Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  But in the ranks of upturned faces Lulu’s shone with pleasure and approval. Emily knew that if she kept her eyes focused on Lulu’s luminous face and Elvis’s happy grin, she just might make it to the bottom without disgracing herself. She could worry about the actual party later. She could even, if she absolutely had to, simply refuse to go. In a state of white pique and terror, Emily started down.

  There was a series of drawn breaths as she reached the landing, but no other sounds. Intent as she was on not stumbling in the new heels, she did not look up, but the silence smote her. She had expected at least some comment from someone, a few compliments even if they were forced. But not this breath-held silence. Never this. On the last step she froze and raised her head.

  Lulu was smiling radiantly and nodding. The twins, Aunt Jenny, and her father were staring as if they had been turned to stone. Emily felt her hastily gulped dinner come up into her throat, and tears sting in her nose. What was the matter? Was Emily Parmenter dressed up for a party simply grotesque after all?

  Walter wheeled and walked out of the foyer. After he left there was a small, ringing silence, and then Aunt Jenny breathed, “My God,” and the twins chimed in with “Goddamn!” and “Holy shit!” Lulu looked at them all perplexedly, and then back at Emily, whose eyes were shimmering with tears.

  “You look absolutely beautiful,” she said to Emily. “Just gorgeous.” And to the others, “What is the matter with you all?”

  “You look so much like your mother it’s uncanny,” Jenny Raiford said, smiling at last. “And you do look beautiful. Just…beautiful.”

  The twins smiled, too, tentatively.

  “Shit, you might have been Mama coming down those stairs,” Walt said. “I’ve seen her do it a thousand times. I never thought you looked like her, Emily, but you just…could be her.”

  “Yeah,” Carter said. “She used to look like that on her way to parties and stuff. God, Emily, it’s almost scary. Pretty, though,” he added quickly. Emily had never had a compliment from either of the twins before. It added to the palpable strangeness of the night. She felt the tears begin to track down her cheeks through the peachy blush.

  Emily turned to go back up the stairs. She felt Elvis close beside her, thrusting his muzzle into her head. She heard the thumping of footsteps that meant the twins were retreating to the television den where their father had fled, scattering like hawk-chased chickens before her tears. She heard Aunt Jenny’s voice, soft with pain for her pain.

  “Emily,” she said, “please don’t run back up there. You look wonderful, beautiful. This is your night. I’ll talk to your father. It’s just that you look so much like your mother, and it’s hard for him…”

  Emily whirled around to look at her, blinded with tears.

  “Well, then, he’ll just have to trade me in for another model,” she said, her voice thick. “Or put me in a convent or something. Because if I look like her now, what will I look like when I’m older? Will he still be leaving rooms and closing doors when he sees me?”

  “Of course not,” Jenny Raiford began. “He’ll get used…”

  But Emily had turned again and started up the stairs.

  “NO!”

  It was Lulu’s voice, sharper and more commanding than she had ever heard it. She paused, but did not turn again.

  “Don’t you dare go sneaking off up there like a scared rabbit! You’ve got nothing to run from. If he thinks he does, that’s his problem, not yours. Now get back down here and let me fix your face, and then we’ll get out of here. And high time.”

  Lulu stood straight and tall, her hands clenched into fists, hanging straight down beside her. Her face was still, but two red spots flamed on her high cheekbones. Her eyes, narrowed, burned like a falcon’s from under her straight brows. Emily came down the stairs and walked into Lulu’s arms. Beside them, Jenny Raiford dropped her own outstretched arms. Elvis, wriggling with love, tried to nose his way between the two girls. There was not a sound in the foyer but the ticking of the old grandfather clock in the corner and Emily and Lulu’s breathing.

  Presently Lulu held Emily away from her and looked at her critically.

  “Mascara’s run and blush is streaked. Red nose, too. This is a job for Superdiva.”

  And she took Emily into the downstairs powder room and set about her with puff pots and brushes.

  “Now,” she said. “All fixed. Take a look.”

