Where the River Ends (17 page)

By midnight, three distinct groups had developed. The first had passed out and lay sprawled along the beach, a second group had retreated to their blankets and were snuggling around the fires—a few were making s’mores—while the third stood milling around, whispering, drinking or sitting in the water and letting the warm flow roll past them. All eyes were on Link. He hadn’t said a word in nearly three hours. Finally, he stopped picking and began tapping the face of his guitar. His eyes were lost somewhere in the sand in front of him. Folks gathered in close. The guy next to me whispered, “Last song. Usually Zeppelin.”

The crowd on the beach pulled in closer toward the fire—and him. Golden flames grew up out of white coals, chased the smoke and licked the air, lighting his face and the sweat that trickled down.

He tapped several beats, sounding out a hollow drum. Then he looked across the smoke and sand to me and Abbie, and his eyes lost themselves somewhere over my shoulder.

After a few moments, he spoke. “In 1991, Eric Clapton’s son, Conor, fell from a fifty-third-story window. Forty-nine floors later he landed on the roof of a four-story building. A year later, Clapton released a tribute—‘Tears in Heaven.’ People wanted someone to blame, but at the end of the day, it was just a tragic accident.” He shrugged. “Life is hard and sometimes it hurts. And sometimes those reasons ain’t real clear.”

A guy next to the fire pointed his bottle at the heavens and said, “I heard dat’s right.”

Link continued. “The song won most every award, as did his
Unplugged
album.” He picked quietly. “It’s difficult to pick the greatest tribute song. It’s as if they have their own place outside auditoriums and awards dinners. They don’t classify too easily. Critics nibble at them but I doubt it really matters. After 9/11, a lot of folks wrote songs but none captured what I was feeling like Alan Jackson’s ‘Where Were You.’” Couples around the fire leaned back-to-chest and melted into each other. “In 1977, Robert Plant’s son Karac died suddenly of a stomach infection. Plant was on tour. Out of that, he wrote a song that many have said inspired Clapton.” Link studied the neck of his guitar and his fingers delicately tapped the strings. “It’s my favorite Zeppelin tune. It’s called ‘All My Love.’” He began playing an intro. “I don’t normally dedicate songs. Just ain’t my thing. The song speaks for itself, but…this one’s for…everyone who’s ever stood…where the river ends.”

I lifted Abbie off her bed and swayed slowly above the sand, the water and the fire’s reflection. She clutched my shoulders, pressed her head to my neck and held me as we twirled above the beach.

When he finished, even the woods around us were quiet. Abbie pulled on me and whispered, “How about an encore?”

The harmonics of his last notes were echoing off the river when I stopped him. “Link?” Everyone looked at me—the no-name stranger paddling the gaunt ghost downriver. I cleared my throat. “Would you play that one more time? Please?”

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

H
er 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 led 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.