Where the River Ends

by Charles Martin

  The crowd around him parted and somebody set a five-gallon bucket upside down in between us and the fire. Link rested his foot on the bucket, closed his eyes and poured himself into the song. The tail end of the last notes had yet to fade before they were met by the first.

  When he finished, Abbie pressed her forehead to mine. I was drenched. Sweat was dripping off my nose and my shirt was vacuum-sealed to my back. We stayed there a minute. Finally, I walked down into the water and knelt in the flow. She pulled on my ear and managed a smile. “About time you learned to dance.”

  I laid her in the canoe, thanked Link, and we pulled of the beach at midnight. If people were talking about us, I wanted to get as much river under our belt after dark as I could. We could sleep in the middle of the day.

  I dipped the paddle in the water while Abbie whispered, “I remember my first dance with Mr. Jake at the Dock Street. After the show, they dropped the curtain, but I was still so excited that he grabbed my hand and we danced backstage. I was so keyed up—I just…didn’t want it to end.”

  Not long after my mom explained to me the meaning of an “easy woman,” I decided to enact my own revenge on the big fat woman who started the rumor. She had this thermometer on her front porch that you could read from across the park. She had camouflaged it amongst all the stolen Coca-Cola and Burma-Shave signs. The thermometer was nearly as tall as me and hung on the sunny side of her trailer, which meant it read about five degrees hotter than it really was—which she thought made her special. It was like she’d cornered the South Georgia market on temperature readings. Things were a little slow around the park. Anyway, she drove out of the park one afternoon, leaving her place unattended. I never even hesitated. I grabbed a brick, walked straight up to the thermometer and smashed it into a thousand slivers. The glass exploded. I remember hearing this loud pop and when I looked again the ground was spotted with maybe a half-dozen large silver droplets that looked like warped chrome ball bearings. I poked at them with a stick and they jiggled. They pulled at my curiosity, so I pushed them back together and when I did they all rolled into one big, nearly egg-sized drop in which I saw my distant and distorted reflection.

  The surface of the water clung to the paddle like a liquid mirror, then dripped of the tip in equal drops. Behind us, the moon climbed high and hung bright. Below, the drops pooled like mercury, drawing themselves into one long fluorescent flow.

  She closed her eyes. “Guess we can check off number eight.”

  I never saw my reflection.

  21

  Her parents were livid. Pissed is probably a better word. Truer, too. They did everything they could to force a wedge between Abbie and me. They spelled out our differences, my failings, my lack of pedigree, my—You get the point. And if they did it once, they did it a hundred times. We suffered no shortage of Doss-bashing. Of the two of us, I probably understood it more than she.

  In all the turmoil, I discovered something about their parenting. On the surface, I always thought that a family like hers had all their ducks in a row. They looked happy, therefore they must have been happy. Truth was, they were miserable. Her stepmom was pretty and had all the guys calling. Her dad was a rocketing political star. Seemed like a match made in heaven. Neither ever thought to ask if they actually loved each other. Love was an afterthought. But they learned to put on their happy face and show the world that they had it all together. So she became the ice queen and he, the face on TV. Then Abbie blossomed and they poured themselves into her in a style which said, “I know best, so buck up and pour your energy and passion into my vision for you.” Not once did they think to ask Abbie, “What are you passionate about and how can I pour myself into your vision of you?”

  As a result, Abbie lay in bed at night, listening to the arguments her parents promised her they never had, and she promised herself that—no matter the cost—she was going to marry for love.

  So in a weird and twisted sort of way, I’m glad they fought. Otherwise, Abbie would have married some attorney who wore a seersucker suit and bow tie. Instead, she married me. I’ve never owned a seersucker suit and I couldn’t tie a bow tie if my life depended on it.

  Her parents drew a line in the sand—I was not welcome in their home, on their property or in their rearview mirror. On the other hand, Abbie was expected to attend every family holiday or political function. I said, “Honey, go. They’re your family. You can’t ignore them. I’ll be here when you get back.”

  She shook her head and took the phone off the hook. “You are my family. So don’t try pawning me off on them.”

