, and a bunch of cats.
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Reviews for The Boatman's Daughter
65 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Excessive similes to the point it was annoying. Seriously, did the editor even read this book? Storyline and plot was entertaining and well executed but those SIMILES! Good grief!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Li nu to Hyde sf me I gc sr ee
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5First, let me acknowledge how well the audiobook is read. Five Stars for Samantha Desz!As for the author, Mr. Davidson, one must acknowledge his imagination and his ability to write sentences and paragraphs that conjure up visions of damp, dark places populated by interesting, if often despicable, characters. It is as a plotter that Mr. Davidson falls short. This book piles horrific scene upon horrific scene to the point of no return--it gets old after a while. It also isn't particularly clear how 11-year old Miranda manages to remain independent after the death of her father. The book's best--and worst--part is its long climax, which begins a bit over halfway through and cuts from scene to scene, cinematically, to leave the reader or listener hanging on the precipice of some new atrocity. For all the special effects, it doesn't all really come together. More problematic is the whole supernatural element of the book. Frankly, the story would have been better without it. The supernatural characters, who are never well explained, are not really an integral part of the story, which is more concerned with drug dealing, murder, and family relationships. Not sorry at all that I listened to this. Overall, I did enjoy it. But it is another example of a book that really needed a good, forceful editor.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It’s gothic, it’s bloody, and it’s got a surprisingly literary bite, making The Boatman’s Daughter a satisfying read for horror fans and more, if not a bit difficult to comprehend at times.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Didn't quite live up to its promise.
Miranda Crabtree has lived in the bayou on the Prosper River her whole life. One dark and stormy night when she was a child, her father, the boatman of the title, ferried the local old-world immigrant witch from the house where she had just helped deliver a cultish preacher's wife of a child with webbed fingers and mottled skin to a secret place in the swamp. Her father disappeared, she found and saved the baby, and the witch rescued her from death by snake poison.
Ten years later, Miranda has a tight-knight and loving family in the witch and the boy, Littlefish, who is totally mute. She keeps them supplied with the things they can't grow or hunt (impeccably, with bows and arrows) by running drugs for Billy Cotton, the preacher whose flock has thinned to just a grateful follower, Avery (a dwarf who happens to have a very green thumb for marijuana), and his wife and baby. The local sheriff, villain through and through, gets him connections in exchange for a cut. Unbeknownst to Miranda, Cotton has been trading up, bargaining more than just pot for information, and planning a bloody end to a life full of regrets.
This is a story that dwells in nature, telling us about green and good every chance it gets, so much so that it takes a very long time to kick into gear--almost a third of the book spent showing us how lovely Miranda's life with Irska and Littlefish is in comparison to the drudgery of Avery's, the past-obsession of Cotton, and the plain awfulness of the nasty sheriff Riddle. It takes so long that the horror and supernatural elements arrive almost as an afterthought, frankly unnecessary to the plot, to my great disappointment. I thought I'd be getting literary magical-realist supernatural horror, and while I did get it eventually, it took ages to arrive. If this hadn't been such a fast read, I would have given up.
Also seemingly unnecessary are the references to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which was a major reason why I read this book. We've got Miranda with Littlefish, our Caliban, as an adopted brother (why the heck is he named "Littlefish"? Just for the scene where Trinculo says Caliban smells like a fish? The name seems dehumanizing). Sycorax is a mother/grandmother figure whose role and tendency to keep big secrets is more like Prospero. The Prosper River, near the town of Mylan, feeds to (presumably) the Mississippi. I guess it's so named because it's a magical place? Avery seems like our Ariel in his feelings of being trapped, but a young girl with the gift of foresight, the object of Cotton's search, also seems like a possible fit for actually having powers. There are some supernatural elements around--a house spirit who lives with Irska, some nature leshii--that kind of fit the theme. And Irska lives on a lovely little island. So the parallels are kind of there, but like the supernatural parts, you could strip them out and still have a perfectly functional story.
And to be clear, I did like that story, even if it wasn't what I was hoping. Miranda is a tough young woman who knows and loves her allies, not a "strong independent female character" of the type who accepts no help and detaches herself from everyone. Davidson has interesting characters even if some of them--Avery's wife, the nameless young girl, and Cotton's wife, Lena, who turns out to be far more important than appearances would suggest--could use a little more fleshing out compared to the full-bodied Miranda, Riddle, and Cotton. While initially put off by a last-minute revelation--not least because it created last-minute questions with no time for answers--I did manage to settle it in my mind. And I liked the ending.
