Redemption Road(106)

“There’s an old mill and deep water. A mile or so, he told me. The road should end there.”

Elizabeth pushed in; trees closed above them. “This is where he lived?”

“Born here; lived here. His mother died in childbirth, and it was just him and his father. No electricity or plumbing. They didn’t even own a car.”

It took a long time to cover the mile. When the track broke from the trees, it bent to an abandoned mill that stood beside the rowed teeth of a rotted dock, and water that stretched off in the mist. The mill was ancient. The roof was gone, but bits of paddle wheel remained where a creek pooled behind an impoundment, then broke white over bits of stone. Elizabeth stopped next to the building; saw moss on the wall, and moisture dripping. Adrian got out of the car, and something splashed far out in the mist.

“He used to talk about his childhood here, about family and disappointment, the hard life of a shoeless boy.”

Elizabeth peered into the mill. The floors were rotted out, the walls bare stone. “How long ago are we talking about?”

“Eli was born in the shadow of the First World War, but never knew the actual date. The mill was closed when they lived here and had been since the 1800s. They were basically squatters: Eli’s father, his grandfather before that. They fished the swamp and hunted, poached cypress for the sawmills, grew some crops. There were other families around, but mostly on the low, small islands far out in the swamp.”

“What are we doing here, Adrian?”

But he would not be rushed. He touched the wall of the mill, took a dozen steps toward the rotted dock, and spoke with his hands pushed deep in his pockets. “You have to understand this was an old man talking, ninety or better and looking back on a hard life without phones or power or radio. He’d been decades in prison by the time we met, but could talk about this place like he’d seen it yesterday. He hated it here, you see: the heat and mosquitoes, the lonesomeness and mud and life on the water. He’d be the first to tell you he was young and arrogant and wanted better things. When he spoke of it, though, he was like a poet, the words rough and ready but just … perfect. He talked of black mud, and I could smell it. I knew what rattlesnake tasted like, having never tasted it. Same with the suckers and the gars, the catfish and the bullhead.”

Adrian paused, and she thought he might be smiling.

“There was a blues club twenty miles down the river, just an open-air shed, really. He’d have to hitch to get there, but there were women at the club, women and liquor and reasons to fight. Every time he’d scrounge a few dollars he’d disappear for days, then come back hungover and bruised and smelling of strange women. His father wasn’t like that. He was a hard man, practical and unforgiving. They argued about Eli’s choices, and it got violent at the end. When Eli left for the last time, he was twenty years old, broken and bloody and stripped down to nothing. You’d have to know him like I did to understand how strange that image seems. He had this stillness about him, this quiet.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because Eli came back one more time. It was sixteen years later. His father was dead or gone—he never knew for sure—but he came back that last time. Right here,” Adrian said. “Shot twice and half dead, but here for a reason.”

“What reason?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” He looked at the mill, then up the length of the creek that fed it. “Let’s take a walk.”

“Are you joking?”

“It’s not far.”

He set off along the creek, and Elizabeth fell in behind him. They clambered around the impoundment and circled the pool, pushing into the forest as the mist thinned and the swamp fell away. They followed the creek for half a mile, then came to a fork where two smaller streams joined at a rocky outcrop. The waterfall was not big—maybe four feet tall. That’s when Adrian told her the rest. “In 1946 Eli Lawrence was a young man living on the coast. He was a hustler, a two-bit crook, and like everyone else in that world he dreamed of the big score—him and his friends—of the one job that would put them on easy street for life. In September of that year, Eli thought he’d found it.”

They were following the right-hand stream, the bank falling until mud sucked at their shoes. “They had inside information on an armored car running from a bank at the docks in downtown Wilmington. They knew the routes, the times. Nothing they’d ever done, though, prepared them for that kind of job. Both of Eli’s friends died in the shoot-out. One of the guards was killed. The other took three bullets, but lived. Two different bystanders were shot. It was a bloody mess.”

“What happened to Eli?”

“He escaped with a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and two thirty-eight-caliber slugs in his back. He made it here without seeing a doctor. How he managed, I don’t know. The wounds were infected by then, the bullets working around where they shouldn’t. When he finally went for help, the doctor patched him up and turned him in. Eli got life without parole.”

Elizabeth stepped across a gulley. Adrian stopped and pointed. “Does that look like an island to you?” He waded in without waiting for an answer. The water rose to his waist, and then he was out on the other side. “Are you coming?”

Elizabeth stepped in and felt water in her boots, then higher. She pulled herself up the opposite bank, and they picked their way through brambles and scrub until they reached the center of the island and the tree that dominated it. The tree was massive. Its gnarled limbs spread out, some dipping low enough to touch the ground. Age blackened the trunk, yet it rose tall and gnarled, a giant above roots so thick they buckled the earth. “What is this place?”