"The Open Hand"

He had them under the water and the boat back in the roots, and the patrol was coming, and the counts had already started in him.

He had not started it. He never did. His hands had carried counts his whole life---strokes, bodies, the children he loaded and emptied out of his head before the next ones---and the count came up now, without giving him the figures. Seconds. The seconds since the three heads had gone under the black water and the green had come down over the boat and made it a part of the bank. He held the count and he held the boat low and still, and over the water the engines came on, twin and heavy, slow.

This was not travel speed but the slow quartering churn of a boat with men in it who were looking for something, going nowhere on purpose. He did not think it was them. A patrol on the open in the morning was a patrol going home with the night still on it. But he did not move, because a thing that is looking finds what moves, and the count went on, and the three under the water did not come up, because he had not given them the sign, and they would not come up until he did.

The gunboat came through the thin place in the canopy and dropped its engines to an idle, and it was there.

Five or six of them, in a grey hull going to rust at the seams, and they had the look of men at the cold tail of a long night---red-eyed, slow, one of them asleep sitting up with his rifle stood between his knees. They knew the canoe. Everyone on the water knew the canoe. The one at the wheel took a hand off it, lazy, and called over.

"Ferryman."

He lifted two fingers off the oar and put them back.

"You out early." The voice was rough with whatever they'd drunk. The man squinted at the low boat in the roots, at the drum sitting open in the bow with the fish in it grey and stiff. Osogó had taken the lid off the good barrel before they came, so the fish lay where any eye could land on them and be bored. "What you carrying. Fish?"

"Fish."

"He's always got fish," another one said from the back, eyes shut. "This man is married to a fish."

The one at the wheel laughed, a wet morning laugh, and brought his rifle up and put two rounds flat into the white sky, and the sound rolled out over the water and came back off the trees, and Osogó did not flinch, and the roots did not move.

"Gbán," the man said when the echo died. Gold in the grin somewhere. "We'll be in Gbán by dark. You bring that fish down. We'll take it off you and not even pay you---for the love of the Ferryman."

"Mm."

"Mm," the man said back, mocking the little of it, fond. He set the rifle down and put his hand to the wheel. "Don't drown out there, senior. Who'd carry us then."

The engines climbed and the gunboat dragged its wedge of wake around and went off down the channel, east, into the open and the sun, and the sound of it thinned and stretched and did not stop. It went small. But it stayed. A thread of it hanging out there on the morning.

He waited until the wake had died against the roots.

Then he took the pole and set it to the nearest root and pushed, and the boat slid backward, deeper, ten feet and then five more, in under where the canopy ran thick and the sun did not reach---because the sun was full up now and the old place was a place a boat could be seen from the water, and he wanted them out of the light before they came up.

Then he brought them up.

The woman first. He found her by the roots she'd taken hold of, her face just under the surface, her eyes open and fixed on the place the boat had been, and he got a hand into her wrapper at the shoulder and lifted, and her head broke the water and she pulled the air in through her teeth and made no sound, because she had the sense not to. She came up reaching. Her hand was out of the water and going before her head was clear of it, going for the child who wasn't there, and her mouth opened on the front of a word---

"The gi---"

His hand was over it before the rest came. He held her mouth and he held her eyes with his and he shook his head, once, small. The thread of the engines hung in the east. She heard it. The word went back down her throat. He took the hand away.

"I'll bring her up," he whispered.

He got the boy next. Snail came up white and limp and breathing, his eyes huge in the cassava-pale of his face, and Osogó put him over the gunwale into the bottom of the boat and the woman took him in against her without being told.

Two. He had two.

He looked at the water where the girl had gone down.

She was not there.

He knew the place. He knew every place his cargo went into the water---he had watched her go, marked the black gap of root she'd folded herself past---and he looked at the gap now and there was no girl in it and no girl rising out of it. The count was still going. It had a number in it now, whether he wanted one or not, and the number was too big.

