Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Now we got you all safe and sound, we gon’ feed the both of you till you hollers uncle,” she said.

  “Cleta, you’ve painted your door blue. When did you do that?” Emily said, noticing. “It’s pretty.”

  “Keeps the haints and plateyes out,” GW said happily. “I painted it myself, just before Thanksgiving.”

  Cleta looked at him and smiled.

  “It a Gullah charm to keep out bad spirits and bad luck,” she said. “I can remember when half the houses on this island was blue. I don’t say I believes, but it don’t hurt, just the same. We got us a crack house down to the end of the road since early fall, and the police don’t do nothin’ about it. Seems like them people gets louder and meaner every day. I’ve heard gunshots down there. I’m pretty sure that’s where Tijuan got hold of her stuff this time. If a little blue paint will help, I says go to it.”

  Inside, the little house was clean-scrubbed and warm with firelight, and a red-glowing kerosene heater had pride of place in the middle of the front room. It was a pieced-together, patchwork room, with newspapers and magazines substituting in places for wallpaper, and the small-paned windows had a few cardboard panes. None of the chairs and tables and sofas matched, and many were covered with old shawls and rugs, some quite beautiful. Emily recognized the old sofa that used to sit in their kitchen, and a leather chair that was ripped and mended with duct tape. It had, she thought, lived in her father’s office for a time. By the fire sat an ornate wicker rocking chair with holes in the woven seat and back. It was painted a cheerful yellow, and looking at it made Emily feel oddly warm and cosseted.

  “Yeah,” Cleta said, following Emily’s eyes and smiling. “It was yours. Your mama and I both used to rock you for hours in it, trying to get you to hush up and go to sleep. Mr. Walter gave it to me when…a few years ago. These babies love it.”

  “May I?” Emily said, looking at the rocker and then at the blanket-wrapped, puppy-sized baby Cleta held.

  Cleta smiled.

  “Set down in that rocker an’ I hand him to you. I think he sleep for another hour or two. This here Robert Jr. He the sleepin’ one. Wanda, she the wigglin’ one. She ’bout ready to get up from her nap, an then it’ll be Katie bar the door.”

  Emily pulled the old rocker up to the fire and sat down in it. It seemed to begin to rock of itself, a primal, old-as-the-world rocking, a wooden womb. Cleta put a clean towel down over Emily’s shoulder and then draped the sleeping baby over it. Emily’s arms rose up to cup him as if they had been doing it for eons. She put her face down into the warm-baby, talcum-powder smell of him, took a deep breath, and began to rock. Robert made a small mewling sound and formed a bubble with his pursed pink lips, then settled back into sleep.

  “Did you know that babies smell like new puppies’ stomachs?” Emily said.

  The flickering light and warmth of the fire, the smell of sweet wood burning and collards simmering and milky, powdery baby lulled Emily into a fugue state. In it fires burned in forests and people sang softly over the beat of quiet little drums…all of them, she knew, somehow, family…and outside the circle of the leaping fire wondrous magical things walked softly. Emily smiled slightly and snuggled her cheek into the baby. Home. She had never felt such a powerful sense of home.

  Behind her, on one of the old sofas, GW began to sing, softly,

  “Honey in the rock, got to feed God’s children,

  Honey in the rock, honey in the rock.

  Honey in the rock, got to feed God’s children,

  Feed every child of God.”

  When she jerked awake, Cleta had taken the baby from her and was plopping him into a little basket on a sofa in the corner of the room. He was beginning to fuss and whimper. Again, Emily thought of puppies.

  “I can see why people want to have them,” she thought. “If they just didn’t get any bigger.”

  At supper she turned to GW.

  “What was that you were singing? It was you, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “Yeah. I don’t really know what it means. Ol’ man Gilley from down the road taught it to me. I just likes it.”

  “It’s Gullah,” Cleta said. “It’s a song of blessing and safekeeping.”

  “Did Mr. Gilley teach it to you, too?” Emily said.

