As it turns out, the final run includes not only canning jars packed with dope, but a young girl who is to be delivered to the old preacher Cotton, now descended further into madness. The greater portion of the novel’s action is structured by Avery and Miranda’s last drug run, after which Avery hopes to leave town with his wife and baby.
Miranda, whose own mother died when she was 4, supplements the meager income from the mercantile shop her father owned by running drugs upriver with a man named John Avery, who manages a greenhouse. That long dark summer, she had surrendered her heart completely.” Together with the witch, Iskra, she raises the boy in isolation on the witch’s island. Miranda has adopted the baby: “Burping him in her arms, the rough texture of his skin. Ten years later, her father’s body has never been found, and everyone who can afford to has since left Nash County. Miranda’s father and the witch disappear into the woods, but when Miranda follows in the downpour, she finds only her father’s flashlight, warm shotgun shells, and a newborn boy with webbed fingers and toes. The witch directs them to an unfamiliar island in the bayou.
In the midst of the tempest, Miranda Crabtree and her father ferry a witch and something unknown, wrapped in a pillowcase, from the home of mad preacher Billy Cotton, whose wife has just died in childbirth. Indeed, it was a storm the people of Nash County, Arkansas, would remember for years to come.
Andy Davidson’s second novel, The Boatman’s Daughter, begins with a deluge of biblical proportions.
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