Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [0]
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
AFTERWARD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY CHARLES MARTIN
COPYRIGHT
For my grandparents, Ellen and Tillman Cavert
. . . who have loved well for sixty-seven years
PROLOGUE
I don’t have good memories of growing up. Seems like I knew a lot of ugly stuff when I shouldn’t. The only two things I remember as beautiful were my mom and this riverbank. And until I knew better I thought they’d named the river after my mom.
The man who lived in our trailer was always angry. Always smoking. Don’t know why. He lit one cigarette with the glow-plug end of the other. Touched them like sparklers. They matched his eyes. He never hit me, least not very hard, but his mouth hurt my ears. Mom said it was the devil in the bottle, but I don’t think you drink meanness. You can try and drown it, but, in my experience, it’s a pretty good swimmer. That’s why it’s in the bottle. To escape it, she and I, we came here. She told me it’d help my asthma. I knew better. Dying was about the only thing that’d help my asthma.
With a brick sitting on my chest, I pulled every breath through the length of a garden hose. That made it sort of difficult to get what I thought or felt out my mouth. Mom was always wanting me to talk about my feelings, trying to pull me out of me. I told her, “Forget feelings. I can feel later. Throw me some air.” Between bottle-man, the albuterol and the spastic cough I couldn’t shake, there was a disconnect between my mouth and my heart. Something in me had been severed.
I lived in pieces.
Maybe islands is a better word. Whenever I crept inside myself and took a look around, I didn’t see one whole. Or one main. I saw a continent cut and quartered with each section floating aimlessly on some far corner of the globe. I’ve seen pictures of ice sheets near the pole that do the same thing.
From the ages of five to eight, I wore a helmet even when I wasn’t on my bike and grew up with the nickname “Smurf”—adopted from my occasional lip color. To occupy me during my forced sedentary and mostly sucky childhood, my mother bought me some paints, and in them I found escape—painting the world I wished I lived in.
We had this bench down by the river where we used to sit nights. Mostly when the cigarette haze and verbal dribble drove us out of the trailer. Our butts had worn it smooth. One night, when I was about ten, I’d picked up on the trailer park chatter and I said, “Momma, what’s an ‘easy’ woman?”
She’d heard it, too. “Who you been listening to?”
I pointed. “That big fat woman over there.”
She nodded. “Honey, we all lose our way.”
“You lost yours?”
She touched the tip of my nose with her finger. “Not when I’m with you.” She put her arm around me. “But that’s not what really matters. What matters is what you do when you find yourself lost.”
She walked me through the woods, sat me on the bench and panned her hand across the view in front of me. “Doss, God is in this river.”
It was one of those copper-colored evenings when thunderclouds blocked out the sun. The edges were red and the underside dark blue and bleeding into black. In the distance, we could see the wave of rain coming. I scanned the riverbank, the ripples on the water, remembering all the times I’d felt my tongue thicken and turn numb, right before I blacked out due to oxygen deprivation.
I frowned. “That explains a lot.”
She pushed the hair out of my eyes while I stole two quick puffs on the inhaler. “What do you mean?”
I held my breath