Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [39]
We edged back under the trees. I placed my finger on Abbie’s lips again and lay down beside her, staring through the grass toward our campsite. Growing angrier, the two that remained gathered up everything they didn’t want and threw it in the campfire turned bonfire. The flames were now fifteen feet high and licking the underside of the tree limbs. They slung whatever else remained over their shoulders and began carrying it back across the river, following the lone man who’d just stolen our canoe. That left one canoe and little else.
I placed my hand on the shotgun. Abbie put her hand on mine and said, “Everything over there is replaceable. You’re not.”
11
With her parents’ party still in high gear, Abbie hopped off the concrete wall, tucked her arm inside mine and said, “How much do you know about Charleston?”
“I know how to get to work, school and a few places where the fish occasionally bite.”
She raised both eyebrows and shook her head. “That won’t do. Won’t do at all.”
The roads in Charleston are wide—designed that way in 1680 to avoid the congestion typical of London’s narrow streets. So we walked up East Bay, along Rainbow Row, took a left on Elliott to Church and down Cabbage Row. She pointed up and down the street. “You ever seen Porgy and Bess?” I shook my head. “Well, when you do, this is Catfish Row.”
We crossed over to the Dock Street Theater. “This is where I learned to stand in front of a bunch of strangers.” She smiled. “And like it.” She led me a few doors down to the Pirates house built out of blue granite quarried in Bermuda. “Rumor has it,” she said, pointing at her feet, “there are secret tunnels leading from beneath the house all the way to the wharf.”
“You believe the rumors?”
She nodded.
“How come?”
She looked left, then right and leaned in closer. “’Cause I’ve been in the tunnels.”
We U-turned and then righted on Chalmers—Charleston’s longest remaining cobblestone street. British ships in the East India Trade Company used England’s cobblestones as ballast in their transatlantic voyage. Landing here and filling her stores with cotton, rice or lumber meant she left us her rocks. Frugal colonists used them to pave the streets, filling in the cracks with crushed oyster shell that, due to its high lime content, naturally filtered the runoff. Turning left on Meeting, we passed under the Four Corners of Law—so named after the four buildings that line each corner: the federal courthouse and post office, the county courthouse, City Hall and St. Michael’s Episcopal Church. After another right on Broad, she steered left on King—culminating our walk through and around the visual library of architecture that is Charleston. Abbie explained, “Charleston has the largest number of original eighteenth-and nineteenth-century homes in the country. In the renaissance that resulted after Hurricane Hugo, a fever spread. Everybody wanted a piece, sending home prices skyrocketing to nearly a thousand dollars a square foot. Rarely does someone post a for-sale sign in the front yard. They aren’t needed. The owner merely mentions to a friend or realtor that they are thinking about selling and before day’s end they’d have answered eight or ten calls. Bidding wars are not uncommon. Most homes around here are what they call the Charleston single house. One room wide, with its narrow end bordering the street. The porches—or piazzas—often run the length of the house, and face south or southwest to catch the prevailing sea breeze. Colonists learned long ago it’s better to plan for the long, oppressively hot summers than the brief winters.” Abbie knew more about Charleston in five minutes than I knew at all. She ducked in one alley to show me a bricked herringbone driveway. At another, an original Philip Simmons ironwork, or a garden growing something unique: “That Wisteria is thought to be a hundred and fifty years old.” I’d studied art most of my life, but Abbie’s eye was as developed, if not more so, than mine. She saw beauty in the smallest of details. At another gate, she leaned