Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  The afternoon before, both her aunt and Cleta had come to her door and knocked softly, coaxing her to come down and eat her Thanksgiving dinner, telling her the coast was clear; her father and the boys were shut up in the small, glass-enclosed section of the porch they used for a TV room, lost in the football games, unlikely to come out or hear anything until much later.

  Emily had not answered, and finally her aunt had called, “I have to go now, sweetie, but I’ll talk to you tomorrow or the next day. Tell you all about Columbia. Maybe you can go with me next time.”

  She heard her aunt’s steps going away. Presently Cleta called out.

  “I gotta go on home for a little while, but I’m leaving you a plate at your door. You call me if you need me. I just be at home. Don’t worry, baby, he don’t mean nothing he say half the time. Probably done forgot all about it. They in there lisenin’ to that football game and eatin’ pie.”

  Cleta’s heavier tread went away down the stairs, and then there was silence. Utter silence. Emily knew she did not sleep until much later, but she did not hear her father and brothers come up to bed. And no one stirred now, as she and Elvis crawled deeply back under the piled covers of her bed. She had been afraid that the sheer awfulness of the dream would keep her awake, but it did not. Both girl and dog slid into sleep before the covers had settled.

  When she woke, it was late, toward noon. She could tell by the rectangle of light on her bedroom floor, let in by the place where the curtains would never quite close. From hundreds of mornings gauging how long she might linger in bed by the position of the oblong, Emily knew that it was near noon.

  She swung out of bed and padded to the bathroom, followed by Elvis, his claws clicking on the tile. She washed her face and brushed her teeth and dressed in corduroy pants and an old sweater of Buddy’s that still smelled faintly of him. She could tell without looking out that it was cold. The floor was frigid, and the bathroom mirror had had a cloud of icy breath on it. She listened, but did not hear the faint subterranean rumble of the old furnace. She added heavy socks and high-topped tennis shoes and went out into the hall, tentatively, lest she run headlong into her father.

  Once out in the hall, she knew that she would not encounter him or anyone else. An empty house has its own special silence. It is like a great held breath. There is no sense that somewhere within it someone will break the silence with footsteps, or a slammed door, or a rattling of pans in the kitchen. Emily stood letting the quiet wash over her, and then went silently and uneasily down the stairs. She did not know why she found it necessary to tiptoe. Even Elvis, at her heel, moved silently, with no jingle of collar or tick of toenails.

  Downstairs there was no light except natural daylight. Not that it was needed; Sweetwater had lovely natural light from the river, and large windows. But a lighted lamp would have been welcome this morning. Emily crept from room to room: the kitchen was empty and spotless, but where was Cleta? The living and dining rooms, her father’s office, still glistening with its polishing, all were empty. The glassed-in television room was empty, though strewn with newspapers and empty glasses and candy wrappers from last night’s football orgy. Even as she had passed them, she had known that her father’s and brothers’ bedrooms were empty. You could smell the emptiness.

  She went out onto the back porch and looked toward the river. It was the kind of winter day she liked least, vast and shadowless and so bright there was no succoring pool of shade for the eye to light in anywhere. It was a merciless kind of day, as if the great skies and the cold earth and water had turned alien, indifferent to man, absorbed in some elemental and unstoppable cosmic business of their own that did not take into account anything that breathed air. Emily found it was easy to stay inside on this kind of day.

  Nevertheless, she and Elvis walked away from the steely river and around to the side of the house where, deep in a grove of pecan trees, her grandfather had built the never-to-be stables and corrals that would have housed his thoroughbreds. They were used now for the dogs. Emily walked slowly down to the kennels. Her father’s truck was gone, and the battered old Volvo station wagon that the whole family shared. She did not see the twins’ shared, shambling Mustang, either.

  “Nobody home,” she said aloud to Elvis, simply to hear the sound of a voice. Then she saw a movement over behind the kennels and Kenny Rouse came around the side, carrying a huge sack of dog food.