  Emily had refused to look in the mirror while she was dressing. Now, in the wavering, dark-flecked old shell-rimmed mirror she saw a girl she did not know, a girl with a tumble of gold-red curls piled high on her head, tendrils curling around her face. A girl with cheeks flushed bronze-pink from blush and tears, a girl with tilted cat’s eyes and a soft mouth blooming with coral lip-gloss. A girl with a pointed chin and a long neck and smooth bare shoulders, her only adornment small pearl earrings and a single strand of creamy pearls. A girl who was going to a party.

  She turned back to Lulu.

  “I don’t know who I am,” she whispered. “I’m not me and I’m not her. I don’t feel real.”

  “Get used to it,” Lulu smiled behind her in the mirror. “That very pretty girl is your future. Now let’s blow this taco joint.”

  They went out into the foyer again. Emily’s heart was pounding with the inevitability of this night. Jenny still stood there, smiling slightly, and gave Emily a brief hug.

  “You both look smashing,” she said. “Now go and have a good time and remember everything so you can tell me about it.”

  Elvis whined, but stayed still, sitting beside Jenny.

  Emily and Lulu went out into the warm, cricket-singing night.

  Lulu had borrowed the truck for the trip to Maybud.

  “Can’t you get somebody to bring your car out here?” Emily had said, when the arrangement was made. “Or at least let the boys clean their car up and take it. The truck smells like dog and dog food.”

  “That’s the point,” Lulu had said. “If I’ve got to go to this thing, I’m taking the dogs with me for good luck.”

  And so they ground and rattled down the driveway and onto the pitted road through the oak and palmetto forest toward the highway that would ultimately take them to Lulu’s family’s plantation. Lulu drove the cumbersome truck as well as she did everything else, wrestling it through ruts and over roots with elegant assurance.

  “Where’d you learn to drive a truck?” Emily said.

  “There are a million of them at Maybud,” Lulu said. “I always loved them. And a friend of mine had one that I used to drive a lot.”

  They reached the crumbling blacktop that would lead them to Highway 174 and thence deep into Edisto Island to the south of Sweetwater, where Maybud Plantation had stood in its sprawling gentility on a deep tidal tributary of the Dawhoo River since 1798. As the crow flew it seemed only a long stone’s throw from Sweetwater, which looked across the water from Wadmalaw Island to Maybud’s site on Edisto. But like so many Lowcountry venues, you had to drive many miles and wend your way down many back roads before you got there. Bridges were not a priority in this wild old backyard of the Ace Basin.

  They said little as they drove through the deep velvet darkness of the August Lowcountry. Occasionally an insect committed spattering suicide on the windshield, and the red-eyed, dark shapes of who knew what wild night things scurried or loped across the road in front of them. But not until they turned onto the overgrown dirt road that led down to the water and Maybud did Emily speak.

  “I’d have thought a big place like y’all’s would have some kind of gate or sign,” she said. “How do people know how to get here?”

  “The people who come here know,” Lulu said. There was something in her voice that Emily could not quite catch, a kind of cool flatness that could have been anything at all except pleasure at coming home.

  The rutted road narrowed to a track that wound its way through vegetation so dense that it became a tunnel of black-green. Moss from great oaks brushed
the truck; branches of shrubs and saplings whipped at it. The tunnel was lightless except where the headlights caught leaves. “Black as Egypt,” Cleta would have said.

  Emily fell silent again, her heart dragging heavily with apprehension. Presently she said, in a strangled voice that sounded thin and mewling in her own ears, “I don’t want to do this, Lulu. I want to go home.”

  “Too late,” Lulu said, and they rattled around a moss-shawled hummock and into a great cave of light.

  11

  ALWAYS AFTERWARD, Emily remembered the end of that journey as you would an epiphany, a revelation, a lasting dream.

