by Nancy Morse
Chapter 5
It was a place that wasn’t on the way to anywhere else. You had to go there on purpose, not that anyone ever did.
John used his paddle to press the nose of the canoe against a wall of saw grass, but the stalks were higher than John and Rennie’s heads and wouldn’t budge. Eventually, his strength prevailed and the walls parted, and little “saws” scratched at their arms as they moved through it.
Rennie knew now why John had insisted she wear his long-sleeved denim shirt. She’d been hesitant at first to accept it, when that wild and earthy scent of his had wafted up from the supple fabric to fill her head with undisciplined thoughts. She was glad to be wearing it, though, for not only did it offer her arms protection from the nasty little blades that pricked the soft cotton, but the scent that she had found disturbingly intoxicating now filled her with a feeling of safekeeping, as if nothing could harm her in his presence.
“This must be how Moses got his start in the bulrushes.”
His deep voice called her away from the thought of him and the warm surge of feelings it elicited.
Finally, the canoe broke free of the tangle. The fragrance of blossoms and earth and crystal-clear air filled Rennie’s nostrils. “John.”
He knew by the way she said his name what she was asking. “There’s a jungle of cypresses rising from the swamp,” he said, describing the scenery for her. “They’re glowing coppery with morning sunshine and their limbs are laced with Spanish moss and red and white orchids.”
“This place must be Paradise,” she said.
“Some might say that. But you should know that this paradise is dying.”
She turned her sightless eyes toward him and tilted her head questioningly.
“Years of development and agricultural poisons are killing it inch by inch,” he said. “Thanks to a plan dating back to the fifties to dry up the swamp, only about half of the original Everglades remain.” There was an undisguised anguish in his voice, as if he were talking about a good friend that he was watching slowly die. But for now it was still there and teeming with life.
Rennie cocked her head to the side and listened. There was a little plop in the water. “What’s that?”
“A yellow-bellied turtle just dived off the rock it was sunning itself on,” he answered.
A screech from above drew her attention skyward. “And that?”
“An osprey. Clinging to the edge of an elaborate nest. She doesn’t appreciate our company.”
She turned her head toward a rustling that came from a crook in the forest.
“Baby alligators,” he said, “fighting their way across the water lettuce.”
The calm green place that John described offered its heart to Rennie’s troubled soul. She couldn’t see the towering palms, the live oaks and sweet gums, the moss-draped cypresses or the gumbo limbos that he said were there, but she felt them as keenly as if she could. Out here life didn’t seem so terribly complicated at all. She leaned back in the canoe, savoring the sun’s warmth on her cheeks and listening to John Panther’s deep-throated voice describe the sounds and sights that were all around them.
She didn’t know what connection existed between the wild and distant place and the man who guided her through it on this early summer morning, but from the sad and loving way in which he spoke about it, she suspected that his attachment had to do with more than just his people’s history.
More than a century earlier the Seminoles had vanished into the marsh to escape the soldiers that were forcing Indians out of Florida during the Seminole Wars. There they found a sanctuary where they could live their lives in peace, untouched by the outside world. But what was John Panther’s reason for being there? What was it about the seclusion of the swamp that appealed to him? For aside from the beauty that she could not see, yet knew was all around her, there was also a feeling of isolation and loneliness hovering in the still, humid air, and she could not help but wonder what kind of refuge he was seeking…and why.
“It must have been difficult for your people when they fled into the Everglades,” she remarked.
“They managed. Life was tough, but the tribal traditions thrived. Clans farmed small hammocks and grew corn and pumpkins and bananas. They fished for gar and hunted deer. And every spring they gathered for the Green Corn Dance.” She didn’t see the fatalistic shrug or the disappointment that clouded his features when he said, “Today, it’s not held regularly, and when it is, it’s just a travesty of the old, sacred ceremony.”
“Nothing stays the same,” Rennie muttered, thinking of her own travesty, her own ridiculous and shameful imitation of life that had led to the shocking realizing that it was no life at all. “Sometimes it’s best if we just surrender ourselves to it.” Yielding to her mistakes and accepting the blame for them was something she was trying desperately to do in the aftermath of her eye-opening experience with Craig, not an easy thing to do when she also felt like the world’s biggest fool.
“The Seminoles won’t surrender. They never have.”
“I just meant that what used to be is often an illusion, and the quicker we know it, the better off we are.”
“I’m under no illusions myself,” he said. “I’ve seen too much change. When I was a kid, I had this little scruffy brown dog that would lie down in the middle of State Road 7 a good hour before the next car came along. These days, I doubt a dog would make it across the busy street alive, let alone lie down in the middle of it. Today, concrete-block homes have replaced the old cypress chickees, and Seminole women have swapped their beaded necklaces for gold ones.”
“You make it sound so dismal.”