On one hand: Heavy-handed imagery and Symbolism-with-a-capital-S, not-quite-integrated genre and Shakespeare elements, and a long time to build up steam. On the other hand, interesting characters--some very much so--a very strong sense of place and atmosphere, plus I'm a sucker for the Tempest references and magical/supernatural elements that are there, if not as much as I'd want. An okay book, not a waste of time, worth a write up, but not a rave review.
Oh, and it seems odd now that I didn't mention this sooner, but there's an awful lot of blood and violence. Didn't seem gratuitous, but it was a lot. Just something to be aware of. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Southern Gothic with a lot of gore. It’s a bit of a muddle, with names that invoke Shakespeare’s Tempest, elements of Eastern European mythology, all sloshing together in the muck of the swampy Arkansas bayous. The language is florid, and the action is violent and grim, of the sort that makes it hard for me to want to keep reading because horrible things happen unrelentingly to good people, and to morally ambiguous people, and to downright evil people, who outnumber the good ones by quite a lot. But I kept reading to see how it all turned out, despite that where and why things went the way they did wasn’t always entirely clear, even at the end.On the plus side, the florid language did evoke the bayous’ sights, smells, and sounds almost tangibly. And there are two or three really interesting and well-drawn characters.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I loved the vibes and writing of this novel, which in some ways felt like a marriage of Carson McCullers and Cormac McCarthy, with just a touch of Joe Hill. Sinking into the scenes and the setting as things unfolded was a pleasure, and as the book kept going, the reading got faster and faster.The issue for me, though, became clarity. So often, it felt like I needed just a bit more connective tissue and narrative to help be sure of how the characters related to each other, how their pasts connected, and exactly what was happening on the page. Especially in the middle of the book, there were moments where I loved what I was reading, but still wasn't quite sure of what was going on in that moment. At a certain point, all of those moments of confusion added up, and I was reading for vibes as much as meaning, letting the language and individual scenes pull me on even when I wasn't quite sure of the larger canvas and how it was coming together. Probably, this is a book that would benefit from multiple reads...but when it comes down to it, I never quite connected to the characters well enough that I'm tempted to re-read. In some ways, that makes me feel like this is a plot-driven novel which is written more in the style of a literary or character-driven novel. Not to say that all those things can't come together at once, but in this case, I'm not sure they did.I look forward to trying more of Andy Davidson's work since I loved so many elements of this. I'm not sure I'd recommend this specific book, but it was immersive enough that I think I'm glad to have come across it.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Absolutely couldn't get into this. It felt written to death. Adjectives, adverbs, details clogging up everything.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I seem to be on a horror feast this month and this one certainly fits right in. It’s a noir thriller dipped in the dark mud of the bayou, packed with witches, demons, and gods I have never heard of...nor wish to hear of. I’ve never before read anything by this author but I know that he knows how to write my darkest dreams...or give me some shiny new nightmares. I love to read. That should not be news to all that know me and I try hard to not be judgmental of an author’s work. After all I have no personal experience with seeing someone tear your hard work apart but I do know when something comes along that has merit and appeals so much to the depth of my being that I don’t want to put it down. This was one of those books.
Book preview
The Boatman's Daughter - Andy Davidson
I
In a Certain Kingdom, in a Certain Land
It was after midnight when the boatman and his daughter brought the witch out of Sabbath House and back onto the river. Old Iskra sat astride the johnboat’s center plank, wearing a head scarf and a man’s baggy britches damp with blood, their iron reek lost to the night-fragrant honeysuckle that bowered the banks of the Prosper. In her lap: a bread bowl, wide and deep and packed with dried eucalyptus sprigs and clods of red earth broken around a small, still form covered by a white pillowcase. The pillowcase, like the old woman’s clothes, stained red.
They angled off-river at the mouth of a bayou and were soon enclosed by the teeming wall of night. Cries of owls, a roar of bullfrogs, the wet slopping of beaver among the stobs. Miranda Crabtree faced into the wind, lighting Hiram’s way with the Eveready spot mounted on the bow. The spotlight shined on branches closing in, cypress skirts scraping like dry, bony fingers along the johnboat’s hull. Spiders in the trees, their webs gleaming silver. A cottonmouth moccasin churning in the shallows. Miranda held up arms to guard her ears and cheeks from the branches, thinking of Alice down the rabbit hole, one small door opening upon another, and another, each door smaller than the last.
Push through!
the old witch cried.
