Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” she said, making a gift of the words to Lulu.

  In the brightening day, Lulu turned over in the linen sheets and slid back into sleep.

  14

  LULU CAME OUT to the dog ring late that afternoon while Emily was finishing up the “sits” and “stays” for a new class of youngsters. They were a beautiful lot, born of pretty-faced Phoebe and sired by Elijah, Elvis’s father, known at Sweetwater as “The Hunk.” Elvis invariably sat quietly at the gate to the ring, watching as the young spaniels received the rules of their calling. He seldom moved, but once in a while, when a fractious baby romped away from the group, or a timid one hung back, he gave a short, gruff bark. The miscreants usually fell sweetly into line.

  “I don’t need to be here at all,” Emily was saying to Elvis, who grinned and cocked his red head. “Why don’t you just take over?”

  “He’d put us both out of a job in no time,” Lulu said, coming into the ring to stand beside Emily.

  Emily looked at Lulu obliquely from under her lashes, dreading what she might see. The dread morphed swiftly into amazement and relief. Lulu stood smiling in the slanting sunlight, fresh in pressed white shorts and clean T-shirt, her skin scrubbed and shining. Her gilt hair was still damp, and she smelled of shampoo and the French lavender soap she used. Her eyes were clear and there seemed to be no more tremor in her hands. Elvis left his post by the gate and trotted over to her and bumped her leg with his head, looking up at her, tail flailing. The puppies, sensing release from their duties, swarmed over her shoes and worried the laces of her sneakers with their little needle teeth.

  “Hi, guys,” she said, stooping to pick up an armful of wriggling puppy. “I hope you behave better than this for your aunt Emily. Otherwise you’ll turn into bench dogs and never see a marsh or a boat.”

  Emily smiled at her in simple relief. Lulu had set the tone of the afternoon, and it was, after all, okay. More than okay. Her smile widened. Bench dogs, in a hunting dog’s world, were the pampered, effete creatures of the show ring, objects of scorn among the breeders and hunters of the Lowcountry.

  “Not a chance,” she said. “If I don’t beat manners into them, Elvis will.”

  The sun slanted lower now, in the dying of the summer, but it still bit into forearms and bare legs and dampened collars and underarms with sweat. After they had cleaned the dust from the puppies and deposited them back with their mothers, Lulu looked at Emily, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

  “Let’s go see the dolphins,” she said. “There’s time before dinner.”

  “It’s too late for them,” Emily said. “I’ve never seen them this late.”

  “I think they’ll be there,” Lulu said, smiling at her. “I dreamed they were.”

  They cut across the field and into the creek woods, which lay hot and still and silent at this hour, only a few autumnstunned bees droning, a few grasshoppers burring in the tall grass. The air smelled of dust and drying pluff mud. The mud hardly ever worked up a really lush, rich stench in this dreaming, suspended time between seasons. Everything would sleep, dry and warm, until nightfall.

  When they reached Sweetwater Creek and the dolphin slide, Emily was surprised to see that the grooves in the little beach’s mud were still slick and damp.

  “You dreamed right,” she said, and Lulu smiled.

  They lay on their stomachs in the heat-curled ferns on the little bluff, not speaking, almost drowsing, waiting for the tide to retreat a bit further. Already the green cordgrass at the creek’s edge loomed high over the emptying sand bed, and the sea of green stretching to the western horizon was gilded with the dying light. When the dolphins burst into the creek they started up out of a drifting half-sleep. Lulu sat up straight, eyes spilling light. In a heartbeat the somnolent creek was full of splashing and murky storms of creek water. The big, shining fish made their usual choreographed wave, which surged onto the beach, but this time only a few frantic mullet were cast up before them. It was too late in the season for mullet. Most had left their holes and gone back to the sea.

  But the dolphins followed the thrashing few up onto the sand, lying close-packed on their sides, as they always did, and picked off the fish one by one, in a lightning carnage. The one huge, cold black eye that was visible on all of them seemed to stare up at Emily and Lulu. The mandarin grins stayed in place even as mullet slid through them and vanished.

