Where the River Ends

by Charles Martin

  7

  I woke up hungry, face tender and one eye swollen completely shut. My lip was busted and looked out of proportion to the rest of my face. Somewhere along my right rib cage, a knifing pain told me that I’d either broken a rib or bruised it rather severely.

  I put on some water to make some Raman noodles, when I heard a tap at the door. I pulled some jeans over my boxer shorts and opened the door.

  It was her.

  I stood there like a deer in the headlights.

  She looked up and down the street, then without invitation, stepped past me and into my studio. She was wearing a baseball cap, sweatshirt and jeans and looked sort of like one of those Hollywood A-listers who’s shopping in the mall and trying not to be noticed. I stuck my head out the door, looked up and down the street and then back at her. She motioned to the door, which I shut, and then moved toward the back, near the boiling water, and out of the streetlight.

  Hands in pockets, she looked around, taking in what little there was to take in. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes. “I didn’t get to thank you. I just ran and…” She wiped her face on her shirtsleeve.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  I might not have had much, but tea I had. I reached into a drawer stuffed with tea bags and she started laughing. “You like tea?”

  I shrugged. “I umm…I steal it from work. A bag or two a night. Sometimes three. It’s easier than stealing coffee.”

  She laughed again. I poured two mugs of tea and pointed to a chair in the corner. Since I didn’t have a table, I often ate in that chair with my dinner on my lap. She sat and I leaned against the wall, the tea bag string draped across one finger. She sipped and eyed the hundreds of pieces of my work either leaning or hanging around my studio. She stared up at the loft. “You stay busy.”

  I picked a dirty T-shirt off the floor, turned it right side out and pushed my head and arms through it. As soon as I did, I realized my mistake. Somewhere in the last week, I’d run out of deodorant and since then, I’d apparently worn that T-shirt. I held out a stop-sign hand and said, “I’ll be right back.” I hobbled up the stairs, put on a clean T-shirt, washed my underarms with a rag, sprayed them with cheap aftershave, then came back down and resumed my tea-steeping dip with the tea bag. She pointed and said, “You forgot…one thing.”

  I looked down and found my zipper wide open. While I fumbled with it, she set down her tea and began studying my art. Slowly, she eyed each piece. Really taking them in. I sat quietly. After the third or fourth piece, she stopped and looked around. “Where’s the piece of the Gullah woman?”

  “What?”

  She pointed to an interior wall. “It used to lean over there. She was working at the slave market, weaving a wiregrass basket.”

  Somewhere in my first week at school, I was walking through the market, getting my bearings, when I came upon this woman. She looked mid-seventies. She was leaning against the brick of the slave market, a hundred baskets at her feet, a single piece of grass sticking out of her mouth, no teeth, no dentures, knotty hands, dirty dress, tattered hat, bronze skin and yet there was something about her eyes. With the woman’s permission, I spent a week—every afternoon for an hour when the light fell soft behind the trees—and captured her.

  Abbie said, “Everybody paints the Gullah”—she shrugged—“they’re easy targets. But you’ve done something not normally seen. Not even in New York. You captured the eyes. And Miss Rachel”—she tapped the center of the woman’s frame on the canvas—“has some of the kindest and most beautiful eyes God ever made.”

  “You know her?”

  She looked over her shoulder. “I grew up here.”

  I was confused. I scratched my head. I had never put her on display in the window. “Where have you seen it?”

  She crossed her arms and pointed at the window. “We’ve never actually met, but from time to time, I window-gaze. See what’s new. What you’re working on.” She lifted her sunglasses back over her eyes and I saw her again for the first time.

  “That was you fogging up my glass?”

  She nodded.

  “Why didn’t you come in? I don’t bite.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s nice not to be known.”

  She spent twenty minutes looking at my walls. The more she looked, the more I felt like a nude subject beneath the spotlight.

  Finally she turned to me. “When do you graduate?”

  “Technically, this summer.”

  She waved her hand across the room. “Problem?”

  “Well…no, not really.”

  She read my hesitation and stepped closer. “We have a Christmas party. An annual thing. I’d like it if…if you’d come.”