  The dirt track widened into a graveled alleé of giant old live oaks, heavily shawled with moss, some of their branches resting on the ground. About halfway down strings of small white lights had been wound into the moss on each tree, making an otherworldly cocoon of light-misted moss that enveloped the truck as they rode on. Even farther down, the tree lights became tall torchières on either side of the drive, flickering in the small, soft wind. Behind them all lay the plantation house, shining in the dark of the woods like a great ship. Every window blazed with light; votive candles outlined the circular drive, and the formally trimmed boxwood around the house glowed like miniature Christmas trees. Lights traced strict, linear paths behind the house and the garden balustrades and terraces, leading, no doubt, to the river. Close around the house, paper lanterns had been hung in the lower branches of the sheltering oaks. Maybud Plantation was, on this night, a house made of light, shimmering in the dark woods like an enchanted castle out of Sir Thomas Malory, seeming to float in space.

  Emily drew in an involuntary breath, and Lulu smiled.

  “It cleans up pretty good, doesn’t it?” she said. “On an ordinary day you can see the patches of brown in the grass, and the mud in the turnaround, and the shutters that are shedding paint like fish scales. But when Mother goes all out, it’s a magical place. From the outside, anyway.”

  They pulled onto the circular drive that looped around to the twin wrought-iron staircases leading up to the portico. The portico rose two stories high, on slender white columns that shone against the mellow old brick. Atop it rode a graceful gable, breaking the line of the roof, with a white oval medallion at its center.

  Lulu pointed to an explosion of soft light spilling from behind the second-story portico balcony.

  “That’s the ballroom,” she said, grinning. “Considered one of the finest in the Lowcountry and a great place to stay away from, in my book.”

  Sweetwater had only an attic.

  “Did you stay away from it?” Emily mumbled. It was not possible for her to raise her voice in this luminous place. If she did, who knew what cracks in the enchanted eggshell would snake swiftly from top to bottom? Who knew what creatures would come out of the yolk inside?

  “Nope,” Lulu said, slowing the truck. “It got me once, for a Sweet Sixteen ball that was as ghastly an affair as I have ever attended. Did you ever read Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death?”

  Emily shook her head. Buddy had considered Poe an over-wrought pulp-fiction writer.

  “It’s about these people at a grand ball in a castle in the woods,” Lulu said. “They’ve taken refuge there to escape a great plague that is decimating the countryside. They’re carousing while the populace dies. It’s a masquerade ball, so nobody knows who they’ve been dancing with. Well, they drink harder and dance longer and laugh louder, until midnight, when everybody unmasks. And when they do, they see that one of the dancers is Death himself, and they know that they’ve escaped nothing; they will die. My party was a little better than that, but not much. To me, at least.”

  “That’s horrible,” Emily said. “Didn’t you ever like parties? Weren’t there some you enjoyed?”

  She knew she was chattering, to put off the moment when Lulu would stop the truck and she would have to step out into all that swirling, pouring light. She knew that she would drown in it.

  “No,” Lulu said. “There was never a party in this house that I enjoyed. There weren’t many anywhere, that I can remember. Maybe birthday parties at Miss Hanahan’s Little School, but I’m told I was a strange, unsociable child even then.”

  She pulled the truck onto the grass bordering the drive and hauled the hand brake on. They were well into the curve of the circular drive, but not near the front portico, where young men in white shirts and black ties were politely decanting guests and taking their keys, and driving their shining, clifflike SUVs away. Emily did not see a single regular automobile in the lot. Maybe these guests had struggled through wild jungles and savannas and veldts to reach this blazing haven. Maybe they had bashed through herds of stampeding elephants and prides of snarling lions. Maybe they had outrun cheetahs and charging rhinos.

  Lulu caught her thought.

  “You’d think they’d come from the Amazon rain forest, wouldn’t you? But most of them came out from downtown Charleston. I guess you need those things to plow through the tourists.”

  She sat still in the darkness of the cab, taking slow, deep breaths. Emily noticed that the fine, birdlike tremor was back in her hands. Lulu did not want to go into her ancestral home any more than she did. The thought cheered her slightly, and then she felt a stab of guilt. How awful to be terrified of your own house.

  “Where is everybody?” she said.

  “In the ballroom. In the dining room. Out on the terrace and in the gardens, down by the river. Everywhere there’s food and liquor. Come on, Emily. Let’s go.”

  Emily had turned to stone.