  In a few seconds the wild, boiling water subsided and the dolphins ghosted away. But one stayed behind, lying on its side in the sand, its silvery duct-tape hide flashing with sunlight. It lay still, looking at them, smiling.

  “Is he hurt, do you think?” Emily said. “I never saw one do that before.”

  Lulu got up very slowly from the creek bank and climbed, nearly soundlessly, down to the beach. Still the dolphin lay there on its side. Without the rest of its ballet around it, in the transparent brown water, it looked enormous, as big as a whale. Slowly, slowly Lulu knelt on the sand beside it and reached out and touched the shining hide. The dolphin stayed still, grinning up at her, and then gave a huge heave and writhed backward into the creek and slid away. They stared after it in silence. From the bank, Elvis, who had been watching as motionless as a spaniel in a breed book, erupted off the bluff and down to the beach barking joyfully and launched himself in his beautiful copper arc into the water. Wet head up, he paddled strongly after the retreating fish until it had slipped deep into the dark, running depths and disappeared toward the sea. He grinned his doggy grin and swam back and scrambled up to them. He shook creek water in a glinting spray, and then sat down beside Emily, smiling up at her, panting.

  “I was born for this,” the golden eyes said to her.

  Emily hugged him and looked over at Lulu. She sat still, staring at the empty creek, tears on her tanned cheeks, smiling.

  “It really is going to be all right, isn’t it?” she said softly. “First you said it would, and then the dolphins did, and now Elvis. Who could want more assurance than that?”

  “Well, of course it is,” Emily said briskly. “I wonder why they came? Most of the mullet left a week ago.”

  “To say good-bye,” Lulu said. “They came to see if we needed them anymore, and if we didn’t, to say good-bye.”

  After that, they never spoke of the terrible night, not even obliquely. Emily thought about it, though. It was not that either one of them was embarrassed, it was just…over. It was as if some huge tectonic shift had taken place in the long dark, and Sweetwater was now an island of safety, moated around with magic. It’s going to be all right—As if, somewhere in that warm night, a great and formal shifting had taken place, and Emily had come into her power. Emily, the keeper of the moat. Emily the abbess, and Lulu the supplicant.

  If Lulu sensed this, she never indicated it to Emily. Lying half-asleep late that night of the dolphins, Emily thought, “I didn’t know you could grow up in one night, but I did. And it wasn’t hard at all.”

  At dinner that night, in the circle of Aunt Jenny’s candlelight, Emily picked at chicken and dumplings and probed her new grown-up thoughts. She seethed with impatience. Her father and brothers and aunt seemed silly children. She did not talk about the party the night before, even though Jenny Raiford urged her.

  “Come on, Emmybug,” she said, smiling. “It’s the closest I’m ever likely to get to a to-do like that. Tell us about it.”

  Around the table Walter and the boys looked at her, waiting. Tonight she might be just Emily, in jeans and clogs, her hair skinned back in its ponytail. But last night she had been something else altogether, a changeling in their nest, a strange, exotic girl who looked like a painting of their beautiful mother and went to parties in the legendary great houses of the Lowcountry. It was that girl they wanted to speak.

  But Emily would not. It was too big and too life-changing, and she had no words for it and no wish to share it with anyone but Lulu.

  “It was okay. It was ni
ce,” she said, not looking up from her plate.

  “It was more than that,” Lulu said. She sat in her usual place on Walter’s left, and she wore her usual cotton skirt and tank top, but to Emily she seemed to burn with an eerie swamp light. She wondered if the others saw it.

  “It was a wonderful party and she was the belle of the ball,” Lulu went on. “She looked just gorgeous, and Grand adored her. She wants Emily to come and visit her again as often as she can. She says I can come along if I’ll be quiet and let Emily and her talk.”

  Emily did not raise her head, but across the table she felt her aunt Jenny’s long, appraising look and the force of her father’s beaming pleasure.

  “Well, at least I know what turns him on,” she thought. “All I’ve got to do is dress up like Mother and go to a damned party. Just like she did.”

