Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

Emily confined her training to the big barn and sometimes, if the wind was down, the front paddock, and kept the heaters in the kennels and runs going, and curled up with Elvis and Stargate SG-1 in the long dark. Somehow, going outside without a purpose did not occur to her. Running to and from the bus at school she kept her head down and her coat collar up. She might have been the only person within shouting distance of Sweetwater Plantation who did not mind—even welcomed—the dark cage of winter. It made her feel as if nothing had to be dealt with yet. Anything troublesome could wait until the great cold broke. Deep under their layers of quilts, Emily and Elvis slept in the long nights like dreaming plants dormant under snow, and felt no tug of spring.

  4

  IN THE PRE-DAWN HOURS of a day in late March, winter tore its talons out of the Lowcountry earth and lumbered away on its great, dirty-ice wings. It happened suddenly: if you were awake, as many countrymen were, you could have smelled in one breath the stale dank scent of dead marsh and river, and in the next a small, soft puff of warm wind, heavy with briny life and the smell of faraway flowers and above all the sea. You could lift your face to it, knowing in your viscera that the season had turned at last. Animals who slumbered deep in straw or made moss nests for themselves on the hummocks raised their heads and lifted their noses. Ears pricked with the promise of what was coming.

  Even if you were asleep, as Emily and Elvis were, drowned in their quilts, the deepest part of you would have felt the impending transition. Emily had known for weeks that a great change was coming, though she didn’t know precisely what it was. It followed at her heels, and sometimes she could feel the earth shake under its tread. It felt like more than spring. It felt like a formless, limitless kind of knowing. Emily felt, though she did not think it, that after the knowing overtook her she would be a different person altogether: somehow more finished, more substantial, worthy at last of the world’s notice now, because she would know the nameless thing that children do not know.

  Deep in her sleep, Buddy whispered to her: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

  “Showoff,” her heart whispered again, though her sleeping mind did not.

  Presently she turned over restlessly, and tossed the heavy covers away without waking, and lay flat on her back, arms and legs outstretched, waiting to receive the gift that came on the warm wind. Elvis came awake suddenly and fully and sat up, looking intently into her sleeping face. Emily smiled, very slightly. Elvis whined.

  Another dream came. This one was not ethereal and mist-borne like the first of the great dreams. This one had the itching particularity of real life. It was not a child’s dream. Emily felt grit under her bare feet and looked down at the sisal carpet that had lain on the foyer floor when she was a small child. She smelled chicken frying in the kitchen, tasted the stinking sweetness of pluff mud on the back of her tongue.

  When she looked about her she saw that she was crouched in the dark alcove under the curving front stairs, where the telephone table and chair sat. It was seldom used for telephoning, since you could not read the numbers in the murky gloom there, but it had long been Emily’s special place. It was the cave from which, in safety, she eavesdropped on the grown-ups of Sweetwater, trying to assess the precise tenor of her world at the moment. She was alone. She knew, as you do in that sort of dream, that there was a dog named Elvis who was half of her heart, but had not yet been born.

  She did not often look out into the foyer to spy on the adults. Things came to her more clearly when they were only heard. Emily could read voices even before she could read faces. She thought perhaps she had been born knowing how.

  She heard her mother and father’s voices, but they were too low for her to make out the words. They were angry, though. Emily’s heart pounded sickly. She had never heard her mother’s voice raised in anger. She had only heard her father’s anger in connection with mismanagement of the dogs, and then it was a flat, level tone that chilled rather than burned. For a long moment she was afraid to look out into the foyer, and then she did.

  Her mother and father stood beneath the big chandelier that had always hung there, fine but chipped and clouded now. Its light was foggy and pale, but it was sufficient to set her mother’s tumbled curls blazing, and to sit shallowly on the sharp planes of her father’s face. His narrow blue eyes sparked in a way Emily had never seen, and incredibly, his face was streaked with tears. This frightened Emily far more than the anger. That her father could weep was simply not a part of her small universe.

