the Mermaid Chair (2005) by Kidd Sue Monk

Author:Kidd, Sue Monk [Monk, Kidd, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-12-19T00:42:10.281000+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three.

The day I paddled Hepzibah's once-red canoe through the winding creeks, I heard an alligator roar. It was mid-March, four days till spring, but warm enough that a few bulls had begun bellowing for mates out on the marsh banks. It sounded like distant thunder. By April there would be enough roaring to shake the creek water. Mike and I used to row the bateau through the hairpin turns when the ruckus was at full tilt, shouting at throngs of sunning turtles to head for the mud holes before they were all eaten.

Earlier, when I'd arrived on the rookery dock and flipped over the canoe, I'd discovered the turtle skull from the table on Hepzibah's porch propped beside the paddle. She'd obviously left it there for me. I remembered how she, Kat, and Mother had passed it back and forth all those years, a reminder of the way they'd knotted their lives together. The skull sat now on the fraying wicker seat at the bow, looking quite ancient, staring levelly ahead as if guiding the boat.

The mint green tint was climbing back into the blades of spartina grass, and around each curve an egret or heron stood like yard sculpture in the shallows. Their patience was unnerving. Just when I would give up on their ever moving again, they would spring to life, spearing a mud minnow.

I snaked along with the tail end of the ebb tide, making two wrong turns before I located the dead-end tributary where Whit had taken us the day we'd come out here together. When the corridor of grass opened into the cove of water where we'd sat in the johnboat and talked, I pulled the paddle across my lap and gave myself over to the breeze. It washed me up onto the tiny marsh island where Whit had built his hermitage on a hillock beneath a sole palmetto palm.

I wore the pair of old bogging boots Mother used to wear to harvest oysters on the shell reefs, going out with Kat and Hepzibah, picking bushels for their New Year's Eve roast. Stepping out of the canoe, I sank over my ankles into mud. It was the exact consistency of cake batter, and it emitted a rotten stew of smells that I had grown up loving.

I dragged the canoe up into the grass. Sweltering, I peeled off my sweatshirt and tied it around my waist, then stood in my black T-shirt listening for the whir of Whit's johnboat. It had been at the dock when I'd left. I looked at my watch. I'd come at the same time we'd come before when I thought he would be making his rookery rounds.

As I regarded the enclosure of water, the nearly perfect, hidden circle it made, I thought I heard the boat engine, and I froze a moment, watching the black skimmers swoop down and the surface churn silver with mullet, but the sound died and a moat of quiet surrounded me.

I'd brought a floppy basket filled with art supplies, thinking I would try to paint a little if Whit didn't show up.

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