Charleston

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  Eliza reached the corner of Church and Broad streets and stopped in front of the Hat Man. She remembered Henry’s words as they had walked past him last night, “He’s still there.” He wore a gray top hat with a thick yellow band around its base. His head was in the shape of a tall white hatbox, and his eyes were upturned bowlers, his mouth an upturned Stetson, his nose a tall sombrero, and his ears two flat straw hats turned on their side. His arms and legs were a combination of top hats of different sizes, and for feet, he had two sailor berets with black ribbon trailing in the front. He held a closed black umbrella and walking stick behind his back. The building on whose side he was painted was no longer a haberdashery but a boutique for china and gifts and lingerie. Eliza walked past the law offices with their shingles hanging with the family names of boys with whom she had gone to Cotillion, built Christmas tree forts, attended debutante parties, beach parties, and oyster roasts in the country. A few of the law offices had been converted to a smart antique shop, a stationery shop, a silver shop, but for the most part Broad Street looked the same. Everything was just in better shape.

  Eliza stopped at the post office on the southwest corner of Meeting and Broad to check the times on the FedEx box. One and six P.M. She was still thinking about the work she had to finish in order to make Tuesday’s one o’clock pickup as she crossed Broad Street and headed north on King past all of the small antique shops. Delano’s was still in the same place, but Mr. Delano had died, and his wife had sold the business to a woman from Ohio who kept a parrot in the shop. Eliza’s mother had told her that the antiques were no longer of the same quality as Mr. Delano’s, nor was the new owner as reluctant as Mr. Delano to sell pieces. Eliza remembered that going in his shop was like going to someone’s house for afternoon tea. There was rarely any discussion of selling and never of price. You came in, spoke, Mr. Delano quietly followed you around, sometimes telling you about pieces you stopped to admire. It was almost as if you were being interviewed. If Mr. Delano deemed you worthy of the piece of furniture, a typed note with a description of the piece and price would arrive in the mail several days later.

  As she stood looking at a pair of Chippendale side chairs displayed in the window, she heard Henry calling her name. He had pulled over in his beaten-up white Jeep, window down, an arm hung over the side in the shape of a V. “Hop in,” he said.

  “I’m going uptown.” She pointed north. “I have to buy shoes for tonight.”

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, I’d like to. Really.” Henry checked the rearview mirror. “Jump in before the light changes.”

  Eliza looked behind Henry’s Jeep at the cars stopped at a traffic light at the King and Beaufain streets crossing. She ran quickly around to the passenger side.

  Henry turned and smiled at her. “It’s great to see you.”

  “You saw me yesterday.”

  “I know, and it’s great to see you again.”

  “I thought you said you had to drive down to Savannah today?”

  “I did. I decided to postpone my trip until tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I didn’t think yesterday went as well as it should have. I just wanted to make sure that you were okay and that you hadn’t given up on me. I was going to call you, but I figured you might say, based on yesterday, that you didn’t want to see me, so I thought I would just come and find you.”

  “By driving around?”

  “No, actually I went by your house, and Cornelia said you had left to walk uptown to buy shoes. This is infinitely better, just running into you like this. Don’t you think? Fate? Providence? Destiny? Divine Grace?”

  Eliza didn’t answer. She looked to her right at the window of the Preservation Society. It was filled with books on Charleston, recipe books, books on plantations, the Civil War, Francis Marion.

  “Did you not see Mrs. Vanderhorst?” Henry asked, looking at the envelope Eliza held in her hand.

  “She doesn’t work on Mondays, but she’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Looks like you got a lot of sun yesterday.”

  “I did.”

  “Too much?”

  “A little.”

  When the light turned green, Henry shifted into first and drove straight. “You could have turned down Queen,” Eliza said. One block later Henry turned right onto Broad Street and continued on past Logan Street.

  “We should have turned up Logan. Henry, why are we going this way? Where are we going?”

  “Slight detour.”

  Henry drove past the tennis courts at Moultrie Playground and onto Lockwood Boulevard, the western boundary of the Charleston Peninsula.

  “Come on, Henry, please? I really have to get shoes for tonight, and I have only three hours for work before I’m supposed to be at the Alstons’ for an early supper.”

  “We’ll know soon whether you trust me.”

  “We know I don’t so—”

  “But there is a chance?”

  “No,” Eliza stretched the word into two syllables.

  “No?” Henry shook his head. “We’ll have to fix that, then.”

  They passed the Charleston Marina.

  “Remember Peyton Thornhill? He now runs the Marina shop,” Henry said.

  “You’re ignoring me and changing the subject.”

  “I know, but it’s not for much longer. I promise.”

  He turned the radio to FM 102.5, the station that played music from the 1960s. He reached over and turned the radio up. “Sam Cooke—‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’” he said. “See? Destiny. We’re doing the right thing.”

  “Henry, it’s a song about the Civil Rights Movement.”

  “True.”

  “James Island. Why are we going to James Island?”