  Her mother was wearing a drifting silk dress the color of candlelight; Emily had seen it before, and loved it. It was a dress for a princess. Even though her mother’s back was to her, Emily knew how she looked in it from the front. It had a shallow scooped neck that showed her mother’s luminous skin, and pearls the same color as the dress would swing down as she leaned over Emily in her small bed to kiss her good night. Emily sniffed instinctively, wanting the scents of tuberoses and lemons that were her mother’s. She craned her neck around the stair, to see her mother’s face. She knew that there would be a soft, slightly mischievous smile on it, and coppery lipstick. Her mother would brush her cheek with her glossy lips, and sometimes leave a soft, tawny imprint there. Emily never wiped it off. It was a part of her mother that stayed with her when her mother went out into the night.

  “Sleep tight, my little bedbug,” her mother would say softly. “I’ll bring you something fancy from the party.”

  And Emily would slide into sleep on a warm wave of perfect safety. Usually in the morning there would be, on her pillow, a bit of cake, or a tart, or a scrolled and swirled canape tasting of creek shrimp.

  In the dream, though, Emily did not want her mother to turn toward her. She knew instinctively that the face would not be one that she knew. It would be a face whitened with anger, and the mouth would be slitted with the hissing of it. Emily tried desperately to wake herself up, knowing in some small part of her heart that this was a dream. But in the way of truly terrible dreams, she could not move, no matter how hard she tried.

  And then her mother said clearly, “There is absolutely nothing in this place for me anymore,” and picked up her small crocodile overnight bag from where it sat on the rug beside her, and walked past Walter Parmenter through the open door—for it was high summer in the dream—and banged the screened door behind her. The last Emily saw of her was a flare of the ivory silk skirt as she went down the steps into the darkness. After that the dream went abruptly and totally dark, and Emily stood in a black, featureless place where no living being was, or would be again.

  She woke herself with her strangled scream. Even sleep-stunned, she could tell that it was the scream of a small child. Elvis brought her all the way awake by franticly licking her face, and she heard Cleta clanging around in the kitchen. She saw the pale sunlight and the blood at the same time. The blood stained the back of her pajamas and smeared on her hands when she reached down to touch it. It was warm and thick and came, she knew, from the sharp stiletto that was turning in the pit of her stomach. In that first moment Emily thought quite clearly that the dream had killed her.

  In an instant she was out of bed and down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she threw herself into Cleta’s floury arms. She was strangling on her tears, and could not get words out. Cleta held her hard and rocked her back and forth, back and forth, as if she were a toddler, and breathed a wordless crooning into Emily’s tangled hair. Emily held onto her with all the furious strength in her arms. If she let go, she would surely fall off the face of the earth.

  Presently Cleta disentangled her arms and pushed her away slightly to look at her.

  “What on earth’s the matter, lovey?” she said. And then, looking down, “Oh, honey. That ain’t anything to cry about. You just got your flowering. I thought it about time for that.”

  “No, no, it’s not that,” Emily sobbed. “I know about that, that just means you can get pregnant if you do it. A lot
of the kids at school spend half their time moaning if they get it and the rest moaning if they don’t. You’d think the Kotex machine was the Holy Grail! This is different; this is…Cleta, I had this awful, awful dream, and I think this is…it’s, killing me! It feels like a knife in my stomach!”

  Cleta shook her lightly. “You listen to me, Emily. Ain’t no dream ever got dreamed that can kill you, no matter how bad it is. The flowering hurts when it first happens. We can fix that. Now let’s get you upstairs and into a hot bath, and I fix you up a little, and then you tell me about this dream. Go on, now. Yo’ daddy and the boys be down for breakfast pretty soon.”

  There were three modern bathrooms in the house, with showers and built-in shelving and white tile. Her father and the boys claimed two of them, and the other adjoined Buddy’s room and was never used. Emily had the original bathroom, built in 1936 and looking every inch its age. It was high-ceilinged and cavernous—you could have skated on its vast expanse of pitted, mossy green linoleum. All the accoutrements—bathtub, washstand, toilet—were tucked into the corners, and the only lighting was a dim overhead fixture and a little lamp with a pull chain over the washstand. The walls were green, like the linoleum, and in the early morning or at twilight, it seemed like an underwater chamber, aqueous and shimmering. Even the air seemed to shimmer because the old washstand mirror was speckled where the silver coating had worn off, and the windows were the original nineteenth-century wavy glass. It had no central heating, because Walter Parmenter thought that heating a room of its size just to use the toilet or have a quick bath was absurd. A tall, bulbous blue kerosene heater sat in the middle of the floor, and whoever wanted to use the bath in winter had to creep in and turn the little knob and wait until the belly of the stove glowed dull red. Emily loved the room with all her heart. From the time Buddy had told her about Atlantis, she had imagined it to be a princess’s chamber there.

