Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Sweetwater Creek

  A NOVEL

  ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

  For Walter Mathews, who graced many lives,

  mine among them,

  and for Martha Gray, heartfriend,

  who made so many of these books happen

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  When You Are Old

  Contents

  Prologue

  In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, and only there in�

  1

  On a thanksgiving eve, just before sunset, Emily and Elvis…

  2

  There was an oil painting at Sweetwater Plantation over the…

  3

  Deep into thanksgiving night Emily dreamed.

  4

  In the pre-dawn hours of a day in late March,…

  5

  People who live beside moving water have been given the…

  6

  The third weekend in June, the Foxworths came to move…

  7

  On the first of july, Rhett and Maybelle Foxworth came…

  8

  Later that year, Emily told Lulu that when she saw…

  9

  All through late july, Lulu came to the farmhouse frequently…

  10

  Walter was elated.

  11

  Always afterward, Emily remembered the end of that journey as…

  12

  After that, Emily felt as though she had just come…

  13

  Down through the slow, tea-brown water of Sweetwater Creek, just…

  14

  Lulu came out to the dog ring late that afternoon…

  15

  Often, in the hot days of that early fall, Emily…

  16

  For what seemed to Emily a long time, they did…

  17

  And they did. On New Year’s Eve, just at dusk,…

  18

  The sweet, misted days held, a great slow wheel that…

  19

  At seven-thirty that evening Emily, bearing plates of crabmeat canapés…

  20

  In the morning, stiff and sore, Emily dressed in her…

  21

  All that winter a great silence lay over Sweetwater. It…

  22

  Jenny raiford came back to stay at Sweetwater the next…

  Epilogue

  On a blue September morning, the first one in a�

  About the Author

  Books by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  IN THE LOWCOUNTRY of South Carolina, and only there in the world, a savage and beautiful ballet takes place twice a day. Usually in late summer and early fall, when the tidal creeks of the Lowcountry salt marshes are at their lowest, the fish and crabs who inhabit them cling nervously to the muddy banks, waiting for the tide to return and give them sanctuary in the tall spartina grass.

  Suddenly, the dolphins come.

  Pods of bottlenose dolphins, which have hunted these creeks and banks for generations and know every bend and mudflat, burst into the creek and begin to herd the fish, usually silver mullet, against the mudbanks. At a signal, perhaps a whistle or the echoing clicks from the out-riding scouts, the pods erupt, and with sonic blasts and perfect herding tactics, run the schools of mullet into a tight ball against the shore. In a thrashing rush that defies human ken, they create a great wave that washes the bait fish out of the water and up onto the mudflats. The dolphins, riding their own wave, follow them out of the water onto the banks, where they gorge on them until they are gone. The dolphins themselves come completely out of the water, lying side by side in a tight row, always turned on their right sides, as synchronized as the Rockettes. These salt-sea creatures come twice a day for two or three months, always to their pods’ ancestral banks, and for a moment become completely creatures of earth and air. It is called strand feeding, and nobody really knows why or how it happens, only that it has probably happened this way since time out of mind. The waters they hunt are not fresh, but sweet in the way that only warm, salt-softened water can be.

  This story is set on the banks of one of these creeks, and in the fields and woods around it. As long as anyone can remember, this ribbon of tidal water has been called Sweetwater Creek.

  1

  ON A THANKSGIVING EVE, just before sunset, Emily and Elvis sat on the bank of a hummock where it slid down into Sweetwater Creek. Autumn in the Lowcountry of South Carolina is usually as slow and sweet as thick tawny port, and just as sleepily intoxicating. But this one had been born cold, with frosts searing late annuals in early October and chill nights so clear and still that the stars over the marshes and creeks bloomed like white chrysanthemums. Sweaters came out a full two months early, and furnaces rumbled dustily on in late September. Already Emily was shivering hard in her thin denim jacket, and had pulled Elvis closer for his body heat. In the morning, the spartina grass would be tinkling with a skin of ice and rime and the tidal creek would run as dark and clear as iced tea, the opaque, teeming strata of creek life having died out early or gone south with migratory birds. Emily missed the ribbons of birdsong you could usually hear well after Thanksgiving, but the whistle of quail and the blatting chorus of ducks and other waterfowl rang clearer, and the chuff and cough of deer come close. Emily loved the sounds of the winter animals; they said that life on the marsh would go on.

  They sat on the bank overlooking the little sand beach where the river dolphins came to hurl themselves out of the water after the fish they had herded there. The dolphins were long gone to warmer seas, but at low tide the slide marks they wore into the sand were still distinct. They would not fade away until many more tides had washed them.

  “There won’t be any of them this late,” Emily told Elvis. Elvis grinned up at her; he knew this. The dolphins were for heat and low tide. Girl and spaniel came almost every day in the summer and fall to watch them. Elvis’s internal clock was better by far than the motley collection of timepieces back in the farmhouse.