  Kenny was Emily’s least favorite of the helpers her father employed to do the heavy, tedious work around the kennels. The count varied, but there were usually three or four young men, none of whom were in school for one reason or another. Emily doubted her father ever asked why. Kennel helpers were hard to come by. Walter treated his workers well, if abstractedly. Kenny was the only one who never talked or stopped to pass the time of day. He seldom met anyone’s eyes. He was short and bullnecked with the skinned head of a marine recruit, and his small eyes and mouth seemed to be set too closely into the middle of his face. He wore a ring in one nostril and two in one ear. Emily knew her father disapproved of that, but knew also that he would not task Kenny with it. Kenny could, if he chose, do the work of two others.

  He stopped when he saw her and put down the dog food.

  Emily could not gracefully retreat, so she stopped, too, and smiled at him, a silly, prissy little smile. He looked at her as he always did, which meant all over her. Emily hated the weight of those little pig eyes on her. They always made her want to wipe her feet and wash her hands. This day they out-and-out frightened her.

  “Hey, Kenny,” she said.

  “Hey, Emily,” he mumbled. His eyes roamed, probed, measured.

  “Where is everybody?” Emily said in a crazy lilt.

  “They gone to that field trial up in Santee,” he said. “Didn’t nobody tell you? Gon’ be gone all today and tonight and maybe tomorrow night, too. I know I got to feed the hounds till day after tomorrow. I didn’t know nobody was here.”

  There was a slight pause, and he took a step toward her. Emily, whose hand was lying lightly on Elvis’s back, felt a fine, soundless growling start up in him. She stood stiff and straight.

  “You all by yourself, Emily?” Kenny Rouse said. His voice was softer, almost a whisper.

  “Oh, goodness, no,” Emily burbled. “Cleta’s here.”

  “Didn’t see that ol’ car of hers.”

  “Her son brought her. We’re just waiting for my aunt. She and her boyfriend are coming over.” Emily’s voice sounded quite mad in her own ears.

  “Do tell. Well, y’all enjoy your day,” Kenny grinned. He looked, Emily thought, like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern. Not one of the cute kind.

  “I’ll be around for a while,” he said lazily. “Might come beggin’ a piece of pie, who knows?”

  “It’s wonderful,” Emily said. “We’ll save you some. Well, bye, Kenny.”

  “Bye, Emily.”

  She ambled back to the house, trying desperately not to break into a run. She could feel his eyes on her back; they felt as if they would leave smoking craters. Behind her, Elvis marched stiff-legged. She could hear, now, the tiny, high growling. When she reached the house she locked all the doors and the french windows, and put on all the lights in the kitchen, and turned the radio up as high as it would go. She did not realize until she sat down at the kitchen table that she was trembling all over, a shivering as fine as Elvis’s. She did not see Kenny Rouse again, but from the corner of the kitchen window she could see that his old pickup was still there. It was there every time she looked out.

  Cleta did not come and did not come.

  By four o’clock the brightness was fading from the cold sky, leaving it the opaque white of a lidless eye. The dark would fall down suddenly. Emily let Elvis out the front of the house, the side that faced the driveway, not the kennels and the river. He trotted a short way into the browning grass, relieved himself, and shot back into the house as if Emily’s need for speed and silence was his own. She locked the door behind him and d
id not go into the front of the house again.

  She wandered around the too-large, too-quiet kitchen, foraging for food for herself and Elvis. She found cold turkey and dressing, milk, and the untasted benné seed biscuits Jenny had made. She thought to take them upstairs to her bedroom to eat, and to light her lamps and listen to her radio and lock her door. Surely by then Cleta would have come….

  She lingered by the refrigerator and scanned the calendar that hung on a magnet on its door. If was, of course, a dog calendar, sent courtesy of a brand of dog food they never used. This one was puppies. She found yesterday’s square, and saw her aunt’s slanted black handwriting saying, Thanksgiving w. Parmenters. The square after that, today’s, read, Columbia, symph. w/Althea/Evelyn/Lana.

