Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [36]
“I was fourteen when my mom’s car slid off the road, broadsiding a concrete barrier. She was driving back from the store on bald tires in a light rain. On the front seat the paramedics found new paints and a roll of canvas. After the burial, I went home, lined up each of my inhalers on the fence and shot them with a stolen shotgun. Then I slipped beneath the cover of the river and disappeared. I had a lot of questions I couldn’t answer and was tired of living inside a plastic bag. For an entire summer, I paddled from the swamp to the ocean. No medicine. If I couldn’t breathe, I wouldn’t. I stole enough to eat and learned to duck and dodge people who asked too many questions. Sometimes early in the morning or late at night, when the mosquitoes hatched and the mist rose off the river, I’d lay on my stomach, my nose inches from the water, and squint my eyes trying to catch a glimpse of Momma’s God in the river.”
She interrupted me with a smile. “And if you found Him?”
“I was going to grab Him around the neck and choke Him until He answered me.”
“Did He?”
“If He did, I never heard Him. ’Course, it’s hard to hear when you’re hurting.” I shrugged. “I turned fifteen, swam to the surface and convinced enough folks in the trailer park to forge enough papers to help me finish school. Mom would have wanted that. At least that’s what I told myself. Besides, the school couldn’t argue with what I could do with a brush. It was somewhere in there I first remember hearing the term realist. I didn’t even really know what that was. I used to tell them, ‘’Course it’s real. I painted it.’”
“While technically my work was good, it was also devoid of emotion. Hollow. Even I could see that. That river summer had changed me. I had learned how to hold my breath. To live half alive because it kept the pain away.”
“Pain of what?”
“The present. Beyond all the coughing, sputtering and hacking, in between the moments when the light around the edges of my eyes narrowed and the tunnel closed in, I have held on to the inkling that I was made to breathe. That my lungs actually serve a purpose other than suffocating me. All they need is a reason.
“My mom helped me see beauty when I thought there was none. She’d steal me away to the river and then dip me in the sunlight as it dripped through a weeping willow. Then she’d set me in front of the canvas, hold my hand in hers, tell me to close my eyes and then rub my fingertips across the texture of the canvas. ‘Doss,’ she’d say, ‘God is in the details.’ I told her, ‘Momma, that may be but’—I’d touch her temple or point to the bruises on her neck—‘he ain’t no place else.’”
“I’d like to have met her.”
“I can take you to her grave.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” A minute passed.
“And your dad?”
I shrugged. “Word around the trailer was that my mom was ‘easy,’ so I’m not quite sure if the guy who lived with us was my dad. I haven’t seen him since before the funeral.”
She stared at me, letting the sound of the wake from the yacht roll across the top of the river and spill across the rocks. “So when you paint, you’re painting for your mom?”
Between her father’s power and her own success, everybody wanted something from Abbie. Given this, she was guarded. Not unkind, not insincere, but careful. It didn’t take a genius to see there was more behind her question.
I shook my head. “I grew up in…in pieces. Mom saw this and it hurt her. Oil and canvas were her gifts to me. And sometimes, even if for the briefest of moments, they were the glue that put me back together. I can’t explain that. It just did.”
“An aspirin for your anger?” Another question.
“Anger?”
“I watched you fight a man twice your size.”
I nodded. “Yes, sometimes I come angry. But then there are moments when I lose track of time and when I look up and the canvas is staring back at me.”
My tone softened. “It’s a welling-up. I can’t not do it.” I tapped the side of my head. “When God wired my brain to my mouth, I think he might have crossed a wire. What’s supposed to go to my tongue, runs out my fingers. I think and my fingers move. So I paint.