Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [98]
I ducked under the arms of the willows, its long green bows draping along my back, and made my way up a log walkway to the building. The logs had been cut in half and laid sideways, like railroad ties, spaced a short step apart. I shined the light onto the old wooden structure. The wood had darkened with age but I could tell it was pecky cyprus and that given the width of the planks, some eighteen inches in width, it had been cut a long time ago. Pecky cyprus is made when an organism like a worm gets into the wood and screws with its DNA. It makes for a beautiful and, some would say, psychedelic design. I walked around it trying to figure out why anyone would build a cabin here. The roof was made of cedar shingles and covered in a green spongy moss. Given the fading in the wood and the horizontal watermarks, the building flooded at high water. Which might explain why it looked like it’d been empty for some time. It stood about a foot off the ground, elevated on pilings that had been driven into the sand. They were two feet in diameter, hand-hewn and squared using an adze and an axe. Huge unequal planks made up the siding. The building looked to be a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years old. The windows were tall, and covered by shutters that were maybe three feet wide and six or seven feet tall. Hinged at the top, they opened at the bottom. I walked around the back, lighting the roofline and answering my question.
Maybe even pirates need God.
The front door hung on a huge rusted iron hinge that looked like it could have come off an old sailing vessel. A carved dowel had been wedged through an iron ring, making a crude latch. I knocked it loose with the flashlight and leaned against the door. Inside, a dozen or so benches with no backs sat in equals rows and faced forward. Standing and sitting room, the place might hold fifty people if they didn’t mind getting close. Everything was worn, dusty, tacked together with cobwebs and hadn’t been used in decades. Equidistant drill holes lined the walkway down the middle. I stood there dripping, wondering why somebody would mess up a perfectly good floor. The water fell off me, filled the cracks, then disappeared. Drain holes. They were large enough to let a lizard in but would keep out most snakes. On the back wall, above the window, somebody had carved intricate lettering into a single beam that supported the roof. The carvings had faded, but I ran my fingers through the grooves I could reach. “When you pass through the waters…” The passage continued but my arm was too short.
35
Her doctors said we needed to be “more aggressive,” so they scheduled her for accelerated treatments first thing Monday morning—giving us the weekend to ourselves. Mid-morning Friday she wrapped a blindfold around my head, led me to her car, drove four hours—talking nonstop about everything and nothing—then parked in a gravel lot, slid me down into a canoe and paddled for more than an hour while I leaned against the seat back, twiddled my thumbs and threatened to swamp the canoe. The sounds and smells—along with the taste of the water—told me, generally, where we were, but I didn’t know for sure until sundown, when she beached the canoe, sat me on the sand and whispered in my ear, “I want you to promise me something.”
I didn’t need to open my eyes. I stretched my feet into the sand and felt the St. Marys River flowing gently