Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [66]
We were quiet for a stretch as the jeep lumbered along the rutted road. On either side was a forest of loblolly pine, wax myrtle, red bay, and oak trees draped in the trailing vines of muscadine. Below the trees, thickets of skunk cabbage and fan palmetto grew low and sturdy.
“You sure picked the hottest time of the year to come,” Andy announced.
“Well, one of us wanted to go to Taos, but the other someone thought it wouldn’t be as hot here, and that somebody won out, didn’t they?” John reached around the seat and gave me a sharp pinch.
“Oh yeah?” Andy looked over to me, then back to the sandy road, slowing for a fawn that happened to cross in front of the jeep. “Next time, you might want to skip August.”
“Can we see an alligator?” John wanted to know. He’d been talking about it all morning.
“We’ll try. It might even be too hot for them.” He pointed to some frizzled brown growth in the crevice of an oak. “That’s resurrection fern. It’s an epiphyte. It looks dead now, but when it rains—and it will—that fern will burst into green.”
“What’s an epiphyte?” I asked.
“It lives off the air.”
At Stafford, after the road split and then joined again, the forest cleared and there was sky. On the right, across from where the plantation house once stood, was a field that served as an airstrip. “You have to buzz the horses a couple of times before you land,” Andy confided. “Even then they’re stubborn. They think it’s theirs.”
The forest grew denser the farther north we went. Andy took us to the Chimneys, the charred ruins of the slave quarters at Stafford; to Plum Orchard, a Georgian revival mansion, where we peered into huge windows at the wide, vacant rooms; and to an old hunting lodge, the wood grayed and overcome by giant sand dunes. We waited without luck by a marshy creek for alligators, but spotted ospreys and ibises near Lake Whitney. We rambled over trails with names like Roller Coaster, Duck House, and North Cut. And when we reached the tip of the island near Christmas Creek, we saw the giant shell mounds where, a thousand years before, the Timucua had held their banquets. Then, through a tangle of trees and winding paths, we came to the Settlement—the abandoned homes of ex-slaves near Half Moon Bluff. There was an old church there that Andy wanted to show us after we had our picnic in the graveyard nearby.
It was during that lunch, perhaps, as we sat in the shadows of the trees feasting on chicken salad, oatmeal cookies, and sweet tea, that John brought up one of the hypotheticals he’d sometimes play with: If you could choose—excluding being old and happy and in your own bed—how would you want to go? He said he wanted it to be quick. I disagreed. I didn’t want illness, I told him, but at least it had consciousness. You knew what was going on. Being hit by a car, you’re just gone. Boom. Exactly, he said blithely.
The small, clapboard chapel that Andy took us to after lunch stood by a grove of longleaf pines. Pale grass snuck from the edges of the stone foundation, and I remember that the paint on the sills of the First African Baptist Church where he would one day marry was a worn, flaking red.
John and I went inside, but Andy did not. He waited for us by a barbed wire fence, arms crossed, one leg hitched over the other. Behind the wooden doors, the chapel had a musty, shut-in smell. There was a dirty green runner and eleven pews—five pairs and one on its own. In the center of the room was a stand with an open Bible. We sat in a back pew and said a prayer, and before we left, John placed a pinecone on the makeshift altar.
We took the beach route back, a straight shot of packed sand all the way. I sat in the back of the jeep next to the empty wicker baskets, a stray