  “No. I always knowed it. The old folks down in Frogmore where I was born all used to speak it, and sing and shout. Dance too, sometime. Now that’s a sight. I can still remember jumpin’ over that fire…”

  Emily had a sudden and powerful sense of Cleta belonging to another world entirely, a huge, ancient one, as much of air and fire as earth, a world where the blessing and keeping of families was the primary thread in its fabric. It seemed, for a moment, as if she was someone Emily had never known, that the woman who had been coming to her home since as long as she could remember was merely a borrowed woman, someone who chose to spend her days with them because, perhaps, they needed blessings and safekeeping as much as she needed the salary Walter Parmenter paid her. She felt as tongue-tied, there in the light of the kerosene lantern, as if she had found herself dining with an oracle from another planet.

  Finally she said, “That was pretty. I’d like to know some of those songs and stuff.”

  “GW and I teach you some, sometime,” Cleta said.

  Emily slept that night on a white-painted iron bed that served as a sofa, pulled up to the banked fire and covered with beautiful, strangely marked old quilts that smelled of mothballs and wood smoke. Elvis curled beside her, his nose to the fire, and slept peacefully and heavily, with no twitching dreams and no jerking awake. When it was time for them to leave and go back to Sweetwater the next morning, Emily felt near tears.

  “I wish I could live here,” she said.

  “You got a beautiful home,” Cleta said.

  “It’s not a home,” Emily murmured.

  “It be one day,” Cleta said softly. “It need you there to make it one.”

  Climbing the stairs to her room in the cold noon sunlight, with Elvis padding behind her, Emily never felt less like this house needed her, or ever would.

  She was still lying on her bed watching the little black-and-white TV Buddy had given her for her birthday the year that he died, when her father and the boys came home. Over the opening of Star Trek, which always thrilled Emily—“to boldly go where no man has gone before”—she heard the slamming of the front door and the sound of heavy boots and men’s voices. When had the twins’ voices become those of her father? Maybe, Emily thought, it happened at the hunt yesterday. Or at the field trial. Maybe one of the events was the turning of boys into men. She did not figure she would ever know, since as far as she knew, girls and women did not go to field trials. The twins had told her that when she was small, and cried to tag along.

  She turned off Star Trek to listen. She heard Cleta call out sharply to her father, and heard the kitchen door close. She heard the boys’ feet stop outside the closed door as if they were listening, and then go on down the hall to the TV room. She heard the idiotic bray of Cops come on. And she heard Cleta’s voice, tearing into her father. She heard no answer from him.

  Much later he came to her door and tapped, and called out, “Emily, may I come in? I think we need to talk.”

  “Yes,” she called back, her heart beating in great, dragging thuds. Beside her, Elvis lifted his head and whined.

  Her father came into her room and stood there in his field trial clothes, a battered old waxed-cotton jacket and high rubber field boots, and looked at the floor for a long moment, as if examining the rug. Emily had brought the old oriental that had always been before the fireplace in Buddy’s room into her own, and her father seemed to be studying it. Then he lifted his head and looked at her. Emily seemed to see him freshly all at once, as you sometimes do someone whom you see every day. Her heart squeezed. Buddy looked back at her—a Buddy whose face someone or something had closed down, whose eyes saw little but middle distance and tomorrow’s dreams.

  �
�He is so handsome,” she thought. “I wonder why I never really saw that before? I wonder if he ever really sees me?”

  “I’m sorry you were left alone,” her father said. “I wish you hadn’t hidden up here all that time. I’d have remembered if I’d seen you.”

  Emily was silent with the sheer idiocy of that. Did she have to be in view to be remembered?

  “We’ll make sure it won’t happen again,” he said. “Now. I think the time has come to make a few little rules, just so we’ll always know where we stand.”

  He moved his eyes from her and looked out her window to the river in the distance. Slate-gray mist was coiling in.

  “First, about Elvis. He’s a fine dog, and I know you’re proud of him, but any Boykin who won’t hunt is not an asset to the plantation. In fact, he’s a liability. I don’t want anyone coming here to buy Boykins to see him. He just looks too good; they’re going to want to see him in action, and we can’t have that. So when people are coming, I want you to take him to your room and keep him there. If they drop in unexpectedly, I’m going to lock him in the back barn if you’re not around. I don’t think this is unreasonable, but if you can’t comply with it, we’ll have to find him another home.”