  Abbie spent two more years doing the New York model thing and then hung it up and came home. She was never picked as the poster girl for Clinique or Estée Lauder but a lot of folks think she could have been. She looked at modeling a lot like climbers look at mountains. It was there so she climbed it, but once she got to the top, she looked around and discovered other peaks. When people asked why, she’d shrug and say, “Been there, did that.” What she was really saying was that she’d proven her point and broken the tether to her dad. That didn’t mean she didn’t love him, but it did mean that when she came home, he couldn’t control her with a noose through her nose. Modeling, traveling the world, opened her eyes to her real passion—design. So she returned to school in Charleston and finished a four-year interior design degree in two years and then went to work for a local firm. When it came to design, she had a knack for it. It didn’t take her long to have her own clients. Abbie’s sense of design was four-dimensional. She could see color and spatial design like everyone else, but her singular gift was that she saw opportunity and possibility when others saw bad lines, antiquated fixtures, a moth-eaten piece of furniture, wood rot or cracked and peeling layers of the previous owner’s bad decisions.

  I learned this firsthand after we’d been married about six months. Between her career as a model and what her father had given her from her deceased mother and his growing estate, Abbie had her own money. And a good bit of it, too.

  One day she parked the Mercedes top down in front of this boarded-up house that looked like it should have been in a Stephen King novel. Paint chipped, windows busted, shingles missing, porch falling off one side of the house, it either needed to be dozed or blown up. Nearly four years earlier, in September of 1989, Hurricane Hugo attempted to rip Charleston off the map. A category-five storm, it caused $13 billion in damage, and much of that occurred in the Carolinas. In its wake, many of the homes it decimated remained untouched and rotting. Like this one. After four years of sitting, the city had tired of arguing with the owners and was in the process of condemning it. Evidently, Abbie had caught wind of it and bought it off the courthouse steps.

  She led me inside, around the dry-rotted debris and up a spiral staircase that led into the master bedroom on the second floor. From there, we mounted a steep, narrow wooden staircase that led into a third story. Finally, she opened a window, pointed me through and said, “Close your eyes.” I obeyed and she pulled me upward into the crow’s nest. The platform shifted under our weight. I opened my eyes and she pointed out across the water. “I bought you something,” she said. I scanned the waterline below for anything vaguely resembling an eighteen-foot fishing boat. I really wanted a Hewes, Key West or Pathfinder, but I’d have settled for a Carolina Skiff. I saw nothing.

  “What?”

  She stamped her feet and smiled. The iron platform rattled where a few of the bolts had wiggled loose.

  I looked down, slowly. Pieces of the puzzle were sliding into place. While the house had weathered Hugo, it hadn’t been touched since. We weren’t just looking at a few missing shingle tiles, a little cracked and peeling paint or even a bit of wood rot. Not hardly. Entire sections of the roof were missing. Windows had disappeared leaving no trace that they’d ever been there. The front door was literally hanging on a twisted hinge. The basement sat stagnating in a foot of brackish water. Further, rumors told that the network of tunnels under this end of Charleston le
d from the old city, under this house, to the wharf. If that was true, and given the storm surge of Hugo, there was no telling how much water might have been in this house or how that might have eroded the foundations of this or any surrounding home. I leaned out over the railing and looked through the roof and down two stories into the kitchen. “You didn’t.”

  Her eyes lit up, the smile stretching from ear to ear.

  Months of nonstop weekends, long nights of work and ten thousand trips to Home Depot were piling up all around me. “Please don’t tell me…”

  She held out a hand, put her arm around my waist and pointed back to the view. Behind me, I could see all of Charleston—where, protected by those who loved her, nothing grew taller than her steeples. On the water side I could see well beyond Fort Sumter, and northeast, I could make out what was left of Sullivan’s Island. She stomped her foot, demonstrating sturdiness. The ironwork rattled, sending reverberations throughout the hollow house. “Really,” she said, “it’s not that bad.”

  The house was one strong wind from collapsing. I shook my head. “Impossible.”

  She tapped me in the chest. “You function, me form.” Which when translated meant: You do all the chipping, scraping, hammering, hauling, sawing and nailing and I’ll decorate.

  Function and form—a good description of us. And truth be told, if she had asked, I’d have built an ark in the desert. Which is about what we wound up doing. Not to mention, the view was pretty good.

  Oddly enough, I hate to paint. I don’t mean that I dislike it, I mean I despise anything that resembles a Tom Sawyer whitewash. Go figure. So when we first started renovating her hurricane fixer-upper, I told Abbie, “Honey, I’ll pay anyone to paint whatever you want in whatever color you want. I’ll hire da Vinci himself, but I’m not painting this house. At all. Ever. Deal?”