  She huddled in bed in her thick bathrobe while Cleta lit the heater and drew a bath, and then, when Cleta called out, she ran into the bathroom and turned her back to Cleta and dropped the robe, and practically dove into the tub. It was huge and clawfooted and deep, and it was filled now with steaming water. Emily shrank into it up to her neck and put her head back and closed her eyes. The hot water seemed to be leaching some of the pain from her abdomen, and a small margin of the dream’s desolation shrank back. Beside her, on the bathmat, Elvis snorted as he pursued a flea. For just this moment, she felt safe.

  She did not open her eyes until Cleta said sharply, “Emily, what them marks on yo’ chest?” and she looked down and saw that the tape had left pinched red pleats and folds over her breasts and ribs. She grabbed for a washcloth, but it was too late. Cleta pulled it firmly away and studied her torso. Then she lifted her head and looked into Emily’s face. Her own was soft with pity.

  “You been tapin’ yo’ breasts down, ain’t you?” she murmured. “Oh, Emily. What we gon’ do with you? You knows as well as I does you can’t stop the woman comin’ out in you with no tape.”

  “Well, I will,” Emily said, beginning to cry once more, wearily. “I will not grow up to be some simpering fool who waves her…bust…at every man who comes within fifty miles of her, and I will not hang around the Kotex machine and the trailer park. It’s my body. I’ll tape it from my neck to my knees if I want to!”

  Cleta reached out and brushed a wet strand of hair off her face.

  “They’s lots of other ways to be a woman,” she said. “Good ways. I reckon you don’t know much about ’em because you don’t see no women very often. You never did. I worry lots about that.”

  “You’re a woman.”

  “Emily, the kind of stuff you need to learn now, I just can’t teach you. I’m just plain too ignorant. I don’t know nothing about the places you gon’ be goin’. I can love you all your life, but I can’t be much help to you right now. I got to think a spell about this. Git on out, now, and I get you a clean towel and a cup of hot tea and an aspirin, and you can sleep some more. I ain’t lettin’ you go to school today.”

  As she climbed out of the water, Emily saw that her blood had curled stringily out into it, and made little whorls. She fled into her room into bed. Presently, in clean underpants and the small, folded towel Cleta had brought, she drank steaming tea.

  “This has got liquor in it,” she said to Cleta.

  “Got gin,” Cleta said. “Best way to water the flowering. You won’t be hurtin’ much for a while. I’m gon’ call Miss Jenny after school and get her to bring you what you need over here. Then we gon’ have a talk.”

  “I don’t want you to tell Aunt Jenny, or Daddy, or anybody,” Emily said thickly. The gin and the aspirin and the warmth of the bedcovers were putting the pain and the rest of the world at a remove. Emily wanted to lie suspended here forever.

  “I ain’t gon’ tell yo’ daddy or the boys, certainly. Scare ’em right out of their britches. But yo’ aunt got to know. Ain’t nobody else can help you much right now.”

  “My mother could have,” Emily murmured. She realized with foggy surprise that it was the first time she had spoken of her mother to anyone but Buddy.

  “Yeah, but she ain’t here, is she?”

  Cleta’s voice was sharp and grim. Suddenly, the dream came scalding back, as palpable and present as breath.

  “I dreamed about her last night,” she said. “It was the worst dream I ever had. I just know it started…all this.”

  “Tell me about that dream,” Cleta said, sitting down on the edge of Emily’s bed.

  And Emily did. By the time she had finished, she was gasping deeply, drowning in grief, struggling once again to break the dream’s murderous hold. When she began to retch silently and claw the air for breath, Cleta turned her over in bed and gave her a mighty slap between the shoulder blades. Emily jackknifed, and then gave a great gulp, and air came flooding back into her lungs. But it was a long time before the tortured rasping stopped. Beside the bed Elvis whined and tried to jump in with her until Cleta put him out in the hall and shut the door. He cried and scratched, but Cleta was adamant.