He laid the oar down where his hand would find it.

He gave the woman a look that held her still, and she gave him back a face gone flat and waiting, the boy held hard against her, and he went over the side into the brown.

Under, the world was the one he knew. Not the eyes---the eyes were no use, silt and root-dark and nothing---but the rest of it. The cold pressure of the water on his skin. The small thread of current working through the roots. The give and the not-give of the river around a solid thing. He had moved in this his whole life. He had walked down into this river once to die in it and it had not kept him, and the dark under the surface had never been a thing he feared after that. He went through the roots by feel, hand over hand, down and along, reading the black the way he read a channel in fog.

His hand found her hand.

It was open. The fingers spread, easy, not clawing, not snatching at the water the way a drowning thing snatches. Just open. Just there in the dark, held out like she had set it where it could be found. He closed his hand over it and felt the smallness, the scarred small bones of it, and pulled himself down the length of her arm toward her---

And her eyes were open.

In the brown dark where there was nothing to see, her eyes were open, and they were on him. She had not shut them. She had gone down under the air and under the noise and held still in the deep with her eyes open on the place a thing might come from, and she saw him before he reached her.

He brought her up slow, under the roots, into the black water in the boat's shadow where the light did not come, and her head broke beside his and she took her first breath in through the nose---narrow, even, the smallest sound a breath can be and still be a breath. She knew how to come up quiet. Somebody had made her know it.

He got her over the gunwale and in.

And the girl who had not shut her mouth since the dock, sat down against the hull with the river running off her, and looked at him, and said nothing. Not one word. She breathed. She looked at him with the eyes that had been open in the dark.

He looked back at the water. He picked up the oar.

⁂

He took them deeper into the swamp.

The channel he wanted was a crack between two walls of mangrove, a thing a man would not find unless he'd been shown it or had found it himself one year in the dark, and he put the bow into it and the green closed behind them and the open water and the last thread of the engines went away together. The light came down green and broken. The water here did not move. The boat slid on it and left nothing behind.

Nobody spoke. The boy had stopped his soundless crying and lay against the woman with his eyes half shut. The girl sat where he'd put her and the river dried on her in the warm air and she began to shiver, and then the boy was shivering, and then the woman too, though the cold had gone out of the morning.

He knew that shaking.

It was not cold.

He reached behind the drum and brought out the blanket---an old thing, a heavy woven rug gone soft with the years, traded down from the north where they wove them thick for a cold the delta never had, and it carried the boat in it, diesel and river and the dried fish that had ridden under it a hundred trips---and he shook it out one-handed and let it fall, and it came down over the three of them at once, a single brown weight settling, and they took its edges and drew it close and went still beneath it.

He watched the water.

The oar went down and came up. The woman's hand came out from under the blanket and took his ankle.

He did not look at her properly. He looked where her face was pointed---out past the thinning of the canopy to where the open water showed in a band of sun---and he had it before she could say it.

"Is that---"

He put his hand down flat in the air over her and she stopped.

Forty feet out, where the roots gave way to the bright water, a V stood on the surface and came on. It was not fast. It had no need of fast. The point of it was a snout and the two ridges behind were the eyes, up and clear of the water, and the long dark of the rest ran back under the brown, and the V did not waver and did not turn. It had a line, and the line was the boat.

He did not read the animal.

He read the problem.

He read the problem.

He dropped his eyes to the waterline and the waterline told him what the thing out there already knew: with the three of them bundled low under the wool and the morning's water standing in the bottom of the boat, the side of it sat a hand's breadth above the river. It was not a boat. It was a log, low in the water, with the warm smell of four bodies on it.

And he could not run. The cord on the motor would bring the men in the east back down the channel before the animal ever reached him. The slap of the oar on the water would do the same. The thing out there would feel the strike come through the river before it heard it, and so would they.

He had a thing that fed through the water in front of him and a thing that listened to the water behind him, and the one rule that answered both was the same: no sound.