  “Just wait,” Henry said.

  When “A Change Is Gonna Come” was followed by “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Henry turned the radio even louder and drummed his flat palm on the steering wheel. The highway dead-ended into Folly Road. Henry turned left toward Folly Beach. Eliza rolled her window down.

  “You aren’t going to attempt an escape?”

  “No,” she sighed. “Just conceding defeat and”—she leaned her head back—“I’m just reminding myself what it feels like to be southern again.”

  They crossed Folly Creek and sped across the marsh on the narrow causeway that connected the island to the mainland. The road narrowed to a single lane with a three-foot bicycle path on the margin. A band of seagulls rainbowed across the sky.

  Eliza read a sign out loud. “‘Welcome to Folly Beach at the edge of America.’ Folly Beach? Why Folly Beach?”

  “We’re almost there.”

  The causeway turned into the two blocks of Main Street with a gas station, two surf shops, a liquor store, and a variety store that proudly displayed the plastic head of a shark with its jaws open. Main Street dead-ended at the pier.

  “We’re going to the pier?”

  “No, but not a bad guess.” Henry turned left, and they drove down the beachfront, where cottage after cottage had been built in the 1920s and 1930s.

  At its very end, the island narrowed to a small strip barely wide enough for one road and a row of houses. Mothers with folding chairs and towels and coolers were trailed by sun-drenched children back to the cars they had parked alongside the road. The road narrowed to a thin sliver with water on both sides. They reached the end and stopped at a gate with a sign that warned PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING.

  Eliza had never been here. Henry stopped the Jeep in front of the gate and leaned over her to open the glove compartment. He fished for a key on a braided piece of leather. He opened the gate and drove through.

  “I bet you thought there wasn’t anyplace we could go that we hadn’t been to before,” Henry said.

  “In Charleston?”

  “In Charleston.”

  “We’ve been to
Folly before.”

  “Yes, but not here.”

  “Is this yours?” Eliza asked.

  Henry nodded.

  “I didn’t know you owned this.”

  “Nor did I until my father died. In the 1920s, my grandfather bought a good bit of the northern tip of this island. He left most of it to the Episcopal Church as a summer retreat for orphans, but the church sold it, even though they weren’t supposed to. When my father died, I had to review everything. My father had been paying taxes on a tract of land I didn’t recognize. I went back to some of the original documents and found that my grandfather had saved fifty acres on the tip. My mother didn’t even know about it. I asked Clarence Frost, who had been my grandfather’s and father’s lawyer, and he said he couldn’t really remember, but there was something about a distant cousin drowning out here. The current at this end is treacherous. Mr. Frost is ninety-two so I don’t know, but maybe that’s why my father never came out here or did anything about this land. I do remember my father telling me about spending summers on Folly Beach when he was a child. He talked about a double row of dunes with palmetto trees. He said his favorite thing to do was to lie in a hammock at night and look up at the stars and listen to the sound of the waves.” Henry braked.

  Ahead the road was washed out for a good thirty feet.

  “Can we make it through all that water?” Eliza asked.

  “I think so, I went across it last week. Just depends on how soft the bottom is. Do you want to get out while I see if I can get through?”

  “No, I’ll stay.”

  “You sure?”

  Eliza nodded.

  “It’s going to be rough. Put on your seat belt and hold on.”

  Henry yanked the Jeep into four-wheel drive and shifted into first and then second and pressed his foot down hard on the gas pedal. The Jeep hit the water and began to skid, and Henry kept his foot down and twisted and turned the steering wheel to keep moving forward. When the Jeep began to stick on the soft muddy bottom, he shifted into reverse and gunned the Jeep backward and then shifted into first and raced it forward and then back to reverse without ever letting the Jeep stop to sink into the soft bottom. Eliza braced herself against the dashboard and the car door. Henry rocked the Jeep backward and forward until it reared past the bad spot. He turned the steering wheel to the right, and the Jeep spun and skidded sideways, and its left rear side slammed hard into the trunk of a pine tree as they cleared the washed-out area.

  “All in one piece?” Henry looked behind him in the rearview mirror.

  “So is this how your Jeep has gotten so beaten up?”

  “Pretty much. We can go out the back way on the way home. It can’t be any worse than this. Hang on.” Henry shifted into neutral. “I just want to check that I didn’t bust the brake light.”

  He got back in the car. “All intact.”

  A quarter of a mile later they pulled up to a cleared area where a small wooden house, painted forest green, stood. It was raised several feet off the ground on pilings. It had a low-pitched red tin roof, which extended over a front porch that ran the length of the house. Huge palmetto trees stood in random clusters on the rough lawn.

  “This cottage was about to fall down when I discovered it. I think my grandfather built it. He built a number of cottages down at the other end of Folly Beach just to keep people working during the Depression. It has beautiful cypress paneling inside. Here, I’ll show you around.”

