The sky was lightening to morning gray and it was cold enough that we could see our breath when we climbed into the pickup thirty minutes later. I lifted the napkin covering the basket Mary Pell had handed me and the cab filled with the smell of warm biscuits—sausage biscuits for me, plain for Brad. I looked back at Tasha and Maybelle riding happily in the truck bed.
“I don’t recall them being vegetarians.”
“Go ahead,” Brad said.
I took patties from two biscuits and tossed them to the dogs.
We followed a sandy dirt road until it ended by a grove of trees at the edge of the Savannah River.
“Live oaks,” Brad said. “See how those low-hanging branches end up growing almost parallel to the ground? You can see why they’d be so good for ship planks.”
I saw what he meant but my attention was diverted by the fact that a long blue Buick was already parked at the grove, its driver’s-side door open and its driver lounging half in the car and half out. As we got closer I could see that it was the lanky Reverend Grace dressed in jeans, high-top black sneakers and a blue satin LA Dodgers baseball jacket.
It was the first time I had seen Grace since the Sampson story broke. I hugged him and thanked him for his belief.
“Truth finds a way,” he said.
“Eventually,” I said.
“In the long run, truth doesn’t need help. But in the short run, sometimes it uses people like you and me to speed itself along.”
Brad pulled a green fourteen-foot jonboat from a grove of bushes, slid it into the river and maneuvered it to a short dock that stretched into the river just inches above the water. He took a five-horsepower Evinrude from the back of the pickup and bolted it to the stern of the jonboat as Tasha and Maybelle scrambled in. Grace and I followed.
The sun was poking over the horizon. Brad started the quiet Evinrude and steered us away from the dock as small waves slapped the front of the boat.
“Botanically, half of South Carolina’s in the inner coastal plain and half is in the outer coastal plain,” Brad said above the outboard. “We’re right at the northern limit for plants that thrive in the tropics and right at the southern limit for the mid-Atlantic species. So we have an incredible variety of vascular flora—three thousand, one hundred and sixty different kinds, if you count native and naturalized.”
Brad turned the tiller on the engine. The nose of the boat swung around so that we were heading upriver. “The thing about plants is that every one of them has something interesting about them,” Brad said. “Did you see the Yaupon Holly?”
“Maybe,” said Grace, stroking his salt-and-pepper beard.
“The bushes where we stashed the boat. Pointed leaves and little green berries. The leaf has the highest caffeine content of any plant there is. Much higher than tea or coffee. Used to be a very popular tea.”
We were beating against the current with the wind at our backs. The sun was rising higher and it was starting to get warm. I peeled off my sweatshirt.
“Oleander,” Brad said, pointing to the bank. “Also known as Southern Belle Suicide.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s a deadly poison but virtually undetectable in the human body. Legend is that it was the favorite of Southern belles who married rich men for their money, then killed them off with Oleander and set the death up to look like suicide. No muss. No fuss. No evidence.”
A low growl emanated from Maybelle and in a moment both dogs were pointing in front of the bow, barking. Twenty feet in front of the boat a curious wet head with cat-like ears popped out of the water and watched us intently.
“Beaver,” said Grace.
“River otter,” corrected Brad. “Look at the skinny tail.” For the next hundred yards the otter swam with us, popping up on one side of the boat, disappearing under water and then popping up on the other side. The dogs were invariably caught looking the wrong way and I began to feel the otter was enjoying the game, that he knew exactly what he was doing. In the next few miles we heard the calls of gulls and saw egrets, herons, osprey, and the nest of a bald eagle.
I found myself totally absorbed and relaxed, as if this life on the river was the only one I was living. I had almost forgotten about my father, Wallace Sampson, or why I had come to Windrow in the first place until we pulled to the bank to let the dogs run.
“That Pulitzer was a pretty good lick for you,” Reverend Grace said as we sat on a log by the riverbank eating a biscuit. He picked up a cypress branch and began drawing crosses in the mud, releasing a musky smell of decomposition and decay. “That’s journalism’s highest award. And People magazine, you’re right there with Oprah Winfrey and Rod Stewart.”
“Matt, you ought to be pleased with yourself,” Brad agreed.
