Where the River Ends (18 page)

22

JUNE 4, MORNING

T
he earth’s surface over what we know as the State of Florida is essentially soft sand and a few rocks thrown over a thick layer of limestone. Once the river cut to the limestone, she had only one way to go: out. Her banks are continually on the move, meaning that the river was constantly changing its course—earning her the nickname the Crooked River. It might take years to see any visual difference, and only then if you were paying attention, but in areas of fast current or in times of increased flow, she could carve new boundaries at the rate of an inch or so a day. Beaches became beaches as the river cut itself further into the far bank. I’d been away for fifteen years, so to my eyes the river was transformed.

Few houses or people populate the river’s banks between Stokes Bridge and St. George because most of that land has been acquired by plantation owners and paper companies. One such plantation sat on the Georgia side covering some twelve hundred acres. Spread Oak Plantation wound three miles along the river and served as a breeding ground for nocturnal corn-fed deer, territorial inbred turkeys, giant beavers, crafty red-tailed hawks, several dozen Tennessee walkers, spiraling pine trees and palm-sized bream, but her most famous “crop” was quail. The bobwhite. And those she grew by the thousands. My interest in Spread Oak centered on its protected beaches. Other than our extended stop at the Redneck Riviera, we’d been moving for nearly twenty-four hours and I was starting to ache in places I’d forgotten I had muscles.

With the sun just breaking the treetops and burning the steam off the water, we glided downriver. It was the first time since the bridge that I’d not had to paddle. The water was deeper here and the flow pushed us along at maybe a mile and a half an hour. Wood ducks flew single file down the center of the river. I looked up through the mist and saw a deer standing knee-deep next to the bank. Water dripped off his nose and his ears twitched in my direction. He was large-bodied, his stomach sagged and his horns were covered in golden velvet. They extended two to three inches beyond his ears and climbed high above his head. The light made it difficult to see, but I think he had six points on either side and the two directly above his head—brow tines—looked a foot long. I didn’t hear him come, and I didn’t hear him go. When I blinked, he was gone. A ghost. Leaving only ripples on the water. I didn’t think deer like that still existed around here, but I guess he didn’t get that big being stupid.

We pushed through the rising mist and listened to the earth wake around us. Dog barks, car doors, glass-pack mufflers, black crows, bright red cardinals. We spent the morning tucked beneath a birch tree on a Spread Oak beach. Other than the breeze whistling through the paper bark of the birch trees, bark that had curled like a twisted scroll, it was relatively quiet. Every now and then we’d catch the sound of a chainsaw or motorcycle and twice I spotted a bi-wing plane above us. On his second pass, he nearly brushed the treetops. As it flew away, I got a better look. Blue body, yellow wings.

Between the guys somewhere behind us, word spreading around about us and the plane above us, I was starting to get uncomfortable.

A funny smell rose up my nose. I looked down at Abbie and she was painting her toenails with clear polish. I chuckled.

“What’re you laughing at?”

“Where did you get that?”

“You don’t think I left home without it, do you?”

“No, but everything we had was made into a bonfire about twenty miles ago.”

She smiled. “Not everything.” She started on another toe. “Girl can’t go around with dull toes.”

I scratched my chin and found myself laughing again. She pointed her brush at me. “You’re still laughing.”

My face felt better, and while my eye was no longer swollen shut, my lip was still puffy. I tipped my hat and laid back. “When Gus first hired me, I guided these guys from Stokes Bridge to St. George. A good group—bunch of weekend warriors with wives at home—but they’d never really spent much time in the woods. After a long day, and then a longer night on hard ground, one of them came to me and said, ‘What do we do about a bathroom?’ I didn’t know how much detail to give him so I handed him a small shovel, pointed to the woods and said, ‘Just dig a hole and cover it up when you’re done.’ He looked at me and one end of his lip turned up. He glanced downriver. ‘How long before we come to a public bathroom?’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe tonight.’ A few minutes later, I looked upriver maybe a hundred yards and the guy was sitting on the beach reading a magazine. His shorts were at his ankles and his bare butt was pressed into the hole he’d dug. I just shook my head. Anyway, the others soon followed suit. Maybe I should’ve said something. That night one of the guys came to me and said, ‘Ummm…hey, uh…do you have any bug bites? Like little red bites?’ He was scratching himself as he talked. ‘No. You?’ He nodded without letting on. ‘Where?’ I asked. He pointed down. ‘Everywhere.’ He crossed his arms and whispered, ‘Like…every square inch. And it’s itching so bad I’m about to lose my religion.’ I asked, ‘Big red bumps?’ He nodded. I reached in my bag and handed him a bottle of clear fingernail polish. ‘They’re called chiggers. You can’t see them. They’re little bugs that seek out hot spots, burrow into your skin and hang out for about two weeks unless you smother them. Put that on every one and keep it on there.’ He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. ‘You’re yanking my chain, right? This is one of those rights-of-passage things that you river guides do to city boys like me.’ I shook my head. ‘No. I wouldn’t kid around about chiggers. Come midnight, if you don’t do something, you’ll be itching so bad you’ll…well, you’ll be in a bad way.’ He took the bottle and asked, ‘Every single one?’ I nodded. ‘Yup.’ I cleaned the breakfast dishes, broke down the tent and loaded the canoes. When I returned, all five of them were standing around the fire, pants at their ankles, fanning the polish dry. It’s one of those images I could do without. One of them, a skinny guy that ran power plants around the country, said, ‘What happens on the river, stays on the river…right?’ ‘Yeah, but you’re going to have a hard time convincing your wives of that.’”

