Low Country Read online

  I went up the central stairs, a freestanding iron staircase made for Clay by an old black ironmonger on James Island when the house was built, and whose designs now brought hundreds of thousands of dollars, and paused at the landing. The house is open on both the seaward and the landward sides, so that standing on the landing is like standing suspended in a great cage of glass. It always makes me dizzy, as if nothing lies between me and the close-pressing darkness of the old oaks and the shrouding oleanders in back, and the great, sucking, light-breathing, always-waiting sea in front. I shook my head and went quickly up to the second floor, where the bedrooms were. They are open to the sea, too, the best ones, but you can close it away with heavy curtains if you choose, and the others, at the back of the house, overlook the dark-canopied backyard and feel to me like sheltering caves. I have moved my daytime retreat there, in the back corner, away from the beach and sea, though I still sleep in the big master suite hung in the air over the lawn and sea, with Clay. But when he is away I sleep on the daybed in my den.

  Instead of turning to the right, toward our bedroom and mine and Clay’s dens, as I almost always did, I turned left and walked down the hall toward the children’s rooms. I think I had known all day that I was going to do so. I did not hesitate, and I did not think. I walked past Carter’s closed door—closed because he had left it in such a disgraceful state when he left in September for his first year at graduate school at Yale that I had refused to go into it, and told Estelle not to touch it but to let him come back and find it just as he had left it—and stopped at the big ocean-facing room on the end, its door also closed. Kylie’s room.

  Unlike Carter, Kylie was neat to a fault; she hated it if anyone disturbed the strict order of her things, and had insisted from her earliest childhood that no one enter her closed room when she was not in it. I had always respected that; I felt somewhat the same way about my things, though long years of sharing a room with Clay had loosened my scruples about order a bit. He is not untidy, only abstracted. I think he does not notice either order or disorder. I could still hear small Kylie, frustrated nearly to tears in her attempt to explain why she did not want me to come into her room when she was not in it: “But it’s mine! It’s not yours! You have a room of your own. Why do you need to go in mine?”

  “What are you hiding in there, a pack of wolves?” I said. “Kevin Costner, maybe?”

  She had fallen in love with the movie Dances with Wolves, and was so besotted with wolves that she was planning to be a wildlife veterinarian when she grew up, and work with the wild wolf packs of the Far West. It was a mature and considered ambition, and I would not have been at all surprised if she made it happen.

  “I’m not hiding anything,” she said, looking seriously at me, and I knew that she was not. Kylie hid nothing, ever. She was as open as air, as clear as water. Then she saw that I was teasing her, and she began to giggle, the silvery, silly giggle that, I am told, is very like mine, and then she laughed, the deep, froggy belly laugh that is mine also. In a moment we were both laughing, laughing until the tears rolled down our so-alike small, brown faces, laughing and laughing until Clay came in to see what was so funny, and said, grinning himself, “Ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment tonight…Venable and Venable! Let’s give them a great big hand!”

  And we rolled over on our backs on the floor of her room, Kylie and I, in helpless laughter and simple joy, because it was true. We were Venable and Venable. We simply delighted each other. There was nothing in either of us that did not understand and admire the other. Even when she was a baby, there was nothing childish, nothing condescending, nothing mother-to-child about it. We were companions on every level, confidantes, comrades, friends, lovers in the deepest and most nonsexual sense of the word. My daughter and I had fallen in love and delight with each other at the moment of her birth, and it was often all I could do to keep Clay and Carter from coming off second best. Because they are so ludicrously alike, and because Clay’s mind is almost absurdly full of riches and Carter is a sunny, confident young man with a full and empowering sense of himself, I do not think that either of them has suffered. Rather, they, like most other people in our orbit, simply enjoyed and often laughed at Venable and Venable.

  I opened Kylie’s door and went into her room. At first the great surf of brightness off the noon beach blinded me, and I stood blinking, my hand shading my eyes. Then they adjusted and I looked around and saw it plain, this place that was, of all her places, most distinctly hers.

  It was not a frilly room and never had been. Like me, Kylie was born with a need for space and order and a dislike of cluttering frills and fuss. She had always been a small, wiry child, almost simian in her build, narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered, slightly long of arm and short of leg, never tall, always thin to the bone. Ruffles would have been as ludicrous on and around her as on me. She was, instead, sleeked down for action; pared to sinew and long, slender muscle; meant for sun and sand and wind and water, and that was what her room reflected. I do not think she ever drew her curtains, even at night. Kylie fell asleep with her face turned to the moon and the comets and the wheeling constellations, seeing when she woke in the night the dance of phosphorus on the warm, thick, black summer ocean, or sometimes the lightning of storms over the horizon that looked, she said, like naval battles far out to sea. Waking to the cool pearl of dawn on tidal slicks, to the pink and silver foil of a newly warming spring ocean, perhaps to the Radio City Music Hall dance of porpoises in the silky summer shallows. Kylie went as far as any human I have ever known, when she was small, toward simply using up the sea.

