On Wednesday we were honoured to bring you the cover reveal for the Uk edition of Andy Davidson's The Boatman's Daughter, today we bring you an extract from this highkly anticipated novel
THE BOATMAN'S DAUGHTER, EXTRACT
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 graygreen. 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.
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 graygreen. 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.
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.
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.
