Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

And then she stopped, mortified. That life was going to be Lulu’s very soon.

  “It’s okay,” Lulu said. “Not all debutantes are like…you think they are. I actually know some who work in the migrant camps and volunteer their summers in Haiti or some other place just as desperate and awful. Lots of things like that.”

  “You could do that,” Emily said. “You really don’t have to do the normal debutante thing, whatever that is….”

  “Emily, I’m just too fragile right now,” Lulu said softly. “Puppies are about all I can manage. It feels really good to be working at something I care about, though. I was afraid I never would again.”

  There was more, of course, something terrible; Emily already knew this. She also knew she would never ask. No matter what Lulu thought about her being strong, she could not bear the weight of whatever it was that pulled Lulu’s mouth into that silent scream she had seen. Suddenly she was desperate to be back in her own room watching Stargate and eating potato chips and cuddling up to Elvis.

  “So do you think you’ll need Elvis tonight?” she said politely.

  “No, I don’t think so. Tonight has been good therapy for me. You all go on back and jump in bed and for goodness sake, don’t worry about me. I shouldn’t have dumped all this on you. Poor Elvis. He should hang out his shingle.”

  Emily did not turn off her bedside lamp until much later. She could see no lights burning in Lulu’s apartment, and Elvis slept peacefully beside her, sighing and wriggling occasionally, snuggling closer. He smelled sweetly of sun and dog.

  “What strange stuff,” Emily whispered to him as she turned over to find the hollow where she would sleep that night.

  She did not dream, and he did not move, and the next morning, cool and bright for once, nothing seemed strange and she felt grown-up and competent and not at all surprised that she had a new friend, as vivid and fabulous as a unicorn, or a roc, who had come willingly to stay for a while in her barn.

  9

  ALL THROUGH LATE JULY, Lulu came to the farmhouse frequently for dinner. There was no set schedule, though Walter Parmenter attempted to establish one. Whenever he did, Lulu would smile politely and say that she wouldn’t dream of imposing such an inflexible routine on the entire family, and that sometimes she simply needed a very early supper and bed.

  “And you needn’t worry about cooking extra for me,” she said. “It’s treat enough for me just to sit with you and swap stories. I really don’t eat very much.”

  She obviously didn’t; though she was far more animated now, and there was a wash of healthy new color over her fading tan, Lulu was still as slender as a willow switch. Her cheekbones and collarbones still stood out like bas-relief under the silky skin, and when she wore cropped T-shirts you could still count her ribs. Her eyes still had their febrile fire-blue glitter sometimes, and wire-fine trembling, though abating, still occasionally gripped her hands.

  Walter worried that she was not getting enough to eat, and had Cleta take out plates of hot biscuits and ham or, if it was lunchtime, hearty sandwiches on homemade bread, with Cleta’s own rich mayonnaise. Hardly a day passed that pies or cakes from Cleta’s kitchen did not find their way out to the barn. Finally Lulu sweetly declared a moratorium on the largesse.

  “You’re a better cook than anyone I’ve ever met,” she said to Cleta, “but the doctor says it’ll be a while yet before my appetite really comes back, and it’s just a shame to waste all this. Save it for the day when I’ll clean you out of the kitchen and beg for more.”

  “She don’t need food,” Cleta said darkly to Jenny one afternoon when she came in from summer school. “Somethin’ eatin’ that chile up from the inside. It ain’t food she needs. She hungry for something else.”

  “I’ll talk to Walter about letting up on the food,” Jenny said. “She certainly eats enough when she comes to dinner. I agree with you that something else in chewing on her, though.”

  “Y’all don’t need to go pokin’ around to see what it is,” Cleta said, jamming on the battered old man’s straw fedora that was her summer signature. “’Specially Emily don’t. Lulu a sweet chile, but she carryin’ around some kind of germ that look to me like it catchin’.”

  “It’s not that kind of illness, I don’t think,” Jenny said. “I think she really is getting over being so tired, and having the flu, and then there’s probably some kind of trauma we don’t know about, maybe family. She needs the peace and quiet, and I think she’s beginning to need some company, too. I like it when she comes to us for dinner. And it makes Emily happy.”

