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By Root 939 0

“Abbie Eliot’s father.” At the same time, they stopped introducing her as Senator Coleman’s daughter. Secondly, I kept my mouth shut and nose to the canvas. My work output increased exponentially. Abbie had a grace and presence that attracted people like a magnet. Of course, she was beautiful, but beauty alone does not achieve Abbie’s level of success. By default, that opened doors that I never could have opened on my own. I have no illusions—I did not get here on my own and hence, I am not responsible for my own success. In truth, I rode her coattails, and thankfully my talent was good enough to enable me to hang on. My growing success, especially in Charleston, put me—or rather my work—front and center every time the Colemans’ walked into one of their friend’s homes. Seems like they couldn’t escape me. I took one project a month, and I was booking more than a year out. We had even started talking about a family.

Then Abbie forced me to take a year off.

22

JUNE 4, MORNING

The 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.