Low Country Read online

  ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

  LOW COUNTRY

  For Gervais, Curry, Richard,

  and Hart Hagerty,

  the next keepers of the Ace

  Nature’s first green is gold

  Her hardest hue to hold.

  Her early leaf’s a flower

  But only so an hour

  Then leaf subsides to leaf.

  So Eden sank to grief,

  So dawn goes down to day.

  Nothing gold can stay.

  —ROBERT FROST

  Contents

  ONE

  I think I’ll go over to the island for a few…

  TWO

  When I was sixteen, the son of the local undertaker…

  THREE

  When I came downstairs, showered and more or less together,…

  FOUR

  The five rules of sleep according to Kylie Venable:

  FIVE

  I sat down abruptly on the steps and looked at…

  SIX

  This time it was Lottie who woke me.

  SEVEN

  It’s funny how a night’s sleep can change the complexion…

  EIGHT

  In fact, he had done just that. When we got…

  NINE

  Ever since I was a small child I have had…

  TEN

  It was a curious time, the first hours of that…

  ELEVEN

  I didn’t tell him for over a week. For the…

  TWELVE

  But I did not do that, after all, because when…

  THIRTEEN

  When Ezra Upchurch set out to ruin an ass, he…

  FOURTEEN

  The storm the newscasts had promised us came a day…

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PRAISE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  1

  I think I’ll go over to the island for a few days,” I said to my husband at breakfast, and then, when he did not respond, I said, “The light’s beautiful. It can’t last. I hate to waste it. We won’t get this pure gold again until this time next year.”

  Clay smiled, but he did not put down his newspaper, and he did not speak. The smile made my stomach dip and rise again, as it has for the past twenty-five years. Clay’s smile is wonderful, slow and unstinting and a bit crooked, and gains much of its power from the surrounding austerity of his sharp, thin face. Over the years I have seen it disarm a legion of people, from two-year-olds in mid-tantrum to Arab sheiks in same. Even though I knew that this smile was little more than a twitch, and with no more perception behind it, I felt my own mouth smiling back. I wondered, as I often do, how he could do that, smile as though you had absolutely delighted him when he had not heard a word you said.

  “There is a rabid armadillo approaching you from behind,” I said. “It’s so close I can see the froth. It’s not a pretty sight.”

  “I heard you,” he said. “You want to go over to the island because the light’s good. It can’t last.”

  I waited, but he did not speak again, or raise his eyes.

  Finally I said, “So? Is that okay with you?”

  This time he did look up.

  “Why do you ask? You don’t need my permission to go over to the island. When did I ever stop you?”

  His voice was level and reasonable; it is seldom anything else. I knew that he did not like me to go over to the island alone, though, for a number of reasons that we had discussed and one that we had not, yet.

  The island is wild and largely undeveloped now, except for a tiny settlement on its southwestern tip, and there are wild animals living on it that are hostile to humans, and sometimes dangerous. It is home to a formidable colony of alligators, some more than twelve feet long, and a handful of wild boar that make up in ferocity what they lack in numbers. Rattlesnakes and water moccasins are a given. Even the band of sullen wild ponies that have lived there on the grassy hummocks between the creeks and inlets since time out of mind are not the amiable toys they seem. A small child from the settlement was badly kicked only last year, when he got too close to a mare nursing her foal. Clay knows that I have been handling myself easily and well on the island since I was a child, but he mistrusts what he calls my impetuosity more than he trusts my long experience and exemplary safety record.

  Then there is the settlement itself, Dayclear. That beautiful word is Gullah, part of the strange and lyrical amalgam of West African and Colonial English once spoken by the handful of Gullah blacks still living in pockets of the South Carolina Lowcountry. They are the descendants of the slaves brought here by the first white settlers of these archipelagos and marshes, and some of the elders still speak the old patois among themselves. When I was a child I knew some of it myself, a few words taught me by various Gullah nurses and cooks, a few snatches of songs sung by gardeners and handymen on my grandfather’s place. I know that Dayclear means “dawn.” I have always loved the word, and I have always been aware of the settlement, even if I did not often visit it when I was growing up and have no occasion to do so now. I do know that it is made up now largely of the old, with a preponderance of frail old women, and that some of them must be the kin of those workers of my childhood, if not the actual people themselves. I know that there are virtually no young men and women living there, since the young leave the island as soon as they are physically able to do so, to seek whatever fortunes they might find elsewhere. There is nothing for them in Dayclear. There are children, small ones, left behind with the old women by daughters and granddaughters who have taken flight, and there are sometimes silent, empty-faced young men about, who have come home because they are in trouble and have, temporarily, nowhere else to go, but they do not stay long.

  I have not been to the settlement for many years, as my route across the island lies in the dry, hummocky heart of it, and the house to which I go is at the opposite end, looking northwest toward the shore of Edisto. But when I think of it, I feel nothing but a kind of mindless, nostalgic sense of safety and benevolence. Dayclear has never given me anything but nurturing and love.