  “She need a lot more than that. She need almos’ everything anybody got. We needs to look after Emily.”

  “Emily’s happier than I’ve seen her in a long time, Cleta,” Jenny Raiford said. “And besides, I do look after her. That’s what I’m here for.”

  Cleta’s bottom lip went out.

  “Folks don’t always see what under their noses,” she said, shutting the screen door behind her. Jenny stood looking after her. In the afternoon stillness, she could hear the dogs being exercised barking joyfully from the ring, and over it the sound of Lulu and Emily laughing. The small frown between her brows, that had first come on the day that Lulu did, appeared again. It had its own groove now.

  But it was hard to worry; when Lulu was at their table, laughter beat in the air like birds’ wings. Lulu still spun her wry, glittering tales of downtown Charleston, but now, occasionally, Walter Parmenter would proffer, clumsily, a tale of his own, and everyone would laugh—dutifully, for he was not a natural spinner of tales and never would be, but at least he tried. Even Walt Junior and Carter would sometimes chime in with some highly embroidered account of their own Herculean journeys through adolescence, heavily freighted with allusions to conquests and sexual prowess. They were dropped before Lulu like dead rabbits, Emily thought in embarrassment, but Lulu only smiled and nodded with interest, and asked for more.

  Debutantes have incredible manners, went into Emily’s grid.

  July at the Parmenter dinner table was a time out of time after Lulu Foxworth came.

  August dropped down over the Lowcountry like a soaking wool blanket, without wind or rain, smothering, relentless. The puppies and their mothers had to be moved out of their nests in the barn and into makeshift kennels made of wire netting and canvas outside in the deep shade at the edge of the woods. Emily and Lulu got up at daybreak to train the older ones in what cool there might be, and went several times daily to freshen water and sometimes spray mothers and babies with a fine mist from the hose. The older dogs were exercised at sundown, and Walt Junior and Carter, grumbling and dripping sweat in cutoffs and sleeveless T-shirts, took the intermediate Boykins for training to a long, flat field just above the cordgrass beside the river, cleared and leveled for the purpose. Most afternoons boys and dogs came home damp and smelling of river water. Swimming with the dogs was strictly forbidden, but Walter did not chastise his sons. Emily and Lulu sometimes turned the hoses on themselves and Elvis before going in to bathe and dress, but they had not been swimming yet. Lulu always demurred, pleasantly. Emily thought that she probably did not want to appear half-naked on the dock with the twins panting after her.

  A day came in the stunned white procession of days when the sun boiled down with such coppery savagery and the air thickened to such a lung-swamping soup that Walter told Lulu and Emily to take the day off.

  “I think it would kill the puppies to move around in this heat,” he said. “We’ll pick up again when it cools off a little.”

  “I don’t guess it occurred to him that it would kill us, too,” Emily said sourly.

  “What difference does it make? We’re still off,” Lulu said. “Want to spend the afternoon up at my place with some of the littlest ones and Elvis and the air conditioner on high? I’ve got a video of Seabiscuit.”

  “I didn’t know you had a TV,” Emily said in surprise.

  “It’s in the closet. But I can roll it out,” Lulu said. “Would you li
ke that?”

  “What’s Seabiscuit?”

  “Emily, you really are clueless,” Lulu laughed. “It’s a wonderful movie about this little loser horse who becomes a great champion. Everybody loves it.”

  Emily looked over at Elvis. He groaned and got up and slumped into the damp splotch the hose always left. Emily thought, not for the first time, that a thick, satiny coat of blazing curls would be anathema on a day like this. She grinned at Lulu.

  “We could make a movie like that about Elvis, and call it Dogbiscuit.”

  Lulu laughed appreciatively.

  “That’s really funny,” she said. “Now where did that come from?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said.

  “Yes, you do,” said Buddy from down deep. Emily smiled. Buddy had been silent for a long time.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Emily said. “Let’s get a picnic lunch and I’ll take you over to Sweetwater Creek and we can swim there. There might be something really wonderful over there, too, depending on the tide. It needs to be lower than now.”