  They sat a while longer, as the gold and vermillion sunset dulled to gray-lavender. They would go back to the house soon, or be forced to stumble their way home in the swift, dense dark. Emily hadn’t brought her flashlight. She had not thought they would be gone this long. But the prospect of the dim kitchen light and the thick smell of supper, and the even thicker silence, kept her on the marsh. This night would not be a happy one, even by Parmenter standards. Already words had been flung that could not be taken back, and furious tears shed, and the torturous wheel of Thanksgiving day loomed as large as a millstone. No, there would be silence now, each of them drowned in their own pools of it. The speaking was done. It was not the Parmenter way to go back and try to mitigate hurt and anger. By suppertime it would simply not exist anymore, except in Emily’s roiling mind. Her father and brothers would be deep in their eating and drinking, and her Aunt Jenny would have gone quietly home to her own silent hearth. Tomorrow she and Emily and old Cleta would prepare the ritual dinner for the returning hunters. Weather or catastrophe, sickness or grinding grief, the Thanksgiving hunt was sacrosanct. Walter Parmenter had instituted it long before Emily’s birth.

  “All the big plantations have them. It’s an old sporting tradition,” he said often, to anyone who might be listening. “We, of all the plantation families, should have one. We have the best hunting dogs in the Lowcountry, and some of the best bird land. The other planters talk about our dogs and our land. People tell me they hear about them all the time.”

  That there were now very few planter
s left on the huge river and tidal creek plantations around Charleston was, to Walter Parmenter, beside the point. He lived far back in his head, in the glory days of the family-oriented plantations. But most of the properties now were owned by northern sportsmen or hunting clubs, with managers to oversee day-to-day life. In this new millennium, they were largely weekend plantations. It was a point of immense pride to Walter that he had lived and worked Sweetwater Plantation almost his entire life. He scorned the holiday planters.

  “Not one of them knows the woods and fields and marshes and the game and birds like I do. I could show them things about these parts that would pin their ears back. I could outhunt the lot of them, too. Me and the boys and the dogs, we’ll show them a thing or two about that one of these days.”

  Emily thought that unlikely; Walter had never been invited on the great Thanksgiving and Christmas hunts that were traditional with some of their landed neighbors. They visited only to look at and buy Sweetwater’s famous Boykin spaniels. They would smile and speak admiringly of the Boykins, and usually go home with a pup or leave an order for the next litter, and then retreat to their fine old houses at the end of their long live oak allées. Her father was right about one thing, though. Sweetwater’s Boykin spaniels were among the best in the Lowcountry, bred from strict breed standards and long lines of legendary hunters, and trained meticulously. If you took home a Sweetwater Boykin, whether started or broke, you had yourself a hunting dog that would be greatly admired in the field and house by every visitor who came. Elvis was one of them. Emily had trained him herself.

  “You know I’m not going with you tomorrow,” she said, only getting to her feet as the swift dark closed in. “I’m only your owner and trainer, and the best trainer this farm has. But Daddy and the boys are going to hunt you your first time because this rich muckety-muck wants to see a Boykin in action and Daddy knows you’re the best we have, even if he won’t admit it. He thinks this guy will watch you hunt and come back and order ten million Boykins, him and all his rich friends, and tell everybody what a fantastic breeder and trainer Walter Parmenter is. Nobody will ever know I trained you, because you can’t have an eleven-year-old out-training the big expert. I think it stinks. I told him so, too. I said you were mine and I wouldn’t let him take you anyway. He knows how I feel about hunting. And he said, every Boykin on this place has to pull his weight, no matter who he belongs to. And finally he yelled at me, and I yelled back, and…here we are.”

  Elvis wagged his stubby tail and cocked his head up at her. He knew, always, when she was angry or hurt. Emily often thought that no one else, except maybe Buddy, paid such exquisite attention to her or showed such uncomplicated pleasure in her company. Buddy had read aloud to her, during one of their afternoon reading binges, a passage from a man called Lord Byron, who, Buddy said, was a very great poet, though perhaps not quite so great as he thought. The passage went like this:

  Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of Man without his vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery, if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of Boatswain, a dog.

  Thinking of it now, Emily’s eyes stung and filled. Lord Byron might have been talking about Elvis, except Elvis was alive. She shook the tears from her eyes. Buddy had told her that most tears were easy and cheap. Oh, Buddy….

  He had harbored the invading succubus that slowly sucked the life from his muscles and the breath from his lungs ever since she had known him, had recognized that he was an older, masculine part of her, a brother. Even though she had two other male siblings, younger by three years than Buddy but older by four than her, she thought of no one but Buddy by the word brother. The others were simply that: others. Other from her. Connected, but apart, like the man who wore the word “Father.” They were all large, at least to her, and massive, and their eyes, though they saw her not unkindly as the small, wild-haired creature who haunted the corners and passageways of their world, soon slid over and past her to the outside, where the lush sun and the thick, still air and the limitless spaces of marsh and creek and woods and fields lay. And the dogs. Always the dogs.