  Clay fears it, though. He has never said so, but I know that he does. I can tell; I always know when Clay is afraid, because he so seldom is, and of almost nothing.

  “There’s nothing there that can hurt me; nobody who would,” I have said to him. “They’re just poor old women and babies and children.”

  “You don’t know who’s back in there,” he said. “You don’t see who comes and goes. Anybody could come across. There are places you could wade across. Anybody could drop anchor in the Inland Waterway and come ashore. You think everybody in that little place doesn’t know when you’re at the house, and that you’re by yourself? I don’t like it when you go, Caro. But you know that.”

  I did know, and do. But he does not forbid me to go to the island. For one thing, Clay is not a forbidder; he would find it distasteful, unseemly, to forbid his wife anything, the operative word being distasteful. Clay is a fastidious man, both physically and emotionally.

  For another thing, I own part of the island. And if there is anything Clay respects, it is the right of eminent domain.

  But the main reason he does not want me on the island alone is that he is afraid that I will drink there. I do drink sometimes, though by no means often, but when I do I tend to do it rather excessively. When I am with him, at this house or the club or the town house in Charleston, he feels that he can at least control the consequences of my drinking, if not the act itself. The consequences are not heinous, I don’t think; I do not stumble and fall, or weep, or grow belligerent. But I do tend to hug necks and kiss cheeks, and sometimes to sit on laps, and sometimes to dance a
nd sing, and I imagine that to Clay these are worse than staggering or tears. They might imply, to some who don’t know us, that I do not receive enough affection at home. And they tend to dismay visiting Arab sheiks. So Clay, while he says nothing to me then or later and never has, stays close enough to initiate damage control when he thinks it is necessary. Perhaps if we talked about it, I could tell him that when I am slightly drunk I feel so much better than I normally do, that I am happy, exuberant, giddy, and wish to share the largesse with whomever is close. But we do not talk about it. To name a demon is to make it yours. Clay does not wish to own this particular demon, and I do not wish, yet, to give it up. So we do not speak of my drinking, though the time may come when we have to do so. Or maybe not. I do fairly well with it, as long as I have the island for refuge.

  This is something Clay does not understand, and will not unless I tell him: that the island is the one place where I do not want to drink, or need to. I know that I could probably ease his mind considerably about my time over there if I told him so, but again, that would mean naming the demon, and we both know that we do not want its disruptive presence in our lives. It would be like having to acknowledge and live with an erratic, malicious relative who was apt to break the china, fart in public, insult our guests, change the very fabric and structure of our graceful lives.

  So Clay goes on hating and dreading my trips to the island but refusing to discuss them, and I go on going. It is a devilish seesaw, but it provides a sort of balance.

  I looked away from him and out the French windows to the lawn and the seawall, and the beach and sea beyond. When Clay first began to develop Peacock’s Island as a resort and permanent home community, he decided that we must certainly live there if anyone else could be hoped to, and so he chose the best lot on the island and had this house built for us. It is beautiful; even now, when I cannot look at the ocean without darkness and sickness starting in my stomach, I have to admit that it is a lovely house and an even lovelier situation, a perfect marriage of shore and sea. It was the first of the famous Peacock Island Plantation houses to be built, the model for that rambling, unobtrusive, graceful style of architecture that has become rather standard for beach and marsh houses in the various Lowcountry resort developments now. The architect who began it all is credited with our house, but it was Clay, all those years ago, who leaned over his shoulder for long hours at the drafting table, seeing in his mind’s eye what the future homes of Peacock Island Plantation should be, and prodding until Dudley found the proper architectural metaphor for his vision. They dot the Lowcountry like beautiful fungi now, lying close along the shoreline under the twisted old live oaks and among the dark, cool thickets fringing the marshes on the landward sides of the barrier islands. They vary, of course; there is room for individual taste and interpretation, but no house is built in Peacock Island Plantation that does not meet the company’s rigid design codes and so there is nothing intrusive here, nothing raw or ragged or incongruous, like you might see in other, newer and less carefully provenanced developments. Clay was adamant about that when he was young and new to the business and stood to lose a lot of money with his lofty design standards, and he has never loosened or amended them in this or any other of his projects. He likes to say that his family has loved and lived the Peacock’s Island life ever since its beginning. And so we have, or at least lived it, for the past twenty years, when he moved us here from the cheerful suburb full of new ranch houses and young professional families where we started out, in Columbia.

  Our son, Carter, was only a year old when we came to the island. Kylie was born here. They were children of the sea and beach and marshes; it was, to them, a known world, taken entirely for granted. It was, to me, like living permanently on a kind of extended vacation. I was born in Greenville and grew up in a succession of small South Carolina towns, all long hours from the coast, and came to the Lowcountry only during the summers, to visit my Aubrey grandparents. I still feel that way about living here. Sometimes I wake up before dawn, when it is too early to see that peculiar nacreous gray morning light that the beach and sea send backward to the land, when the wind is down and the surf is so sluggish that you cannot hear it past the dune line, and I think, Have I overslept? I didn’t hear the garbage trucks. I’m going to be late for school.…

  My lucky children, I have often thought, to gauge the rhythm of their days by surf and wind and the dawn chorus of a hundred different shorebirds, not ever to have known anything else. It seems exotic to me, foreign somehow. I used to say this to them, when they were very small, to try to explain this strange, suspended feeling that sometimes woke me in the earliest hours of the day, but I could never do so, at least not to Carter.