  “What?”

  “Show you,” Emily said, and went to beg sandwiches and fresh peaches and iced tea from Cleta.

  They cut away from the house and the river, across the peninsula on which Sweetwater Plantation rode. The open field that Walter let grow wild so that they could train some of the upland hunters was scorched to fawn stubble, so still that not even the great vaulting grasshoppers took off on their dizzying flights. Swarms of droning midges seemed the only other living things. Emily, leading the way, thought that they could just about reach the edge of the strip of maritime forest that bordered Sweetwater Creek before they simply dropped in their tracks and died. Beside her Elvis trotted steadily, but his head was down and his tongue dripped sweat. Emily could not remember a day like this.

  “We should have brought hats,” she said, looking back at Lulu. Lulu’s face was flushed deep red, and her breath came in short gasps.

  “Just ahead it will get better,” Emily said, and it did. When they entered the fringe of the live oak and palmetto forest, the searing burn went abruptly out of the air, though the fathomless, sucking wetness remained. The little path that ran through the trees to the creek was slightly overgrown now with the matted ghosts of sweet grass, and the sodden leaf mold that bordered it looked undisturbed.

  Emily had not been to the creek since when? Last Thanksgiving eve. A lifetime ago, she thought. The whole world had been different then. Then, she had stumbled home in fast-falling purple darkness, Elvis ahead of her, her heart flaming with anger and grief. She remembered how his coat had suddenly ignited to fire when he reached the moonlit field, and the fierce wash of love she had felt at the sight of his red curls. Then, she did not know why. Now she did. Her mother. Her mother’s hair burning in the light of the chandelier as she left Sweetwater forever.

  Was it better to know?

  “Yes,” said her mind.

  “No,” said her heart.

  But now there was Lulu, and a different kind of knowing, and slowly, slowly it was buoying her heart back into life.

  The path was thick with silence and heat. The creatures who came out to sing and warble and click and splash and chirr and pop were somnolent, buried deep in mud or silent in the deepest shade, or drifting at the bottom of the cool, deep holes. The tide was running toward low; Emily knew that in the afternoon when it turned, a little wind would come ghosting through the trees and the marsh and creek world would resume its orbit around the sun. But now forest and the little mud bluff that bordered the water were totally stopped and still, a spell-cast, sleeping world.

  They came out of the canopy of oak and palmetto and stood on the bank and stared down at Sweetwater Creek. It hardly seemed to move, but Emily knew that down deep it did, following the heartbeat of the great tides from the distant Gulf Stream. It washed only halfway up its banks, so that the slick gray mud on either side was visible beneath the beginning of the great prairie of cordgrass that swept off to the horizon. At full tide the marsh was an unbroken sea of undulating green, broken only by glints of deep blue where small tributaries snaked, seeming to stretch to the end of the earth but in truth reaching only to the far-distant line of trees that meant the beginning of rural life, along Highway 17. At half-tide, like this, you could see the homes of the creatures who lived here: the thousands of small, inset holes where the fiddler crabs lived; the sharp-fanged oyster beds on the banks; the darker water that meant shrimp holes; the low-hanging branches and fallen trees where turtles sunned and great, thick snakes half-slept, waiting. But the citizens of the marsh and creek were nowhere to be seen.

  “Nobody’s home,” Lulu said, dropping down onto the grassy edge of the near bank and brushing sweat out of her eyes.

  “They will be,” Emily said. She sat down, too, and Elvis flopped beside her. He looked longingly at the water.

  “In a minute,” Emily said silently to him.

  “If we’re going to swim, we ought to do it now,” Emily said. “In a little while it’ll be too shallow.”

  “You swim in that?” Lulu said. “It looks filthy. And you’d mire down in pluff mud to your butt. I’m not wading in pluff mud; I don’t care if I die of heat right now. And I may. Besides, you’d stink like the creek for days.”

  Emily sniffed. She was used to the rich, clotted, algae-thick smell, and that of all the other creatures that had lived and died in Sweetwater Creek, and underneath it all the sweet stink of anaerobic mud three feet deep. It was the breath of the living creek.