  Henry led Eliza up the front porch. It was bare except for a few pieces of driftwood and sand dollars. The house consisted of a large front room that was sparsely furnished, one bedroom and bath on one side at the back and a small kitchen on the other side.

  “I’m sensing there’s a limited range of physical activity that I can do with you,” Henry said, then clapped his hands together. “So, well, what do you say about a walk?”

  “Henry, come on, when are you going to tell me why we’re really here?”

  “I want to sort everything out with you. I figured the only way to do that was to kidnap you and take you to a place you couldn’t tell me you had to leave. Plus, it really is beautiful down here at this time of the day. We have the entire beach to ourselves.”

  “God, Henry, is there more to say? Is it really going to help anything?”

  “Maybe not, I just want to make certain we have the right ending before you disappear at the end of next week.” He kicked off a pair of tennis shoes that were so old that the canvas had separated in several places from the rubber rims of the soles. “You can leave your shoes here.”

  They followed the boardwalk down to the beach. The breeze from the ocean rattled the tall sea oats that covered the dunes. The tide was low, and the sense of scale was distorted by the lack of any human figures. The broad beach stretched on forever.

  “No one comes to this end much. There’s no parking, plus it’s known for treacherous rip currents. Look, right there.” Henry pointed to an area of the surf where the waves were small and choppy, and the water had a sand-colored tint.

  Eliza recognized the sandy water. She knew there must be a channel between two sandbars out there, and the waves, when they broke, flowed back through the channel. She also knew that the sandbars were constantly shifting with the tides and the rip currents were never in the same place.

  “Let’s walk north to the end,” he said. “You can see Charleston and the Morris Island Lighthouse from there.”

  The beach sand was warm from the sun, and Eliza walked along the ruffled edge of the waves. She picked up a perfect sand dollar lying on the sand and then put it back down.

  “Don’t want to keep it?” Henry asked.

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ve stopped collecting.”

  “Doesn’t seem possible, not even tempted?”

  “No, not really. I don’t know. It just feels—well, lighter.”

  When they got to the northern tip, they stopped and looked at the lighthouse that stood three hundred yards out in the water. The six wide stripes of alternating black and white were faded and peeling.

  “There’s hardly anything left of Morris Island. Look. It’s low tide, and there’s just a sliver of sand around its base,” Henry said. “We should go out there again. It’s just as we left it. We could sail or take a canoe from here. Come to think about it”—he shifted sand over a shell with his toe—“sailing from the Yacht Club was probably not the smartest thing we ever tried.”

  They turned to walk back, but Henry stopped and looked at the lighthouse again. “I wonder how much longer it will be there. I took Lawton out there last summer. The door was open, and we climbed all the way to the top. It’s in remarkably good shape. I had forgotten how beautiful its wrought-iron spiral staircase is. They’ve taken the old light out, so the top platform is bare. Just the same wrought-iron bars running every two feet or so, vertically and horizontally. So you can see all around you—three hundred and sixty degrees.”

  When they reached the path that led back to the house, Henry turned and pointed to the darkness gathering along the horizon.

  “Cleve used to always tell me that was the shadow of the earth. And I guess I heard it so many times I believed him. I remember talking to my science teacher at Woodbury Forest about the possibility of such a thing. It makes no sense, but I really wanted to believe there was a way it was possible.”

  Eliza looked where he pointed. “I see,” she said. “I’ve never noticed that before.”

  “It doesn’t last very long.”

  Henry broke off a piece of a sea oat and chewed on the blade. “If we go around to the back of the island, we should be able to catch a couple of red drum.”

  “For?”

  “Supper.”

  “Henry, I should get back to town. I can’t waste another day.”

  “Waste? Waste? Oh, hard-hearted Eliza.”

  “Come on, Henry, you know I brought work to do, and so far I’ve done nothing except unpack my suit
case, and even that I haven’t finished.”

  “I understand. I do. But it’s just Monday. We haven’t seen each other for ten years. And, Eliza, listen, I can’t speak for you, but there’s no place I would rather be than here with you right now. I promise I will leave you alone all day tomorrow.” He held the palms of his hands out to her. “Promise,” he laughed.

  She shook her head and smiled. “You always do this to me.”

  “Do what?”

  “Get me to do things I don’t want to. But I should, at least, call my mother and tell her I’m not going to be able to make it to the Alstons’ party. Is there a phone inside?”

  “There’s one in the kitchen. It should work.”

  Eliza called and the answering machine picked up. She waited for her mother’s long message to finish.

  When Eliza returned, Henry was sitting outside on the steps. He was turning a piece of driftwood slowly over in his hands. He looked up at her. “Did you get through?”

  “Yes, fine, no one was home, so I left a message.”

  “I remember you liked fishing.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “Good Lord, Eliza, what have those English boys done to you? You can watch me, then. There’s a nice spot to sit. You’ll need your shoes.”

  He disappeared around the corner of the house and came back with a fishing rod, net, and small plastic box. He held the fishing rod up. “You’re sure?”

  “Sure. What are you going to use as bait?”