  Her walls were painted the milky green of the sea on a cloudy day, and on them hung her posters of animals and birds and sea creatures and the big, luminous painting of Richard Hagerty’s that was the official Spoleto Festival poster one year, of Hurricane Hugo striding big-footed and terrible down on a crouching Charleston. I had not wanted to buy it for her because I had thought it would come to haunt her, but she was adamant.

  “Yeah, but see, Hugo didn’t win,” she said. “Big as a thousand houses, big as a booger, and he still didn’t win.”

  And I had laughed and bought it for her, because I wanted her to remember that: the boogers don’t always win.

  On the low bookshelves were the models she had made of animal skeletons, from kits I had ordered for her from marine biological laboratories and supply houses, and three or four real skeletons we had found over on the island when she went with me to the house there: the papery carapace of an eight-foot rattler; a wild boar’s skull with great, bleached, Jurassic tusks; the elegant, polished small skull of a raccoon. Estelle would not dust these herself but made Kylie do it. Clay was distinctly not amused by the skeletons, and even Carter only said, “Yuck. You’re weird, Kylie.” But I knew. It is important to know what the inside of things looks like. Otherwise, almost anything can fool you.

  Her books were there, in a military order known only to Kylie. The old ones that I had loved: Wind in the Willows (“Mother! Listen! ‘There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about on boats.’ Oh, he knew, Ratty knew, didn’t he?”); the Waterbabies; the Nancy Drew series; the Bobbsey Twins; the Lawrenceville Stories. For some reason they fascinated her. Black Beauty. Silver Birch. Midnight Moon. And alongside them, the handbooks and textbooks and charts and maps of the Carolina Lowcountry marshes and islands that we got for her from the Corps of Engineers and various coastal conservation and natural resources organizations.

  On her desk, a small voodoo drum that Estelle’s Gullah grandmother, who adored Kylie, had given her; we never knew where it had come from originally, but Estelle seemed to think it was the real thing. And the big osprey we had found newly dead on the bank of the tidal creek that cut through the undulating green marsh over on the island one summer day, still perfect except for the forever mysterious fact of its death. Clay had taken it to a taxidermist for her, and the great bird, wings spread, had kept yellow-eyed watch
over Kylie and her room ever since. Of all her things, I think she loved that bird the best.

  And that was all. Except for her neat, beigespread bed and the matching armchairs, nothing else of her showed. Her clothes were shut away in the closet; she almost never left anything lying out. Her outgrown toys were in a hamper in her closet. The room did not look lonely, though. The space and order spoke of Kylie as clearly as strewn possessions would have of another child.

  I walked over to the French doors that opened onto her balcony and leaned against them and looked back into the room. Something caught my eye, the edge of something blue, almost hidden under the dust ruffle of her bed. I leaned over and picked it up. A T-shirt, a small one, faded, that read PEACOCK ISLAND PLANTATION SUMMER RECREATION PROGRAM. You saw shirts like it all over the island; they were issued to children who joined the summer program, mostly the children of guests who wanted to enjoy the island’s adult pursuits while their children went about their own, supervised activities. I remembered that Kylie liked the shirts but hated the program and absolutely refused to join, even when her father pointed out that it would be a real treat for the visiting little boys and girls to meet the daughter of the owner of the Plantation.

  “Big deal,” Kylie said. “You think I want to go on a nature walk with some kid who’s gon’ yell his head off if we see a snake?”

  We did not make her attend the program. It would indeed have been ludicrous. Kylie was dealing calmly with bull alligators and rattlesnakes when the offspring of the Plantation visitors were shying at horseshoe crabs. She deigned to wear the T-shirts, though.

  “That way the kids will all think I go,” she said reasonably to Clay, and that was that.

  I held the shirt to my face and sniffed. It smelled fresh and particular, like summer and sun and salt and Kylie herself, not at all like dust. But it should have smelled of dust; it must have been there, just under the fringe of the dust ruffle, for a long time. A little over five years; Kylie had been dead that long. I had not been this far into her room since the day we closed it, not long after her funeral, after Estelle, tears running silently down her long brown face, had cleaned it for the last time and closed the door. Sometimes I opened her door and looked in, and I knew that Clay did, too, but I did not think that anyone came all the way into it. I would ask Estelle. She must have simply missed the little T-shirt the last day that she cleaned.

  I looked out at the ocean then. Kylie had died in sight of her room, in sight of our house, when her small Sunfish with the red sail had flipped in heavy surf after an August thunderstorm and the stout little boom had hit her a stunning blow to the temple, and she had gone down and not come up again, at least not until long after. None of the children she was with had seen it happen, or none would ever admit to seeing it, but then they were only ten or so, as she was, and all had been forbidden to take their boats into that stormy water, as she had been. They had been playing in a neighbor’s yard after a birthday party, only three houses up the beach, and had slipped off and taken their little Sunfishes out while the adults were having their own lunch on the patio, behind heavy plantings. I was off the island that day, at the dentist in Charleston. I never blamed Marjorie Bell or her housekeeper; Kylie had never disobeyed us before in regard to the Sunfish, nor had the other children disobeyed their parents. Island children have water safety drilled into their heads almost before they can toddle. We will never know what started it all, what child dared the others, who first leaped to the dare. Kylie, in all likelihood. It doesn’t matter. The children were so traumatized by it that more than one of them gave away their Sunfish, or let their parents sell them, and one family moved away from the island.