  “We can shower when we get home. And it’s not all shallow; see that patch of darker water down the creek a little ways? It’s a shrimp hole; I’ve never felt the bottom of it, even at low tide. It’s a lot cooler than here, and it’s pretty big. If you stay in the cool you’ll never touch the mud.”

  “But what is that stuff in it?” Lulu said in true horror. “The water’s so thick and gray you can’t even see two inches into it. Who knows what’s in there? And it looks so blue from a distance.”

  “It’s not dirt,” Emily said. “It’s things alive. This marsh is the most alive place on earth, inch for inch. If you looked at a glassful of this water you’d see a million things wriggling around in it. If you looked at it under a microscope they’d look like dragons and monsters. None of them are big enough to hurt you, though. You’d never even feel them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, I’ve been swimming here a long time. And I have looked at the water under a microscope. It’s really something.”

  “Who showed you all that?” Lulu said.

  “My…somebody I used to know,” Emily said. She wasn’t going to introduce Buddy to Lulu. Not yet. Maybe not ever. You had to have something that was all your own.

  “How do you get in it without clumping through the mud?” Lulu said.

  “I go out along that dead tree trunk; it reaches right out over the hole. You just slide on in from that.”

  The sides and bottom of the oak were thick with barnacles, dead and living. A handful of fiddlers waved their gigantic, cartoon-like red front claws at the very end of it.

  “God,” Lulu said faintly. “You can’t tell me you couldn’t feel those crabs.”

  Emily clapped her hands and the fiddlers faded away as if they had never been there.

  “They’re not about to come out until we’re gone. Nothing else will, either. There’s a pair of otters who play around this bank, but they’re gone if you make a move. All you have to watch for is snakes, and I don’t see any today. I’ve looked.”

  Lulu was silent for a long moment. Then she said, grimly, “Okay. I’d rather die anyway than stay this hot another minute.”

  And she stood up and shucked off her shorts and halter top and stood stark naked on the bank, breathing deeply, and then picked her way out the length of the oak and dropped into the water. Emily stared after her. She had never seen a grown woman naked before. The only breasts and pubic hair she had eve
r seen were her own, and then only through soapy, undulating bathwater. Lulu Foxworth looked…nakeder, somehow, than Emily had imagined any unclothed human could look. The narrow white strips where her swimsuit had hidden her body seemed to magnify the tight, round buttocks and the silvery bush of hair at the V of her legs, and her nipples were so dark in the full whiteness of her breasts that they were like eyes. Emily felt a red tide of embarrassment surge into her cheeks and neck.

  Lulu’s head popped out of the water, gilt hair darkened and plastered to her narrow, beautiful skull. Her eyes were closed in ecstasy.

  “Oh, God, it’s heaven,” she called. “You’re right, it’s wonderfully cool. I don’t care what’s in it. Aren’t you coming in?”

  Emily stepped out of her shorts and T-shirt, slowly and reluctantly. She wore her tank suit underneath it, faded red-gray with years and creek water. Still, she automatically shielded her breasts with her hands. They were, she knew, spilling out of the tank suit like overripe fruit.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Emily, take that awful thing off and get on in here,” Lulu snorted. “You think I’ve never seen a naked girl before? Nobody wears clothes at Randolph Macon, not when they don’t have to. You’ve never seen so many women walking around naked after hours, when they get out of the showers.”

  Emily squeezed her eyes shut, and then, flushed all over with shame and daring, peeled down the tank suit and ran along the tree and jumped into the water so fast that it surged up her nose and she emerged coughing and sputtering. Lulu was right. Cool water on naked flesh was—transcendent.

  “I bet you wear that thing even when you swim by yourself,” Lulu teased her. “Throw it away, Emily. You have a wonderful body. It’s going to make you very happy one day. It’s going to make several people happy, I’d bet. If you’ve got to have a bathing suit, get yourself a bikini and strut that stuff of yours. You’ll be a beautiful woman. You already are. What good is that if you don’t enjoy it?”

  Emily was startled. So far her burgeoning body had gotten her nothing but Kenny Rouse touching himself, leering. She did not know how to think about it in any other context.