Branches screeching over metal, they did, the boatman breaking off fistfuls of dead cypress limbs until the boat slipped free onto the wide stage of a lake. Here, Hiram cut the motor and they drifted in a stump field, a preternatural silence descending over frog and cricket and owl, as if the little boat had somehow passed into the inner, sacred temple of the night itself.
To the west, purple lightning rolled thunderless in the cage of the sky.
In the water were the twisted, eerie shapes of deadfalls. They broke the surface like coffins bobbing in flooded graves.
What is this place?
Miranda asked, angling her light all around.
But no one answered.
Ahead, a wide muddy bank stretched before a stand of trees, tall and close, and when the boat had nosed to a stop in the silt, the old witch got up with a pop of bones, stepped over the side, and staggered off along the path of the light, bowl in her arms. Her shadow long and reaching.
Hiram brought up a shotgun and a smaller flashlight from behind the stern seat. Miranda knew the double-barrel to be her grandfather’s, the only gun Hiram had ever owned. She had never seen him fire it. They were bowhunters, the Crabtrees. Always had been.
She needs me to go with her,
he said. You stay put.
But—
He stepped out of the boat into the mud and came around to the bow, where Miranda could see his face in the light. Long and narrow, sadness in his very bones, it seemed, the first touches of gray at his temples. Drops of moisture swirled thick in the light between them.
Stay,
he said. The light will guide us back.
He took her chin in hand and brushed her cheek with his knuckles and told her he loved her. This frightened Miranda, for these were not words Hiram Crabtree often said. They struck her now like a kind of incantation against something, some evil he had yet to fathom. He kissed the back of her hand, beard rough against her skin. He said he would be back. He promised. Leave that light shining,
he said, and then he left her, following the witch’s humped form into the trees. Their deep tracks welling up with water, as if the land itself were erasing them.
The spring night grew hushed save for the the far-off mutter of the coming storm, which had been threatening since twilight, black clouds like a fleet of warships making ready to cannonade the land with fire, water, wind, and ice.
Hours before, when Hiram woke her, Miranda had been dreaming of stumbling through woods and brambles onto a path that brought her out of the trees and into a clearing, where the land sloped up to a hilltop draped in flowering kudzu, little white blossoms aglow in the moonlight. Cradled in her arms, a black bullhead catfish she had only just pulled slick and dead from the bayou. Atop the hill: the witch’s cabin on stilts, one yellow flame burning in a window. Miranda went up the crooked, red-mud path, up the wide board steps of the porch, and into the cabin, where the old witch stood waiting. She dropped the fish in the old woman’s bread bowl and the witch took her filleting knife from her apron and slit the fish’s belly. Miranda put her thumbs in the fish’s gills to lift it and the innards slopped out in a purple heap. The old witch slung the guts into her boxwood stove, where they hissed and popped in the fire, and the dead fish heaved in Miranda’s hands, came alive, began to scream. It screamed with the voice of a child.
Then Hiram’s hand on her shoulder, shaking her.
Now, in the johnboat, she was waiting. Chin in hand, elbow on her knee, just as she had sat waiting earlier that night on the porch steps of Sabbath House. They had fetched the witch from her cabin on the bayou, and from there upriver to that ugly, paintlorn manse.
The front door of the plantation house stood open to let in the cool, blustery air. Last fall’s leaves skittered over the boards like giant palmetto bugs as, inside, the witch went about her ancient trade behind a shut bedroom door. Across the gravel lane, Hiram stood in the bald, root-gnarled yard of a low shotgun house, talking softly to a man who was not quite five feet tall. The little man listened intently, head down, hands in his pockets. Windows of the other five shacks that stood beneath the trees were lit, a few men smoking anxiously between the clapboard dwellings, just beyond the reach of their own bare-bulb porch lights. Vague, grown-up shapes to Miranda.
Within the manse, a woman screamed, freezing every soul who heard.
Another scream: the wail of something deep and true torn loose, lost to the dark.
Hiram and the dwarf went charging past Miranda into the foyer, only to halt in shock at the foot of the stairs. Miranda pushed between them and saw an old man, all legs and elbows in black suit pants and a bloody white shirt, stagger out of the bedroom to sit like a broken toy at the top of the stairs. He clutched in his hands an object, something Miranda could not see, forearms red with blood up to his cuffs, which were rolled at the elbows. Miranda felt her father’s hand on her shoulder, and when she looked up she saw Hiram’s face gone pale as chalk. The little man to her right was stout and strong, but she glimpsed it on his face, too: horror.
The witch came solemnly out of the bedroom. Carrying the bread bowl. She passed the old man on the stairs, whose eyes never strayed from whatever faraway place they had fixed.