  Emily knew that for years her aunt had gone on a Thanksgiving excursion to Columbia, to hear a visiting symphony orchestra and stay in a large, square white Radisson Hotel, and spend the next day shopping. All of a sudden it seemed a pitiful thing to do, such a scanty pleasure. Her eyes filled thinking of her aunt’s life. She had known the story since early childhood; it must have been Buddy who told her. Jenny Carter had indeed married handsome, good-for-nothing Truman Raiford a scant two months after her sister had swept Walter Parmenter into marriage, and they lived first in a small apartment in Ravenel, where Truman was a sometime general contractor. Jenny had been teaching at the consolidated elementary school there. They had high hopes, as her father had promised both girls large land inheritances, and by that time it was clear his diabetes wasn’t going to give him much more time.

  Her father died the next Christmas, and left the plantation and all its holdings to Caroline and Walter. To Jenny and Truman he left a large working farm on John’s Island, complete with a neat, if not at all pretentious, farmhouse and land so fertile that tomatoes and other vegetables seemed to leap out of it. Truman sold his ragtag business to a casual friend and became a gentleman farmer. It did not take him long to persuade Jenny to sign her ownership over to him “for tax purposes,” and only a year or so longer to run the farm almost into the ground. Truman took the deed to the farm and a nineteen-year-old Rantowles blonde, an acrylic nail technician by trade, and disappeared into the great Midwest. Walter tried halfheartedly to track him down for Jenny, but nothing came of it. Walter was busy building his own empire on the curvy backs of his Boykins. Caroline was busy becoming a planter’s lady. She offered Jenny a room at Sweetwater, but Jenny refused politely and moved back to another apartment in Ravenel. She was a good teacher and quickly found a position teaching third grade at the same school in which she had started out. She had been there ever since. Her children loved her. Emily wondered if she missed having children of her own.

  It seemed to Emily, standing in the chilly kitchen and seeing whole, for the first time, her aunt’s life, a bad bargain in the extreme. She knew that Jenny would have loved living at Sweetwater with Walter. Now, she was gone into sensibly shod early middle age, and he was gone into his bitterness and his Boykins. Too late. She thought of the dream. Was everything always too late?

  She carried her plate past the tall french doors out onto the porch and saw that Kenny Rouse’s truck was still there. Kenny himself sat on its front fender, arms folded. He sat very still, staring at the house. When Emily passed the window he gave her a jaunty wave and a smile that seemed to have the jumbled teeth of a shark. Elvis froze and slid into perfect point, something spaniels seldom did. The growling began again. Emily dashed up the stairs and into her room, the steps seeming endless, and locked herself and Elvis in. She scrambled about in the mess on her desk for the pink cell phone Jenny had given her last Christmas, and punched in Cleta’s number, one of the few she knew by heart. It seemed to her that in the space between the dialing and Cleta’s answering voice, she did not breathe.

  “Cleta?” Emily said in a tiny voice with no breath behind it. “Is that you?”

  “Yeah. This me. Who this? Emily? Is that you?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. I, ah…I was just wondering when you were going to get here.”

  There was a long pause, then Cleta said, “I’m taking today off, Emily. Tijuan got in a bad way yesterday morning and Robert had to take her to detox. I got the babies with me. I told Mr. Walter I takin’ a day off. Where’s Jenny?”

  “Well, you know, she’s gone up to Columbia with her friends to hear that orchestra thing. She goes away after Thanksgiving. I don’t think she’s coming back till tomorrow or Sunday.”

  “You by yourself?” Cleta said sharply. “Yo’ voice sound funny.”

  “Yeah,” Emily said, trying to whip strength into her wobbling voice. “Daddy and the boys have gone to some field trial upstate. I think they’ll be gone till tomorrow.”

  “Lord, God, he didn’t say one word to me about no field trial,” Cleta said. Her voice was an octave higher. “I’d of got somebody to come over there, or asked Jenny. You know she’d be glad to stay home with you.”

  “I guess he forgot,” Emily said.

