by E.R. Fox
On the Choke at Cutter’s Point
Copyright 2015 E.R Fox
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September, 1989, on the South Carolina Coast
He tended to his bees like some quietly embittered farm hand of the devil. His movements were odd in their precision and speed, blurred like the heat and palmettos that surrounded us in some sad measure of time. And as I looked upon him, he wore no coveralls or hat against the bees, yet they left him to his business - neither disturbing the other. This was Leonard Melton, a tall, oddly gaunt man with a long Moses beard and a bald shaved head. He wore old blue jeans and a white t-shirt, dirty white canvas tennis shoes with no socks and he wore a gold earring in each ear. His hands were bizarre in the fact that they were big, with long fingers and exceedingly long curled finger nails. He still had not answered my question as we stood there in the heat of a late summer’s afternoon, August into September, the season of Hurricanes. It was appallingly quiet and still. Between the branches of the trees I could see a storm’s heavy black clouds looming - portending a deadly presence. Leonard Melton showed no signs of concern, he merely spent his energy on finishing the last of eleven bee boxes, fastening the wood peg latch, and then on to his house he went, stooping to pick up a metal pail and his Bee smoker.
It was almost wicked in the way the trail with sand spurs, palmetto and tall pine seemed to always curve around to keep him just out of sight ahead of me. I had only a glimpse of his shoulders above the thick tangle of brush as I tried to quicken my pace to catch him up, and so quickly did the path twist and turn then suddenly end that it took me by surprise. On the edge of a vast dry marsh that stretched far to my left to the beach, the right hand side surrounded by tall pine and large oak, I stood across from his house. The house itself was an oddity into extremes, casting shadows across my soul as it stood alone the distance of about 500 yards from the ocean on what was known as “Cutter’s Point.” This place was haunted – severely so. Heavy stories of sad and depressingly mad events that were linked to Leonard and his family loomed around these small marsh islands. Large clumps of dead driftwood trees covered the beaches of these places like skeletons pointing poisoned and deformed limbs, reaching to the sky in some mime of agony.
It wasn’t a big house but it must have been something in its day. It stood on what was known as the “Choke.” The Choke at Cutter’s Point was nothing more than a peninsula about a mile wide and stretched backwards for about two and a half miles deep into the woods. To the right of the house was a narrow clearing where you could see down to the ocean and where piles and piles of oyster and crab shell sat in clumped mounds where the seagulls had picked them into powder. In front of me was the dry marsh with heavy yellow reeds and saw grass with a path to the house made of old and greyed planks of wood. On each side of these you could see the remains of the hundreds of fiddler crab holes in the dried mud. And with one glance to follow that boarded path your vision would come to the house. A place that I would have avoided for the all world if it had not been for the letter that Elena had sent in such urgency. Leonard’s daughter and the last of his family except for himself, Elena was the love of my life and was now missing. Her descriptions of the house to me in her letter were exact – disturbingly so.
It seemed to lean to one side in the shadows of the pines…perhaps an illusion. Two stories tall with four windows in the front that were dark with dirty grey panes of glass supported by sagging frames. It was a “Shot Gun Style” house with the front and back doors in line with each other, a tall narrow house that looked as if it would collapse at any moment. Elena had said that the house hated her and that she always felt an urgency to know something about it, like some secret in the back of her mind.
A heavy wind from the storm rushed the trees and stirred me to cross the boarded path to the front door of that house in haste. Where was Leonard? I had not seen him since I had reached the clearing of the marsh. No time now…the storm winds were beginning to howl with sheets of rain pounding the dry mud and salt of the marsh as it foamed with the deluge. I turned the loose old ceramic and rusted doorknob of the front door and found it unlocked. I went in quickly to avoid the wet spray of the rain ricocheting off of the front porch. Closing the door behind me, I turned to look down a long narrow hallway bathed in a dim yellow light from a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Old and worn flooring, the wood sanded to a dull grey due to use over the many years highlighted by faded green wallpaper on the walls with some sort of floral pattern now unrecognizable beckoned me to follow along, down the hall to pass by a room on each side. Dark rooms without any sign of life, except for one that emitted a slight flickering light down at the end on the hall on the left, I approached and saw Leonard sitting alone quietly and staring blankly ahead of him as if he were troubled. A dim yellow light from a Hurricane lamp surrounded him as he sat in an old high-backed chair, the light flickering, casting eerie shadows on old walls covered by large picture frames of scenes of family lore. Antiqued furniture filled the large room neatly and I came in to sit on a worn sofa. The noise from the storm was loud, the Hurricane in full force upon the house, loud upon the roof and window panes. We sat and listened.
My mind raced as I watched him across from me in the meager light of the lamp. He had not answered my question to him when I had first arrived this morning; “Where is Elena, she was supposed to have been here a week ago. The boat had dropped her off on Saturday, people had seen her.” He had looked at me as if he were looking straight through me and went about his business with his goats, his bees, and his repair of outboard motors in silence. Now we were at a place where I could ask him again. And through the howl of the storm outside I asked,
“Mr. Melton…….where is Elena; she sent me a letter asking me to come. She said that there was something wrong – where is she!?”
He leaned his head back on the high-backed chair and closed his eyes, why wouldn’t he answer me; it was his daughter for God’s sake!
Over to my left on a table there was a large flashlight, reaching for it I decided that I would go look through the house for anything that would ease my conscious and to find any sign of Elena. He paid no attention to me and I left him to go through the rooms of the house.
I had met Elena in Savannah by way of my work at the Newspaper. An interview of the surrounding old families of the Islands on the Intracoastal Waterway from South Carolina to Georgia, she was one of the several people I had interviewed. Very attractive with her jet black hair and slender build, she was tall like her father, wide, dark, beautifully compelling eyes that she had inherited from her mother. Elena and I had become close. And I had spent enough time with her passionately as well as in her private life to know that she had definite misgivings about her mother and where she was from. Her mother had come from Louisiana to Savannah back in the 1950's. She met Leonard Melton and they were married a week later. They had moved to Cutter’s Point and built the house with the help of some of the locals. Why Cutter’s Point? It had been suggested by people that Elena’s mother had something to hide.
The more I searched the rooms of the house downstairs, the more I felt that anguished feeling of some sort of desperate secret the house may be hiding, much as Elena had always mentioned. In the darkness with the loud frightening energy of the hurricane outside there was little to ease any hopes of enlightenment as to why. The other three rooms downstairs were mostly the same. Old faded moldy wallpaper peeling in dusty corners. More old furniture with depressingly old covers placed here and there, sand was prominent over the faded rugs as I waved the flashlight around the
place. Poison ivy had pushed its way up through the floor boards in some corner of the front room where a large gold enameled framed picture of Lucretia Melton, Elena’s mother hung on the wall facing the door. It was large, and enabling my already heightened uneasiness about the house and Cutter’s Point. The photograph was old and cracked with her mother in an old flowered dress. A face like that of Elena’s, the same jet black hair and incredible wide dark eyes, beautiful hands – menacing in her gaze, the eyes pulled at me