Blood dripping on the boards between his scuffed wing tip shoes.
Hiram pushed Miranda toward the front door, and she glimpsed, off the foyer in the downstairs parlor, a man sitting on an antique sofa. He was young, slim, handsome, a lit cigarette between full lips and a glass of amber liquid in hand. He wore a gun, a badge.
He winked a cornflower-blue eye as Miranda scooted past.
Now, in the johnboat. Waiting still, picking at a scab on her bare knee.
Thunder boomed, closer.
Straight ahead, a white whooping crane stepped out of the trees into the Eveready’s beam. It stood in the mud and seemed to glow, stark and bright and otherworldly against the black of the swamp. Miranda watched it, and it watched her. The spotlight’s beam like a tether between two worlds, Miranda’s and the bird’s. Something preternatural crept up her spine, raised gooseflesh on her arms.
A slow, rolling rumble that wasn’t thunder came out of the trees, and the crane launched itself into the dark.
The water in Hiram’s bootprints rippled, and Miranda felt the aluminum boat shudder.
The distant trees swayed in their tops, though the air was heavy and still.
Miranda’s heart pounding in her chest.
Then, deep within the woods: a gunshot.
It cracked the night in two.
A second shot followed, reverberating huge and canyonlike.
Miranda drew a single breath, then leaped from the boat. The mud yanked her down, but she struggled up and ran for the trees, forgetting that the Eveready at the bow shone only so far. In the woods, darkness reared up and closed her between its palms. She skidded to a halt.
Called for Hiram. Listened.
Called again.
Heart racing, blood pounding, shore and spotlight at her back, she ran.
Lightning flashed at close intervals, lit the trees bright as day.
She ran on, calling out until Hiram’s name was no longer a word, just a raw, ragged sound. She struck a tree, bounced, came up hard against another, and there she hung against the rough bark, gasping.
More lightning, and in that staccato flash, the land sloped down to a maze of saw palms wrapped in shreds of mist. Beyond the maze, the undergrowth rose up in a tangled, briar-thick wall, impenetrable. Great thorny vines, woven tight as a bird’s nest.
Shining deep within that nest, like a string she had followed from boat to forest, was the faint orange beam of a flashlight. Fixed and slanting across the ground. All but swallowed by the darkness.
Miranda staggered into the saw palm maze, blades nicking her bare arms and legs. She felt the wisp of orb weavers against her cheeks, webs enshrouding her as they broke against her, as if nature were clothing her in itself, preparing her for some arcane ritual. When the fronds grew too close, she went down on hands and knees and crawled in the moist earth, and the light ahead grew stronger, closer. When she finally reached the undergrowth, she saw a kind of tunnel through it, just large enough for a fox or a boar—or a girl. She pressed her belly to the ground and worked elbows and hips and legs to worm through the thick tangle, aware a sound was coming out of her, some primal grunt that made her think she might vomit up the whole of her insides and there, in the sticky pink folds of stomach, would be a pile of stones, the source of this grunting, clacking noise. Finally, she came out where Hiram’s flashlight lay bereft in a clump of moss and pale, fleshy toadstools.
Daddy,
she was gasping, Daddy.
The glass of the lens and the blue plastic housing crawled with bugs.
Covered in mud and spider silk and tiny rivulets of blood, the squished remnants of a green-backed orb weaver stuck like a barrette in her dark hair, Miranda took up the light and got to her feet. She called again for Hiram, sweeping the beam over bare, bone-white trees, like great spears hurled down into the earth. Clumps of marshy reeds rising out of black pools that sheened in the light like oil. Narrow, mossy strips of earth among the pools.
And something else, too, glimpsed in the lightning, just beyond the trees.
Miranda went carefully alongside one of the pools that branched into a stream, black and thick. Moss along the bank festooned with brown toadstools and odd, star-shaped plants she had never seen the like of in all her trips hunting, fishing, trapping with Hiram. Sticks and clumps of bark were lodged in the stream and blackened, and at what appeared to be the widest, deepest point, her light caught the shape of something large and half submerged on its side. Brown feathers speckled black. An owl.
The stream opened out into a kind of moat that circled a great wide clearing, and at the center of the clearing was the thing she had glimpsed in the lightning. A shape, huge and dark and shrouded in mist. Peering up at it, Miranda saw what looked like a head, two great horns, and two long ragged limbs ending in crooked fingers. She almost cried out, even took a step back. Then realized, in the rapid shutter of the lightning, that it was only a shelf of rock, atop it a tree, thick and twisted and dead, its trunk canting out at an angle that should have sent it tumbling from the ledge into the muck below.
