Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [84]
We slipped past Blood Landing and watched the moon reach full and high over Cabbage Bend. The moon lit the water in a hazy shade of blue and cast tall tree shadows across the water. The light brought out the water bugs, which in turn attracted the fish by the hundreds. We paddled through feeding frenzy after feeding frenzy. It was one of those rare occasions that would have been beautiful had it been any other time. Abbie climbed up, leaned against the side of the canoe and dangled her fingers in the water. All along the banks, the tree frogs croaked a summertime chorus that was answered by an occasional alligator and distant barking dog.
Years back, Mr. Gilman of the Gilman Paper Company donated several thousand acres of land for what is now the White Oak Plantation. It’s beyond exclusive. There’s a golf course, but you can’t play it. You can’t set foot on it unless you’re a president or somebody real famous. Drive up to the gate and they’ll instruct you in the finer points of a U-turn. Invitations are scarce and money won’t buy you entrance.
Word has it that somewhere in the 1980s Mr. Gilman met Mikhail Baryshnikov. A friendship ensued and Mr. Gilman built a dance studio for what became the White Oak Dancers. Made up of the best dancers in the world, they are quite possibly the most elite group ever to perform, which they have done some six hundred times around the world. It always struck me as odd that the pinnacle of ballet achievement and performance trains at a plantation in the sticks of North Florida.
My interest in White Oak had little to do with Gilman or the dancers but rather Brickyard Landing. White Oak rolls out of the oaks and crawls up to the river’s edge at a little concrete ramp and manicured landing tucked down in the woods behind a No Trespassing sign. Solitary needle-thin pine trees rise sixty feet high, swaying slightly in the breeze, but it’s the smell of the marsh that gives it away. It is here that the river changes yet again. Sandy beaches, scrub oaks and poplar trees have given way to wiregrass, pluff mud and oyster beds. It’s also the first place on the river where you can detect the tidal stain on the bank. Here it’s just two or three feet, but closer to Highway 17 and I-95, the stain will color nearly six feet on the bank. The smell brushed under my nose, the trees spiked the night sky above us and Brickyard Landing appeared on our right.
I cut the paddle like a rudder, pulled the canoe up the concrete and steadied Abbie as she stepped out. When I was working for Gus, there was this older guy—maybe eighty years old—named Russ who came around every morning with his pipe, newspaper and coffee. He was lonely, widowed by both his wife and dog, so he talked to us while we gathered the boats, life jackets and paddles. His skin was real thin and both his forearms were covered in sailor’s tattoos. He got them after he landed on the beach at Normandy and lived to tell about it. The skin had stretched and fallen in taut wrinkles and the voluptuous woman who had once stood there now drooped. Anyway, Russ was there most mornings, spinning stories and living vicariously through us. Every morning as we shoved off the bank, he’d push himself up out of Gus’s rocker, wave us off and then stand there, hanging on to the side of the wall while his arthritic knees quivered beneath him. Then he’d stroll home, looking forward to tomorrow morning.
Abbie stood, her knees quivered, she hung on me and I remembered Russ.
Behind us lay a grassy lawn, ankle-high in Bermuda grass. To our left sat a dark boathouse with a dock, screened in porch and bathroom.
The power had been turned off, but I found a candle and began searching the porch, where I stumbled over a large pot and propane cooker. I boiled about three gallons of water, dumped the crabs in and then I spread an old newspaper across the picnic table while Abbie dug two lemon-lime Shastas out of a pantry in the back. I