  “That’s dumb,” he would say. “I don’t see how you can still feel that way when you’ve been living here so long. This is better than garbage trucks and traffic any day. This is better than anything.”

  Carter, my pragmatist, so like Clay. To this day, I do not think anything out of his earliest childhood stalks him in the dark.

  Ah, but Kylie…Kylie always knew. How, I don’t know, but she did. She would ask endlessly for the story: “Tell about what you heard in the morning when you were little, Mama. Tell about the garbage trucks and the lawn mowers and the carpool horns…”

  My small towns did not have noise ordinances like the island does; I realized early on that to Kylie, my childhood morning cacophony of manmade hubbub was as exotic as this profound, mystical sea-silence still is to me.

  “Why do you want to hear that?” I would say. “This is much nicer. This is nature pure and simple; very few people are lucky enough just to hear natural sounds when they wake up.”

  But she was unpersuaded.

  “Will you take me to see the garbagemen sometimes?” she would say, over and over. “Will you take me where I can hear a carpool horn?”

  Kylie and Carter went to the island country day school, and were picked up at the head of our lane by a smart, quiet little school bus painted in the muted Peacock’s Island tan and green.

  Finally I gave in: “All right,” I said. “Okay. We’ll go spend a weekend in Columbia sometime soon, and you can see the garbagemen and hear the carpool horns.”

  We never did that, though. Somehow, we just never did.…

  The sea at the horizon line was banked solid with angry purple clouds this morning, as it often is in autumn, but as I sat staring at it, the clouds fissured and broke and a spear of cold, silvery sunlight streaked through, stabbing down at the sea and lighting the tossing gray to the strange, stormy pewter of November. At the same moment the ocean wind freshened, lifting the fine, dun-colored sand from the tops of the primary dunes and swirling it spectrally into the air, rattling the drying palm fronds at the far edge of the lawn where the boardwalk down through the dunes to the sea began, stirring the moss on the live oaks that sheltered the house. It seemed for a moment that everything was in swirling, shimmering motion: air, sea, land, swimming in diffused light, drowning in silver. I looked away, back to the breakfast table and then up at Clay. On such a day, I knew, my stomach would roil queasily with the shifting light and wind, and my heart would beat queerly and thickly with it, until the wind dropped at sunset and the benevolent golden light of sunset spilled in from the west.

  It was days like these that I most needed to be over on the island.

  I speak of it as if it were a different island; we all do, though it is not, really. Technically, the island is the back third of Peacock’s Island, the westward third, the marsh third. It is separated from the larger bulk of Peacock’s Island proper by a tidal estuary that is full only twice a day; during the other times you could wade through the ankle-deep muck in the empty, corrugated rivulet that cuts the island like a snake, though no one wants to. The mud is deep, and stinks of ancient livings and dyings. You can better cross it, as I do, on a sturdy if raffish wooden bridge just wide and stout enough to hold a truck or a Jeep; the island is never truly cut off from the larger bul
k of Peacock’s.

  It might as well be, though. It is another place entirely, eons older, wilder by millennia. I don’t think it ever had a name, since it is of course a part of the larger mass. In my lifetime, in my time here, it has always been known simply as “the island,” just as the larger, more hospitable two-thirds of it has been known as Peacock’s Island, usually shortened to Peacock’s. I think the inept old pirate for whom it is named would have agreed with the practice. If legend is true, he had no truck with the marsh-bound back third of the island, either, except to leave some of his hapless live captives there staked out for the alligators and the wild pigs and the savage, swarming insects and to dispose of the dead ones in the black, silent tidal creeks and rivers for the nourishment of who knows what. It is shifting, unquiet land, and it is no wonder to me that the unhappy victims of Jonathan Peacock are said to be unquiet, too, stumping about and murmuring querulously in the close, still nights. The Gullahs of Dayclear are said to be as familiar with them as they are with the terrible duppies and other assorted haunts who came with them in their chains to these shores, and on the whole, perhaps, prefer them. An unhappy ghost can be cajoled, soothed, propitiated, but there is no reasoning with a duppy.

  Clay was still looking at me, studying my face as calmly and gravely as he had been studying the Wall Street Journal. Waiting, I knew.

  “I’m almost through with the studies for the new painting,” I said. “I’ve got everything but the light on the Inland Waterway at sunset. It’s different from anywhere else; it’s deeper there, and the water moves a lot more. That changes the light entirely. I really want to get that. I think a night or two would do it. I’ll take the camcorder and see if I can get enough of the change from sunset to full night so I can finish it back here, if you need me. Is there something special?”