  When Emily’s breathing slowed, Cleta brought the bottle of Gilbey’s over to the bed and pressed it matter-of-factly to Emily’s lips.

  “Swallow,” she said.

  Emily did, and choked, and spat the stinging liquid onto her quilt.

  “Again,” Cleta said inexorably, and this time Emily kept the gin down. In a few seconds warmth curled out from her stomach all over her, and the dream withdrew silently, like a wild animal. It muttered at her from the edges of the room, though. Emily kept turning her head to look into the corners, as if she could actually see the great inky shape of it.

  “Now,” Cleta said. “We needs to talk about that dream.”

  “No,” Emily whimpered, shrinking back into the pillows. “What if I have it again? Oh, Cleta, what if it comes back, and back…”

  “Ain’t gon’ come back,” Cleta said, looking far away into some distance of her own.

  “How do you know?”

  “’Cause it ain’t no dream. I the last person in the world ought to be tellin’ you this, Emily, but it’s past time and I reckon the only other one who knows about it ain’t ever gon’ speak. An’ you got to know, because it ride you like a hag all your life if you don’t. You ain’t gon’ know what it is, but you’ll feel it behind you, and you be wonderin’ all the time when it gon’ catch up with you.”

  “I’ve already felt that,” Emily quavered. “For a week now, at least. How did you know about it?”

  “We all knows,” Cleta said. “Some people call it a haint and some says it’s a plateye. But we all knows down deep that it ain’t nothin’ but a big truth tryin’ to catch up with you. You run, and it run harder. You turn and stare it down and it go slinkin’ off like some ol’ sissy. I seen it happen a lot of times.”

  “You mean—that dream is the truth?”

  “Yeah, it is. I wondered if you’d remember it on your own. Lots of c
hirrun never do. It’ll hurt you a lot right at first, but it won’t ever chase you through the nights no more. God knows this ain’t the time for it, but yo’ insides knows it already, an’ it tryin’ to come out now. We needs to help it on out.”

  Emily closed her eyes and leaned back. The whole world seemed warm and enveloping. She felt swaddled, cocooned. What could possibly touch her? Elvis’s cries sounded like those of a dog in a far-off TV program.

  “You can tell me now,” she said, and smiled. She could feel its foolishness on her mouth. The smile became an even more ludicrous giggle. “All I’ve got to do is keep drinking gin.”

  “It don’t hardly never help none, but there’s times it’s a right good friend,” Cleta said. “This is one of them. All right. You be quiet and listen till I’m through, and then we see what we need to do next.”

  Emily looked at her silently. Gin or not, this was going to be a bad thing. She could see its dense shadow advancing before it. But it was abstract, unreal.

  “What you dreamed happened one night when you was about three,” Cleta said. Her rich voice turned suddenly flat and hard-edged. “Yo’ mama and daddy thought I’d gon’ home, I reckon, but I was still in the kitchen, ironin’. First I just heard their voices real loud and mean, like I ain’t never heard before, and then I could hear what they sayin’. An’ after a while, Jesus help me, I opened the door a little ways and watched. It was wrong, but I ain’t sorry.”

  “What…”

  Cleta held up her hand. “I reckon they’d been fightin’ for a long time; I knew yo’ mama lose her temper sometime, an’ bang things around when she don’t get what she want. Her daddy spoil her bad. But until that night, they kept it upstairs. The help usually knows, but I didn’t. They standin’ there in the foyer under that chandelier, and she got on that pretty silk dress she got up in Atlanta for that big weddin’ in Charleston, and her little suitcase was sittin’ there on the flo’ beside her. She right up in yo’ daddy’s face, and she hollerin’. He just standin’ there like a statue, an’ he got tears rollin’ down his face. But he mad, too; I could tell. He say somethin’ like, ‘Don’t you care about nothin?’ and she say, clear as day, ‘There ain’t nothin’ in this house for me to care about.’ That’s when I saw you. You was standin’ there by that telephone place in yo’ nightgown, an’ you look like somebody done strike you dead. White as a sheet. I wanted so bad to go get you I couldn’t get a deep breath, but you turn around then, and scoot back upstairs like a little rabbit, so quick and quiet.