He did not pick up the oar.

He took the pole.

He choked his hands down it, close to the iron foot, and he did not set the foot in the open water. He set it to a root---a thick one, old, black and hard as a bar under the surface---and he pushed against it, slow, and the boat gave and slid backward into the thicket, into the dark of the roots, and never put a ripple out ahead of it for the thing to read. Root to root he took it, pushing off the wood and never the water, the boat going back in a long silent drag, and he laid the iron tangle of the mangrove between the soft of the hull and the open where the animal had the advantage. The V came on across the bright water toward the empty.

It reached the place.

It stopped.

The snout went side to side, slow, tasting what hung in the water. The near eye came around---yellow, a black slit standing up the middle of it---and found the dark mass of the boat back in the roots and held there.

For a long moment nothing in the world moved. The woman had both children inside her arms under the wool and the boy's face pushed into her, and the girl made no sound---none---her eyes wide over the edge of the blanket and her hand on the gunwale gone bloodless at the knuckle and not one sound coming out of her.

Then the eye went under. The ridges went under. The V flattened off the surface and the bright water closed smooth over the place where it had been.

Off the top was not gone.

He stood with the pole and he waited and he counted---not seconds now, he had lost the seconds, he counted the way you count a thing coming, the empty count with no numbers in it that ends only when the thing arrives---and the thing arrived in the soles of his feet.

A weight came along the bottom of the boat. A slow, heavy, dragging scrape down the length of the keel, something armored passing under the floorboards, feeling the shape of what floated, asking whether the log would roll and give up the meat in it. The hull shuddered with it. The boy started to come up out of the woman's arms and she pulled him down and put his face to her chest and held it there. The girl's grip on the wood went harder. Osogó stood over all of it and did not move his feet and felt the long body slide beneath him, reading him through the wood the same way he was reading it.

He slid in the pole down the side of the hull. Smooth, no splash, a needle going into the brown, and he felt it pass the planking and run down along the dark of the thing below, the iron foot dragging over a pebbled hardness, the armor of the back, until the hardness gave to something else: the softer hide low and behind, where the head met the body.

He leaned on it.

He did not stab.

He put the foot of the pole to the soft place and he put his weight down the length of it, all of it, the shoulders and the back and the long years of the river in his arms, and he drove the head down and away, pinning it into the mud of the bottom, turning it off its line---the way you turn a heavy thing, not by fighting its weight but by giving its own weight somewhere to go. The pole bowed in his hands. His arms shook with it. He held it.

The animal did not care for the iron. It did not care for the mud against its head, or for the close roots that gave it nothing to turn against. And it went---all at once, a great silent surge of the tail that humped the water up over the side of the boat in a slow heavy wave and ran cold over their feet---down, and away, off toward the deep water where it had room, and the weight came out from under the hull and the pole was suddenly light in his hands.

The wave it left rocked the boat and slapped soft against the mangrove stalks, and the slap ran out into the quiet and died, and after it there was nothing. No V. No ridges. No weight in the soles of his feet. The brown water lay smooth between the roots and gave nothing back.

He stood with the pole and watched the smooth water and did not know if it was gone.

He waited a long time.

The water stayed smooth. The thread of the engines in the east had worn down to nothing while he was not listening for it. Off in the green a frog tried one note and thought better of it.

He let the pole down, slow, and laid it along the floorboards where his hand would find it.

⁂

He took up the oar and put it in the water.

The girl did not speak. He did not look at her. He kept the boat to the middle of the thin channel and rowed, and his hands took up the count---but it was not the strokes they were counting now.

It was some other thing. A thing they had started keeping back there in the brown water, when his hand had closed around her open hand in the dark, and they kept it now the way they kept the strokes and the bodies and the years, steady, and with no number in it at all. He looked down into himself for the figure of it. There was none. There was nothing there to count, and his hands were counting it.

The oar went down. It came up.

He did not know what he was counting now.

His hands did.