  “Yeah? I mean…” I tried to sound like I attend these things all the time. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Saturday week? Around seven. I’ll send a driver.”

  Driver? “Yeah, sure.” I pointed toward the street. “Mine’s parked right down the street. I don’t like him blocking my view.”

  She scanned my studio one last time, her eyes landing on the only photograph I owned.

  On June 13, 1948, Nat Fein was sent to Yankee Stadium. The usual photographer had called in sick. Nat, a thirty-three-year-old from Manhattan’s east side, usually shot human interest images for the New York Herald Tribune; i.e., he once took a picture of a cemetery with a one-way sign in the foreground. But June 13 was different. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famous park in the Bronx and in that ceremony they would retire number 3. Babe Ruth. It was his house and everyone was there to see him. At fifty-three years old, he was the greatest player in baseball history, but for the last two years had been in and out of hospitals. A sportswriters agreement meant no one had ever used the word cancer, but when Nat first saw him in the locker room Babe was too weak to tie his own cleats. A male nurse did it for him. Nat watched him, saddened. The Babe, skinny, his uniform hanging off tilted shoulders, slipped on an overcoat and shuffled to the visitors’ dugout. When his name was called, the place erupted. Babe slipped off his coat, grabbed a bat and walked to home plate—leaning on the bat. When he reached home plate, he took off his hat with his left hand and stood there, facing the house that he built. Every photographer had staged himself along the first and third base lines—in front of Babe. To get a shot of one of the most photographed faces in history. But not Nat.

  Nat had seen his face and it wasn’t the one he wanted to remember. Also, the only place “3” could be seen was from behind home plate. So that’s where he stood. And while most of the other photographers used flashbulbs, Nat used available light. He shot low, near the ground, up across Babe’s shoulders and out into the upper deck.

  The result was one of the most famous pictures in sports history.

  The next day, it appeared on the front of the Herald Tribune and then the AP picked it up and it ran on papers around the country. Two months later, Babe Ruth died. And in 1949, Nat Fein received the Pulitzer Prize for the photo.

  She pointed at the picture. “Seems sort of out of place.”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  She seemed intrigued. “How so?”

  “Take a long look at it.” She did. “Now close your eyes.” She looked at me. “Just close them.” She folded her arms and closed her eyes. “Now, tell me what you see.”

  She opened her eyes. “His face.”

  “Exactly. Except you can’t see it by looking at that photo.” I walked to the wall and slid a large canvas out from behind another. I had filled most of the canvas with the Babe’s face.

  “Wow.” She studied it a minute. “Have you shown that to your professors?” I shook my head. “You should.”

  I slid it back into its place. “I’m…well, I do faces. At least I’m trying.”

  She stared at me. She didn’t want to leave. “Why?”

  I folded my arms and shrugged. “Because of what they say without ever utter
ing a word.”

  She nodded. “I’d better get back. He’s probably worried. Flew all this way and I’m not even home.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Daddy.” She checked her watch. “About seven, then?”

  I glanced at my watchless arm and said, “Sure. When the freckle gets past the hair.”

  She laughed. “Thanks for the tea.”

  “Yeah…there’s always more. And if not, I know where I can steal some.”

  She pulled the baseball cap down over her eyes. Her tone when she spoke was quiet and soft. “And…for last night.”

  I set down my tea. “Anybody would have done the same thing.”

  “Yeah?” She shook her head and pointed over one shoulder. “One man with binoculars was watching us through a window. Another, a jogger, crossed the park and pretended not to see.”

  “How’d you see them?”

  “It was hard not to. I was on my back.”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets, trying to look like James Dean. “Well, next time, pick somebody bigger. Make it a challenge.”

  “Do you always make jokes when someone else is trying to be serious?”

  Long pause. “I rented this place eight months ago with the hopes that the storefront would allow me to sell my work.” I waved my hand across the room. “I’ve yet to sell the first piece. Making jokes helps me…in truth, it’s the curtain I hide behind so folks like you won’t see that the emperor’s food taster has no clothes.”