  She nodded, ’cause she knew I had my work cut out for me and ’cause she thought she liked to paint. “No worries. I’ll paint. I like painting.” I knew better. After a few nights working in the house, hearing her mutter beneath her breath, and realizing I was going to have to hire someone to come fix her mess, she came to me. It was about midnight. I was leaning over a belt sander working on the floors. A dust cloud hovered around the room. I clicked it off, pushed my mask up on top of my head and waited for the ceiling fan to push out the cloud. She was covered in white primer. Head, hair, hands, arms, pants, feet. She looked like someone had rolled her in her own paint tray. She leaned against the wall, picked at some dried paint on one hand, raised an eyebrow and said, “You help me paint this house and I’ll give you some loving.” She dropped her wet brush. “Right here.”

  “I love to paint. I’ll paint the whole house. Right now.”

  So we painted. The house, each other, neither of us was very good but we learned and more importantly, we laughed. A lot. Laughter filled our house from day one.

  To become a member in ASID, designers must work under another designer for two years, then sit for and pass the NCIDQ exam. She put in her two years, passed the exam and, Christmas of 1995, hung up her shingle, opening her own studio. Doing so, she established a second name for herself. Her father was both proud and put off. And, in truth, she and her studio put me and my art on the map. Without it, I’d be very skinny, teaching art at a local high school.

  Over the next decade, thanks in large part to the before-and-after pictures, Abbie’s fixer-upper would be featured in Southern Living, Architectural Digest and a handful of regional and low-country magazines. Most of her girlfriends were jealous. When the articles appeared, her detractors gossiped beneath their breath, Her daddy used his influence. ’Course, those were the same detractors who cried Nuts! when we bought it, and trust me, her daddy wanted nothing to do with it. He, too, said she was nuts. But they didn’t and do not know Abbie. She saw, and has always seen, what no one else could.

  Meanwhile, during our first two married years, Senator and Mrs. Coleman didn’t speak to me. But thanks to time and Abbie, they eventually warmed up. That doesn’t mean they were kind or forgiving, but at least they weren’t foaming at the mouth. Two things happened to soften them. First, Abbie’s public persona of both successful model and designer surpassed that of her father. He could not deny that she was far more famous, and in some respects powerful, than he. Television personalities in and around South Carolina began introducing him as “Abbie Eliot’s father.” At the same time, they stopped introducing her as Senator Coleman’s daughter. Secondly, I kept my mouth shut and nose to the canvas. My work output increased exponentially. Abbie had a grace and presence that attracted people like a magnet. Of course, she was beautiful, but beauty alone does not achieve Abbie’s level of success. By default, that opened doors that I never could have opened on my own. I have no illusions—I did not get here on my own and hence, I am not responsible for my own success. In truth, I rode her coattails, and thankfully my talent was good enough to enable me to hang on. My growing success, especially in Charleston, put me—or rather my work—front and center every time the Colemans’ walked into one of their friend’s homes. Seems like they couldn’t escape me. I took one project a month, and I was booking more than a year out. We had even started talking about a family.

  Then Abbie forced me to take a year off.

  22

  JUNE 4, MORNING

  The earth’s surface over what we know as the State of Florida is essentially soft sand and a few rocks thrown over a thick layer of limestone. Once the river cut to the limestone, she had only one way to go: out. Her banks are continually on the move, meaning that the river was constantly changing its course—earning her the nickname the Crooked River. It might take years to see any visual difference, and only then if you were paying attention, but in areas of fast current or in times of increased flow, she could carve new boundaries at the rate of an inch or so a day. Beaches became beaches as the river cut itself further into the far bank. I’d been away for fifteen years, so to my eyes the river was transformed.

  Few houses or people populate the river’s banks between Stokes Bridge and St. George because most of that land has been acquired by plantation owners and paper companies. One such plantation sat on the Georgia side covering some twelve hundred acres. Spread Oak Plantation wound three miles along the river and served as a breeding ground for nocturnal corn-fed deer, territorial inbred turkeys, giant beavers, crafty red-tailed hawks, several dozen Tennessee walkers, spiraling pine trees and palm-sized bream, but her most famous “crop” was quail. The bobwhite. And those she grew by the thousands. My interest in Spread Oak centered on its protected beaches. Other than our extended stop at the Redneck Riviera, we’d been moving for nearly twenty-four hours and I was starting to ache in places I’d forgotten I had muscles.