  I have always wondered if she looked up just before the boom hit and saw the dazzle of summer light on her window, saw the roof and trees of home.

  I wondered now what she would be wearing if she had lived, what I would be picking up from her floor. What color it would be, what size. What its smell would be, the smell of Kylie Venable at nearly sixteen.

  I used to have the fancy that I wore Kylie inside me, just under my skin, that I was a suit that fit exactly the being who was my child, and that she was the structure that filled out the skin that was me. Since that day there has been a terrible, frail lightness, a cold hollowness, a sort of whistling chill inside me where Kylie used to be. It makes me feel terribly vulnerable, as if a high wind could simply whirl me away. As if there is not enough substance inside me to anchor me to earth. Usually the pain of her loss is dulled enough now so that it is more a profound heaviness, a leaden darkness, a wearable miasma that is as much a part of me as the joy of her used to be. But sometimes that first agony comes spiking back, as it did now. I sank to the floor, the T-shirt still pressed to my face, feeling the killing fire flare and spring and rage, feeling the great shriek, the scream of outrage and anguish, start in my throat, feeling the scalding tears gather and press at my eyes. I opened my mouth to let it out, but nothing happened, nothing came. It never did. I screamed silently into her T-shirt, my face contorted, my throat corded and choked with the need for her, but no sound would come. I could not cry for my child. I never had, not even when they came to tell me, not even when I watched her go down into the earth of the Lowcountry, riding in a fine carriage of mahogany and bronze.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard Clay’s voice.

  “Caro, don’t. You promised you wouldn’t. Come on with me now, and take a shower and get dressed, and we’ll have some coffee on the veranda before we go. I’ll take you by the guest house; we’ll put the flowers around together. They’re beautiful, by the way. Those old roses, they really have lasted, haven’t they?”

  I did not move to get up, and after a moment I felt his hands under my elbows, and he lifted me up.

  “You need to work, baby,” he said. “That’s the thing that will help; that’s what’s helped me most. Real work. This is your job now, helping with the new families, you need to come and do your job.”

  I looked at him then.

  “She was my job,” I said.

  But I did not say it aloud.

  2

  When I was sixteen, the son of the local undertaker in the little town where we lived asked me out on a date, and my stepfather promptly called the chief of police, who was in Rotary with him, and had the chief dispatch a deputy to follow us everywhere we went. My friend Lottie Funderburke, who is a painter and lives on the island (but not, she is quick to point out, in the Plantation) thinks this is the funniest thing she has ever heard. She may be right. It was not, however, very funny then, at least not to me. The deputy was a gangling, slouching eighteen-year-old named Honey Cato, low of hairline and waist and thick of shoulder and head, and he had been whistling and making stunningly suggestive and stupid remarks to me since we moved to Moncks Corner, when I was twelve. I had told my mother and stepfather about it, but my stepfather said only, “If you didn’t run around with your behind hanging out of those shorts, he wouldn’t do it. A lady doesn’t get herself whistled at on the street.”

  I didn’t mention Honey to him again. In the first place, I didn’t intend to give up my short shorts. Every other teenager in Moncks Corner rolled her shorts as high as they would go, and I had a horror, then, of being different. In the second place, my stepfather never would have understood about Honey Cato or boys—I purposely do not use the word “men”—like him. Honey would have whistled and made his crude remarks to Helen Keller, or a nun. It was his duty as a South Carolina good ol’ boy. My stepfather was from Ohio. The difference was measured in far more than miles.

  “So what exactly did your stepfather have against undertakers?” Lottie said when I first told her. “I would think an undertaker made more money than a lot of people in Monkey House, or wherever it was you lived. And you could say it’s a profession. Of sorts.”

  “Well, you know. An undertaker,” I said vaguely. “And then there was always this rumor that Sonny’s father ran some kind of illegal operation ou
t of the funeral home. Running liquor or something; I never did know what. Whatever it was, my stepfather didn’t think it suited the daughter of the town lawyer. Even if he did get his law degree mail order.”

  “Where was your mother on this?” Lottie said.

  “Well, she usually sided with him. She’d worked too hard to land him, see; she wasn’t going to screw that up by sticking up for me. And I guess I was pretty hard to handle at that age. Mainly, she didn’t think dating the undertaker’s son suited a future Miss South Carolina.”

  “Oh, Christ, that’s right, somebody said you’d been in the Miss South Carolina contest. I thought at the time they had to be lying. Not that you aren’t right presentable, when you’re all cleaned up, but you don’t have a dimple to your name, and you’d look like a first-class ‘ho’ with blond hair. I wouldn’t have thought you’d had a chance.”

  “I didn’t. Especially after I dropped my baton.”

  “Don’t tell me. You twirled a flaming baton to ‘Age of Aquarius.’”