  She bit her lip. “From what folks are saying, you don’t wear them much anyway.”

  “Yeah, it’s a new marketing campaign to get people to the window.”

  “Too bad you can’t keep them there.”

  “Ooh…that cuts deep.”

  She walked across the room, grabbed Miss Rachel and placed her in the window. “Each piece should have a name. It’ll help people identify with them. Buyers, that is.” She thought a minute and pointed at Miss Rachel. “Contentment.” She looked at me. “Because she is.”

  She untied the dusty $300 price tag off an existing piece and hung it over the corner of Miss Rachel’s canvas. Then she carefully placed a 1 in front of the 3 and stood back, chewing on a fingernail. She tilted her head, considered it a moment, then wrote over the 3, creating an 8 in its place. She stood back. “Folks around here like to feel they are buying something of value. If you don’t value your work, why should they? In New York, this would be a bargain, and”—she waved her hand across the shoppers milling along the streets—“that’s where most of these folks shop when they’re not”—she shaded her eyes with her hand—“fogging up your window.”

  She tugged on the bill of her baseball cap and disappeared around the corner. She had yet to tell me her name.

  8

  JUNE 1

  I steadied the boat and began paddling just as a muted voice rose up from beneath the tarp: “Hey, good looking.” I leaned in. “You have done this before, right?”

  “Once or twice.”

  She shifted to one side. “That sounded like it went well.”

  She was smiling beneath the adrenaline rush brought on by the combination of fentanyl and Actiq. I knelt, sweat dripping off my face and nose. “Yeah, well, I never really liked Charleston anyway.”

  She rolled her eyes closed, then open.

  “We can still turn back.”

  She shook her head. Her tongue was thick. “I’m with you.”

  I felt her feet, which, despite the seventy-five-degree heat, were cold and clammy. “How you feeling?”

  She shifted uneasily. “Never better.”

  “Headache?”

  She nodded and tried to smile. When the headaches had first started, she said it was like riding a roller coaster that never stopped while sitting next to someone who kept banging you in the head with their elbow.

  Rigged with a stern-to-bow towline, the second canoe tracked behind, slipping serpentine across the water. Knotted and twisting, ancient live oaks rose up on either side and reached out across the water forming a canopy that spoke of Pat Smith’s forgotten land and maybe the ghost of Osceola. Cypress stumps spiked up through the river’s surface, while deadwood fell across, forming raccoon bridges and fishing-line snags. At this early point in the river’s life, where she was less than fifteen feet across, portage was a necessity. At her deepest the river was a foot and her shallowest an inch, so every few minutes, I’d step out, pull both canoes across a log or sand bar, then hop back in and shove off only to hop out once again and start all over. During one three-hour stretch, I fashioned a makeshift harness and sloshed ankle-deep along the bank and river bottom.

  Unlike rivers out west that cut canyons down into and through rock walls, the edges of the St. Marys ebbed and flowed depending upon rainfall—making it difficult to establish a state line within a few feet. One day the river might be ten feet wide at a given point, but throw some rain in that equation and that can widen to thirty or forty feet in a day, only to recede back to ten or expand to fifty before the next day’s end. In the last few decades, home buyers and builders made sure they bought or built above the hundred-year flood line.

  Once out of the swamp, the river travels through Moniac at Highway 94, then according to the map, some thirteen miles to State Road 121, but that’s a lie. Whoever made the map was smoking crack. Probably more like twenty-five. Riding her is brutal, tough work and yet a beautiful, mysterious, even somewhat prehistoric passage. To miss it is to miss some of the heart of the river. Abbie knew this. That’s why she’d said, “All the way from Moniac.” Taking a helicopter’s view north of Glen St. Mary, the river turns hard left, or due east, and runs across the northern tip of Macclenny. From there she bends north, where the winding river makes a crooked run up to Folkston—meandering some two miles for every crow mile. At Folkston, she bears hard right, and zigzags east by southeast to the coast. Crow distance from swamp to ocean is a little more than sixty miles. Total river distance is nearer 129 miles, give or take. Usually, more give than take.

