Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  She moved to the kitchen door and held it open. Outside, the damp, hot, river-breathing darkness had swallowed the world. The moon was down. A cloud of iridescent moths bumbling at the dim yellow porch light was the only life Emily could feel in all that vast space of water and earth and sky. Still, Lulu did not move, and presently, her grandmother pushed her very gently out into the night. Emily hung back. She did not want to go out into that consuming, secret-hiding blackness. More than anything in the world, she did not want to do that. There was no one now who could protect her.

  “Take care of her, Emily,” Mrs. Foxworth said to her softly. “She’s by no means as cool a cookie as she thinks she is. Call me if this business keeps up. Call me anyway. It’s in the book under B. Foxworth Sr.”

  She took Emily’s cold hands in her own. Hers were as fragile as bird’s bones, but surprisingly strong and warm. Emily felt competence flood back. I am in charge now, she thought. Lulu has to do what I say.

  She nodded and took Lulu’s cold hands and moved her out of the circle of light and onto the dark path.

  “Oh, wait, your book,” Mrs. Foxworth called from behind her.

  “I don’t want it!” Emily called back. Anxiety came flooding back. She had taken in and absorbed a strange and luminous old woman, and the familiar Lulu Foxworth in two violently different and unimaginable new personas. She did not think she could bear to have to see Buddy in a new light. Something that she could cling to had to remain unchanged.

  “You take this book and you read it. It’s one thing you can still do for your brother!” Mrs. Foxworth said sharply, holding the book of Yeats’s poetry out into the light, and Emily mumbled chastened thanks and took it from her. She planned to toss it into the muttering river or simply let it fall into the thorny, ferny underbrush on the path. She went back to where Lulu stood motionless on the path and took her arm.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ll be home before you know it.”

  The tide was full out and the pluff mud stank richly. The trip back to the truck was accomplished in utter silence. The small rustlings and chirps and deeper beast-songs seemed to have faded with the moon.

  Their feet stumbling over roots and through tufts of brier and grasses were the only sound. Emily could hear her own breathing, but she could not hear Lulu’s. The girl who had laughed so richly and pantomimed sex so joyfully now moved like a zombie through the dark ahead of her. Twice she stumbled, and Emily reached forward and caught her shoulders. But she did not speak at all, and Emily did not, either. When the fading aureole of light from the big house came into view, and the truck rose up in black relief against it, Emily felt her chest rise and fall with a great sigh of relief, and heard Lulu breathe, taking the thick, black night into her lungs like pure ether.

  “It’s okay now,” she said in a tight, small voice to Emily. “I can drive us back.”

  And she could. Even though her fine profile never turned from the rutted road and she seemed stricken dumb, Lulu drove the truck with a careless familiarity seemingly born in a Lowcountry farm or trailer park. She was still white to the roots of her hair, and there was still a fine, piano-wire tremor in her hands, but the truck ate up the miles steadily to the paved road home.

  When they reached the first of the lights along Highway 174, Emily stretched and looked sidewise at Lulu. Out of her heady new adulthood, she said, “I can’t imagine why you let your mother scare you like that. Just tell her to butt out. You’ve done that all summer. What can she do to you? Geez, anybody would think…”

  Lulu’s head whipped around toward her.

  “Shut up, Emily!” she hissed. “Just shut up! You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. You sound just like the baby you are!”

  And Emily, swung crazily too often this night between childhood and adulthood, took refuge in familiar, impotent childhood. She scrunched herself against the door and dropped her head to her chest, and felt hot tears lacquer her face. She sniffed loudly.

  The familiar landmarks that signaled Sweetwater and home had rolled into view before Lulu spoke again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, the words borne on a deep sigh. “I shouldn’t take it out on you. It’s just something that’s so…complicated, and so painful that I can’t talk about it. I didn’t mean you were a baby. I just meant that you hadn’t…been where I’ve been yet. It’s not my mother, not directly. I can handle my mother most of the time. You’re right, I’ve done it all summer with one hand tied behind me. But she has the power to destroy me, even if she doesn’t know it, and I can’t let her do that. I’ve worked too hard….”