  “I’ve asked Emily to spend the nights with me for a while,” Lulu said. “There’s plenty of room—the bed’s a trundle—and I’ve got tons of books I want her to read and lots of music I think she should listen to. She’s been letting all that go for too long. We’ll probably be up late most nights, so I thought it would be easier if she stays there.”

  There was a small silence. Emily looked sidewise at her father.

  “Maybe I’ll even let her give me lady lessons,” she said.

  “Well, I think it’s a fine idea,” Walter said heartily. “Just don’t let her get in your way, Lulu.”

  “No problem with that,” Lulu said.

  There was another silence, and then Lulu said, “Let us do the dishes tonight, Mrs. Raiford. We haven’t done them in ages. You put your feet up and watch TV with Walter.”

  “Not tonight,” Jenny said. “You both had a late night last night. You can help another time.”

  She got up and went into the kitchen. No one looked after her but Lulu. Lulu looked for a long moment. Then she looked back at the table and the talk swirled on. In the candlelight, she talked and talked and talked and they listened.

  That night Emily slept in her bedroom for the last time. She would move her things to Lulu’s apartment the next day. For a long time she could not sleep, whether from the residue of the night before or from the sense of great change pressing her down, she could not tell. Elvis lay snugged tightly into the curve of her side, twitching every now and then in some doggy dream, and once whining. When Emily stroked him softly he sighed and subsided, wriggling a little to find a comfortable place. After that he hardly moved.

  Outside her curtained window the moon hung huge and white and swollen with the coming autumn, and made the familiar shapes of Emily’s bedroom furniture stand out in bas-relief. Emily stared at them for a long time. Ever since she could remember they had been the landscape and boundaries of her nights; she could have found her way around the room if all her senses except touch were gone. Tonight they folded her in like a blanket. She moved restlessly in her bed and wondered what the night world in Lulu’s apartment would be like. Drifting white with moonlight and the gauzy drapings and the whitewashed walls, of course, but there were bound to be other things that would become her dark-time totems, her polestars. The wall of books, of course, so like the one in Buddy’s room, and the delicate camel’s back of the little sofa, and the spidery French writing desk under one window. They would, she thought, become comforting friends to share her nights, as her own things were. And then she thought of the great, savage painting that at once discomforted her and drew her eyes like wildfire. She hoped that her bed faced away from those wheeling black birds, and the great pyramid and the cold cobalt bowl of the sky. From the brown man with his red hands uplifted. She thought that if she got up in the nights those hands might reach for her.

  “Don’t be silly,” she thought. “You loved that painting from the first time you saw it. Lulu loves it. Her grandmother does, too.”

  But not at night, a deeper part of herself said. As cloistered as they were in the little apartment above the barn, they would not be protected from the red-armed priest and the diving birds. These were part of the room itself. They were shut in with them by the moat.

  Then she thought of the familiar sounds of the kennels, and the droning cicadas off in the woods, and the ticking of warm rain on the barn roof, and Lulu’s soft, even breathing, and most of all, Elvis’s warmth against her. Elvis would let nothing touch her in the night.

  Nevertheless, she felt a sudden stab of anxiety. She wanted to stay in this haven that was the only one she remembered.

  “Do I have to give her everything?” she thought. And then: “Buddy?” reaching down to him, as she often had over the past summer. “Where are you? I need to talk to you.”

  He did not answer. She had the sudden thought that perhaps he might not like Lulu’s apartment, would not come to her there; that the violence in which the past night had ended, and the new assurance that filled her, had stopped his voice.

  “Maybe he thinks I don’t need him anymore,” she thought. “But I do. He keeps me safe, just like Elvis does. If he doesn’t come back I’m not going to stay out there. I’m not giving her Buddy, too.”

  In the moony dark Elvis licked her hand drowsily. The childish doubts receded like the creek at dead low tide, and the new, grown-up Emily stretched her arms and legs under the familiar flowered top sheet.

  “She needs me,” the new Emily thought. “Only I am helping her. Only I can. I can come back here later, if I want to.”