“First came the white hunters who wiped out huge flocks of wading birds in a matter of hours and slaughtered alligators and panthers and white-tailed deer by the thousands. Then there were the developers, carving canals deep into the swamp, digging for the dirt that would reshape the coastal areas and change the Seminoles’ world forever. Then came the missionaries who told us to give up the old ways. So if I make it sound dismal, that’s because it is. But don’t get me wrong. I love this place. There’s a beauty here, a calmness, and something greater that you need only come here to feel.” It was where he came after Maggie’s death to make some sense out of his grief and to reconcile his own culpability, and where he stayed, accomplishing nothing except to isolate himself in his singular pursuit of a beast that defied all natural explanation.
“You mentioned panthers. Aren’t they becoming extinct?”
John’s guard snapped to attention. Of all the subjects to come up, why did it have to be that one? He had spoken impulsively, and now he regretted it.
“No one knows how many panthers remain in the wild. Maybe forty. Maybe less. The population is considered stable, but because the number is so small, the animal is vulnerable to extinction.” He hoped his voice did not betray his racing heart. The facts, he cautioned himself. Stick to the facts. “Habitat is critical to the species’ survival because the animals require huge amounts of land. A male panther can patrol a home range of more than a hundred square miles.” Who knew that better than he did? Not merely because he was a biologist and knew the habits of the Florida panther, but because in the last year and a half he had traversed at least a hundred miles in his relentless hunt for one miserable beast.
“You certainly know a lot about panthers,” said Rennie. “Is that how you got your name?”
“Panther was my father’s name. I took it because it was the only thing left after he was gone. My knowledge about panthers is just a coincidence.”
Yes, but what a shocking coincidence it was. Who could have guessed when a small boy took his father’s name as a means to hold on to him that the name would come to mean so much more? He had to change the subject fast.
“You know, the best way to get the feel of the Everglades is to slog through them, to get down in the muck with mud in your shoes and walls of orchids brushing your shoulders. I have some hip boots back at the cabin. Ma
ybe tomorrow, instead of paddling, we’ll walk through the swamp.”
“Walk? But aren’t there alligators, and snakes, and…things?”
“I know my way around well enough to keep us out of trouble, but if you’d rather not, we don’t have to.”
“I don’t know about walking around hip-deep in the water, but I’d like to see this place,” she said. “I mean really see it.”
“Maybe someday you will.”
Rennie sighed. The skin around her eyes was healing nicely, thanks to the tannic acid from the leaves of the sweet gum that John simmered and then smoothed over it each morning, followed by cold clay poultices. She was getting physically stronger every day. But it would take a different kind of strength to return to her former life and confront her mistakes. Was there a Seminole remedy for that? she wondered.
She had to believe that one day she would see again, and that hope kept her from sinking into depression. But as the days passed in a haze of uncertainty, she grappled with what she had left behind and would one day have to face, and with the confusion caused by the inexplicable attraction she felt for a man whose face she could not see.
Her efforts to draw him out were in vain. He had no trouble talking about his surroundings and his people, but she noticed he avoided speaking about himself. In his deep, regretful voice she heard an aching vulnerability that she didn’t understand and that only added to the mystery about him.
Not a word was said about their tense encounter in the kitchen when John had admitted his attraction to her. In the days that followed, he wasn’t around much, but whether that was because of his work out in the field or he was keeping to his vow to stay as far away from her as possible, Rennie didn’t know. When she had asked him this morning if she could accompany him, explaining that the fresh air and sunshine would help make her stronger, she had expected to be turned down flat and had been surprised when, after a tense pause, he had agreed.
She found herself wishing she could give him more than just her gratitude for saving her life. She knew it was crazy to feel this way, especially when there was so much about him that she didn’t know, like who he was, and what he looked like, and where he went night after night, leaving her alone in the cabin with unanswered questions and empty longings.
Four-winged orange dragonflies danced above the water’s surface. The saw grass stretched for mile upon mile, broken in places by scattered clumps of palms and wax-myrtle bushes. As John paddled through the maze of watery paths, he was grateful for Rennie’s curiosity and a chance to explain the sounds around them and share with her some of the knowledge he had acquired as a biologist. It helped take his mind off the fact that once again she had gotten to him, and that despite his vow to maintain his distance, here they were, alone together in the swamp. To his dismay he found that the attraction he had confessed to in a weak moment was only heightened when the sunlight tinted her cheeks with a warm pink and poured over her hair in a wash of gold.
In the shaded rooms of the cabin he hadn’t realized how much her tawny hair resembled the panther’s coat in color. But out here, without the tangle of branches overhead to obscure the sun’s rays, he was struck by it, and by the realization that this woman was as dangerous to him as that damned cat.
“There are twelve species of frogs in the Everglades,” he said, “six species of lizards, twenty-four species of spiders, and twenty-six species of snakes, four of them poisonous.” He spoke as if he were reading from a textbook, in that same staccato voice that revealed nothing. It was only when he saw her grimace that a measure of emotion seeped in. “The Spirit Being made the poisonous creatures, too. You can’t love only the prey and hate the hunter.”
But that’s what he was, a hunter, he caustically reminded himself, and in his hunter’s heart it was hard to fathom that the Spirit Being, or anyone, would not hate him because of it.