  She leaned back against the seat and stretched her arms out straight, loosening her shoulders.

  “I don’t hate my mother, even if I act like it sometimes. I wish you’d known her like she was when she was much younger, when I was small. She’d laugh and play the piano and dance around with me and dress me up in her clothes, and she took me out on the river in our Boston whaler sometimes and we took sandwiches and Coca-Colas, and had picnics at one of the hummocks. I thought she was the most beautiful person in the world. She sort of gave off her own light. I wanted more than anything to be like her. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that she changed. It was as if every ambition she’d ever had for herself got turned on me, as if she had to connive and posture and claw to get me all the things she’d never had until she married Daddy. Like the invitations, and the right little cliques within cliques, and friendships with all the girls who grew up on the big plantations around Charleston, and the right schools and dancing classes and little finishing classes, and of course the Junior League and the right college. She was so proud of everything I did at school, all the so-called honors and things, that I thought she was going to have a pamphlet about them published and pass it out at the Garden Club and the Yacht Club. And when it came time for this so-called season of mine, this debut business, she turned into somebody I didn’t even know, and didn’t like at all. I learned to get around her from age thirteen on. I pretty much went my own way. It was as if all the things she wanted for me made her vulnerable and ineffectual. And of course, Daddy never cared where I was or who I was with. He just assumed his daughter knew the proper drill. The sad thing is, Mother didn’t have to do any of that. I already had all that stuff automatically. The Foxworth-Coltrane names got it for me. She never did quite understand that, even after she married into it. Grand’s right. A McClellanville Cutler doesn’t automatically make the cut in our crowd. It’s all in the names.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll never have all that Charlotte Hall la-di-da stuff Daddy wants for me then, because the Parmenter name wouldn’t make any kind of cut,” Emily said. For the first time in her life she felt the smallest wing-brush of loss and envy for that unimaginable world.

  “You’ll have something better than all that, if you want it,” Lulu said. “It’s all there in you. I can see it, even if you can’t. Grand sees it. You could even have the Charlotte Hall la-di-da stuff if you really wanted it. There are ways. Charlotte Hall’s not what you think it is, Emily. I loved a lot of my time there. Maybe part of it is ‘society stuff,’ as you call it, but a lot of it is as good an education as there is in the Lowcountry. And whatever you end up doing with your life, you’re going to need that.”

  “So how do you get around all that other stuff?” Emily said. “All that…frou-frou?”

  “You take what you want and need and just ignore the rest. It’s possible. I did it. I know a lot of girls who did. We got the kind of educations you can’t get just anywhere. And for some of us, like me, the first frilly society thing we ever put on was our graduation dress. And you look as pretty in mine as I ever did.”

  “I don’t need all that education just to run a dog farm,” Emily said mulishly.

  “Yeah, you do,” Lulu said. “We’ve been over that. And life is pretty minimal and gray without that kind of education. Your brother knew that. He was doing his best to give it to you.”

  There was
a small, stinging silence, and then Lulu said, “Emily, I’m sorry about Buddy. I never knew he had died that way. If Grand thinks it was an act of supreme courage and grace, it must have been. But it must have been awful for you. I guess it was the shotgun….”

  “You shut up!” Emily choked. This ease of Buddy’s name on Lulu’s tongue was suddenly unendurable. She would not share Buddy, either his life or his death. “If I have to shut up about your mother, you have to shut up about my brother!”

  “Fair enough,” Lulu said presently, and reached over and gave Emily’s stiff shoulders a small hug.

  They said no more until they pulled up on the dark circular driveway at Sweetwater. After the blazing Kubla Khan splendor of Maybud, it looked scant and flimsy against the blackness over the river. A light burned downstairs; Aunt Jenny would be waiting up for her. That, too, made Emily obscurely angry. She would share none of this night with anyone.