  Turning into sleep, she did not, as she usually did at this time of night, hear her father and her aunt talking. There was no sound whatsoever. Emily listened for another minute, and then, finally, slept.

  She moved a few things out to the apartment the next morning, but did not go there when their last session with the puppies was over. She went back to her house, waiting dimly to see if anyone was going to say good-bye to her. But there was no one about. Her father and the boys had taken four of the new puppies to be neutered, and though she could hear her aunt moving around the kitchen, she did not go in search of her and Jenny did not come out. Emily stumped upstairs pettishly, thinking that everyone had just assumed she was gone from the house and moved on about their business. This hour after the day’s work, when she had showered and changed, had always been her time with Jenny Raiford.

  Lulu came for supper that night flushed and smiling and bearing a steaming casserole.

  “Supper’s on me,” she said a little shyly, and everyone smiled. Lulu, wreathed in fragrant steam and smiling bashfully, was totally charming.

  “But you shouldn’t,” Jenny said. “You work all day in that heat. I’m accustomed to cooking, and I really like to do it.”

  “Well, I just thought all of a sudden that I’d like to try it,” Lulu said. “It’s my famous shrimp and grits. You know, the recipe that closed down the Carolina Yacht Club. I’m afraid the shrimp was frozen, but the grits are honest to goodness Carolina Gold. My mother sent a bag of them with me when I came. I think she believes that Carolina Gold will ward off evil spirits.”

  The shrimp dish was a great success. Everyone exclaimed over it and had seconds, and Lulu sat in an aureole of her own light, pleased and flustered as a small child at the praise.

  After dinner, she said to the table at large, “Listen, I have a proposal to make. I’d like to get supper most nights. I’ve got all the things I need in the apartment, and Emily can help me. Charleston ladies should be able to hold their own in a kitchen, whether or not they ever actually cook. Everybody’s cook has nights off, and no Lowcountry lady ever ordered in pizza in her life. Mrs. Raiford has slaved all summer in the kitchen in this heat, and I’d love to wait on her for a while. Please let me. I really, really want to do this.”

  Walter smiled at Lulu.

  “I think it’s a fine idea,” he said. “You’re certainly a good cook. I’ve never had better shrimp and grits. But only if you promise to stop if it tires you. And between the dogs and supper you’re not going to have much time for that reading and music you and Emily
were going to do.”

  “We don’t need much sleep,” Lulu smiled. In the candlelight, she seemed a creature who would never need sleep or food or drink: an eternal creature living on light.

  “Well, we’ll try it then,” Walter said. “If Jenny is agreeable?” He looked at Jenny Raiford for the first time.

  She nodded slowly.

  “But the first time you look droopy, I’m going to insist that you stop,” he went on. “After all, it’s what Jenny’s here for.”

  Lulu’s eyes flew to Jenny Raiford, sitting at her end of the table. Emily’s did, too. Jenny’s face was still and expressionless.

  “Nice to have some help,” she said.

  As she and Lulu walked across the grass to the apartment after dinner, Emily said, “Do you really want to cook? You never said anything about liking to cook.”

  “I really do,” Lulu said, smiling. “I used to do a lot of it out at Grand’s. She was teaching me.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I want to help,” Emily sniffed.

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Lulu said. “But it’s a lot of fun, really. I think we’d make a good team.”

  They did not, after all, stay up talking that night as Emily had thought they might. Lulu pulled the little trundle from under her bed and made it up for Emily, and said, “You take the first turn in the bathroom. I’ll set the alarm for seven.”

  So Emily dutifully went into the bathroom and scrubbed her face and teeth, and pulled on a new batiste nightgown her aunt had given her, that she had never worn, and came back and climbed into the little low bed. She thought that, after the soft sea of her big bed, it would feel narrow and constricting, but the silky, lavender-smelling linens were delicious, and Elvis’s weight against her side was sweet and familiar. She did not, after all, face the painting, and the nighttime sounds from outside soothed in a way that the breath of the river never had. By the time Lulu came back into the room in short white pajamas, Emily was fast asleep, and she did not stir until the unfamiliar chime from the little bedside clock woke her.