“It’s getting hot,” he said. “That sun can broil you brighter than an orange-bellied turtle. We’d better head back.”
Their morning excursion took them deep inside a tunnel of mangroves. John grabbed the trees and pulled his way through. Bromeliads poured from the elbows of the trees, and roots dangled from above, brushing Rennie’s face like unseen hands, causing her to flinch.
“I don’t remember coming this way,” she said.
“We’re taking a shortcut back.”
There was no reason to linger, not when his discomfort at her close proximity was growing by the minute. He didn’t bother to tell her that the place they now passed through was steeped in history, that the banks were full of old Indian encampments, some thousands of years old. He’d done enough explaining of things for one day.
The airboat buzzed across the water, humming loudly as it skimmed over the vegetation, drowning out the cackle of the gallinules that were perched in the tall cypress trees.
The airboat slowed to a halt along the soggy bank, and Billie Gopher climbed down into the shallow water. He was used to inaccessible places that could not be reached by automobile. A lifetime spent trekking through the Everglades had taught him that the fastest and easiest way to get around was on the water. In the old days he used to paddle. These days, he relied on the air propellers to get him where he wanted to go.
Billie Gopher had come into the world beneath a birthing pole sixty-eight years ago, at a time when the medicine men used to take the mixed blood babies into the swamp and leave them there to die. When they came for him, his mother had turned them away with a shotgun.
He came from a line of doctors. His great uncle and grandfather had been doctors. His mother and aunts were medicine ladies. There was never any question of what he would do with his life.
He saw early on that the ancient remedies yielded by the swamp could not cure the white man’s diseases that were killing his people, so at the age of thirteen, barely able to read or speak English, with the help of a white uncle, he enrolled in an Indian school hundreds of miles away from home.
Today, fifty-five years later, there was a medical degree from the University of Illinois on the wall at his house. But he never forgot the old ways, and in the black bag he carried, along with modern drugs, were the plants and tinctures his mother taught him how to use.
John knew he was there before he even had a chance to knock, and greeted him outside.
Inside the cabin Rennie sat in the lone chair at the table, eating the soup she had prepared for lunch. Her morning outing with John had left her tired and hungry, but her appetite was quickly forgotten as she strained to hear the hushed voices outside. Her breath lodged in her throat when she heard John’s familiar footsteps enter, along with ones she did not recognize.
“Rennie, the doctor is here to see you.”
She breathed an inward sigh of relief. It was neither the police nor a private detective, as she had feared it might be. That could only mean that Craig had not discovered her whereabouts, and that for the time being, she was still safe. It was only the doctor. But with that knowledge came a different kind of apprehension. What news would he have for her? Would she be able to see again anytime soon, and have to face the thing she dreaded most, confronting her past mistakes? Or would he tell her that she was permanently blind, and she would never be able to see the place that filled her heart with peace or the face of the man who had saved her life?
“John tells me he had you out for a canoe ride today. I’m not so sure that was a good idea.” She didn’t see the reproachful look he aimed at John, but his voice was mellow and comforting. It was the kind of voice that drew its listener closer, as if it had a secret it wanted to share. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired,” she answered.
He came forward until he was standing before her. “That’s understandable.”
He was a tall man. She knew that from the distance she judged his words to travel. There was a faintly familiar scent about him of the swamp, and she knew that anyone who spent that much time in this place to absorb its essence into his skin could only
be Indian.
“Let’s see what’s what, shall we?”
He took her hands in his and guided her to her feet. His touch was gentle and assured, with none of the tension that was in John’s touch. He led her to the bed. She sat down on the edge and he pulled the chair up before her. Gently he peeled the gauze from her eyes and turned her face toward the light from the window.
“I see that someone has been taking good care of you. Your skin is healing very nicely. From the redness and blisters I observed when I first examined you, those were second-degree burns you sustained.”
“I waited until the healing started before applying aloe vera,” said John.
“That’s correct. Aloe on second-degree burns, only when the healing’s begun. Lorena taught you well.” He glanced at the bowl of soup on the table. “Soup is good, but we’ll want a diet high in protein for tissue repair. And fluid intake should be increased, particularly since you’ve been in the sun.”
From his black bag he took a slender flashlight. “Look straight ahead,” he instructed. He shone the light into each of Rennie’s eyes, saying nothing as he examined her. When he was finished, he snapped his bag shut and rose.
“There’s still some swelling of the optic nerve.”
“Will the swelling go down?” she asked.
“It should.”
“And I’ll be able to see again?”
There was the slightest pause before he answered. “You’re doing remarkably well, considering. Let’s see what happens. Meanwhile, I’m going to prescribe an antibacterial spray to prevent infection. And John, sixteen hundred units of vitamin E, two hundred micrograms of selenium and ninety milligrams of potassium should speed up that tissue repair and prevent scarring.” Turning back to Rennie, he said, “My dear, you’re a very lucky woman, not only to have survived, but to have been found by John. He’ll take good care of you until I can return.”
“When will that be?”
“A couple of weeks. If there’s any change, John can call me.”