  They got out of the truck in their long skirts and muddy heels. Off at the barn, under the sickly yellow bug light that always burned there at night, they saw the beautiful, bronze shape of a dog: Elvis. Waiting for them. But why at the barn? For Lulu? Pain added itself to resentment in Emily’s stomach.

  Elvis trotted toward them, tongue lolling out, stubby tail arcing joyously. He came first to Emily and put his paws up against her waist and licked her outstretched hands. He made a small sound, a breathy little bark. And then he went over to Lulu and sat down beside her, as if it was she who had his heart.

  Lulu looked at Emily. “Could I have him tonight?” she whispered. “I really, really need him. I think he knows I do. But if you’d rather not…”

  “No. By all means, take him,” Emily said. It was ungracious, she knew. As if he sensed her hurt, Elvis whined softly.

  “Go with Lulu, Elvis,” Emily said. But she need not have spoken. She knew that he would.

  There were two new litters of puppies in the barn, far too small to begin their training, just beginning to tumble out of their boxes and toddle about the hay-strewn floor. Everything in their world was new and exciting, and was to be heralded. Their treble yips shattered the still night like glass. The yipping went on and on.

  Elvis turned toward the barn door and gave one bark. It was a sound Emily had never heard: short, deep, authoritative. The yipping stopped abruptly.

  Emily and Lulu looked at each other.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Lulu said, smiling. It was a small, tremulous smile, and her face was still blanched, and her hands still shook slightly, but somehow Sweetwater had begun to heal her. She opened the door and went up the stairs to her apartment. Elvis trotted behind her.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Emily called up after her.

  “I think so. Sleep well, Emily,” Lulu called back. “Thanks, more than you know.”

  Elvis whined again. The door shut. Emily turned and went across the dark yard, fatigue suddenly so heavy upon her that she could hardly put one teetering foot in front of the other.

  When she opened the screen door, she heard Aunt Jenny’s voice, lilting from the sitting room.

  “Come in here and tell me all about it, Cinderella,” she called. “Was it wonderful? Were you the belle of the ball? Did the old lady shoot her shotgun at midnight? I can’t wait to hear.”

  Emily did not go into the sitting room. “It was a nice party,” she said shortly, not turning her head toward her aunt’s voice. “Yeah, the old lady shot the shotgun. I’m really tired, Aunt Jenny. I’ll tell you about it in the morning.”

  There was a small silence, and then her aunt said, “You go on up, then, honey. Tell me about it later. Your father promised to let you both sleep in.”

  “Good,” Emily said, and went up the stairs and into her room and closed the door, the place where Elvis should have been aching like a wound. She shed her clothes and tossed them away, dived into bed, and turned off the light. Downstairs she could hear her aunt moving around slowly, turning off lights and then climbing the stairs and going into her room. The room down the hall that had been Buddy’s.

  Emily lay there for a moment, her body pounding with tiredness, and then remembered the book of poetry old Mrs. Foxworth had given her. She turned the light back on and got out of bed and found it under the wrinkled drift of Lulu’s white graduation dress. She got back into bed and opened it, slowly.

  On the flyleaf, in Buddy’s careless, slanted backhand that went through her like a dagger, she read: “For Emily, in her thirteenth year. ‘One man loved the Pilgrim soul in you.’” It was signed, simply, Buddy.

  She turned off the light and scrubbed her face into the pillow, and once again that night, cried for her brother. It was not until much later that she realized that the message had been, even then, written in the past tense.

  13

  DOWN THROUGH THE SLOW, tea-brown water of Sweetwater Creek, just off the dolphin slide, Emily sinks. Down and down, circling slowly in the fretful little wash that meant near-low tide: down to where the great, silent black rays lie half-hidden in the corrugated bottom sand; down into the cold of the until-now bottomless shrimp hole where she and Lulu had swum, clouds of transparent, nibbling shrimp picking her flesh now until she is near essence; down through the death-cold at the hole’s bottom; down, finally, into the two feet of velvety, anaerobic mud that harbors so much invisible life that it is, people say, the most life-rich place on the face of the earth. Here, in the warm, silky, teeming, stinking pluff mud of the Lowcountry, Emily finally stops, reduced now to a mere atom, a living point of light, an invisible awareness. It is wonderful here, succoring, amniotic, endlessly warm. Emily is finally home; she sinks no further than this, and does not want to. Here is forever.