Abbie finished, spun the cap back on the bottle and blew on her little toe. “What in the world got you to thinking about that?”

“The smell.”

“Well”—she waved the bottle in the air—“if you find yourself in need, you can get your own. I’m not letting you”—she twirled her index finger in the air, making a circular motion and pointing it in my general direction—“paint yourself, and then expect me to paint my toes with it. A girl’s got to have her boundaries. You’re on your own.”

“Can’t say that I blame you.”

23

B
ecause of her travels, Abbie had seen some of the greatest art ever created. She’d stood right in front of it. Stared, laughed, cried. Hence, she understood it better and appreciated it on a level exponentially deeper than I did or could. While I might have understood the painters’ lives, Abbie understood their work, and in a greater sense, them. Compared to Abbie, I didn’t know squat. I’d be looking at an art book, turning the pages, and she’d say, “I’ve seen that,” or “It’s better in person,” or “Oh, honey, you should see that…the way the light travels across…” I was always jealous.

We’d been married a year when she came to me. I was sitting in my studio, mixing paints.

She sat in my lap, arm around my neck. “I want to go on a trip.”

“Okay.”

“And I want to plan it. All by myself.”

“Okay.”

“And you’ll go with me?”

“Sure.”

She walked out of the room, grabbed a folder that was about four inches thick and came back in. She sat on the floor, patted the ground next to her and then unfolded a map of the world.

One of the great things she’d gotten from her father was the ability to think outside the box. Add to that the fact that she had money and Abbie could come up with some “out there” ideas.

We were gone nearly a year.

In a perfect world, we’d have started with the early Renaissance and moved forward linearly, hopping through a timeline of artists and their work. Instead, we hopped geographically, from city to city. That is, until the very end. But that, too, she did on purpose.

Our first stop on our way to New York was the National Gallery in D.C. I remember turning a corner and there hung Rubens’s
Daniel in the Lions’ Den.
I sat on a bench opposite the work and walked across it with my eyes for nearly three hours. The idealized grandeur reached down within me and touched something I never knew was there.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, we sat with Toulouse-Lautrec and his
At the Moulin Rouge.
Toulouse was the crippled outcast who hung out in Paris bordellos with prostitutes and other social outcasts and found comfort in the night world of Paris. If Toulouse had taught me anything, it was that it takes an outcast to paint the needy.

In London, Abbie rushed me to the National Gallery where I met Giovanni Bellini and his
Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan.
The face, the expression of the mouth, the facial wrinkle in the cheek matched by the neck and, most importantly, the eyes. Nothing prepared me for that.

We flew to Florence and met Giotto. Giotto had taken the flat two-dimensional creations of his predecessors and, using light and dark shading, added dimension. He gave solidity and weight where it had not existed before. In her role as my tutor, Abbie asked me, “Why is he important?”

I could see now. “He thought outside the box.”

Second, she led me to Donatello’s sculpture
Mary Magdalene
—the aged woman, her anguish imprinted on her face. Her torment stopped me. The way her hair draped across her face, her torn clothes, she wore her emaciated, withered soul on the outside.

In the Uffizi Gallery, I found Piero della Francesca and his one-sided portrait of Federico da Montefeltro. Federico was disfigured in that he’d lost his right eye in a sword fight, so Francesca painted him in full profile but only of his left side—to hide it. Oddly enough, while his contemporaries were idealizing their subjects, he showed the moles and crooked nose. Also there was Titian’s
Venus of Urbino.
While her body is provocative, it is drawn in such a way that leads you time and time again to her face, the angle of her neck, the inviting drop of her shoulders, the playfulness in her eyes, the relaxed crossing of her legs. It’s what a nude should be.

Then she took me to
Portrait of a Man (The Young Englishman).
Whereas Bellini’s
Doge
is stiff and wooden, Titian’s
Englishman
is not, the youthful honesty of his face drips off the page. While his garment fades away, can even be described as washed out and nondescript, his gaze is almost verbal. He captures the viewer, pulls at your eyes and forces you to come to grips with the singular thought that his might just be the best portrait ever painted.

One afternoon, she wrapped a blindfold around my head and led me by the hand down a walkway, around a corner and sat me on a bench. I knew where we were. It’s rather a famous walk, but then she took off the blindfold. There he stood. Michelangelo’s
David.
I hit my knees. If there is anything perfect in art, that may be it. I cried. Cried like a baby.

Abbie knelt beside me. My tutor. “Why is he important?”