A bark-skinned log bridged the black moat that encircled the rock. Miranda crossed it, balancing as she went. Sweat soaked through her shirt, her underwear. The earth beyond the moat was spongy, soft, rich. She felt it sinking underfoot with every step. She went through clumps of reeds and grass and played her light up at the rock as she came into its shadow and saw a long branch reaching like an arm from the tree, and from this arm a thick vine dropped straight down like a plumb line into a mound of freshly turned black earth, at its center a hole, deep and dark. The opening big and wide as a tractor wheel.
Among a stand of thin brown reeds at the base of the mound: the old witch’s bread bowl, drawn in blood, overturned. A pillowcase in the dirt.
Miranda heard a snap in the dark, a squelch from near the rock.
Eyes were on her, she could feel them.
Bugs crawled over Hiram’s light.
Her voice small and swallowed by the night: Daddy?
She played the light over the distant rock, its cold surface shining back, a tangle of fat roots and vines like a fall of wet hair. Her beam caught something in the mud, a glint of brass. She went to it, bent, and plucked up the red wax casing of a shotgun shell. She touched it to her nose, smelled the acrid scent of gunpowder still fresh on it. She knocked bugs from the light and cast about for Hiram’s blood, a second shell, some track or sign.
Nothing.
She pushed the shell into the pocket of her shorts.
A rustling, in the clump of grass near her feet.
Miranda swung the light.
Something round and red and raw lay in the moss, not far from the upended bowl. At first Miranda didn’t recognize it. Slicked with gore, more like a skinned rabbit than a baby. Its flesh a lifeless gray. She played the beam over arms and legs. They were mottled, rough and scaled, a long white worm of umbilicus twisted beneath it. Leaves clinging to a head of dark hair.
Its belly heaved. Its mouth opened.
For an instant, she did not move. Then she ran to it, dropped on her knees beside it.
Below its chin, a wide slit bubbled fresh bright blood like a second mouth as the baby gulped and sucked air.
She saw the pillowcase among the reeds and stooped for it, not looking where she was stepping. She splashed into a shallow pool of black liquid, thick and warm. It flooded her shoe, soaked her sock. Miranda gasped as her foot began to tingle, then to burn. Working quickly, ignoring her foot, she turned the pillowcase inside out and used a clean edge to press the wound at the baby’s throat. But now it seemed it was not a wound at all, for the blood wiped free and the flesh there, beneath the jaw, was whole.
Had she imagined it? Some trick of shadow and gore?
She wiped her hand on her shorts, snakes of adrenaline still in her fingers as she worked her thumb into the baby’s old-man palm and the digits parted. Between each digit was a thin membrane of skin, purple veins alight in the glow of Hiram’s flashlight.
Webbed—
A sudden rustle from the reeds where she’d found the pillowcase.
A whiplike blur, pink tissue and fang.
She felt the sound: a tenpenny nail punching flesh.
Shocked, she fell back on her haunches. Barely caught a glimpse of it, fat and long, the color of mud. A cottonmouth, corkscrewing away.
… snake-bit, oh, oh, Daddy, no …
… she grabbed the flashlight, shined it on her left forearm, saw the wound welling blood, the flesh already puffing …
… stay calm, keep your heart rate down, the boat, the baby …
One last clamor of thunder and the rain began to fall. Big fat drops, cold and stunning.
Oh, oh no, Daddy, I’m sorry …
Miranda staggered to her feet, picking up the baby in her right arm, holding the flashlight with her left, right foot gone numb from the sludge that slicked it, and set off back in the direction she had come.
At the tunnel she fell to her knees, heart racing, sluicing venom, head fuzzy.
The flashlight went tumbling. Lost.
Crawling now, pushing through, slow, so slow, the numbness in her left arm reaching her shoulder, the tingling in her foot inching higher, into calf and thigh, her whole body assaulted, long thorns snagging her shirt and hair, and all the while the baby’s heart hammering against her own, a fish odor wafting up.
Upright again, lurching—
Left arm tight against her side, stumbling, sharp fronds slicing, right leg numb from the hip down now, oily black sludge burning skin—
She fell.
She lay on her back and the rain pelted her face, ran beneath her in tiny rivers.
The fingers of her left hand swollen thick as corks.
The baby lay at her small, girl’s breast. Alive but weak.
You are going to die tonight, Miranda Crabtree thought, staring up at the dark boughs of the trees, where the lightning made jagged shapes and turned the trees into devils come to minister. This is your death.
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