  The sound must have been going on for some time when it finally reached her in the womb of the salt marsh, the slowly pulsing uterus of the creek. She tried to shut it out of her consciousness, but it was too insistent. It pinched and tugged and tore at her until she was sucked up out of the silky mud; up through the icy shrimp hole to the blood-warm water at the top of it; up past the ray-shielding creek bottom, growing larger and more corporeal and clumsy until she burst up into thin, harsh air. The sense of loss was so profound that for a moment she could not move her limbs or open her eyes, and then she did, and was sitting up in her bed in the farmhouse, tangled in sheets and sweating in the hot night. Finally she opened her eyes, and there was Elvis, next to her face on the pillow, barking, barking.

  For a moment, marsh-drunk and stupid, Emily could not place this red dog on her pillow who bayed steadily into her ear, and she tried to push him away in fright. And then the world gave a slight shift on its axis and she was fully home again, and her dog was telling her something dreadful. Her heart began to pound with fright.

  “Elvis, shhhh, you’ll wake up the whole house,” she whispered, trying to gather him into her arms. He pulled free, barking, barking.

  “What’s the matter?” Emily could hardly get the words out past the lump of fright in her chest. “What’s the matter?”

  For something was. It was written in his golden eyes; it had followed them home from the party; its breath had found her fathoms deep in the safety of the creek floor.

  The spaniel jumped off her bed and ran to the door and looked back. When she did not rise, he ran back to her and took the edge of her cotton nightgown in his teeth and pulled. He was growling softly in his throat, a sound Emily had never heard him make.

  She got out of bed. He ran back to the door and sat beside it, staring at her with his great golden eyes, as stiff and still as if he was on point. She looked around in confusion for her clothes; not the crumpled white dress of the past evening, but the wrinkled shorts and T-shirt she had taken off much earlier. Elvis barked again, sharply, insistently. Hurry up, he said.

  Emily skinned into her clothes and looked at him.

  “Is it Lulu?” she said in her mind. “Is there something the matter with Lulu? Do you want me to go out to the barn?”

  He barked
one last time and flew out of her bedroom and down the stairs to his dog flap in the back screen. There he sat and waited for her, whining, as she groped and stumbled down the stairs in the darkness, not wanting to wake the house if his barking had not already done so.

  He dashed through his flap and out into the darkness, and she followed, running lightly and in dread, sliding in the dew-slippery grass, stumbling over clods and loose pebbles and once a dropped dog biscuit. Ahead of her, in the barn, Lulu’s light still burned. Elvis was waiting for her at the top of the stairs to Lulu’s apartment when she got there, gasping for breath and shaking with fear.

  The door to the apartment was standing half-open. More than anything she could ever remember, Emily wanted not to go into the room. But Elvis took her arm gently in his teeth and tugged softly, and at last she went in.

  She did not see Lulu at first. The normally chaste, spare room was a whirlwind of tossed clothes, books, CDs. It was like looking into a crazy kaleidoscope. There was no sound except a CD, obviously stuck: Etta James singing over and over again, “At last my love has come along….”

  But there was a smell. A sick-sweet, overpowering stench of whiskey and human vomit, and it was that that Emily followed, stomach heaving, heart threatening to leap out of her mouth, around to the other side of the little painted French bed.

  Lulu lay on her back on the skewed white sheepskin rug, a rug stained now with the fluids of despair. She wore nothing but white silk bikini panties, those, too, stained. Her eyes were closed and she was the white of dirty paper and she was still vomiting. It ran in dribbles from her mouth over her chin and down to her slight, gold-burnished breasts. She was choking, too. Deep, terrible strangling noises rattled in her chest and throat. If it had not been for the noise and the steady, thin stream of vomit, Emily would have thought that she was dead. Beside her on the rug a quart bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon lay open. It was empty.