  In the silence that followed, Emily felt as if she had been too close to a gunshot. Her ears rang and her face tingled. Elvis whined again. Her father was still studying the river.

  “Can you do that?” he said. Still, he did not look at her.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “All right. Now. I don’t think it looks good for you to spend much time at Cleta’s house, and especially not with GW. I know this was a special occasion, but it’s not a habit I want you to get into. Surely there are some little girls at school who could come visit you on weekends, or you could visit them. I know you like working with the dogs, but weekday afternoons are enough. You’re getting to be a young lady. You need to act like one.”

  “Yes,” Emily said numbly. She was talking to the side of his head. He was studying the marsh and hummocks on the other side of the river now, and the deep, wet-glistening woods.

  He was silent for a minute more. Then he looked at her again and said, “I’m glad you agree. I don’t want to have to worry about you all the time.”

  “When did you ever at all?” she thought furiously, tears beginning to sting in her throat. She wanted to hide her face so that he would not see, but she could not seem to look away from him.

  “Okay, then,” he said, and turned away, and went out of her room, closing the door behind him. There was a pause, and then from the other side he called, “I’m sorry I yelled at you about Elvis the other day.”

  She did not answer, and presently she heard his footsteps going downstairs.

  She did not, after all, cry. She simply sat on the floor, holding Elvis against her. Star Trek slid into The Twilight Zone and then The X-Files. It seemed much later when Cleta knocked softly on the door, but the sun had not yet set.

  “I made you some tea cakes; they still warm. You eat ’em now with this glass of milk. You ain’t had no lunch, and it’s been a long time since breakfast. Can I come on in?”

  Emily thought of breakfast that morning at Cleta’s house: crowing babies, crackling fire, fresh corn pone and syrup, eggs scrambled endlessly high and golden, homemade sausage sizzling from a cast-iron skillet, and coffee lightened with cream. Warm, all of it, everything, warm.

  “Come in,” she said. She did not get up from the floor.

  Cleta set the tray on her desk and stood looking at her, hands on hips.

  “Yo’ Daddy say he gon’ have a little talk with you. I let him know right off what I thought of him goin’ off and leavin’ you here. I reckon it didn’t go so good, huh?”

  “Oh, it went great,” Emily said savagely. “He’s made a few rules so we’ll all know where we stand. For one thing, I can’t let anybody from outside the farm see Elvis. Ever. I’ve got to keep him hidden when we’ve got customers here. Either that, or Daddy will find him a good home. Then, I’m supposed to have my little friends visit me on weekends, or go and visit them. I wonder what would happen if I brought some of my little friends home? They’ve all got nose rings or belly rings, and they wear blouses that their bras show through—if they bother with bras. They cuss every other word. And some of them are already doing the dirty deed. They use a trailer in that old burned-out park outside Meggett.

  “And, I don’t work with the dogs on weekends. I’m getting to be, quote, a young lady, and I need to act like one. Like he knows what a young lady acts like…”

  She stopped, breathing hard. Something was filling her chest up like wet cement. She did not tell Cleta about not being allowed to go to her house anymore. She sat, hugging Elvis, struggling to control her breathing.

  “That man ain’t hear a word I said,” Cleta muttered.

  “Oh, Cleta, he wouldn’t even look at me! He never did the whole time! He looked off at the river and the woods, but not at me! I didn’t realize he couldn’t stand to look at me!”

  The words burst out on a geyser of tears. She buried her head in Elvis’s curly coat. Cleta knelt awkwardly and put her arms around both of them. After a while Emily’s tears slowed and stopped. But the paralyzing hurt did not.

  “Emily,” Cleta said presently, “I want you to get up and go look at yourself in that floor mirror. Go on now.”

  Unwillingly, Emily did.

  “What do you see?” Cleta said.