“He made his own box.”

Halfway through our trip, I realized that Abbie had lifted my masters off the page, taken them out of the realm of gods and set me at a table where they were carrying on a rather lively conversation. She introduced me to them and slid my chair up to the table. It was a gift unlike any other. In doing so, she took what head knowledge I had of each of them and allowed it to sift down into my heart. Where it would take root.

In Rome we found Bernini’s sculpture
Damned Soul.
It is the face of a tormented man facing eternal damnation. To get the face just right, Bernini scorched his forearm with a hot iron. It worked, because you can see the torment in the eye and cheek, the rise of the nose, the wild flaming hair—open mouth, wide eyes. I shook my head. How does he do that?

In Potsdam at the Neues Palais, I marveled with Caravaggio and his
Doubting of St. Thomas.
For so long I’d wanted to lean in close and study how the finger, up to the second knuckle, was stuck into the skin in Jesus’s rib cage. In Rome, we found
Judith,
and I met the servant with the wrinkled, serious face.

At the Louvre in Paris, I met Raphael’s
Baldassare Cas-tiglione.
He was the clear-eyed and pensive man I’d met twenty years before on a page in the library with my mom. For the first time, I understood how the introspectiveness of the philosopher is seen through the eyes, and how such a somber mood is created with stillness and “quiet” colors.

We met countless others, but she saved my favorite for last.

Rembrandt.

In an era when most who sat for portraits were posers, clothes horses, engaged in a costume drama where they believed their clothing identified them, along came Rembrandt. He didn’t think twice about accurately depicting a crow’s foot, a bulbous nose, the oversized scrotum of a chubby toddler, or Abraham’s huge hand on Isaac’s face—which we saw at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

Rembrandt looked for what described a person, what identified them, and he did not avoid it or shy away from it. He sought to uncover the personality of the person before him by taking off the mask that either he wore by choice or that society had placed on him. His fine motor skills caught the precise textures of fabric, like perforations in lace or the translucent layering of chiffonlike fabric. He used high finish and rough scraping within the same area, scratching back white paint with the stub end of a brush. In
A Portrait of an 83-Year-Old Woman
in the National Gallery in London, he gave us the droop of an octogenarian eyelid, where the skin hanging loosely over her lid had been made with jabbing strokes of the brush. Her tortoise face, the wetness of her eyes, the way she looked past you—the shadows give thoughtfulness, and her pink eyelids suggest nights without sleep.

Nobody does eyes like Rembrandt.

With Rembrandt, there were no grotesques. His naturalism—which some would say was uncompromising—jumped off the canvas. He read people emotively and looked through the mask to find the individual. Whether through the arc of an eyebrow, the angle of a chin, the rise or fall of cheekbones, a once-broken nose or the folds of a jowl. He listened to the pull on his insides and what that told him about someone. He found that singular thing, painted it and gave you a reason to look, and look again. I could not take my eyes away. Up close and in person, I saw levels and layers to his painting that didn’t exist in any book. His craft did this, his technique, from finesse to broad strokes, his hand and brush were in perfect concert with his head, his imagination, and with this, he invited your sympathies. Even in something so simple as his
Slaughtered Ox
at the Louvre in Paris.

I had held it together until the end of the trip, but Rembrandt brought me to a crisis of confidence. Michelangelo would have, except that he’s…Michelangelo. Abbie knew this—that’s why she saved Rembrandt until last. I walked away from Rembrandt with a DNA-level desire to craft unedited human nature, in all its rumpled impurity.

Abbie tapped me on the shoulder. “And him?”

“Those people who sat for portraits…they didn’t pose. Motionless, yes; but they nonetheless moved. They lived.” I wanted to quit. To give up. Burn everything I’d ever done.

Abbie nodded. “What you see is human greatness. This is as good as it gets, as it’s ever been, maybe as it ever will be.” I saw what he’d done and I knew that I could not do that. Abbie wrapped her arm inside mind and said, “Come on, he’s just a man. You can do that.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“You already do.”

“But…he’s
Rembrandt.
”

She nodded. “And you’re Doss.”

“You’re still nuts.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I believe.”

Our trip was an education unlike anything I’d ever known. It was as if Abbie knew my incompleteness. My deficiencies. To combat them, she mapped out a course filled with precisely the art I needed to take in, proving that she knew instinctively which works I needed to see to become the artist I could be. To become the artist she knew I could.

I remember leaving the hall where
David
stands. Walking out, we passed by all the friezes he created. Nothing but huge chunks of granite with these forms of half-people climbing out of the rocks. It’s like they’re breaking free. Escaping. And when I walk back down that hallway in my mind, I realize that Abbie had done that for me.

Abbie led me to her river, and I drank deeply.

We returned home and I discovered that Abbie had given me a gift I had not anticipated. I stood before my easel and found that I saw beauty in the not-so-beautiful, even in the grotesque. What she had birthed with Rosalia, she had now shaped and matured. I looked at the paints piled in a bucket at my feet. Where before I had seen a few dozen, now I saw ten thousand.