“Hello?” we asked, more quietly now.
“Ava!” said Ossie. “It’s a dredge.”
“Oh.” For some reason the word made my heart speed. Now that she’d found the name for it I saw immediately that Ossie was right — this boat had a bucket and cables and a crane arm, presumably for bringing up the crumbling muck and digging a road or canal. We had black-and-white pictures of them hanging in our museum: The Dredge and Fill Campaign, 1886–1942.
Ossie was already moving toward it. The canal had swollen to seven or eight feet and twisted and hissed now like an unbungalowed snake; the recent rains would have driven it even higher. I guessed that the dredge would have continued on, too, but it had gotten hung up in the crooked pincers of the mangroves. Something about the angle of its entry made me think of a key that had been jammed hard into the wrong lock. Several buzzards sat on the dipper bucket. Once I noticed the birds I started to see them everywhere: one was slim-winged on one of the crane’s ladders. One was eating a squirrel on the hull. There was something canny and bald about their attention, their tiny wet eyes. I felt like these buzzards had been waiting here for us, for a long time.
Ossie didn’t seem to notice them; she was intent on reaching the boat. She took the first-moon-man leap over the canal and I followed. The deck was a dull, uneven black. Slick. We got the cuddy cabin door to open, which took a lot of one-two-three!ing and team wrenching. When the door came loose, colors flooded over us. I screamed, too, and covered my face with my arms, and if Ossie hadn’t caught me I might have fallen into the wedge of canal between the shoreline and the boat. In that second I knew that I’d been wrong this whole time: that my sister was psychic, that the whole world was haunted, and now a ghost was tuning itself like a luminous string above me. Then the ghost broke into particulates of wings.
“Calm down, dummy, it’s just a bunch of moths.”
Moths jumbled tunelessly above our heads, kaleidoscoping in this way that looked like visible music to me — something that would be immediately audible to an alligator or a raccoon but that we human Bigtrees couldn’t hear. Could my sister hear them? I wondered. She was picking a wedgie on the deck.
“Hear what, Ava?” She freed a tiny, beating moth from my bangs. Moths kept coming at us in unbelievable numbers. “My God,” she whispered, “there must be thousands of them in here!”
“More than that.”
“You heard somebody in the boat, Ava?”
“No, that’s why I was asking. I don’t hear anything.”
The cloud of moths drew their darker blues across the pale egg of the sky. Now I felt stupid. Nothing about these cake-icing blues suggested ghosts or monsters.
“Well, only one way to know for sure. Ready, Ava?”
“You bet I’m ready.” Wings painted our faces. “For what?”
Ossie yanked me into the cabin, sunlight flashing everywhere as we pulled at the door; a second later the moths were outside a dark porthole, and we were inside the machine.
Inside the cabin of the dredge barge we found:
Flaking metal everywhere in these fantastic reds and greens;
The staring socket of a pole sticking straight out of the floor;
A box of lemon candies called Miss Callie’s Pixie Dust, which looked like the flavors of spinsterdom, yellow and soda brown;
A man’s work shirt, size medium, long sleeves and white-and-canary checks;
A mosquito veil;
A dingy WPA jacket;
A cypress workbench, rotted through, its surface slimed with various life-forms;
A rag beneath this that looked as powdery and dry as the last century, something the last century had used to wipe its lips; it smelled wheaty and sicksweet, like beer, and it stuck to the floor;
A skeeter bar bleached the lunar blue of salt;
A four- or five-gallon bucket with the initials “L.T.” scratched in these somehow polite letters onto the side;
Tools I didn’t recognize inlaid on hooks along the walls, fishermen’s swords, I thought: something like a spear with an antlered tip;
A mucky key — I wiped it golden again on my shirt hem and bit its teeth straight;
A map.
We smoothed the scrolled things: illegible mechanical diagrams, the map and the veil. The wavy mosquito netting was made of an amazingly old and weird material that couldn’t be straightened; I tied it over my face like a surgeon and it kept crimping at my nose. I sneezed into its tiny squares. Haunted, a frantic voice in me said, haunted, but my hands disagreed with this hysterical lady: everything I touched here confirmed itself as solidly cloth or wood or rope.
“Be careful with that stuff, Ossie! The Chief might want it, for the museum …”
Ossie was climbing into the galley. I saw cabinets furry with damp greenery, an accordion pump, a sink with a pox of rust around a black faucet. The sink was still full of tiny copper forks and spoons and a squat thermos that for some reason made my heart constrict. I wished we’d thought to bring flashlights. We’d only been inside the dredge cabin for a few minutes but I half-expected to see a moon outside, stars the color of blood, a totally changed world. I peered through a porthole: there was the sun, beaming down at us like a dim-witted aunt. There were the same oblivious trees.
I ducked my head back inside the dredge; Ossie was taking swimmer’s breaths with her eyes closed. She was sitting on the floor between puddles of water and clotted oil, the Ouija board on her lap. She tugged her skirt over her dirty knees and blinked up at me like some waylaid picnicker.
“What are you doing? What — you think there are ghosts here?” I tried to use Kiwi’s roller-coaster intonations on her (I’d seen his sarcasm work like an ax to break her milder possessions). “Tell the ghost it smells like farts in here. Ask the ghost if I can have one of his lemon candies.”
One eye snapped open. “Gross, Ava. Let me concentrate, okay? Please don’t eat the candies from the thirties. Remember how sick you got from the candy corns, and that stuff wasn’t even six months old!”
Ossie smoothed the work shirt that we’d found and put it in her duffel. She was always muling around this duffel now, which must have weighed a ton — it contained The Spiritist’s Telegraph, apple snacks, and her bath-towel turban and various occult supplies.
“Why do you get to have that? What if I wanted the map?”
“You can have the hammer. And maybe the rag.”
“Oh, gee, thanks …” I stared into the crowd of shadows toward the barge’s stern. The buzzards had all vanished from the railings. The hull was rocking slightly.
“We should go pretty soon, Ossie. We should probably go now.”
But we stayed, opening the years-glued cabinets.
I kept returning to the map, which we’d weighted with a rock on the wormy workbench. The map had the greenish tint of great age and drew a world I didn’t recognize: MODEL LAND COMPANY/DREDGING OBJECTIVE read the insignia on the bottom, each word boxed together in gray and red lines like a locomotive car. The initials “L.T.” in the left-hand corner again, that same well-mannered handwriting. L.T. had added a date this time: December 12, 1936. Above this inscription, a filigree of golden hairs with tiny numbers (A-7, A-8 …) cut through the grid. Water was blue, that was easy to figure out. Also you could see the black powder kegs of the pinelands, and teak shadings that seemed to correspond to the saw-grass prairies. Other lines were drawn in golden pen, each one numbered and lettered — were these supposed to be rivers? A system of canals?
“Ossie! Do you know how to read this thing?”