  “I can’t go in there,” she whispered. “I can’t talk about anything but dogs.”

  “We’re not going in there. We’re going around to Grand’s house. There’s a path around the house and back into the woods that leads to it. It’s dark, but I know the way.”

  “Are you just going to leave the truck?”

  “Yep,” Lulu said. “Give the place a little class.”

  Emily got out of the car on wings of relief. Outside, she could hear faint music from the terrace behind the house, and laughter. She stood beside Lulu, staring at the conflagration of white light, and then Lulu turned and plunged off the grass into the deep shadows of the bearded live oaks.

  “Follow me,” she said. “And watch these damned camellia bushes. They’re thick as a jungle now, but Grand planted them when she was first married, and she won’t let Mother have them cut.”

  The little path was pitch black. The dissonant songs of katydids and crickets and the sweet slap of faraway water were the only links to the world she had left behind on the blacktop road when Lulu had turned toward Maybud. Dew-heavy leaves slapped her face, and more than once the ridiculous heels of her shoes caught in the gravel and she stumbled. She fixed her eyes on Lulu, a shimmering column of white silk ahead of her. It was like following a will-o’-the-wisp with no notion of what eerie place you might fetch up in. Emily liked this whole thing less and less.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” she called to Lulu, and flinched at the sound of her own voice cracking the silence. What sort of old lady was this who lived alone out in this black, haunted wood?

  “Yep. And here we are,” Lulu said, and the path sloped abruptly down into a hollow ringed with live oaks and palmettos. In the center of the hollow stood a small stone house half-covered with vines, the crooked chimney on its steep slate roof sighing out sweet wood smoke, its deep-set, small-paned windows glowing with yellow light. Around it was a low piled-stone wall that enclosed a rioting cottage garden. Bowls of dried dog or cat food were set out in a ring at the edge of the tiny, neat lawn. Behind the house, just over the far lip of the hollow, the river gurgled and ran. It was the same sound Emily’s river made when the tide was full in. Something in her chest that had been cold and clenched loosened just a trifle.

  “It’s just like Hansel and Gretel,” she breathed.

  “It is, and aptly so,” Lulu said. “Everybody in these parts knows Grand is a wi
tch.”

  She knocked on the heavy, iron-bound wooden door and called out “Grand? You got room for two tired and hungry pilgrims?”

  “Come on in this house,” called a tiny, silvery voice, that sounded like it might belong to a very old-fashioned china doll. “If I’d had to wait any longer I’d have eaten all this stuff myself.”

  Lulu pushed the door open and ran into a big, low-beamed room to hug a tiny, silvery elfin creature who sat beside a blazing fire in a morris chair so large that it almost swallowed her. The hug lifted the elf half out of her chair, and Emily saw that her legs were withered and matchstick-thin, though she wore smart black satin slippers on her tiny, gnarled feet.

  She hovered in the doorway, unsure of what she should do, until the old woman called out, “Come here into the light and let me get a look at you, young lady. I’ve wanted to meet you for a very long time.”

  Emily wobbled slowly forward, teetering on the renegade heels. She would have given anything to be back in her own bed eating popcorn and watching Stargate with Elvis. When she reached the paper-thin oriental rug in front of the fire where the old woman sat, Lulu kneeling at her side, she stopped and simply waited.

  Strange, light-blue eyes, so like Lulu’s, peered at her out of pouches and webs of wrinkles. She seemed to be made of wrinkles; her fine, thin skin was pleated with them. She had silver white hair piled high on her head, showing spots of pink scalp, and her nose was that of a Roman emperor. When she smiled her teeth were fine and white, set off by a gash of brilliant red lipstick. She was very tanned.

  She held out both her hands to Emily, and Emily bent over her and took them, unsure what to do with them. There were rings on both the old hands, huge, dirty old diamonds set in gold; massive rubies and emeralds, threatening to slide off the fine-boned fingers. There were diamond teardrops in her tiny, webbed ears, and she wore a long black satin dress cut low enough to show a terrifying swath of spotted, wrinkled skin behind a necklace of diamonds that matched the earrings.