  Emily looked closer. She saw a tear-smeared, red-nosed small figure with a tangle of blazing curls over her face and large, brimming hazel eyes. And she saw, as if for the first time, curves. The swell of hips. The circle of waist. Breasts. Distinct small mounds under the too-tight old T-shirt that said BOYKIN SPANIELS—THE DOGS THAT WON’T ROCK THE BOAT. Her nipples showed distinctly through the e in “Spaniels” and the w in “Won’t.” She stared at her image, aghast. When had all this happened? Why had she not noticed? A miniature woman looked back at her. Emily hated her on sight.

  She looked up at Cleta.

  “Yeah,” Cleta said. “All of a sudden you ain’t little Emily anymore. That bother your daddy. But what bothers him most is that you look exactly like yo’ mama, when he first married her. I been thinkin’ for a long time that you did. I wondered when he’d see it. I knew you wouldn’t, because there ain’t no pictures of her like she was back then around here. But there you are. Miss Caroline in the flesh. He must have just seed it today.”

  “If he loved her so much, why wouldn’t he want me to look like her?” Emily sniffled.

  Cleta said softly, “He like to die when she take off. He ain’t even say her name, from that time to this. I ’spect it just plain hurts him too much to look at you right now. He get over it, you’ll see.”

  I don’t see how he can, Emily thought, if I look more and more like her the older I get. Maybe pretty soon we’ll just pass notes to each other.

  “You eat them cakes, now,” Cleta said. “I brought Elvis some bacon, too. I got to go get y’all’s supper, and then get on home. You needs to come down to supper, Emily. Right now ain’t a good time to buck yo’ daddy.”

  When she had gone, Emily sat munching vanilla tea cakes and feeding Elvis strips of thick bacon and feeling the import of this day. It would, she knew instinctively, divide time. Forever after she would have to think of her father in an entirely new way, a nearly mortally wounded man trying to live around his pain. She was not ready to forgive him, but she knew that she could never see him the same way again. She did not know what she would ultimately see. Whether or not pity would ever come creeping in, she did not know.

  She got up slowly and went to the mirror and peered at her new self through splayed fingers. This was a far more profound shift of perception than she was asked to make toward her father. This was a seismic shudder. She could not and would not be that changeling woman in the mirror. Not now. Maybe not ever. The very thought made her nearly ill with fear.

  When
Emily went down to supper that evening she wore an oversized flannel shirt over her jeans. She had scrubbed her face and pulled her wild hair straight back into a tight ponytail. She did not look at herself, either in the flesh or in the mirror, when she bathed and changed her clothes. And before she went to school the following Monday morning, she bound her small breasts absolutely flat with adhesive tape. Getting it off at night was painful. Going without it would be agony.

  The conventional wisdom in the Lowcountry was that an unusually cold autumn meant an unusually early and warm spring. But in early January, when the forsythias and camellias should have been softening garden beds and the marshes beginning ever so faintly to green up, the bitter cold bit deeper and hung on.

  “Never seen another winter quite like it,” people at school and around the drugstore and Bi-Lo said.

  “Shoot, there’ve been worse,” the old-timers around the mom-and-pop grocery and gas stores in Meggett and Hollywood and Adams Run said. “I remember one time it snowed in April. Think it was ’37. You don’t see it much now, though. All that space stuff’s heating the planet up.”

  It was bad hunting weather for the few remaining birds and animals whose seasons lasted into early spring. And it was not good training weather for the Boykins who had graduated from the paddock to the field and the watery marshes. A sort of stasis, an indrawing that might have been the hallmark of a far northern winter shrouded Sweetwater. The boys stayed late at school, pleading athletic practices, and came home smelling, sometimes, of drugstore perfume or beer and, oddly, oregano. Emily and every other child in the rural Lowcountry over the age of ten knew what the smell meant, but Walter Parmenter did not, and so did not task them with it. Walter himself spent longer hours shut up in his office, poring over wildlife magazines and sporting newspapers. The boys had given him a second-hand computer for Christmas, knowing that the wealth of obscure information about hunting and dogs available on the Internet would please him, but he had tossed a macintosh over it in late December and had not looked at it since.