I was, but for a different reason. I’ve learned it’s not wise to depend on other people to define one’s worth. I’d spent the better part of my life seeking approval from someone else and I’d found the search frustrating and never-ending. It turns out I’d been looking in the wrong places, outside, instead of in.
It was getting close to midday as we loaded back in the jonboat. Brad used the Evinrude to move us to the middle of the river and then cut the engine, letting the current take us where it wanted as we drifted downstream toward the dock. The breeze had vanished. Grace stripped off his jacket, draped his arms over one side of the boat and legs over the other, closed his eyes, and tilted his face to the sun.
I was alone with my thoughts until Grace said, “You’re awfully quiet.”
I told him I missed my father. “We were just starting to get to the good part,” I said.
In one of those moments where everyone happens to be focused on the same thing, we were all watching when a dead tree suddenly toppled from the bank and splashed loudly into the river, flushing a flock of egrets.
“Tupelo gum,” Brad said.
“If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” I asked.
We drifted on a ways before Grace spoke up. “You know your relationship with your father is like that tree making a sound because we were around to hear it. Let’s say your father died but you didn’t know it. You’d continue to think of him just the way you did when he was alive. You wouldn’t know he had died so as far as you’re concerned, the relationship is unchanged.”
“I know. We’re all going to meet on fluffy clouds one day in heaven.”
“I’m not talking about that,” Grace said. “My momma died when I was eight. Years later, I felt I’d been called by God to enter the seminary but I prayed for clarification. When I had finished a vision of my mother appeared to me. She told me something she always used to say when I was a young boy. ‘Son, whatever your path, do something nice for someone along the way.’ In other words, years after she was gone, my momma still spoke to me. Your father will always be in your heart and in your head. You will talk to him and you will know what he would say and what he would do. He will always exist for you. Death won’t end that relationship. ”
We rounded a turn and pulled up to the dock where we had put in. Tasha and Maybelle scampered down the dock, waded into the water up to their bellies and lapped up the river. Brad unhooked the Evinrude and loaded it into the pickup while Grace and I pulled the jonboat into a holly grove.
I arrived home Sunday to find a beaming Delana in a slinky dress—sexy and silly at the same time—doing her best Vanna White imitation with a fully restored green TR 3 in the driveway.
I was stunned. “It’s just like the one Dad had when I was growing up,” I marveled.
“It is the one your dad had when you were growing up. I tracked it down through the Triumph club six months ago and had it restored.”
The next morning I drove the Triumph back to The Farmlet and surprised Delana in her pottery studio. She took off her clay-spattered apron and we wal
ked to our favorite spot, the old dock at the pond. I knelt, took her hand, and proposed to her then and there. I barely got the words out before she pulled me up and clutched me tight. I reached into my pocket, took out the ring I had bought months ago and slipped it on her finger.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. I smiled. My father had always told me, don’t scrimp. It’s the one thing you’ll give her that she’ll show off the rest of her life.
We were married with Reverend Grace presiding and Ronnie Bullock serving as best man. Brad and Lindsay arrived in the Volvo along with Tasha and Maybelle and a wedding gift—an autographed copy of Brad’s Windrow book, just published by the University of South Carolina Press. The ceremony took place in The Farmlet’s pasture, not ten feet from where I had scattered my father’s ashes just six months before.
We were having dinner two months later when Delana announced that we were expecting a son on July twenty-ninth.
“Luke’s birthday,” I said.
“Then that’s his name.”
I said I wasn’t so sure.
“It honors your brother and your father,” she said. “Plus it’s a beautiful name.”
The date was right but Lucy Harper, not Lucas, arrived on the twenty-ninth of July. As my dad taught me, never assume anything.
About the Author
Mark Ethridge is a third-generation reporter and writer who directed the Charlotte Observer’s Pulitzer-Prize winning investigations of the textile industry and the PTL scandal involving Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. His work has appeared in newspapers and magazines coast-to-coast. Ethridge studied as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and was a member of Esquire magazine’s inaugural class of “People Under 40 Who Are Changing America.”
To learn more about Mark Ethridge and Grievances, go to www.newsouthbooks.com/grievances
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