  “He ain’t gon’ forget again after I get hold of him,” Cleta said hotly. “You scared over there, baby? I really think you be all right, with them security lights and the dogs. I be over there first thing in the morning. Tijuan’s cousin Esther comin’ to get the babies and take ’em home with her. Don’t nobody know how long Tijuan gon’ be in there this time.”

  “Oh, well, no, I’m not scared,” Emily said. “Only ol’ Kenny Rouse is over here sittin’ on his truck and he won’t go home, and he’s been here since noon. I think he knows I’m by myself.”

  There was an indrawn breath and a pause, and then Cleta said in a calm, no-nonsense voice: “You stay right where you is and lock them doors, Emily. Pack you a little bag and wait. I’m gon’ send GW over there to get you and bring you over here. He be there in fifteen minutes. He blow his horn; don’t you come out till you hear it. I’ve told Mr. Walter and told him that ol’ Kenny Rouse is sorry as gully dirt. He try to get in before GW get there, you just call the police. You got Elvis with you?”

  “Yeah…”

  “You be all right, then. Bring him with you. I got fried chicken and collards and corn bread and a Coca-Cola cake. We have us a feast.”

  Emily hung up the phone and sat down on the edge of her bed to wait. She shut off the radio when it occurred to her that she could not hear the sound of the door being tried over it, or soft footfalls on the stairs. By the time she heard the cranky soprano squall of GW’s old truck, she had worked herself up into such a state that she was hyperventilating and could scarcely stand. She was halfway out the back door before her heart began to slow its crazy hammering. A sidewise glance revealed that Kenny and his truck were gone. She had not heard him leave. Disgust with herself had replaced the frozen terror by the time she opened the door to GW’s truck.

  “I had him turned into the devil,” she said under her breath, “and all the time it was just old white-trash Kenny Rouse.”

  Realizing what Buddy would have replied to that, she blushed and crawled into the stuffy cab. GW gave her his wide, sweet white grin.

  “Hey, Emily,” he said. His voice was clear and tenor and beautiful. Emily knew that he sang in the Goshen African Methodist Episcopal Church. All of Cleta’s brood went there.

  “Hey, GW,” she said. Beside her, Elvis wiggled his red behind and licked GW’s knuckles on the steering wheel. Everyone, human or dog, loved GW Pringle.

  “Did you happen to see anybody when you came in?” Emily asked him.

  “Nobody but that ol’ Kenny Rouse,” GW said serenely. “He jump in that truck and take off like a bat out of torment when he seen me. Scratch out of the driveway like he was Dale Earnhart. Who was you lookin’ for?”

  “Nobody,” Emily said. “I just wondered.”

  They drove through the dusk, smeared now with river mist, sunk into comfortable silence. GW was a hulking coffee-colored boy of sixteen with the mental capacity of an eight-or nine-yearold. School had long since proved beyond him, so he stayed with
his mother and worked around the house, and did chores and heavy work all through the neighborhood, and pumped gas for Besson’s service station up on Highway 162. He also picked tomatoes in the big truck farm fields, and was the weekend sexton at his church, and was usually available for baby-sitting on short notice in the neighborhood. GW loved almost everything he encountered, but the three things he loved most were children, stars, and singing. Sometimes he took his small charges out to the creek banks, especially during meteor showers, to watch the burning, wheeling stars, and when he did, he would sing to them, strange, haunting songs that Emily could not understand. Cleta told her they were very old, and came from Africa with the first of the captured slaves. Gullah, the language was called, possibly from the place named Angola, in West Africa, where many of the slaves came from.

  Emily had known GW since she was a small child. She had been one of his baby-sitting charges. They were totally comfortable with each other and did not need to talk. It was good, she thought, just to sit in the rattling cab with her head back against the gut-spilling headrest, feeling the blast of the faltering heater on her feet and hearing the drone of the engine in her ears. By the time they reached Cleta’s small house at the end of a muddy, moss-haunted lane deep in the marshy wood near Pleasant Point, she was dozing, and Elvis slept soundly, twitching a bit in dreams of wildness.

  Cleta was standing at the front door when they arrived, beaming, with a small sleeping black baby over one shoulder and a wooden spoon in the other hand.