  But if you trace her lines, things are different. While the headwaters bubble only sixty crow miles from the ocean, she is in no hurry to get there. And while she may run under one name, she is, in actuality, four rivers. The first runs from Moniac, under Highway 121 to Stokes Bridge—maybe thirty-one miles. Think drainage ditch inside a bridge tunnel. It’s narrow, overhung with trees that interlock like fingers, crisscrossed by elevated railroad trestles, crawling with frogs, hanging with Spanish moss, slithering with snakes and given the nearly impenetrable maze of pickup-stick trees that have fallen across her, nearly impossible to paddle for very long. You can swim it, pull through it, push over it, walk around it or cut through it, but she will regulate your speed and it will not be fast. She has her own rhythm. Chances are, unless you’ve spent much time around here, hers is a good bit slower than yours—physically and emotionally. Her flow is unregulated, so while some corners are fast, others—given the topography—are slower. Maybe the water pools up, maybe her banks widen, maybe she has cut through the bed to the limestone and sped up, or maybe she U-turns and whips you around like a water-skier. Whatever the case, there is little consistency other than that she is moving toward the ocean. Whether you live or die matters not, but don’t think her impersonal and don’t doubt her. She is far more in tune with you than you are. Having cut all the way to the limestone, some of her banks are bluffs some forty feet high, others are root-webbed sand hills, while others are cow pastures who’s grass and mud roll into the water. Doing so has left holes that are teeming with warmouth, perch, smallmouth bass and water moccasins. When the sun can break through the canopy, her sides are dotted with Buick-sized white sandy beaches; leaning, tin-roofed, vine-covered barns; and screen-enclosed tree houses—but trickling down the middle is a copper blanket of sweet bronze liquid that in most places is also cool.

  Part two of the river runs from Stokes Bridge to Trader’s Ferry—forty-four miles. Here she widens, offers stretches of padd
le-ability, and runs nearly the entire length with bleached white beaches. Because she is constantly eroding her banks and floor, the ancient trees that line her inevitably fall inward. First they lean, almost bowing as she passes by, then they cross like swords in a military-dress procession, then they topple as she undercuts their roots in her way to the limestone. She ranges from a foot deep to maybe ten in a few of the deeper spots. Beneath her surface is an intricate and invisible spiderweb of branches, or arms, that pull at boats and those who wish to float her. Beyond the branches, tucked into the shadows, are white-tail deer, black bear, feral hogs, quail, turkey and horseflies with an attitude. It is also here that people have begun to populate her banks, built homes on stilts, swim in her shade, bask in her coolness, swing from ropes hung high in her towering arms, ride zip lines and litter her with beer cans, bobbers and bathing suits. From copper bronze, her color has darkened to that of iced tea. Depending upon the sun, maybe weak coffee. But don’t let the color fool you. Black does not equal bad. Or evil. Her sandy bottom filters her every hundred feet. Like everything on the river, appearances can be deceiving.

  Leg three runs from Trader’s Ferry to the Coastal Highway, or Highway 17—a distance of thirty-six miles. From the railroad trestle at 17, the ocean is only another eighteen miles downstream, which means that tides begin to affect her. Her flow will actually reverse every six hours. Like a flushing toilet, she empties quickly and fills slowly. Her banks widen to some two to four hundred yards across. She brims with otter, beaver, water moccasins and alligators. Some ten feet in length, their heads nearly three feet long. Boat ramps, fish camps and long since rotted docks have replaced sandy beaches. Her banks now roll down into the water with pine trees and palmetto bushes making a nearly impenetrable wall. Approaching the bank is like petting a porcupine—you must pick your way in. And not quickly. Residents have sunk pilings into the bank, poured and fortified concrete walls and built getaways where they sit on the porch, sip mint juleps and listen as the river rolls by. Below, she has opened herself to recreation—motor boats haul skiers, fishermen, poachers or wildlife officers and Jet Skis buzz like hornets. Beneath them all, she has morphed once again. Here she hides her secrets and flows Starbucks black.