  Buddy did not go out into the air of that world, except in his wheelchair on the way to see his Charleston doctor. Emily thought she could remember, barely, a time that he walked; in her mind she saw a cane, and the thin, wiry figure of Morris, Cleta’s husband, supporting Buddy as he shuffled from the front steps to the big black car that never seemed to change over the years. But the scene was misted and flickering, like the one in which her mother had stood when Emily last saw her. The reality of Buddy was the chair, and his quick, wry smile, and his blanket that covered his wasted legs. And his voice. The sweet, deep, slow voice that told her ten thousand wonderful things and taught her where to find them herself, in the piles of books that were always strewn around his big, cave-dim room.

  Even with the chair and the oxygen tanks and the other paraphernalia of chronic illness, she never thought of Buddy as “sick.” It always took her by surprise when visitors to the farm, almost always dog people, spoke to her father in hushed tones about his poor, damaged, oldest son. Once she had heard a large, leathery-tanned woman in a shapeless tweedy poncho-like thing, say to Walter Parmenter that she had been praying that the terrible burden under which his family staggered would be lifted. Walter had nodded gravely and thanked her.

  “Have we got a burden?” Emily asked Cleta, who was rolling out biscuits in the big, shabby old farm kitchen. “Some big old lady said she was praying our burden would be lifted.”

  “I guess she mean po’ Buddy,” Cleta said, slapping her rolling pin down on the dough on the old marble pastry slab. “’Cept it always seem to me like he more an angel for this family than a burden.”

  “Maybe she means me,” Emily said. She had known since she was very small that she was a dark thread in the fabric of this family, though at that time she did not know the nature of it.

  “You ain’t no burden, Emily,” Cleta said smiling. “They’s two angels in this house. You the other one.”

  Each Parmenter child was allowed to choose a pup when he reached his tenth birthday. Walt Junior’s was Avenger, and Carter’s was Sumter, after the Union fort in Charleston Harbor that the Confederates fired upon, thus starting the Civil War—or simply The War, as many Lowcountry denizens called it. That the aggressive, jingoistic names were totally unsuited to the sweet-tempered, eager-to-please Boykins did not cross her brothers’ minds. If the dog was yours, you got to name him. Buddy’s was Aengus, after the beauty-possessed wanderer in William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Since the name was pronounced Angus, most people simply assumed that Buddy was honoring his Scots forebears, and he did not explain.

  Oddly, Emily thought now, she and Buddy seldom talked about the real furniture of their world: the farm, the dogs, their father, his disease, her school. They lived largely inside themselves, and spoke of that. Only once had they talked about their mother. Emily had been quite small when that happened. Of her mother she remembered only low ivory light and warmth, and the softness of her arms, and the smell of gardenias.

  And then all those things were gone. No one spoke of her mother to her, but she saw some of the adults look quickly at her and shake their heads when the name Caroline was mentioned. Emily quickly learned two things: that Caroline was her mother and that she herself was not to know anything about her. In the way of a child, she did not ask. The shaken heads meant pain, trouble, unknowably terrible things. Very early on, though, Emily had learned to read faces. Theirs all said that she was part and parcel of the pain. Better by far not to ask.

  But she did ask Buddy, just once, “Where is our mother?”

  He turned his back to her and looked out the long windows of his room onto the unkempt circular gravel drive.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, is she
dead?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “I thought she’d come back unless she was dead.”

  “No,” he said in a flat voice, without resonance. “I don’t think she’s dead or sick or hurt or anything. She always took very good care of herself.”

  “Do you remember her?” Emily asked. It seemed a question of great import. It brought life to her mother.

  “Of course. Do you?”

  “I remember that there was never much light and she sang to me sometimes, and she smelled like flowers.”

  “Nice memories,” Buddy said. “Don’t push it any further, Emmy. Maybe I’ll tell you about it later, but right now the most important things are the reading and the being together. You remember that.”

  And so they read and read in his lair, and laughed, and ate sweets pillaged from Cleta’s kitchen, and there seemed to Emily virtually no distance between her older brother’s mind and her own.

  One winter afternoon when rain streaked the windows of his room and the fire in the hearth hissed damply and snakily, he read a poem to Emily.

  “Listen, Emmy,” he said, “and you’ll hear four of the most beautiful lines in the English language.”

  Emily, sprawled on the hearth rug, leaned her head against Aengus’s sleeping flank, and closed her eyes. She was eight at the time, and attended the little stained cinderblock consolidated elementary school on James Island, where the only poetry you were likely to encounter was scrawled on the walls of the girls’ bathroom. Emily had made no friends there. Most of her classmates, from working-class and frankly impoverished families, thought it was because she lived on a vast plantation and was stuck up, but in reality, Emily needed no other friend but Buddy. He had never, in the years she had known him, patronized her. He was perhaps the only person in her world besides Cleta who did not. She was small and neatly curved, and only the burning tangle of hair branded her a girl child. It was all too easy to treat her like a doll.