  With the sun just breaking the treetops and burning the steam off the water, we glided downriver. It was the first time since the bridge that I’d not had to paddle. The water was deeper here and the flow pushed us along at maybe a mile and a half an hour. Wood ducks flew single file down the center of the river. I looked up through the mist and saw a deer standing knee-deep next to the bank. Water dripped off his nose and his ears twitched in my direction. He was large-bodied, his stomach sagged and his horns were covered in golden velvet. They extended two to three inches beyond his ears and climbed high above his head. The light made it difficult to see, but I think he had six points on either side and the two directly above his head—brow tines—looked a foot long. I didn’t hear him come, and I didn’t hear him go. When I blinked, he was gone. A ghost. Leaving only ripples on the water. I didn’t think deer like that still existed around here, but I guess he didn’t get that big being stupid.

  We pushed through the rising mist and listened to the earth wake around us. Dog barks, car doors, glass-pack mufflers, black crows, bright red cardinals. We spent the morning tucked beneath a birch tree on a Spread Oak beach. Other than the breeze whistling through the paper bark of the birch trees, bark that had curled like a twisted scroll, it
was relatively quiet. Every now and then we’d catch the sound of a chainsaw or motorcycle and twice I spotted a bi-wing plane above us. On his second pass, he nearly brushed the treetops. As it flew away, I got a better look. Blue body, yellow wings.

  Between the guys somewhere behind us, word spreading around about us and the plane above us, I was starting to get uncomfortable.

  A funny smell rose up my nose. I looked down at Abbie and she was painting her toenails with clear polish. I chuckled.

  “What’re you laughing at?”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “You don’t think I left home without it, do you?”

  “No, but everything we had was made into a bonfire about twenty miles ago.”

  She smiled. “Not everything.” She started on another toe. “Girl can’t go around with dull toes.”

  I scratched my chin and found myself laughing again. She pointed her brush at me. “You’re still laughing.”

  My face felt better, and while my eye was no longer swollen shut, my lip was still puffy. I tipped my hat and laid back. “When Gus first hired me, I guided these guys from Stokes Bridge to St. George. A good group—bunch of weekend warriors with wives at home—but they’d never really spent much time in the woods. After a long day, and then a longer night on hard ground, one of them came to me and said, ‘What do we do about a bathroom?’ I didn’t know how much detail to give him so I handed him a small shovel, pointed to the woods and said, ‘Just dig a hole and cover it up when you’re done.’ He looked at me and one end of his lip turned up. He glanced downriver. ‘How long before we come to a public bathroom?’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe tonight.’ A few minutes later, I looked upriver maybe a hundred yards and the guy was sitting on the beach reading a magazine. His shorts were at his ankles and his bare butt was pressed into the hole he’d dug. I just shook my head. Anyway, the others soon followed suit. Maybe I should’ve said something. That night one of the guys came to me and said, ‘Ummm…hey, uh…do you have any bug bites? Like little red bites?’ He was scratching himself as he talked. ‘No. You?’ He nodded without letting on. ‘Where?’ I asked. He pointed down. ‘Everywhere.’ He crossed his arms and whispered, ‘Like…every square inch. And it’s itching so bad I’m about to lose my religion.’ I asked, ‘Big red bumps?’ He nodded. I reached in my bag and handed him a bottle of clear fingernail polish. ‘They’re called chiggers. You can’t see them. They’re little bugs that seek out hot spots, burrow into your skin and hang out for about two weeks unless you smother them. Put that on every one and keep it on there.’ He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. ‘You’re yanking my chain, right? This is one of those rights-of-passage things that you river guides do to city boys like me.’ I shook my head. ‘No. I wouldn’t kid around about chiggers. Come midnight, if you don’t do something, you’ll be itching so bad you’ll…well, you’ll be in a bad way.’ He took the bottle and asked, ‘Every single one?’ I nodded. ‘Yup.’ I cleaned the breakfast dishes, broke down the tent and loaded the canoes. When I returned, all five of them were standing around the fire, pants at their ankles, fanning the polish dry. It’s one of those images I could do without. One of them, a skinny guy that ran power plants around the country, said, ‘What happens on the river, stays on the river…right?’ ‘Yeah, but you’re going to have a hard time convincing your wives of that.’”